Game's cool. You play as Meatwad. It’s filled with smartly designed puzzles, making engaging use of an oddball toolset that rewards out-of-the-box thinking… but only so much. Beyond manoeuvrability skill checks that are satisfying enough to clear, and a few cool mechanical revelations, there wasn't a lot of head scratching here for me. Animal Well is tremendously well-accomplished for a solo project, I had a great time with it! It's just lacking a certain star power for it to really raise the bar.

For complete transparency, I had this game sold to me as an ‘Outer Wilds-like’ - and upon seeing that it was a sidescrolling metroidvania, I was beside myself with hope that I’d get a few notes of La-Mulana in Animal Well, too. In practice however, I think the more apt comparisons for Animal Well would be games like Environmental Station Alpha, Super Junkoid, A Monster's Expedition, or Knytt. The distinction is important, to me at the very least, because I approached Animal Well with pure intentions but spent most of my runtime hoping for an experience that never actually came. This isn’t a game about losing yourself in the sprawling tendrils of a world’s unfolding internal logic - Animal Well is an array of screens containing pressure plate puzzles. The world feels utilitarian, and even with the animal themed ruins that politely aim to conjure a sense of dread and mystery, it’s all misaligned and mismatched in a way that lacks the cohesion of a place with a history worth learning. The latter end of my runtime was characterised by backtracking through areas to collect the final few tools, but it was made excruciating by way of the fact that practically all of the screens merely become desolate roadways once you’ve solved their focal puzzles. I don’t think I spent any more than five minutes on any given puzzle in the first ‘layer’’ of the game, and for as much as I like how left-field the player toolset is, their interplay with the puzzles themselves is usually shockingly obvious and leaves very little room for doubt.

There is, undeniably, an inclusion of outtadisworld ARG-like puzzles that at the time of writing are still being unfolded by dedicated Animal Well researchers, but I’d be lying if I said I value things like that remotely as much as game content I can be trusted to learn and master on my own. Will the community uncover a secret back half of the game that turns the whole joint on its head Frog Fractions-style? I kind of doubt it lol. I’m a sicko that completed La-Mulana 2 on launch week before any guides were even written, the distinction here is that that series takes great pains to contextualise its puzzles in multiple ways - through cryptic hints and also through things like inferred historicity and synergy. Animal Well doesn’t do this, it scatters codes and event flags around the map in obscure nooks in the hopes that a friend group is putting together a Google Doc.

I don’t want to talk TOO much about the part of Devil May Cry 5 where you PLAY it because, let’s be real here, you know, right? I’m late to this party. We all KNOW that this is simply one of the finest video game action achievements, the culmination of fifteen years of promise since DMC3 set us down this road. One of the few games with a modern AAA level of fidelity that by and large emulates the quick, snappy responsiveness of the PS2 era that grandfathered it. We’re all maybe a little sad to see the puzzle elements fully reduced to an aesthetic touch and the challenge dressing on levels discarded entirely (is this the first DMC without a stage where your health constantly reduces in the main progression path?), but we’re also all well aware that these things along with the discarding of all gimmick enemies betrays an absolute confidence in the core experience, a confidence well-earned. We all know this is Dante’s most perfectly tuned, well-balanced move set, without a chink in its armor; we all know that the addition of devil arms lends a feeling of completeness to Nero that finally makes him feel like he competes with the big boys in potential along with a truly unique layer of strategy that expands upon his already technical skill set; I’m sure you’re all as impressed as I am at how weirdly intuitive V is to play as, a stealth highlight of a campaign that was truly joyful, near frictionless.

Everybody KNOWS this stuff. We’ve all played DMC5, we’ve all talked about it, the game is simply sick as fuck. We all love Pull My Devil Trigger, it’s the best song ever made, this is just true! It’s Just True. So I don’t feel like writing about that stuff any more than I have, other people have surely done it better. I try not to read reviews before I’ve finished writing my own, but I’m sure people have done it better right here on Backloggd. I’d rather talk about the way this series has very organically transitioned from something I laugh along with, that’s maybe a lot smarter about its application of gothic theming than I would have expected, to something that’s emotionally invested me on the level I care about, like, I dunno, Naruto or whatever, to something that I think has, over time, crafted a genuinely touching story of a family wounded by trauma and their ability or inability to overcome a great social and generational violence. I don’t think this has been there the whole time, but by allowing the series’ now-regular main credited writer since DMC3, Bingo Morihashi, a consistent creative voice in the franchise, he’s taken characters who have been portrayed disparately across two decades and used these gaps and these disparities as a tool to demonstrate the ways that time and experience do and don’t change us, especially when we’re molded by intense experiences early in life. I think this has been happening for a long time in this series, but DMC5 gives the context necessary to fully solidify it as a feat of characterization.

I don’t think that either of the twists in this game are particularly shocking if you’re paying attention to anything anyone says or does in DMC4 or this game but I am gonna toss out that there are a couple of big bombs in this game and I’m gonna talk pretty openly about them, and as I’ve mentioned I think the writing in this is pretty fuckin sick so if you care about that, now’s the time to duck out!

Devil May Cry 5 is a game about The Boys. Everybody tends to take their turn in the limelight in this series but as is often the case in this genre of story a lot of the time they just kind of hang out after their story is done? Like, there’s not really a good reason for Trish and Lady to be in DMC4 and 5 from a narrative perspective and they don’t really grow as characters, we’re just happy to see them because they’re Cool, right? Vergil didn’t even get to like, BE in DMC4 he only got to be a bonus character in a RE-RELEASE of it seven years later lmao. DMC5 is unique in the series in that it’s the first time we get a story that gets to focus entirely on characters we already know and whose schtick we’ve already seen and, importantly, whose schticks have not changed in a meaningful way. And this is ultimately the problem, right? The crux of this story, and in some ways, ultimately, the crux of every Devil May Cry story, is that Dante and Vergil refuse to change. They’re unable to do it on their own, and they don’t have anyone willing to force them. But they have to change, or they’re going to die. They’re going to kill EACH OTHER, and Nero is probably going to kill like a million more people, but they’re going to kill each other too, and that’s like, that’s sad, right? It sucks. These are Our Boys. Let’s talk about them.

I’ve alluded earlier and in my DMC4 review that Dante is a character who is something of a chameleon in this series – he wears a lot of different hats. He can kind of be whatever he needs to be, symbolically. A romantic hero, a gothic one, a gay icon, a harlequin. And it works, he’s a complicated guy, aided by the fact that he’s the character who most often straddles the fourth wall, playing most directly to the audience. But no matter what Dante is in a given moment there’s something he always is, unerringly: closed off. Dante’s most consistent trait, more than loving pizza, more than being a loud mouth, more than thinking violence is sexy, is being unwilling to let other people in on his own turmoil. He doesn’t lack for it! When your dad is Cool Satan and your mom dies saving you from demons when you’re only a wee lad, right in front of your eyes, as your house burns around you, surely that would fuck you up. Dante is kind of an asshole but he IS an innately kind person; he’s made it his mission to hunt demons and he does it mostly altruistically (he is clearly not raking in the bucks at any point in the timeline we meet him on) and throughout the series he’s looking out for other people, trying to do right by them even if it’s often in a paternalistic, self-sacrificial way.

But while he’s happy to be there for other people, emotionally and more often physically, he’s loathe to let anyone be there for him. After Vergil rejects his offer of family Dante essentially shuts down and he’s on a downward path for the rest of his life. We see it at the end of the third game when he stoically rejects Lady’s attempt to comfort him in his obvious grief, physically turning away from her to hide the evidence of his tears as he verbally denies their existence; we see it in 1 where he only talks about his feelings for Trish after he thinks she’s dead, and when she’s back at the end he frames all of his tenderness towards her insecurities rather than as a projection of his feelings; 2 is perhaps his most obviously wooden state in all directions and gives him no obvious opportunities for connection; and in 4 he essentially fails to act normal towards Nero until the actual ending, when there are multiple points where large parts of the story could have been entirely averted or assuaged had he just taken a moment to let Nero in. I don’t JUST mean when he’s first meeting Nero and Nero tries to kill him either, I mean once Nero is suspicious of the church and Dante clearly knows what’s going on; just chat him up in the jungle bro! But he can’t, that’s his whole thing. Dante is like 40 years old in DMC4, and he’s had no reason to get better about his hangups and many reasons to get worse since Vergil amplified them twenty years prior. By the time of DMC5 it’s no wonder why he tries to forcibly remove all of his friends from a dangerous scenario even before he realizes how personal the conflict is to him, and why he works so much harder once he does connect the dots – he’s fully given up on trying. And after getting away with having people at arm’s length for so long, why not? It’s going fine. So in 5 he repeatedly tries to psych Nero out of hanging around, eventually starts telling him flat out to leave, and he refuses to talk to Trish about Vergil, again framing it as for her own benefit when she’s wounded as an excuse to avoid his own feelings.

I feel like Dante is largely a pretty classic variation on the post-war Japanese delinquent type of guy who exists explicitly in opposition to the conservative society that he largely was spawned from, or even the post-delinquent kind of scrappy hero you'd see in the post-Nikkatsu studio boom (thinking about early Imamura type protagonists - although Dante's sexuality is more implicit to his being), and oftentimes this character comes with a bleeding heart of gold that may be hidden to varying degrees, to further drive home his separation from the straight lace he opposes; except that Dante clearly sees his vulnerability as a weakness to be hidden, fully erecting his facade, which DMC5 offers the most cracks in. Throughout the game, especially in the last few missions as things become more dire and he’s starting to sweat, you can see Dante’s happy-go-luckiness slip. Not that it’s a mask all the time, but that in these moments he has to work for it. There’s a degree to which he would rather fake his normal personality than deal with his shit. I don’t think Dante’s totally putting it on or anything, like I think when Vergil is like “if I 1v1 nero and win it’s like I beat you okay” and Dante replies jokingly to it I think that’s a genuine response to the absolutely unhinged thing Vergil said, but I also think it’s an effort to enact a Nothing Is Wrong Tee Hee personality All The Time, and he loses it a lot at the end of the game.

Vergil, then, as ever, is Dante’s opposite. He didn’t get those last few moments of parental love before their mom died, because she died looking for him after she sheltered Dante, so the lesson Vergil took away from that night was that the only person he can ever rely on is himself, and he needs to become strong enough that no one can hurt him ever, ever again. That is, of course, a starting point, and a driving element of his personality that we were missing before DMC5 shows us those moments in detail. Crystallizing the moment of trauma also crystallizes these two as people rather than fun but shallow shonen protagonists. Vergil may ultimately be an enormous prick with no empathy but he’s not like that for no reason now and I do think that’s worth something.

So where Dante is a red-blooded rebellious asshole Vergil is prim and proper, clothes suggesting angular lines and rigid posture. His speech is formal, his sword is more classically elegant, an ornate katana vs. Dante’s gaudy hot topic ornament broadsword. He evokes classical samurai imagery in more than his sword – it’s in his cruel demeanor, his manufactured regality, the way that much of this is a facade, and the way he considers power a justification in itself. The strong dominate the weak – he has experienced this firsthand, as the weak, as a boy – and so in pursuit of becoming the strong, nothing is off the table, and more than once he does some intense mass murder to get to where he needs to be. He essentially has the same image of the ideal man in his head that modern Japanese fascists do but he at least has the justification of terrible childhood trauma driving his insecurities.

The thing about Dante and Vergil though isn’t just that they’re opposites - they’re also twins. They perceive themselves to have the same problem: they both think that to be vulnerable is their ultimate weakness, and to cope with that they’re both performing idealized images of masculinity, they just have different ideas of what that looks like. Dante’s is obviously less harmful to the world at large because he hasn’t murdered anyone over it and he never voted for Shinzo Abe, but he’s doing the same fundamental thing Vergil is doing in his own way. And sure, Dante is in a healthier place overall; he has friends who love him and whom he loves, and I think it’s telling that when he commits symbolic seppuku among their mother’s ashes he is empowered by absorbing the last earthly relic of their father where Vergil does the same thing and it intentionally separates all of his empathy into a separate guy while he becomes a buff, shitty monster dude. But at the same time, when we get like 90% of the way to a resolution and Vergil is back to himself and Dante is there with him for the first time as real equals in over twenty years, Dante does not recreate the events of DMC3. He doesn’t reach out to Vergil. He doesn’t even try to talk him down this time. He just wants to kill him and be done with it, or die. He’s been burned too many times. He simply can’t be that guy again.

It would be the setup for a genuine tragedy, two men trapped in a cycle of violence that reaches back (and as we will soon see, now forward as well) generations and leads them to destroy their family. It would be if not for the fact that there is a Third Boy at play. We gotta talk about Nero.

One of the most charming things about Nero is that in a series where everybody else is acting Like That all the time he is basically just a normal guy? Like yes he used to have a fucked up demon arm and yes he can rev his sword like a motorcycle but like, all this man wants to do in the world is hang out with his fuckin girlfriend bro. He’s just a nice little grumpy guy. He kind of tries to do banter with guys he fights but he’s not very good at it, and it’s VERY easy to rile him up. Really wears his heart on his sleeve. He’s pouty. I love this guy dude, I just want to make him an ice cream cone with like three scoops on it. I wanna put him in a little glass jar and shake it up. Great guy, Nero.

But he’s got his own shit, right! He was adopted by some important people in the cult church from DMC4, I forget if they had a name, it’s not important, kind of raised by his girlfriend’s brother, whom he will later kill in self-defense (5 brings this up in a pivotal moment as something that motivates Nero in the present, which I appreciate), and he has that fucked up demon arm, which he feels compelled to hide for his whole life because he assumes his church will not be cool about it, unaware that they are actually a demon cult. So when things do start popping off and the only institution that he’s known a tenuous sort of safety and family with turns on him and endangers his found family in his girlfriend Kyrie, it’s fucked up! Gets him all mad, gets him all sad! But Nero doesn’t bottle shit, he doesn’t hide it. Nero might give himself more responsibility than he’s liable for but he’s a guy who understands the value of what he’s got and sings about it loudly; we don’t know as much about his circumstances as we do Dante and Virgil’s so it’s hard to know for sure what his childhood was like or how he feels about it, but it seems that his support network and his experiences have given him perspective and the ability to deal with his feelings in a healthy way, even as he’s really put through the ringer.

So when he finds out that Vergil is his dad and everyone knew this but him he’s pissed, because Vergil DID cut off his arm and murder like a million people lol, but when he finds out that this ends in Dante and Vergil killing each other he’s confused, because Nero is a normal guy and this doesn’t make any sense from the outside. You get the vibe that Nero has always wanted a family, a place to unconditionally, belong, and now that he finds out he has one everybody’s just acting like it’s an inevitability that it has to destroy itself, and that’s fundamentally unacceptable to him. In a series where I think every single game is about people somehow killing people they consider family (except maybe 2? I don’t remember if that guy was Lucia’s dad I think he wasn’t), Nero, affirmed by a conversation with his found family in Kyrie insists that this cannot be the way. In a series where people hold their shit inside, where everyone is constantly posturing like sick badasses, Nero spends an entire boss fight yelling as his dad to knock it the fuck off and act like an adult. All it took was someone without context, with eyes unclouded by a lifetime of participation in the cycle they had created, to fight for the family instead of against it. This also activates his devil trigger for the first time in a direct inversion of how that happened for Dante in 3 – a powerful protective, loving impulse rather than the urges of despair.

And it works, mostly. Things are not fully repaired, and Dante and Vergil are not new men overnight, but they do work together to stop the apocalypse Vergil had triggered, and they do consign themselves to an indefinite co-solitude in hell where they can duel each other in a friendlier way than they have in the past, because on one hand this is truly the only way they know how to communicate and on the other, as half-demons it’s demonstrated throughout the series that violence is a form of positive communication for them. This is good, I think, to demonstrate that people so stuck in their ways can’t just fix their shit in one conversation, in one act. But Dante and possibly Vergil both wanted this, and they’re happy to have it.

This is what makes DMC5 so good; Morihashi has taken all of these disparate threads from twenty years of games, each of them with very different stories and very different ideas, and builds upon each of them to create a work that is thematically satisfying and narratively conclusive for characters who didn’t necessarily have distinct narrative arcs before this. I love these characters, they’re Cool Dudes and now they’re also compelling characters, more after this than ever before. I don’t know if this is the end of Devil May Cry but I think it very well could serve as one. I hope that’s not the case, though. Not only do I think it would simply be criminal to leave the world wanting another action game this fuuuuucking sick, but they keep proving there’s always more to mine from these characters and their world. I think it would be a shame not to take another shot at it.

"Video games are supposed to be fun" - the motel clerk in Lake, whose name I never learned

I feel that boiling games down to purely "was it fun?" is a bit of a reductive stance... but when Lake itself said it, it distracted me. I wasn't having fun. And all told, while my favorite games are generally constantly active things like Mario or Doom, I do have quite a soft spot for small experimental titles that revel in their own weird quirks... but Lake wasn't clicking at all. And while the hotel clerk isn't even remotely presented as a likable character (at least as far as I spoke with him), his annoying griping struck at the heart of the biggest issue I was having with the game; even being down to see what it has to offer, I wasn't having any fun engaging with this game.

There's a moment near the end of Lake where you go up to a secluded cabin in the woods and deliver a package. An annoyed voice complains about you disturbing his writing process, and you have a back and forth with this pretentious author. After all, he's the one who ordered a package in the first place, what right does he have to complain about it being delivered? You drop that on him before leaving to do the rest of your route as he awkwardly gives a half-assed apology and goes back to writing his Alan Wake story. This is the kind of thing I was hoping would happen more often in Lake, mundane but mildly amusing encounters with random locals, but there's really only two or three moments like this throughout the game. We get plenty of setup for fun moments, too, but they're often just left hanging. In particular I'm thinking of what I assume is meant to be an Evil Dead joke, where you deliver a giftwrapped chainsaw to an abandoned rundown cabin. That was a moment where it felt like something could have happened, be it a spooky musical sting or maybe Meredith saying "groovy", anything at all. It was a complete softball to setup a punchline, and instead you simply knock on the door, Meredith has a voiceline expressing confusion that nobody is answering (??????), and you leave the item and go. Even something like Meredith asking why there's a delivery to an abandoned house would have been SOMETHING, but for my playthrough she remained silent as she does after leaving any package at the door. That's the majority of your deliveries, being done to relative silence - the best you can hope for is a few randomly selected canned responses from Meredith that you'll get tired of hearing. Otherwise, they're simply a means to force an interaction with an established character in the cast. In principle this isn't even really a bad thing, after all it's kind of what I knowingly signed up for, unfortunately I didn't find the locals to be even remotely compelling. The little moments just aren't really something that the game is interested in delivering despite feeling like the obvious thing to pack this game to the brim with, because what Lake thinks it's meant to be about is big meaningful moments to drastically change Meredith's life instead of smaller moments that make life feel more vibrant.

Where I find Lake particularly confusing is that the general concept is hard to swallow. Meredith has been away from home for 22 years, and she is 40 years old. She's apparently got enough of a good relationship with her parents that it's easy for her to spend her vacation house-sitting and substituting for her dad at his job so he can go on vacation instead, but she also hasn't been back here once for over half of her lifespan. It's almost a bit ridiculous how long a time she has been gone, and the way her parents and neighbors talk to her makes it feel like she's supposed to be younger, but instead she's middle-aged and with a well established job that she's eager to bring up and talk about with others. It's very clear that Meredith is proud of her job at Addit. The game then spends a good portion of its runtime trying to tear down her independence at her tech job, essentially saying "return to an idyllic small town away from a corporate tech job to regain your soul". And what's weird is that they could absolutely build up Meredith having some nostalgia for the town with some flavor text, but she only has around two or three nostalgic remarks and as a result it makes the idea of her even wanting to move back very difficult to sell. I remember her saying something about having her first kiss at the campground, but aside from that she didn't have much to muse about and it made her feel disinterested in being home. When she is offered to take her dad's job and her parent's house permanently, if you do not show interest her parents are taken aback and offended; frankly that interaction was kind of a harrowing moment. The game was pretty clear in its messaging that it felt that was not the right choice, but what it tries to say with that is that she should simply fall over and allow her parents to thrust her into a permanent change to her life because they're having a great time being drunks in Florida. Honestly, no wonder Meredith hasn't been home in 22 years if that's what she had to deal with for her first time back, and they act as if having a 20% stake in a company that's about to make millions of dollars off of her dedicated work is some silly impetuous whim. Listen - I'm not someone that's super motivated by seeking profit and personal gain, but it's absolutely jarring to have your mom scold you like a teenager for being on the ground floor of something like Apple because you're not jazzed about a bait and switch plot to move you back to a dead end place you've spent the majority of your life avoiding!

And speaking of changing up your life, there's romance in this game. I opted to seek out neither romance route simply because I found both of them to be almost too painfully telegraphed as romantic interests. That's not really fair to Lake, but it just didn't feel natural for me so I opted to simply not engage that way - I called them both as love interests off of their very first sentences and I was right. Props to Lake for some bisexual representation here by having an option for Meredith to go either way, but I wasn't feeling either of them and opted to just be a professional upstanding postal worker and go about my business politely. Even with that behavior though, you'll get Angie calling you "babe" as if you've been flirting with her too, and you'll get Maureen telling you that Robert has a double meaning with "trying to keep pretty things in PO". It's nice that there are dialogue options to try to blow people off, but it really doesn't matter and it often doesn't feel like what you say has any impact at all upon the characters and their interactions. It feels like the game thinks you're pursuing romance with your every interaction until the point where those plotlines end, and that sure does get a bit uncomfortable feeling at times when either Robert or Angie are clearly angling at you despite showing no reciprocation.

And speaking of Lake ignoring your inaction, your actions never have any consequences. The crazy cat lady wants you to help her with her sick cat? Doesn't matter if you don't! I mean, I'm glad the cat didn't die, but I said no (I'm the postman, I have work to do, you clearly have a car right there in your driveway lady) and it made no difference. I said no to hanging out with the hippies who I spoke to twice, both times incredibly brief encounters, and yet I was still forced to go say goodbye to them and listen to the guy's bad singing while they passed around a blunt - if ever there was an encounter I wanted to not do, it was this one. Hell, I'm actually just surprised that there weren't more events that I was forced to do like that. One such event I thought would be a shoo-in for a forced encounter, if you don't help Robert save the town from new apartments (who are they going to put into those apartments??? we're in the middle of nowhere and have a tiny population, who are we renting to?), he will still succeed at rallying the town to stave off the construction. If you do or don't help Angie with her movie rental store, it will always fail and she will always leave... and honestly I'm surprised that you even had the option to say no to helping her, she wanted you to do deliveries and that's what the game is all about. Most egregiously, your boss at Addit will repeatedly pester you to do work off the clock to help ensure their multi-million dollar deal goes through - I blew him off every single time he asked and not only did the deal still go through, I was still offered a huge stake in the company too. You can simply sleepwalk through Lake, never once engaging with anything, and your inaction doesn't matter. I was cordial but distant to Meredith's former best friend Kay (I'm shocked at how abrupt her storyline is, I was expecting a more natural moment for them to reconnect and it didn't really happen), and after days of being treated the way you would treat an inoffensive customer at a retail job she just decides that you're still her best friend and she'll go asking you favors and being super chatty all the time. She asked me to babysit her kids so she could go see Journey, and I didn't - she still ended up seeing Journey anyhow. Your actions don't matter, aside from whoever you choose to kiss or where you decide to go in the end. You can even be kinda rude to most people and you'll still get a radio sendoff where the town says they'll miss you if you leave town at the end.

Probably the strangest plotline in the game for me is the bit with Frank and his gambling addiction. The man is using his federal job to run an illegal gambling ring to better himself. The postmaster general gives you a threatening phone call to do postal policies correctly, and then shows up in town to ask about Frank. I actually completely spilled the beans about Frank, saying that yeah, he's misusing his position and doing some kinda corrupt shit. Listen, I don't WANT to acquiesce to the police like that, but honestly yeah Frank was kind of a shitty person for using his job to do that kind of stuff so I figured screw it, let him have some consequences for abuse of his position. Frank is then suspended for a single day, and the postmaster general immediately gives up with the provided reasoning that he didn't wanna talk to the crazy cat lady again and that Frank has some lawyer friends who scared him off. What do you MEAN this backwoods doofus has lawyers who got the federal government off of his back when he was in the wrong? The game even tries to portray Frank as the hero who is in the right here! Come on man, misuse of federal funds and shit like that, why do you want me to root for Brett Favre?

What I'm left with in Lake is a game that feels like it wasted my time. I didn't like the cast, and frankly that's all the game was really about - without that, it's nothing. The gameplay loop is to walk slowly (hold down a button to walk 1% faster), drive a clunky unresponsive van, and fight the map with its icons that rarely feel like they're in the right place for most houses. You'll chat to some locals, and if you aren't interested in them you have nothing to latch onto. The sound effects often broke, I'd constantly see massive 8 car pileups happen entirely on their own in random spots on the road, there's about 3 songs on the radio, and when I finished the game the credits song didn't even play. Maybe that's because I did what the writers clearly felt was the bad ending? It's hard to tell whether that was intentional or not when so many other things broke so frequently, but it did lead off the credits with the name of the song so I doubt that was the point. This game wants so badly to have the vibes of Life is Strange, but all I could feel the whole playthrough was how much I wish the town could be the setting of a successor to Deadly Premonition instead of what it is. It's a shame, because I wanted to find something in this game, but I felt unfulfilled the whole adventure. I guess the answer was to simply just not go back home.

Clickbait intro: Game so bad it makes notorious diehard videogame preservationist pray that it's lost to the sands of time.

You know, I had about 1400~ words of an incomplete real review typed up for this one, but I tabbed back in to keep playing and just.

Man.

I try to be fair to the games I play, even if they're ass. I like to sit with them, ponder them on my morning walks, look into their creation. I believe that all art contains a variable amount of love and that love should be, if not appreciated, at least acknowledged. I think games are art, and my desire to treat them the same way I've treated music for decades is what made me create this Backloggd account in the first place.

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands makes me wish I reneged on that personal promise.

It's difficult to describe this term using language, because the game just feels like pure hate. So much of it is steeped in contempt for someone or something that it actually borders on staggering.

If you care enough about videogames to even use Backloggd you probably already know about Borderlands Humor so I'm not gonna devote a mini essay to it. I'm also not gonna pretend I never liked Borderlands; up until around 2018 Borderlands 2 was a game I'd replay yearly.

Borderlands humor now grates on me in my old age, but the jokes at least have setup and punchlines even if those punchlines are of debatable... everything.

Wonderlands' jokes confound me, because oftentimes the punchline is "a thing exists". It has all the same energy of your debatably conservative uncle nudging you with his elbow at a wedding party and saying "Polish people, right?" except it's some quip about tabletop game/player stereotypes that the writer found by going on Tumblr and sifting through the TTRPG tags.
At least 95% of the dialogue in this game is jokes like this, or orphaned punchlines that feel as though they're responding to a nonexistent setup.
The other 5% is... Dated. Borderlands humor gets even more dated as each entry comes out and betrays the sad, unmoving time capsule that the directors live in, but Wonderlands is somehow worse than the prior entry because it feels like it came fresh out of 2012. I only played Portal 2 a month or so ago and this game could've been its contemporary.

I know riffing on a Gearbox title for not being funny is a bit redundant, it's like riffing on Gears of War for having cover or riffing on Skyrim for having dragon shouts or riffing on Halo for having Spartans or riffing on Baldur's Gate 3 for being bad. But I dunno, this game came out in 2022 and it's somehow a step backwards from everything before it. It boggles the mind. Even as I type this I find myself endlessly confused, wondering who they used as focus testers that anything in this game writing-wise got approval.

I think the sticking point for me is that this game is very ostensibly a parody of tabletop games and tabletop gamers, but there's a bit too much venom for me to really call it a parody. Many of the TTRPG related jokes feel mean-spirited and cheap, not unlike the Saints Row reboot. These don't feel like jokes for tabletop players, they feel like jokes about tabletop players.
The ones that aren't mean feel very... "How do you do, fellow kids?", to the point where even calling them "Reddit-like" is inaccurate

The spiel about games and love up above wasn't just a fillerbuster, it's something I genuinely have been pondering this entire time.

Wonderlands doesn't feel like it was made with any love.

I question who or what the target audience for this game looks like because just from observing the text, I get the feeling it just fucking hates everybody? It clearly has no love for tabletop players given both them and their hobby are the butt of the joke, it has no love for Borderlands players either because its parent series is barely present and is only wheeled out to keep the player awake, and it clearly has no love for sensible people because it forces you to listen to Ashly Burch's ulcer-bustingly racist Tiny Tina voice for a full game's runtime.

What really confounds me is just how desperate the game is, though.

In 2013, they already did this game. It was a DLC for Borderlands 2 titled "Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep" and it was... Okay, I suppose. I'm not the biggest fan of BL2's DLC for numerous reasons, but it was this game down a T except with like... Not even better writing, it had writing to begin with.
I harp on the jokes so much because that's basically all this game has, besides Will Arnett phoning in a performance to get a paycheck now that the Arrested Development and Bojack Horseman mines dried up.
There's a story which, prior to playing the game, I'd seen hyped up as "Better than BL3's". After playing it, I wondered if I'd bought a secret copy that lacked any plot, because there basically isn't on.

Wonderlands does have gameplay which, as is the running theme here, is just BL3's but infinitely worse. God I miss Moze. What were they even cooking here? Were BL fans begging for less interesting gameplay?

All in all, I am struggling to come up with a meaningful conclusion here, or even say anything nice. Saying "it's just bad" is boring, and something any goblin with a keyboard can tell you over in the Steam reviews, but... It's just bad, dude. I got this game for £12 and I'm genuinely regretting not using it to get a nice haul from Greggs. A pack of sausage rolls for the fridge, a Mexican chicken oval bite for the evening and a packet of their spicy chicken bites for lunch... Mmm.

Some people, usually Bloodborne fans for some reason, will tell you that they wish they could wipe their memory and play a game for the first time all over again.

I wish I could wipe this game from my memory.

Which, given the next Honkai Star Rail update is all about memory, sure does feel prophetic.

     ‘You have freed the one with yearning eyes whose lot was hunger tragic.’
     – Gary Gygax, The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, 1982.

Players of the tournament adventure The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (1976) were greeted, after some exploration, by prismatic lights dancing on the walls, contrasting with the pile of dark rocks in the centre of the room. Far from being an end in itself, this hall was merely the gateway to the Greater Caverns, where countless secrets were hidden amidst strange stalactites and rock formations conjured from a demented imagination. The treasure of Iggwilv, mysterious as it may be, was only for the bravest of souls. In the 1970s, the development of PLATO, a computer system linking several thousand terminals around the world, led to the emergence of a community of creators who generally made no secret of their inspiration for the dungeon-crawling style typical of the printed RPGs of the time. These first forays set a trend. Among these, Oubliette (1977) perhaps stands out for its remarkable depth for its time: the source of inspiration was clearly Dungeons & Dragons (1974), but the inclusion of attribute tables for the different classes and races, as well as a rich magic system, placed it at the forefront of computer games.

     A formula based on Dungeons & Dragons rules

Unlike PLATO, mainstream computer systems did not have the same computing power and early titles could seem like a step backwards. In 1978, Robert J. Woodhead, who had already gained a small notoriety for plagiarising dnd (1975), decided to replicate the system and experience of Oubliette in his own version, promoting an original adventure. The Dungeons & Dragons system is used quite faithfully, and any veteran can create their characters without getting lost. Since multiplayer was not an option, Wizardry recommends creating a team of six characters – or less – to explore the ten underground levels that make up the adventure. As a result, by appropriating the ideas of Oubliette, the title established a canon of standard rules and codes that would have a lasting influence on the dungeon crawler genre.

The player assumes the role of several adventurers whose goal is to venture into the catacombs beneath the castle of King Trebor. Having gone mad after the wizard Werdna stole a precious amulet, he sends young mercenaries to the first floors of the complex where the wizard is hiding. He hopes to find adventurers strong enough to reach the deepest part of the catacombs to kill Werdna and recover the amulet. The tone is rather light and the adventure, though rough in its progression, is punctuated with comic messages; there is something strange about exploring Wizardry, as a light-hearted theatricality contrasts with the often serious and merciless nature of the early Dungeons & Dragons modules.

From the outset, Wizardry requires an investment from the player, who must build their team based on attributes, classes and alignments. A balanced approach is preferred, with three characters in the front attacking with melee weapons, while the backline provides defensive and offensive support with a variety of spells. Character creation oblige, it is possible to abuse the system to get the best possible scores and start with a comfortable roster; likewise, creating characters to take their money is a viable strategy, allowing the player to properly equip themselves before even entering the Proving Grounds. This freedom is reminiscent of the shenanigans possible during TTRPG sessions, and adds to the idiosyncrasy of Wizardry at the time of its release. Traditional reflexes are thus rewarded: the cautious and savvy player will exercise extreme caution, taking care to map effectively and intelligently identify any items recovered from the dungeon.

     Some diverse but often obsolete mechanics

The Famicom version, released in 1987, retains these gameplay features, but improves the title with better graphics. The port is largely faithful to the original, with the exception of some floors in the second half of the game, which have been completely redesigned. Even in the Famicom version, the player has to progress slowly and draw their own map to avoid getting lost. However, the first few floors are particularly enjoyable to explore. Wizardry opens elegantly, with Floor 1 divided into quarters, making exploration more digestible. In the first one, the player learns that opening doors is the most common way for the party to engage in combat, and only then can they find chests containing gold and sometimes equipment. Exploration feels organic and natural, with the compartmentalisation ensuring that the player is not drowned out by overly large rooms. Floor 2 follows the same logic, introducing the importance of key objects in the progression: indeed, some areas are inaccessible if the adventurer does not possess the figurines, and the game takes good care to communicate this information through its pseudo-labyrinthine design. Mapping is still fairly straightforward, but takes a bit more time to complete due to the many twists and turns.

At the same time, the player will slowly become accustomed to the combat system. While the backline is generally of no help at the start of the game, as it has no spells, it will gradually become more useful. Once characters have gained enough experience, they can rest at the inn to advance to the next level. Wizardry complicates the process, as not only can certain stats be lowered, but time spent in the inn will cause characters to age and their powers to diminish, before they eventually die. This system may come as a surprise, as it encourages the player not to use the inn excessively as a means of healing. The system does force the player to use the Cleric's spells, but the process tends to be lengthy and the menus are rather cumbersome.

Furthermore, the shop, while useful at first, quickly becomes redundant. The stock is relatively sparse, and the player will easily equip themselves with the best gear available long before exploring the floors where better weapons and armour can be obtained from the monsters. This element makes character progression heavily reliant on enemy grinding – and luck on the chests' table – but renders some mechanics obsolete. In practice, gold coins are only used to visit the temple and remove negative statuses. A similar problem exists with the promotion system: once the attribute and alignment requirements have been met, the player can change a character's class to diversify their options. The problem is that they start with the lowest stats for their race, and it is necessary to grind experience from the start to make the character viable. This emphasis on grinding is at the root of the structural problems in the second half of the game.

     Exploration abandoned in favour of grinding: an artificial approach

While the adventure up to Floor 4 remains organic and natural, with a forced encounter forming the game's first genuine obstacle, the following floors lose all interest in ergonomics and decide to take a very aggressive route. The floors become much more complex, with devious traps and frustrating hidden doors. The title introduces anti-magic zones, which severely neutralise the party's abilities – although enemies suffer the same effects. Where the backline, with its crowd control and area attacks, became paramount towards the end of Floor 4, the player is deprived of these options during exploration, making progression much rougher and more difficult. The problem is that the middle floors, 5 to 8, are completely optional. After collecting the Blue Ribbon, players can use the private lift to go directly to any floor between the fourth and ninth, which opens the way to Werdna's lair.

More specifically, the Blue Ribbon is necessary in the progression, as the ninth floor can only be reached by this particular lift. It turns out that the intermediate floors have no other purpose than to be grinding areas. Naturally, the player begins by mapping out the rooms, but when they visit the ninth floor out of curiosity, they realise that all this work is pointless. Because the grind cannot sustain its formula, especially with such a bare interface, the temptation to brute-force the last floor and fight Werdna as quickly as possible is strong. My experience was very similar to the speedrun strategy, as I decided to grind the Giants on Floor 10 to unlock the most powerful offensive spells. Once my Mage was level 13, the final challenge was to survive the gauntlet on the final floor and reach Werdna; at this point, a simple Haman to teleport the boss group ends the game with minimal fuss.

Wizardry remains a challenging title, and the strong dichotomy between the first and second halves is surprising. Could it be that the change in gameplay philosophy is the result of contrasting inspirations? Oubliette offered a fairly straightforward map that, while more open than the early stages of Proving Grounds, was natural and pleasant to explore. Here, the later floors are riddled with cruel traps, such as the three rock columns that instantly punish teleportation with Malor by killing the party with no chance of recovery. This ruthlessness must have been too much for the Japanese team working on the port, as they decided to implement their own floors, which are much more explicit about their optional nature: the hidden stairs in an infinite corridor have been removed, and it is not possible to find the stairway between Floors 7 and 8 without a deliberately creative use of Malor.

The title was an important trailblazer that inspired entire genres of video games, both in the West and in Japan. If it is still possible to experience it in 2023, it is worth remembering the extent to which Wizardry embraces game design ideas that are now considered archaic. The game does not hesitate to punish careless actions and shows no mercy towards unprepared parties, even to the point of permanently eliminating them. The emphasis on grinding, although facilitated by the lifts that allow easy access to the surface, is frustrating. Before reaching level 13, a party can suffer from an encounter that is a little too crowded with enemies, and the player is pressured to reach this threshold before attempting to fight Werdna. As in Tsojcanth, obtaining the Blue Ribbon is only the beginning of the adventure; far scarier things and devious traps await the player, but Wizardry never conjures up the poetic strangeness of these rainbow caverns where unknown and wondrous crystals glisten.

Well, look before you meme, I guess. I don’t know what I was really expecting with this one, but this game definitely managed to fall short of most of my hopes. The general structure and battle system of Live A Live were recreated pretty well, but a lot of the adaptation work misses most of the best parts of the original.

For instance, what if the China scenario had only one disciple you train for slightly different stat boosts, dulling the decision making and removing the strongest story beats of the original? What if Wild West had the enemies come in easy waves, and the boss on her lonesome, meaning there’s no point to picking up items, which was the entire challenge? Even the chapters I enjoyed like Ninja tend to coast off the successes of the original instead of improving anything. So many things don’t come together that one of my friends, watching my downward spiral playing this game, called the developer a type of fan who only saw Live A Live as a cool obscure game to copy off of.

And I find “fan” to be apt as Touhou A Live also trends towards really vapid shoutouts of both the original and other games. At the very least, the undeniably true Touhou lore that Yun LiveALive trained Meiling is funny, and most of the Live A Live cameos don’t take up much space. Meanwhile, the generic video game references were what really got to me. Like, Wild West has you play as a fox person, so Mad Dog is named after James McCloud and names you Fox! (In fairness, this one could be part of the translation, but there’s so many other references that it seems likely the joke could be in the original) The evil cavemen are crows, which obviously means Zaki has to be a Murkrow for some reason and his boss fights are you baiting out Brave Bird recoil damage. I guess this isn’t the biggest deal in the world, but it just gives off the vibe that whoever made this is like… really annoying about why Cube should be in Smash, if that makes any sense. These sorts of basic callouts really sap the immersion out of any story when they happen.

Speaking of the story, it’s a complete mess. The most immediate example is the end of the Knight chapter, something that in the original evidently inspires lots of thoughtful essays, including on this platform, from people probably better at writing than me. Here it’s just… Marisa mad that she’s the “Luigi” of Touhou. On some level, I get it. Touhou characters are more just funny than anything, and if Touhou A Live wanted to entirely divorce itself from Live A Live’s discussion of narratives, that would be acceptable. The Wrestler chapter is a strong example of this, with Masaru’s quest to become “the strongest” naturally imposed onto Cirno, who in typical Cirno fashion gets her shit kicked in by really strong bosses until you finally figure out their patterns. The chapter even has other good gags like the cast being 5 Touhou girls, as well as the entirely unchanged Moribe. Something silly like this is a perfect adaptation of Live A Live into the Touhou universe.

However, the narratively focused chapters still try to be “serious”, generally replacing the original plot with some incredibly insipid “who is truly correct in war” babble from a boss before a big fight. I simply don’t find a Touhou version of Live A Live a worthwhile way to examine themes like this (even putting aside hacky “we’re not so different” lines). At the point at which like, Gensokyo is planning a goddamn false flag operation to kill a whole village of their civilians in order to enrage the population to enlist in a war against Makai, the game has just forgotten what makes either of these properties appealing. And then the chapter inexplicably just becomes Knight again after this nuclear MAD false flag nonsense wraps up. The only time I think any of this works is in Mecha where you get to see the people in the process of liquefaction, which shows where Live A Live just kinda told us to care. Also, Wild West gets filled with pervy jokes towards the main character, and there’s a disgusting assault scene in the Knight chapter. The conversation around these sorts of games are usually shitposts about their general nature from people who haven’t played them, so I think it’s responsible having finished it to inform people who would play this for themselves about any disturbing content.

I know someone’s going to get on my case with “what about the gameplay though”, and general issues with chapters aside, I think the battle system is still fun here. Porting this whole real time grid thing to RPGMaker sounds like a headache, but it generally works. Sadly, in later chapters with more complex moves, “generally” often isn’t enough, and there are softlocks if you play fights the wrong way (like using a recoil move to KO a commander enemy, causing a BREAK DOWN). Of special note is the final boss, who softlocks if you KO one of the sentries while hitting another. That was very fun when my best damage dealer hit a whole row. On the other hand, the second phase glitched so bad that everyone but Cirno got stuck charging but the boss didn’t attack so I kicked her to death for like 9 minutes. We fucking take those.

Despite some mechanical issues, there are also some genuinely impressive fights. Towards the start of the Knight chapter, you need to rescue a woman from some bandits, so your main crew starts the fight in a far off corner while all the bandits surround their victim. You have to try to evacuate her ASAP since her vanishing from the field on death will cause a Game Over. This serves as a unique challenge and storytelling opportunity that Live A Live never tried. Even simpler ideas, such as a miniboss in Mecha who kills you in cardinal directions, forces you to strategize on the fly, dancing around the deadly attack while still keeping up pressure because the boss will heal too. Of course, in typical Touhou A Live fashion, this is balanced out by fangamecore bosses of “wow the mother computer goes into a third phase that instantly kills you if you dont spend 5 minutes using high update first so cool”. Taken as a whole, there are good ideas floating around in the game’s various fights despite it all.

Unfortunately, most of the best ideas here really are drowned out by the bad. I couldn’t even fit in other grievances like how the final chapter is even more bloated and dull than the original. There’s a lot of passion that goes into redoing a game like Live A Live, adding new sprites (including bombastic boss ones), even giving the whole soundtrack an infectious SiIvaGunner energy. But the mere presence of passion isn’t enough to make a good game, not when that passion goes toward a nonsensical tone and overlooks simple gameplay decisions, bulldozing over the best parts of Live A Live while seldomly providing much in return. If I wanted to be a news anchor I could say there’s still some interesting stuff here to check out, maybe the insanity of it all is compelling enough for some people, but really, this year I gained a massive appreciation of Live A Live and severe Touhou brainrot. If I could barely tolerate this game long enough to finish it for the bit, what is anyone else getting out of this?

except the best version of mecha omg stan mokou shes so fuckin epic