..................................................This is Sony's answer to the critically acclaimed game Final Fantasy VII on the PlayStation 1? Fucking pathetic. How dare they even ATTEMPT to mimic one of the best games of all time. Dart wants to be Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII so fucking bad it's unbelievable. The addition mechanic is a fucking joke as well. The last thing I ever want to hear in my entire life is some, and excuse my profanity, ASSHOLE, screaming VOLCANO like a fucking inbred idiot. Don't believe me? Take a gander: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6NZr7A72Zk

Enough said.

Ladies and gentlemen im going to keep it a buck 50 this might just be the worst game ive ever played

I dont think american developers should try to emulate japanese media and vise versa because this is the result of that.... Whats up with the shitty music its like they want to be shitty dragon quest so bad

Save yourself the money and time just go buy Final Fantasy VII instead

Glimmers of greatness, marking Mike Klubnika as one to watch out for.

Anthology collections are always going to be a bit of a mixed bag. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that stayed at a single level of quality throughout; Magnetic Rose from 1995’s Memories — one of the most beautiful pieces of animation I’ve ever seen — is only the first part of the collection, and is immediately followed up by Stink Bomb, which is roughly thirty minutes of a guy who can’t stop farting nerve gas. Stink Bomb isn’t bad, but holy fuck, is it no Magnetic Rose. Unsorted Horror is similarly not immune to anthology syndrome, and excellent pieces like the perspective-swapping Concrete Tremor sit a bit awkwardly next to Control Room Alpha’s core theme of “big spiders are scary”. Despite some inconsistencies, however, Unsorted Horror is still a collection that shows a lot of latent potential peeking through the cracks.

The Other Side was the first game offered to me, and it’s the first PAYDAY 2-themed horror game I’ve seen; you’re tasked with maintaining the biggest piece of shit drill ever engineered to put a hole through through a vault door, constantly topping it up with coolant, oil, fresh batteries, and new bits. It’s a lot of blind fumbling around to figure out what goes where and how it all works together, much in the same vein of a personal favorite like Nauticrawl, but it’s not especially polished; I managed to get softlocked the first time I needed to take the drill down for repairs, and that’s not very impressive for a game that’s only about fifteen minutes long. The ending is also pretty silly, culminating in the classic indie horror final shrug of “spawn a scary PNG that moves toward the player and then cut to credits”. It feels distinctly amateurish, and it’s not a great first step forward into the collection.

Control Room Alpha is next, and similarly fails to impress. The core conceit hinges almost exclusively on whether the player is scared of spiders; if you aren’t, then this is mostly just going to be you fucking around with a dipstick for a few minutes before a big spider jumps at you. There’s certainly something admirable about the way that Klubnika tries to build tension here, especially given how short of an experience it is — wandering outside to the spider pit when the equipment fails, having to very carefully move the samples while insects skitter around your station — but, again, if you aren’t afraid of spiders, then this isn’t going to do much for you. There’s another equally cheap jumpscare at the end of this one, too, and I was afraid we were going to fall into a pattern with the remaining three games.

Not the case, luckily! Carbon Steel is the third entry of the collection, and it’s far more feature-complete and engaging. I used to daydream about being a lab technician when I was younger, just getting to work as some sort of scientist; it was a pretty simple imagining of how such a job would function, given that I was a child who thought scientists were just people like Doc Brown or Dexter who fucked around with machines and chemicals all day, but it was something I fantasized about all the same. While real lab techs do boring shit like crystal chromatography, Carbon Steel lets you run experiments on live sea monsters that are constantly threatening to break out of their rusty tubes and savage you for your hubris. Sick. There’s a neat little plot running through this that gives a bit more context and worldbuilding than I was expecting from such a breezy title, and it provides a lot of motivation to do things properly. Or really, really wrong. Your choice. Things were starting to look up.

Concrete Tremor is next, and it’s the easy stand-out of the lot. Multiple perspectives, a slowly-unfolding story, and some truly chilling moments make for a wonderful piece of dream-like horror. The Battleship game that goes down at the end gives you the opportunity to get a phone call from someone in a group of people you were playing as earlier, and there’s an exchange between your old character and your new one that actually managed to get an audible reaction out of me. It’s my understanding that this one is actually offered as a standalone title, along with every other game I’ve mentioned previously, and I’d seriously suggest just getting this one if you aren’t in the mood to play through the entire collection.

We round things off with The Tartarus Engine, which was created exclusively for this anthology, and it shows; it feels the most obviously like the sum total of Klubnika’s talents, mixing a lot of systems and knowledge together into something that feels remarkably cohesive. He’s gotten a bit better at writing, a bit better at coming up with diagetic ways to convey information to the player, a bit better at constructing level layouts, a bit better at creating a consistent art style. You can see a lot of elements of the other works present in Unsorted Horror cropping up here, and it makes you feel like something of a proud parent to see the developer applying all of his learned talents at once. That said, Tartarus Engine isn’t my favorite of the lot — that still goes to Concrete Tremor — but it’s easily the piece that shows the most promise for Klubnika’s future work. Frantically checking your watch as the time you have to hack into the machine slowly ticks away is a wonderful little mechanic, and it fits the short runtime perfectly.

Unsorted Horror is a bit of a mixed bag, but the title should have given that much away. While it’s certainly not going to be winning any awards, this is still a nice portfolio to show off a lot of little, unique ideas. The indie horror scene is currently going through some weird growing pains, with a deluge of scary children’s mascots designed purely for the sake of having Game Theory videos made about them and liminal space walking simulators where a scary monster eventually jumps out at you and screams until your speakers pop; anything being made today that can break free of these amateur trappings is deserving of your attention. Going off of what’s here, you’d be smart to keep an eye on Klubnika from here on out. He’s gonna make something truly spectacular sooner rather than later, and you won’t want to miss it when he does.

This game is good. Surprisingly so when you look at it, as most of the game consists of dull checkerboard walls/floor/ceiling and mazes, but it turns out there's a lot you can do with that. The game doesn't ever scream at you (and I'd say there's no jumpscares at all but there is room for disagreement) yet still keeps you on the edge of your seat, even when you know damn well what you're doing and what consequences come about when you screw up. This especially comes about in Hide and Seek, where the game leans more towards the outright goofy when it realizes the horrors aren't landing (and the game knows when to be humorous,) yet I found myself always worried and cautious nonetheless. That isn't to say the game can't be scary, nono, Shutter Mode and Living Halls in specific consistently elicited the occasional whimper. It puts forth a bunch of diverse ideas with the same standard formula and they all manage to work!

Obviously that isn't without fault, though. The Phantom's AI is outright unfair at times, with it revisiting areas, and avoiding capture at plenty points is outright impossible. The maze design in Living Halls isn't the greatest, especially near Vault B, where the entrance is practically obscured. Classic Mode quickly ends up being a little too simple (though understandably so,) and its extra mode honestly just sucks. Doors are pointless, and a few of the ending cutscenes aren't necessary. I find myself wishing that it put a little less forth in that department, and just leaned in more with being a maze minigame collection.

But most of my complaints are nitpicks. It's not airtight, but it's solid nonetheless, which is impressive for how small the underlying formula is.

hello charlotte episodes 1 and 2 should be played not just to be caught up on the story, but to watch a developer gradually learn to express what is at their core. this also means that hc is a series with some growing pains, including but not limited to how it can be: hit or miss in its sense of humor, unevenly paced, and full of puzzles that even if thematically fitting are largely forgettable. i'd put hc1 as a little bit above average for an artistically inclined tumblr user's first rpgmaker game--plus i think its very funny in how eager it is kill you--but i can understand not liking it. hc2 is actually quite good and a very compelling leap forward from 1, and sows some very important seeds that make it ESPECIALLY crucial to be paired with hc3, but its still just shy of excellence on its own. they can still showcase etherane's specificity and intelligence pretty well, and having some of the context for what she's informed by and responding to--which is to say not just rpgmaker in general but that filtered thru tumblr fandom--lets you understand some of where she's coming from. but these two games alone do not exactly feel like fully confident and complete works.

by contrast, etherane's first game after hello charlotte, tomorrow won't come for those without ██████, has a more experienced and steadied hand guiding it. it's standalone and more concise, but this has its advantages over the relative bulk and bloat of the series etherane worked on previously. it's partly because its more contained and wastes less space that the fog of all the tensions twc suggests to us feel so dense, making it like a short story that invites rereads to find something new each time. its more distanced tone and tighter writing also brings a weight and sobriety to it that hello charlotte did not have as consistently. basically it's more "perfected" in what it aims to do with its narrative than any hellchar, and i would call it a capital G Great game for that. only the puzzles still feel hc-tier but that's not a big deal. i do wonder what i could have gotten out of this creator's oeuvre if i had started with hello charlotte and then built up to twc, but i think playing it first was a good way to assure me that ane is the real deal, enough to want to see their first series through to the end. even with the growing pains or whatever other superficial hangups i may have had as i went through it.

then there's hello charlotte episode 3, sitting between the amateurish but inspired explorations of the series before it and the more fully developed twc. childhood's end fits as a subtitle, a sign of not just the finale of hello charlotte as a series (mainline, at least), but also an assertion of itself as the break from the artistic immaturity of previous entries that's now been outgrown, so to speak. this may sound like i'm saying this is where etherane finally reached their potential of greatness, and my answer to that is, essentially, yes! but 3 has more of an adolescent energy to it; even as its subtitle declares being done with childish things, this can be taken not as an objective assessment of itself but coming from a sort of teenage urge to prove that they can overcome their past, by any means necessary. these means are often bratty and practically asking to be disliked. it diverts hard from the last 2 entries, sabotaging the mostly harmless and maudlin cringe for more provocative cringe that at times, tbh, can be offputting for the wrong reasons. at a glance, its lack of subtlety in its belligerence at points can make it seem like it amounts to little more than an overly hammy, bridge-burning heel turn. all these rough and serrated edges often do the opposite of bringing greater coherence that hc2 hinted at, making for an even more unbalanced experience than what came before.

alot of this is done to address a realization that the previous two games, even with their own strengths and self-awareness, lent themselves to being taken as scatterbrained misery entertainment; stories of a soft nice and easily likable character getting her shit kicked in constantly to “become relatable to the max", as a character puts it. fandom attaches to this easily and often uncritically, and as this attachment informs their own interpretations as told through fanart and fanfic, the work itself and characters within get untethered from the creator's control & intentions. many such cases of rpgmaker games--or rpgmaker-ish ones too--that this applies to, and hellchar practically speaks directly to that context it’s situated within. frustrated with the shallow regurgitation of angst back and forth, ashamed of having played into it previously without bristling at it enough, paranoid towards giving a personal story up for voyeuristic dissection (especially for this audience's expectations for authors to unload their traumas and neuroses in a correctly consumable manner), hc3 lashes out in order to separate itself from this and take the narrative back. the guro danganronpa nietzsche-pilled "this is LITERALLY 1984" theatrics, cringe they may be, have a sincerely felt anger and pessimism underlying them. it's painfully aware it's entrenched in a juvenile world and only knows juvenile means to escape it, writhing within what feels like a meaningless feedback loop.

this is the set up for one of the most scorched and restless reconfigurations of identity i've found. hellchar may have gotten so wound up about the subculture it's within, but it doesn't turn its back on it completely in the end because it remains, just as it had been previously, a vector for speaking on its specific preoccupations and troubles. idolization of creators, the ways presumptions about others reflect yourself, fear over losing some cultivated idea of purity from contact with people, having your own life dictated through your psychosis...these are things it wants to express that are inextricably tied with this world it has so much friction with. it comes to understand that even art that is embarrassingly derivative (figuratively and literally) or selfish projection can reveal something, if the author is really willing. its critique of stories that hand out catharsis like its nothing wouldn't mean much if it wasn't so committed to reaching an actually useful catharsis of its own. it strains itself to go further and deeper into its pain, despite all the nihilism it talks up, to eventually finding meaning within its own efforts to change, to keep moving on. here was when etherane showed what true vulnerability is: letting you in on something that would otherwise be kept secret, not hiding behind subtlety--its genuinely smart and incisive in its opaqueness--but also not oversharing or self-flagellating for cheap sympathy. anyone can speak honestly, but very rarely do you see someone really understand that you aren't just speaking in a vacuum. after pulling back all the layers of failed perceptions that attached onto it, being frank about its perceived failures to form attachment before, it's then that hc3 finds a space to hit more directly than anything else it could be compared to.

this game is a mess but it's also a maelstrom, one that's craftily and furiously and courageously leaned into to find where truth really lies. tomorrow won't come is technically a more respectable effort, but in retrospect it is the collected sigh after the panic attack that hc3 was. an extremely fraught but incredibly observant moment of soul searching that haunts what comes after, whether it's heaven's gate or twc or probably the freshly released mr rainer's solve-it service (haven't got to it much yet but i trust post-hc3 ane with my life so it will be the greatest gaming sensation of this week, at the very least). the big bang, scattershot as it may be, of etherane's full voice, and it's the instability specific to it that makes this my favorite game from them. with all its entropy and fevered tantrums in the background, it managed a connection and communicated something invaluable to me. it knows that anxiety of leaving yourself defenseless to others seeing the rear of your head, hating to imagine what their eyes see and doing that despite yourself--and also knows the desire to crane your neck backwards in the hope you'll see it for yourself. it will look grotesque and humiliating and idiotic to go through all those contortions, but don't you want to get one good glimpse for once? and if you can't do it, you might as well try to impress how hard you're trying to anyone who dares to watch.

I usually don't think about rewriting things on here, but my prior HC3 review is currently the most liked one on this page and, Unfortunately, one that I have a deep embarrassment towards. Not that I didn't speak my truth, but lots of time has passed since my first interaction with the game, and my words on it were much more of a riposte of the thought-cyclone the game left me with than anything, like, substantial. And frankly, the feeling I get when I receive a notif about it, that someone assumes I still ride with those thoughts is - boy, no wonder I gave this shit a 5 - enough to coax a second try out of me. After all, as I said in my old review, to confine it to one conclusion would do it a disservice (though now I mean that in a more direct way than I ever did before, lol).

As far as more formal things go (character depth, conciseness, visual splendor) it could be argued that etherane has outdone HellChar 3 a few times by now, but to be honest, the more I sit with it, the more I think the circumstance of Hello Charlotte as a series is a worthwhile feature more than any kind of problem. Playing HC1 and casting it off as a study of RPGMaker more than a developed game in and of itself feels almost necessary to eventually get to the part where HC3 throttles some purple and blue into your cheeks. To put it more directly: even if I didn't see myself in it (which I do), I still think it's incredibly worthwhile to see this rare glimpse into the game creator's artistic trajectory.

What makes this game part of that trajectory, let alone the extremum of it? Well, with all its internet-coded self-reflection, the nihilistic lashouts at just about every aspect of the game as an object/piece of entertainment, the audience as a collective entity (crucially, the audience of people who were there at the time of HC3's release, who played HC2 and asked, "please may I have some more"), and the ensuing story as the byproduct of an intellectually and emotionally laborious creative process. It works through that initial stage of self-awareness games this metafictionally occupied have and into a world of razor-thin separations between idea and story. And none of this is strictly contemptuous, but etherane does not mince words and speaks to certain things so directly that the aforementioned separation of fiction is liable to break down, if only for a moment. (I believe the less-nice way of saying this is "preachy", but stick with me)

Hello Charlotte always has been very artificial as a fiction, but here its worldstate is so rebellious that it's a wonder any coherency occurs. Though, I will say, the conceptualization of creator and creation here is perhaps more vital and centers more than that explanation leads on, and there's a layer of, for lack of a better term, knowing bratiness that IS SO IMPORTANT TO INTERNALIZE by the end or else you'd just fuckin' hate this shit. But, even then, these things are likely to someone's distaste (understandably so) given how brash and just straight up trying it all can be at the best of moments.

BUT, that's the thing, and I'm gonna just come out and say it, HC3's rigor and vulnerability remain unmatched in the space of games, even in the rolling wake of personal games or w/e tag you'd ascribe to them. It has a pinpoint line of sight to the core of tumblr's now-ruinous identity and truth politics and proceeds to shred the Earth's mantle to get there. You could not make this up if you tried - etherane shoveled the trenches of that distinct blog-era mental-to-digital-to-mental anguish and isolation, and the dirt and clay, cracking in the fiery kiln, forms this completely unstable work that cannot be any less angry or confused than it is, lest it fail to... be itself. But it succeeds, and I am so fucking thankful that someone out there spoke to it with such bare intentions, because it's a cultural aftershock that affected me and continues to affect me on multiple levels - I reckon this is at least partially why the game gets such a strong response years after its initial release, because it's prodding the tender points of a life so common among its demographic but also one that's, from my own experience, hard to come to terms with. I've seen some people struggle to understand or even outright despise this game for this, but in my case, there's no way, man. This game got it.

ALSO sneak-attack Heaven's Gate review because I finally played it: so much more than the AU tag gives it credit for, at least in the sense that it doesn't feel at all out of step with anything else in the series. I mean, rigid fiction HellChar is not, so what's a couple of smudged details to stop you from feeling out Charles, Anri, and Vincent as a graduating class? It pretty much sledgehammers the layers of abstraction left in HC and becomes unfettered conversations with these ideologues that the True Realm characters have assumed the roles of. Despite that, though, it's maybe the most natural dialogue of the series and every conversation with these three ends up being just SO emotionally fulfilling and a great treat for those who already liked the sprite versions of them. I guess that is etherane's twisted idea of an AU? God, please miss, just once.