A so-called zen decorator hampered by rules devised by the most maniacal of Feng Shui practitioners, Unpacking isn’t so much an easy-breezy meditation on passion and what we leave behind as we age, and more a reflection on the apparent issues of how I, as an individual, design and decorate.

While the assumed narrative follows a nameless, voiceless protagonist through their life, across break-ups, move-ins, and start-overs, the real story of the game hinges on you, the player, as you realize by way of accursed red-outlines that everything you know about interior design is fucked up and evil. Plates that refuse to go with other plates, lest you be judged, coasters that scream foul if you place mugs atop them, egg timers that rain misery on you for daring to place them a few inches away a cutting board, the inherent madness of owning an air fryer.

Combine weird systematic flaws in what is deemed right or wrong (something that seems bound to happen when working with something as nebulous and personal as interior design) with a storyline that basically equates to “quirky art student goes to college, dates a guy, hides her passion, breaks up, regains passion, dates a girl, there’s nothing to gleam from this game other than the introspection inherent to being told, time and time again, that your mind goblin-addled thoughts are deranged and objectively wrong. It's weird, it’s uncomfortable, and it’s not the takeaway I expect from a game that claims to be a chill, downtempo type experience.

Edit 1: Corrected Typos (11/28/2021).

Before I get into the meat of this review, I want to talk about flowers. Yes flowers. In Calico, there’s heaps of flowers across the main area and from a distance, they look quite pretty and cute.

Get closer however and reality rears its ugly head. All of the flowers are exactly the same with no variation at all and all of them are missing any sort of stalk or leaf and all are 'just' a little too high off the ground which ends up making what was 'Cute Flowers' turn into 'Floating Litter'.

And that fits Calico quite well. The game as a whole looks incredibly cute and sort of fits that weird Tumblr aesthetic to a tee where everything’s pastel coloured, round, fluffy and about two steps away from swerving into some incredibly niche queer porn art. Its certainly a creative choice and in still screenshots it works a charm.

But then when you actually start playing, everything falls apart and the lack of technical prowess and graphical detail just hurts. The ground and tree textures are flat, your character routinely breaks limbs when trying to pick up things, animals repeatedly get stuck inside items or just SPEEN in circles for no reason.

There’s clipping through items, walls, chairs, trees and the floor. Character animations are jerky and clumsy. Movement feels floaty and uncoordinated. Sitting characters have no animation at all so they just look dead-eyed and glassy at all times.... Unless they happen to be roaming cats who eat at the cafe. In which point they'll just phase through whatever they are supposed to be sat at because the sitting animation hasn’t loaded properly.

I could literally go on with the absolute mess that this game is in and its honestly a real shame as there’s a cute fun little game buried under mounds of broken animations and flat texturing. Its rather charming racing around, doing little fetch quests, petting animals and working out some of the quirks in the game world and while it isn’t the longest game going, the more charming elements does help prevent it from becoming a total write-off... But its still a bad game that’s just in desperate need of clean-up. Its crying out for help.

Pikmin 4 is a gimmick-fest of the game. Just about every aspect feels as safe and marketable as possible. Bringing the amount of captains back down to 2 was the right move, but having the other one be an indestructible reddit doggo that can be upgraded to be even more OP was not the move. This game is crowded, uninteresting, and did irreparable damage to the worldbuilding the series was carefully building since the very first game. This game prioritizes RTS micromanagement over actually convincing you of the world and the dire situation you're in. It's just about everything I didn't want Pikmin to become.

A must play for people who consider themselves fans of the horror genre, as creative in it’s approach to the gameplay as it is terrifying, its a real test of mettle and how much you can handle, it tosses away conventional regular enemies to instead focus on a posse of stalker enemies who chase you around as you try to desperately advance through various levels, speaking of those, it’s amazing the amount of interesting environment you can pack with such a simple setting, some later levels are just jaw-dropping in terms of atmosphere and detail. It’s a true spiritual successor to RE1, but you’re not playing a person capable of being able to shoot any threat that comes their away, quite the opposite in fact, Fiona can and will succumb to the stress placed upon her by enemies which leads to a variety of panicked states, she only has her wits and some piss poor attacks to maneuver or defend herself, the German Shepard she rescues, Hewie, does the real carrying but even then he can only temporarily stop enemies and not permanently incapacitate them, add to that the fact that the stalkers in this game don’t have a habit of giving up easily on chasing you and you have a great basis for some truly terrifying moment to moment gameplay.

Oh yeah, the story is also interesting and holds it’s own quite well, Fiona might not say much but her expressions show a sea of emotions, seriously the facial animations for the game are pretty fucking good and they add a lot to the cutscenes, one of the most terrific scenes is pretty dependent on em! As for other aspects I really like how an act of unwarranted kindness from Fiona, even in the depths of hell, is what ends up saving her, I think it’s a neat way to shine a light on an aspect of Fiona’s personality.

You ever play something so ahead of its time that you could trick someone into believing that it just came out yesterday?

Seriously, what the fuck? 1998? I know Dungeon Hack existed for half a decade before this, and Wizardry a decade before that, but this feels advanced. Like, this might just be me speaking from ignorance, having not played the fifteen years of first-person dungeon crawlers building up to this, but there's something about the entire design philosophy of this that seems modern. Roguelikes weren't new at the time — you know, what with Rogue existing — nor were real-time blobbers, but combining them into one entity that encourages multiple playthroughs to peel back an obfuscated story is something that I last saw in The Binding of Isaac and in precisely zero games before that.

This game is impossibly cool. Let this be the most Hot Topic thing I ever say, but there's something about these hellish industrial land-and-soundscapes that make me feel a sense of belonging. Having a world that's in such an obvious, complete state of disrepair that you can't do much besides band together is a welcome reprieve from our world where everything is awful but the collective populace pretends as though it's fine. Comfort in discomfort; the end-times as impetus to make what's left over better. Of course, that isn't going to stop opportunists like Coffin Man from picking your corpse for loot, but it's not like he's gonna kill you for it, either.

It's a difficult title to discuss, and that's mostly due to how reliant it is on being experienced. This is probably a bit of a nothing statement, given that everything is designed to be experienced by someone, but the actual act of attempting to engage with the game feels more like "the gameplay" than its actual mechanics. Attempting to define this by putting it in neat boxes of clearing rooms and slashing up monsters and leveling up does a disservice to the whole. You cannot break this down into its parts without losing the magic that binds them all together.

I mentioned in my Last Call BBS review that I have a hard time with puzzle-solving because I can't really figure out how to learn how to solve them. With that said, though, brushing through Baroque's cryptic design came naturally to me. It's a game not just of learning, but of risk-management. You learn that Bones are items that can be thrown or consumed to deal enemies and apply buffs, respectively, but what do you do when you find an unidentified Bone on the floor? Do you gnaw on it and risk hurting yourself, or do you toss it at the enemy and risk giving them total invulnerability? When you find a new weapon, do you equip it right away to identify it, or do you avoid doing so because it might have an "adhesive" that makes it impossible to take off? These are basic tenets of Rogue games, but are they really different to puzzles in any meaningful way? You're meant to use your reasoning to figure out what the best course of action should be, and then following that path. Is that distinct from puzzle-solving?

I suppose what makes Baroque work for me is that there's never a binary right or wrong answer. There are good answers, and bad answers, but never right or wrong. Gnawing on a damaging bone will hurt you, but only for 10/20 HP (you start with 99). Stepping on a status pad might afflict you with Lust or Darkness, but only for a minute or two. The game can be harsh, but never unfair. You can never make a single mistake that'll cost you the run; you have to make several mistakes in sequence before you're in danger. I like not being judged completely on a scale of "you did it/you didn't do it". You can succeed here in a lot of different ways, but it's just that some ways are more efficient than others.

Immaculate vibes. It's a wonder that this got a translation nearly 25 years after it released.

I considered strongly putting together a long-form critique of this game, but the most damning statement I could possibly make about Final Fantasy XVI is that I truly don't think it's worth it. The ways in which I think this game is bad are not unique or interesting: it is bad in the same way the vast majority of these prestige Sony single-player exclusives are. Its failures are common, predictable, and depressingly endemic. It is bad because it hates women, it is bad because it treats it's subject matter with an aggressive lack of care or interest, it is bad because it's imagination is as narrow and constrained as it's level design. But more than anything else, it is bad because it only wants to be Good.

Oxymoronic a statement as it might appear, this is core to the game's failings to me. People who make games generally want to make good games, of course, but paired with that there is an intent, an interest, an idea that seeks to be communicated, that the eloquence with which it professes its aesthetic, thematic, or mechanical goals will produce the quality it seeks. Final Fantasy XVI may have such goals, but they are supplicant to its desire to be liked, and so, rather than plant a flag of its own, it stitches together one from fabric pillaged from the most immediate eikons of popularity and quality - A Song of Ice and Fire, God of War, Demon Slayer, Devil May Cry - desperately begging to be liked by cloaking itself in what many people already do, needing to be loved in the way those things are, without any of the work or vision of its influences, and without any charisma of its own. Much like the patch and DLC content for Final Fantasy XV, it's a reactionary and cloying work that contorts itself into a shape it thinks people will love, rather than finding a unique self to be.

From the aggressively self-serious tone that embraces wholeheartedly the aesthetics of Prestige Fantasy Television with all its fucks and shits and incest and Grim Darkness to let you know that This Isn't Your Daddy's Final Fantasy, without actually being anywhere near as genuinely Dark, sad, or depressing as something like XV, from combat that borrows the surface-level signifiers of Devil May Cry combat - stingers, devil bringers, enemy step - but without any actual opposition or reaction of that series' diverse and reactive enemy set and thoughtful level design, or the way there's a episode of television-worth of lectures from a character explaining troop movements and map markers that genuinely do not matter in any way in order to make you feel like you're experiencing a well thought-out and materially concerned political Serious Fantasy, Final Fantasy XVI is pure wafer-thin illusion; all the surface from it's myriad influences but none of the depth or nuance, a greatest hits album from a band with no voice to call their own, an algorithmically generated playlist of hits that tunelessly resound with nothing. It looks like Devil May Cry, but it isn't - Devil May Cry would ask more of you than dodging one attack at a time while you perform a particularly flashy MMO rotation. It looks like A Song of Ice and Fire, but it isn't - without Martin's careful historical eye and materialist concerns, the illusion that this comes even within striking distance of that flawed work shatters when you think about the setting for more than a moment.

In fairness, Final Fantasy XVI does bring more than just the surface level into its world: it also brings with it the nastiest and ugliest parts of those works into this one, replicated wholeheartedly as Aesthetic, bereft of whatever semblance of texture and critique may have once been there. Benedikta Harman might be the most disgustingly treated woman in a recent work of fiction, the seemingly uniform AAA Game misogyny of evil mothers and heroic, redeemable fathers is alive and well, 16's version of this now agonizingly tired cliche going farther even than games I've railed against for it in the past, which all culminates in a moment where three men tell the female lead to stay home while they go and fight (despite one of those men being a proven liability to himself and others when doing the same thing he is about to go and do again, while she is not), she immediately acquiesces, and dutifully remains in the proverbial kitchen. Something that thinks so little of women is self-evidently incapable of meaningfully tackling any real-world issue, something Final Fantasy XVI goes on to decisively prove, with its story of systemic evils defeated not with systemic criticism, but with Great, Powerful Men, a particularly tiresome kind of rugged bootstrap individualism that seeks to reduce real-world evils to shonen enemies for the Special Man with Special Powers to defeat on his lonesome. It's an attempt to discuss oppression and racism that would embarrass even the other shonen media it is clearly closer in spirit to than the dark fantasy political epic it wears the skin of. In a world where the power fantasy of the shonen superhero is sacrosanct over all other concerns, it leads to a conclusion as absurd and fundamentally unimaginative as shonen jump's weakest scripts: the only thing that can stop a Bad Guy with an Eikon is a Good Guy with an Eikon.

In borrowing the aesthetics of the dark fantasy - and Matsuno games - it seeks to emulate, but without the nuance, FF16 becomes a game where the perspective of the enslaved is almost completely absent (Clive's period as a slave might as well not have occurred for all it impacts his character), and the power of nobility is Good when it is wielded by Good Hands like Lord Rosfield, a slave owner who, despite owning the clearly abused character who serves as our introduction to the bearers, is eulogized completely uncritically by the script, until a final side quest has a character claim that he was planning to free the slaves all along...alongside a letter where Lord Rosfield discusses his desire to "put down the savages". I've never seen attempted slave owner apologia that didn't reveal its virulent underlying racism, and this is no exception. In fact, any time the game attempts to put on a facade of being about something other than The Shonen Hero battling other Kamen Riders for dominance, it crumbles nigh-immediately; when Final Fantasy 16 makes its overtures towards the Power of Friendship, it rings utterly false and hollow: Clive's friends are not his power. His power is his power.

The only part of the game that truly spoke to me was the widely-derided side-quests, which offer a peek into a more compelling story: the story of a man doing the work to build and maintain a community, contributing to both the material and emotional needs of a commune that attempts to exist outside the violence of society. As tedious as these sidequests are - and as agonizing as their pacing so often is - it's the only part of this game where it felt like I was engaging with an idea. But ultimately, even this is annihilated by the game's bootstrap nonsense - that being that the hideaway is funded and maintained by the wealthy and influential across the world, the direct beneficiaries and embodiments of the status quo funding what their involvement reveals to be an utterly illusionary attempt to escape it, rendering what could be an effective exploration of what building a new idea of a community practically looks like into something that could be good neighbors with Galt's Gulch.

In a series that is routinely deeply rewarding for me to consider, FF16 stands as perhaps its most shallow, underwritten, and vacuous entry in decades. All games are ultimately illusions, of course: we're all just moving data around spreadsheets, at the end of the day. But - as is the modern AAA mode de jour - 16 is the result of the careful subtraction of texture from the experience of a game, the removal of any potential frictions and frustrations, but further even than that, it is the removal of personality, of difference, it is the attempt to make make the smoothest, most likable affect possible to the widest number of people possible. And, just like with its AAA brethren, it has almost nothing to offer me. It is the affect of Devil May Cry without its texture, the affect of Game of Thrones without even its nuance, and the affect of Final Fantasy without its soul.

Final Fantasy XVI is ultimately a success. It sought out to be Good, in the way a PS5 game like this is Good, and succeeded. And in so doing, it closed off any possibility that it would ever reach me.

It doesn’t really surprise me that each positive sentiment I have seen on Final Fantasy XVI is followed by an exclamation of derision over the series’ recent past. Whether the point of betrayal and failure was in XV, or with XIII, or even as far back as VIII, the rhetorical move is well and truly that Final Fantasy has been Bad, and with XVI, it is good again. Unfortunately, as someone who thought Final Fantasy has Been Good, consistently, throughout essentially the entire span of it's existence, I find myself on the other side of this one.

Final Fantasy XV convinced me that I could still love video games when I thought, for a moment, that I might not. That it was still possible to make games on this scale that were idiosyncratic, personal, and deeply human, even in the awful place the video game industry is in.

Final Fantasy XVI convinced me that it isn't.

CW: Semi-Formal Discussion the Mechanics of Domestic Abuse, Queerphobia

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This is very similar to a game that I don't like, Answer these 10 Questions. To name just a few similarities: both feature a breakup narrative, have the events narrated over by the other partner who feels 'wronged', and feature an obsession with the past with a very similar thematic conclusion. How can I express my bitterness about romantic reflections and then cling so heavily to this version? Is the difference just that this is a queer narrative about 2 transgirls in a band? Am I really that shallow?

Perhaps I am, but let me offer one counterargument. The difference that separates the 2 for me is that Curtain is a masterful reflection on the subject of trauma. When you boot Curtain you're greeted with a walking simulator so pixelated and hazy that you have to spend a few seconds even making out what's going on. Curtain spends its duration going over a story of intimate domestic abuse, by bringing us into the shared apartment of the abuser and making us victim to Kaci's constant put downs and destructive criticisms narrated at us when we interact with objects. The whole point is to show the desperate obsession that abusers have with controlling narrative flow and how both suffocating and yet unrealistic it is.

Everything you look at is controlled by a paragraph of postulation from the abusing party explaining the importance of it within specifically their framework of understanding. There's a forcefulness there, and most verbal domestic exploitation happens through this type of psychological tactic. You can be numb and realize that it's happening and yet still feel the effects of it on you as one of the primary issues that arise from being around somebody is aural. If somebody wanted to keep making noise they can, and your only way of halting that noise is either by plugging your ears or by leaving, both reactions that are too dramatic too do suddenly, so instead you are contained with the noise machines surrounding you, human or otherwise.

The digital space has allowed for a much better respect and appreciation of noise aversion and thus has helped mitigate this factor, but the reality is people will often play into it too much or even compensate with that by speaking more in physical space than they otherwise would. Perhaps you've noticed this effect from quarantine, everyone is suddenly more talkative because they have to make up for that period of isolation.

Abusers take the normality of chattiness and infect their personal relationships with it using it as a tool of control. Whereas in the quiz game this narrative tactic was being used by a mutual of victim party, here this narrative tactic is shown in itself as a vector of control, when combined with the hazy and abstracted visual form the overall experience works to create a trauma-environment. As somebody who has also suffered domestic abuse for prolonged periods of time before that specific mental haziness and lack of voice actually connects quite well with my own experiences.

The other thing I appreciate a lot is that it actually counters my weakest point from discussion on the previous game, that because I'm trans anything that I do wrong is the result of a system that refuses to look at me and perceive me as a woman. While this may be on the most functional level true, it avoids accountability and personal control entirely. Kaci and Ally openly make queer anticapitalist music as conveyed through the various excerpts. Yet, Kaci is still a deeply controlling over her own personal life and partner. Instead of seeing it as a contradiction it's a tacit warning sign. No amount of economic or queer theory can decongest relationship issues or disconnect someone from the pratfalls of fucking up. I realize that this entire write up sounds deeply cold and analytical but if it is, it's for a reason: We don't have a way to discuss how this stuff happens.

Do we honestly think all verbal exploitation comes out of bad actors? Of course not. Not all relationships are built on the same external function of power, while the abuse a man has towards a woman can be explained as financially beneficial to the man. Relationships outside of heteronormativity can't be rationalized so easily through feminism without falling into the trap of calling it 'manish' behavior. In order to actually combat domestic abuse there needs to be guidelines and information about the psychological mechanisms that pervade it and lead into it. Things like clinginess, inability to self isolate from other people for long periods of time, aural control, etc.

The reason why is because until there's a systematic analysis on relationship theories and patterns of control we are going to fall into the same epistemological traps over and over. It needs to go beyond the level of a simple pamphlet and hotline, and generic valourization of consent (which is important of course). Until then, two mechanisms of hate will continue to intensify:

1. External hate: Games/Art like this will be utilized as some strange anecdotal evidence that queer people are serpents and that you (the cis-heteronormative class) should be paranoid of them. Queerphobia can lurk between the arguments that queer people are openly violent or more psychologically abusive at ease. Note right now we are being called 'groomers' whereas before it was imagery of outright violence and tantrums, its now moved to this idea of insidious action. In time after using this trope out enough (and probably in response to a queer riot at their injustice) they will move back to the physical violence narrative. The only way to stop this interchange of narrative hate is through being able to take power out of the predation narrative through public awareness and learning.

2. Self hate: We should adopt these preventative measures for our own sake and safety. Even if the cismenance wont adopt this, being able to build genuine relationship theory would aid as one more proactive tool to combat this perception. I can't tell you the number of online relationships and polycules I've seen fall apart due to abuse and mistreatment and turn into public google doc accustions. We need to be more aware of these practices and protect each other from falling into these patterns. If not out of self preservation than at least out of compassion for each other.

This is my takeaway from Curtain, and the fact its such a polemical one speaks to the games strength as a powerful trauma narrative. The best trauma narratives perform a sense of intervention on the receiver and for imbuing that in me at least its worth full marks.