Assassination. Government conspiracy. Terrorism. Human trafficking. The weaponization of the human body. The gratification of murder. The unceremonious silence of death. The expression of one's own humanity through the suffering of another.

Why must the world be this way? What is it all for?

Killer7 asks all these questions and provides answers to none. It is a vessel for reflection and wandering through the unimaginable horrors of the mind. It's not that it has nothing to say, but that it presents you with an unfinished puzzle, and lets you use the loudest pieces to fill in the rest of the picture.

Games as a medium have spent so many long years trying to understand what it means to 'tell a story' and to 'be art'. Decades of writers trying to give 'the right answer' to questions while fumbling over their own cynicism, egotistical tendencies and unchecked cultural biases. We are so concerned with the desire to be perceived as 'artful' that we lose sight of making anything with truly unique meaning or power.

I don't have a damn good answer to what needs to be done differently, - I'm the most out-of-touch, lost-in-their-own-head numbskull on the planet - but if I had 1 call, we definitely need to step back and remember the strength of letting players write their own endings. Games spent their first several decades owning the vagueness of their own format, right down to the dirty FM patches and choppy polygons. There's a lost art to the ability to 'allude' to things instead of just 'showing' them, and letting the process of trying to compute the missing links be part of the game too. Everything's a tasteless puppet to specificity, excessive details, and borderline machine-generated design philosophies.

Killer7 was a note that we have so much room to grow as not just an industry, but as designers. So much untapped potential. So many strengths we haven't even become aware of. And damn, a lot of room to mature in regards to how we treat real-world tragedy and sociopolitical issues.



I couldn't think of a smart way to integrate Dan Smith into this so here's a funny

Have you ever just completely lost patience with what you're doing while in the middle of doing it? Like, you realize suddenly that you would rather be doing anything else than what you're doing at that moment?

Origami King started off so promising. The presentation is wonderful, music is top-notch as it's always been for this series, writing is genuinely very funny and there's a lot of just contagious fun that the game is having with the Mario series. As someone who was burnt by Sticker Star, even when I knew this wasn't an RPG in the style of the first two games, I was still game to try what this game was doing. And I thought I would be able to tolerate the battle system.

But then something happened where in the middle of spinning that fucking ring for the 50th time I just kind of snapped. I straight-up hate the ring puzzle aspect of these battles, it always feels like busy work and for some reason my brain just can't solve them while having that timer breathe down my neck. Of course there's an option to pay for the game to solve it for you, or to pay to get more time, but it's when I realized I was paying EVERY time that maybe my time could be better served elsewhere. Even outside of the ring nonsense, these battles felt so weightless and nothing. It was all busy work and no variety, and maybe that's unfair to say when I only got about 5 hours into the game, but I can't be bothered to find out if it gets interesting at all.

At some point I have to ask why this series bothers with turn-based battles at all. It clearly resents ever being an RPG, so why not just go the Super Paper Mario route and have it all take place in the overworld? The overworld puzzle solving and adventuring was my favorite part of this game, I'm sure they could find a way to build the game entirely around that. Instead, every game since SPM has been like "here's our new nightmare battle system that you'll tolerate!" It's a sad state, honestly, especially now that the Mario and Luigi series is dead, this is the only thing close to a Mario RPG series now. Basically, either give up on the RPG dream entirely or become something different altogether, because I can't stand this middle-of-the-road compromise nonsense anymore.

Delightful little NES platformer that's hard but not as hard as other games of its kind. Feel like a good entry into that genre of game, which are often very intimidating while this one has the appeal of looking like a playable old school gag manga. Not that the difficulty ever relents, good god those last three stages are evil. Managed to beat it with no save states though, which felt pretty good (OK well I used save states to load back where I started when I had to leave the game, but I didn't use save states to start in the middle of levels!) I also really like the bonus games in the middle of stages, but the way they're set up meant I didn't get to play one of them. I haven't explored most of the NES library outside of first-party stuff and I really should, this was a lot of fun, I'm now someone who wants a new Kid Dracula, until I remember this is a fucking Konami thing so never mind.

the opening montage of Up really destroyed a whole generation's concept of effective nonverbal storytelling by making them think a parade of prefab domestic clichés embellished with flavorless Milestone clipart set to overbearing music is in any way sophisticated or interesting huh

this girl is a tasteless unfuckable dweeb and i wish her all the worst. the way she's simultaneously a self-insert wish fulfillment character AND the most hapless and bland cozycore dork imaginable is really dark tbh. inexcusable taste in stuffed animals! stop decorating with your diploma already you absolute MONSTER!!! When a sappy celeste-adjacent chiptune ballad plays as it's revealed via context clues that she came into her own after a trip to Japan (and returned w/ a bevvy of basic tourist kiosk tchotchkes) and now feels confident enough to explore rockabilly-lite fashion...hell. It's all so flavorless and antiseptic--she is 30 where the hell is her hitachi wand and why CANT i stuff her horrid garb into the closet in the ideal organizational format--the pile? the subject here is so unpalatable that i honestly would have preferred they scrap the whole progressing narrative concept entirely (esp. when its used in such an unambitious way that communicates very little beyond trite sentimentality; life has its ups and downs, #gratitude, don't make time for haters who dull your shine, the more things change the more they stay the same, when god throws out a mug he buys you a wacom tablet) and instead present a medley of varying rooms/spaces occupying a plethora of subjects, aesthetics, and experiences, but also idt the same devs who chose this protag have anywhere near the worldliness or savvy to attempt something like that. impressive amount of unique isometric assets and cool implementation of foley though!

This has been a long time coming. I've always called myself a Gamecube ride or die, and yet I've never touched any of the essential games that were part of the Capcom 5 (well, 4 in the end). Of course, most of the games in the Capcom 4 ended up not actually being exclusive Gamecube games, but they're still very important to the console's DNA and style, and I feel bad for neglecting to play any of them up until now. At the same time, the release of No More Heroes 3 this year, along with me joining this website and seeing all the people I follow who deeply admire Suda51, has caused me to go on my own Kill the Past journey through his catalog. Before this year, if you asked me how I felt about his games, I would probably say something like "they're probably good but not for me". But now, at my 500th game played on Backloggd (let's pretend this is the case and it's not actually the 501st), there's no doubt that these games are extremely For Me.

Now so far I've spent this review not talking about the game and that's because I'm kind of intimidated by the idea of doing so. I don't just wanna sit here going "the themes are good and the graphics are nice", something as incredibly dense as this deserves more than that obviously, which is why I'm thankful for the people I follow and their great reviews of this game. Like previous Suda games, there's a lot of details to get lost in, different factions and figures with different interests all coming to head, a fully-realized world just as complicated and really only slightly more absurd than ours. No one really tells you exactly what is happening or why, and that's because they have their own interests to protect and people to control. Its commentary on the war on terror and international relations, specifically that of the U.S and Japan, remains sharp and unmatched, and it also has a lot of characters doing really cool stuff and saying cool shit.

Like The Silver Case, the way this game played felt so different to me at first that I almost considered dropping it. It's not just the unique control scheme and on-rails movement, but all the different terminology and mechanics thrown at you, the whole cast of characters just kind of dropped on your lap with their own unique abilities. The game provides tutorials, but you have to read them yourself, and there is a lot of reading. It's intimidating, but I understand that the team behind this game probably thought having to go through a prolonged tutorial at the beginning of the game for every single thing in the game might have been a bit much and would have broken the pace of the first level and any other level with new mechanics. The thing is, after the first level the whole process of this game became second nature to me. Like, to the point that I would go to other games and hold A to go forward.

Previous Suda games have been so not-action that it's a very pleasant surprise to get to this game and actually really enjoy the action here. It never stopped being tense, the process of entering a new room, hearing a laugh, pulling out your gun to scan for anyone in the room and reacting quickly to whatever enemies appear. Despite always having a good amount of blood vials to recover health, it's very easy to get combo'd by two or three Smiles to death, and it honestly gets pretty terrifying at points. When you scan only to find an enemy three feet away from you, or one of them hauling ass from behind you and you stop them right before they hit, it legit got me as good as an actual horror game would hope to. It doesn't help they let out an incredibly loud scream right before they blow up in your face.

I really love the blood system in this game and how it encourages play that I would normally avoid. In order to level up your characters and have blood vials to recover health, you need to kill enemies. Not just kill them though, but find their exact weak point, which usually requires some precise aiming and distancing from the enemy. It all really comes together in a beautiful way, and it helps that every character is honestly useful and worth keeping alive and leveling up. Characters I wrote off as being uninterested in like Con ended up proving themselves very helpful and fun later on. I also really like the way levels will give you only a certain combinations of Smiths to start off with, which also encourages trying out guys you may have looked over, and being able to unlock other characters serves as a good reward for performing well as those characters. It becomes pretty clear as the game goes on that Dan is easily the most powerful and will probably be most people's preferred choice, especially as he gets upgraded, but I never really wrote off the other characters. Also, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with one character being better than others in a single player game, in real life there are lot's of people better than me so it makes sense. (Side note: I think the solution to Donkey Kong 64's character management problem would have been to make it like Killer7's. Obviously this game came after that so it's a dumb suggestion, but I couldn't help but think about it).

Visually, this game is unmatched. Every part of it looks immaculate, and the use of fixed camera angles is genius. I've realized as time goes on that games with fixed-camera angles weren't like that by accident, it wasn't because they didn't figure out how to be Mario 64, it's that it allowed deliberate camera movement and composition. I have a new found appreciation for it. While I'm talking about presentation I might as well bring up how good the voice acting is, because I think it's incredible. I feel like this is the kind of game that if it released now the voice acting would be a lot more generic and more typical of Japanese games with English dubs, but the performances and cast here is perfect for this game. Just going through the character select TV and hearing each Smith's voice line is enough to prove this.

At this point I'm just saying obvious shit. "The music is good", "The gibberish voices are good", "The use of different art styles in different chapters is fun", "I want to own every Travis shirt", it's all been said and done. But seriously, playing this game was a level of pure enjoyment I haven't had in a while, I tried to stretch out my time with it as much as I could because I didn't want it to be over. It's good to know I'm still able to have these sorts of experiences with a game.