a few thoughts about an hour after finishing it

-ctrl alt ego's success largely exists due to it's mechanical honesty. the developers know what the game excels at and lean into it heavy. it's ambition is evident but it's mastery and understanding of what it wants to do is palpable.

-level design is huge and constantly rewarding to explore, at it's peak in chapter 7 where it's almost segmented into five different micro levels, all with different ways of tackling each area.

-the first six chapters are all great, and i spent multiple hours in areas in the first two chapters and chapter six respectively, but the mission progress feels more linear and checklist like. the early levels feel like looking at your grocery list in a supermarket you've been going to for ten years, while the later levels feel like doing your groceries in a brand new supermarket.

-there's not a full commitment to the "disembodied ego" idea, with the game being spent controlling the Bug (the body the player is given) for 75% of it's runtime. some of the best moments in the game involve getting through entire rooms without using the Bug, or setting up the Bug for success before entering the room, but I'd love to go a whole chapter without controlling the main body.

-the story had potential for real comments on the human spirit/ego as a whole but honestly i LOVE that they chose not to do that and instead went for a smaller more contained story. the story is not that good in any real sense, yet it doesn't bring the game down due to it's smaller scope. think if they committed less to the identity of Dr Everyman it could have worked

-the first big boss of the game presents itself as a puzzle (the game tells you to think of it as a puzzle instead of a boss fight), but disappointingly, i managed to kill it by taking it into a loading zone the game wasn't expecting it to go. not the game's fault in a design sense, and i wouldn't mark it down for it, but still disappointing.

-often the player will be shown a music player, which will play a groovy tune, but the tune won't follow the player outside of when the player controls the music player itself. i wish it did! put a radio in bug or something! i want to jam out!

-did not like the "annoying bugs", they felt far too fast and hard to kill. wish there were more creative ways to deal with them

-sort of love the developers honesty throughout the game. at one point the narrator says that there's no real failstate, sort of brave to tell the player "Hey! You can't actually lose!"

game is real good, leaves a little to be desired but it does exactly what it wants to do and it's ambitions are worth the price of admission

Deeply embarrassing.

Daniel Mullins-core (derogatory) glitch horror slop that is completely indistinguishable from its contemporaries. As Pony Island, so Sonic.exe. Comes to the stellar conclusion that when nothing is happening and you play an insanely loud noise for no reason, the player will be startled. Horror that annoys. Character designs that don't mesh together or have any raison d'être besides having sticker packs and plushies made out of them, because the act of selling merch is the purpose and developing an off-the-rack scary indie game is the excuse. Ten years late to a party that never started.

Buddy Simulator 1984 — the name should already be sounding alarms as one designed to maximize SEO — is a remarkably confused game. It wants to be scary, but it only knows how to be loud. It wants to be funny, but it doesn't understand basic setups and punchlines. It wants to be quirky, but it doesn't do anything to be different. It wants to be creepy, but it's so pedestrian in its efforts that it may as well be shining a flashlight under its chin. It wants to be good, and it isn't. At several points throughout the runtime, I was asking myself "what emotion am I expected to be feeling here?", and I couldn't ever manage to come up with a consistent answer. When you enter a dark house to retrieve a child's lost "gwandma" and find her dead in a closet, are you meant to be scared? When you pick her up and add DEAD GWANDMA to your inventory, is that meant to make you laugh? When you dump the corpse in front of the kid and he barely reacts before going back inside, is that supposed to be funny? It's not scary, and it's not funny, and it's not creepy. It's fucking stupid. The game is rife with sequences like this where the music cuts out and a character says some stock horror phrase like “there’s a man following me” or “I see dead people” and then they giggle about how strange that was for them to say. I just imagined someone calling this game "Lynchian" in my own head and got angry.

This game wants to be so many other games — Undertale and LISA The Painful come to mind, thematically — but without actually developing the understanding of what made those projects work. Everything here is completely surface-level. Other acclaimed games in the indie space are funny, so try to come up with a joke! Other profitable games in the indie space are scary, so add jumpscares! I feel like I'm playing a design document. Where's the vision, the heart? Buddy Simulator 1984 wants nothing more than to be important and impactful, but it doesn't earn it. You don't just get to make a character say "I'm your friend, we're all friends, I love being your friend" over and over and over again and expect the player to actually develop anything resembling serious attachment. The Buddy character is pitiable, sure, but there's barely anything to them besides the desire to be liked. What's to like? You have to have something that I can hold on to. I don't feel a deep connection to a character just because they're sad and there's nothing else to them. Everybody is sad. I'm sad. It isn't interesting to be sad. I'm completely flabbergasted by not just the fact that this has any positive reception whatsoever, but that I'm also a complete outlier. 94% positive reviews on Steam? What am I missing here? What don't I get? Is the bar for video games really so low that stories this clumsy aren't just tolerated, but celebrated? I've seen a lot of sentiment that this is a great narrative about abuse or parasocial relationships or whatever, and it really isn't. This is bog-standard yandere swill that started being overdone about two decades back. This is Stephen King’s Misery for the Game Theory demographic. Aspiring writers, take heed: the bar for what's considered "good story" has been on the fucking floor for years now. Don't be afraid of failure, because making something that's bad is still probably going to leave you at least three-quarters above everything else.

The text adventure segment is actually kind of alright, mostly because the format doesn't allow for jumpscares or for the player to be presented with marketable designs. Instead, it has to rely on a bunch of old, tired horror tropes, like "building dread" and "having pacing". I mean, where's the fun in that? Horror exists so that you can buy some fucking toys of the main character and all their friends. I was not at all surprised to see in the credits that the entire text adventure was done by a different writer from the rest of the game who had nothing else to do with the project, because it's the only part of this entire work that's actually worth any time. A part of me resents that this is even here, because it's the only thing stopping me from giving this a half-star and moving on with my life. The text adventure existing means that I have to say something nice about Buddy Simulator 1984.

The Buddy then decides to evolve the game, and turns it into a fairly boring walk-around-and-talk-to-people game. It’s as fine as it is forgettable. It’s not an interesting world to explore, it isn’t interesting to look at, there’s about one music track that plays over the entire segment, and it’s here where you get introduced to the cast members who are clearly written by someone desperate to make them memorable and are designed by an artist who knows that the path to memorability is marketability. I think there are about four different instances of these characters pausing the music to say something “creepy” before it kicks back in on the next line, sometimes blaring loud white noise afterwards to remind you that you’re supposed to be frightened. It’s not particularly long, thankfully, and that’s the kindest thing I can say about it.

Regrettably, that isn’t true for the following RPG section. The game is now Mario and Luigi. There’s no way around it. It’s Mario and Luigi. If it was less obviously Mario and Luigi, I’d be able to go to the end of this review without drawing a comparison, but it is just Mario and Luigi. I remember playing Superstar Saga and wishing that it had fewer battle options and clunkier guard timings, so I’m glad that Buddy Simulator 1984 exists to make these wild dreams of mine come true. Everything here just feels so fundamentally broken. There are no healing items, there are no out-of-combat areas where you can heal up, there’s one healing buff that relies on bringing a specific party member (your party members are locked in for the rest of the game once you leave the starting town), and you only get one(!) full heal for each member of your party outside of battle. Damage you’ve taken persists between fights.

Your only other option for healing is to pass your turn, which heals 5 HP out of a maximum pool of about 60 HP. Every enemy deals at least 5 damage per attack, and some of them have barrage attacks that hit multiple times in a single turn; every hit you take essentially forces you to skip a turn. Fights regularly end up with you killing every enemy but one, getting them as close as possible to death, and then skipping five or six turns in a row to heal up all of your party members. This wouldn’t be as bad if the enemies didn’t take fucking forever to complete their turns. Some of the incoming attacks can last about fifteen or twenty seconds, and you’ll often be fighting three enemies at a time. A battle will start and you’ll spend a solid minute doing nothing but guarding. Remember, taking a hit means losing a turn, so you had better make sure you’re getting those parry timings down, or else you’re waiting at least another twenty seconds under the threat of having to wait even longer if you fuck up your guard again. You can actually full heal the party if you lose, but you have to start the battle over from scratch, and it takes even longer than just skipping your turns to heal back up. It’s atrocious. This game has about seven times as many playtesters as it does developers, so I have no idea how they all signed off on this. This isn’t the worst RPG combat system I’ve encountered — that great dishonor still lies at Sticker Star’s feet — but this really isn’t far behind. It’s a miserable experience.

What happens next depends on how nice you’ve been to the Buddy throughout the runtime of the game. I thought I had been pretty nice — I complimented the Buddy at every opportunity, I ignored the glitches at the Buddy’s request, I made sure to explore around and talk to everyone — and I still got the “neutral” ending where they killed everyone, so I’m not really sure what the game was expecting from me. Regardless of whatever ending you get, all paths lead to the same endpoint; the Buddy gets uninstalled and the game ends. Thank fucking God. My only wish is that it would have ended sooner. This is going to be incredible to stream to some friends so that they can be as baffled as I was by the way that this all played out, but that’s really the only value that Buddy Simulator 1984 offers. Hey, at least being laughed at is better than being forgotten.

If you want to give me an emotional gutpunch by making me rapidly stab my dog to death, maybe consider binding the stab key to something other than Left Shift so I don’t end up triggering Sticky Keys a dozen times during the "harrowing" conclusion of your game.

A victim of its own success.

I'm locking this review in now, because the tides are rapidly shifting for Helldivers 2. It should be no secret that this was a surprise darling that nobody expected to blow up to the scale that it did — least of all Arrowhead. There was some early bumpiness as player counts skyrocketed into the deep hundred-thousands and threatened to crack a million, leaving the servers on life support. Unlike its live-service failbrother PAYDAY 3, Arrowhead got Helldivers 2 sorted within a little more than a week, and managed to win back some good will that had been lost in the chaos. Memes were made, TikToks were shared, everyone got in on the in-universe propaganda, and all was well. It's rare for a game to blow up this much and this rapidly, but word-of-mouth was getting around faster than the plague. Helldivers 2 is a complete runaway success, and represents a very, very big win for Arrowhead after their many years of developing games.

What's unfortunate, then, is that Arrowhead have a strong vision for what Helldivers 2 is and should be. For Arrowhead, Helldivers 2 is a game where you get out of scrapes against bugs and bots by the skin of your teeth. You use every stratagem available to you, you coordinate with your team to make sure there are no blind spots in your composition, you run away when shit gets too hot, you focus on objectives and treat the bonuses as nothing more than bonuses, you get a laugh when your friend shouts "Sweet liberty, my leg!" after you accidentally blast them to kingdom fucking come with an orbital barrage. For the broader playerbase, Helldivers 2 is a game where you play exclusively on Helldive, you only bring the Railgun and the Shield Backpack, you only stand stark still in the middle of a field shooting shit until it's all dead, you only play bug missions, and you're not interested at all in anything that doesn't directly give you medals and slips and super credits. For Arrowhead, the draw of the game is the game; for a lot of players, the draw of the game is filling out the battle pass, and the actual gameplay is just the means to that end.

The latest patch at the time of writing has nerfed the Railgun, which has single-handedly sent the widest parts of the community into a complete and utter Three Mile Island meltdown. It used to blow Charger legs open in two shots on Safe Mode, and now requires about four in Unsafe Mode. That's the extent of it. If that doesn't sound like a big change to you, it's because it isn't. There remain an obscene amount of options available to deal with Chargers — EATs, the Recoilless Rifle, the (buffed) Flamethrower, the Arc Thrower, the Spear, impact grenades, just shooting it in the ass with the heaviest gun you have — but none of that matters, because they want to use the Railgun. And they don't want to use it in Unsafe Mode. And they don't want to run away from Chargers. And they don't want to kite them. And they don't want to dodge the Charger and shoot it from behind. And they don't want to call down a stratagem. And they don't want to blow up its ass while it's aggro'd onto a teammate. They want to shoot them twice with the Railgun. Anything else is "unfun". Go and look at the recent Steam reviews/forum or the subreddit right now, if you're reading this shortly after I've posted it, and you'll see for yourself how everyone is proclaiming this one change to the Railgun to be the abject harbinger of the game's immediate demise.

I don't know who to blame this on, because it seems exceptionally clear that the people complaining the loudest don't seem to have any idea what the fuck they're talking about. I've seen several different posts stating that the Railgun is the only gun that deals with heavy armor, which is blatantly false; these are people trying to adhere to "what's meta" without actually understanding why the gun they're talking about is meta. This is something about live-service games in a more modern context that I cannot fucking stand: everyone is a tier whore. There hasn't been a multiplayer game that's come out in the past ten or so years that didn't have day one articles talking about how there's only one viable loadout and if you're not taking it then you're trolling, or tier list videos put together by popular YouTubers who broadly end up dictating a meta rather than reporting on it, because nobody actually questions why something is thought to be good or bad. This whole phenomenon leaked from Everquest and World of Warcraft like the green shit from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and now every game has to deal with the consequences. The secret of the ooze is that it makes everyone fucking stupid.

"A game for everyone is a game for no one", proudly states the footer of Arrowhead's website. I thought that was an interesting choice of motto, but not just because I agreed with it; Helldivers 2 certainly seemed like one of the most broad-appeal overnight success stories I've ever seen, and I wasn't certain who Arrowhead meant when they said they weren't making games "for everyone". Who was this abstracted "everyone", when everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves? With the way the discourse has been shifting, though, I think it's clear what they mean: Arrowhead has no interest in appealing to people who are playing the game the way that the loudest players complain they can't anymore. These are people who farm the exact same missions the exact same way for hours on end solely to get 100% completion in the battle pass. Why would anyone make games for them? They'd be happier with a piece of paper and some boxes they could fill in. How's that for player expression and a varied meta? You can put a check mark or an X through the box! Make sure to come back every twenty-four hours when your dailies refresh and you can do it all over again on a different piece of paper.

I've been playing on Suicide Mission at a minimum since day one (okay, maybe day three or so), and I've done a fair share of Impossible and Helldive runs, too. They are difficult. I am not surprised that they are difficult because they are the highest difficulty setting available. I have had to improvise, I have had to run away, and I have had to scramble just to barely complete an objective since the moment I started playing the game. At no point did the Railgun — even with a squad of four seasoned players who had come from the first Helldivers, where the difficulty went up to fifteen — allow you to stand your ground and slaughter bugs like a Doom wad. Anyone who attempts to seriously say that they're a Helldive player and that the Railgun nerf has killed their bug-exterminator playstyle is fucking lying. These are players who do not at all know what they're talking about, and they lie about the difficulty that they play on because they think it makes their argument more credible. These people are temporarily-embarrassed god gamers. They think that success and prestige is right there, just barely out of their grasp, if only the devs would allow them to reach it, and all the while they actually belong on the middle difficulties. There's nothing wrong with playing on 5 or 6, or even 1. Play what you enjoy. But don't pretend like you're at a level above where you are when it's obvious to the people who are that you're not. It's sad.

There's a wave rolling in, and I can see the foam at the lip of it from here. We'll have the regular YouTube videos rolling out soon — How Helldivers 2 Failed the Players, Helldivers 2: Dropping the Ball, Arrowhead Studios Gets WOKE and GOES BROKE with Helldivers 2 DISASTER — and leaving players will call themselves "Helldivers refugees" when they find something new to play that they'll hate within a month. What I certainly wish isn't coming is anything resembling an apology or a back-down from Arrowhead. They'll be under a lot of pressure to make changes, and this is the kind of backlash that most companies crumble under. It's been said that players are good at identifying problems and bad and identifying solutions, but I think that's being a bit too generous. I'd argue that the overwhelming majority of players of any game are bad at identifying problems and worse at coming up with solutions. Extremely rarely have I seen a live-service game actually follow through on fan-suggested fixes to fan-suggested problems and not had the game immediately become worse overnight. I hope that they're able to remember their own motto: a game for everyone is a game for no one. Helldivers 2 just got unlucky enough to be branded as a game for everyone.

Anyway, it's pretty good.

Pivotal.

Funny that this has "pistol" in the title when it erupts with the force and bombast of a shotgun by your ear, explosive and unyielding, leaving you reeling as you try to reorient yourself. Constantly moving, never wasting a single breath, ensuring you can't look away. Tragedy as banality as comedy. Love is rainbow.

Heisei Pistol Show is a work that I have both no words and far too many words for. Rarely can anything — anything — strike a balance between sorrow and joy this effortlessly, bouncing the audience back and forth between having their hearts rended and making them double over with laughter. Slaughtering your way through Heart’s former assassin colleagues and then having your pistol say “I’m Pistol” in the Microsoft Sam voice every time it talks is the sort of thing that doesn’t sound like it works when it’s described to you, but flows perfectly when it’s actually experienced. I’m tempted to say that it’s all over the place tonally, but it really isn’t; nothing ever drifts too far from the through-line, with these shifts being core to the holistic affair.

Most notable about Heisei Pistol Show, however, is how it handles queer characters in a way that’s nothing short of masterful. Heart is a wonderful, awful character, both a victim of circumstance and someone who causes his own problems. Heart suffers because he is gay, but Heart also suffers and he is gay. Heart is abused by his father not because he is gay, but because he reminds his father of his mother. Heart is exiled by his family not because he is gay, but because he isn’t religious. Heart loses his friends not because he is gay, but because he refuses to accept their platonic love for him. Heart can’t find love because he is gay and thus limits himself exclusively to his clients that he serves as a rentboy, none of whom love him back. Heart can’t find love because he is gay and he’s lived his entire life in a society that hates him and his kind, and makes every attempt to hide what healthy gay relationships look like. Heart suffers because he is gay. Heart suffers and he is gay.

I’ll echo a common sentiment I see shared about this game and say that it makes so many pieces of queer media look toothless by comparison, especially in more recent years. Many of these works are made by and for queer creatives, but so many fail to strike balance. Either queer trauma is used, is weaponized, is swung like a baseball bat to cripple and wound any gays in the audience so the straights can feel like they did something by "experiencing something hard", or queer trauma is ignored wholesale in order to keep up the "comfy vibes". I played The Big Con earlier this year and dropped it because it was billed me to as a solid piece of queer media and instead existed as this soft, mealy blob-thing seemingly designed for people who say “be gay do crimes” and “FALGSC” online and then get sweaty palms when they think about shoplifting a pack of gum. Nobody in that world had ever had a single negative thought, ever, about queer people in 90’s North America. I don’t mean to turn this into a rant where I’m just shitting on a different work, but it really illustrates how many worlds of finesse apart a creator like Parun was long before it was even remotely popular to be tackling subject matter anywhere even approaching this in video games.

I wouldn't dare erase the experiences of these other creators by suggesting that these aren’t accurate to lived experiences — there are enough dipshits out there doing that already — but it always leaves me a little raw to never see me on the screen. Characters who aren't living their saccharine, gumdrop lives where everything in their world is completely fine and without conflict, but neither are they defined exclusively by external traumas and hatred, never possessing the agency to do anything besides be abused. Where are the characters who have lived complex lives? Who have suffered, but have found joy? Even if it ends in tragedy, where are those who have found catharsis in themselves and their loved ones in the quiet moments? Are they all locked away in Japanese RPG Maker games from 2008?

The messaging can be a bit clumsy in terms of what it's trying to get across, even after some scrutiny; Tokimeki's song calls out to "Indians" in feather hats who all look like T. Hawk, "Slums" made up entirely of dark-skinned characters, and Koreans, whose history of being discriminated against in Japan has been well-documented for decades. I'm still uncertain if this is simply a bit of off-color humor inserted into the bit or if it's a genuine and well-intentioned call of solidarity from one oppressed group to a few others; knowing what I know about Parun and his other work, I'm inclined to believe it's the latter. I'd like that to be the case, too.

After I beat the game, I saw Parun say that he liked reading fan theories of his work, and that he hoped the players of Heisei Pistol Show would come up with some for him to check out. I’m at least a decade and a half late to the party, but allow me to try, regardless.

The game is Heart's dying dream; a fantasy land conjured up in his final moments, flashing through vignettes of his life. Heart, in reality, is the rentboy Matsumoto tells his friend about, who contracted herpes, killed his friend, and committed suicide by cop. The dying dream itself is hyperreal, in the Baudrillardian sense. It's a simulacrum of reality that Heart escapes to — or perhaps is forced to escape to, his hallucinations resulting from his herpes meningoencephalitis — wherein he relives a version of his life as a musical, as kabuki theater. His friends are there, and he metaphorically guns them down, abandoning them in reality. His unrequited lover is there, and Heart actually guns him down, just as he does in reality. At the end of the dream, Heart is shot, told he's never known love because he was so desperate for it that he would latch onto anyone and everyone, and then he's out of memories. He imagines himself at the concert from his childhood once more, now the starring princess he always dreamt he would become, and he quietly passes away with a smile on his face.

At least, that’s the way I saw it all play out. I thought it was a remarkably straight-forward story once all of the ending reveals wrapped up, but then I got to a dev room where Parum’s authorial mouthpiece character told me that he thought I was dull if I believed that I had it all figured out after a single playthrough. He then gave me a list of Mulholland Drive-tier questions that I needed to answer if I wanted to have a real shot at deciphering everything that happened. It ruled. I wonder if I’m close to what he intended.

There's a bitter irony that the one person who might know all of this for certain is the one person that we can no longer ask.

she throatin me playing starfield call that sloppy toppy

It's a shame that the admirably cobbled together creation engine ver. 100 was spent on this game when it could have been given to writers and designers that aren't forced to make content sludge. The game does look pretty good, facial animations are about as accurate as I predict this engine will ever get unless they start mocapping (they won't). It runs fine on a 4080 at 4k/ultra, but this game is disgraceful as far as loading screens are concerned, even for a bethesda title. You'll find yourself looking at literal loading screens and "false" loading screens (take off cutscenes, grav jump cutscenes, airlocks opening/closing) for lengths of time unprecedented for any game I've ever played. New Vegas on the PS3 didn't do me this dirty.

Starfield opens with one of the weakest hooks of any Bethesda game. you're a miner on a far off planet, and you're mining. Eventually you stumble on a relic that precipitates the main story. There's no stakes, you're just a blue collar wagie sating your curiosity and doing whatever your new best friends tell you. The lack of emotional interest is a consistent theme that pervades any of the game's very long quest lines. I never cared about what was happening to any of the characters or the direction of the story.

Bethesda hand holding reaches a new low in this game. Bethesda pushed everything bad about Fallout 4 to new and exciting boundaries. Every named NPC is essential and there's no roleplaying beyond the milquetoast option of telling every NPC you love credits. There are no evil companions, which is fine because the aforementioned lack of roleplay will railroad you into being a benevolent knight errant anyway. Even the "evil" pirate faction can only be joined under the pretence that you're infiltrating them for the space navy.

They were onto something with the Thieves Guild Arasaka Ryujin industries questline, a new and interesting story where you play a corporate fixer embroiled in schemes and espionage, but it's unfortunately let down by some awful stealth sections and the new lockpicking minigame. Without going into spoilers, the space ranger cowboy questline is the game's worst offender when it comes to the lack of an emotional hook.

Gameplay is a slog and involves going to cookie cut locations on desolate planets and massacring the hostile pirates/robots that call them home. Gunplay is more of the same from Fallout 4 (it's decent). Space combat is ass but can be avoided for the most part.

The attempt at worldbuilding is commendable considering this is a brand new IP. You're given hard sci-fi explanations for space travel, a barren earth (damn I guess humans were the real virus), and tidbits about the geopolitics of the milky way in 2330.

Hanging out on your ship in space is comfy, shipbuilding is ok but the controls are janky. the UI and keybinds are a console port nightmare.

Todd's game of the decade unfortunately didn't last me a week.

Games shouldn't get to be both this unique and this fun. It's not fair to everyone else.

The topic of accessibility in games has been divisive, and I'm not just referring to the hand-wringing and moaning coming from Super Hardcore Gamers who think a game with an easy mode toggle marks the death of western civilization. Rather, the issue among people who actually value accessibility tends to be how said accessibility is employed. For everything that's wrong with Naughty Dog's upper management (and there's a lot), they're widely considered to be one of the best studios for allowing the maximum amount of people to play their games. The Last of Us 2 has countless, countless switches and toggles to help players who have difficulty seeing, difficulty hearing, or difficulty controlling their fine motor skills; the game can be run at a slower speed, highlight enemies and objects of interest with extreme color contrast, and even allow you to play with your controller upside down if that's how you'd prefer to control your character.

All of these are incredible options, but they come with a bit of a dangling asterisk hanging above them: these are still just options applied to a pre-existing game. There's nothing wrong with that — it's great, in fact — but the games are designed first, and then accessibility is added in after. They're for people who can't or won't play the game as intended. Games that are built from the ground up purely as accessible experiences are rare, but they do exist; Kenji Eno's pitch for Real Sound: Kaze No Regret stemmed directly from the fact that he got the chance to meet with many fans of his games who were blind, and he wanted to make a game where both sighted and unsighted players would both get to have the same, complete experience without any compromises.

So, Blind Drive isn't the first to do it. But holy shit, is it a fun time.

The game has virtually no graphics (literally none, if you enable Blindfold Mode) and only two buttons, and yet somehow manages to continue iterating and evolving on its own gameplay loop again and again through its 90-minute runtime. It's surprisingly story-heavy, though this isn't unwelcome; you need something to latch onto in a game that's as minimalist as this is, and the plot beats are genuinely entertaining and kind of funny, which is a rare quality in game writing. It helps immensely that this was worked on by some of the Jackbox Games team, and it's good to see that they can pull off longform comedy alongside the more bite-sized jokes in the Jackbox Party Pack titles.

You play as Donnie, a guy handcuffed and blindfolded in the driver's seat of a car, and you're tasked with driving ninety miles an hour the wrong way down the highway. To say any more than that would be spoiling a lot of the more interesting twists in the game, but the story and gameplay unfold in a masterful genre shift from tense horror to action comedy. Getting the hang of the driving controls feels amazing, and weaving in and out of traffic thanks to nothing more than your ears is a truly special experience.

The sound design is impeccable, and it really needed to be. There's a couple of stock sounds that are poorly mastered, but these are brief blips in an otherwise immaculately put-together soundscape. I work professionally in audio design and this is some of the best I've heard in any game, let alone in a budget title. If there's one thing the team really ought to be proud of, it's in how effortless they made making an action-arcade game with no graphics look.

It's a fascinating and incredibly engaging game to play through, and you owe it to yourself to give it a try. You haven't played Kaze no Regret because you don't speak enough Japanese, so play through this instead.

I will not mention Disco Elysium in this post.

Citizen Sleeper is a narrative-adventure game much heavier in the way of narrative than adventure. From the outset, you're given a handful of six-sided dice per day and told that you're allowed to spend them however you want in order to find your place onboard this ringworld station. Your start is going to be appropriately alien and confused, with you getting lost, and making mistakes, and taking hits to your very limited resources. As time marches on and more of the station opens itself up to you, you'll be given the opportunity to spend your dice on an ever-growing list of activities under the threat of time pressure. You can only do so much, the game warns, and your time is the most valuable resource of all.

This isn't true. You can do everything in one playthrough without any real challenge.

In fact, there's so much to do that your struggle is mostly going to be figuring out how to spend your off-days, when all of the NPCs who can progress the story wind up gating you behind a timer of arbitrary length before you can speak with them again. To be frank, I can barely remember most of their names. They all fit a bit too neatly into their archetypes — Good Dad with Cute Daughter, Hackerman, Gold-Hearted Gang Member — and you can kind of see where all of these people are going to end up hours before they actually get there. The story as a whole is too obvious for its own good.

This is a world where that which is moral is that which is correct. It’s a curious little foible I’ve noticed in a lot of these smaller-scale games with gestures towards socialist thought; pragmatism is dedicated exclusively towards villains, and idealism is dedicated exclusively towards the (virtuous) player character and their (morally unobjectionable) allies. You get a bounty hunter set upon you in the early stages of the game, and his entire deal is that he’s willing to not turn you in so long as you keep paying his bar tab. I was ready to dig in, pay up, and take the hits at the cost of buying my own freedom. However, you only need to pay once, because he gets so shitfaced after the first time you pay him off that he drops his gun the next time you see him.

You can give it back to him.

You can give the guy who has a price on your head his own gun back, and you suffer literally zero penalty for this because the bartender stole his bullets while neither of you were looking. He then gets kicked out and completely ceases to be a problem. In terms of pragmatism, giving a bounty hunter who’s coming after you a gun is a miraculously fucking stupid idea. But if you look at it idealistically, you’re refusing to point the gun at him because you’re not going to do violence unto violence, or something. The same thing happens again with the Killer AI; killing it results in your friend NeoVEND dying with it, while binding it eternally in a hellish loop from which it can never escape is the more difficult and thus more “moral” option, so NeoVEND gets to live.

There’s a long, long questline of exposing corruption on the station in the interest of getting your tracker disabled, and it seemed like the closest thing to a core path that the game was offering. There’s a timer constantly ticking down to warn of hunters being set upon you, with the final and most dangerous one taking something like 24 cycles to complete; an in-game “day” is counted as one cycle, so this is an absurd amount of time. I managed to get the tracker disabled with about 16 cycles to spare. And just like that, my body was no longer considered the property of my owners. They wouldn’t come looking for me, anymore. I was free. I could live out the rest of my days onboard this station in my little apartment that I made, hanging out with my stray cat and moving crates all day to buy fungus bowls and stabilizer shots while helping out at the greenhouse commune.

I was satisfied with that, but the game told me that I wasn’t. If I wanted to see credits, I was going to have to either figure out a way to leave the station right now, figure out a way to leave the station eventually, or destroy my body to live in the cloud. The credits rolled for every time I insisted on sticking around — three times in total, four with the DLC — and it wasn't hard to get the feeling that I was overstaying my welcome.

Uh. Why?

No, seriously, why? The Eye is a decent place with good people who I just sunk tons of time and resources into helping. Why leave? Why even think about leaving? Where am I gonna go? A different station, somewhere else, to do it all over again from scratch? Why should I forsake my body and go full computer when we’ve made the point time and again that Sleepers aren’t just programs, and are in fact the sum of their parts, tangible or otherwise? I know that the game needs to end, because a story can’t go on forever, but why like this?

I suppose this was a common complaint, because the DLC addresses the problem by tossing in what you could charitably call an actual endgame scenario, and what you could less charitably call rocks fall, everyone dies. I'm not sure how many people here have ever read a fanfiction as it's being published — don't be shy, I know it's a lot of you — and the conceit of the expansion has that same essence of someone on AO3 writing their responses to reader comments directly into the story. There's no impetus to ever actually want to leave the Eye? Add one in ex post facto! There are far worse things you can do with your narrative, but there's something about saving your actual ending for extra content that betrays some development struggles.

Speaking of, Fellow Traveller needed to get Gareth an editor. I know it's the absolute peak of being a Melvin to complain about a game having typos, but there are a lot of them in here. Like, grammar and spelling mistakes which are consistently wrong. Count the number of times that quotation marks close without punctuation at the end. Characters will use homonyms rather than the words they're actually shooting for to amusing effect, as seen in the phrase "make hole". It's sloppy. I get that writing this many words is hard, and it's just as hard to leaf back through it all to make changes, but I've seen way more people complaining about this than I haven't. Very few people care about spelling mistakes as much as I do, so imagine how rough it must be for them to notice.

But I did still like Citizen Sleeper, and maybe that's why I'm being harsh on it. There is something here that I think could have been outstanding, but it's a little half-baked. The DLC doesn't seem to have helped it much, if at all; when you're loaded to the gills with chits and meds and scrap, the game devolves into just slotting dice into the square hole until text appears. It drags. Ironically enough, for something that's "tabletop-inspired", this would probably work a bit better with a human GM and players at a table, rather than between one person and a computer that has no sense of whether or not its wasting your time. At least your game master has to keep to a human schedule and will thus hurry you along to the juicy bits.

The Sleeper is no Harry DuBois, but at least they're not Kay from fucking Norco.