Der "etwas andere" Space-Shooter
Schwarzer Humor pur!
-The german tagline of the game.

One shy evening while I was being grilled alive at 35°C in my room, fellow gamers (non-derogatory) @'d me on discord to go and play "Killer Baby" under the pretense of "I know German so this should be fun".

Intrigued as I was, I couldn't find a game DL of it for the life of me. Aside from this very humble game cover, there was no info to be found about it on the vast interwebz.
I did however find out that Amazon was selling it a discount of 100% off, FOR A WHOPPING 0.01 CENTS

After 8.01€ spent (8 Euros on shipping, capitalism smh) and also getting an external cd playa for my puter, it arrived

Now I could finally answer this burning question that was lingering inside me:
Is this an actual game, or is this just malware?

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.
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It's fucking boring, that's what it is.

Here some gameplay I recorded to see for yourself. For archiving purposes, I put the zip of the CD-ROM and the game (and the games front and back of the packaging) on Archive.org so that you too can play mid.

Currently going through this list by @Erato_Heti because I am interested in what the users on this website have created and to find motivation for my own efforts while also getting my little itch game fix.

Turns out the first game I chose to play was made by @gomit and a couple other folks who all went together to my old school in the Video Game design class. Earth is the size of a wallnut it seems.

"A favor" is a narrative-driven horror walking sim that is worth checking out for its well executed tension, atmosphere and good pacing helped by its short playtime.
I liked "A favor" but I think there are two troubles one could experience, the obvious student project aura and the obvious narrative.
I personally couldn't care less about the former, like when there exists some jank here and there, a bit of a lack in a unique visual identity, but it should be adressed, because it could bog down the experience for some. The trajectory not matching up with the crosshair, some not so hidden short cuts in presentation or even the fucking bin only catching the trash when you aim slighty above it, are all endearing to me and part of the honesty in workmanship why I keep coming back to free itch games instead of cleaning out my huge backlog of games I've paid for or the ones I started with subscriptions services.

As for the story and primarily the Twist. The "He actually was that Tyler Durden dude the whole time!!"-moment.
The chef's kiss student project Gütesiegel, which reminded me of my own old classmate's approach towards the idea of interesting narrative writing. That conclusion should already be obvious to the player on the first or second in-game day.
In my own experience with the (what feels like it got used here) borderline misguided storytelling technique,
which feels like coming up with a mindfuck-ending first and then a tasteful enough framework around it, this actually got me kinda impressed with its strength in narrative-flow and the suspense build-up through its horror elements. (I am not posturing that you can't come up with an ending first. I merely wanna point out that the intention for a plot-twist often seems to be the focal one in these kinds of stories)

I fully want to echo that other review on here and say that despite having a predictable plot built on a honestly trite narrative trope, it still kinda pulls it off anyway. Kinda.

Kinda, cause fucke me, mental illness as a narrative device seems like a thing we should have left behind last decade.
Not only for it's reduction of real, difficult issues into a contextual reasoning for scary and weird shit happening in a story, but maybe just because it is too expected.
Just let that sink in for a moment, mental illness and the discussion of and around it got used so many times as merely a mechanical crutch for lazy writing that I can feel confident in accusing its focal use in a story as such of being trite, of being tropey.
This apathetic perspective towards its thematisation is a direct result of the regular misuse of such a delicate topic.
Of its almost expected reduction into just a plot-twist device with maybe some obligatory hints towards a real message or statement on it.
I am not even aiming my criticism directly at "a favour", but at the broader ways of implementation in which mental illness gets handled in Pop-culture.
Hell, even my use of the word "implementation" for such a difficult topic feels apathetic, but that seems to be a more fitting description for the approach mainstream art festered around it.
Mental illness just isn't the thing most of these stories actually want to discuss, it's just the reveal of it's existence in them that wants to make you say "Damn" right as the credits start rolling.
It's like a slightly less trite, slightly more delicate and often actually well intended, version of the other student project classic, the theme of recreational drugs. I am more than guilty of exploiting that one as just a weird-shit-happening or plot-twist mechanic in my own student projects.
I can recall a teacher calling us students out on it's collective overuse, which is probably more difficult to do with a theme that has more weight and often actual sincerity to it.

"A favor" pulls it off in my opinion. Not the adequate discussion owed to this topic mind you, but the use of it as a plot-twist device. Simply the road towards that conclusion makes the fithteen minutes worthwhile, at least if you are able to shut off that ranting voice that made me type out that last paragraph in its timeframe.
Also, that the reveal got communicated through a simple, understandable phone unlock via face recognition was kinda neat.

The set-up already let my M. Night senses tingle, only communicating with the friend via the phone, finding pills and especially the Video Game book you can find on the first day accompanied by the inner monologue "I own the same book" on the player's screen was all I needed to know where this was going.


A interesting thing "a Favor" managed to achieve was to skirt around a niche indie genre I like to call "Wage Slave Horror", while also executing that style better than the ones I've played. Recently I made this list after binge playing a lot of itch games and recognising a fascinating pattern. Admittedly "a favor" only evades my very specific parameters because, even ignoring the twist for a sec, it's a favor the player does, not a real job.
But that said, having played a decent number of these, the design in this one around the medial tasks was excellent.
The position of the telephone in the corner with the player's back towards two hallways made me anxious each time I needed to answer the call machine, but was unable to check my backside.
Same with the position of the plants. The player can't keep an eye on the entrance to the room while watering them, they have to look towards the neighbouring building which also made me feel tense that something is gonna happen over there any moment or in my blind spots.
Same with the paper bin, the kitchen, the safe and the bathroom mirror.
There is always the possibility that something could creep up behind you without any notice.
Of courses after one playthrough this tension is gone, which now that I think about it seems maybe to be too contradictory towards the use of a re-contextualising ending.
"Fight club is better on the second viewing" because you can now see all the careful foreshadowing and attention to detail.
You watch a different film, or rather watch it differently.
Knowing the beats of a horror game and especially that loss of uncertainty towards it's potential but non-existent scares works directly against this built-in replay value.

I would love to see another project by this team if they choose to keep working together. They showed their potential here and they got all the game design basics more than down especially for the subtle emotional strain needed in a good horror game.
Damn. This write up got way longer than I intended it to be. I hope my criticism was constructive, even that rant I couldn't hold back on. I think when something gets someone to write that much it speaks for the amount of thoughts that art made one engage in, which to me is at least the biggest compliment.

Terrible appropriative studio copying other artists' work and claiming it as their own while wildly misinterpreting the meaning of its inspirations.
To further my anger towards this game, it does a poor, even harmful job at portraying mental illness, so far as to demonize victims of depression and anxiety as though they're "unfixable," and their demons are an inconvenience and impediment to those around them.
The emotional intellect is completely missing, and the storytelling is amateurish and immature, blatantly favoring style over actual substance and subliminality.

As someone who got pretty heavy into street photography again this summer, I wanted to give this genre a second chance despite my lukewarm experience with Toem a couple months ago, but in my first impression of Umurangi Generation I just got reminded of some of the same design philosophy and issues as i had experienced back then. However I eventually found more intention here than in Toem.

The gameplay loop consists entirely of following a restriction of checklists with the photos you need to take for the game. Add to that, an incentivesed speedrun for a bonus if you complete all of the bounties in the current location below ten minutes, which seems utterly antithetical to the joy of photography.
Is the act of being a gamefied contract worker really the only possibility for these types of games? Does it really also need a ticking timer in the corner to stress me out on top of that?
And I can understand the feel for the existence of the former, but only because we are trained to expect some kind of tangible objective to follow as gamers and game designers. Umurangi Generation to my suprise actually found a way to elevate this game design obligation. (I get into that a bit further down) "If there are no conditions to be met how else could you call it a game, how else would the game know you did the thing!" could be argued. My problem with this notion is that every photography game I have played inevitably turns the inherent creativity of that artform into something different instead of searching for a way to fully embrace it.

For about fifteen minutes of trying to check off the ten-solar-panel-bounty from the list in the second level "Otumoe Tai" I was naively ignorant towards the little, extra symbol next to that objective, because I genuinely didn't even want to consider that the game asks for further, more specific restric.. I mean conditions to take my shots. I legit thought my game was bugged or some shit, but turns out I was truly a bit naive and that Umurangi Generation wants it's players to take most of their pictures with a very particular lense or distance to the sub- and objects for successful progression. In those twenty minutes my efforts at photography became really uninspired and after that realisation the recovery from this seemed pretty usless to me and the game.
The timer, which in my playthrough continued in red numbers upwards to infinity (it should just disappear after you failed or only be unlocked after your first completed run of a level) for no apparent reason other than to tease me with exactly how much time I have been wasting in this game, was not encouraging a different mindset.
There were two levels after which I gave up on trying to loose myself in "making art" and just tried to speedrun the act of pointing at the right thing with the right thing in the right way, but failed each time to get the bonus and dreaded to complete tasks in which I was asked to count a bunch of things again. If I had known this game was more about counting shit, finding specific stuff or the semi-puzzle of detecting an angle(often a single intended one, for the most egregious of the bounties to my delight illuminated by a neon green circle, which presumably also earns the player some extra cash to stand in and take their photo from but Idk) to combine multiple of the intended sub- or objects in one frame, all with, and I'll say it again, A TIMER STARING AND JUDGING YOUR EFFICIENCY, I probably wouldn't have bought it on a whim and engaged in a little more thinking feller behaviour before that. I should just stop going into games completly blind and adjust my expectations with a bit of research beyond looking at some screen shots or looking at a high number next a promising ramping curve on a Backlogged entry, smh.

Thoughtfull level design kind of alleviates some of those complaints a bit. Like when I was inside the Train a bounty asked to photograph twenty sticky notes. I knew the game wouldn't get my lazy ass to actually count all the things on my screen again, but low and behold I eyeballed it and the first snap I took of a wall in the kitchen had generously, exactly that amount of yellow squares rendered on it. Occasionally my illiterate ass got stumped by a single word in the objective (my dumbest moment, which I would like to share for the readers amusement, was seeing the words "two coffees" next to the word "downlight" in which the context of coffee made me unironically, on autopilot and by association deduct, while also not really questioning the lack of a space between the two, that "downlight" had to be an in-universe drink.. you know like bud light.. In retrospection I am fully selfaware that this was hilariously stupid, but Idc to admit this while simultaneously still blaming the game, because this was the first bounty with two entirely different genres of things, there is an overabundance of in-universe food items in this level and the term "ceiling light" exists. Lol. Hell, I should just play games, with the option available, in German. The word used in that version of the game translates literally into ceiling light and not "Einbauleuchte" as google translates my headcanon light beer,(I only looked this up after the fact tho) would have saved ten minutes of my time which I am now more than matching with this self-reporting paragraph about my own idiocy for your entertainment. Edit: I actually managed to find a streamer with an even dumber thought process than mine https://www.twitch.tv/superantonio64/v/861937373?sr=a&t=20s all love tho and the photo is pretty fire)

But man, thank god, most of these problems seem kind of more.. unimportant once world building does it's magic, the story fully lifts the curtains and the worth of the camera in your hand achieves it's, by the game intended, purpose. (I actually won't spoil that much of the story or themes in here)
Those very specific things you need to photograph lead the player to examine the Mise en scene,(unless of course they just unpluck their thinking box and only scan the enviourment for the crucial thing) so while the gameplay could feel like contract worker's fetch quest to me, the lists are admittedly kinda genius in getting the player to focus on each individual polygon, it's meaning and as a result in it's enviourmental story telling and exposition. A part of this trick Umurangi pulls, which shifted my initial annoyance about it into appreciation once I got what it was doing, were the at first glance decivingly simple descriptions which lead me to inspect every render in some of the comfortably small levels to rule each one of them out. When a prompt asks to photograph a specific word for instance, I would in tandem, even if just accidentally, read most of the sentences on a poster, graffity, the small print on a random box, the food item label, or beyond just the headline of a magazine a NPC might hold in their hands.
This got me to properly inspect the green fireflies while searching for a butterfly which lead to some cool isolated close ups of one, or aware if the large amount of cigarettes, knifes and medkits in the UN millitary camp while searching for those objectives(some of the first clues hinting that there is something more sinister going on than the rooftop photo-session like in the intro level before that), or to fully inspect the unravelling apocalypse outside a moving train while joining the flashing of a red light.
How the entire Walled City is looking for solace inside VR gaming headsets, while I was taking shots of a the word "gamers" a bunch of times. Crazy how a prompt like "photograph the word gamers 7 times" can lead to such a hard hitting declaration by the game I myself was currently escaping into. Seeing a fully armed and ready Military OP right next to a twitching dude with a VR headset tucked to his face is pretty jarring imagery. Or how your first sight in that level are a bunch of joyful folks dancing in the streets, I in an instant felt obligated to capture with my shutter, just to turn that camera lense and understand what the name "Walled City" truly encompasses.

Through this design Umurangi Generation engaged me in it's story, themes and humanity with a sharp but subliminal efficiency. All of the games I've played then forgotten in which the gorgous, painstakingly sculpted 3D models, digitally printed graphic designs, each intentfully placed static pixels on my screen transformed into backround noise after the obligatory respect for the effort, all of which are contrastingly focal in this world and even highlighted in their low-poly beauty through the gameplay of toying around with an array of lenses and settings gifted to the player.
A part of me believes that all of these observations I just attributed to the games design would have still taken place without it's reliance on checklists, but the existence of one itself gives context. Who am I taking these for? Who even pays me for it? The ominous implication of getting a fine for photographing the blue shells, which needs a bit of time to fully settle in, comes to mind. That this at first deceptively simple mechanic to get the player to be more careful with the framing and not just mindlessly waste a filmroll has genuine meaning in the story was brilliantly executed.


The music is also more than worth mentioning, but I have to admit I fell like condensing a plethora of tones and soundscapes into a few sentences, not wanting to adding another wall of text, always boils down to using genre descriptive buzzwords. In the context of this review a famous Elliot Erwitt quote on photography is fitting "The whole point of taking a picture is so that you don't have to explain things with words"
Maybe that's why I'd rather listen to, or play music than attempting to find the right ones for something that maybe can't be reduced to them and my RYM is as empty as my ball sack after listening to this OST. Anyways.
Bouncy, atmospheric synth- and drum-sample-heavy EDM, Breakbeat and Hip Hop transcends the atmosphere even further and goes hard from the moment you are greeted by the flapping vapor-waves of the penguin at the starting screen. There might be a few duds here and there, but the sheer volume and consistency in the catalogue for such a short game is impressive on it's own.
(Pretty irrelevant, but why did that MF choose the surename Adolf in his music?? Or did his parents do that to him? I couldn't find it out)

Gonna go even more off the rails here and talk about my love for street photography a bit, although truthfully the game feels more like you are a war correspondent, which I cannot speak on in the slightest and like I explained it even kinda convinced me of its game design philosophy on photography after some time and thoughts, but still.
Street photography in general seems impossible to replicate inside of a Video Game. You try to capture the slipt of a second in time, in an endless stream of movement. No looped animation circle could achieve that. Street photography specificially(hell, realistically war photography even more so, but probably for different more legitimate reasons) even if harmless can be an adrenaline rush. "Everything you've ever wanted is on the other side of fear" You'll need to be friendly, confident, subtle and bold in the same breath and not afraid of some verbal confrontation. It is kinda therapeutic to me and genuinely helps me with my, during covid developed, agrophobia and social anxiety. If they catch me while snapping it I just smile and tell them what I am doing, most of the time they don't even care. I only take pictures in touristy spots and mostly groups of old people and their dogs, but I still sometimes catch myself not wanting to disturb anyone and once I only take one picture in a span of twenty+ minutes that's when I am done for the day. I just do it for myself, to get better at it and photography.
It also lets you view the world through a different lense (bad pun intended). You start noticing and appreciating lines, shapes and people you were previously blind towards and develope an eye for when a real or interesting moment is about to unfold out of the nessecity to capture it. "All the the technique in the world doesn't compensate for the inability to notice"
There is no way a glorified screenshot in a Video Game could ever come close to that specific experience. That game would need to be a money-eating, ambitious risk and for a very niche audience. And probably the only, I hate say this next string of words, open-world-game I would get giddy for. Shit I'll just go outside and do my thing there.

Like I said I don't actually want write about or spoil the story, beyond a few observations up to the halfway point at least. Mostly because it's the one thing best experienced for yourself and someone smarter probably did a better synapsis or analyses about it. That reminds me, now I can finally, fully delve into that new Jacob Geller hood classic, this time without skipping the portion about this game. Also this review is way to long already. Holy.

I might bump the score eventually, because I am aware I sometimes like to judge games for what I wish they could have been, which is silly when a game achieves what it set out to do well enough. Despite having even more nitpicks like the finicky 3D platforming I didn't care for or that I wished the NPCs had at least some kind of reaction to shoving a camera up their faces or words to say about it and the world instead of just changing the poses of the player characters friends. The score will always be capped though, because the implementation of a timer is inexcusable to me. (I've said that like four or five times now lol, but I was just unable to ignore it in my playthrough)

The layers of presentation, the very unique branch of the low-poly (gonna throw reductive buzzwords out again) "neonpunk vapor-wave" aesthetic, the bopping OST and the detailed, environmental world building gives Umurangi Generation the worth to spend your time and money on, but I would recommend leaving the house if you go into this expecting it to scratch more than a very simple and gamefied itch for photography, although it found a way to give purpose to it's use in a slightly different context.
I actually would recommend the latter to eveyone here, in all of the ways you choose to interpretate it. Aight, imma grab my film rolls and head out.

“An American tragedy. An odyssey of debt, of grief, of broken promises, of hope. A painful, melancholic fable composed of fables and more fables, spreading out and weaving in and out of itself. A dream ebbing back and forth between memory and fantasy. A plea for you to care about something.”

...This was my original review for Kentucky Route Zero. I still think it’s a good description. But on consideration, I feel as though I need to be bold and say it: Kentucky Route Zero is not only one of my favorite games, but one of my favorite things ever made.

This is not an assessment of quality. I am not telling you what to feel. I am telling you how I feel. And Kentucky Route Zero makes me feel a way.

I specifically say “Favorite Thing”, because Kentucky Route Zero doesn’t affect me like a game. When I think about many of my favorite games, I often think of them as games. They are full of mechanics, of challenges, of systems. That’s certainly not all games are, and games can be many things, but in the capacity that they affect me, enchant me, or fascinate me, it is often within this vague category of “game”. But Kentucky Route Zero is different. To call it “my favorite game” and leave it at that misses something. It’s certainly a game, but it doesn’t make me feel the way games usually make me feel. First and foremost, Kentucky Route Zero is a story. It’s unlike most. The main body of this story is a game, but it’s also a multimedia saga. There’s something quintessential permeating my experience of Kentucky Route Zero that transcends that category.

It is a hauntological melancholy. It conjures a world more like a memory than a reality. Kentucky Route Zero tells the story of people who seem familiar but you’ve never met, with jobs that were never really secure, in situations that could never happen, in a version of Kentucky that has never existed. Magical realism constructs a vision not of reality, but of memory, of a sensate fabric that you swear could have been but never was. Americana is a mythic entity made visible, standing in front of me within Kentucky Route Zero, and it’s on its last breaths.

It’s a hopeful story. That doesn’t mean it’s happy. The world around you is a wasteland. Everyone is dying. Everyone is suffering. Everything is weighed down by debt, pulled deep down into pools of darkness. To live is to work, work, and die. But there are other ways to live. There always have been. Should we move on? I think the answer is clear. But that doesn’t make the pain go away. We have to be willing to feel both grief and hope in the same breath.

All of its blemishes are dismissable. Fleeting problems with UI, incidentally clunky writing, weird mechanical tangents, overwhelming scope, these melt away when I take a moment to remember what Kentucky Route Zero is and feel the frisson travel up and down my skin. I'm trying to not be too longwinded here, but it's hard. I can't get into specifics. So I wax poetic instead. I could write thousands of words on every minute I spent with Kentucky Route Zero and still feel like I was forgetting to say something. It is a multitudinous masterpiece, refracting and reflecting endlessly, timelessly, quietly.

Kentucky Route Zero is one of my favorite things.

on the surface the game is a crappy rpgmaker rpg and arguably a crappier horror game. the game all but forgets to be scary beyond the first dungeon, and its recurring motif of blood quickly becomes saccharine comedy, as the game wanders away from any particular horror theme to a game dependent on the whims of it's developer, thecatamites, at any time during development. you can almost tell by the pacing of events that most of the content in the game was decided essentially at the moment it was added in. there is no rhyme or reason why the merchant is a Peanuts character, or the player character can spend half of the game as a fish, or that one of the more lengthy dialogues in the game is an interrogatory conversation about dracula's smoking habits. almost every moment in this game can be explained away as the developer self-indulgently humoring themself as they go.

despite all this, there are clues suggesting a much deeper understanding and intentional, pointed rhetoric behind the 'form' the game takes. its going to take a bit to explain what i mean by this.

space funeral is most often depicted as a contemporary with other horror alt-rpgs of the time: OFF, yume nikki, Lisa, etc. ironically these titles have ended up being the standout successes of the rpgmaker engine, particularly because of how un-rpg they feel. i think its important to understand that the stated intention of space funeral was not to sit among these games, but actually with the rest of the 'less interesting' catalogue from the engine: the hundreds of substandard dragon quest clones it was posted among on rpgmaker.net. you can see the developer in the comments of this game and others debating its purpose with other users. some of it is kind of petty, even. this is a game by and for rpgmaker users. with this lens, many of the abstract or comedic choices the game makes begin to take on some clarity.

the moment you open the game it should be immediately clear you are playing an rpgmaker game. this is something the game expects of the players: the traditional new/load/end game buttons have all been customized to just read 'blood'. its not difficult to intuit what you should press to start, and the game knows you know this, which is why its freely able to modify its UI the way it does.

space funeral makes a point to showcase all the features packed in rpgmaker, while simultaneously making them feel pointless. a circle of wizards in the starting town of the game explain a complicated elemental weakness system in enemies. the protagonist, phillip, has a custom action in combat that has a myriad of random effects. despite this, combat in the game is painfully simple - most enemies are defeated in a few hits, and you can truthfully spam attack for every fight. the engine's boat/airship function is used in an entirely linear section of the game which could have easily been another plain or forest map. All the classical rpg elements are there. You go from town to town, collecting incrementally better equipment and fighting slightly tougher enemies. the only section of the game where it feels like gameplay was intentionally injected was the pyramid where you have to dodge mummy npcs through the hallways. each town has a 'church' where you may go to rest and regain full health, the sprite for which is a coffin which already has another copy of your body in it. Everything you can think of in an rpg exists in this game, functionally, but in this unrecognizable form.

you can close your eyes and play this game like its any other bog standard little final fantasy. try as it might to feel different, this is exactly the type of game it's toolset coaxes users into making. at a fantastic arcade presentation, thecatamites describes working with rpgmaker as an almost autopilot process: you start your passion project like any other, by placing a few grass tiles, then some trees - an hour later you are somehow building yet another sewer dungeon.

really the only things the engine allows you to customize are graphics and music. most of the graphics are scribbled in. tilesets do not repeat textures properly. assets are colored in with blood, or skulls, or otherwise goofy angry faces. its obviously not pleasant but importantly it's expressive; it sells the tone of the game well. the music is maybe the most genuine look at the developer of the game (within it's own text here) - it's sampled from various bands and radio broadcasts, small acts the developer clearly has a taste for. it does kind of feel like trying to 'show off', which is fine, but its also about one bauhaus or joy division track from me wanting to shove it in a locker.

all of it is so abrasive. the game seems to want you to spend time considering its aesthetics. why is everything so stupid. the characters are all mean to you. there is clearly some joke at the expense of the player. these days it's easier to revel in these abstract indie games. but i also remember a time where my understanding of free indie games was limited to happy wheels, and stumbling into games like a closed world, or triad laughing at the audacity that someone would make these games that don't even make sense and aren't fun. i am mostly glad that the net has come around on this, but i think its important to think about for the context of this game, as the type of player the game might be concerned with subverting here. the player character, phillip, sort of has a goal which i think mirrors that mindset in which he needs to go to the city of forms and change or 'fix' all of these things about the world. the game's antagonist, moon (likely a sort of self-effacing stand in for thecatamites or at least a reflection on their Point Here), has been faced with the same situation but only sees futility in it: moon has come to understand what this perfect version of the world is supposed to be, but it's too perfect. only shoddy copies can be made. so rather than fulfill this goal, it decides to distort everything completely. this is why the game is the way it is.

so what is the game about. ultimately when you defeat moon and accomplish your goals you are faced with stock assets from rpgmaker, the RTP (runtime package). what the game posits about the RTP is that its representative of this platonic ideal of the JRPG: a fictional game aspirational to many users that is ultimately unachievable. rpgmaker gives you the tools, sets the precedent for what to make, but leaves it up to the player to execute that vision. space funeral is making the argument here that when you act in your own vision you are poisoned by the medium you inhabit, but when you act in the vision of this 'ideal' the work will still exhibit your own hubris. there is a sort of nihilism to this. and i think at the time it comes from a lot of frustration at the surrounding community of users, who maybe were thought to have been wasting talent or potential on something they are only being suggested to do.

so largely this game is an argument for other developers to spend more time 'coming into themselves'. i think in some ways this point is self reflection on previous work and maybe other insecurities from thecatamites too. but the blatant cynicism of it here is not entirely something i agree with. at play here is an excellent understanding of what it means to use tools, and how they challenge and direct developers in certain directions. but i don't think there is as much interrogation of why the developers may choose to go one path or another with their projects, and it largely results in a lot of "why isn't everyone else like me"isms.

hobbyists make games for wildly different reasons. thecatamites clearly understands it's easy to fall into a pattern using this tool, but doesn't seem to recognize what is also valuable about that. there's a sort of catharsis in placing trees in your village and goblins in your haunted woods, and remembering the dumb names you gave your team in final fantasy 3. space funeral and these games it argues against are all self indulgent in their own ways, which kind of makes it moot to complain that one way is more 'fulfilling' than others.

i think space funeral ended up getting caught in the middle of a larger cultural shift of the attitudes behind indie games. generally in the 2000s if you made videogames outside the industry you were already pretty technically minded, and when like minded developers did meet, they'd try to create spaces. while rpgmaker has existed since then it was only popular in some spaces of the net, and fewer people were recreationally using their pcs for this kind of thing. space funeral's rhetoric is tied very closely with the site it came from. i think with the movement of indie game spaces from places like tigsource to more open social places like twitter and later discord show a lot about the changes to mentality surrounding indie development. more, easier tools have become available, and developers today are having a lot more 'fun' making games, though of course 'serious art' still exists too. in 2010 a game like space funeral could classify as dada, or at least low brow, but today just as easily file in with other 'meme' games too. because what is a meme, other than a set form that is meant to be followed, but also undermined for extra humor. im not sure what thecatamites would have to say about this take. but hey, if what one says was their Post another ascribes as a meme, it sucks but what can you do

does the platonic jrpg actually exist? can it be made? probably not, but space funeral is quite possibly the most rpgmaker a videogame can be.

Convinced it’s a psyops by some developers to suck off your energy and brain cells. First it pulls you in with its polished presentation and promise of captivating shmup gameplay. Then as you take control, you are suddenly burdened by its piss ass controls, insultingly easy difficulty and inoffensive, bland, stale environments and setting. As varied in taste as a raw block of tofu, the game jinglies its keys in front of you with its bobbing and pop-ins of wonderfully polished vfx and pixel animations, but that alone cant help the fact that this game just feels so weirdly sterile - as it it was concocted in a lab with multiple focus groups to create a generalization of a genre onto mobile devices, sprinkled with enough currencies, scrires and menus to husk ur soul away.

It's a lot more fun than I may have expected, as evidenced by my uhhhh playing through the whole thing in a single seasonal depression binge over the course of almost nine hours.

There are a lot of flaws, but most of them are at least a little charming even with how annoying they can be. My experience was saved by emulation save states, I don't think I would have had the patience to go through it on its own terms with how much backtracking you have to do and how easy it is to die in stupid ways.
It also starts off insanely hard and gets progressively easier until the final area which is just the worst, and sort of hinges on a mechanic the game doesn't tell you about. Usually I like that at least a little bit in FromSoft's design, but it wasted a ton of my time when I realized I was just a few numbers away from hitting an invisible stat that allows you to cast magic through your sword. I ended up hex-coding my HP up so I could just spam the boss and that worked fine.
I'm really excited to see how the series grows exponentially over the course of the next few games. This one left me incredibly charmed even with all of its downfalls, and I know I'm going to fall even harder for these games the longer I spend with them.