If the last half-decade has demonstrated anything, it is that the terminally online rhetoric of post-ironic who-gives-a-shit is metastasising. Vine was a benign growth, TikTok a malignant tumour. The netizen-hive-mind-collective that 'solved' the Boston Bombing is directly responsible for the fashwave that is/has/does/will erode democracy. Your grandpa has FOMO and bought $GME to 💎🙌 to the moon and we're all gonna make it, gm, gn, and you're buying into my shitcoin so I can rugpull you because Blizzard nerfed Siphon Life during Obamna's first term. Video games and anime used to be so much better before this forced diversity bullshit ᴡʜᴀᴛ ᴛʜᴇ ꜰᴜᴄᴋ ᴀʀᴇ yᴏᴜ ꜱᴀyɪɴɢ ᴅᴏ yᴏᴜ ʜᴇᴀʀ ᴛʜᴇ ꜱʜɪᴛ ᴅʀɪʙʙʟɪɴɢ ᴏᴜᴛ ᴏꜰ yᴏᴜʀ ᴍᴏᴜᴛʜ yᴏᴜ ᴄʀᴇᴛɪɴ took away the possibility of me getting a tradwife with Abigail Shapiro's body and Marin Kitagawa's face while I [REDACTED] to Angela White after a month of semen retention and get those GAIN$$$$ because there's always a bigger fool and it sure as fuck isn't me and you just don't get this new meme and I'm being gangstalked and I haven't [As the owner of a LandNFT, you own your individual Metalverse patch and secure a permanently assigned place on the Met---

The Milennials are the new Boomers [GEN-X ERASURE] and even the Zoomers are coming of age and they've been inundated with information and bullshit bullshit bullshit so they're casting a mirror back at this fucked up world we've made for them in their own art but some people are trying to be cute and coy with it and you get a YIIK or a Neon White but at least one of those was a good game even if it was still corpo-white-washed faux-sthetics. And your cute and coy attempts and being quirky fail to represent how angry you should be that you were born into this mess of a world because don't you know anger results in nothing? Why yes my favourite podcasts are My Brother, My Brother & Me, and The Adventure Zone, I love to choke down the fetid slurry that is the McElroys' toxic positivity of no bummers and horses and you're being force fed advertisements for fast food and you can't even open your eyes to realise it.

So when a game has the moxie to be viscerally angry, I have to take notice because that feels so genuine in the hyperrealistic world we inhabit. And Splatter is mad that the Internet has made us manipulative, lonely, nostalgic, deluded, greedy, and ultimately willing to harm others (or ourselves) for some gain, be it financial or spiritual or egotistical or chemical. This works where other games borne of the online mindset falter because this runs deep. Rat King Collective didn't disconnect to craft up some malformed half-simulacra that is outdated before it comes out. They never stopped being online, they didn't go for the here and now, they struck at the core of fourteen-year-old-me's identity. This isn't the cream of the crap, this is the dregs of a multitude of online cultures that you, yes, had to be there for. Or maybe you didn't. Does it matter? This goes deep enough that a missed referential quip refuses a reading of "oh this is one of those internet things I don't get," it simply recedes into the background, a cacophony of noise.

It isn't as if the gameplay is some marvel though. It's a spongy xoomer-shooter affair with hand guns and a Dark Souls Borne Ring dodge and commitment to the bit. A leaping enemy is gonna leap! Your dodge isn't going to give you i-frames but it'll get you out of the way and into a new harm's way. I'm not here for the gameplay anyways, it's a means to an end.

This is the video game equivalent of B.R. Yeager's Amygdalatropolis and I ravenously ate it up. Get mad. Wreck shit. Tear it all down. WORLD IS A FUCK

This is an incredibly written game – and I mostly mean in quantity rather than quality. Not that the writing is bad even a little bit, it's just So Written. At times it seemed a little too impressed with itself, a little too proud of just how much it had written and just how thoroughly it had considered everything about its world. The deluge of these instances made it difficult for me to resonate with the more rare moments that were clearly supposed to be emotionally impactful. Heaps and piles of world-building featuring places we'll never see and people we'll never know. Does it set the scene? Yes – does it establish the game's bleak tone? Yes – but it is constant and it is incredibly dry. Sometimes I'd go a full hour or so without encountering any moments like this, and suddenly getting caught in the current of yet more world-building would make me realize how much I was enjoying all the dialogue and narration up to this point (by contrast of how much I wasn't enjoying myself anymore). And this was with the full-game voice acting off, I can't imagine playing the whole game with it on. I kept voices on the "Classic" setting, and sometimes even that proved to be too much. The voice actors are great but their performances are absolutely not (save for Kim, of course). I found myself speeding through text faster than normal when they appeared so they would stop sooner. Which is a shame, because the tone and quality of their voices are great reference points to understand their characters better, but unnatural emphases and inflections regularly distracted from the meaning of the sentences rather than adding to it. Disco Elysium is an incredibly smart game but failed to make me feel much of anything, and I'm not afraid to say I value one of those things a lot more than the other.

This is a wonderful little game, very in line with early Love-De-Lic games (particularly Moon RPG Remix Adventure), and with just as much heart as that game too (but less needless frustration). It’s an adventure-style game at heart, but based around a day system where you can only do so much each day, and some things reset each day, while some things only progress day to day. It’s small and handmade-feeling, with wonderful cute, bizarre, and well written characters. I almost feel like this game loves me, and I love it too.

Some of the most fun I’ve had with a game in years was learning how to kill lizards in Rain World. In my entire time with the game in my first playthroughs, I’m not sure I ever intentionally killed one of these beasts. I saw them as impossible foes. But in order to reach many of my goals in Downpour, I had to learn how to conquer them. The first kill feels like a fluke, like luck, and in a way it is. But each spear that pierces their hide feels more real, more earned. They never stop being terrifying. They never stop being a threat. But I had to learn how to take them down anyway, backflipping, juking, stabbing, feasting. I had to learn how to slay dragons.

I have a brand, and part of that brand is that I really like Rain World. In all my poetic waxings, I often am remiss to mention what makes playing Rain World itself actually so cool. So for once, I’ll try to offer an admittedly vague explanation. I’m sure you can find no shortage of mechanical rundowns, so I’ll keep this brief: Rain World is a unique game where you play as a little slugcat trying to survive and find shelter before the devastating rain comes. It’s quite a difficult game where challenges may often feel insurmountable. What makes Rain World such a unique game is its emphasis on emergent and procedural systems. The vast majority of these systems are not explained to the player at all, and as such have to be learned by experimentation and exploration. The behavior and animations of all the predators and creatures you encounter is unpredictable and dynamic. The game is a bountfiul garden of consistently surprising gameplay.

The result, for me, is something unlike anything else: a constantly exciting game. It’s always a thrill playing Rain World. Even dozens of hours in, I find myself yelping and gritting my teeth. I can get into specifics but I don’t want to dispel the magic of experiencing it yourself. I adore this. It can also end up making making the game agonizing. This is why initial critical response was negative, and why many players will find the game simply too hard or too cruel to even play let alone enjoy. But that agony is a part of the experience, or at least my experience, and it’s part of what makes the slugcat’s journey so beautiful.

So what about Downpour? This is an expansion that adds a litany of new features. If you just want a straight recommendation, I don’t advise going into anything related to the expansion before playing the base game. It’s not a required expansion and frankly is extremely geared towards die-hard fans. Most of my time was spent with the new slugcats, but they also added co-op, Expedition mode, challenges, and other stuff. A major addition to the game was Remix, a suite of new options that is available to owners of the base game. This alone makes recommending Rain World significantly easier, because it now comes with a big list of checkboxes that can help you tailor the game to your own needs. (If you want help figuring out what to use, check out my forum post here.)

Now, there is a criticism that Downpour in many ways actually distorts and weakens the unique core identity of Rain World. I’m torn on this. On one hand, I think it’s a bit paranoid. Even with an expansion (which is still optional!), Rain World remains a singular game like no other. Hunter and Monk were already additions and didn’t distort that vision. On the other hand, this game has a lot of things in it. There’s five new campaigns, a bunch of new game modes, and major additions to the map. There’s a chunk of community easter eggs, which frankly rubs me the wrong way, and the involvement of fandom in art can get ugly fast. The expansion also ends up adding a fair bit to the lore and narrative, and I don’t have simple feelings about some of the choices. (I won’t get into it for spoiler reasons, but there are some big swings that I don’t love.) It’s so much that I couldn’t possibly cover it all, and all the implications and complications in this review; even what I’ve written here is longer than I wanted. I wanted to just talk about the lizards, but this is too dense with content that I can’t just leave it at that. I would never go as far to say that Downpour ruins or fundamentally changes Rain World, but it does definitely add a lot to the mix.

There’s a reason for all this. Let’s talk a bit about the history here: years ago, some Rain World modders began developing the More Slugcats mod, which would add new playable slugcats to the game. Eventually, Videocult took these folks onto the team directly and made the expansion official. This, perhaps, explains why there is a sort of eagerness and lack of restraint to the expansion. The developers have announced intent to continue working on Rain Word, though I get the sense that this will mostly be the Downpour team and not the Videocult duo. I won’t lie that this concerns me; I don’t necessarily want to see this game endlessly expanded. I’m still waiting on the Signal project, and I want to see what else these teams are capable of putting together.

I think part of this comes from the fact that I don’t really engage with games in the way a lot of others seem to. For some people, Rain World is there forever game. I don’t want a forever game. I don’t generally seek to play a game for an indeterminately long amount of time. When I see credits on a roguelite, that’s generally when I stop playing. I am so puzzled when I see people gripe about growing tired of something after several hundred hours in a game. Even my favorite games of all time I generally do not return to ad nauseaum.

But that’s sort of why Downpour ends up making me happy. In spite of some of my concerns and gripes. A messier Rain World is still Rain World, and Rain World is good. And at the end of the day, Downpour gave me a reason to play one of my favorite games again. It gave me a reason to learn how to slay dragons. And that’s worth a hell of a lot.

Acho bem interessante como em cada mídia artística há uma forma singular de se apresentar ao interlocutor; livros pela semântica; músicas por meio da sonoridade; os filmes através de planos; e os jogos, por sua vez, com a interatividade. Claro que resumir essas mídias apenas com tais aspectos seria ignorar toda a articulação artística possível; música se complementam com letras; os livros tornam-se mais contemplativos com planos; os filmes ficam mais extasiantes por meio da sonoridade; enquanto os jogos, mesclando cada um desses aspectos, se transforma em uma experiência única e atemporal. Acho que a minha parcialidade deixou um pouco claro: dentre todas as mídias artísticas mencionadas, os jogos sempre me foram mais atrativos. Acredito que seja o modo com o qual tudo articula-se, criando um diálogo com uma espécie de entidade, similar a Deus, que por meio dos fragmentos apresentados por ele naquele mundo virtual, eu crio um universo em minha mente que busca destrinchar cada mínimo detalhe até chegar em uma conclusão que me agrade em virtude daquele solene mundo. Fatum Betula é sobre isso, uma conversa que desagua em inúmeros temas e reflexões. O que eu escrevi pode parecer um tanto quanto confuso. Porém é o que melhor define Fatum Betula.

Atomic Heart wants desperately to be like Bioshock Infinite. Everyone knows this. Everyone says this. It oozes it from the first seconds of the game, pushing you through an idyllic world-building hallway in a floating city before everything turns to shit and the havoc begins. There’s even a fucking lighthouse. It’s so obvious it’s actually pathetic. The Bioshock series (itself deferred to System Shock 2) is sort of messy, wrapped up in gestures towards depth, both narratively and mechanically, that are ultimately flat. And this hit an apex with Bioshock Infinite, a game I truly despise, which was utterly vapid and utterly hateful. When it comes to depth, these are the equivalent of a Road Runner tunnel painted on a wall. So what of Atomic Heart? What happens when you imitate an imitation?

There’s that famous Putin quote, “Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.” I doubt I will ever really understand this sentiment; I’m not Russian and my ancestors left there long ago. But Atomic Heart is the most I’ve ever seen it manifest. The game is fascinated by Soviet aesthetics, the socialist realism, the hammers and sickles, but rejects the values that formed them. Marx statues and Lenin busts are easy to find, but they’re just set dressing. It loves the utopic visions of Soviet communism, but is disgusted by its own nostalgia. It is trapped pining for the aesthetics of past without its politics. It wants badly to be able to be superficial.

I struggle to explain the exact way this game is so facile. At first I say that Atomic Heart isn’t sophisticated enough to really have an ideology, but that’s not true. Everything has an ideology, and this game often makes it very clear where it’s coming from. So, maybe it’s not sophisticated enough to have a message. Okay, maybe, but it definitely seems to be trying to. So I just land on this: Atomic Heart is not very smart. It really, really thinks it is. But it’s just not.

Dumb games aren’t intrinsically bad, but I think Atomic Heart is. Like, look, aesthetics count for more than most of us want to admit. And, if nothing else, Atomic Heart has a stunning visual style. The robot designs are creative and eerie (and sometimes horny), and the environmental design is almost Seussian at times. That’s why this game’s trailers blew up: it looks sick. If this game was all looks and middling gameplay, I wouldn’t be writing this. Hell, I might be doing a cheeky review of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother, instead. But it’s worse.

The problem is that this game never shuts the fuck up. It’s annoying bland protag never stops talking. The glove never stops talking. It does the time honored faux pas of complaining about mechanics it makes you perform. The motherfucker keeps saying “crispy critters” like he’s trying to make it a thing. I tried to play the game with Russian audio but the constant chattering made the game almost impossible even with subtitles. The game is very much interested in its plot and its plot fucking sucks. All of its twists are predictable and none of its ideas are new. Some twists are cribbed directly from Bioshock. I’m withholding some of the absurd spoilers, but there are a few moments that had me laughing to myself, saying, “I hate this game.” And god, it really is not that original. It’s the most run of the mill sci-fi plot you could have cooked up for this game. Its beats are so obvious and so rote. I think the glove literally quotes Animal Farm at you. It’s so fucking annoying. The messages, vapid as they are, are hammered repeatedly and obnoxiously, conveying its shitty politics piecemeal. And its politics really are shitty. There’s the undercurrent of nationalism and of anti-collectivism. This is not to mention the way female-coded robots are sexualized, and the apparent presence of anti-Ukrainian propaganda. I’ve even been told there’s a racist caricature hidden away somewhere in the cartoons that run on loop in this game. It is dripping in bad vibes.

And you know, I’d love to sit here and virtue signal about how I reviled the game and hated every moment, sneering “mid” and patting myself on the back. But I’d be pretending. Because there are fun moments to this trash heap. Like, yeah, it’s a 2010-ass game in a lot of ways (linear, parkour, quicktime events, minigames), but with a post-boomer revival combat sensibility (fast, hard, lots of enemies) and I don’t think it really quite works all said. I could get into it, but I won’t. Regardless, there’s glimmers. Even beyond art assets. In particular, there are some unique mechanical elements to the robot ecosystem. Granny Zina is cool (it would have been a better game if we could play as her). And I actually really liked most of the conversations with the corpses. There are brief moments, when they finally choose to shut the fuck up, where I had genuine fun. But those moments felt rare, where I was left to my devices to revel in silent aesthetics and mechanics, in a constant deluge of its overbearing sci-fi shenanigans and questionable choices, and by the end, all I could remember was the muck.

But doesn’t this all remind you of something? An alternate history sci-fi game, that had really impressive trailers to garner interest, with a very strong art direction admittedly steeped with nationalist visions of the past, that is an extremely watered down immersive sim, that is so enamored with its cliched plot about free will filled with garbage politics, where the game pontificates about agency while robbing you of it and espousing empty platitudes about power, with constant dumb twists and undercurrent of misogyny and centrism, resulting in a game that is inexplicably lauded despite all its glaring flaws and horrendous pretensions?

Atomic Heart wants desperately to be like Bioshock Infinite. And the worst part is, it’s succeeding.

The bottom line is that this game is incredibly annoying.
The audio design is composed of the sound of crying (then laughing) babies, stock zombie roars, and out-of-place swearing repeated ad nauseum.

The hurdles you encounter are not challenges more than they are inconveniences, the mini-games control poorly and any uniqueness in their design is quickly overshadowed by their repetition and length. The bosses are not difficult, just well-conceptualized puppets with a glowing weak spot you have to hit too many times before they make a dick joke and go into their next phase and you shoot more.
Mini-bosses are worse, often the design is not intuitive enough to tell what you're supposed to do, and when you finally do figure it out the loop goes on far too long to the point where you question whether or not you ARE doing the right thing.
I spent 8 minutes on a fight with a generic big zombie, I went through 68 bullets shooting it with lightshot then blasting it in the back while it was stunned. It took my entire full stock of shotgun ammo to kill it, plus some from my handgun. It did not move for the entire fight save for the stun animation. I did not move either. We were locked for 8 minutes in a still, silent dance to the death.
It was not fun.
The final boss (I have since been informed that this is NOT the final boss, but the pre-final boss) took me an hour, you have to unload clips into him so he'll split into three pieces and spin around you too fast to aim, but not at a consistent speed, so you can't try and match his pace. The laser pointer reticle cannot find his hit boxes. When you do hit the shots, it's only a few before he re-forms and you have to keep shooting til he splits and spins again. I ended up quitting because I'd run out of alcohol (in-game, the healing item, I mean, I'd drunk approximately 50 bottles of various effects in this encounter), and if it had taken me an hour to get through just 2/3 of the fight (judging by the spinning pieces remaining) I didn't have it in me to do that again. My spirit had been broken. I was drinking tea this entire time in an attempt to stay calm and collected and patient. My tea had gone cold. I googled a video of the ending cutscene and went to sleep. Tomorrow I will play Dragon Quest XI and have a much, much better time. It will be therapeutic. I will forget Shadows of the Damned overnight.

The dialogue is irritating and provides no bond between the characters. We know Garcia loves his girlfriend because he is a man and she is a woman and they are both hot and the game talks about sex a lot. He also likes her caprese salad, as we learn in a throwaway line that ends in a half-assed oral joke.
Johnson is not a character, he is a dick joke. The only tension between characters is either a given sexual baseline spawned from a middle school boy's imagination, or else a threat of masculinity between two Big Beefy Boys who want to Have Sex with Women, but are being Cockblocked by the Devil (this is the name of my new indie band, debuting this April at the bar's open mic night).

The two variations of cutscene are "men make references to the fact that they have penises, then get angry," or "woman is tortured and assaulted for shock value." Poignant music is played over a scene of the latter, while a demon repeats the words "fuck youuuu" more times than I would be comfortable writing in an entire script of any length, let alone one scene of this length. Two jokes of masculinity watch this event, one shooting guns solemnly while the other stands with his dick in his hand. This is not a joke, Johnson is a phallis. He is in Garcia's hand constantly. This is the smartest subliminal messaging the game is capable of, and it's just a play on the phrase "just standing around with your dick in your hand."

There are QTEs that just happen, without you realizing what's happening until it's too late. There are crying babies, frequently. They do not stop crying, or laughing, sometimes for the duration of a miniboss fight. As I've established, that time frame is unbearable. Johnson just says things, so does Garcia. These things do not matter. There is no story in this game. All you need to know is that sex exists, in the real world, and EA loves it. That's the plot of Shadows of the Damned.

This game has boobs in it.

"My objective was solely archaeological. I would hunt these gray forms until they would transmit to me a part of their mystery, a part of the secret few phrases could sum up: why would these extraordinary constructions, compared to the seaside villas, not be perceived or even recognized? Why this analogy between the funeral archetype and military architecture? Why this insane situation looking out over the ocean? This waiting before the infinite oceanic expanse?...

...Why speak of "brutalism"? And, above all, why this ordinary habitat, so very ordinary over so many years?

These heavy gray masses with sad angles and no openings - excepting the air inlets and several staggered entrances - brought to light much better than many manifestos the urban and architectural redundancies of the postwar period that had just reconstructed to a tee the destroyed cities. The antiaircraft blockhouses pointed up another lifestyle, a rupture in the apprehension of the real. The blue sky had once been heavy with the menace of rumbling bombers, spangled too with the deafening explosions of artillery fire. This immediate comparison between the urban habitat and the shelter, between the ordinary apartment building and the abandoned bunker in the heart of the pores through which I was traveling, was as strong as a confrontation, a collage of two dissimilar realities. The antiaircraft shelters spoke to me of men's anguish and the dwellings of the normative systems that constantly reproduce the city, the cities, the urbanistic.

The blockhouses were anthropomorphic; their figures recalled those of bodies. The residential units were but arbitrary repetitions of a model, a single, identical, orthogonal, parallelepipedal model. The casemate, so easily hidden in the hollow of the coastal countryside, was scandalous here, and its naturalness was due less to the originality of its silhouette than to the extreme triviality of the surrounding architectural forms. The curved profile brought with it into the harbor's quarters a trace of the curves of dunes and nearby hills, and there, in this naturalness, was the scandal of the bunker...

...Slowed down in his physical activity but attentive, anxious over the catastrophic probabilities of his environment, the visitor in this perilous place is beset with a singular heaviness; in fact he is already in the grips of that cadaveric rigidity from which the shelter was designed to protect him. "

- Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology

It kept popping around the backloggd sphere. Given the title, I thought it was some random meme game. (I guess everyone assumed that)

It's a 3 minute "experience" made in bitsy. It's a super personal piece to the point that relating and/or understanding it is impossible for me (thats not a bad thing really lmao). Given the use of bitsy, I persume this was made in the rush of the moment - very quickly and just trying to get the feelings/idea across while it is still fresh in their mind without having to commit to building a lot of system and tech beforehand. While minimal in its tech and execution, it still creates a strong sense of nostalgia for me - even though I never played Cave Story nor relate to the stuff said in the game.

In the end, I don't get why this got so much traction. I guess the title got some heads turnin'.