An angry and brutal deconstruction of rpg and action game tropes but like a punk song it quickly reveals itself to be little more then a simple 3 note ditty with a lot of rage. Once you get past the shock of how awful character is and the surreal imagery you are left with a barely functional, esoterically padded action game populated by one note characters in a frustratingly unexplored world.

Years earlier Moon: Remix RPG Adventure tackled many of the same concepts with a lighter touch and more nuance and years later many more games (including those by Yoko Taro) would explore many of the same ideas in more depth) yet there is something to be said about how bleak and direct this game is. The music and visuals have a very avant garde and ethereal quality which is lacking from Taro's future work on nier which visually is a snooze fest in comparison to the boldness on display here. Drakengard said what it needed to in the time it came out and paved the way for many future games, but I'll be damned if I touch it again any time soon.

This is the culmination of all of the past Mr Driller games into one updated collection. There is the classic game mode, a drillstone based one, an item based one, and two new game modes all wrapped up in an appealing UI and OST. Ultimately though the classic Mr Driller game mode remains the best which is why i have to score this game relatively low. Classic game modes like endless or time attack are locked behind grinding out and completing the other game modes meaning if you dont like them I cant even recommend this just for the classic game mode. The controls also feel ever more so sluggish compared to the OG which makes it hard to recommend at full price.

I've come to the conclusion ideologies are a sort of mental poison which utterly stifled any actual thought in its victims. Case in point this slapdash discord rant masquerading as an essay. In this case it seems the primary game design ethos of the author is escapism. They want to escape and exist in another world and mechanics serve as a barrier to that. This betrayed in the cliche 2000s teenage girl writing style which show a desire to exist as someone of a different age in a different time (your wannabe 2000s cringe culture is dead sparkle dog bimbo brainrot disease aesthetic isn't unique its an epidmic).

This leads to some baffling claims like talking about how comfy the world of the half life games, a military installation and eastern Europe respectively, are. None of the locations except the alien planets are particularly unrealistic in half life the author could always just fly over to eastern Europe and see some brutalist architecture. Ultimately its not the locations in games OP wants to escape into but into the simplistic feeling of a game. An abstraction of reality where hunger, drinking, insecurities, ugliness, and complexity don't exist. Where cutting grass and slashing slimes can give you enough honest days pay to keep you going. The pixels and polygons smooth over so much of the harshness of reality making even a dystopian world like half life seem comfy in comparison to the real world. Its like Japanese anime where a common plot trope is someone killing themselves and being transported to a magic world just like mmorpgs and jrpgs the protagonist/watcher are familar with. Its not an escape to a new an unseen world (like many past fish out of water stories) but instead an escape into a simple and familiar world. Its creepy and shows a lack of imagination (I seriously question the normalization of suicide and sexually charged fanservice in a country with a high suicide rate and gender segregated train cars) . You have only one life and one chance in this world don't waste it wishing you were something else in a world of 5th gen polygons. I promise the real world is not as scary as your toxic online communities and brainrot ideologies have made you think.

This shit is hard to core. 3-D platformers are normally way easier then their 2-D counterparts, but Sami doesn't pull punches. You are on a strict time limit with annoying precise ball physics which make me wanna rage but it allows for such freedom to cheese that you'll bounce between being stuck on a level for hours to finding a short cut which skips 80% of another level. The second playable character works as all good alt characters should she opens up just as much brand new cheese as other levels are made harder due to her new moveset.

In general game's difficulty follows two contradictory maxims: 1. the game should get more challenging and 2. the player should get more powerful. Incarnation lightly pokes at these tried and true laws by offering a game where you get weaker to provide a real sense of difficulty, is what I'd say if the contradiction above hadn't been solved decades ago by simply making the further levels harder to counter any player growth.

This makes Incarnation less of a subversion and more of a inversion. To handle the players drops in power Incarnation has to make its later levels easier which makes it's difficulty curve basically the same as any other game's just getting there in a slightly different way. Rather then getting stronger with the levels getting harder at a faster pace to create an overall more difficult ending Incarnation has its levels get slightly easier as you loose power at a rapid rate so it overall gets more difficult. Even the thought process of choosing which upgrades to give up is shocking similar to the one of choosing upgrades in a normal rougelike.

I could be a little more forgiving of this slight failure of premise if the the controls actually let you move and attack independently, but tying everything to a mouse when combined with your eventual low range and weak attack mean you have to take damage in later levels. This fact was seemingly known by the game's designers who have filled the later levels with tons of spare healing items which kinda destroys the fantasy of being made super weak when you are just expecting to tank everything.

Still this is little more then a stupid thesis which is avaible on steam for a low price if the concept interests you. I think there is just enough to make it worth the 1~ playtime, but I also think it ultimately fails in its premise.

A fun little micro puzzle adventure game experience. Its like pony island but it has like actual puzzles in these weird witness puzzle panel-Sokoban hybrid puzzles. The puzzles arent all that challenging but they serve their purpose well in adding some meat on the aesthetic bone here. The biggest issue here is the general lack of polish which lead to inconsistent graphics and game breaking bugs which required the game to be reset multiple times after getting softlocked when the game did shit like forgot to respawn items when resetting a puzzle or collision just not working.

Remedy continues their streak of making super interesting and high quality games which leave me unfulfilled by the end.

I think Alan Wake 2 is a better game overall then Alan Wake 1 with gorgeous FMV cutscenes and an insanely high quality dub which seamlessly turns two actors into one character. Certainly a step up from the 240p Night Springs episodes in Alan Wake 1. The story is also more abstract, philsiopshical and occult. It follows in the footsteps of Twin Peaks the Return but feels more distinct unlike Alan Wake 1 which was embarrassingly reverent to Twin Peaks.

The issue here is that the new horror gameplay just isn't up to snuff. Even on hard this is the first horror game where I have entirely filled up both my inventory and the storage so I just had to throw away precious resources and stop picking them up. There are some interesting combos you can set up with weapon upgrades but in 90% of the game you can just ru past enemies making the game, like Alan Wake 1, a game of mostly just dodging foreword between safe rooms. Needing to explore a single location for a bit does mitigate this problem a bit compared to Alan Wake 1, there are less annoying enemy spam hoard segments, but it also makes every combat encounter way less creative. The whole appeal of the taken to me is how easy it is to design some clever environmental ways to use light to your advantage, when outside of two scripted set pieces, the only way you damage enemies is with the flash light or other light generating items. You cant ever bang a car to quickly turn the headlights on or lure enemies into a room and flip a light switch to damage them. It just seems like a waste for such a creative game.

Its like what would happen if you crossed the bland overly open level design of New Soup Mario bros Wii (before Nintendo realized how to design levels for single player and 4 player co op at the same) done to slow the game down to work with players with the okay mock genesis physics and BS heavy level design of Sonic Advance 1. This is on top of having some quirks of its own like really bad bosses which drag on due to limited opportunity to hit weakpoints and some jank hitboxes and the new "emerald abilities" which range from situational to useless to game breaking. Really this game is an embarrassment being sold for 60$ when Mania launched at 20$ and had more content (the reused zones in Mania are more creative then most of the new stuff here lol).