Beautiful things don't ask for attention

Beautiful and charming are not two words associated with a game from a small developer. These two words are more often directed at giant games with big budgets that are designed to replicate real-world conditions, from textures to the quality of lighting. That when dynamic weather effects appear or the change of day makes the lighting effects look realistic at various angles, this is the kind of reaction and praise that the audiences will give. However, it is not uncommon to encounter situations where indie games, with all their creative abilities, actually appear stunning in this aspect. Not taking the same approach as most AAA games, but offering something unique, beautiful and strong at the same time. And Gris is the definitive example of this made by Nomada Studio.

Like most games with an "art" approach like this, GRIS is a game that from the start of playing clearly has a strong metaphorical meaning. That the real story is not what you see on the screen, but the metaphorical meaning that flows from every action, consequence and storyline that flows. Everything is conveyed implicitly, without really clear dialogue. Above the surface, you play as a nameless female character who at the beginning is seen trying to restore the colorless world around her, which is also represented by a giant statue of a nameless woman. In the midst of the confusion that occurred, he fell from the giant's hands. A situation that makes him, like it or not, have to keep moving to find a definite solution. The woman finally found a special point that allowed her to move in four different directions to collect a point of light that symbolized the stars in the sky.

Beautiful is the first reaction you might have when you see what Nomada Studio has achieved with Gris. The visual approach is made in such a way that you feel like you are playing a painting that now moves interactively with the actions you take with the existing keyboard or controller. The details offered are not aimed, for example, at capturing the main character's body anatomy as realistically as possible, but rather at trying to capture an atmosphere that suits the world he is facing. What you will find is a character with a face full of details, attractive color design, fantastic motion animation, but only moves with legs and arms which are simply drawn as straight lines. Something that really suits her abstract world.

With an implicit story approach like this, the only way for you to understand what the developer wants to convey via Gris is simply to "feel". Through empathy and sympathy, trying to understand what kind of struggle the main character has to go through to fix so many things can end up being a symbol of a problem faced in the real world. However, considering that this style of storytelling will not require specific clarification to justify or blame, you are given the freedom to make your own interpretation. Well as for me myself, Gris seems to be aiming at a portrait of a woman who is experiencing complicated problems and has a messy body image who is struggling, in the midst of her sadness and anger, to rediscover her self-confidence and self-love. The positive emotions presented by this nameless main female character.

Appreciations of course has to be mention for the sound and music in Gris which really captures the emotional side without dialogue that he wants to inject, while building the right atmosphere to build the playing mood. The approach and quality must be given a thumbs up because there are several moments that strangely, with the help of music, managed to make us tense, sad, and even get goosebumps with the hair on the back of our necks standing up when faced with certain scenes. For a game with no dialogue and only offering motion and facial animations as expressions, this is an achievement worth talking about.

At the start, Gris feels like a walking simulator game, where you just have to run and jump over various obstacles. However, as the story progresses, there will be more challenges that require a little of your brain power. Slowly but surely, the girl will gain new powers that will help her overcome various obstacles at once, accessing deeper, higher or further places. At the start, she can turn her dress into a heavy and hard block. Changing this dress means she can't be hit by strong winds for example. You can also use it as a crack floor destroyer or just a weight to make the building structure unbalanced or slightly stressed. The girl will then be strengthened with the ability to float, swim and sing. Levitation can be used to access higher ground and singing can make specific nearby plants bloom and reveal new puzzle solutions or platforms to jump onto.

Of course beautifulness does not make Gris run away with its flaws. In terms of gameplay, there are several areas where exploration can be done freely, this game does not have landmarks or maps that are really clear about the locations that you have actually explored before. Unlike other similar puzzle platformer titles like Inside or Little Nightmares, Gris doesn't have a game over system and because of this the decision to create a boss fight that has a scary design with such sweet animation and visuals ends up having no consequences and actually eliminates the sensation of threat that exists. Even for sequences where you are faced with a clear threat, there is a some kind of like safe zone with automatic animation cuts that make the girl automatically dodge. There's nothing that feels urgent, there's no sensation that you want to protect this girl out of concern, which ultimately makes it lose its meaning.

But after reflecting it a little bit, i think that is what made Gris stands out from others. Gris is a platformer game that can be called "relaxing", where despite the challenges, it is still a game that has a purpose and that is to make you enjoy the world and its atmosphere well. The presentation is amazing in terms of visuals and audio, making it a charming indie platformer game that is ready to amaze the audiences from the very first sight. It can lead to an emotional and powerful playing experience, even though you end up not clearly understanding what the definitive story and the message are actually trying to offer. Everything is covered in level design that is beautiful and remains challenging at the same time.

"I was the front man for a punk band, boss. Fuck no, I can't sing."

I have never cared for a party in a video game anywhere near as much as I did for the cast of Shadowrun: Dragonfall.

I've seen complaints about these characters that far too many of them are too nice to realistically be shadowrunners. Your fixer is just a kindly, unassuming guy with the Ryan Gosling jacket from Blade Runner 2049. Most of your crew can be stony and serious, but they're very rarely hostile to anyone who hasn't provoked them first. People hanging around the commune may be drug addicts, or broke, or both, but they usually seem happy to see you. There is a dark world outside of the Kreuzbasar, constantly bleeding into the city from its edges, and a decent chunk of players think that the lighter, less gritty characterization here is at odds with the setting.

These people are wrong.


Dragonfall's characters embody spitting in the face of inevitability, be it wrought through the tendrils of capital or magical instability. Anyone with so much as a passing knowledge of Shadowrun lore knows that Berlin's anarchist east is a carcass circled by corporate vultures, and the game makes no effort to hide this. Every gig you run comes with its own mini-conclusion, but there's no way to reconcile this with the fact that everything you do will inevitably be for nought. Why keep fighting and struggling in the face of a future so far beyond your collective control?

Because fuck them, that's why.

A lot of the more mainstream cyberpunk stories that get talked about these days usually get trotted around for the tragedies awaiting the characters at the end, but I feel like this is missing out on nuance for the spectacle. Going down in a blaze of glory is memorable, but death is death, no matter how it comes. If we're remembered only by how we died, then we've lived awfully boring lives. Whether it's with you or the generations that come after you're gone, Dragonfall is genre-aware enough to know how this ends. It trusts that you are, too. And in spite of this, never once does it give up hope. No matter how infinitesimally small of a chance, it insists over and over that you can make things better. You can help. You can matter.

Your moment-to-moment missions are all little microcosms of the greater whole of Berlin. Some people are scared, and down on their luck, and desperate. You can reason with them. Others aren't as willing to talk, and you're forced to gun them down. Sometimes you'll be killing some bastards who really, really deserve it, and other times you'll be shooting at victims of circumstance. There is the potential for you to fuck up severely, on purpose or otherwise. Just because the game wants you to make things better doesn't mean you have to abide.

The game is willing to trust you with a lot of freedom, all the way from how you build your character to the many, many different paths you can take to achieve your objectives. You can absolutely ruin your PC by making a completely garbage build with your limited karma, but the fact that you can do that at all is significantly more than some self-professed RPGs allow. There are many ways to avoid direct combat, meddle with a battlefield before you even enter it, or storm in guns blazing faster than anything in the room can react. Nothing short of a nuclear blast can chip through a troll street samurai's health pool. That's unrelated, but I like bringing it up.

All of this is punctuated with a wonderful score, punching through combat scenes with harsh synths, or swelling under quiet moments with strings. Glory's theme remains one of the stronger pieces of music I've heard composed for a game, especially in the context in which it plays. Everything in this game comes together flawlessly. There's not a single element here that feels out of place or tacked on. It's such an impossibly cohesive whole.

Every tabletop adaptation wishes it had what this does.

Perhaps someday I will return to this but this is one of the worst fucking games I have ever played, it's a genre blend it has FPS sections it has fighting game sections it's mainly a third person adventure game and it's good at none of these concepts. The fighting game is either comically easy or a button mashing slog at times. The FPS sections make my blood boil and it's astonishing how bad this is for the year 1999 well after several titans of the genre had already been released. The adventure game which is the primary gameplay of this game is filled with cryptic bullshit and the level design is the worst I've ever seen in an "open world" yes there are very large open settings with very minor effort put into telling them apart but every fucking building is the same thing I cannot tell the interiors apart I cannot tell the exteriors apart. Every single goddamn puzzle every thing I need to do is never spelled out or intuitive or even coherent and I would rather this game tell me where the fuck to go on the MAP then piss around for two more hours looking for a mummy called Kiwan! There is barely anything interesting to do in the world this game defies the idea of good game design in a year that had so many innovators making great games. This game is not bad because it is old it is bad because it is bad, it was shit then and it's shit now. I didn't just want to hate this without any effort into constructive criticism so I'll say this what would improve this game is a smaller scale world with more actual design towards making each part unique dont just copy and paste random exteriors and interiors it makes the game so confusing. Next cut out all of the FPS sections no one wants this it just doesn't need to exist in fact this game should have focused on the third person adventure game aspect of the mechanics.finally make the UI consistent with an understandable font and simply just tell the player about what you want them to do next don't pretend this bullshit is coherent I understand that making everything intuitive would be hard so just tell us where the fuck to go and what to do.

how loving some(one) or some(thing) brings meaning to one’s life, a message through ff6 ꨄ
~spoilers
when people are lonely they are more vulnerable which allows them to become self destructive but the cast of final fantasy 6 find that they can’t allow themselves to lose their sense of self or direction because of love.
you have a character like terra who didn’t understand her purpose in fighting or going forward, who lived her life in self hatred towards her true self but then finds her purpose through the orphanage children she was able to love, or celes who tried to kill herself and doubted her worth but when seeing lockes bandana, she had hope. When we are lost in life, love gives us hope and courage. love also comes in many ways, maybe a child, significant other, or maybe a pet is what drives you through your hardships, or even maybe just your passion for your hobbies. that’s why both celes and terra, and the main cast all find love through different things. Love is what keeps us through the days, and that is why someone like kefka parallels the main cast so well, because without love you lose hope. he doesn’t care for life or the world, because kefka tried gaining purpose through power instead of finding true meaning, which is found through love.

There's this phrase eternally uttered among fans of tabletop game that goes something like...

"I wish there was a faithful videogame adaptation of my favourite tabletop game".

It's a nice sentiment, but I can tell you from experience that most people don't actually want that. Warhammer videogame fans, for instance, absolutely don't want to play a game where their carefully assembled Thousand Sons army is torn apart limb from limb by a guy who's been playing Necron since Pariahs were still a thing. D&D fans don't want a game where you don't get to do anything because someone is minmaxing to the point of taking 6 or so actions per run. For a more generalized statement: People clamour for a vague idea of 'faithful videogame adaptation' and never once consider what it looks like, or that the mere act of being faithful leads to what many people/armchair game devs decry as 'bad game design'.

I'm built different though, I actually have wanted a faithful Battletech game for the longest time, warts and all.

Yes, that means I wanted some mechs to be objectively terrible and borderline unusable. Yes, that means I wanted clan tech to shift the power curve unreasonably far. Yes, I wanted to overheat from using my weapons once and then get headbutted to death by a cocky Rifleman pilot. Yes, I wanted to lose mechs to a lucky AC/20 shot from across the map that had about 20% chance to hit. So on, so forth. I actively yearned for a game that was as unpleasant to play as Succession War-era Battletech is on tabletop. I have Mechwarrior 5 if I want one of those newfangled 'fair and balanced videogames' the youth are obsessed with.

HBS Battletech, referred to as such to differentiate it from its parent IP, is the game I've always wanted.

On the surface, HBS Battletech is yet another XCOM clone. Turn based tactics with battles that're defined by positioning, missing 95% chance to hit shots, and reacting to whatever may lurk off screen. Battles that may have negative consequences even if you win due to your deployed units having upkeep costs, repair costs, and other traits that spill out onto your campaign map gameplay.

Where HBS Battletech differs from its ilk, however, is in the customization. Well, 'customization' isn't quite the right word. Here, you're essentially playing the role of an engineer out to fine tune your various Mechs into killing machines that can complete objectives without overheating from a single missile volley, and have enough money to repeatedly deliver those missile volleys without hearing the dreaded click of empty tubes.
Each weapon you can bolt onto a mech generates heat, needs ammo, and has a specific range its most effective at. Each mech you can field has its own varied hardpoints (weapon slots), engine, heat capacity, armor and other endless stats to consider. Plus there are free slots to mount ammo bins, extra heatsinks, additional armor, mods, etc etc.
On top of this, mechs have a tonnage limit. Slap on all you want, but putting 51 tons on that 50 tonner isn't ever going to fly.
On top of THAT, each individual mech part has health, different armor depending on angle of attack, and items are lost for good if a limb is destroyed.

The core of HBS Battletech, arguably more than the actual field gameplay, is a precarious balancing act. Weapons need ammo and heatsinks, but more armor might be the difference between a part being damaged and a part being lost. More weapons can help you kill faster, sure, but mounting all that ammo and those accuracy mods means the repair costs will soar into the stratosphere if the limb they're mounted on explodes. It's one thing to say "I will strap on as many autocannons as possible and go crazy", but what if they explode, player? Now you're down several strong weapons, their ammo, and the money you need to shell out to repair them.

HBS Battletech is a difficult game, there's no sugarcoating it. Oftentimes when people make a statement along these lines, it's followed up by: "It's difficult, but fair! I promise!".

I am a merchant of words, however, and lies are not among my wares. HBS Battletech is bullshit. It is a game where a 100-ton Assault mech clad in enough armor to withstand the heat death of the universe can fall to a few successive headshots from a trashcan with a rifle mounted on it. It is a game where 99% chance to hit should not be read as such, for it is best read as 1% chance to miss. It is a game where you will fine-tune a mech, customize it, give a name like "Anklebiter" and then watch as a tin can with two 1960s machine guns attached to its waist jumps off the top rope and crushes it into paste.

Make no mistake, though. This is not a nail-pulling kusoge that will fight you at every turn, no. Much like learning the actual Battletech, HBS Battletech is a game of risk mitigation. Your early days will suck: You'll teeter closer to debt in game than you are in real life, your mechs will come home missing entire limbs, and you'll sometimes lose more than you gain.
But every failure is a learning experience. A light mech jumping onto your heavy hitter and tearing off an arm is a reminder that it's always worth the action points to remove small threats. Your first death to overheating will remind you that water and rivers are lifesavers. Your first time getting sniped will make you consider the value of Long Range Missile pods. A 'slow' mech getting behind you and blasting your Warhammer to bits from the rear will serve as punishment for not watching your positions.

The learning curve is vertical, but it's still surmountable. Unless one dips into one of the three (excellent) modpacks, it's actually exceedingly rare for a mission to be unwinnable. There's always cover to offset hit chances, water to disperse heat, vantage points for extra accuracy, or something. And you, as a player, will naturally grow and learn the rules of engagement. XCOM-like cluster formations will (hopefully) give way to planned flanking moves, clever use of jumpjets, calculated overheats and other bolder tactics. Remember: Rules are meant to be learned first, broken second. I've always felt tactical RPGs start off encouraging strategy only to discourage it in favour of throwing your best at an enemy. HBS Battletech is consistent, and always rewards good strategy over all else - RNG willing, of course.

Likewise, the game does get easier once you know the arsenal on display here. Being a game centered around the 3010-3040 period of Battletech, the weapon and gear variety is low but in the context of a videogame this means there's nothing truly useless, and every tool is a solution to a problem yet to be unmasked. Even something as simply as the aforementioned shitty 1960s machineguns can turn the tide if you have the tonnage to spare, to say nothing of later acquisitions like particle cannons and targeting modules.

As opposed to many of its peers, much of the difficulty is easier to stomach because battles are far less rapid. This is not XCOM 2 with its rapid fire series of traded instant kills, nor is it Rogue Trader with its 10 actions per character turn, and it is not Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters with its 'being terrible'.
Fights in Battletech are slugfests. Simply 'depleting health' is out of the question, for the game is a race to dissasemble a mech by either destroying its ability to fight, destroying the engine or destroying the pilot. Losing an arm sucks, but a mech that can still shoot is a mech that can still kill. Damaged is different from Dead, after all, and torso-mounted weapons are always a good investment as they're usually the last to go.

That all said, there's a reason I docked half a star: Much like vanilla Mechwarrior 5, a lot of vital information about a mech (free tonnage, engine type, engine heatsinks, etc etc) is withheld from the player. It's one thing to say that the player will come into possession of better Mechs, aye, but it's often hard to know what's good just from looking at the store.
Take the Cicada, for instance. It's a surprisingly fast Medium mech that mounts some okay weaponry, so you might think "Wow! I'll take that as an armoured scout!" Except... The Cicada is overengined - meaning it mounts an engine far too large for its chassis - and thus has terrible free tonnage. Plus, for a Medium mech, its armor is atrocious and for its weight class the weaponry is appalling. These traits are all difficult to discern from looking at it in the store/salvage assembly, and indeed there are more than a few mechs that suffer from the same problems. Early in a campaign/career, these aren't easy to mitigate and Blake help anyone who buys a Charger.

Ultimately, despite the constant XCOM comparisons, I'd say that HBS Battletech has more in common with FTL: Faster than Light, much like its peer WH40k: Mechanicus. All three are games which are more about parts than any collective whole, heavily defined by calculated risks and how the player reacts to damage/losses that they know are inevitable. Games where the hits will come, but can be endured with varying degrees of competence. Where success is never guaranteed, but always possible.

The presentation is also deserving of glowing praise. There's a story, and while it's hardly a modern epic, it perfectly captures the feeling of frontier life in the Battletech universe complete with that mix of mechanized warfare and space western that defines pre-Clan Battletech. All of the VAs are relative unknowns, but their performances are stellar and contribute well to the atmosphere. As usual for Battletech media, the art direction is out of this world and I have great love for the battle maps too, for they manage to blend gameplay-first practicality with gorgeous mood lighting and respect for the source material. Nothing in this game is as high in fidelity as Mechwarrior 5 - though as a Paradox published game, it's sure priced as if it were >.> - but everything fits so wonderfully.

And the audio, oh the audio my beloved. Lasers purr with a satisfying hum as they miss 98% shots on a mile-wide target, autocannons have a hefty boom on launch, missile pods sound like a dream when they go off and collide with a wall, and every mech stomps and whirrs as it moves. Couple that with an amazingly atmospheric soundtrack, great ambience and the pilots calling out every other action, and each battle is a soundscape like no other.

If you want my advice, though? Beat the story once, and then pick up one of the three modpack: Roguetech, Battletech Advanced 3062 or Battletech Extended, listed in order from hardest to easiest. I have a personal preference for BTA 3062, as there's the option to dump some of the excessive stuff and just get more from the game. The better mechlab, bigger starmap and Clan tech really do augment the experience.

Buy it via the grey market, though, because Paradox's bullshit claimed another studio.

Welcome in Omikron.

A bit less than a year ago, I took an innocuous trip to a retro game store. I didn’t have any special pickups planned or anything, it was just something for me and my friends to do to burn time and maybe find something cool. However, we didn’t find something cool, we found Beyond Two Souls. My friends pushed me to join them and offer up my PS3 to play the game and it truly made for a memorable experience to say the least. Of course we then followed that up with David Cage’s other three story games as our little group expanded. While I think those four games definitely aren’t great, and that they definitely vary in quality, I can at least say they brought me a little bit of joy with their goofy moments. However, as our grand finale, we had to get together one last time and play his first game: Omikron: The Nomad Soul.

There was nothing goofy about Omikron.

Let’s start with the graphics, because jesus christ this game is ugly. Despite promising a big cyberpunk adventure, the world of Omikron is less Blade Runner and more Black Mesa, “Mesapunk” as my friends and I referred to it as. The color palette is incredibly drab and lifeless, covered in grim grays. Despite the game intending to show a big, bustling lived-in world, it feels so empty, which I’m sure was not intentional. The whole world feels artificial which is unfortunate when that’s a big marketing point for it. Admittedly there are a few inspired settings, I quite enjoyed the second zone, but for the most part the world is entirely soulless. The character design is pretty dreadful too, with bland humans or demons that aren’t disgusting enough to look cool but aren’t appealing enough to… Be appealing. That’s not even to mention the unnatural, lazy character animations and the poor shot composition of cutscenes. Even for the time these are lackluster, especially for a PC and Dreamcast game. By far the worst aspect of this game’s visuals is something I don’t think I’ve ever seen fail before, at least like this. The font. Legitimately, a huge chunk of this game’s writing, including required reading for puzzles, is in a borderline illegible font. Seriously, look up “omikron the nomad soul font” on Google Images, it’ll blow you away. There’s multiple points where you can buy books on the game’s lore, which is a really cool concept, but I legitimately didn’t want to just because so many were a headache to try to decipher. How do you even mess that up?

On the other end of aesthetics, the soundtrack for Omikron has received nearly universal praise… I don’t get it. The background tracks are horribly repetitive and dull. The music mainly fits into a bland ambiance that bores me to tears, only further creating the negative emotional aura this game gives off with the world design. When it is not that you, get tracks like the fight themes which are just grating. The worst it gets is with the theme of the Awakened Base in Jaunpur, which is a 90 second loop that plays EVERY MINUTE you’re in the area. The song is already a little annoying and repetitive, but when it’s in an area you visit CONSTANTLY it just gets infuriating!

The music isn’t just where the auditory issues end, because the sound design in this game is horrid. So many things in this game are just… Silent. I swear with how empty this game is you would think it’s a horror game. My favorite part is the sliders, vehicles which you can call upon for fast travel and even drive. These cars make no noise at all. None when they drive to you, none when you get in, and none when you get off. Great work everyone. The voice acting isn’t great, it could be worse, but it’s not good enough to invest someone playing. It’s also held back by your player character never being voiced! You just get this crappy wind sound whenever they talk as the dialog shows up in a tiiiiny spot in the bottom left corner. Because why should the most important character in the game talk, right?

But let’s be real, the acclaim for Omikron’s audio comes from David Bowie’s work. And it’s… Alright. I’m not deep into Bowie’s work but the stuff in this game feels more like B-sides than top tier compositions of his. All very okay and forgettable. You’re also only going to be hearing a few of his songs in the game, I think there are more but they’re stuck in optional concerts. It’s more than likely you won’t be going to them because that requires navigating in this game.

The bulk of The Nomad Soul is spent navigating the open world of Omikron. We’ve already gone over how it isn’t a very interesting world, but is going around it fun at least? No. First, let’s talk controls. They’re bad. The Nomad Soul is controlled entirely with tank controls. Tank controls may have been a pretty common standard at the time, however I still question their implementation here. I haven’t played a ton of late 90s adventure games, but I fail to see how this improves the game at all. Maybe due to the fact many PC players would be stuck on a keyboard? I have no clue, but it took quite a while to get used to how stiff the movement is. It’s workable but trying to turn around with your player character’s stupid slow half-steps is never not irritating. Sprinting makes it a little better, allowing you to cruise your character around, but it’s still not really ideal movement, especially in smaller rooms. Sure these aren’t the worst controls ever, but when the vast majority of the game is wandering around aimlessly it can only make things worse. Speaking of worse, that’s what this game continues to get when it starts expecting you to platform! It’s few and far between, but the slow, janky jump in this game is expected to be used to get you across platforms. It’s not fun. It has no momentum either so it just feels entirely dissatisfying, but you better not fail due to expecting that since this game has fall damage! Great! There’s also a handful of times you’ll have to swim, but they control sort of alright and never get you into situations where it’s likely you’ll drown. Not great, but I appreciate one of the few times this game doesn’t screw something up.

You may be thinking that I’ve forgotten to add any details on substance, and that’s because there is not any. The majority of this game is spent walking from Point A to Point B. And I’m not exaggerating. Sometimes maybe you’ll solve an annoying puzzle, usually one of the numerous ones involving translating symbols, but that’s it. There’s nothing exciting to the adventure gameplay, nothing that mixes it up and makes it engaging aside from the previously mentioned rare platforming and rosetta stone puzzle segments where you have to read off that awful font. This game’s main gameplay loop can basically just be summed up as following orders on where to walk and who to talk to, but I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. There is some other traditional gameplay here, so let’s talk about it.

Okay, so Omikron actually is split into three gameplay styles. There’s the third person adventure game segments, the fighting game segments, and the first person shooting segments. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “those sound like completely different concepts that don’t mix together.” Well thankfully, you’re right. It’s completely jarring, it’s not like Zelda where you pull out your sword and fight on the same overworld, the game will just pause and go “hey it’s time for a fight.” Not to mention that you basically have to familiarize yourself with two different genres on top of this game’s horrible excuse for main gameplay.

The worst of this is the hand-to-hand fighting game segments. Thankfully there is a free training room you can interact with at the beginning of the game, but unfortunately there isn’t really anything to learn. I think you can block, dodge, and you have four combat buttons you can mix up for moves I’m pretty sure? You may be wondering why I’m talking in such uncertainty and that’s because there’s no proper tutorial or training for how it works. I know that that could be seen as intrusive, but having something like that could possibly give us the chance for interesting gameplay. Plain and simply, you mash to win. There are, I think, a few combo moves you can use, but you’ll never actually have the chance to learn them unless you waste your time labbing in the training room. There’s no command list, it’s just “here’s the four attack buttons good luck.” Absolutely no motivation to get better is given, there’s probably less than twenty of these in the entire game and they last no more than two minutes. I would just throw myself at these and sometimes I would win getting hit twice at worst without even dodging or blocking, and sometimes I would be decimated without even getting the chance to respond. It’s an unintuitive crapshoot that feels like it was made by someone who’s fighting game experience was watching their friend play Mortal Kombat at an arcade ten years ago. It’s terrible and the only "compliment" I can give it is that there’s no actual difficulty scaling or anything, because being expected to learn this with absolutely zero information would be a nightmare.

A nightmare is a title more deserved for the shooting segments, because dear GOD who the HELL thought these were okay? First, you aren’t even given a chance to learn how to play these despite it being a completely different gameplay style. You’re thrown into the first two segments with enemies in your face, and you can die extremely quickly, but thankfully there aren’t really many consequences. We died pretty much instantly due to the controls. I played this game on Steam, and I just wanna say this port is a piece of crap. At one point our saved controls undid themselves, and playing these segments on controller is legitimately unplayable. Dual analog was never added, you’re stuck aiming with buttons, but that’s not the issue. The left stick is SO SENSITIVE that, no joke, even moving it as slow as possible and barely exiting the dead zone would cause my character to make a full rotation in only about a second’s time. So optimally playing this game is switching from controller to a mouse and keyboard whenever these segments pop up. Maybe it’s a good thing the change in gameplay is so jarring. However, the control issues do not end there. I had multiple times where going forward would just. Break. I would move for half a step and then just. Stop. For one section I had to have my friend help me dual hand the keyboard and mouse + the controller since we were far away from our last save point and couldn’t restart the game, which trust me WE’LL GET TO. Even when that wasn’t happening, the use button would just legitimately never work for us during shooting segments on keyboard. We would have to leave pressing A on the controller to someone else a lot of the time, and when you’re constantly being shot at that’s not a very good thing to rely on, especially if I were to be playing this game alone.

But whatever, when the controls actually worked, these sections were barely better than playable. First off, the working controls still aren’t great. You move like a car, with super fast top speed and incredibly slow acceleration, which makes strafing away from enemy attacks near impossible. Kidding of course, because often it just IS impossible. I had. COUNTLESS. Times where enemies would shoot from behind the crappy draw distance that wasn’t upped in the PC port either, enemies shooting me at first sight before it was even possible to dodge, and times where I’m running at max speed, going backwards, AND jumping and I get hit anyway. Getting through these shooting segments is often more of a test of endurance than anything. There’s no actual skill in gunplay, especially considering you’re limited to using one weapon for all of a segment and ammo management is stuck to “you have the good ammo you got elsewhere and then you run out and use the less good ammo.” There IS technically a second weapon, you get it early on even, but you either use one or the other in a section with the other basically being useless, and they behave basically identical. Why even have a weapon switch function if it’s useless? Oh wait, because it isn’t useless. There’s other weapons. Allegedly. You have to find them in the dumb as hell overworld optionally, but that requires actually being able to find things there, but, again, I’ll save that for later. Either way, the horrible enemy placement and dodging is not fun. This is only made worse by the actual level design in these segments too.

To be fair, not all of these segments are horrible. I’m sure one or two can be maybe mediocre if you love first person shooters even in their most poorly designed forms. However, when Omikron brings out complicated objectives, I start to get pissed. Here’s a list of some of my least favorites. Searching around a maze of rooftops for the rare few things you can actually interact with, where you’re constantly taking pot shots from offscreen enemies, especially if you aren’t just using someone else’s gameplay to tell you where to go. Going through a sewer WITH A TIME LIMIT to lay bombs on certain spots, where I’m pretty sure if you miss one you’re screwed (and also has a glitch where you'll just randomly die far into it that happened about five or six times for us). And the GOD AWFUL final boss where you’re expected to utilize the unusable strafing to circle around after stunning him and hit his back. I’m pretty sure those alleged other weapons don’t even work on him by the way so no hope in sweetening that deal. As far as I’m aware, because all footage I’ve seen of him does this and I had to do it as well to beat him in the second half of the fight, the only way to realistically beat this fight is to get him stuck on level geometry and abuse his AI to get behind him. What great game design where BREAKING THE GAME is the most well known method for fighting a boss. A lot of these segments, including ones I didn’t mention, feel as if they’re unplayable without having stocked multiple medkits before. I wonder if that’s why this game makes you have multiple saves, because this seems like a game where it would be VERY easy to hardlock yourself otherwise.

Anyway, now let’s head back to the main gameplay. A bit abrupt to go from completely different concepts and then back to wandering aimlessly right? Yeah, I know right, who would ever think of that. Now imagine this except without the first sentence, because there sure aren’t any transition cutscenes. Whatever, nitpicking. There’s another reason it takes up a majority of the game, in fact there’s a good chance this gameplay style could take up over 99% of your playthrough. Why? Omikron is, without any exaggeration, the most cryptic game I’ve played in my life. Now, I don’t instantly hate a game for being cryptic. A few of my favorite games of all time even have a moment or two where I feel it’s best to just look something up. However, let’s talk about why it bothers me less there. Mother I think has dungeon design that’s way too maze-like, so I feel it’s best played with a map on the side. Super Mario Sunshine has a handful of overtly obtuse blue coins for 100%, and I think it’s healthier to just look up the last few you’re missing at the end of the game. These games also make up for this by having actual gameplay. There’s no fighting enemies and for the most part no platforming in the adventure segments of Omikron, just walking.

Keep in mind Omikron is an open world game. The best way to describe the situations it puts you into to progress is a needle in a haystack. Here’s some specific examples I remember. Finding buttons that are almost identical in color to the wall they’re on. Having to use a random part an NPC that you may or may not talk to gives you on a random elevator despite them having no mentioned relation. Being expected to jump UP to a ledge to grab an item for the ONLY TIME you’re ever able to do that in the game. Using candles you got multiple hours earlier in the game to lay out in a summoning circle. And the most common, getting a random item and being expected to show it to someone on the other side of the map. Imagine a point and click game where you have triple the items, there’s fifty filler screens between each area, and what you can interact with isn't even emphasized objects or NPCs.

That’s not even to mention that this game has LIMITED INVENTORY, despite the fact that every single item that could ever possibly benefit you in combat being able to realistically fit in your inventory at the same time. So in reality this system only exists to give you that moment where you realize you can’t pick up an item and you have to go find a stupid PC to put your items up in. Ignoring that, the game’s gameplay loop just becomes following orders from a walkthrough due to how cryptic it is. “Go here and do this. Go here and get this item. Give this item to this person.” There goes your chance of getting lost in the world! Sometimes even a written guide isn’t enough, at one point the game deleted one of our addresses the sliders could take us to so we were forced to wander around for twenty minutes until we found out where to go! There is NO REASON it disappeared by the way, it just… Did. Why? What does that add? Was this an oversight? Did anyone even get this far in playtesting? That would certainly explain the final boss. There is no way in hell that anyone beat this game naturally, without a guide, and enjoyed it. How did anyone on the team think this was okay?

Thankfully, there is one saving grace Omikron has for navigation: the magic rings. Magic rings are a currency you can find throughout the world, and using them will give you advice. Is the advice good? I wouldn’t know, never used it. And it’s not because I didn’t want to, it’s because advice costs FIVE magic rings to use. Five FINE-ITE magic rings. I wanted to have as many as I could because they’re used to restart shooting segments… And to save. Yes. SAVING. THE GAME. IS A FINE-ITE RESOURCE. I repeat. SAVING THE GAME IS A LUXURY. Who the HELL thought this was good? What does it add to the experience? What does making it harder to progress and harder to SAVE THE GAME add to Omikron? Does it make it more fun? More challenging? Hell no! All it does is make it more tedious and frustrating to play. Not like that’s the only questionable rollout of items in the game either. Health packs are limited too unless you buy them, and there’s no way to do something like sleep to restore HP, but money is limited from finding it on the ground unless you do dumb minigames that thankfully I never had to do due to save scumming. Why was I save scumming? A lot of the time dying doesn’t result in loading a save or a game over but having your soul transferred. This makes you lose money, which can softlock you by the way! Again, what does this add? Why? At worst it softlocks you just like that, and at best it just lowers the stakes of fighting or shooting segments. There is just… No value here. The only, ONLY credit I can give to any of these three gameplay styles, is that occasionally you use the game’s nomad soul body changing gimmick to do something clever like possess a guard to escape a prison. That’s neat, but of course it’s both underutilized and limited by mana that you only need to stock up for by managing money for potions. Great!

So if the gameplay, music, and visuals suck, what is there to keep you playing? Well, there’s the story. I’ve actually seen some people online claim that the story is pretty interesting. Do I agree?

What the hell do you think?

Omikron starts in an admittedly intriguing way. With a man named Kale coming to you, the player, asking you to inhabit his soul and access the world of Omikron for some unknown reason. One of my main issues comes right here. This game’s soul hopping gimmick doesn’t give you a character to get attached to, it’s just you. If this game had a silent protagonist or something I could maybe roll with that, and while there are dialog options that would fit that, there’s snarky dialog describing characters and it just confuses me. Are they me or are they a character? The story revolves around them being me, but I’m getting ahead of myself. The characters in general are just so lacking. There’s so few recurring characters, and most of them just get dropped really quickly. First you’re working with the police, then you leave to be with the awakened, which is a cool concept I guess, but there goes your entire first cast of characters. Then most of the awakened get sidelined after you leave their original base, so who am I supposed to get attached to? It’s not like anyone is remotely charming or interesting anyway, the only one I even remember the name of is Soks and that’s because he’s a goofy robot, and as I mentioned earlier, Omikron always chooses not to be goofy!

One of my least favorite things about David Cage games is that they almost always choose to follow this dystopian, doomer atmosphere, which just makes the games come off like they really do think they’re high art despite there being nothing to analyze. There’s no humor or anything to ground you in the characters, because this game is so focused on showing you its epic and deep plot, which just makes it come off even more pretentious. And speaking of pretentious, Omikron is pretentious! I hear that word thrown around a lot with David Cage games, and while I do get that I can’t help but feel it’s a little exaggerated. Except with this game. Omikron has such poignant commentary like “the computer and the government is controlling us all and we need to become awakened.” Wow, so deep. That’s totally not saying the most surface level, unnuanced crap imaginable!

Where this game gets the most pretentious however is the meta elements. A major element of the plot is that Omikron is a game made by the villain to suck in the souls of gamers and use them. So, let’s talk about meta elements in fiction. I’d say there’s two types, one is where the game is built around “meta” ideas, let’s say saving loading, and resetting, but the story can function without you, the player, being an imagined concept in the game. On the other hand is a much more complex idea, one where you as the player existing and playing the game is a necessary aspect for the story, like if a character had an obsession with the person playing. The second is a lot harder to pull off, and ignorantly, Omikron chose that method. So this very world-shattering decision was made and… Nothing is done with it. They mention how no one else has gotten this far and has been destroyed or whatever, which instantly breaks any immersion with the fact you need a guide from another player to get through this game. There’s this horribly cringe-worthy dialog you can get where you mention how Omikron is just a game and an NPC goes “erm, actually, Omikron isn’t just a game it’s a real world you’re interacting with.” Come on, Even for ‘99 this was corny. Worst of all though, nothing is done with this. No interesting ideas are raised, it just pays lipservice to being a commentary on video games or general media and does nothing with it. It’s just. Meta to be meta. Subversive to be subversive. So epic...

Not like the actual story is anything to ride home about anyway. The first part is a mystery about what’s really going on, but after you hear Big Bad's name and join The Awakened you do crap like spread radio waves about le truth and blow up a random bridge like that’s gonna do anything. It really just feels like filler, doing random missions that mean nothing over and over again between the constant handing off of random items to random NPCs in random places. The plot meanders until eventually you get a few back-to-back epic Omikron lore drops and are allowed to fight the final boss. An underwhelming story full of missions would maybe be fine if there were interesting characters, fun scenarios, or, you know, GOOD GAMEPLAY, but Omikron has none of that. Nothing at all. This lore does nothing to pull me in either. As I mentioned reading about it is painful to your eyes and brain to process, but both the lore books and what lore they dump on you with exposition in the horribly stilted cutscenes is a bore. It’s all so generic “ooo shedemerv dropped onto ooladan and used the granjardee to activate the porgorcan” and it’s just obnoxious to sit through. It mixes so horribly too, the game’s supposed to have this epic sci-fi world but in typical David Cage fashion he has to add everything he thinks is cool, so it has demons you need to fight and ancient powers stored in fantastical people because why not? I’m not against sci-fi and fantasy mixing, but jesus all this crap just feels like it was made up as it went on. It all leads to a boring climax that sneaks up on you and an unsatisfying ending, to the surprise of no one.

If it wasn’t obvious enough, I despised pretty much every single thing about this excuse of an interactive experience. The graphics are ugly as sin, the sound design is simultaneously obnoxious and dull, the story is pretentious and poorly-written, and the gameplay is some of the most cryptic, boring, frustrating, stressful crap I’ve ever put myself through. Everything I said was a major complaint too, I could go on even longer if I wanted to nitpick into further detail. Anything positive I said about this game was less than a minute of “oh that’s kind of cool” compared to the hours of excruciating, torturous gameplay and cutscenes my friends and I had to go through. Nothing went right here. I can say without a doubt that Omikron: The Nomad Soul is the worst game I have played in my entire life, and I think the developers should be embarrassed to have had worked on this. I would give a 0 if I could.

I'd fuck those lightswitches and I'm not even going to pretend otherwise.

Anyway, OWB doesn't have much to chew on, so this'll be brief.

Humor is the name of the game here and they've unfortunately put it on the same shelf where the other parts of New Vegas put themes and actual writing. I feel like everyone's opinion of OWB is always going to be coloured by how well the humor lands for them, and for me OWB's never has.
There is a token attempt made to add some depth to the story - which is debatably about losing one's humanity through clinging to the future in opposition to Dead Money being the same but with the past - but it gets about as much focus as the Lobotomite NPCs do.
In many ways the 'story' is a microcosm of New Vegas actual; someone took your brain, go get it back, oops more complicated story. Except, since this DLC is about an hour or four long depending on how inquisitive you are, the format results in it feeling like an anticlimax? I have vivid memories of younger Mira being deeply confused that the DLC ended.

At the very least I do somewhat appreciate how tightly the developers cling to the pulp sci-fi influences. The LAER and Sonic Emitter in this DLC are better "b-movie alien weapons" than Mothership Zeta's attempt at such in the last game. Same goes for the Trauma Harnesses, the Stealth Suit, and the other doo-dads hanging around. It's a nice degree of aesthetic coherence that I don't typically expect from Gamebryo games.

That said, as a relatively neutral aside: Some of the asset reuse from Fallout 3 is hilarious. Tranquility Lane is reused for Higgs Village - interiors and all - while an entire cell of Fallout 3's Citadel is reused for a lab. There's an entire cave which is just ripped from somewhere in Little Lamplight and, in general, a lot of this DLC reuses Fallout 3 stuff more than anywhere else in the game. I don't mind, it's just funny.

Really, the only emotions this DLC stokes in me aren't even related to Old World Blues. Instead, I only feel things when I think about how this DLC reflects on the rest of NV.

OWB is an odd prequel to Dead Money. Traces of Christine and Elijah's conflict dot the landscape, telling their story in whatever dysfunctional order you find them in. Admittedly, I don't actually like most of this? NV isn't the most subtle masterwork of CRPGs, but it knew when to leave some things up to interpretation or in subtext. Almost all of the stuff relating to DM in OWB amounts to little more than saying the implicit part out loud. I know it was probably planned - the Big MT is mentioned in NV and Elijah mentions coming here a few times in DM - but it still feels very condescending.

But also... I find the repeated assertions that the Big MT are responsible for so many of the evils that dot the landscape of the Mojave to be kind of annoying. It's an ongoing theme in NV that you can't exactly pin all evil on one person or institution, so having the Big MT pop up and go "Hi! We made Cazadors and Nightstalkers!" is eye-rolling. I'd call it un-needed, and I say that as a person that hates being a prescriptive critic. Not helping matters is that these reveals pretty much exist solely as the butt of jokes involvin Dr Borous and not much else?

Oh, and before I forget: I hate the chat with the brain. People unjustly lambast Lonesome Road for "forcing a backstory on the player" (and they're wrong to do so) but IMO forcing the Courier to be an obnoxious redditor is even worse.

I came into OWB expecting it to be an unremarkable stepping stone until I start Lonesome Road, but I was amazed to realize just how unremarkable it is.

Ah well, time to end it.

Yoko Taro’s Drakengard (2003) is an extremely contentious game, a love it or hate it ordeal in which some are swayed by its abrasive and transgressive nature, while others will vehemently cast it aside, claiming it was simply a terrible experience. My own opinions aside, what Drakengard tells us is that Yoko Taro is a video game creator with the propensity to sacrifice enjoyment at times, pushing players into frustrating and mindless scenarios, all in order to prioritise the point he’s trying to get across, and NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139... (2021) is no exception. ver.1.22 is a remaster of NieR RepliCant (2010), a game I have never played, but what I do know is that the original Replicant, and therefore the modern one, is heavily inspired by Yoko Taro’s post 9/11 commentary, an event that changed much of his thinking. With this inspiration, Replicant tells a story about the importance of acknowledging different perspectives and encouraging communication, tightly knitted together through its unconventional structural approach in regards to storytelling.

Much of NieR Replicant is designed to play with players’ preconceived notions of the JRPG genre, deliberately conforming to long-standing genre tropes only to later subvert them down the line for great effect. Everything about the entire game just screams RPG from top to bottom, from the setting, to the level and item progression, down to much of the story itself. Our protagonist, Brother Nier, lives in a quaint, grassy and reclusive village with his sick little sister, Yonah, and in the pursuit of her medicine, and resources required to live day-to-day, he garners a reputation amongst his community as someone who will accept any task, no matter how mundane or trivial. The game begins with no direction in regards to the overarching plot, we start by going on standard fetch quests for the townsfolk, both to help them out and also earn some money for our troubles, all while the game uses it to introduce and ease players into its mechanics. It’s all very run-of-the-mill, and yet it was never meant to be anything but. The narrative leans into these ideas even further, guising the much bleaker true nature of the story under the framework of a tired and stereotypical hero’s journey with a clear cut antagonistic force and plainly defined sides of good and evil, pretty simple right?

While Route A very much operates wholly embracing this thinly veneered exterior, that's all it is, an exterior, telling a story of found family learning to love themselves and finding hope in a world on the verge of dying out, but that's just on the surface. Within the context of NieR Replicant, Route A is ultimately a test, a test to see how far we are willing to believe in what is merely shown in front of us, under the confines of a singular perspective, all told in a way only a video game could. The transition from Route A to Route B in which the proverbial rug is swept from under our feet is therefore what truly defines Replicant, and where its themes that stem from Yoko Taro's post 9/11 commentary come to fruition.

“You have your own motives. Your own desires. And we have ours. I fear it really is just that simple.”

Replicants' philosophy can be summed up by a quote from Yoko Taro himself, in which he says: “You don’t have to be insane to kill someone. You just have to think that you’re right”. Perspective is consequently at the heart of NieR Replicant, a theme so seamlessly integrated into every facet of the game born out of its unique use of its New Game+ structure. To chalk up any characters actions in this game into a black and white judgement of good or evil would be fallacious, for each character is driven by their own personal beliefs and motivations that have been shaped by years of hardship - what one party sees as an imperative good another party sees as an irrefutable evil. This amalgamation of varying perspectives and viewpoints reaches a boiling point in which nobody can claim to have the moral high ground, nobody is willing to budge, and the addition of miscommunication blends everything into an unrecognisable situation in which nobody has any idea what truly transpired in the first place to lead to this, everyone just believes that they are right. It may seem like a fairly basic commentary on moral relativity, one in which there are no rights and wrongs, but simply just people doing what they themselves believe is right, and while that may be true, what really drives this point home is the cohesive and concise execution through the use of its unorthodox structure, the undoing of the tropes Replicant pretends to conform to, how all of the main plot beats feed into this central idea, it all comes together in such a well-crafted way that punches you in the gut and leaves you crying on the floor afterwards.

Not content with just subverting extremely common JRPG tropes, Replicant also attempts to take shots at other elements of the genre, such as sidequests, although these jests come across as nothing more than tasteless. Frequently criticised and described as tedious, Replicant's sidequests are self-aware in their seemingly intentional mundanity, with Weiss often musing, in his typical dramatic style, about how he “would enjoy receiving a quest that can be solved in the general vicinity of the asker…”. This is criticism directed towards video game quests that force you to cover long distances, going back and forth monotonously in order to fully complete them, which can be a fair point to make; the issue is that Replicant only succeeds in poking fun at this flaw. It’s self-indulgent in its humour, failing to follow through on its satire, the game carrying on as if this joke never happened, as every sidequest after it is still designed similarly: you fetch items and backtrack between locales for information in order to proceed. With no resolution to its intent, it fails to convey anything meaningful. Some people also interpret sidequests as laborious as a means for the game to ridicule you for not concentrating on the main story, which should be seen as the utmost priority, although this view of them falls flat once you realise that the main story itself has moments that serve as detractors from our central objective, moments the cast willingly participate in. The shortcomings of sidequests is saddening, as there are a handful of genuinely solid ones that lend themselves to the games themes, but they’re so few and far between that they aren’t able to offset the rest.

Looping back around the aforementioned Drakengard, one avenue that it explores is that of the glorification of video game violence, an idea that also takes root deep within Replicant, best illustrated by the final route of the game. By this point, for most, the gameplay has worn thin, we’ve memorised enemy attack patterns and mentally mapped out the quickest route to the final boss, enemies don’t scale between successive routes so the combat is at its most mindless, story beats see themselves recycled yet again with far less difference than Route B to Route A. With this in mind, in my opinion the perpetual open question of this route is: should you be having fun? Replicants routes are designed so that any one of them can serve as the endpoint of the story; if someone is satisfied with Ending A, they can simply let the story rest there. However for most of us, we keep going, not satiated until we’ve seen every ending in the hopes we’ll land on a better one. Fully aware of the destruction that lies in our wake and its consequences, do we deserve to enjoy ourselves?

It’s certainly a bold move, one that’s often confused with the idea that this is an “intentionally bad” stylistic choice, but I don’t personally believe a game pushing itself into such territory is an automatic hallmark of bad game design, there’s an intention behind it to foster discussion and appeal to the player. These choices are what make Yoko Taro's works so divisive, fundamentally some people will not be able to enjoy the 3rd playthrough no matter what, while other people like me are fascinated by it. I understand you could apply this to any element of any game, but in the case of Replicant which is so renowned for its unique game and storytelling choices, I think it’s a bit more prevalent here.

NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139… is an experience able to be viewed and picked apart from so many different perspectives, and not all the ideas will land for everyone, making it a hard game to recommend without some caveats, but in spite of that I still think it comes out on top. My review doesn’t even cover all the games bases, such as its commitment to varying camera angles mixed with genre-switching gameplay, its fantastic main cast dynamic between Nier, Kaine and Emil, or how it succeeds in adding texture to all of its side characters. Despite the flaws I found, it’s a game that resonated with me so much along with its ideas, that I can look past them all and say I love it, and that even if you don’t like aspects of it, coming to understand the intention and purpose behind them might change your outlook a little.

Today I went in to get some bloodwork done. My hands still hurt from where they pricked me. 6 whole vials, taken from me. Well, "taken" isn't exactly fair. This was of my own volition after all.

Maybe it's not my right. Maybe I'm making an irrational decision, one that feels correct to me, but isn't exactly correct in the eyes of the world. Do I care? Hell yeah I do. Far, far more than I should. But... but even still... this is what I want.

I'm scared. Scared that living as a man is rotting me to my core. It's making me cynical. It's making me sad. It's depriving me of hope that I'm so desperate for these days.

I'm scared. Scared that I'll never be accepted as a woman. That because I'm fat, because I'm not attractive, that I'll forever just be an ugly perverted man in the eyes of the world.

I see 9S struggle against the crushing realities of his existence. I see his fear, his anger, his despair, and I see myself in it. Upon learning his existence was never his to begin with, and his agency was never a right he had, he had nothing left but to be angry and scared.

I see A2's rejection of the powers that be. I see her refusal to give into total despair despite the cruelties of their existence. I see her take her life into her own hands, make her decisions of her own volitions. I see her disregard suggestions of the systems that oppressed her. I see who I want to be. Who I hope I can be.

Right now, I see the world through the eyes of a man. A depressed, unemployed man. A man who hates being a man. A man who hates every ounce of his own flesh and blood. I see a crying girl in there, begging to be freed from this disgusting body I was forced into. A body created by people I hate, by people who hate me, by people who reject me and robbed me of my "self."

I can't change that. I'm powerless to the cards dealt to me. Fight as I might, this is the life I have. It's not one I'm happy with. If I had my way I wouldn't be who I am at all. I wouldn't be alive in the first place.

I can't change that. Instead, I'll have to change me.

My hands still hurt from where they pricked me. It served as a reminder during that final sequence, a systemic destruction of the artists who worked on this game, that my existence doesn't belong to my pain, my traumas, my despair. It belongs to me.

So this week I start HRT.