Being trans is hard.
If it's not someone being hostile just because we exist, then it's ourselves putting up non-existent obstacles that can only get worse depending on our self-esteem and self-confidence.

one night, hot springs stars Haru, a rather shy and introverted trans girl who just wants to live without bothering others, but today she has to go to the public hot springs because it's her best friend Minami's birthday.
Naturally, the hot springs are divided by gender, which naturally causes anxiety for our protagonist.
"Should I put my name and legal gender?" "What if they see me?" "Is it really okay to be here on a girls-only trip?" are so many of the questions Haru asks herself inside her head. With 7 different endings of a rather short duration, our protagonist faces such imaginary obstacles that her own head makes her suffer.

A very nice experience that won't take too much time out of your day and that I will always remember when such imaginary obstacles invade my mind and want to make me feel bad.
If you are not a trans person I still recommend it, as I feel it is positive to be able to understand even more how the people around you feel and how can you help.

Despite not really being religious, I used to say that "we should pray for a kind future".
The world did get more kind, it's just that we're all still suffering from the past and the lack of options we got due to capitalism.

I hope future generations don't have to deal with sexual abuse and incompetent people anymore. That would be my dream.

Doing sex work is hard, treacherous and it's impossible to perform it without any scars. This game depicts a deep, personal and realistic way of how sex work can affect someone that isn't ready for sex work because the world refuses to wait for them or to make their lives easier.
No matter how hard you train, no one is ready for sex work. No matter how much of a "nympho" you think you are, there's no way you will come out of this unharmed.

The worst thing about psychological scars is that the more time it passes, the more it affects you. The less you take care of them, the more work you'll have to do and sometimes they can be invisible, making the healing process even worse. As a cherry on top, no one tells you how to do it. No one tells you how to fix them, no one tells you what you should do, and sometimes you cope a certain way thinking it's good but in the end that wasn't the case.

People say that trauma makes people "strong", but they fail to recognize that this only happens if you actually overcome that trauma to some extent. Overcoming trauma is not about not being affected by it anymore. It's about recovering from pain and dealing with it better than before.

If you're a millenial or an early zoomer, there's a chance that Christianity and religion was part of your life at some point, wether you wanted it or not. With the sudden uprise of the LGBTQ+ movement and rights, people are less and less afraid of being queer to the point "gay" is not an insult anymore. We Know the Devil is a story released at a moment in life where acceptance wasn't as present as it is today (online, at least) but christianity and religion was still quite present.

One of the things you'll notice very early on is how unsettling and distant the soundtrack is. Almost as if it always stalking, waiting for the moment to catch you off guard. It doesn't really has much calm moments where you can actually relax. It's a soundtrack that perfectly encapsulates the feeling of trying to hide something, of a danger that is lurking but hasn't striken. It sometimes manifests itself like a broken disc, with static and scratches.
I am unaware if this is intentional or not, but at one point where the game is using the second "messiest" song, they are talking about radio static being described as "God is already warning us".

The writing respects the reader with a storytelling that skips over details and lets you fill in the blanks based on the information you receive with the interaction of each character.
Every time details are given, it's to plant a seed on the reader. A seed of doubt. A seed of curiosity. A seed of inquisivity.
To give a non spoilery example, at one moment the player asks themselves what even is this camp. What are the intentions behind it aside of religious, which is when the game does this clever thing of [i]telling[/i] it's hand rather than showing it by saying it's a camp for "bad kids", which ponders the question of what is considered bad based upon the entire religious context. It is a line delivered fairly early into the game which really helps the reader to start analyzing more and more the possible reasons why these kids were sent here. Although they're ultimately revealed, it has never felt as if the writing is mad at you for not figuring things out earlier.

We Know the Devil might be short, but it takes a lot of care in it's writing , which is something I truly admire.

--

On a personal note, aside of the review and more of a vent than anything, I want to mention that I knew I was trans since a very early age. Religion never truly sticked with me thanks to my brother that really fucking hated going to church (just like me) because of how boring it was. We stopped going at an early age and one of the arguments we gave was that the church is nothing but humans who read the bible and interpreted a specific way. We got out of religion with the excuse that we wanted ot have our own interpretation of the bible and follow our own path with our own beliefs. It is important to note that my brother is 4 years older than I and my brain was too small to formulate these kinds of thoughts yet so all I did was nod to whatever he said for.. some years.
Seeking my own interpretation of the bible, I finally felt at peace. It was the moment where being queer stopped being shameful. Where I started to question myself and how I was feeling -- hell, at one moment I even had the interpretation that we're all our own god, which is the opposite conclusion the game gives in each arc lol --, yet it took me more than 10 years to finally come out of the closet to my family.
I'll never forget how my mom, who volunteers at the church, grabbed me by the arms and told me "please, never be gay. I see them suffer so much". At that moment my young self understood that as "it's not safe to be gay" and therefore.. hid it. I never repressed it, I hid it.
I blocked my family from all social media, I prohibited from entering my room and slowly but surely cut contact with them as much as I could.
I isolated myself from my family out of fear.
As the years went by, my parents and family kept saying they missed me, that they wish I was more present, but every time I tried they all mocked me and pushed me deeper into isolation until I felt like trying wasn't worth it.
After coming out of the closet, my dad did not talk to me for a while. My mom was overwhelmed at basically having her daughter tell her she has to help her rewire her, and my brother had other things to worry about, specially after those years of extreme isolation on my end.
Fast forward to today, I am living in another country with my wife in a family that accepts me and accompanies me as a whole. I'm still in contact with my parents. My dad talks to me but by my deadname and refuses to call me by my now legal name, so I avoid him if possible. My mom wishes she could be closer to me but realizes not even herself knows how to be a woman, and therefore doesn't know how to be a mother. She feels more like a friend that worries about me but doesn't have the words nor means to support me. I'm sorry mom.
My brother on the other hand, I want to call him a cunt but he has all the reasons and rights to be one. It's not like I have been the best sister to him.

I am having a good life where I'm free, loved and don't have to hide myself anymore, but sometimes I have to get reminded of the two decades I spent in the closet to not go there again.

Audio is one of the most important parts of any horror game. Hell, I would argue that it is THE most important thing to do well when creating a horror game. When I heard this game was designed around voice proximity voice chat, I knew it was gonna be amazing but I wasn't ready for the absolute gem that this game's audio design has.

As soon as you enter a game, you'll notice how grotesque everything looks, sounds and feel. The UI showing your cracked helmet, the footsteps in your metal ship emphasizing how heavy your boots are, the way you "press the brakes" whenever you change to an opposite direction... all of these pieces get together and make you feel suffocated, dirty, and tired. This is how Lethal Company sets the tone and begins to make you uncomfortable in just a matter of seconds. This is the base level of comfort that the game will throw at you and it doesn't get safer than this and I love it.

After learning how the terminal works, you get to a moon and enter the facility, where the game actually starts. Monsters barely make a sound but they're all very distinguishable from eachother. Most of the time, you won't hear anything but the ambient noise. Filled with metal creaking, landmines beeping, or even fireplaces but.. try and think how any of those things I mentioned sound. Now make it crunchy and dry. That's every noise in this game. No sound sounds as you would expect it and if it does, it's 10 times worse than you imagined and I adore that.

Let's address the elephant in the room; Voice chat.
In this game, Voice Chat is so well done and optimized that if you're underwater, your voice will sound all "wobbly". If a monster is suffocating you, your voice will sound muffled. Fuck, if you inhale helium, your pitch will go higher too because this game is fucking amazing.
Your teammate's voice will bounce in the walls as you would expect it to happen IRL in a place like that. I have zero fucking idea how the developer did this, I am intrigued, fascinated and scared at how perfected this is.

Everything is so well done and achieved that when doing it with friends, you can't avoid but laugh and have a fun time and the developer is well aware of this.
While the amount of monsters and items are not a lot, they're all unique and memorable due to the way everything interacts with the player(s). If a spider kills someone, they will be wrapped in webs and left to dangle in its nest. Everything has a way to counter it and play around, making it always fun and unnerving to get into a new moon.

It's a game where you constantly adapt around it's circumstances. It's punishing, it's fun, and I can understand how it's "trial and error" nature can turn some people off, which is why this being a coop game is just perfect.

The execution is questionable, the story is a disorganized mess and not much happens in the narrative -- and that is the point.

When I first finished Serial Experiments Lain for the Playstation, I felt... wrong? uneasy? mainly because the game does have an ending but not scrolling credits after finishing it. For a long time I felt like it was an experience but nothing too crazy.

So, why am I giving it a 5 star?
It has been 3 years since I finished this game and I still haven't forgotten about it. Hell, everytime I see fanart of Lain I get quite afraid because she makes a hypothesis inside the game, but it's proven to be true outside of it and that's what makes it scary. The fact that she owns a place on backloggd, the fact that she receives fanarts decades after her appearence...

this game lets you see Lain's life in a very deep and close way which is partly why everything is so haunting after you're done with it.

An unmemorable world, story and characters plagued with one liners placed into a game full of QoL, well thought mechanics and a co-op that makes the game quite enjoyable to play, but a chore to pay attention and dig in when it comes to the narrative.

The developers of this game do play a lot of games and truly understand how third person shooters and souls like behave and what feel like, and they nailed it! But the world is uninteresting and randomized so if you're here on the story, keep your expectations very low.

The gunplay, guns (and rpg aspects) with souls-like elements feels very well polished. The equipment and mods are always interesting and a joy to find even if you're not gonna use them. Levelling up is a way to get skill points guaranteed, but you can also find them laying around as random loot and I really love this because it completely removed the FOMO that I get in RPGs when levelling up. Almost no trait feels useless as almost all of them are designed for.. well.. weapons! The only exception can be melee builds because they're kind of hard to do due to rng but still. Even the weakest traits made me feel like they were worth looting, as they have a base effect just by adquiring them with no limit whatsoever on how many you can have.
Weapons/Guns are also very cool-- if you're not into automatic weapons. Almost all of them are single shot reload, shotguns, pistols/revolvers and while there are automatic weapons, they are usually quite bad and rare. Due to how the game is design, I don't see this as a bad thing, but I do recommend people to keep this in mind when trying to play the game.
Conclusion on the gunplay, guns and RPG aspects: Excellent, really well polished and thought.

Bosses and enemies are interesting and fun to play against once you accept that they will spawn mobs. Don't see them as annoying; see them as resources for your mods to load faster.
Some bosses have alternate kills that go from straight up dismemberment to don't fight at all by doing a puzzle. Each kill with different rewards that are tied to the method you used and I find that really cool.
Conclusion on the bosses and enemy design; Good and interesting, always fresh.

Co-Op and Scaling can be played in every mode (Campaign, Adventure and Survival) from beggining to end. (atleast with two players) feels incredibly great. You don't feel overpowered and the scaling doesn't feel rough at all, specially if you both coordinate and try to keep the gear score at the same level (aka everything upgraded at the same level as the other players due to the scaling of the enemies being tied to weapons, while the world and loot tied to everything. For more info click here).
The game features friendly fire that CANNOT be turned off and I'm glad. The friendly fire really makes you think before using your weapons and coordinating with others to advance while crouched/get out of the way because a sniper is behind you and you're a close quarter shotgun playstyle or because you have an AoE attack that doesn't distinguishes friend from foe that can literally instakill your friend if the enemy decides to jump. It's fun.
Conclusion on the Co-Op and Scaling aspects of the game: Great, incredibly well pulled off, to the point where I feel like you would make yourself a disservice by playing solo.

The random elements of loot, npcs and level design are something that I found really enjoyable and fun to replay, because this game has a feature called "reroll" that allows you to re-play a biome or "world" with another seed, separate of your progress in the main campaign and I find that extremely cool for people like I that suffer from fomo and dont really want to replay an 11 to 20 hour game from scratch just to get some achievements that didn't spawn due to RNG. I found it really interesting to "reroll" biomes to see what other cool stuff you can get like.. hell, you usually get like 3 bosses per world but rerolling I found like at least 12 extra ones in the first world alone and when playing an extra mode, when I thought I had everything, there was more?? so that was really fun but at the same time worrying because you can get really nasty bosses in your campaign seed.
Conclusion on the RNG aspects of the game; Good but annoying when trying to get achievements or something specific due to the obvious nature of RNG

The story is told.. very badly. The lore scattered is way too much, doesn't help to bring context and it's all scattered in logs that take.. no kidding, 4 to 6 minutes of reading and this wouldn't really be a problem if the logs were.. different? but you don't really know names, you don't get to know anyone, and when a character is presented as very important, they don't have lines like.. at all after you meet them.
The main story doesn't really say anything, forcing you to read the extra lore logs that don't add much to the story either, and I feel like the entire story can be summed up in a single minute video due to how little happens pretty much everywhere.
Some other nitpicks that I don't know where to fit in this story paragraph: Only one player can read logs at a time so unless you're into narrating like a child's book to your friends on vc or they are afk for more than 6 minutes, reading logs is not advised. The voice acting is incredibly hit or miss that ranges from the best thing you've heard to "are they just reading a paper?"
Conclusion on the narrative and storytelling; Between Bad and Average. Forgettable

Overall this game is a four out of five stars. No more, no less, no regrets nor feeling like it should be more or less. It's a really good game but due to how uninteresting the story can be, you're gonna be playing it for the gunplay alone.
TL;DR - Don't treat this game seriously. Play this with friends and shoot while talking to eachother. That's the best way to play this game.

For a game summarized as "A reverse-detective adventure, where you control your character's face" I thought there was gonna be a bigger emphasis on the face and the mystery and all that but.. there sadly isn't
Expressions don't matter that much and most of the endings don't involve using them. Those that do, is always during the same specific scene which I genuinely found out to be dissapointing.

Who's Lila? is a game that I was incredibly hyped for. The game is weird, charming and with an interesting gimmick + there's a Daemon! Used to give you clues and context in a cryptic way. I found that really awesome but sadly it's designed for a single ending and by itself, it doesn't add anything to the plot outside of William's room.

While the game definitely nails everything in a visual sense and knows how to make it eye catchy, the actual execution it's incredibly lacking. The story has some really interesting moments, like when you see William at the party.
The game features 16 endings but if we're talking about non repeated content that lasts more than a minute, we're talking about 5 endings at most (don't quote me on the exact amount, It's been a while since I played this). Most of the endings are usually game overs or slight alterations but you still have to go through them to get the "true" "ending".

My problem with all of this is the story. You're almost guaranteed to know the events that truly happened because almost every ending forces you to go through a 5 minute unskippable section every time and while it's cool and incredibly well done, I was so tired of seeing it over and over, specially when it turned out I didn't do it right and I got a repeated ending instead.

The story also touches some meta aspects of it which are incredibly vague. The game just gives you crumbs and adds cryptic shit for the sake of it, just to fuck around with the player and I find that incredibly dissapointing.

Overall if you're gonna play it, play it for the experience, not for the story. That way you might be pleasantly surprised or not instead of feeling dissapointment like I did.

I wasn't gonna recommend this game at first but if I'm truly honest, I love this game. I'm just dissapointed at the wasted potential in delivering a meaningful story because what we got is a video game that tries too hard to be a David Lynch media and if you like the guy and want to play smth like that then it's cool but I just wish there was more and that it didn't suck.

I'll be honest; I've always loved King's Field and Shadow Tower and I find them amazing games but having played them recently, they are very old, clunky and slow games which naturally ends up in an outdated game of a genre already dead nowadays, and the truth is a shame, since FROMSOFTWARE doesn't feel like making more King's Field either, and it's understandable.

Several years later and in the middle of FROMSOFTWARE's golden age, it's normal that many people want to revisit their pre-Miyazaki titles, but again, they are not very accessible and go at 10 fps most of them, so they are games that I never recommend to play, despite liking them so much.

Lunacid on the other hand... changes this, offering all the good stuff these games offer with everything they needed, like showing a small icon when you're near a fake wall so you don't have to spam the interact button on every wall, The story is just as awesome and interesting, there are several enemies that are direct references to King's Field and Shadow Tower. hell, in the trailer you see 2 areas that literally look like they are taken from the first King's Field and the "hub" of Shadow Tower, and I think it's perfect.


I don't know, it's literally everything I would have asked for from a new King's Field and more. I'm really glad to see it out, and I hope it becomes popular soon or the genre wakes up, because I really love the unique feel of real-time first-person dungeon crawlers.
To buy it on Early Access from day one, it's pretty polished and has a lot of content.

Something I love about King's Field and also Lunacid, is the ability to use magic at the same time you melee, ie; do both attacks at the same time instead of just one at a time. Some weapons have their own experience levels, and most of the time they are worth having, even if you don't plan to use them, it's just fun.

Actually the difficulty of the game is pretty--- "bland"? like, for now the only maze-like levels translate to a lot of darkness only, there are no things like multiple doors and keys in each level that open different paths (the castle update changed this), which made me a bit disappointed by the simplicity of the levels, but it doesn't take away from the fact that they're fun, they're just pretty short and the only reason to revisit an old area is the totally optional and unnecessary grinding.

That said, Lunacid has a lot of potential and I can't wait to see which way it goes.

After 73 hours of gameplay and 5 days in a row of wake up --> eat --> elden ring --> sleep 5 hours and repeat, I decided it was a good time to finish elden ring and get back to having a life IRL.

This game is fucking amazing, from start to finish it surpassed all my expectations and everything that at first I thought was lame, managed to convince me that it was better than I thought it was.
The level design of the dungeons is phenomenal, it's amazing how they all have a super different and fun layout, and I love the way they balanced the game, always grateful that the enemies don't have a cheap scale with level, they are genuinely well thought out and well placed. The world is fun, it's amazing, and I thought it was going to be overwhelming, but it really always ends up being "do what you want to do, in the order you want to do it" and I love it. I love being able to skip the main bosses and then go back and get them, I love knowing that every dungeon I do and every boss I do will be useful to me even if the loot doesn't interest me, because what matters to me is not the loot itself, but the experience that the game provides with every dungeon, every boss, and every trap.

Having played the King's Field and replayed Dark Souls 2 recently, Elden Ring didn't feel like dark souls, but like another king's field, a more fun king's field and with a story just as beautiful.
like by god, I could talk for hours about why I love the elden ring story and the NPCs, which by the way there are more npc questlines than all of darksouls combined AND I LOVE IT. Eventually I'm going to get 100%, but I decided to rush the ending because I wanted to be more relaxed about spoilers from my friends and so on.

Speaking of friends, I love the new group system. I love that you get a buff if someone within the group kills a main boss and get a bunch of DMs from my friends saying "yoo congrats 🙂 ", I love writing messages helping others or posting a message saying "dog! " to any non-hostile creature, I love reading messages saying there are hidden walls and making me a mental bet on whether it's really an illusory wall or not, I love messages saying "fort, night", even the ones obstructing stairs/chests, forcing you to use the dpad and change action, it's just a culture I missed already having passed souls so long ago.
I love how non linear it is so much, I haven't felt so at ease since Dark Souls 1.
Thank you, Miyazaki and FROMSOFTWARE for making Elden Ring something real, I can't wait to see what else you guys are going to do in general, even if it's an armored core or a king's field or idk, I love it. Amazing game, 100% my GOTY.

The final stretch with 3 double phase bosses was super exhausting, especially because none of them were easy, the final boss was literally 1 hit away from death and with no mana or estus. At the beginning I was really annoyed, but now that I passed it... god, probably one of the hardest things I've ever played.

I have to start this review by saying I'm completely biased with this game. I'm a girl. A trans girl to be exact, so this game meant a lot for me.

I promise I won't delve a lot on gender outside this paragraph.
This game is focused on cisgender womanhood and puberty. Regardless, it's still womanhood. Societal norms and views of the gender are the same.
That awkward phase of being alone and shifting into adulthood as a girl it's always... well.. awkward-- and scary. Specially if you don't fully know who or what you are.
Many people consider this a "weak" entry, but I genuinely feel like it's a thing about gender. Not mysoginy, just.. different childhoods and societal norms. Silent Hill 2 clicks with guys a lot, Silent Hill 3 clicks with girls a lot, and for trans people it's usually both.

I used to think Silent Hill games won't get better visually (in terms of horror) after Silent Hill 1 due to the PSX aesthetics, but Silent Hill managed to do that while also keeping the beautiful character models of the PS2.

The soundtrack, the ambiance, the monster and level design is unnerving as fuck and I will never grow tired of it.

Finished touhou 19 on hard (first run)
The game is incredibly short, with each run being only 14 minutes long! and honestly? I love it.
This is not a main campaign kind of game, it's a vs shmup game and last time it was done was on PoFV (touhou 9). Back then in TH09 there were 16 fucking characters and they all had to fight with eachother atleast once or so, so you ended up playing for more than 40 minutes until the AI decided to just lose. I remember I once was testing stuff with a invencibility patch because and the run went a full hour and a half on a single stage alone and it felt tedious and exhausting and boring too! Because the patterns weren't hard for me, but if I died too much, I had to restart and hope the boss died in less than 40 minutes.

This doesn't happen here. This time you fight 4-5 characters and your run is done. No enemy lasts for an stupid amount of time, and for a game this replayable that makes you learn every character, I really am happy that runs aren't long.
The enemies, characters and boss attacks are very well designed and you will always have atleast one surprise or another with new sprites and.. I don't know, it's like you can really tell ZUN's experience as if he peaked here in terms of fluidity and overall feeling. TH18 already felt incredibly good and updated to play, but TH19 takes this one step above due to it's main mechanic of doing damage because we finally have a better way of doing damage other than just pressing Z until you're tired. This new mechanic makes you do a small attack and for each enemy killed, you spawn more stuff to your enemy's screen while also receiving a damage boost, for what I've felt. It had come to the point where I'm straight up going head in into every boss as if I was trying to do a quick kill and I love this. I've always loved doing shit like this in Touhou and I'm so glad it finally got addressed as a main mechanic high risk high reward.

While it's fun to me, it does have some flaws and missing features like the replay system which is a shame because I would love to see the bot and how it behaves against me. Visual pollution is still a thing too. The game in Lunatic has straight up impossible to dodge patterns, forcing you to abuse the new mechanics which some can see it as great and others can hate it (I personally love it).

The card system is there again to make the gameplay more interesting, and rewarded after each boss without letting you choose, which can help when there's no power bar but the lack of choice and meaningful upgrades makes it more like a "oh sure" instead of "omg yes! this is great"
I wish there was a "go against every character" extra mode or smth because I'm curious to see all cards acting at the same time

It really is a great, and I am loving it despite never being a fan of PoFV or these kind of vs shmups. Maybe that is why it's so fun and refreshing to me lol

EDIT: After playing for a while, I can say that the game is good but suffers quite a lot from badly designed characters. I don't mean weird characters to play as such as Sakuya in PCB or clunky, just characters that are literally useless and will give you a complete headache even in normal. I have a lunatic 1cc in every touhou but Sanae and Nazrin's route are the hardest things I have ever witnessed in this game and it's so tilting because you can't really do much against full RNG with characters that can't kill at all due to the lack of damage. The hitboxes are weird and the visual pollution can be incredibly annoying not because "there's too much shit on screen" but rather because you literally can't see what hit you because your powers can hide bullets and it's incredibly annoying.
It is a good game but the only main entry I would encourage people to skip unless you really want to play this one.

I was deeply dissapointed at how bad this dlc is. I didn't expect much because "lonesome road" = straight line, but I did expect a lot from the story because "if they're not adding more gameplay here, maybe it's because they focused on the story.. right?" well.. no.

This character they teased in all the other DLC ends up being corny as hell.
Lonesome Road feels like you've published a book, someone doesn't like it and in a fan meeting they come and tell you that they hated it and they hope you die in person.

How am I supposed to react to that aside of "Ok? lol"? It's just dumb and unnecessary and I feel so stupid when I say this out loud because even when I look it up online, people talk about this dlc as if it was amazing because it talks about the past of the protagonist and it being really cool! but.. am I the only person that really doesn't care? hell, I feel like I gotta replay it or watch some video essays on it, because almost 3 years passed since I last played it and it still feels like a really bad dlc to me and I'm just sad that it's the case.

A horrible game designed to make you suffer in a shitty situation with shitty people.
5/5

Pathologic is one of those games that are more of an experience. In this case, a raw crude experience. The gameplay is really hard and the mandatory missions to complete the game purposedfully incite you to do stuff that will either harm the town, the protagonist or the player (morale).

The story is so incredibly well crafted with three characters to choose from. These characters interact with eachother regardless of which one you're playing. Sometimes, the actions of a character will hinder another and when playing as them you can see why, you can do better or you can do worse and it's great.

It's a bad game but a magnificent story. A niche title that is definitely not for everyone.