You know what? This isn’t just Super Metroid. This is Superb Metroid!

Despite having played several other metroidvanias in the past, I never actually tried to delve into one of the franchises that gave name to the genre, mostly because at the time I had a general avoidance of older games due to thinking they could have “aged poorly”…

But here’s the kicker! That past version of me from 2021/2022? HE IS FUCKING GONE (for the most part)! And it’s about time I came back to a genre that I was obsessed with in the past in some capacity, by going all the way back to the game that started it all!

The NES, short for Nintendo Entertainment System, is a video game console that, while I admire it, I don’t really like the idea of going all the way back to actually playing those games more than theorizing about them, the biggest reason is that for some of the more well known titles in the NES, looking back at them with the power of hindsight, though not as obvious as it is with franchises like Ultima, most of them just planted the seeds for what would grow into full blown trees with later entries, some of them ended up growing fast enough that they are still fairly solid like Castlevania and Super Mario Bros, but for others like Final Fantasy or Metroid… Yeah, I’ll pass.

And speaking of Metroid, its seed would eventually grow, but only in the NES’s successor for the next generation, the Super Nintendo, however, the seed that had grown into a small sprout with Metroid 2 on the Game Boy, would very suddenly grow into a Big Fucking Gun Tree, one so big that several people would eventually try their hands at getting as many fruits from there as humanly possible in a short amount of time, memorizing everything about the tree and finding out the most effective way to get through each branch and collect the most fruits as fast as they could, and to this day people still try their hands at such task, AKA speedrunning. But if that wasn’t enough, that tree would go on to inspire many, many other gardeners (or developers) to try and plant trees inspired by that one, even creating an entire genre (alongside Castlevania: Symphony of the Night) called Metroidvania. And yet, even if we try to ignore this game’s long-lasting cultural impact within gaming, this is still one of the medium’s finest touchstone classics.

But what makes Super Metroid so compelling in the first place? Well, there are many reasons for why, and by many, I do mean it.

Crateria: A Strong Introduction

As soon as Samus touch its foot on Zebes for the second first time, the game immediately manages to instill both a sense of curiosity and fear on the player, curiosity as it makes the player hooked and eager to explore this wonderful “new” planet, touching on the human desire to explore new worlds, and fear as the place seems completely empty of any life, as a foreboding track plays in the background, further accentuating the feeling of exploring the ruins of a desolate planet completely unknown to the player, not helped by the fact Samus just escaped from Ridley invading a research station to steal the Baby Metroid there, so on top of that there’s a sense of something lurking around in the shadows, waiting for your presence to then attack you. That’s until you get the Morph Ball where the first game ended, and something like that does in fact happen, and what was once ridded from life is now filled to the Brinstar brim with enemies ready to kill anything potentially invading Zebes.

Super Metroid nailed the introduction so hard it could probably pierce through marble pillars, not only by introducing some of the fundamental aspects of the core gameplay loop to the player, but also by excellently establishing Zebes as a setting in every way imaginable, but especially gameplay and presentation. And speaking of the latter…

Brinstar: A Phenomenal Presentation and Atmosphere

As it can be noticed in the first ten minutes of the game, the presentation is amazing!

First of all, this is one of the most visually impressive in the SNES, and that’s saying a lot. The graphical leap of the Super Nintendo, going from a 8-bit to a 16-bit console, really allowed the developers to bring Edson Samus Arantes, Zebes and its denizens to full life here, with the colorful yet dimly lit colors giving an extra edge to Samus and especially to the enemies, Ridley and Mother Brain especially look even more alien and menacing than ever, and every area standout from one another due to their unique environmental detail along with their stark color palette, there’s a reason why most renditions of Metroid’s most iconic characters, both within and outwith the franchise itself, use their Super renditions as their main source of inspiration for their look. And soundwise it’s also great, having a mix of eerily ambient tunes to accompany this game’s most atmospheric moments and catchy upbeat songs that complement this game’s more action-focused moments while keeping the player going forward.

All of this combined makes for one hell of an atmosphere, one of feeling alone in a stranded alien planet while everything in there tries to murder you, and that’s what draws us into exploring those alien worlds, isn’t it? The idea of exploring worlds that would seem impossible to do otherwise in real life, ones that seem completely out of the ordinary, and then trying to get as much out of exploring it as possible, whether by understanding the inner workings of there or simply gathering every possible loot you can get…

Norfair: A Powerhouse of Mobility and Murder

But normal human beings can’t feasibly traverse the entirety of Earth itself, let alone a planet as dangerous as Zebes, they would probably die in one way or another.

Don’t worry, Samus Aran got you covered, and with some damn fine movement at that. Since we are talking about one of the games that established the Metroidvania, you slowly unlock Samus’s true power instead of immediately getting everything right off the bat, and with every major upgrade unlocked, it opens up a slew of new possibilities for you to go through every crevice of Zebes, and by the time you reach Mother Brain, you will have become a invincible god. There is one ability though that is available from the start that can fundamentally change the way you approach the entire game:

The Wall Jump

Where as in other games from the time like Mega Man X the wall jump is as simple as pressing the jump button against a wall repeatedly to climb up that wall, in Super Metroid that requires mastery, as you must be spin jumping against a wall and then go to the opposite direction of that wall and press the jump button WITH THE RIGHT TIMING! It’s incredibly satisfying to master the usage of wall jump, as it allows for the player to sequence break through levels that not only accommodate, but even encourage learning how to properly use the wall jump. And that’s not even the only hidden movement tech in the game either, there is also the Shine Spark which allows you to jump insane heights as long as you get enough momentum to use the speed booster.

And speaking of the upgrades themselves, they are all really fun to use in their own right. As I mentioned in the first paragraph of this section, they all open up new possibilities for uncovering secret upgrades in incredibly rewarding ways, but aside from that, a lot of upgrades make traversing the map incredibly fun as well, as you can just blast through every area at a quick pace to make backtracking engaging, with notable ones being the aforementioned Speed Booster which allows you to run at a insane speed as long as you gather enough momentum through running in a large straight line, and the grappling hook which, when latched onto specific blocks, will allow Samus to launch herself from larger gaps.

All of this lends for some of metroidvania’s, heck, even some of 2D platformers’s finest controls and movement ever seen, movement which many metroidvanias still haven’t quite matched. But here’s the kicker…

Maridia: An Incredible World and Level Design Chock Full of Secrets

You can’t simply make a game with controls as good as these without putting them to good use, don’t get me wrong, you can literally do that, but that would make it a pretty lackluster experience, wouldn’t it (isn’t that right Jedi Academy)? Here’s where I finally talk about the elephant in the room:

The level design

It has some of the most intricate level design ever seen. It manages to be both linear and open-ended at the same time, never feeling too confusing and always being pretty clear where to go but also open enough to encourage you to explore it to its fullest, and damn there is a lot to unpack here, there are a ton of hidden collectables, and by ton I mean so many that by the time I had beaten the game, I hadn’t even got 60% of progress in the game, and it was still fun as hell to find out all the upgrades I did find, since the game forces the player to fully learn how to best use every upgrade and movement tech and will make many concessions to the 100% Nutcases who want to get the most out of exploring Zebes.

Now about that “linear and open-ended at the same time” stuff, despite how big its levels are in comparison to any contemporary released at the time, the game still manages to communicate to the player where to go really well, not only in how the game generally teases you on what's to come with all the gateways (literal or figurative) locked behind different upgrades, but also in how the pathways are always cleverly designed in a way that the player still ends up knowing where to go but becomes willing to engage with what’s outside the main path towards the next major boss/upgrade, and even when you need to use a bomb to progress through, it’s often fairly logical where you need to use the bomb, all of that without ever explicitly telling you where to go (unlike some other titles in the same franchise).

Actually, I was going to reach the ultimate conclusion here but…

Wrecked Ship: A Interactive Painting Disguised as a Game

The reality is that thinking about Super Metroid started to slowly lead into a path that at first I wasn’t willing to consider talking about at all, but now I just cannot stop but think about this:

What separates video games from mediums like cinema, literature and music?

The most obvious answer would be how a video game actively forced the viewer to engage with the work in a tactile level, and thus not only absorbing its sights and sounds, but also participating in the game world in some form or capacity, and a game will have roadblocks that will test the player both physically and mentally. What I think best describes video games as a medium though is that the developer is essentially a painter, the game itself is one big painting carefully made so that it portrays everything they want to portray in there, while leaving enough space for the viewer to play the role of a different painter trying to find new ways to fill in the blanks both literally, drawing new things and leaving those paintings marked with your own ideas, or figuratively, soaking up what’s already there and trying to find meaning to it.

What does all of this have to do with Super Metroid though? Well, the artistry in the game lies on how its world is structured, if you just look at it you can beat the game just fine, but the real deal is in trying to understand the inner workings of what’s present in that painting, or, to put it better, trying to get the most out of exploring every crevice in the game to then reach an ultimate conclusion to what’s actually there, and that also seeps into another major aspect of this game, its visual “storytelling”, where nothing outside of the opening cutscene is explicitly told to you, and because of that, this lends an extra layer of mystery to planet Zebes, as even after leaving it, it’s still unclear how the alien lifeforms found there actually behave, and then there’s also a sense of loneliness whenever exploring the planet as Samus doesn’t speak, and neither does the enemies as they are too busy trying to murder you, and then you get to Tourian and it’s probably, in my personal opinion, one of the most disquieting moments I’ve ever seen in any Super Nintendo game outside of Earthbound, as Samus trudge through the mechanical lair of Mother Brain, and hears a unfathomably alien ambient song, and as you think she is destroyed, she brings her true form to life, an demonically terrifying amalgamation of flesh and steel.

Tourian: A Definitive Conclusion

Super Metroid is one of the best and most influential games of all time, that should be obvious by now, but the reality is that not many games have even attempted to replicate most of what makes it such a iconic game in the first place, even other titles in the same franchise couldn’t quite capture what made Super Metroid the SUPER Metroid, and even after the release of so many great metroidvanias like Guacamelee 2 and Yoku’s Island Express, games that brought their own new spin to the genre by focusing on a amazing and varied combat system or even completely redefining how we traverse worlds in metroidvanias, this one is still one of the very best, I mean, there’s a reason why people have done so many speedruns of this game (and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night).

And if you somehow still haven’t played this, why are you slacking off from playing it?

People give BioShock shit for this all the time, but DOOM 3 is the actual poor man’s System Shock 2 meets Half-Life!

I can’t understate how bad DOOM 3 is. It's the best example of what would happen if someone looked at both of the previously mentioned games and tried to superficially imitate it without understanding why those games worked so well.

DOOM 3 is one of the prime examples of id Software’s dark age, where basically everyone from the old guard, save for John Carmack and a few others like Tim Willits, had left the company, and thus was gone the personality and charm that made id Software’s prior works so memorable, and was replaced with a studio that seemed stuck in the past and didn’t know how to make games fun anymore, where as Valve continued to rise to the top after the huge success of the Half-Life franchise.

Now, conceptually the game itself does sound interesting, it takes the foundation of the original DOOM games, specifically DOOM 64, which was already leaning into horror with the atmosphere, and goes all the way into survival horror territory, or at the very least, it could have? Because here’s the main problem, DOOM 3 feels very much confused, it doesn’t know what it wants to be, and ends up trying to be three things at once, and failing at all of them as well.

But I guess I’d need to explain why those other games work in the first place, to then explain why this one doesn’t, so here we go fellas…

Half-Life

Arguably the most obvious point of comparison, down to even plot beats being ripped straight from it, Half-Life is known for its masterful use of environmental storytelling and player immersion, taking cues from the original DOOM games and making it much more grounded than “marine tears through demons”, but what truly makes Half-Life Half-Life is its gameplay. See, the gameplay itself isn’t just about running around the map killing monsters, and what in DOOM would be diversions from the core gameplay loop (the key/secret hunting) is integral to Half-Life, between gunfights there are also puzzles and platforming segments, and areas can even vary in how their gameplay is structured, going from survival horror-esque segments in the more claustrophobic segments of the Black Mesa facility, to engaging in firefights with the military and the monsters in the desert and etcetera.

In summary, Half-Life is a game that constantly shifts in pacing to make it never get stale, making it so you are never playing through the same chapter for too long (barring Surface Tension), and since often some sections come with setpieces that excellently manage to introduce you to that one chapter, it makes every one of them stand out from each other.

Also ‘On A Rail’ is a very good level.

System Shock 2

System Shock 2 is a pure survival horror at its core, and it manages to knock it out of the park. Using Thief: The Dark Project’s Dark Engine, enemies have audio cues that instill the paranoia on the player, and creates fear not because of the unknown, but because you know there is a looming threat close to you, but you don’t know where they are exactly, and even rooms that might seem safe could have a Cyborg Midwife rushing to your position and messing with your day, and that’s not getting into how your weapons could jam during battle, or you could run out of healing items, or other unfortunate circumstances, though all put in contrast to the RPG systems that allow you circumvent those situations in a number of different ways. And System Shock 2 is no slouch at storytelling either, and is even stronger at it than Half-Life, still similarly using incredible environmental design and storytelling, but also audio logs that spectacularly capture the horrors of being trapped in a place such as the Von Braun while it goes all downhill, seeing the last words of crewmembers, whether they are dying or being turned into part of The Many, is incredibly chilling, and at times the story can reach even philosophical levels, as questions about being an individual or mistakes from the past start to creep up on the player.

I don’t want this to turn into a full blown System Shock 2 review, so to cap it off, the game consistently manages to create horror both with its narrative and moment-to-moment gameplay, while still giving you the tools to fight back against it, or even outright break it (grenade launcher and full agility go bonkers).

Right, back to sadness and darkness, AKA DOOM 3.

DOOM 3 tries to imitate several aspects of these two games, but fails at almost all of them, especially in its (non-)story. And speaking of which, the story is… Fine? Like, it’s pretty much just Half-Life 1 with a bit of System Shock in there as well for good measure and… That’s it. It just lacks the spark that made either of these games from a narrative perspective so interesting, look at the main antagonist for example, he (and Hell) lacks the complex and downright philosophical overtones of S.H.O.D.A.N and The Many as well as the mystery and visual storytelling of Xen and the black ops. Really, it’s barely above Quake 2 in terms of story, except there are more cutscenes than just the ones between each level.

But yeah, that’s still far better than the gameplay itself, which is, at least for almost 80% of the game, shit.

A lot of the gameplay in DOOM 3 feels like a trickle. The weapons are mostly terrible, lacking the beef that they had in the first three games and at times feeling more like peashooters in comparison, especially the INFAMOUS shotgun, and another problem is that it tries to be a survival horror game where you have to deal with low ammo and such, but at its core it’s still a DOOM game, and those two things gel very badly with each other. The enemy encounters are just very lacking for the majority of the game, just repeatedly reusing the same “Imp appears out of a monster closet/portal to kill ya” at a rate having a drink shot for every time that same setup was used would lead me to the fucking hospital, or the even more obnoxious “small melee enemy spam” that the game loves so much that the game has two different enemy types that serve for literally the exact same purpose, be as obnoxious as Fanboy and Chum Chum, and the few interesting enemies the game uses sometimes are either very underutilized like the Pinky (who has got a radical redesign here), or appear way, way later in the game. The level design is generally very dull and boring, just taking place in very samey industrial corridors that would make Quake 2 look like Pizza Tower, and due to taking place in those very samey industrial corridors, significantly cutting down on opportunities for interesting level design beyond reusing the same incredibly flimsy attempts at horror, and by horror I mean “oh look here’s an Imp just behind that door that you could not possibly predict unless you already knew it was there” kind of thing, and after a quarter of the way through the game, I was just expecting for every two rooms to have something like either of those previously mentioned types of encounters, while all following the exact same structure of “pick that keycard/pda to get through that door”, where as 1, 2 and 64, while still following a similar structure, at least incorporated puzzle elements into the mix to make getting each keycard more challenging than just “go through all of those corridors killing enemies”, and occasions that remotely resemble those puzzles from those games are VERY few and far between.

And the end result is a game that is BORING… Really, really, really BORING. While not having many diversions from the core gameplay loop of killing demons isn’t the worst thing, that gameplay loop in question is so repetitive, irritating and busted that after the first hour it becomes a exhaustive slog, and by the time I beat Hell, I was begging for the game to end there.

And speaking of Hell, I want to dedicate a whole paragraph to Hell, the only level that manages to be almost genuinely good and isn’t boring beyond belief. Hell is the highlight of this game, for starters this level is probably the one that best captures the feeling of being in Hell, possibly in the entire series even. You truly feel like a mere mortal that managed to get into a place no one should ever dare to, and the hellish architecture and art direction of this puts every other DOOM game up until that point to shame (yes, I am being serious), I mean just look at that loading screen, it’s so fucking foreboding and awesome it makes me wish the entire game was half as good as this. And in the gameplay department this doesn’t disappoint either, at the start of the level you are starved of ammo and is already forced to fight a Hell Knight with only your shotgun, and this is the ONLY time in the entire game where the atrocious spread of it actually makes a gunfight in this game more intense. The latter half isn’t quite up there, but it still brings to the table some challenging combat encounters using stronger enemies and more tight levels, and the best part is that it ends before boredom starts to creep up, albeit it ends in a disappointing boss fight like with every other DOOM game before it, but at least the game ends in a high note here…

Too bad it doesn’t end in Hell!

I wish every other level in the game was as good as Hell, especially in the art direction (though there are some that try).

Because in terms of sights and sounds this manages to take Quake 2’s already pretty uneven art style and make it even more bland and uninteresting here. As I said before, most levels are just boring gray industrial corridors over and over and over again, and even when there’s a different room that isn’t just that, it’s still unremarkable due to how everything else blends itself together in my mind, and I don’t think that can attributed solely because of its setting, since later on there a few moments that do try to go for something different and start mixing those industrial corridors with hell and it's pretty awesome, but they are tainted by the fact that at their core they are still those same corridors you have been seeing since the very beginning of the game.

And I don’t think this game’s setting is the root cause of this problem, specifically because if I look at a System Shock 2 (literally), while the game does take place almost entirely in a massive Star Trek-esque starship, every area in the game looks and feels different from one another even if they happen to have a similar color palette, most notably because of how each room is carefully laid out to fit that deck’s purpose, and consequently creates several memorable and noteworthy rooms because of that, and that’s not even getting into all of the body horror galore of The Many. DOOM 3 also aspires to do levels that feel like tangible real places, but it lacks the ability to do something interesting with them, and even when it does, it’s way too late in the game. Going into the sounds, they are just there, and when they aren’t just there, they suck. Again, weapons sound more like peashooters or Nerf guns, but that’s par from the course at this point.

Just before wrapping this up, this game is really not scary, I don’t know if it is because it’s a horror shooter and I am naturally far less scared of games where you can directly fight back against the source of those horrors, but yeah, DOOM 3 failed to scare me at all, most notably because of the overuse of the already mentioned to death monster closet jumpscares that are very flimsy to begin with and quickly become predictable, but maybe that’s just me and in reality this is one of the scariest games of all time according to a professional gaming journalism site like IGN or Kotaku (if the latter is even professional).

I might be sounding (or reading) like a broken record at this point, but yeah, DOOM 3 is really that bad. There are certain things I do appreciate and even like about it (again, the Hell level is great, and it does start to pick up steam at the last quarter), especially their ambition in trying to turn DOOM into pure horror affair, but they are bogged down by literally every other bad thing this game does that it is no wonder people don’t really talk about it in the same way they do about Half-Life 2 or F.E.A.R, or even lesser known ones like Dark Corners of the Earth.

They couldn’t even get killing demons right. I’ve seen bad Devour clones that put more effort into how enemies died than DOOM 3.

Though at least it probably still isn’t as bad as Rage…

Yume Nikki is one of the most important games ever despite its seemingly small scope, paving the way for several RPG Maker games inspired by it in one way or another, as well as one of the most iconic surrealist games of all time, and for very good reasons.

In several ways, Yume Nikki isn’t really meant to be understood in any conventional way, nor is it meant to be played with the mindset of expecting a conventional game.

Yume Nikki as a game strips down the gameplay down to the very basic cycle of walking around like an idiot, soaking up in its atmosphere and occasionally finding something new, though the main difference is that where as in other games, such as Super Metroid, the reward for exploring the map to its fullest are upgrades that make you more powerful, finding new areas is the reward here, with some of the “power ups” merely changing the look of Madotsuki and nothing else (while others aid in traversing the map), but in the end they are still pretty cool.

But what truly matters in the game is what’s present (and what’s NOT present) in each location you find. Mind-bending landscapes where the borderline nonsensical reigns over anything else, seemingly endless black voids where surreal entities and abstract images coexist, and even the (arguably) more grounded places manage to feel just as strange as everything else due to their haunting atmosphere, helped by a stellar soundtrack which really sells the vibe of every place, all of that make the game arguably more harrowing more so by virtue of exploring a world so uniquely alien and terrifying as Madotsuki’s perturbed mind than that of an actual threat hiding around the corner. But eventually you start getting accustomed to the world’s idiosyncrasies, and consequently starts to get a better hang of the environments both based on their map layouts and their sights and sounds (for better or for worse), and the game itself is absolutely ripe with imagery and symbolism, and thus, much like the best surrealist and abstract art, it’s up to you to find meaning in everything you find throughout the game, and that’s the magic of Yume Nikki, isn’t it? Finding sense in everything found throughout the seemingly endless dimensions of abstract images, and piecing together all of it to find a meaning to Yume Nikki, or maybe not doing that at all and just soaking up all of it as it is and leaving it at that, that works too.

Now you may be wondering why did I rate this game only a mere three stars out of five despite everything I said so far?

SHORT ANSWER: IT’S BORING! Or rather, it BECOMES boring.

Long answer: When you first start, everything seems and feels extremely bizarre, and thus, it ends up being incredibly compelling and rewarding to explore each location and sometimes find new things, helped a bunch by other secret places and events that are entirely optional, making your first time reaching those moments really friggin special.

HOWEVER, it does get tiring when you have to do that to accomplish a goal as dull as “Collect 24 Effects”, especially with the slow as a snail speed of Madotsuki, and no, the Bicycle doesn’t make this much better. What starts as engrossing and bewildering starts to become annoying and exhaustive to go through, and I’ll admit I used a guide to find out how to get the rest of the Effects after I got 14 of them or so, since some of them are fairly tricky to find as well, which I would appreciate more if not for the aforementioned slow speed. Pro tip: Get the Bicycle ASAP, and then start using the Bicycle Glitch to get through most areas as quickly as possible.

I get that most people will look past this and still adore it for everything else, and I can perfectly see why, but when the whole gameplay loop involves something as mundane as walking and nothing else, that one flaw starts to get on me. And to me, the game manages to be boring both intentionally and unintentionally, and the latter part is the issue.

In summary, I do really admire what this game does (and did to indie gaming as a whole alongside Cave Story), it is an absolute piece of art that broke the boundaries of what video games could be at the time, to the point where several games were inspired by it, including fan games like the famous Yume 2kki or .flow… However, I could also say something similar about other games I far prefer to play over Yume Nikki.

TL;DR - I admire the hell of what Kikiyama did, but I don’t like actually playing it, and I’d rather just watch about it than playing it, but I don’t know, maybe YOU will find those “flaws” as something that adds to the experience of playing Yume Nikki, and I'm fine with that.

Edit: Who the fuck changed the cover art in IGDB? Come on bro the other cover art was so awesome, but now it's replaced with this dull as a plank stuff!

If you are more into obscure games from the 90s, you may have heard of this game, if not, then be welcome for the wild narrative which I am about tell, where I neither expect nor ask for belief, except it wouldn't be so mad for me to expect belief, in the case where my own senses agree with the evidence, I am in fact not mad, and certainly not dreaming.

What truly drew me in was the fact that it is based on stories from Edgar Allan Poe, one of the most well regarded authors in horror literature history alongside the likes of H.P. Lovecraft and Junji Ito, and from what I heard of his stories, they are in fact really good, with The Black Cat being my favorite. And combining this with the really cool artstyle and how it is one of the great examples of video games as art despite being so obscure, I decided to give it a shot, despite me generally not liking games that are more so interactive museums. And damn was it worth it.

Let me start with the most obvious thing, and that is... In terms of presentation, this is an absolute marvel of a game, and it becomes clear just looking at the box art, and especially as you start a new game. The puppets for the characters all look cool, having this uncanny feel to them where they look realistically unsettling and terrifyingly stylized at the same time, contrasted with the rather primitive but still great looking tridimensional environments, and that's because I haven't mentioned the astounding slide-show sequences showcasing Annabel Lee and The Masque of Red Death (the latter in particularly singlehandedly made me give a 4 star rating for this game). And if those things weren't enough, the sound department is just as spectacular, with really great music that all really fit the scenes well, elevating many moments from it (honorable mentions to The Tell-Tale Heart and, again, The Masque of Red Death), as well as the voice acting which is very good, with a special praise going to William S. Burroughs, who alongside the visuals and music, make the slideshow sequences hit even harder, but the rest of the cast is just as good, especially when considering the time it was released, as voice acting in video games wasn't really taken seriously to begin with barring a few exceptions.

All of those things bring the stories, in this case The Cask of Amontillado, Berenice and The Tell-Tale Heart, to absolute life and make them a delight to see fully realized in a medium different from either books or movies, but the main story involving the house where the game takes place in is just as compelling and manages to be as good as the stories Poe actually wrote back then, every single one of them is very cool and the story involving Henry and Elise (and Uncle Edwin, the owner of the house) is great and when combined with everything else I mentioned before, make it even better.

Now as far as the gameplay, many people hesitate in calling this a proper game and more so a interactive story, where you have to click on things on a specific order to progress the story, it is even simpler than most point and click adventure games from the time, and here, unlike everything else, is perfectly fine, nothing spectacular and sometimes it can be rather difficult to tell what exactly you have to do to progress the story forward, but for what it is, its far eclipsed by the amazing everything else not related to it.

And that's the thing, The Dark Eye is not really something you play for its gameplay, much like other games like Gadget, you play for the experience, and its really something I actively recommend for someone if they are very into games as a art form and obscure stuff or even Edgar Allan Poe, but if you do, you should absolutely check this out, this game is one of the best examples of combining video games with other artforms outside of gaming in more direct ways, I may not like it as much as Blade Runner and Clive Barker's Undying, but I still really wish more games like this were released today.

Finally an Quake expansion that isn't only decent at best or terrible at worst, in fact this far surpassed everything that came before.

One of my main criticisms with the base game was the level design, where levels would be just a bunch of corridors with sometimes slightly more open arenas made for combat, while complementing it with annoying enemy placements that pretty much forced the game into a cover shooter, as well as the overuse of a few enemies like the Fiends, and the fact that many types of enemies have way more health than they should, which really tampered my enjoyment of the game.

Fortunately, this expansion actually does justice to what the best parts of Quake 1 are, fast-paced mayhem in open arenas with enemies that can very easily tear through you in close quarters while the player has more opportunities for maneuvering over the arena in long range battles.

Where as Dimension of the Past felt like it was indeed stuck in the past, doing a lot of what I found already bad in the base game while also introducing new problems like the overwhelmingly scarce amounts of ammo while spamming Death Knights down your throat, Dimension of the Machine feels like it took many lessons from all the very best fan levels from Quake and put it at full display in here, while pushing the engine to its absolute limits and taking full advantage of the graphical settings present in the Nightdive remaster of the game.

And speaking of that, this expansion is absolutely no slouch at art direction, and its clear from the moment you appear at the main hub! Other expansions already had some decent moments of distinct theming, like the egyptian temples of Dissolution of Eternity, but in Dimension of the Machine, as said in the previous paragraph, they absolutely ran with the capabilities of both the Quake engine and the Nightdive remaster. Every realm feels like, indeed, different realms, all being very varied while still being thematically cohesive throughout, even the Realm of the Machinists, which is comprised of SEWERS, manage to stand out in comparison to the rest of the levels present in this expansion.

The level design in general here is great (for the most part), always emphasizing map control and constant movement with wide open areas, while still having some more maze-like levels akin to the base game, but even those more tight levels are open enough to allow mach speed maneuvering through the map. But as well as that, the enemy placement is (mostly) very on point, using the potential for interesting enemy encounters to its fullest (as far as official expansions go), to the point where, while there still are a few situations where you will just be using cover to get through certain rooms, rarely suffering from the same issues from the other Quake 1 campaigns, they manage to do a lot with every single episode, which by comparison have only two levels (two extensive levels at that).

Really, my only two criticisms involve the Realm of the Stonemasons (which still incorporate some of the bad parts of the base game like the overuse of a few strong enemies and cheap traps) and the final boss, but other than that, if you liked Quake 1, then this expansion is mandatory for you to play, and even if you didn't enjoy it that much, then this still has a lot to offer that the base game didn't quite use it to its fullest due to development issues.

WARNING: This review is very spoiler heavy!

Let me quote ProudLittleSeal’s amazing review on Fallout here for a bit

“The trouble with calling something “ahead of its time” is that it implies whatever made that something so special has become standard since its release.”

Now, this quote could be applied to many games that people call “innovative” or anything synonymous with the word, look at something like Half-Life for example, many people cite its focus on actual storytelling and immersion as one of its biggest innovations for the FPS genre at the time, but one thing that people don’t mention quite as much is it’s gameplay, where instead of shooting enemies from point A to point B (while maybe solving puzzles as you go along), you go through a variety of smaller sections where gameplay can differ pretty drastically, whether it is the survival horror-esque sections inside the Black Mesa facility, or the fast-paced gunfights between you and soldiers (and the aliens later on), and then at the last few levels of the game, a mix of platforming and gunfights in the alien world of Xen (whether you think Xen is good or not it’s up to you), it’s this variety of gameplay loops that many devs still did not try to replicate after all these years that truly makes Half-Life’s gameplay alongside everything else.

Now you have read all of this and wonder:

“What does this all have to do with Arx Fatalis?”

Well, Arx Fatalis is another one of those games that are somewhat commonly called “innovative” and “ahead of its time” for many reasons, but similar to what ProudLittleSeal said about the first Fallout, very few games actually tried to do something close to Arx Fatalis, which is ironic because the game itself is clearly inspired by Ultima Underworld (Arx Fatalis was even originally going to be Ultima Underworld 3, but EA did not allow it to be Ultima Underworld 3).

And speaking of Ultima Underworld, let me stop to talk about the dreaded Immersive Simulation term, arguably one of the most misunderstood terms in all of gaming, every time a discussion that involves trying to define what does the Immersive Sim term actually means, it often ends up with people fighting to define the meaning of it, sometimes missing the actual point about the design philosophy in of itself, the main point of a Immersive Simulation is the following:

Adapting the rules of a tabletop RPG like Dungeons & Dragons, in which you can solve problems in as many ways as you can think of, while making the world behave as though it was real and you really were interacting with it

Read this for more information

Now, if we look at System Shock for example, notice how most of the rooms in the game have a bunch of furniture like chairs, cabinets, desks and all of those stuff, notice how there is a bunch of junk that serves absolutely nothing throughout the entire game like worker hats or skulls, a lot of these components are made to make Citadel Station as a place feel real and not gamey like the levels from DOOM. Heck, even look at how you engage in combat in System Shock, instead of just pressing the button to shoot, you have to point your cursor at the enemy you want to shoot and then you press the button to shoot, as with the grenades, you have to click (twice) on them to activate them, drag them out of your inventory and click at the point of the screen you want to toss the grenade at. Even the audio logs (an idea that came from Austin Grossman) were made to fix one of their biggest issues with Ultima Underworld, that being the dialogue system, in which the game paused everything to start the dialogue screen, with audio logs it was made so that you never get pulled out from Citadel Station when playing it, and the transition from Citadel Station into Cyberspace feels less like the game pulling you out of the world and more so teleporting into a different world.

Now, while Ultima Underworld and System Shock were (and still are) great games regardless at how well they execute this design philosophy compared to games released later, it is undeniable that in some aspects they are rough around the edges, mainly in terms of graphics, keyword, GRAPHICS (the art direction in System Shock is great though), since, at the time, fully tridimensional games with fully tridimensional items and character models were still not a thing, so if we look back at System Shock again, while it does have the strength of having every room look and feel as believable as it was possible at the time, the fact that the environment itself was also fully 3D (using a heavily modified version of the Ultima Underworld engine) but the enemies and items were still 2D sprites definitely makes the game, at least in terms of graphical fidelity in comparison to games that used this design philosophy to much greater effect, pretty dated.

And then, years later, there came the Dark Engine, which would take the Immersive Simulation (originally called Immersive Reality) philosophy to the next level, and it did in many ways, now that the graphics were fully tridimensional (although in some ways the graphics were outdated even for the time the first Thief game was released), the geometry of the levels could be more complex than the engine from System Shock could ever be before with further uses of verticality and such, not only that but there was more interaction with items and the environment than ever, and of course the one thing that everyone mentions about the Dark Engine when they talk about it, the usage of light and sound which could cause different reactions on NPC based on audiovisual cues like footsteps, throwing items onto the floor/wall and many more interactions with it, with no other game demonstrating it better than the Thief games, particularly The Metal Age, where the engine was used to its fullest potential.

Though the Thief games and System Shock 2 further expanded on the imagination of the Immersive Simulation design philosophy than they ever did up until this point (and up until Ion Storm released the hit Deus Ex, which knocked it out of the park the same year Thief 2 released as well), there was certainly still room for improvement and even more interesting ways to expand on the design philosophy.

And finally, that is where Arx Fatalis comes in, a game that was initially met with lukewarm response from critics and middling sales but has gathered a cult following over the years, especially after Arkane’s explosion into popularity with their hit Dishonored.

Now you might also ask me:

“Why did you waste most of your review talking about the history of the immersive sim philosophy and not actually talking about the game at hand?”

Now, if you’ve paid attention to this wall of text up until this point, you’ll notice that I gave a pretty big focus to interactivity and immersion within the game world, and how within the Dark Engine framework, they were able to excel in what they set out to do based on that image with text I linked earlier.

As with Arx Fatalis? It further doubles down on that aspect with further systems that make you engage even more with the environment, that is without ever doing anything through a menu or something, look at how you make potions in the game, you first need to use a pestle and mortar on flowers (like a Water Lily flower), and then you combine the water lily powder with a empty bottle, after that you have to use a still (and also have a certain amount of the ‘Object Knowledge’ skill unlocked to do the potion) and after that you’ve done a single potion, only by touching your inventory and a still that is seen in a few places you find through the game, like the alchemy room in Arx’s castle, another example is how you make bread, where you need to combine flour with water to make dough, and then put it on a fire (on which you can light with the spell ‘Ignite’) and BOOM, you have done bread, is that particularly useful? Not really, since there are far more effective options for healing in the game like a Life Potion or the ‘Healing’ spell, but what really does matter is that all of those subsystems make the world feel more immersive and therefore make it so that you actually feel like engaging with objects in the real world instead of just clicking through menus and such things you would do in any other game, to the point that even buying items from shopkeepers work through interacting with the inventory in chests in real time without losing control of the character you play as.

Then there is the magic system, which is the one thing everyone mentions about this game whenever it is brought up in conversation, so it might as well have an entire paragraph dedicated to it.

Instead of simply pressing a specific button for using a certain magic spell, you have to first press the ‘CTRL’ key, draw the correct runes in the correct order, and then click on any spot, and then release the ‘CTRL’ key to cast the spell, a genuinely creative magic system that, much like the cooking and alchemy systems, make the game world feel even more immersive, leading to more interesting interactions within the environment using the magic system, and truly make you feel like a actual wizard performing magic (insert IGN meme here), rather than simply pressing (or holding) a button/key to perform magic like in other RPGs or even games in general (granted you can precast up to three spells, including repeats, which will be incredibly important when dealing with a few enemies you find throughout the game), not to mention can make some fights more intense as a result (like the ones against the Lich), as you have to both pay attention to how you are drawing the runes to not mess it up but also pay attention to the enemies for them to not hit you (and boy are the Lich and Ylsides going to stomp you if you don’t manage either of these things proper), and for a game with such magic system, obviously you expect it to make you want to engage more with such, and of course it will, like using the ‘Levitate’ spell to get through the Ice Caves, and also try combining spells together (like Levitate with Speed, you get through the Ice Caves much faster at the cost of twice as much mana to do so).

Really the only issue with the magic system is that it pretty much throws a wrench on the character creation, where the magic system is such a integral part of the game that you will actively want to upgrade anything related to it and a few other skills like Close Weapons (which becomes redundant once you get to use the Fireball more often), Object Knowledge and Technical Skill, even when I was limited to not being able to use more powerful armory due to not having enough Strength, I managed to use the Ylsides armory by using Blessing and the Ciprian long sword of Force to increase my strength and be able to use the Ylside armor (doesn’t help that it also gives you more strength), something I thought was really cool admittedly. Though to be fair, what WRPGs are perfect when it comes to balancing? I mean, Planescape Torment was (and still is) critically acclaimed even for the time, yet the game pretty much forces you into only upgrading the Wisdom, Charisma and Intelligence attributes, since your companions can already do the combat job for you anyway. And at least in the case of Arx Fatalis, the game is graceful enough to give you quite a handful of spell scrolls which make you capable of using those same spells without needing to do a character focused on magic spells.

Back to Ultima Underworld and System Shock, another big part of both of these games were exploring the dungeons (or space stations) these games took place in, with a variety of nooks and crannies to find throughout both the Stygian Abyss and Citadel Station respectively, and again, while I haven’t played Ultima Underworld as of the time of writing this (yet), System Shock’s Citadel Station was really fun to explore throughout the game because of how much it rewarded exploring through the station’s multiple levels, especially with the security system which would reward you with even more powerful (at least for that stage in the game) items to help you get through levels easier, even going as far as unlocking certain upgrades that you would have unlocked much later in the game have you not explored a level of the station fully.

As for Arx Fatalis, how well does it accomplish the exploration and level design of the underground world of Arx? Damn well, the level design itself is excellent, every place feels genuinely lived in with every room feeling believable, and the way every level connects with each other feeling natural and organic, doesn’t help that every level also has a handful of hidden paths you unlock throughout the levels. Another very noteworthy aspect of the exploration is the sense of freedom you get to explore the entirety of Arx’s underground world right from the get go just after a few main quests, even some late game areas you can explore before you even need to do so like the Ylsides Bunker you need to go through to fight the final boss (though you can’t go through the Crypt until you need to do the quests involving Krahoz and Zohark), not to mention that, as mentioned before in the paragraph regarding the magic system, the Speed and Levitate spells can greatly make traversing each layer of Arx much faster when you start revisiting them more often, which you will do a lot (especially in the City of Arx and the Underground Lake), but even going through each level for the first time is really fun, especially as you discover certain things that either lead to different side quests (which there aren’t a lot, but they are still good enough), or even things you weren’t supposed to discover early on but come very in handy at later points in the game (such as when I went through the Ylside Bunker earlier on in the game and found out later on I was supposed to go there at the end of the game). There are even sublevels within a different level (like the Crypt and Temple of Akbaa), though they do suffer a bit because of the puzzles, as some of these puzzles can be a bit too difficult to do without a guide and can lead to pixel hunting (the one with the symbol stones was one I especially had difficulty with, as you have to keep wandering around to find the stones with different symbols, it took me ages to find the last remaining symbol stone), but even with that slight issue, they still have great level design and never does the levels get confusing to explore or know exactly where you are, much like the rest of the game.

Just before wrapping up on the topic of gameplay, as far as the “multiple ways of the beating certain missions” that everyone mentions when talking about Immersive Sims, they aren’t the most common thing in this game admittedly, though there are some moments where you can do something in a different way and they are really interesting, such as choosing to either buy a dragon egg from the dragon found in the Ice Caves, or fighting him to get three of the same dragon egg, or giving both Krahoz and Zohark to Alia to unlock the Shield you needed to get in the third level of the Crypt to get Krahoz earlier rather than giving both Krahoz and Zohark to their original owners (Alia and Zalnash respectively), also one very interesting observation about those moments is that none of those choices are actually done through dialogue, all of those are done in real time, when even Deus Ex had choices you needed to do via dialogue…

I could keep going and talking about how great the gameplay of Arx Fatalis is, but of course, while gameplay is the most important part of a GAME, great gameplay alone does not make it memorable enough, even the best Immersive Sims have more than just great gameplay, System Shock 2 doesn’t just have great (if flawed) gameplay, it has a terrific atmosphere, a great story (especially villains), an awesome Cronenberg-esque art direction and especially incredible sound design (and soundtrack).

And I am happy to say that in the case of Arx Fatalis it is no different! For an game that takes place entirely underground, it's very impressive how Arkane managed to make every level feel distinct from each other in multiple ways, whether it is the lively City of Arx, or the haunting and desolate industrial dwarf mines, the mythical and almost otherworldly Sisters of Edurneum Outpost and the list goes on, all of these levels feel starkly different in atmosphere from the other, as well as every level looking different in any way or another with incredible art direction and architecture, further elevated by the amazing sound design and pretty great ambient soundtrack present within the game that manages to be at the very least on par with the the first two Thief games, which really shines in areas with a more creepy and foreboding vibe to them like the aforementioned Dwarf Mines and the Crypt, where you feel much more the sound of your footsteps and general interactions with the environment combined with the creepy ambient songs found throughout those levels, contrasted with the City of Arx with a more typical Tolkienesque fantasy song to further differentiate it from the rest of the levels, heck, even the Human Outpost has a song akin to a war movie like Saving Private Ryan, seeing the consequences of the war between the humans and the Ylsides. And of course, I shall never forget the voice that plays every time you draw a rune correctly (MEGA! SPACIUM! MOVIS!).

As for the story and setting? Firstly, the setting itself is like the average western fantasy setting with all the staples you would see in any media such as Goblins, Dwarves (though they are all dead) and all that stuff (no elves for some reason though), however, the setting is made far more interesting because of its premise, where a meteor has fallen into the earth and the sun started to fade away to never be seen again, and so all the races had to work together to transfer Arx into the underground, since without the sun the surface would be completely frozen over, with only very few people being able to survive there, but of course Arx Fatalis is still no slouch at worldbuilding, with many cool aspects of the world of Arx to learn about like the races of Arx, the history of Arx, or everything related to the Noden (which obviously I won’t spoil). The plot itself is also simple, you are a man called Am Shaegar (who is kind of like JC Denton from Deus Ex somewhat) who wakes up with amnesia in the Goblin Outpost’s prison, and you have to escape the prison and after a while you have to start to do missions to manage to destroy the so called Akbaa, with a lot of twists and turns along the way, a simple plot indeed (again, you don’t really have any section with major story choices throughout the game), but that’s where the charm of the game comes from, the simplicity of it’s story and world makes it so that both the simple story and complex gameplay connect much, much better and together accomplish the task of making the world feel and behave as though it was actually real and tangible much better as well, look at System Shock 1 again, that game had a very simple story but complemented everything else about it to make as though you really were in Citadel Station, and some of the same principles apply here as well.

Now, after all of this jargon I wrote (I’ll admit that I may have wasted a bit too much time explaining what the term “Immersive Sim” means), I can confidently say that, while this game is certainly not perfect (far from it), this is an excellent game that managed to use the “Immersive Simulation” design philosophy to its fullest potential possible at the time in so many inventive new ways, and even today you don’t see that many games that matches the depth of this game in specific (or at least in the ways Arx did), like come on, how many games you have seen with an magic system similar to Arx Fatalis? This game is certainly on the same level as the other great “Immersive Sims” like Deus Ex and System Shock 2 and if you are fan of this design philosophy, you should definitely play this game at one point.

This is truly the Red of Suda51 (no pun intended)

The Angel has Red eyes

On the Sunset you find a Fallen Angel

And then you have One More Red Nightmare with the Cloudman

The Providence of God will lead you to a Encounter with a familar figure

And as you fight the Alter Ego of the Handsome Men, you see a Starless Smile from a roaring Lion in the horizon.

While at moments this was really fun, I can't help but notice the many, many issues this game has in many ways.

First of all, why the hell do I have to GRIND through many, many online matches to unlock most game modes, which is a huge problem since we are talking about a party game, and party games in general are games that you play for fun with friends, not something you would try and master for a multitude of hours, and in the process of grinding, you will have to play the same game modes over and over and over and over again, and most of the starting modes aren't even fun and are very poorly balanced, except for a few like Bomb Tag (which I thought was pretty fun). (And this is not even taking into account the mutations, then with the mutations you will have to grind twice as long to unlock everything, genuinely heinous!)

And speaking of game modes, they are a mixed bag, some are really fun such as Bomb Tag, others are bad and/or unbalanced like Fizzle Floor and Sugar Rush, and others are pretty middle of the road, but then, as said in that sentence above, there are also mutations to keep matches more varied, like, for example, a mutation where the rules of the game are reversed and instead of Move or Die it's actually Move AND Die, or another where your character starts moving slowly but then moves hyper fast. Again, like the game modes, they are a mixed bag, but more of them are leaning into the unbalanced side of things, like for example, on the one where you need to be close to someone in order to not lose HP, in the mode 'God Gun' if there are two players alive, the only way for someone to win with this mutation activated is if they get lucky and get to be the guy controlling the laser weapon at the top of the screen, else they lose, so it's now 'Get Lucky or Die' and not 'Move or Die' like the title says otherwise, this also applies to modes like Bomb Tag too, and even without mutations, some of these modes are very luck reliant for you to win, like Sugar Rush, where if the candy appears at your very side in a 1v1 scenario, you already won, where as if you spawn too far from it, you cannot win unless the other player can barely traverse the level properly, and speaking of 1v1 scenarios, some modes and mutations are borderline useless or luck is 100% the determining factor for whether you lose or win, for example, in a 2 player scenario where you get Souls, the one who doesn't get shot first will always win the mode. Well, I could go on and on but at this point you probably got the idea of what I want to say already.

So just before finishing this review, I want to also talk about how the way you host matches is pretty underwhelming, first of all, you cannot change the settings of your match once you press 'confirm', if you want to change the settings of the match, tough shit, go back to the main menu, also the settings are too simple, the only things you can really do is changing the length of the match, whether mutations are enabled or disabled, whether MODS are also enabled or disabled, and I think there is another setting I am missing right now but yeah, that is it, you can't choose to make it so only the host choose the mutations, you can't choose from every single mode you want to play in the match (only a limited selection), which I find rather disappointing, as I wanted to play this with friends and I generally host the matches.

Okay so that is it for this, I mean, do I recommend you to play this game with friends? Yeah, I guess? Just remember what I said in the first paragraph, but in comparison to other party games like Ultimate Chicken Horse or Worms Armageddon, this has one too many issues for me to ignore it, and of course this score should be based on how well it does what it sets out to do, and it does to pretty middling results.