It's a pretty solid metroidvania that's very reminiscent of Nifflas' early work like Within a Deep Forest, but doing the post-game (which is actually like 80% of gameplay) feels like the video game equivalent of playing ping pong with a boomerang.
There was a certain point in the egg hunt portion of the game where my brain was constantly replaying that Far Cry 3 Vaas quote - you know the one - on repeat, as I traversed the same fuckass dog and bear sections of the map for the billionth time, trying to see if I didn't miss some three pixels of diggable dirt.

It's a weird balance of a game that's way too short and a post-game that's way too long for its own good. You might say: "well, that's the point", and in that case, guess I'm just not the biggest fan of the idea. A big part of the game is "unpeeling the layers" or whatever, but every time I did that, it mostly just meant that I had to go through the entire map again.

That being said, I absolutely adore the art and sound design and the overall creepy atmosphere of everything. The items are a lot of fun to play with - especially the bubble wand. Really brave of a metroidvania to basically give you a free "fuck it - skip everything, break every puzzle, I dare you"-kind of item that's so easy to exploit, so early into the game.

I think Animal Well is an example of a subgenre that fundamentally does not work in games: the overly esoteric puzzler largely cracked through community-effort. These games have existed before, though they're never been overly populous, but Animal Well is a particularly egregious example of the trend.

Other games of this ilk, Fez and Void Stranger come to mind, are conceivably solvable by oneself with a lot of trial and error. Often that's what these games come down to: a "How would I know to do that?" level of ridiculous solution. This blow is softened when the effort is outsourced to a community who can work together to try everything in a fraction of the time it would take one person. How much you feel like you'd enjoy being a part of this discovery process will vary, but something is undeniable here: It only happens once. If you miss the boat on the community puzzle solving then all that exists are the solutions published across countless websites. The way these games are intended to be played has a very rapid expiration date given how the internet works, but at least these other titles can conceivably be solo'd.

Animal Well does not share that trait. There is a very in-your-face puzzle that can only be solved by networking with at least 50 other people to compare notes about the unique item in your current save. The game explicitly leans into the idea that the secrets will be solved as team; the game explicitly asks you to turn to the internet to get through it.

I bought this game a few days after release and this puzzle had already been solved. There was nothing for me to do. And hey, once I am already forced to just look up a pre-existing solution, why not do it for other puzzles? They may also require outside assistance.

It's such a baffling design decision. Animal Well will spend the vast majority of its existence as an old game. The "gameplay" portion of this puzzle is already finished and will never exist again. It dings the experience solely to facilitate the short-lived fun of a few dozen people in some Discord. Incredibly short-sighted.

And this is why I think all of the games in this niche subgenre just do not work. They all share the same issue: the nature of setting their game in a physical environment is at odds with the effort required to work through esoteric puzzles. The cost of combing through areas for hidden compartments or niche interactions with forgotten items is much higher when travel time, platforming, and being put in danger are necessitated.
The motivation to try tapping the interact button three times on every bush sprite vanishes when I have to go through the spike platform zone.

There "game" portion of the computer game becomes busy work in the way of trial and error brute force puzzle solving. Better conveyance would solve this, but of course then the puzzles themselves wouldn't be needlessly secretive. To some, it's so much more interesting to have a secret series of collectables that require setting up your printer than it is to save 12 hours time by indicating their existence. To others, it's laborious.

Without focusing on these more involved puzzles, Animal Well is simply lacking. The platforming isn't fun despite some extra, hidden techniques hidden in the game's inventory. The aesthetic is both uninspired and severely misguided; artificial scanlines are not only ugly but at-odds with the need to pore over the finer details of the map. The base game content in what has been called the first two "layers" is too short to justify the purchase.

Buy Animal Well if you enjoy looking up solutions online to feel clever about the work others have already done. Buy Animal Well if you enjoy parking your RV at a campground rather than pitching a tent in anything resembling wilderness.

Thought this was a really good game until I had spent hours trying to figure out a puzzle only to finally give up and look online for a hint and discover that there is literally no way to solve it in the game. They're all "optional" but it turns out that there's more than one puzzle requiring external resources, including one EXTREMELY visible one where the solution is meant to be obtained IN THE DISCORD as an "ARG" no one who buys the game will even know happened. And once you know this, it's simply not possible to enjoy the game because ANYTHING you haven't solved yet might actually be impossible, and the only way to know is to look it up. To be clear, I got ~90% of the hidden items before I looked anything up, but by that point i had also spent like 6 hours of my life banging my head against non-puzzles out of a total 20. If you don't want people to engage with your game as you released it, why did you bother releasing it to the public? Also another half star off because playing the flute is a nightmare user experience. This is a real unforced fuckup that could be turned into an ACTUALLY good game by just NOT including this shit.

I find this game incredibly difficult to pin down to a star rating and it might actually inspire me to ditch the stars on BL altogether.

I think I got kinda screwed with this one and my expectations of it. I knew about this game for awhile but I wasn't really interested until I saw all the comparisons to things like Outer Wilds and Tunic. I definitely understand why people make those comparisons but going in to this game thinking of those experiences really put me in the wrong frame of mind. This seriously is just a really good Metroid with some super neat ideas. It's only when you get to the discord study group required sicko third layer that the game becomes something truly mind bending and unfortunately, everyone who got early copies of the game talked about it like that was the entire experience.

The first layer of the game is really fun though! Finding your way through these areas and collecting the four flames is super rewarding, especially because the major items are so esoteric and multifaceted. There were more than a few times that I picked up a new item, thought it was completely worthless, and then realized it was so important in ways I never even considered. On top of that, you can have that sort of discovery multiple times with the same item! It's nuts!!

The main thing held me back from really falling in love with this game though was the save system. For me personally, I think the saving in this game completely fights against what makes it so special. Once you get past the credits the game becomes about collecting hidden eggs throughout the map (which feels extremely similar to collecting missed energy tanks in Metroid). I was pretty excited to dive in to this after getting to the first credits but I quickly came to the conclusion that getting around the map just felt tedious and unexciting. I constantly had the sensation of brain blasting a new idea to try out being undercut by the realization that I had to find my way back to wherever that room is. I think this would immediately be one of my top games of this year if it just had the same screen respawn from Celeste. I know that would completely ruin some bigger parts of the game but I think it could just be temporarily disabled for those sections. Once you've gotten to the egg finding portion it is just so bothersome to mess up a platforming section you've already done and be sent back to some phone that is 20 screens away.

I had a lot of frustration with this game but I always felt like I wanted to be playing it when I was away from it. When I play a game like this I think a huge draw is the narrative mystery behind the puzzles that is being chipped away it. When you play something like Tunic it always feels like you're getting closer to a revelation about its world as you get deeper in to the puzzle web it's made up of. Animal Well feels purely mechanical to me. The atmosphere is truly incredible in this. I especially love the lack of music for a lot of the game. But it took me a bit to realize that the reward for completing all of these puzzles would be more complicated puzzles. There wouldn't be some kind of eye opening moment that made me view the would world differently. It would just be different ways to look at these rooms.

And that's ok!! I want to be clear that this game is incredibly impressive and that I probably am not even capable of having a conversation with Billy Basso and his gigantus style brain. I just think it's not my flavor of whatever this genre of game is and I mostly wanted to share these thoughts because I disagree with so much of the messaging I have been seeing about it. This game is for puzzle freaks ONLY who also can put up with a lot of backtracking. I think that would have been me if there were the promise of something a bit more there along the way.

IDK tho! Part of me loves Animal Well and I think I would like to revisit it some day in the future with the right mindset.

This game is currently in the Humble Choice for April 2024, and this is part of my coverage of the bundle. If you are interested in the game and it's before May 7th, 2024, consider picking up the game as part of the current monthly bundle.

A Song of Fire Emblem and … just fire Fire Emblem.

Symphony of War starts with the main character and a friend going off to fight in a war to get a kidnapped Empress back. During that battle, they met up with people they knew when they were cadets. This is all done in the background of a large Strategy RPG where players will move their characters tactically around a map and take out units. It’s a lot like Fire Emblem, and that’s a good thing because the battle system here is solid but adds a few new tricks.

You can fill out your squad as you want, change your character’s classes to try out new things and build a larger army than the Fire Emblem games.

At the same time, this is more of a pure strategy RPG with the focus more on roleplaying and tactically maneuvering troops rather than just overpowering the enemy. The maps feel overwhelming when you first reach them but then almost feel too small once you finish them. Also, people have pointed out this has a lot of RPG Maker assets, but if that is what enables a team to make a thirty-hour or more game with a small team, the more power to them. This is a twenty-dollar title after all, not a big sixty-dollar one.

Pick this up if you like the Strategy RPG genre, this is more Fire Emblem than anything, but there’s a little bit of a feel of Advance Wars, or Wargroove as well and so far it is delivering on all cylinders. There’s an obvious turn coming but it would be worth playing more to see the story.

If you enjoyed this review or want to know what I think of other games in the bundle, check out the full review on or subscribe to my Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/8q4m_yRP5xw

Fanservice Sensory Overload

In the light of Sonic x Shadow Generations' release later this year, there's a good chance the original Generations would get delisted from Steam, so I went ahead and grabbed it as long as I still could, but waited until finishing Origins, as I wanted to see as many references as possible - wise choice!

As I've already mentioned in the opener, Sonic Generations is fanservice incarnate. Every stage present here is a reimagining of an already existing one and you're going through them in release order. Each level has two acts, with the first one always being 2D and the second one being a mixture of 3D and 2.5D - although I think it would have been better if Modern Sonic's stages were just 3D, since the 2D sections take out the speed from the levels they were built around, but also because there are cases like Planet Wisp's Act 2, where the 2D segments end up being a lot longer than the 3D ones, despite the latter being the main draw of Modern Sonic's levels. However, Classic Sonic is not all sunshine and rainbows either, as his physics feel a bit off compared to the original games, but I can turn a blind eye to this, as Generations runs on an entirely different engine. It's also worth noting that the 2D level structure generally feels a bit strange and half-baked at times, City Escape Act 1 stands out especially in that regard to me. YMMV.

In terms of presentation, Generations still looks fantastic 13 years later and is the prettiest Sonic game I've played so far. It's the type of game to leave a smile on your face as you rush through those familiar levels with newly composed remixes and experience them from a different perspective - 2D zones in 3D and the other way around. Seeing Speed Highway for the first time on the hub world gave me joy, the same can also be said for the revamped Shadow chase (good lord, that fight was messy in SA2) and the second boss in Generations. But I've already said enough, some of those surprises are just better if you see them with your own eyes.

Despite being rather short compared to the Adventure duology, Sonic Generations doesn't overstay its welcome with the main story and still has enough side content for those who want to play it a bit more. As an anniversary game, it completed its task successfully - celebrating 20 years of Sonic with a really fun time.

I Am... All Of Me.

Shadow the Hedgehog has been my favorite Sonic character ever since Sonic Adventure 2, so naturally I was looking forward to trying out the one game, where he plays the main role - despite the overall divisive reception of Shadow 2005.

That being said, you know you're in for a ride when the very first level already leaves a sour taste in your mouth. Have you ever wondered how Shadow would control like if he was constantly ice-skating? Probably not, but Shadow 2005 takes that question off your mind by providing you with physics that feel floaty and entirely different from the previous 3D games. Even with those complaints in the beginnning, everything was still tolerable enough for me to keep my motivation to a certain point, but while playing through Iron Jungle, it dawned on me that this game was infamous for a reason. The cherry on top was the Egg Breaker boss afterwards though, who should have been named Camera Breaker, cause that's all he does while Shadow is running little laps around the base in the center of the arena ad infinitum. No offense to Lava Shelter though, it was the final level on the route I played and I actually enjoyed it a good amount after the mess that the previous stage was.

Enough talk about the gameplay, as the unique way of storytelling is also a key aspect of Shadow 2005. There are unironically 326 possible routes to play and they even have their own unique names - but it doesn't change the fact that the storytelling is nonsensical in many cases. So basically there's an alignment system in the levels, which you can advance through completing certain objectives towards your alignment. If you want to be evil, do Black Doom's requests. If you want to remain neutral, just run through the level and get the Chaos Emerald. This way of storytelling is actually an interesting concept for a game like Shadow the Hedgehog, as he is this morally ambiguous character, who can be easily interpreted as a player for both sides. Depending on which objectives you complete, the selection of levels across the stage flowchart changes accordingly and I'm sure the idea is that you don't have to play the same levels twice. Quite ironic, considering you have to play through Westopolis at least ten times in order to see the true ending, all while doing the same, repetitive tasks. Considering the amount of "kill [x] amount of enemy" challenges present, it would have been nice if you weren't required to kill every single enemy in the stage. You missed one? Good luck backtracking and finding them, cause the game surely won't tell you where to search. I couldn't really bring myself to do those challenges, so I went for a run that's mostly on the neutral side, but even that required me to play arduous levels like Iron Jungle to the end. Playing it several times would not be something on my priority list, so I only played a single route and called it quits for now.

Sorry for the amount of unorganized rambling in the second half. I still had my fair share of fun with Shadow the Hedgehog, even if some of it comes from a "so bad it's good again" perspective, cause there's something about it that sticks with me here, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Either way, if I have to give the game some credit where it's due, it's for the soundtrack - the remix for Eggman's theme and the title theme "I Am... All Of Me" are both bangers.

I can give this less than a perfect 10 and what does it matter? Any less-than-immaculate rating cannot take away just how much of a consummate work of art Dark Souls is. This game’s main factors are excellent and blend together so well. The mechanics, the structure, the world-building, the lore… the stew they make together is amazing.

Back in 2011, Dark Souls showed everyone what a cohesive piece of art a video game could be and the years have not done a disservice to it. It still feels great to play, the world is captivating, and just about every little detail is worth exploring. That’s what it gets down to: just about everything here is worth examining like any other great piece of art in history.

I could mention some of its flaws like the camera can betray you at the most crucial moments or how the collision physics in the Crystal Cave are pretty bad because, hey, those criticisms are legitimate! But art is more than just weighing pros versus cons, so in case you were wondering why I could give a game like this a 9 out of 10 and then say it was one of the greatest pieces of video game art, that’s why.

THE BINDING OF ISAAC WARP ZONE: S H A R D S O F I S A A C

The Binding of Isaac Rebirth is my favorite game of all time. But what about the original, programmed in AS2 rather than C++? While I did play Rebirth first, this review series would be a bit incomplete without mentioning the original, no? Flash was made by a much smaller team than Rebirth, composed of solely Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl, with music provided by Danny B. Flash was worked on for the course of several months, but it was considerably rushed and generally unpolished, even to this day. Even then, it still attracted a large audience, even to this day, where it still gets about a hundred players daily. Is this for good reason? Perhaps Flash has something that Rebirth (and subsequent versions) don’t? Only one way to find out! So let's hop in this old ass Basement and check out what old Isaac has to offer.

Right off the bat, there's a few noticeable differences between this and Rebirth. First off, the artstyle and music. Compared to Rebirth, the game sports a hand-drawn artstyle, and a different music genre entirely, compared to Rebirth's pixel style graphics and hard Rock. In terms of graphics, Flash is just as strong, arguably stronger than its Rebirth cousin, as grotesque as ever, gore, piss, and shit all left intact. However, when it comes to the music, it's a fair bit debatable. Flash’s soundtrack goes for a more electronic style, with its music focusing more on the beat of the tracks compared to Rebirth. Meanwhile, Rebirth (and subsequent DLCs) have a very heavy focus on leitmotifs and melodies. It’s a bit of a tossup as to which one I prefer, but even though I find myself leaning towards Rebirth’s soundtrack more, Flash’s soundtrack is pretty good as well. All of these tunes are all time classics, with Repentant being my personal favorite track in the game. The boss tracks aren’t as great as Rebirth’s, but they’re still pretty banging here. The songs do feel a little short, but granted Flash’s limitations, it’s understandable. But what about the gameplay itself?

Rebirth is about the same as Flash, control-wise. You still move and shoot in four directions the same way you do as Rebirth, place bombs and use cards like you do in Rebirth. But, there's a bit of an issue… Where the fuck is the controller support? This is one of the unfortunate downsides of the game being programmed in Flash. Because Flash lacks any support of native gamepad support, you have to use a program called Joy2Key to even try to use a controller. And even then, the controls don't translate the best, because the movement isn't analog. And on that note, I found, even on a keyboard, the controls were pretty damn sensitive. Isaac instantly darts with a tap of WASD, and it feels mediocre, especially compared to Rebirth. Shooting feels just as good as possible, which is nice, but I can't help but feel the controls are just too janky for my tastes.

On the topic of gameplay and story itself, Flash still holds up pretty well, as much as Rebirth did. For a more complete gameplay overview, I highly suggest reading my Rebirth review, but the gist of the game is that “Mom tries to kill Isaac but that's not really what happens”, the player goes through randomly generated dungeons, collects items upon the way, and defeats supernatural creatures at the end of each floor before moving on. Avoiding damage is key to success, as you can achieve Devil deals which significantly power up your character. It's just as fun here as it was in Rebirth. Obviously, there's a lot less content here as there is in Rebirth, it being an older version of the beloved classic, but I really appreciated the balancing here. The game is a fair bit more difficult than Rebirth, but a lot less focus is placed on the items and more so the challenge, and it does that very well. Flash provides a consistent challenge from beginning to end, and I am all here for it. But said challenge comes at a bit of a cost, and one of the main reasons why I spring towards Rebirth rather than Flash. I love Flash, I think it's great, but where the hell is the content? Flash is a really fun game hampered by a lack of run variety, making the game become way more stale than Rebirth and future iterations. In Flash, there are a little over a hundred items, and before a Halloween Update, there were about 80, a disappointing amount compared to Rebirth's 300. And the items present at best aren't as innovative as even Rebirth’s worst. Each run is pretty similar for the most part. Find stat ups, maybe flight or one or two tear modifiers, a few useless passives, a half-decent activated item, and bam. Run’s over before you know it. Flash also suffers from a lack of synergies, another unfortunate consequence of Flash as a programming language, adding to the issues of a lack of run variety. And those issues of content don't just apply to items as well.

Flash also suffers from a lack of final bosses and floors. It's almost customary for any roguelike to have a super secret ending that's really difficult to achieve (Hell from Spelunky, Throne II in Nuclear Throne, and so on), but Flash really only has Satan to its fairly small name. And that was added in a patch, as base release simply… ended. Without any major conclusion. But Satan himself isn't really that difficult, either. A step up from previous floors, but far from difficult to get. And having him be a random spawn pre-It Lives kind of takes the oomph out of him being the “true ending”. He isn't labeled as such, but I feel that's what they were going for.

Now, with all that being said, you might be wondering why I rated Flash a 8/10. Well, that's because Flash is still a REALLY good game, just as not as good as Rebirth. Like I said at the beginning, it's still as fundamentally great as what comes after it, but I hold a heavy preference towards Rebirth. It’s a very small, yet focused game, and while I appreciate that, it really needed more content to warrant spending more than a few wins on it (in my opinion). However, almost all of my problems with it would be fixed WITH…


“Within the past grasps / All familiar faces surround / My life is rebound” - “Flash” by zeusdeegoose, Written on 4/22/24

At the end of the day, this is a very simple game and it mostly does what it sets out to do well enough. It doesn't have the purity and streamlined design of something like Geometry Dash, and yet I found Bit.Trip to be a much more enjoyable experience than Geometry Dash because it doesn't feel the need to get unplayably difficult right off the bat. On the surface, Bit.Trip feels like a pretty mid game; nothing too bad, nothing too good, it's all just... adequate.

That's not to say I didn't have any more significant issues with this game because I definitely did, but they mostly ended up being rather specific. While I found the level design to be quite good (decent use of repetition without becoming stale, interesting mix of obstacles, etc), the overarching difficulty game is rocky to say the least. In particular, level 1-11 is an absolute nightmare. It's by no means the hardest level in the game (although it is by far the longest), but placing it at the end of an introductory world filled with pretty trivial levels for the most part is just sadistic, and led to one of the most abrupt difficulty spikes I think I've experienced in gaming.

I also don't really get on with the aesthetics in this game, or how they impact the moment-to-moment gameplay. For starters, the game is so heavily pixelated that I had to learn how to read the HUD, because none of the characters looked like the letters or numbers they were supposed to. I also don't like how similar the colour pallets for the foreground and background are in large parts of this game, as it can make it very difficult to make a snap judgement as to what is a hazard in some of the more challenging levels. In fact the use of colour in general is overall poor in this game. It feels like colour could be used to convey player information (e.g. all kickable objects could be blue, all objects that need ducking under could be black, etc); the game does do this, but only with 2 or 3 of the many types of obstacle, and most of the time working out the correct way to deal with a hazard is left to educated guesswork or trial and error.

The most heinous misuse of colour though has to be with the little squares you have to use the shield for in World 3, which are coloured the same as the gold bars you are supposed to collect. The game spends 2 whole worlds conditioning you that hitting gold objects is a good thing, only to sadistically 180 at the last moment. When I'm in a flow state in this game my lizard brain is 100% in control, and it simply cannot differentiate between two small identically coloured objects in the 1/10th of a second you have to process information in the more hectic parts of this game. Honestly this feels like a deliberate choice to fuck over the player, and it's not the only one; Bit.Trip Runner also loves to have obstacles fly at you from off-screen so unreasonably quickly that the only way to deal with them is to just learn exactly where they all are. It really goes against the sense of flow and rhythm that this game can create at it's best; I think the 'haha fuck the player' attitude present in many of the early indie titles is nearly always a mis-step, but especially in a game like this where it seems completely antithetical to its specific brand of gameplay.

I think the game also hates anyone who would be interested in 100%ing it as well. If you collect all the aforementioned gold bars in a level you get a 'perfect' score for that level and a little badge for it, which is a nice reward for opting in to a bit of extra challenge. But you also get a bonus level. These bonus levels are obtusely long, deliberately awkward and incredibly uninteresting... and you need to get all the gold bars in the bonus level too to get a true perfect score on a given level and an even nicer badge. Missed one or two gold bars in the bonus level? Well then you'd better go get a perfect score in the original level again, because that's the only way to have a second go at the bonus. In a game that so heavily relies on trial and error, having such a hurdle be in the way of retrying content is just agony, and makes any effort you put into getting regular perfect scores feel completely wasted.

All this makes it sound like I hated Bit.Trip Runner, but I really didn't. At times I did (1-11 can continue to go fuck itself), but my issues with the game were mostly surmountable roadblocks rather than persistent problems. Once I learned to give up on 100% and treat this more as a memorisation game than a reactive one, I started to get a lot more out of this. I am glad to have played it, but I do think this is still one I'm going to remember more for its failings than for its successes.

It's fine.

When folks decry Super for being a blasphemous take on the tried-and-true formula of Classicvania with it's eight-directional whipping, they're absolutely justified in their thought. It takes away the strategical element that made us love the thinking person's aspect behind the careful movement. An entire sub-system becomes a complete afterthought, with them only being convenient at hyper-specific instances rather than something that was there to truly compliment our whipping prowess to help with entire courses and encounters. Taking a death becomes less threatening as losing a sub-weapon essentially turns into a very minor slap on the wrist at worst, as an empty sub-weapon box may as well had been what it felt like the entire time we had been playing.

It's an ordeal that can't be simply ignored in a self-imposed challenge like the charged mega buster in every NES era Mega Man past the third game, and you're left with Simon being able to skillfully twirl his whip better than any other Belmont before or after him. Perhaps Simon was always meant to be presented as the most headstrong and bullish of the family? Characterization through mechanics? It remains to be seen if that was the intent, or if it was supposed to be an "evolution". An evolution that no doubt would've made this entry an even bigger target of contempt, especially if the stage design would continue to fail to compliment the new system beyond smattering a few bats flying down from odd angles, and if we could still easily thwart Axe Armors from below the floor they're standing on. Luckily for all of us however, this would be the only time such a new take would be used, and instead of being a deplorable turning point for the series, it is in fact unique and now it's own experience.

A retelling of the original that shows Simon's entire journey from beyond Devil's Castle, braving the horrors that crept from the onset of the horrid manifestation of Dracula's power within what was once a peaceful forest accompanied by strings of a violin within a purple and grey console. A walk through the caves with beautiful woodwind arrangements, and mesmerizing illusions brought upon by the seventh mode conjured by unknown forces presumably under the control of the dark lord himself. The approach to familiar scenery from the beginning of our original story of the legendary quest partnered by intimidating percussion for nightmares to come. We make our way through the retold portions of Simon's tale, and upon completion hear echoes of our past one last time before we must move on to beginnings of a new generation. The slow haunting keys of an organ cue the entry of Dracula to the main stage. Simon's Theme of which signaled the entrance of the hero at the very start, returns once again at the final moment the Count is nearing his defeat to build the audience's tension to the epic conclusion of the adventure. The orchestra plays to the agonizing death of the villain, and rings in daylight's victory over the darkness.

The fabled saga, retold and reimagined with added flare of chilling drama and suspense. Not to replace the original, but to remember it through a more cinematic lens. Forever immortal.