not a poorly crafted experience in any sense and i'm sure theres a lot here i lacked the generosity to find but i felt like i could completely visualize the creators' concept and reference stack with such exact clarity that it became distracting:

femininely morose akihiko yoshida and ayami kojima art/
lilting twinklechoral keichi okabe-wave ost/
vanillaware storybook Spine animations/
folklore character collection combat/
soulstroidvania wielding its genre structure of labyrinthine sparseness to spin a ludically obvious yarn about seeking ~ absolution amidst decay ~

-- and I had to uninstall because the returns are so diminished for me at this point and it was genuinely making me sad that such a clear and passionate labor of love could feel so utterly taxonomizable and consumed by its own clockably interrelated references

at this point idk its just kind of upsetting to play something with such a rigorous and dogmatic commitment to its reference material that doesnt seem to extend very far beyond the world of games themselves, even if said games are all things i find personally beautiful and worth emulating. felt like a very workmanlike and glossy medley of touchstones from works that clearly moved the creators--but executed in a sort of surface way that belies their inability to cogently, personally express how said works resonated beyond mere facsimile. no judgies girl i relate and its why i havent reliably maintained any true semblance of a dedicated art practice for years!!!

tldr; i saw myself in this and i didnt like it

The first 2-3 hours of inscryption are wonderful. A creepy, thoroughly atmospheric dive in this weird, creepy card game, played in a small little cabin against some weird guy who pantomines the parts of the bosses and kills you with a camera at the end. There's so many little touches in this part, and coming off the table and solving all the little puzzles of the cabin with an aim to escape/win, its awesome. There's a great occult, macabre vibe to it all, and then it all comes together for a neat resolution as you and your talking cards hatch a plan.

Its sad for me to say that whilst it would have been dissapointing in it's own right, the game would have been better stopping right there. It would have left me wanting way, way more and the game would come out at about an hour and a half long, but that's a better world than the one we live in.

Because Inscryption really just could not help itself from going down the creepypasta meta rabbit hole for the latter two thirds of it's runtime. It's not as bad as the dev's previous game Pony Island and is presented pretty well, but is ultimately just way less endearing and interesting than the first act.

Sadly the game also gets less mechanically interesting. Part of this is definetly a psychological element - i'm less interested in getting into the minutae of the mechanics when its obvious the game's now committed to throwing the baby out with the bathwater every 20 minutes, but I also think there's an elegance to the creature sacrifice emphasis of the first act that nothing that comes after comes close to matching.

I understand there is meant to be a point to this, at least somewhat, as the soulful roleplay-driven gameplay gives way to more mechanically deep or whatever gameplay, but I do think it just falls flat and the non-card gameplay of the latter sections are particularly weak in comparison.

And the story? It's thankfully told with fantastic production values and editing and is pretty well paced, and pulls those good old 4th wall meta game tricks which honestly im a bit tired of by now even if they're very cute in this one. But it's just really not interesting and there's not really much more to it than Sonic.exe at the end of the day. It's well told and the presentation is outright incredible throughout, but on a personal level it's really just where I wish the story didn't go after such an incredible opening.

It also really drags near the end. The final section prior to the ending is way too fucking long and not much even happens in the story. If it didn't so blatantly feel like a "final act" I probably would have dropped it about halfway through.

So yeah, if I stopped playing the game after 2 hours the score here would probably be a 4.5/5, maybe even a 5 if i was feeling particularly generous. And it's not like the rest of the game is offensively bad or anything, it's just profoundly dissapointing, especially in the light of what's clearly a mountain of effort and attention to detail that's gone into it that feels in service of completely the wrong way for the game to go.

Inscryption truly took me down the rabbit hole. I wish it didn't bother.

This is my favorite of the "Indie horror game that becomes absurdly popular with 12 and unders" genre because while most others at least try to be scary, this one's such a blatant shitpost you can't really take it seriously. One of the enemy characters is literally a random broom from the devs closet because they realized "oh shit, i didn't design the janitor enemy and the game jam ends tomorrow let me just take a picture of this" and now i look up the broom in google images and people are drawing tons of "human versions" of the character that make him look like a himbo and it's very bizarre.

One of the most insane, yet purposeful, interesting, and empathetic meta narratives I’ve ever experienced.

Despite the game being a bit sluggish and laborious at times, OneShot is ironically able to cover a wide variety of themes in it’s short run time. Those of which not only serve to create surprisingly impactful emotional/intellectual conflicts in the players brain, but to also deliver an impressive commentary on our humanity and its relationship with fictional narratives.

Although nothing in the game, nothing in fiction may be real, we are capable of giving it life through our emotions and memories. We live through fiction, and fiction lives through us.

playing the demo for babylon's fall is a bit like watching the slow-motion death of video games occurring before your eyes. this miserable game, limping onto store shelves covered in the wounds of a visibly disastrous development cycle, is only able to offer a substantially slower, less responsive version of the combat system of a game from 2017, deliberately stripped back and wounded in order to accommodate a miserly loot grind that actively makes the game worse in order to sell to you a season pass, a battle pass, and a daily treadmill running endlessly towards a carrot labelled "the prospect that this game might eventually be fun" kept forever out of reach. it's not just a bad videogame, it's a game deliberately made worse, stripped of all potential to be good, in order to try to sucker more money and time out of you.

this is the kind of game that platinum's ceo wants to be making rather than the by-most-accounts very good Sol Cresta. what the actual fuck is going on at this company. someday there's going to be a tell-all documentary about what was going on behind the scenes at Platinum in the past decade or so and it will be one billion times more entertaining than this dreck