weirdly the complete antithesis of what mcgee was going for in the sequel,, the sequel is bright and colorful but ultimately dour and overly dark in tone and story. this is one of the most dark looking games ive ever played and the map layouts for each level are so utterly confounding and disorienting, a labyrinthine hell constructed by others specifically for u to suffer during. the first is a game about growth and progression, forgiveness and regret and the pain that comes w both, the sequel is concerned w regression and ig I just don’t vibe w that as much. this belongs more to an era of game design like max payne or rule of rose where ur small and the world is big and there’s plenty of ppl who don’t want you to exist within it. the structure of every world is chaotic and dizzying and scary! I love some of the weirdo imagery the enemies can conjure up like the flying bomb dropping bugs that seem almost military like.

there’s so much being said here even w like v minimal actual words being said,, alice herself conveys sm through grunts and screams it’s actually kind of wild. a simple jump to a ledge sounds blood cur-tingling and filled w anger + desperation. idk to see her suffer so often and in such extreme ways and come out the other side (at least for this game) a better and more whole person is rlly fucking fulfilling and satisfying to experience.

part of me wishes there was a third game and a better ending to both alice the character and the series, but also I realize that this series obv took a lot out of mcgee and was coming from a place that’s maybe better left sitting dormant for his own mental health. he seems kind of happy as a retired old guy living in shanghai that’s left behind a wealth of art that means a lot to a lot of ppl and now just makes emo plushes that while don’t mean rlly anything to me obv mean something to enough ppl. I think that’s nice ^_^

Take “boomer shooter” out of your vocabulary; the term has been rendered meaningless.

I knew this entire little sub-genre of first-person shooters was cooked the second that the joint advertising teams of Games Workshop and Focus Entertainment all came to the conclusion that “boomer shooter” is a marketable enough selling point to tie your multi-million dollar IP to. If, indeed, it ever did mean something, it doesn’t anymore. What a boomer shooter is, in a post-Boltgun world, is “a shooter with pixel graphics”. That’s all. And if that’s all that it was — just a Doom Eternal demake — that would be forgivable. But the reality is that Boltgun is a completely miserable experience made by people who have zero fucking clue what they’re doing, chasing after trends without so much as an inkling of understanding as to why those trends are popular in the first place. Sure, fuck it. The new Doom games are gory shooters. Throwback games made popular by studios like New Blood seem to sell well. All we need to do is put the two together, boom! Free money! Paint it all in space marines and warp and chaos and we’ll be billionaires before breakfast tomorrow. How hard could it be?

I can’t fucking stand Boltgun. For some ungodly reason, someone in charge decided that the best people to put to work on a first-person shooter would be a crack team of board game and strategy developers from Auroch Digital, all of them completely unqualified to get to work on a project such as this. Consider this your first warning sign, long before you even boot up the game; why would Focus hire out to the studio behind Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics and Beermaster: Beer Brewing Simulator to make what’s intended to be a fast, brutal, tightly-paced shooter? Is it because they genuinely believed that these were the best people for the job, or was it because some tiny management-game studio from Bristol wasn’t asking for as much money as the next guys who knew what they were doing? I don’t blame Auroch, necessarily; I know what it’s like to be way in over my head under the guidance of a boss who doesn’t know enough to understand how badly I’m fucking up.

Boltgun is a game of numbers, and not of much else. “Suit your weapon’s strength to an enemy’s toughness rating,” reads one particularly cheery loading screen tip. As requested, I take aim at a Level 3 Nurgling with my STR 5 Boltgun, and the taste of bile in the back of my throat gets harder to ignore. Locking your reticle on an enemy will give you every detail about them you could ever want to know: their name, their level, total health, current health, social security number, bank password, browser history, the works. You swap between the weapons on your hotbar and each of them tells you the exact strength and name of the equipped gun: STR 4 Boltgun, STR 3 Meltagun, STR 7 Plasma Gun. Poke around levels for long enough and you’ll find secret pickups that’ll boost the power of your weapons, adding all sorts of little tags like “Kraken Round Magazine” and “Dragonfire Round Magazine” or “Machine Spirit Upgrade”. Your HUD gets flooded with all of these details, paradoxically taking up so much space on the screen that it’s near-impossible to read any of it. One pressing question remains, throughout all of this:

Why?

What do we gain from having all of this worthless fucking information on the screen at all times? Seriously, what the fuck is the point? I don’t need to know the enemy’s level. I don’t need to know exactly how much health they have. I don’t need to know a numerical value for how strong my weapons are. I don’t need to know what type of ammo I’ve got loaded into my boltgun. I don’t need to know the maximum amount of health that an enemy could theoretically have. I don’t fucking need any of this. How are you getting lapped in your UI design by the original Doom, a game that came out three fucking decades ago and realized then that you didn’t need to tell the player all of this completely fucking worthless information? If you didn’t know before playing that Auroch were strategy game developers and not people who make shooters, this is what gives it away; such a fucking obsession with showing numbers to the player in a situation where they’re worse than useless.

And none of this would matter, really, if the game were fun. If this was all just pointless, ignorable set-dressing for a game that otherwise works fine, then I could forgive it. I can’t, though, because Boltgun commits the mortal sin of being abjectly fucking boring. This might be one of the most pathetically easy games I’ve ever played, even with the difficulty cranked as high as it can go. Enemies feel like they’re shooting at you only as a formality, firing projectiles that move in slow-motion across the screen that’ll land in a different zip code so long as you strafe left. This is true for just about every enemy that can fire something at you. All of them are so sluggish that it’s as if they’re only pulling the trigger at you because they’d get fired and lose their health insurance if they didn’t. The flamers might be one of the most unintentionally hilarious monsters I’ve ever seen in a game like this; I think doctors test for brain activity by whether or not you’ve ever taken a hit from a fireball a flamer has thrown at you. You could only ever get clipped if you were comatose. Exterminatus difficulty does seem to make projectiles go a bit faster, and spawns more numerous and more powerful enemies, but I imagine most people who have played a game before could do most of this in their sleep. Not because they’re god gamers, but because Boltgun never stops drowning the player in goodies.

Pickups are peppered fucking everywhere in all of these over-long levels, littering the floor with every single type of ammo, every single grenade, and more health and armor kits than anyone could ever possibly need. There’s a section on the right side of the screen dedicated to telling you which pickups you got, and you should get used to seeing it be filled with nothing but “Boltgun ammo full, Boltgun ammo full, Heavy bolter ammo full, Krak grenade full, Health full, Health full, Health full, Boltgun ammo full, Plasma gun ammo full, Health full, Heavy bolter ammo full, Shotgun ammo full, Health full”. Outside of Exterminatus difficulty, I don’t think you ever even need to switch weapons; you get so much ammo for every single gun that you’ll never get so much as an opportunity to run a weapon dry. Armor needs to drain to zero before enemies can start dealing direct health damage, and armor caps out at 300(!!!!!), meaning you’ll always have plenty of +100 health kits to backtrack for in the unlikely situation that your foes manage to break through your 300 armor and get to your 200 health. I walked out of every stage with more supplies than I walked into them with, even after certain stages would force me into a minimum of four purges before I was allowed to move on.

In addition to your usually loop of finding color-coded keys and unlocking color-coded doors, Boltgun takes a page from the new Doom titles with the purge mechanic, where all of the doors lock and you aren’t allowed to progress until you’ve killed everything inside. New enemies will constantly spawn in, so it’s mostly just an exercise in strafing around and firing at the teleport particle effects. Enemies spawn in slowly, and the purge arenas are often big enough that you’ll be running around trying to find where the fucking enemies actually are so you can shoot them and progress. A big part of what makes these encounters so slow is that enemies spawn in waves, where more of them refuse to teleport in until you’ve killed everything from the first wave; there’ll be some shit gunner who dies in three shots from the Boltgun meandering around two continents away, and it’s up to you to go and find him so that you can get the momentum going again. There’s no challenge, there’s no pressure, it’s just blindly wandering through these enormous arenas trying to figure out if everyone else went home and didn’t tell you.

A part of me is grateful that this is on Game Pass, because it means that I didn’t need to spend a cent of my own money beyond what I was already paying to find out how atrocious this really is. The other part of me is annoyed, because I never would have bothered trying this out had it not been offered to me as part of a package deal. The only thing it cost me was my time; the one resource I can never get more of. What a complete and utter waste. You know a game is really bad when it ignites the flames of existential dread. There were so many better things I could have done with my time, and I instead allowed this game made and marketed by clueless people to suck it all away and leave me with a taste in my mouth like I ate two servings of dirt. The bar for Warhammer games is on the fucking floor. Do yourself a favor and try to forget that this even exists. I’m sorry for writing this review and reminding you of it if you’d gotten it out of your mind.

I can offer no greater condemnation than by stating that this is a sprite-based game with vertical mouselook.

essentially the video game equivalent of that one south park production story about how trey and matt made an entire episode centered around baseball just bc they thought the idea of the cast in baseball uniforms was cute. princess peach as a cowgirl or a pastry chef is rlly rlly cute and it does kind of seem like the devs and artists behind this came up w cute looks for peach before actually designing the levels or their structure,,, and that’s perfectly fine w me lolol. idk obsessed w how often mario games mess w artifice and play in rlly cool ways,, possibly some of the better meta design elements in pop-game philosophy. cool stuff I love tonya harding princess peach,,, apjvff Ass game

personally I think more games should be eight hours long and allow u to wear cowprint dress and also only use one action button idk !!

"Some horror compilation. Trash."

Oh, man. I said in my earlier review for Observation that I thought No Code had a serious shot at making a good Silent Hill game, and I meant it. After playing Stories Untold, I'm not so confident. The only saving grace here is that this is the older of the two works — Observation came out three years after Stories Untold, and it remains the most recent title they have out — but this is really bad. This is the psychological horror equivalent of when someone tries to guess what you're about to say before you've finished saying it, and they guess wrong. And that first wrong guess doesn't shame them enough for them to shut the fuck up, so they keep interrupting you with more guesses, and they keep getting it wrong. They don't have a clue what they're doing, like human autocomplete. The protagonist's repressed guilt over the murder of a loved one causes them to spiral deep into torment, going through a series of nightmarish trials where they — hold on a second, what did you say the protagonist's name was? James? Oh, No Code, Silent Hill 2 already handed me this assignment back in 2001. You copied off of Team Silent's homework, didn't you? No wonder Konami gave you the license; who better to hire for their long-running franchise than fangame developers?

It's not especially clear until you've got the benefit of hindsight from the following chapters, but the first act of the game started out as a standalone piece. It was not original to this, nor was it intended to be the start of the compilation; it was made for a Ludum Dare as its own self-contained work, and then forced into this as act one of the compilation. It's...not great, mechanically, but it spends most of its time setting up a story that promises to be interesting. The entire sequence is done as a text adventure, where the actual "text adventure" part is happening through an in-universe computer. The text parser is kind of shit. This section — the whole game, with its obvious Stranger Things trappings — is going for this late-80s style, yet the parser itself is dumber than anything that was coming out around that time. Forcing you to type "look around" rather than just "look" to get the layout of an area is a fairly obvious misfire, as is the obscenely slow crawling text that you have to re-read every single time you visit a room you've already been to. It's got a pretty limp ending, but everything up until then is at least neat. The lights flickering when you turn on the generator in the text adventure, the alarm clock blaring, the door swinging open; it's all very neat.

Act two kicks off with something that almost always engages me — fiddling around with unfamiliar machines — but every function of every device is given to you from the outset, along with their exact positions in the stack. You don't need to find anything nor experiment at all because it's all very clearly labeled and set out, and you're just following instructions as written. Turn the dial to 10, punch in a few numbers on this keypad, flip this switch. It all plays itself, which is an exceptionally boring way to handle a gameplay concept that I usually enjoy. I've played this exact game but better in Nauticrawl, in Unsorted Horror — this is just boring. It isn't long before the object you're experimenting on breaks free and starts strobing a red light in your face that you have to keep looking at to solve the final puzzle of the section. You just stare at it and it strobes a light at you with symbols in it and you reenter the symbols into a computer. I don't have epilepsy, but this seriously fucking hurt my eyes; I think anyone with photosensitivity might actually have a seizure off the back of this. It's ridiculous.

The third section is where things really take a headfirst dive into an empty swimming pool. What you're meant to be doing is simple — turn in to a radio frequency, get a code, cite the manual to find out what you do with that code — but the manual itself is provided on microfilm. Not an inherent issue, but Stories Untold refuses to ever give you a straight look at any of the computer monitors in the game, which means the monitor with the microfilm on it only takes up about a third of the screen. You can manually look closer in by holding down right mouse, but this doesn't help much. You can get the monitor to (mostly) fill the screen, but the actual important text is written in an incredibly tiny, smudgy font that makes it near impossible to tell what the fuck the actual instruction is. If you manage to accidentally stumble into the microfilm monitor's additional zoom function, your reward is that you can now tell what you're meant to be typing into the terminal without needing to squint at your screen. The tiny text serves as the only barrier for execution, and what's left serves instead to be pure, rote copying; punch in the not-Unix commands as written and hit enter. Repeat until credits. You're doing data entry while poorly-acted characters fake-shout in your ear about how confused they are in a tone like they're afraid they might wake their parents in the next room. This isn't tense. This is a day at the office. Actually, a day at the office is more tense, because it has stakes and isn't all just a coma dream.

Of course the final act reveal is that it was all a fucking dream. Jesus. What else could it be? What more were you expecting? James was in a coma all along because he got drunk, crashed his car, killed his sister, and then planted a whiskey bottle on the cop he crashed into. It's one of those reveals where they walk you back through every single hint they ever gave, and yeah, I suppose it makes sense, but that doesn't make it a satisfying conclusion. You know what I like in my horror stories? When they're all completely rational, completely based in reality, and completely justified to the audience before they end. I've long been an advocate for films inserting a ten-minute ENDING EXPLAINED video between the last shot of the movie and the credits, so I'm glad that No Code decided to oblige me and adopt this framework for their game.

When the credits roll, the "this is a work of fiction" disclaimer refers to this game as a "motion picture" rather than a game. I thought this was playing into the reveal that Stories Untold is meant to be a TV show in-universe, but the final credits of the game after our protagonist comes back to reality still call this a motion picture. It's literally the final paragraph of text before you're kicked back to the main menu. Mr. Cage is on the phone, and he's fucking pissed. He says someone's trying to tread on his territory.

The only real redeeming factor of this project is that it isn't the newest thing they've done. If I had played this before Observation, there isn't a chance I would have ever played that game. Let's just hope this is a single misstep in what's otherwise going to be a fruitful company history from here on out; if Observation was just a lucky fluke, Silent Hill Townfall will be an especially brutal failure.

Shooting for the Stranger Things aesthetic made this dated from the exact second it dropped.

This is what they were crunching for?

The Callisto Protocol is a man drowning. He’s been swept out by the tides deeper than he can swim, and now I feel compelled to go and be the one who drags him back to shore. I’m not looking forward to it as I swim out there. This always ends badly. I know he’ll kick, and flail, and panic, and drag me under with him. But something compels me. I dip beneath the waves, gliding on the current. Every kick is met only with more water, never ground; it’s been a while since either of us has been able to touch bottom. I get to the man. All of the dread that I felt swimming up to him — the growing pit in my stomach warning me that he’d kill us both — fades as I get a hold of him. He’s calm. He doesn’t fight. He wants to be rescued, and he's coherent enough to tell me as much. So much worry on my end, and for nothing. We’re both going home, and my doubts were unfounded. The two of us make our way back to the shallows, and my heart swells. Nobody’s gonna believe this. I get to be the one who brings back the guy that everyone thought couldn't be saved.

We make it from the depths to a point where the ocean reaches our shins, at which point the man panics and submerges my head in about two feet of water until we both die. I knew I should have let the fucker drown.

What we’re looking at here is a bad start that leads into a remarkably strong middle, hitting an impressive stride just in time to trip and break both legs three hours before the finish line. But that middle section is good. It’s really good. It’s so good that I was ready to come in here and lord a massively inflated score over the heads of all of the doubters who didn’t get it. Reality hits hard when it hits, though, and there’s no denying that The Callisto Protocol just runs out at the end. It runs out of ideas, it runs out of money, it runs out of employee morale — it runs dry and it runs empty until the engine shears itself in half.

This is pretty, but a game "being pretty" hasn't impressed me for fifteen years now. Everything since the early-mid 2010s has given me this shrug-your-shoulders feeling of "yeah, I guess it looks good" and spurred little in me beyond that. I know it's a tired truism to trot out — "art direction is more important that graphical fidelity!", as if we don't all know that already — but even games from that era that were trying to look as realistic as the latest titles don't read as being all that different to me today. Honestly, I think the face-scan mocap shit that's everywhere in AAA games these days looks kind of bad; they're all sitting deep in that uncanny valley where everyone's head looks like it's got a video of the actor's face wrapped around it. Even with (perhaps due to an overreliance upon) all of the tech in place, some of these animations look incredibly bad. Here's a shot of Josh Duhamel's character screaming in agony as he gets an implant stuffed in his neck that hurts so bad that he has a heart attack and dies. It's silly. This is not an expression of pain. He's making a YouTube thumbnail face. Fuck, the source of that image is a YouTube thumbnail.

So, yes, this is all very technically impressive, but in practice it's all just bloom and haze and fog and I can't fucking see any of it because someone turned all the lights off. None of this sparks joy. Everything is gray and bland and devoid of life. There's nothing that even remotely scratches at iconic Dead Space setpieces like the Church of Unitology or the cryopod rooms, because the art direction on display is kind of shit. It's a just-so approximation of enough of Dead Space's elements to provoke familiarity, but it's off in a way that betrays the fact that Visceral was a team made up of a lot more people than just Glen Schofield. He isn't Visceral, and this isn't a spiritual successor to Dead Space. It's a spiritual regression.

But as desperately as this wants to stay latched to the teat of Dead Space, it isn't open to those who want the game to be Dead Space. This is a melee-focused system based around dodging, combos, and environment kills; Dead Space is a shooter based around positioning, dismemberment, and, uh, also environment kills. You've gotta meet The Callisto Protocol on its own terms; playing it like Dead Space is a losing position. You should be doing this for everything you consume, by the way. Don't try and cram a work you don't like into a box that doesn't fit it. Play the game that they designed, not the one you wish they'd designed. It took a little readjusting over the course of the entire opening hour of The Callisto Protocol, but I eventually came to understand what it was going for, how it wanted to be played. And I liked it.

Actually, I really liked it.

Combat is simple, but raw enough to be really satisfying once you get the loops figured out. Each fight will take place either as a gauntlet of enemies that pour out one after the other, or as group battles where you'll be caught between three or four monsters at a time. It's a game of dodging, waiting out the combos, finding an opportunity to strike, and then going all-out until you're forced to stop. Weave around a three-hit combo, dole out one of your own that takes the arm off of a monster, get whipped around by another, block his strike, take his legs out, get shoved, pop one with the new space you've been given; it's a wonderful little system that isn't hard to come to grips with, but is punishing enough to mean that eating a bad hit or two will send you back to your last checkpoint. The added complexity comes in the form of your GRP (pronounced as "grip") and your guns, though you'll be rocking with the starting magnum for the vast majority of the game. The GRP can pick up enemies and hazards to toss them around, and your guns are your combo enders. You can also open with gunfire if you've got some distance on the monsters; they've gotta come to you, so you can filter a group down a chokepoint and take one of them out before you're forced to rely on the melee to take you the rest of the way. Combo-ender gunshots can sever limbs, decapitate enemies, force staggers to open up rushdown opportunities, and generally just act as a major force-multiplier to make sure a crowd of monsters is never unmanageable. If you're thinking that this sounds like it's not really a system primed for a horror game, you'd be right. The Callisto Protocol sucks dick at being a horror game. As an action game, though — much like big brother Dead Space — I thought it was great.

Eventually, you'll progress to a point in the narrative where hitting the monsters for long enough will make worms rupture from their body. These worms need to be shot within a fairly tight window of time, or else they'll cause the monster in question to undergo a transformation that makes them bigger, stronger, and faster. You really do not want to let the worms make the monsters evolve. In theory, this is an interesting escalation — you can't afford to drag fights out the way that you could earlier — but as we've seen throughout this write-up, theory is distinct from practice.

In practice, the worms will always erupt from the same place; the generic guys who smack you around will have them erupt from their guts, and the spitters will have them erupt from their heads. These are the primary enemy types that you'll be fighting against for the overwhelming majority of your playthrough, so combat encounters go from frenetic punch-ups where you're desperately trying to make the right call to something that's solved by a flowchart: three or four hits always followed by a gut shot or a head shot, rinse and repeat. There's basically no reason to ever open up by firing your gun now that enemies can heal by evolving, which leaves you the options to fling the enemies with your gravity glove and hurt them a little bit, or to swing at them with the baton. The baton expends no resources, is fast, is always guaranteed to connect, is a safe option, and will open up enemies for the instakill gut/head shot in no time at all. So many tools, and no reason to use any of them besides the fucking stick. Everything was useful only two hours prior, so being boxed in to what's obviously an optimal strategy to repeat on every single monster serves only to squander a system that was working just fine before.

Where things really fall apart, however, is in the third act. Jacob, our protagonist, falls down a gutter or some shit into an underground area where all of the enemies are blind. They've got super-hearing, but they can't see. Firing a shot or swinging at one with your baton may as well spare you the ceremony of kicking off a fight and just reload your checkpoint the second you press the button; you'll get swarmed by too many monsters to deal with, and they'll chew through every resource you have before they kill you. What you have to do instead is pull a page from Joel Thelastofus's book and crouch-walk around while shivving these clicker expys to death. Unlike in The Last of Us, however, the shiv that you get has infinite uses, meaning that you can very easily just crouch-walk around and kill everything without alerting a single enemy. This is optimal. They don't hear you shivving them, even as Jacob grunts and growls and the monsters gurgle and shriek, and there's no reason to sneak past them; they still drop ammo and money and health packs just the same as everything else. If you could just blast your way through this section, it'd be over in thirty minutes; instead, you have to play the most boring stealth section ever devised by human hands and it takes upwards of two and a half hours.

You get back to the regular action combat in time for the game to end, but the damage is more than done at that point. You fight the exact same boss four times in the span of an hour, and his pattern is literally just doing right-hand swings. You hold left on the control stick and auto-dodge everything while shooting him once per dodge. It's so boring. I knew while I was going through the ridiculously long stealth segment that they were padding for time, but repeating the same boss fight four fucking times really gives it away to anyone who wasn't paying attention that they were running on empty. I went from itching for more in the middle act to wishing it would just hurry up and end by the start of the finale.

Jacob gets to the escape pods, meets a zombie warden who's managed to keep his personality (generic asshole), and then the zombie warden does the Resident Evil boss thing where he talks about having superior genetics and then turns into a big meat monster with glowing orange eyeball weakpoints. I'll take the opportunity now to point out that this game was written by two people. The lead writer has never worked on anything else in his entire life. There were five times as many employees dedicated to the face scanning as there were on the writing team. Remember that the facescanning looks like shit, so adjust your expectations for the quality of the writing accordingly. Whatever. Nobody was ever playing this for the story. It's still a weird choice for a game like this, though; with everything being told to you through audio logs and exposition from characters who have a clue what's going on, you'd think you'd want more hands on deck. Then again, the only thing anyone ever seems to say is "Jacob, go to [the place], I'll explain later", so you probably don't need to put too much effort into putting that together.

But my mind keeps wandering back to the thought that the people at Striking Distance were working twelve hour days, seven days a week — and for what? What about The Callisto Protocol demanded such brutal hours for such a long stretch of development? I can't find anything in the time leading up to the game's release that would indicate what was sucking up so many resources; all I've come up with are some vague gestures towards "new lighting techniques" and "haptic feedback", all incidentals that barely add much of anything to a work that's remarkably standard. This cost $160 million to Dead Space 2's 60 million and it looks and plays worse.

There’s an excellent game within The Callisto Protocol, and one that I imagine would have been able to flourish if made under the banner of someone who actually had a clue. Literally all it takes to turn this from mediocre to great is a better manager. Talented people were overworked and underpaid to make something that broadly isn’t good, but shines in parts; had they been treated properly and overseen by a real leader instead of an MBA meathead who stepped down the second shit got hot, they would have made something that could actually eat Dead Space’s lunch. Instead, we got this, and it’s begging for Dead Space’s scraps.

Glen Schofield can go fuck himself.

Crusader Kings 2 was shat out into the world about 12 years ago. By the time its successor came out it'd developed a reputation as a game that was barebones without any DLC but was a gripping and indepth time-abyss if you had most/all of it.

Crusader Kings 3 decides to iterate on its predecessor by being a game that's barebones without any DLC, and still barebones even with all the extortionately overpriced DLC.

It is an inevitability in first-party Paradox titles that the player will eventually stumble into a period of empty space where all they're doing is advancing time at 5x speed until some events pop up and let you do something. Even Stellaris, the game that most often has you actively doing things, tends to fall into it at some point.

CK3 is sadly the worst for it, in part due to numerous under-the-hood changes that at first seem beneficial but in reality seem drab. Paradox's approach this time round involves dissuading players from attempting to colour the map as in past games and instead focus on a small corner of the world - whether it be a kingdom or an Empire, they don't want you playing with adult colouring books this time.

Instead the focus this time is on roleplay and/or kingdom management, with hefty penalties to expansion and harsh limits on how much you as an individual can control directly before needing to shove things onto your vassals. The game, including its tutorials, not-so-subtly nudge you into grabbing hold of a title and clinging to it. New and reworked mechanics like culture/religion/councils/language and more with DLCs all add to this; the focus of this game is in finding a place and staying there.

Unfortunately this focus results in a lot of waiting, as almost all of the mechanics up above boil down to clicking a button and waiting for a scheme to resolve. The much-praised Tours & Tournaments and Royal Court DLCs are much the same despite their praise, simply offering you more buttons before the wait begins rather than just one. It's all rather at odds with the intent to make you more actively partake in your realm's management, because in practice it's all very passive.
Further dulling matters is that many events often boil down to very static, very predictable stat checks. Oh, someone's trying to murder your son - who is 9th in line to the throne and has more defects than limbs? It's just a passive intrigue and scheme power check. Duelling? Martial and Prowess stats.
Much of these additional stats like Prowess were added to make the game less binary, but given how they scale it's relatively easy to stack the deck in your favour unless you gimp yourself...

But even then, this game's biggest problem is that it's easy. Metagaming is no longer required to stack ridiculous bonuses in your court, especially given the relative prominence of random lowborn courtiers with insane stat spreads. CK3 tries its damndest to have consequences for this, but what use is a hit to your legitimacy when you can pump out children that're functionally immune to rebellion, assassination, or the perils of inbreeding?
The DLCs just make this worse, as most of them are nearly consequence-free. Tours & Tournaments is a series of easy resource/stat boosts for relatively low risk, Royal Court is the same and both of them make socializing so much easier. Northern Lords supercharges a lot of the northern factions, and-

You know, CK2 had a bit of a problem with Eurocentrism, to the point where most non-European factions needed a paid DLC to be playable. Even then, it was almost always the titular Crusader King nations/cultures that got all of the updates and boosts.

CK3 seemingly averts this by having everyone on the map be playable, but it doesn't take a genius to notice that the non-European factions feel distinctly undercooked. Muslims can't even observe Ramadan. As expected from a CK title, Paradox sell the fixes back to you via Fate of Iberia and Legacy of Persia, but even these feel half-hearted and empty compared to equivalent CK2 packs. Go even further East and it's like wading into unfinished content.

I think what really broke this game for me is the lack of impact anything has. The first time a council member blackmails you with your own incest/kinslaying, it seems like a grand obstacle to be surmounted, but oftentimes it's a total non-issue. In my most recent game, everyone and their mum tried to expose me for pulling a Habsburg on my bloodline, but the end result was a few minor opinion penalties that were easily swept away by holding a Grand Wedding. It feels a lot like playing a mod for CK2 that's perpetually in beta; wowed by all the options available until they fire and you realize that you've functionally just skipped a stone across bathwater.

...Also I realized halfway into my conquest of Britannia as the Irish that the devs had forced a Legitimacy mechanic on me and that I couldn't meaningfully engage with it without forking out money for the recent Legends Of The Dead pack. Hurray!

The best way to experience this game is to read people's (probably made up) campaign stories on Reddit, for much of this game's remaining appeal is in doing stupid shit like banging the pope, and for once that's attainable without touching the game.

It's been four years and CK3 still feels as hollow and unfulfilling as it did when it came out.

CW: Discussions of Transmisogyny

The common response to vulnerable niche play experiences like Video Game Feminization Hypnosis (2019), Cave Story Sex RPG 2007 (2021), and He Fucked The Girl Out of Me (2022), is mockery both for the boldness of name and of content. Video Game Feminization Hypnosis is a psychic-design-manifesto with lines like "i dont care about the "puzzles" i just wanna explore weird islands & mess with the machines" and "ive half-joked about my games being laced with estrogen but i wonder how powerful they could be. what if we could use video games to forcefem ppl all over the world" nested as hyperlinks throughout her vent towards a better girly gameworld. Written in lowercase text and using internet acronyms like 'ppl', she speaks with a casual concern for unfettered femme exploration games as a way to potentially rewrite the social code.

It has not been product tested for review, nor has either of the other 2 games mentioned. The problem here is that the culture of 'gaming' itself is unable to step beyond the bounds of product review. Franz inquires into this problem around Cave Story Sex RPG 2007

"Why do we seek to quantify something clearly very personal based on how much it resonates with us?

I think my problem is that I think people are looking at this game as they would a product. Like it needs to have some value to me, otherwise it's not "worth playing".

Nadia, Fewprime, Blood Machine, npckc, communistsister, bagenzo, and [pourpetine] (https://xrafstar.monster/games/). These are in my mind the most notable transfemme gamedevs and their relevant store pages for their work¹. It's obviously not a comprehensive list, but this is my notation for who is the most publicly notable and prolific within the scene. Notice that all of the games on these pages are free as are the 3 games I opened with at the start. That's because transfemme gamedevs more often have to make their corpus free just to get eyes. So what are gaming spaces assessing the 'worth' of a completely no strings attached free simulated experiences? I think its the fact we dare to make people uncomfortable and borrowing a modicum of their time (across all the devs I've mentioned I cant think of 1 that takes more than 3 hours to finish, usually only being around 20 minutes in length at most). My sisters have to cheapen themselves to 0 just to get your ear and its still just met with mockery, harassment, and belittlement².

Even when a transfemme game dev gets the chance of any success at all she is thrown down again. In pourpetine's Hot Allostatic Load (2015) she notes among a litany of pained observations that

"One of my abusers was sent a list of the nominees for the upcoming games festival Indiecade. Unfortunately, I was on the list. I ended up winning an award, ostensibly to recognize my feminine labor in the areas of marginalized game design—years of creating access for other people, publicizing their games, giving technical support, not to mention the games I had designed myself. Instead of solidarity from other marginalized people in my field, I was attacked."

Video Game Feminization Hypnosis beats to a much more Utopian drum. A belief that we can mesmerize people into a more pure goo out of this vindictive rut, create a games made out of love, show people feminine Exits.

I believe in all that. I also believe that my words and those of my sisters are constantly being cast a sidelong jeer of disposability. That I and my sisters are then to blame for when a mobbing happens and not the world's own biases and outrage. This world has made this all quite non-negotiable, no more playing along with the democratic cesspits and hateful comedy routines. Here's to reflecting on the play experience others treat as compost as if its the most meaningful urtexts in the world because to quote pourpetine again "Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain." trash art is my queendom.

I hope it suffocates society before it can flee to their patriarch Arks. As princess put it here 'flood the world and dilute the sludge'.

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1. 2 notable exceptions I know of with pay to play games by transfemme is princess/Girl Software's other games, and the cowriting of Aevee Bee on Worst Girl Games. Also key in on the fact here I'm making no judgements on individual pricing of games as a moral decision.

2. Does not remotely just happen On Backloggd³ if you think this is just a grievance I have with this site you're gravely misreading me and I urge you to slow down your social media outrage use for a bit qt~

3. Although I should not lie, social media sites are remarkably more unreliable habitats for trans people than they initially appear, this place has been a great learning experience of that in my case