I am fortunate enough to possess a [CENSORED TO AVOID NINTENDO HITMEN] and thus I had access to this game a little over a week early. Normally, this is something that will prompt me to dive deep into a game. When Pokemon Legends Arceus (not a good game! yet somehow the best Pokemon game) leaked about a week early, I was absolutely in love and I played about 100 hours of it before it officially released.

As of right now, I have played... maybe 7-10 hours of Tears of the Kingdom. I can already feel the reflexive "you haven't played enough to know if the game is good!!! it gets better!!! delete your review!!" comments coming in. Unfortunately, I'm already confident I've seen all I need to see to know that this game is just unspeakably uncompelling. One or two of the new guys in this game made me go "neat!" and I was impressed upon first seeing The Chasm. But, man, the beginning of this game just utterly fails to pull you in like Breath of the Wild did. It's such a failure that I'm questioning whether BotW was even good in the first place.

Going into this game, I was a massive fan of Breath of the Wild. As someone who has historically been skeptical of both Zelda games and open world games, it managed to thread the needle and be an absolute obsession for the better part of one summer in high school. The way it naturally pulled you in every which direction was so engaging that I could not stop exploring and appreciating the intrinsic joy of finding cool new bits of the world. (I maintain that BotW does this far better than any other open world, sans Genshin Impact, strangely enough. Somehow despite the utterly predatory monetization, shallow writing, and clunky mechanics of Genshin, the world design is absolutely beautiful and entrancing in a way that is hard to compete with.)

But Tears of the Kingdom has none of that. Is it just a DLC? No, not at all -- comments to such regard seem like absurdly hyperbolic contrarianism for the sake of Cool Gamer Cred On Backloggd Dot Com. The world feels completely unfamiliar with how completely it has been redesigned, and at times that is a weakness of the game. If you've ever played a randomizer of, say, Super Metroid, Hollow Knight, or even a Zelda game like Link to the Past, you will be familiar with the feeling of playing a game that distinctly feels like it was not designed to be played in the way you are experiencing it. That feeling of almost disorientation is largely why randomizers are so fun: they extend the lifespan of a game that you love but wouldn't want to play in the exact same way yet again. If only these randomizers could be hand designed by the original developers to allow you to experience the game in its full glory several times over!

In theory, that's something like what the TotK overworld should feel like. Yet the ways in which the world has been shuffled feels, well, random, like a generative AI was fed a list of structures and locations and ideas from BotW and spat them back out in a soulless jumble. It would have almost been better if the world was copy+pasted.

To TotK's credit, this is not true of the newer parts of the game. The Sky Islands and The Chasm are both very distinct from the overworld and feel far better designed, if a bit same-y within their own bounds. In fact, the new things about TotK tend to lean towards the "really good" side -- the handful of new boss enemies I encountered were quite fun to crack (but upon figuring out their tricks, they became trivial), and in particular the cave systems in the overworld do an actually good job of lending new life to a familiar land. My favorite moment out of my playtime so far was being ambushed by a mass of writhing shadow hands in one of these caves, getting up to higher ground, and bombing the shit out of the hands until they died. I jumped down, proud of myself for dealing with them safely, and then a fucking health bar appeared at the top of the screen and Shadow Ganon kicked my ass with his Dark Souls-lite-ass moveset. Fucking incredible moment that came out of nowhere, but I'm legitimately afraid that somewhere in the game there is a guy you are supposed to talk to who will loudly exclaim HEY DID YOU KNOW THIS IS A THING? HERE IS WHERE YOU GO TO FIND HIM AND THIS IS HOW YOU BEAT HIM because that has been my experience with most things in TotK thus far when it comes to natural exploration and the open world.

In a way, it's all too reminiscent of my experience with the similarly middling game Horizon: Forbidden West. That game has a million flaws which I won't go into too much here, but the distinctly best parts were tackling the hardest challenges in the game while incredibly underleveled and undergeared. (Cauldron KAPPA, anyone?) But after doing that, there was really nothing of interest left, and the world itself was just too big and too generic and too arbitrary. That describes my time with TotK to a T.

I dunno. Maybe I'm just missing something. Maybe the game does get better. The first dungeon has given me no hope at all that the game is going to be particularly good when it comes to the scripted content, the side quests are already unappealing and overwhelming, all the points of interest I give a shit about are locked behind invisible walls and story quests with no indication of how to get to that content Now. It feels like the core feedback loop that was so addictive about BotW has been both bloated and constrained to the point that it is lying swollen and dead on the ground, and occasionally when you kick it, it will posthumously cough up a rare nugget of interesting world design.

Or maybe BotW was never good and I just needed to play TotK to realize that. It's absolutely dire that the result of playing the sequel to a game I love is not being disappointed that it doesn't live up to the original, not even blown away with how much better it is than the original, but outright doubting whether the original was good in the first place. Is there any stronger condemnation of a sequel than that?

I'll likely pick the game up again and get further into it out of obligation at some point soon. Maybe I'll eat my words by the time the game is over. Maybe I'll permanently drop it halfway through. Stay tuned to find out!

I am not a man. For most of my life, approximately the first twenty years of my existence, I identified as one, and it seems likely that unless I radically change who I am to hide behind the aesthetics of androgyny, I will always be externally identified as a man by those around me. To escape a bioessentialist lens of analysis in our society is near impossible -- it is a lens that permeates even my internal self, leads me to question whether I am really non-binary or simply afraid of being labeled as a man, and by such label being condemned as inherently violent, hateful, and dominating. I despise patriarchal masculinity for the ways in which it has defined the world around me, shaping my relationships with my parents, friends, classmates, and partners, continually seeking to shunt me into a role which I have always found repulsive. I am not a man, and yet it seems impossible for me to exist without the baggage of maleness.

All this is to say that my relationship with masculinity and maleness is a strange and complicated one. At once I want to disavow it and reclaim it. To do either, or both, or neither requires that I understand masculinity better, that I understand boyhood better, that I find a means by which to deconstruct the patriarchal and toxic frameworks in which these experiences have been shaped, and that an alternate model -- a positive, feminist masculinity -- must take their place.

Within communities centered around the Life is Strange series of games in the several years following Life is Strange 2's release, a common criticism was often levied of the game that I could not seem to understand. The sentiment was, roughly, that Life is Strange was a series about women -- Max, Chloe, Rachel -- and that to write a new game in the series and center it around male protagonists was a step back. Yet another story about men! How tiring. It took me a long time to figure out why, exactly, this criticism rang so hollow, even though in other contexts I would agree with this same piece of criticism about other pieces of media. As someone who would consider themselves an intersectional feminist, diversity in media is something I value -- to have a series centered around the internal experiences of not just women but specifically sapphic women in a landscape of gaming dominated by stories of men was something that I felt was an achievement by Life is Strange.

In an all-too misogynist media sphere, Life is Strange was a breath of fresh air, a piece of media that aimed to take seriously and capture the internal lives of teenage girls -- one of the most maligned groups in the popular consciousness! -- and for doing such, it received extreme criticism in the public eye. There's much to be said about how Life is Strange breaks down the typical archetypes of teenaged femininity, presenting a cast of young women who at first glance fit easily into typical tropes of the cheerleader, popular girl, nerd, manic pixie dream girl, and then going out of its way to humanize those characters and deconstruct those tropes. This, of course, is a prime reason why so much male hatred was directed at the series -- if you were on the internet at any point during Life is Strange's release, it was impossible to avoid accusations levied at Life is Strange of being an "extremist SJW toxic feminist" game. As teenage girls in real life have been mocked for their patterns of speech, so the same was replicated in the virtual space with an absurd assertion that the regionally accurate slang was "cringe" and stupid. It was one of the games picked up by Gamergate as an icon for how "far-leftism is coming for your vidya." All of this for presenting women as humanized characters in a video game!

But this is exactly why this criticism of Life is Strange 2's protagonists fell short for me -- Life is Strange is not a series about women, but a series written from a strongly feminist lens, and feminism cannot exist as a substantial framework of analysis if it only has room for one of the sexes. Feminism is a radical rejection of the patriarchal norms which shape and define our society. It is an insistence that we do not need the patterns of male domination and violence which have come to be implicitly accepted as natural -- more than that, it insists that these patterns are harmful to every person in our society. An analysis, deconstruction, and positive reconstruction of masculinity is not going above and beyond the bounds of what feminism is supposed to be, but is crucial to any feminist project that would seek to abolish patriarchy once and for all.

This brings us to Life is Strange 2. The core conceit of this game is that two young Hispanic brothers, Sean and Daniel, witness their dad being shot by a police officer. In reaction to this, Daniel suddenly gains powers, and in a moment of overwhelming grief and rage, he kills the police officer, without knowing that he did any such thing. The series begins from this point on, the two brothers weaving their way across the west coast of the United States, traveling from their now-abandoned home in Seattle to Mexico in pursuit of freedom from the ever-looming violent hand of the criminal justice system. There is much to say about the obvious racial politics of this game, which are largely transparent and at times lacking in nuance, but it seems to me that the racial politics of this game are more of a mechanism than anything else. They create an impetus for the brothers to leave their home and define a goal for the brothers to pursue, but the real meat of the game is everything in between those two points. In-between those two points is a story about brotherhood, love, family, and masculinity, one which I believe is often overlooked by people when they engage with this game, and one which I think is an incredibly lacking narrative in much of the medium of gaming to this day. Life is Strange 2 is the rare game that explores feminism by positing what a positive model of masculinity and male connection can and should look like.

It would, perhaps, be too trite to step event by event, or even episode by episode through this game and notate the precise ways in which this analysis is done. It is easy to point to the traumas that the Diaz brothers experience and how those make them shut out their emotions, how they (especially Daniel, but both of them at times) seek control over their life with violence and domination, and how Sean's initial instinct towards patriarchal masculinity alienates his brother. It is easy to note that from the very first episode, we see a complex mix of positive and toxic masculinites expressed in the people that Sean and Daniel meet on the road who help them and hurt them, connect with them and steal them away from one another. I think once you're aware that the game is using this lens of analysis in its writing, much of this falls into place naturally, and I believe there's significant value in revisiting the game to see what ideas about masculinity it presents for yourself. For me to prime others to see the exact same messages that I see would be a mistake, as it is not often that we have the chance to critically engage with pieces of media that recognize the toxic nature of patriarchal masculinity and are interested in showing us a image of what positive masculinity can be. To steal that chance away from you, the reader, would be a legitimate shame.

And yet, I cannot help but express the absolute beauty that I find in Episode 3 when this lens of analysis clicks into place and everything suddenly becomes more clear than it has ever been! In the midst of a journey full of pain and hatred and violence and rage, where the brothers fight not only with the world around them, not only between one another, but with their own internal selves, the third episode is a sudden break away from the patterns that have dominated the lives of Sean and Daniel, the structures that have defined our own lives. For a brief moment, Sean sees what life could be like free of the baggage of the patriarchal scars that he's been burdened with for his own life! It is a vision of community and family and love, where he yields his need to control and dominate his life and allows himself to open to the people around him. He sits quietly next to Cassidy and watches her play guitar. He talks earnestly and emotionally with Finn. At some point Sean and I blur into one. I walk around the camp with Daniel and do chores together and finally, at long last, two states away from his home, Sean treats his brother like someone he loves and respects rather than an annoyance to be cast away. We stop being afraid of our brother's potential to hurt. We kiss Finn. We go on night swims and help Daniel train his powers and it seems like finally we're free of all the suffering, that we've broken the cycle of the violence and estrangement innate to our lives under patriarchy!

But it is a brief moment, and no longer. All too easily the outside world and the norms and power structures rush back in and the episode ends again in violence and loss and rage, a patriarchal norm forced back onto its unwilling victims, and as Sean loses an eye and his brother runs off alone, I weep.

I am not a man. But over time I have come to think that it is impossible for me to extricate myself from the relationship to masculinity which has been foisted upon me by the world. The best I can hope for is to shape that relationship into something positive, something not corrupted by the sexism that eats at every aspect of our relationships to others and ourselves alike. Episode 3 is a snapshot of what that might look like, a haven from the world. It is written with a love of men and masculinity, it embraces of all the positive potential that they have, and it denies the insidious idea that the standards of patriarchy we live under are innate and biologically determined. It is wonderfully feminist, and in its quiet but firm commitment to a better masculinity, it is even a little bit radical.

I am not a man. I do not think I will ever be a man. But if this was what it meant to be a man -- perhaps I wouldn't be so terrified of being seen as one.

Yes, it's weird as fuck that I'm giving an idle game a 5* score, especially one that reads so relatively dry compared to many others in the genre. But this game does something that many other idle/incremental games would never dare to do, and it massively succeeds for it: It strips down the Idle Game to the bare metal formulae and numbers that keep the game machine going, and then allows you to try as hard as you can to exploit those formulae and systems and make your numbers go up as fast as possible.

This is where the "exponential" part of the game comes in. As you break the systems and progress through the layers of game by manipulating the coefficients and exponents and variables themselves, the barriers of entry increase exponentially. You consistently find yourself leaping between orders of magnitude to the point that "orders of magnitude" becomes your base unit of measurement and you instead start making order-of-magnitude level leaps between orders of magnitude, and that cycle continues to repeat in perhaps the most numerically satisfying way possible. This game broke my conception of "big numbers" a million times over, and I fucking loved it.

The best part of this game is that it really understands that the core appeal which it offers is in this progression of scale rather than progression of numbers -- an appeal which is, ultimately, true of the vast majority of the genre, but the games rarely seem to be so explicitly aware of it -- and as such, this appeal is capitalized on to the maximum possible level. Every single time you think you've reached the last level of progression, the last layer of numbers going up, the absolute extent of what the scope of this game could possibly be, you cross the threshold into yet another higher layer and realize that the impossibly massive scope which you just mastered was nothing but the beginning of your journey. This kind of recursive shift fits perfectly with the shape of my brain, so to speak, and as such I cannot help but love how well it is executed. You get to shift from manually making second by second choices about how to maximize formulaic growth to automating the ideal growth to automating the automation of the automation of the automation etc. etc. and the layers just continue piling up but never, ever manage to become too heavy or busy for the game to hold its own.

And even better is that the game does not allow itself to decay into just being the same thing on each layer but with different variables -- the typical experience you would expect from an idle game -- but instead, that itself is the first layer of many. At each turn, the way that you play the game and interact with the formulae and numbers (and at times, actual math!) that controls this game continues to change and morph in ways that keep it interesting at all times.

Exponential Idle is a masterclass in the genre of Idle/Incremental games. For several years, I was obsessed with this genre, played all of the big staple names as well as every single indie title I could find on the internet (I still miss the one that let you write Javascript code to automate systems in the game, perhaps the most ingenious twist I have seen in the genre), and without a doubt, this game tops them all. Since finishing my month-long semi-active playthrough nearly a year ago, I have had exactly no temptation to return to any other game in the genre. They may have pretty graphics, nice lore, good design, but they do not grasp the fundamentals of the genre like this game does. If this game went on forever, I would continue traversing each and every level of exponential power scaling for the rest of my life.

Instinctively, I want to love this game. I want to give it a perfect rating and gush about how incredibly interesting the design of this brutal and uncompromising world is, how emergent and complex the interactions between all the creatures are, how satisfying it is to slowly master the world around you so that not only can you survive -- a real accomplishment when compared with the initial cycles of the game -- but deftly navigate wherever you want, weaving around enemies, grabbing items, filling your stomach, and understanding the world inside and out. I want to say all these things are true about the game because that's the sense that I had about the game in the first 2 or 3 of the 10 hours that I played this game before dropping it.

But ultimately, in all of those areas where the game at first feels incredibly deep and fresh and engaging, I started to realize that everything was surface-deep at best. For example, fans rave about the complex systems of interaction that occur between different creatures, but after some observation in the game, it became apparent that by "complex" they meant "emergent," and I very quickly became bored by the fact that everything functioned on incredibly simple rulesets with a large heap of randomness. Is this natural? I think so, yes, and if this game were a nature simulator, that would be a great feat. But this game is a survival platformer. This does not particularly feel satisfying or interesting to me for the purposes of a survival platformer, it feels lazy and frustrating and lacking in the intentionality and design that make the best games in both of those genres the best .

This is, in fact, a recurring theme in how I felt about this game. As a survival platformer (or generally as a game altogether) many of the design choices fail to make any sense whatsoever to me. They make all the sense in the world if this game is ambivalent about being a game altogether -- and largely I think that was the intent behind much of the game. Certainly that is the sentiment I see emerge from fan discussions that I read while trying to understand why I wasn't clicking with the game. As such, I think the creators of this game and I fundamentally just disagree on what makes a good game. And that's deeply unfortunate, because this was a game that from the first I heard about it, I wanted to love.

Revisiting the point of randomness briefly, I want to discuss difficulty. I did not ever find this game hard in the span of my time with it, although I certainly found it frustrating at times. By pure chance my gameplay style of grabbing food items, sprinting through areas as fast as I can without dying, and making a beeline for the first new shelter I discovered was a winner, and not once during that normal pattern of gameplay did I die to the rain, although I found myself backtracking to known shelters once or twice when I failed to find a new one sufficiently fast. I did, however, die a number of times to the creatures in the world. Generally I found this not to be punishment for playing the game poorly so much as sheer bad luck to stumble upon a room where it just so happened that the creatures were positioned so as to pounce upon me before I realized what had happened -- on returning to these locations, the creatures were positioned differently and that plus my newly acquired knowledge meant I functionally never died to a known enemy. I died to random chance. In many cases, this wasn't frustrating, as in the situation described above. That just happens in this game, and I did not consider it a fail state given the flowers (a legitimately cool piece of game design for a number of reasons!) which protected my cycle "streak." What was, however, frustrating was when I found myself unable to progress due to completely uncooperative rideable creatures in several areas, or when a creature parked itself right where I needed to parkour and refused to move no matter my attempts to manipulate it -- these things also just happen due to the nature of the game, but they're frankly just bad, time-wasting pieces of game design that I did not enjoy. When I made it past obstacles of this kind, it did not feel like it was due to any improvement of my own, and ultimately one particularly tedious instance of this resulted in me completely shelving the game. This game is, in my opinion, not particularly difficult if you engage with it the way it wants you to, and I want to be clear that my problems with the game are not in fact because it is "too hard" or anything of the sort, but because of cases of what I believe to just be bad game design.

Some of the things about this game's design I do find legitimately engaging. I generally love when games do not tell me anything at all and want me to figure out what they are and how they function. The little companion fly guy that follows you around somewhat undercuts this piece of design in several places, which is incredibly strange to me because it is very easy to get off the intended path and not realize it. If you follow the path, he tells you what many of the items are and how to use them and what they do. If you don't, then you're completely on your own. This feels like an incredibly half-assed system and it makes the game actively worse. Specifically, the fact that this system is present meant that the developers seemed to feel there was largely no need to make items naturally interact with the world around them (or rather, to have creatures interact with the varying items -- spears are the main exception here). But because it's so easy to inadvertently miss out on the tutorial system, you are left with no natural clues as to what to do to interact with the world around you, leaving you to simply guess and experiment. This is, at best, a passable approach to being a game that never tells you how to play it, because the best of those games guide you from just below the surface while making the player feel as if they were unassisted the whole time. And unfortunately, even this passable approach feels unintentional given the inclusion of the tutorial guy, which begs the question: Why in the world does the UI go completely unexplained? I personally found it fairly intuitive, thankfully, but from what I saw in discussions about the game, many people had no clue what the UI was supposed to indicate. That is a failing on the part of the game.

In fact, it is a truly puzzling piece of design that there are non-diegetic elements in the game at all. It seems like it wants to be an immersive environmental simulator in many ways, including forcing you to figure out how the world around you functions, how your character moves (there's a TON of hidden movement that can largely only be figured out by pure luck or, as with most players, by reading about it online), and what your objective in the game even is . In that case, any mechanical complexities such as the survival cycle should be implemented into the world itself somehow! But then on the other hand you have the weird tutorial system, which suggests that this game actually wanted you to be told how to do many of the things in it, and if you're going that far then why not clarify one of the most basic mechanics of the game? Baffling is the only word I have for this -- it feels like the development team for this game was split in half on how they should fundamentally approach what this game is and how it is told, and they ended up with a half-conceptualized amalgamation of two far better games.

It is undeniably true that Rain World is unique, that it is ambitious, and that much about it is deeply interesting as a piece of interactive media. I find it hard to ever be truly negative about this game because I so deeply want to be drawn into it in the ways that many other people are. But other games exist that are also brutal and obtuse and tell you nothing about them and challenge you to engage with deep and interlocking systems in order to understand what the game is and how to play it, and they succeed in making me love them by virtue of being incredibly carefully crafted and well-thought out pieces of game design. As much as I regret to say it, for me, Rain World fails to live up to what it wants to be.

Upon finally beating Sword Saint Isshin and completing the game for the first time, I was insistent that this was an easy five star game. While doing a couple NG+ runs for the platinum, it became obvious just how much of the game is superfluous and mediocre at best. You could largely cut out much of the first half of the game (and try not putting the least fun mini-bosses in the game towards the very beginning) and it would be a much tighter and more polished experience.

That being said, the combat system and boss fights are so incredibly satisfying that it would be hard for me to give this game anything less than a near-perfect score. Sekiro is at its best when it focuses on getting everything it can out of its combat system, and it hits those highs in nearly every single boss fight, keeping you on your toes all the while without losing sight of being fair and well-designed.