First played this 5 years ago and "loved the style :D" but hated moving/shooting/taking painkillers/any other thing you do while actually controlling Max Payne. I'm genuinely kinda embarrassed this was my take because it turns out I was just playing it entirely wrong? There were moments in this newest play-through where I winced a little bit after remembering how I dealt with combat encounters coming back to them. Felt like I was doing parallel play with my 19 year old self and screaming at her for getting frustrated with scenarios I was enjoying. "Yeah no wonder you hated the gunplay you were barely using its central mechanic!! Stop trying to duck behind cover!" "Remember when you forgot you had a sniper rifle for that section in the Aesir building where you're being shot with grenade launchers from unreachable playforms? And you thought it was "broken" because you couldn't clear it easily with a Desert Eagle?" Just a constant parade of "Jesus Christ what were you doing".

Maybe I shouldn't be quite as harsh to 2019 me but I do think this game clicks a lot more once you accept that it's very difficult and requires you to use all the tools at your disposal. Individual rooms are little gunplay puzzles that you need to maybe die to once or twice before using bullet time to clear effectively. Thinking bullet time was "style over substance" or w/e just meant I wasn't really playing Max Payne at all. To be fair I was originally playing this out of obligation a guy who thought I would be hotter if I also liked Remedy games so it's not surprising I just wanted the whole game to be over.

I think I also just wasn't into it enough to appreciate how genuinely fun a lot of the storytelling is- started playing Max Payne 2 at the time of writing this and I like the pacing and cut-scene direction in it even more but here you can see a lot of that same style even as it seems they have to stretch their budget way thinner. The graphic novel sections are wonderful and I love seeing all the photo-sourced panels- you get the impression the devs were having a blast, they're leaning into the camp of it all. Still, other sections manage to be much darker in a way that feels effective. Any section set in Max's house or a nightmare variation of it is genuinely uncomfortable; the bit in the one nightmare section where almost all the walls in the house are replaced with the disgustingly cheerful wallpaper from the baby's room and rock-a-bye baby is echoing through the house got me pretty bad. Like Max's brain is actively taunting him with how disgusting and backwards the irony of finding the murdered corpse of his infant son in this room designed to feel safe and Lovely is. The "Huggies!" poster in the baby's room in particular feels extremely cruel.

Love the goons. Love how the killer suits are revealed through their dialogue to be LARPing idiots who want to live out the same power fantasy the player is. Just having played the opening chapters of 2 last night "My gun's name is Dick Justice" contrasted against the appearance of Dick Justice as a TV show that's very clearly a parody of Max himself in 2 also feels like it's retrospectively calling attention to Max's own state as a roleplaying weirdo, which from what people have told me/what I've played thus far is a thing that gets explored a lot in 2. Feel as if another review on here by Woodaba illustrates this point much better than I could.

Gunplay is obviously very tight and stylish. Chugging painkillers while mid-shoot dive then switching your weapon is tons of fun and can help you choreograph genuinely excellent little shooutouts, and when you get the grenade launcher it becomes indispensable to beat the reaction time of late-game enemies while also ensuring you don't blow yourself up. VATs got absolutely lauded when FO3 came out but I think this game is very impressive for bothering to make sniper shots bullet-cams and slow-motion enemy deaths into a source of flair in the same way that game does but in 2001. Feels as if every weapon is designed around how cool it'll feel to be used in bullet time. I will say, however, that I wish the shotgun felt a bit more viable in the late game without having to use the Jackhammer. I felt like I was still able to use most of my other weapons towards the end aside from the one-handed variants of the Beretta and Ingram, but pulling out the sawed-off or pump-action just felt like an easy way to get killed. Feels like it limited the scope of what an encounter could look like at the end of the game just a tiny bit.

Overall this was a blast. Managed to pull me away from the Hitman: Freelancer Hardcore doom spiral (which I want to write about at some point because it's so fun but also so insane both in how it twists Hitman into a roguelike and the thematic shit weirdness that comes with that) which I can only thank it for because I need a break from beating my head against a wall due to being Bad At Gaming. Love you Maxwell! Just keep being yourself and you can do anything! :)

post-review note: Jesus Christ does Rockstar need to do some serious patching work on this. I know the remake is coming out but c'mon man. Got softlocked in the Vinny chase because white men can't jump unless they're running at or below 60 FPS. Dude just fell into a pit because his movement in that cutscene is framerate dependent and I spent the rest of the mission watching goons react to a guy who wasn't there tell them to whack da crazy bastard. I was able to move cut-scenes for some reason and the section ended when the camera eternally hung on a scene that seemed to have its completion dependent on Vinny reaching a certain place which he couldn't because he was invincible and stuck in a hole somewhere. Needed to download a hex editor at one point, an expanded, open-source version of the NVIDIA control panel, add some framerate limiters on, etc. Pumping the game full of community patches and screaming "WE'RE LOSING HIM!" as something else with my rig causes visual fuckery every other chapter. Glad the game was good enough to make constant troubleshooting worth it.

When I finished Pagan: Autogeny my first thought was "wow, that was good, but I wish that the endgame wasn't so repetitive- I wish it was greater in scope, and that it didn't reveal its whole hand so quickly. I wish it was more mechanically dense. Oh well."

Now that I've played it, I can say without a doubt that Hexcraft: Harlequin Fair is exactly what I wanted out of Autogeny. It's a mechanically dense puzzle box of an open-world RPG, a scavenger hunt that consistently surprised me. Progression relies just as much on finding out where to go as it does on learning the game's systems through experimentation. It presents you with a city governed by forces you don't understand and rivals who understand them far better than you do, and invites you to scour every nook and cranny, learn from failure, and find ways to survive in spite of the world often feeling totally indifferent to whether you fail or not. Getting into a fight in the early game is a death sentence; it took me an hour to even find a weapon, and another hour or so to learn how to not immediately die in combat. Progress is hard fought, but immensely satisfying when you finally do break through. I'm like begging you right now- if some stroke of luck makes Harlequin Fair blow up in popularity two years after its release- and God, I hope it does- play it blind. I realize it's totally possible that this is just so squarely my shit that it'll seem like I'm being hyperbolic here, but I loved every second of this.