This is one of those games where it's better to watch it on Youtube than it is to experience it yourself. I find myself intrigued by the detective-y noir presentation of the story, and the many notes that you find harken back to the vibe of the original Alone in the Dark. Truth being, I mainly tried this game out because its writer was also involved in Soma, and I think they're doing a pretty alright job here. However, these are not strong enough pulls for me to deal with this game's many puzzles, or especially its lackluster combat paired with forgettable enemy design. The attempts at incentivizing stealth alone severely put me off, the protagonist walks so slow that the enemies you're tailing behind are more likely to do an entire loop around the area and catch up behind you before you reach your goal.

It's funny, because putting it into perspective, the original Alone in the Dark is a game with infinitely worse combat and puzzles that are way more obtuse than anything found here. There are so many things in that game that are out to kill you in cheap and unfair ways, there are potential softlocks to run into, and its guns don't work half the time. And yet, I beat that game. I beat it exactly because of this sort of aggressive cruelty and unpredictability it offered, where every individual room felt like its own unique challenge to overcome. It was the game's strongest point, and it's something that the reboot desperately lacks. Trading in the wonder of discovering a huge jellyfish wriggling in a bathtub, or walking out the front door of the mansion only to be consumed by a giant monster, or touching a statue only to summon a poltergeist that violently shakes the screen and relentlessly pursues you... Alone in the Dark (2024) sacrifices all of this in favor of plain and boring predictability. True, you might not know in what sort of place you're going to wind up next, but you'll always know what's going to happen, a bunch of mindless combat against a bunch of mindless zombie-like enemies. This is not a reimagining, it's an unimagining.

fans love to make erroneous arguments about how detractors dislike the game cos it's different, but the problem has always been that those differences amount to nothing of substance. if they're not completely insignificant they're fakeouts or walked back, if they're not fakeouts or walked back they're jj abrams mystery box bullshit to keep the online dustcloud with arms and legs kicking and howling about The Implications for another four years. this is a game more concerned with how to capture will they/won't they Engagement than its own thematic core; an impressively meticulous effort moored in goopy fanservice and speculation bait

control freak energy from top to bottom, sanitized to an extent that you'd think square report directly to the health department, and guided by one of the medium's most overbearing directorial hands. all slick and shiny bombast and spectacle, perfect skin, compilation pilled navel gazing, and endlessly wrested control. thirty long hours of red light green light meandering thru kidzbop cover acts of familiar events and environments before shunting all responsibility for unpacking anything it might have to say onto the next game

big win for folks who wanted tifa to be a noodle armed simp and sephiroth to have the presence of yakuza kiwami majima

Short little game about ghosts navigating through afterlife and sin and that whole mess.

I think one of the most fascinating aspects is how the mechanics of the afterlife emotionally impact all parties involve. Reapers grab souls, goddesses judge whether you're meant for heaven or hell, sin twists up lost angry souls, etc etc. The characterization of the main reaper Zogzo is bizarrely endearing. His job is only to slice up souls and send them packing. But he cares too much, trapping souls in his private castle to try and rehabilitate them before their proper judgment. He quite sincerely wants to do good. But he's limited by his own nature as a Reaper and his own perspective. Near the 2/3rds point of the game, you can obey his final warning and attempt to return to the castle. He's sighing in relief just before he's realized he's already attacked the protagonist. He can only gasp in horror that the instincts he's been fighting the entire game betrays him at such a key emotional moment. It works primarily because his sincerity is so debatable throughout the game. That moment of vulnerability, genuine self-disgust, is just so endearing as a character.

The goddess, by comparison, is sympathetic enough to the plight of humans, but its limited by her own perspective. She can't grasp the idea that Zogzo has good intent by leaving souls hanging around the mortal realm. Judging souls is her job and delaying it is just gunking up her system. Zogzo can delay the issue all he wants, she's not gonna count his rehabilitation sessions for shit. And her alliance with the protagonist is largely to further her own holy perspective on fighting demons. She can't actually think about the actual material conditions of humanity cause that's just not in her view of anything. Its these little nuances that avoid the expected "demons = good, angels = good" twist and center a horrible system as an existence for these creatures.

Gameplay broadly involves running from location to location with your latest items to unlock new doors, but it functions well. Minigame battles connecting all the pieces together, encouraging broad challenges. Its challenging enough without being insurmountable.

My favorite part of the game might be just how much of the game is just not interested in getting into gritty edgy content re: sin and violence. Its just not interested in that. Demons and angels are real, but also so are cute little dragons. Goofy things exist in tandem with the violent. Its not trying to be deeper than that and that's the kind of ping-pong in tone I like to see.

One of the best examples of "so bad, its good" 90's FMV games I’ve experienced, Tender Loving Care is a bonkers mix of 90's “erotic” thriller and Lifetime movie. Watch John Hurt get more and more confused and disgusted as you descend into a torrent of the most divorced cis straight guy thoughts on psychology and sex imaginable; where bisexual women are all nymphomaniacs, homosexuality is weird unless its two traditionally attractive women making out, and the only minor mention of transgender identity is essentially treated as mental illness. This game would make Sigmund Freud tell them to simmer it down with the sex obsession. The game actually seems rather reactive with the questions John Hurt gives you after each chapter as there are multiple different endings and scenes that can play out depending on them. As I said ultimately this game is bad, but man it’s the kind of deranged purestrain FMV shenanigans we could only get out of the 90’s and never again. Definitely entertaining.

After seeing this game grow popular (mostly for controversial reasons) on twitter due to the nature of some of the content of the game that’s discussed throughout I felt an extreme compulsion to check it out as I had to feel that there must’ve been something more to it, like that something this dark with this much effort put into it couldn’t simply be only edgy, right? There had to be something more to it, right?

This game is bad. It’s bad, and it’s not just because it’s an incestuous game. It’s bad because of how poorly this topic is handled, how badly written both its narrative and dialogue is, how honestly boring it is, and how, outside of its art, it has very little going for it. I’m able to try and see what the author was trying to do with this, but if they wanted to depict deeply problematic things like incest properly, the approach that was taken is a horrible one that never decides whether it wants to be comedic or serious, and loses at both, leaving it feeling like a gross game made for the sake of fulfilling a fetish and nothing else.

To start: as stated before, the topics the game attempts to depict are either never taken seriously enough or are expected to be taken seriously very randomly, with constant jokes about Andrew and Ashely’s relationship being used as ways to make ‘funny sex between siblings joke’ rather than being shown as the relationship where Ashely holds extreme emotional power over Andrew that the game shoots for at certain points. This kind of jarring separation leaves the characters never seeming to have any moments to define them between each other, and each possible moment being used as fuel for poorly written humor. The best example I can think of this is during chapter 2 when Ashely wakes Andrew up on the couch to talk, and their Mother comes in. Andrew’s mother attempts to talk to Andrew about, what seems to be, something explaining how their situation ended up being the way it was. The implication, at least, seems to be that Ashely’s manipulative and parasitic personality is part of the reason that Andrew’s mom wanted to talk to him alone, and likely to discuss and have a dialogue about (how as she states later) how horrible Ashley is and give insight into more of their past and situation, but is interrupted due to Ashely’s presence. Rather than it being taken as a sentiment for Ashely being a literal leech on Andy and the situation being taken as seriously in a way where Ashely quite literally is always attached to Andy without him really wanting it, it’s played off as a blowjob joke and moves on completely. Moments like this where any buildup for these two characters to be established as anything more than vehicles for situations for jokes about ‘woah, isn’t this soooo taboo??’ are thrown away are constantly, with other moments like Ashely’s constant sexual harassment being no more than minor annoyances to Andrew rather than any actual point for him to stand against her and are used constantly as ways to make the audience either hard or go “woahhh that’s so weird haha!!!” and completely muddy any of the points the game tries to make about their relationship to the point that while you can clearly see the attempts to make a proper depiction about Ashley’s abusive nature, it never holds anything simply due to how those few moments are thrown away for bad jokes.

Other criticism i’ve seen a lot are about how things like cannibalism are shown as bad things, but the incest isn’t, and while it’s implied it is due to how Ashley is not only the obvious perpetrator, but is also clearly an evil person, the things mentioned before make it hardly seem like an attempt to properly depict these things, and the points about it being muddied hold strong entirely because of it. When the problematic topic at hand 80% of the time is jokes, you can’t also expect me to take it seriously when it’s tried to be depicted in a heavy manor for that 20% of the time. It’s like if Miura for Berserk made constant jokes and one-liners about the s/a that Guts and Casca experienced but also expected you to care when it came to moments that mattered.
Hugely, the game has no clue what kind of tone it wants and is all over the place, with, most notably, the artstyle not helping. While the art is, yes, good, only helps to push the less serious parts of the game and completely alienate the serious tone the game tries to have. On top of this, the pacing doesn’t give the game any credit either, with the time both Andy and Ashely spending indoors being not only hardly depicted but also ending very shortly, leaving the argument of “what spending so long in isolation can push people to” not holding up for the incestuous parts at all, only really making the cannibalism aspect a real point of discussion and really not helping push the idea that the two had some kind of crazy mental breaking point to make them love each other in a long quarantine, especially with Ashely’s motivations for being the way she is stemming from childhood and hold almost zero ground and are almost random-feeling outside of her just being in love with Andy because she’s ‘just like that and always has been’. There’s basically zero grounds and buildup for any of the things to be taken as actual development between the two, with their time in their apartment only taking up roughly 40 minutes of playtime and mostly consisting of cannibalizing someone. It furthers the problems of no setup but expected payoff, where something as problematic as incest is instantly shot into the players faces and expected to be taken seriously or taken as a real point of development. It’s unexplainable both on the implication the two have been through difficult shit and with the actual evidence of Ashely being weird, again, outside of her tendency to just be overly attached to Andy. Her relationship and love for him is just super unexplainable especially considering how Andy doesn’t reciprocate. Even if it would be something explainable in chapters 3 onwards, the game would be pretending that those things exist now to explain why they’re happening, and just leaves me confused as to why Ashely is the way she is. It’s weird to have a mystery like this exist for something that’s at the forefront of the game that just leads to the author being someone inserting a weird fetish into the game, consistently pushing the idea that the problematic theme of incest is something there that, in it’s entirety, cannot be taken seriously. This point especially makes the game worse if there’s NEVER an explanation at all, meaning that all Ashely is is an overly attached incestuous sister. Relating back to the moments in the game that are very minimal in amount, the relationship the two develop can never decide if it wants to be romantic or tense, with there being seemingly constant random moments where the two want to cuddle and maybe kiss with a moment of Andy wanted to cut Ashely’s neck or Andy feeling clearly directly against what Ashely wants happening immediately after and further the muddied tone of not only the game, but their relationship in total, where despite it having paths, seemingly never showing how the path where Andy’s relationship with Ashely becomes more tense and angry actually affects their dialogue, with the key moments mattering in those routes being extremely exclusive to very specific moments and being completely unrepresented otherwise. An example of this I can think of is when Andy is forced by Ashely to make a plan to kill their parents before going to bed and is extremely upset with her. Afterwords, however, when he’s woken up, he seemingly completely forgets that he’s mad and conflicted with her and just openly accepts her and embraces her - ignoring any of the other things about her he’s conflicted with, only to immediately go back to disliking her once the actual gameplay starts up again. It’s a constant up and down of inconsistency that never ends and leaves Andy just constantly changing for no reason? If he’s implied to be completely emotionally manipulated by Ashely and do whatever, why is that held completely true at some points but completely not at others? It just never helps the stacking list of issues with the game’s writing and what it’s trying to do. On top of this, no time is built for any horror elements either, with the game just feeling like a weird mix between an rpg maker-horror influenced game and a silly, overly edgy one leading to an extremely indecisive feeling experience that can’t decide what it wants to be.

I think the best way I can describe the game with its flaws is that in its attempts to tackle important and problematic ideas it simply comes off as edgy garbage due to how lightly the game handles it’s issues on top of it expecting you to take them seriously - and if the game doesn’t want you to take it seriously or take any of the points it tries to make with honesty, or even try to care about character growth or development, then it simply defaults into being just literal edgy content that chooses not to care about anything for the sake of making bad incest jokes. These types of moments mixed in with attempts to depict a serious, actual toxic relationship not only disarm a reader but, again, further alienate anyone resonating with the point, as the manipulation, leading to incestuous moments, constantly is played for jokes rather than being taken seriously. The damage the lack of care that the problematic parts of the game have rings to disarm and disregard every other part of the game considering the antithesis of both characters being the way they are is what causes them to act the way they do with that act, once again, being pointlessly used as a funny moment and completely dismantles everything it builds up. Incest isn’t the only thing played this way, but especially how things like Cannibalism are played to be funny around 40% of the time, with moments such as the first person dead and the thought of eating him being hardly rejected by someone like Andy and how he struggles with the idea of cannibalism being very quickly thrown away for the sake of Ashely poking fun at the idea that he’s eating people now. Just because the game has a dream section where he’s confronted with a person he’s cannibalized doesn’t make him developed because of it. It’s not deep writing representative of anything, it’s just another thing to be mentioned for a short minute every 20 minutes to claim he’s “changing as a person” then played off for another 20 for silly laughs alongside other things like siblings having sex.

Another thing too - the dialogue. It’s pretty badly written where each time Ashely speaks it’s entirely expected for her to say something weirdly sexual towards her brother or be a nuisance and the response from Andy to be “ugh. You’re so weird and gross!!!” This expectation was fulfilled almost every time and each line of dialogue not only never advancing the characters but always being worded in an extremely cringe and unfunny way. Similarly, every joke the game throws falls almost completely flat (which is a lot of jokes) and leads to the further muddying of the overall tone and feeling the gamer goes for, furthering how flat the game can feel. Adding onto this, even if you choose the direct ‘no incest route’ Ashely never stops sexually harassing Andy throughout every point and constantly ruins the dialogue more.

Smaller notes are repetitive music and barely interesting gameplay, but not only are those less important, they distract from the elephant in the room of the writing being barely passable at best and downright offensive to what it means to tell a story delving in problematic themes.

In the end, that’s all it really is, though. The game’s not bad because it has incest. It’s bad because of a shallow use of problematic themes to pretend that it’s ‘actually saying something, guys!’ rather than just being a bad fetish game with a good artstyle. It’s extremely disappointing considering how every single type of important moment attempted to be tacked always falls apart because of the various things I mentioned, whether it’s the weird shifts in what it’s trying to do that make the game hard to take serious despite it’s serious topics, whether it’s the poorly written dialogue and jokes that cause every moment to not only fall flat just because they’re played as jokes, but specifically because they’re bad jokes, whether it’s the lack of buildup to give characters reasons to be the way they are, whether it’s the over-use of problematic themes for gags, whether it’s the ignorance of what could be important moments for the sake of silly gags, or whether it’s the lack of commitment to making the characters act in accordance to events that happen consistently, the game clearly tries to be something and makes attempts at telling a story with deeply developed characters but constantly falls flat because it can never stick to anything.

Maybe i'm not supposed to look into it this deeply. Maybe it's just supposed to be a fetish game. I dunno, but it's not good regardless.

Some of the guys behind THE 7TH GUEST and THE 11TH HOUR go full 'interactive movie' and make an FMV erotic thriller. It turns out about as well as you would think.

The story is about three things: dealing with the loss of a child, psychotherapy, and sex, but let's be clear, it's really just that last one. The writing and presentation go far out of their way to try to class it up, but it's very obvious that they just wanted to make the "first" "adult" video game. It's overwhelmingly horny, but in a desperate, lame, middle-aged-guy-who-drives-a-red-convertible sort of way. So, needless to say, not 'erotic' in the fucking least.

Both the plot and the interactive bits (with certain scenes and the ending being changeable based on exploration, reading optional documents, and your answers to dumb psychological quizzes) hinge upon each of the major characters' motivations being ambiguous for most of the story, with their (variable) true intentions being revealed only at the end. The problem with this is that, with the exception of a hopefully well-paid John Hurt (who literally cannot help but lend some gravitas), none of the no-name actors in the other roles have anywhere near the chops necessary to carry that balancing act off, and the result is wild shifts in characterization and gaping plot holes if you end up following certain paths. Credit is due with regards to the endings - there are some pretty different outcomes possible, and they all work on paper, but many just feel wrong with the rest of the game, given that the awkward performances are either clearly leading in one direction for 95% of the thing, or are just schizophrenic and nonsensical the whole time. The writers bit off way more than the performers and the director could chew.

Tedium and pretention covering up dull game design ideas, pedestrian psychoanalysis, and cringey, basic-ass sexual fixations.

This review is dedicated to END ROLL: underappreciated in its time (that I played it) and a better game than this one on just about every level.

Wadanohara is nearly eight hours of a deeply, deeply repetitive game. One I stuck with for way longer than it deserved, hoping desperately to get over the hump and pull something wonderful out of the game, led by the recommendation of two separate friends and a--perhaps perverse--intrigue into the big content warning about the game's portrayal of sexual assault plastered on the vgperson translation page. I trudged through several hours of a monotonous journey to six separate shrines, eying the uniformity of each island i landed at, and going from fighting a couple of enemies in my way to not engaging with the combat system all together.

The combat... A RPG having particularly easy combat, hell even trivially easy combat, is not inherently a bad thing. LiEat might as well not have any combat with how trivial it is, but the crux of the game is about solving puzzles and experiencing the story, with combat being moreso a contextual action. Wadanohara on the other hand has massive swaths of the game where you are walking through hallways teeming with enemies that you only fight if you explicitly interact with them. Again, not an inherently bad idea, in fact that could be really nice to choose when you get to engage with the combat, but after fighting the enemies in just a few areas, I was already overleveled enough to kill every boss in 2 turns. This continued up to the final boss of the game, even though I did not fight a single non-mandatory enemy for the entire back half of the game, if not longer!

The lack of purpose to the combat made moments when areas were teaming with so many enemies especially frustrating because I could kill them near-effortlessly, but why would I when the reward for doing so was next to nothing. All the tension of those moments was essentially sapped out and I just had to walk down hallways until the next story beat. This is not to get into how much gear the game just halfhazardly throws at you to equip and replace over and over and over with essentially no fights worth fighting in between that gear being equipped and replaced with something slightly better. I might as well not have changed my gear out at all during the entire story.

Back to the structure, after exploring the six islands, I reached the second act of the story, which is where the game really feels like it focuses in, leading you down hallways with a lot more cutscenes and boss fights, which is what I was looking for! The game has some cute character designs, even if the characters themselves are largely paper thin. But getting to the end of the act, I figured the end was in sight... and then the third act stated.

Largely feeling like a retread of the second act, introducing a bunch of new characters and a new princess and new hallways to wander down, the game definitely introduces it's most interesting ideas here. Still, the ideas it introduces aren't fleshed out nearly as much as I was hoping for them to be, especially with the amount of monotony required to be trudged through to reach that point AND continue to be trudged through in the third act. The writing of the game in general is rather mediocre and frustrating. Outside of Wadanohara, Samekishi, and the main villain, the rest of the cast all blend in together, including Wada's own party members you spend the entire game with! And for the love of god, someone needs to take away ellipses from the creator. A solid half of the lines contain elipses in them, and so many of that subsect are JUST ellipses. It felt so agonizing and a massive fast of my time scrolling through that empty text.

I would also like to point out the aforementioned sexual assault portrayal as one of the things I wish the game handled better. I am a firm believer that depicting uncomfortable topics in media, especially when used to provoke an emotional reaction from the audience, is perfectly fine. The scene is set up during the second act of the game as one of the story's big reveals, one of its only big reveals. It seemed like the story was going to be able dealing with the ongoing trauma from sexual assault, including how our memories get warped in order to protect ourselves from trauma. Then the scene itself happened, and then it ended, and... didn't really have much impact on the rest of the game?

Looking at a couple of other things about the game post-finishing it, it seems the villains of every game the creator makes attempt to commit sexual assault? And the creator drew explicit art of the sexual assault scene for a tumblr ask? Knowing this stuff in post doesn't really change my thoughts on the game much (not that they can get too much worse LOL); The oddity of that scene does not permeate the rest of the game, the strange ballgag equip found on one of the islands notwithstanding. Still, it just feels so odd to have experienced a sexual assault in a videogame that, as far as I can tell, was there due to the creator's fetishes. Like, what do you do with that experience?!

There are some nice things about the game. The cut-in art is well drawn and the interactions between the two leads is generally cute if a bit rout. Nothing is able to overcome the game's overwhelming sense of mundanity though. I dragged myself through to the true ending, hoping for something worthwhile to grasp onto, and now here I am, wishing I followed through with my initial thought to drop the game an hour and a half or so in. Bleh.

I have long had my eye on A Little to the Left, but I was sadly left disappointed by my time with it. The game sacrifices a clarity in its puzzles' design language for a sense of variety and the hope that pure intuition is enough to push the player along. And often it is - but often isn't always. The number of puzzles that required me to fumble around not for the solution, but for the objective, left me far more annoyed than energized. And while there are myriad solutions to many of the puzzles, there's usually a degree of uncertainty - yet paradoxically a level of demanding precision - that can frequently erase any sense of satisfaction the game looks to provide.

A Little to the Left's best puzzles are the ones that build on previous ones, but those don't make up for the number of challenges that seem content asking you to do something largely random. Combine this with sometimes finnicky controls and a play space that can often get too cluttered mid-solve, and you have a puzzle experience that just doesn't work for me. The game is beautifully produced, but it's also markedly frustrating. I wish that the game had been as soothing as I expected.

Hmm. I’m on the fence about continuing this one.

Coffee Talk 2 has some great points, there’s really an interesting conversation simulator here if you really pay attention to the story they’re laying out here, but I think you can’t go haphazardly discussing serious topics in a situation like this. Don’t get me wrong, the game tries its sincerest but I feel like trying to describe systemic racism and discrimination with.. fantasy characters and quirky meme writing doesn’t work. “People are scared of me because I’m a banshee” and “Our love is always struggling and arguing because we are two different species” is handled really fucking weirdly and it becomes apparent at times that most situations are direct stand-ins to real life problems we as a society face, which makes it, ehhhh worse?? It hurts itself even more at times as it tries to stereotype some of its characters with “unique characteristics”, some embedded through pop culture (vampire likes red) and others… yeesh. The first game did this as well, and I feel like the devs have run this through the ground enough (unintentionally) to justify wherever or not I should continue.

The gameplay is also just, alright as well. Some of the instructions are practically cryptic most of the time and getting locked out of best story sections because you didn’t hand someone the right item (even when the game tells you sometimes it feels misleading in when it wants you to) make the game justifiable.

The orc lady’s still cool though.

absolute hall of fame endgame idec how rushed it was. mechanisms and items stripped of any intuitive meanings outside of feeling around in the dark w your verbs, harnessing adventure game puzzle indecipherableness to have you completely in tune w the total dissolution of curtis's semiotic world. and no one cared or even thought it was worth evaluating outside of "bad fmv game puzzle" so that proves i deserve video games more than most of you. MY denpa eroge, MY documentary of my life where curtis is literally me and all of this actually happened