This is a spin-off of the Fault series, presented as an in-universe children's book, and it immediately runs into the obvious paradox: a children's story written for an adult audience is no longer a children's story. But by claiming to be one it can get away with having a simple plot and a familiar moral at the end.

I would like to see an actual children's story played straight in visual novel form, because I don't think that's ever been done, but it wouldn't be fair to judge this for what it's not. It's very good at what it does.

(And if we want to get all rigorously high fantasy about it we can say the cultural expectations for children's stories in Magic Land tolerate horror imagery more than the real world, there I explained it away so you don't have to.)

Yeah, it's good. I love the characters and the little world it builds for itself. There's a very somber yet comforting feel to it all, especially the Refuge, my favorite part of the game. I also found that it handles its metanarrative elements with much more tact and grace than other similar indie games of the time, such as, say, Stanley Parable with its pompousness, or DDLC with its banality and overall shit quality. I'm glad to find something that gets these things right every once in a while, at least in my own eyes.

Knocked this out in roughly 5 hours total while waiting for my Twitter account to get unlocked. Not a long game at all, would definitely recommend giving it a try, especially for fans of other RPG Maker titles.

So, have you ever been on vacation from work and desperately searched for a "vacation game?" A game you want to just sink your teeth into with all your free time and play the SHIT out of. Sometimes they are hard to find, I remember when I was 17 and on my summer vacation finally scoured through the entirety of Deus Ex. I remember that summer like I was IN Deus Ex. It was awesome! I also didn't get laid a lot until my 20s.

Anyway, thank fucking god for the Hedon games for being exactly what I was looking for, like no joke, EXACTLY, what I had been wanting. I was thinking, "I really want a first person shooter with as dense of level design as Unreal, but I've played Unreal so much there is nothing new I can find there." Lo and behold, the Horny Orc game was thinking what I'm thinking.

It took me about 35 hours to finish both games while on my vacation, which is almost an entire work week! Maybe I should get a new job battling monsters in hell? I digress.

The way the game presents itself is so unassuming that I think the developer, Zan, is kind of brilliant. Disguise your thoughtfully designed first-person adventure as a generic boomer shooter with a horny coat-of-paint. It's so brilliantly done I fell for it for a few years! It wasn't until this last playthrough that something finally clicked into place. It was after the mission "Errant Signal" in Act I, you are teleported to a mountainside and you have to navigate through a MASSIVE facility carved into the sides of the mountain, and some drop-dead gorgeous music from Alexander Brandon starts playing. Genuinely from that moment I understood perfectly what Hedon was all about and knew I was playing an all-time favorite.

While combat is genuinely really fun, a lot of meaty sound-effects and great challenges, it really is that thrill of exploration and problem solving that I think gives Hedon its own spice. ESPECIALLY in Act II, where the levels become BIG. Like, BIG big. I am deeply in love with games that feel like journeys, that I have just completed and grand adventure, covered the entire world, and maybe even went to Dimension X, and Hedon absolutely captures that sensation in a way that feels like a Dream Game scenario.

So I would like to formally thank Zan for making the game of my dreams so I didn't have to!

The gameplay is fine. It has some cool ideas it doesn't really cash in on. It's cool to have an open world game in Chicago. Everything that is memorable about this game is focused around the protagonist, the story, and how tonally strange everything is.

It's very clear that Aiden's sister was originally written as his wife and there was very little done to the script to make it feel that way. I love that you can get experience points for non-lethal takedowns as tons of innocent civilians die in a horrible car crash that you caused by hacking the stoplight at an intersection. Technically it's the cars exploding killing them, not you.

Wow, it's the first game I ever worked on professionally! I'm marking this game as "mastered" considering I spent 2 years of my life working on it.

Look, there are other former Volition coworkers of mine that have guested on podcasts and talked about some of the issues this game's development went through. This game was supposed to be doing a lot more, originally. The ideas were too lofty to be pulled off by a team of Volition's size, poor management and meddling from the publisher damaged team morale, and a whole host of other things contributed to the poor final product.

The game was originally more of a loot-based, co-op action RPG with three open world cities that would update over time. The map updates were kind of like Fortnite's, but smaller and on a more frequent basis. New events would happen every so often that featured community goals, the kind you currently see happening in Helldivers 2. The ideas were neat, but it all felt very pie-in-the-sky.

The newly updated engine and tools Volition was using at the time were designed with this original game in mind... which means the tools needed to make a single player open world game with linear missions did not really exist. There were no cinematics tools and no tools for linear, checkpointed missions. So that's why the game launched with a shitload of bugs that would break mission progression.

Also here's a nitpick I have with the game that no one has ever pointed out. There are multiple areas in the game where way more scientist NPCs spawn than any other type and it's really jarring. Also all of the civilian NPCs look like they were built on a slightly different scale than the player characters. All of the civilians are kind of tiny looking, even when put next to the playable characters that are also on the small side.

I'm both annoyed that it took me so long to get into this franchise, but also glad that this is the game that I started with. Yakuza 0 is a perfect starting point, especially with how the remakes of 1 and 2 incorporated new elements from 0 into them to make the prequel game feel more natural.

Yakuza is what the later Saints Row games wish they could be. It nails the delicate balance of a mostly serious crime story with over-the-top action and extremely wacky side stuff.

Kiryu is one of the greatest game protagonists of all time. He's up there with Solid Snake.

A rookie CIA analyst gets involved with assassinations, traitors, and nukes in a partially more realism focused puzzle and investigation game that surprisingly presents a more negative portrayal of the CIA despite a former director's involvement.

Spycraft is a somewhat more realism focused puzzle FMV game where you play a rookie CIA analyst. After your instructor is somewhat hilariously killed you take over the hunt for an assassin of a Russian presidential candidate who is now targeting the US president. Perform tasks like looking up licensee plates, using voice/facial recognition software, analyzing ballistic data, doctoring photos, tracking fund transfers, reading through files, making the right conversation choices based on information you've discovered about the people you meet, etc. These mini-games are typically handled on your in game computer and each its own kind of mini-game puzzle, typically none are anything you would want to do for an entire game but the majority only come up once and they tend to work well like that. One of the more unusual ones that would make for an interesting game if it was better designed is a brief moment where you control a four man team on a raid to rescue an informant and you are viewing a simple building plan of the environment where each of the four is a different color figure with their one specialty in disabling phone lines, stun grenades, breaching, or surveillance. There are a few FMV point and click shooting scenes, and scenes with a photo background with interactable objects. The FMV actors aren't overused and are acted well for the time.

While keeping some elements of realism things do become a bit ridiculous with your formerly rookie analyst going from part of a team looking into a foreign assassination to being the head of it, to it becoming a threat to the US president, dealing with MI6 and and former North Korean agents and defectors and traitors, three or four CIA traitors, terrorists attempt to acquire a nuclear weapon, usually you are passing information onto other teams that attempt to make arrests but at one point you have two options when dealing with a situation that can include you starting a gunfight and shooting your way through the situation. Your decisions can lead to some events playing out differently or certain characters being killed or escaping but these rarely influence the main plot and getting something wrong that would prevent progression typically just has something coming back to telling you that your report was wrong and to look over whatever you were doing again.

I didn't get what I expected from the plot, as the game was developed with former CIA director William Colby and former KGB Major-General Oleg Kalugin having roles in the game (narratively Colby acting as a frequent advisor to your character and Kalugin just kind of appearing once) I was expecting something more insane and offensive, like when Sierra and Ken Williams brought on a psychopath like Daryl Gates as an advisor on Police Quest Open Season and made one of the worst, most offensive, and propaganda filled adventure games I've played. Instead you get an opening with a CIA credo about performing at the request of the president and acting with integrity and honor to protect American values while a voice over explains that it can be best not to tell people or the president what they are doing. You can edit a photo to succeed in questioning someone or you can torture someone while your boss advises you against it, and the ending has you getting a vacation and medal if you follow orders to murder the Russian agent that has been helping you when he tries to arrest a politician for working with the mafia and would support the US or you can let him arrest him and get fired.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1740833331556872636