You walk around in a bizarre amusement park watching extremely weird stuff and discovering odd, but extremely iconic, characters. There aren't actual puzzles, you just need to find out where to go before suffering an horrible death. You can switch between characters whenever you meet then and each one has fun unique dialogs and events, you can even read their thoughts and they are often hilarious. It's priceless.

The downside is that the game is too short, and unlike other short games that properly develop their stories and leave you feeling satisfied, it makes you wish for a lot more, at least I did. This deserved to be like 5 cds long.

Too bad the David Lynch tv series never happened either.

“Mademoiselle, your life will be a crazy carnival, filled with laughter, luck, and life’s lovely lunacies...”

Theresa Duncan and co.’s lens with which to see the beauty of the world. Meets children at their level with their curiosity and does not go any lower. Love love love the writing here (and the narration, thanks David!), giving children beautiful prose to study and understand as they piece together this world. That’s a didactic view of course, but sans that even, the world still feels so descriptively penned. Also, aggressively 90s with its fuzzy guitar, pig-latin jokes, and (oddly popular) pastiche of beatnik culture.

Warms my gnarled heart that Fugazi and Nation of Ulysses alumni embraced this project with the care needed. It shows, truly.

in the first dungeon of pillars of eternity, there's a moment that really stuck with me. you encounter a xaurip - a classic fantasy racism beastman that trades in aesthetics uncomfortably pulled from indigenous american stereotypes. it indicates that you go no further, that you do not follow it down a path into it's territory. there's no option to convince it to step aside and let you past: you either respect it's wishes, turn around and find another path, or you walk forward and kill it as an enemy. it's a moment with, i think genuine nuance, where the agency of the xaurip is respected, a moment that actually asks the player to respect the culture of this people or defy it, preventing them from taking a empowering middle road where they can do whatever they want if they have high enough numbers.

anyway, in the very next area you immediately encounter a bunch of them that attack on sight and that you have no recourse but to slaughter.

this moment is pillars of eternity in microcosm. on every level of it's construction, it is a game that feels simultaneously genuinely aware of the fraught nature of many of the images it is evoking and the things it is doing, aware of the stain left by games of this ilk in the past, and also resignedly committed to doing those things anyway without the brazen dumb confidence of a game like divinity: original sin 2. progressive and regressive, inventive and derivative, evolutionary and counter-evolutionary, pillars of eternity is the fascinating attempt to harken back to bioware's baldur's gate and the crpgs of it's era made by a game that doesn't wholly see the value in going back there.

i won't speculate on director je sawyer's intent any more than the man has directly said himself, as he has shown real discomfort towards people suggesting his opinions on certain games, but i know from my mercifully brief visits to the fascist haven that is the rpgcodex forums that sawyer is a quite strong critic of how the classic infinity engine games actually played, and despite my fondness for RPGs of that style, i find myself very much on his side. there's a reason these games struggle to find new fans that aren't just going to turn the games down to the lowest difficulty to sidestep most of the actual playing of it as much as possible: advanced dungeons and dragons is not, by any metric, an elegant or intuitive system at the best of times, and while real-time with pause was an elegant solution to just how long combat in d&d can go on for (larian's proud statements that BG3 has an authentic, turn-based translation of 5E rules should absolutely terrify any prospective players), it only raises the barrier to entry for those not already au fe with ad&d's eccentricities.

pillars of eternity feels utterly unique in that it is a real-time with pause CRPG based on rules that were designed for a video game, and not for a very different medium, and as a result it is...actually good and fun. the rules and statistics are far clearer, the resource game is far more sensical, and the pace of encounters is such that individual moves are less frequent but far more impactful, maintaining the weighty impact turns have in a traditional turn-based game at a speed far more under your own control. experientially, pillars of eternity feels closer to FF12 than it does baldur's gate, with a sliding scale of playstyles ranging from making each move with care and precision, to writing full AI scripts for each member of the party and letting battles play out automatically at hyperspeed.

when i play games in this genre, i usually keep the difficulty low and drop it even lower if i encounter friction. but with pillars, i kept the difficulty on normal the entire way through because I genuinely enjoyed the gameplay and tactical puzzles it presented. it helped me to see, for the first time, why someone might prefer rtwp over turn-based, and when i started a pillars of eternity 2 playthrough shortly after playing this, i decided to stick to real-time rather than playing the game's new turn-based mode, because i became genuinely enamoured with this system.

pillars of eternity is in the unique position of being a baldur's gate homage that doesn't feel like it holds any particular reverence or great love for baldur's gate, and makes good on that position by well and truly killing bg's darlings where the system design is concerned. this isn't exactly uncharted territory for obsidian: but despite it's progressive approach to it's combat, it feels much more burdened by it's legacy than either kotor 2 or neverwinter nights 2, neither as caustic as the former nor as quietly confident as the latter. it sits uncomfortably among many of the things it does, inherited and otherwise.

to demonstrate: this is, in many ways, a d&d-ass setting. it's a roughly-medieval setting in a temperate forested coastal region, and yet the dyrwood is not medieval france/britain like the sword coast is, it's far closer to colonial canada both in terms of regional politics and technology. you have humans, you have elves, you have dwarves, and things that are kinda like gnomes but with the serial numbers filed off, you have the godlike, which are a twist on the aasimar/tieflings of d&d, each with their own gygaxian race science bonuses to stats, but aside from the aforementioned fantasy racism with the beastmen, these fantasy races matter less in the actual story than national identities and cultures, which makes one question why the race science stuff is even here. even stepping into the mechanical dimension, most of the classes are reasonably interesting interpretations of classic stock d&d archetypes like fighter, wizard, paladin, etc, but the two unique classes, chanter and cipher, are so obviously the design highlights and work in a way that would be incredibly difficult in a tabletop game but are beautiful in a video game. they eagerly invite the question of what this game would look like if it wasn't obligated to include the d&d obligations within it.

while i can't speak for every member of the development team, i know that for je sawyer, pillars of eternity was not necessarily a game he wanted to make - at least not in the way that it ended up being made. elements like the traditional fantasy setting, the real-time with pause gameplay, and even the presence of elves, were all things that were there to fulfil the demands of a kickstarter promising a baldur's gate throwback from a company that had fallen on difficult times. these things that feel like obligations feel like that because they are obligations: concessions to appeal to expectations and desires forged by nostalgia for a game that obsidian didn't actually make. these aren't the only visible compromises that mark the game - "compromise" being perhaps a generous word to describe the game's obnoxious kickstarter scars - but it is this tug of war between the parts of itself that wish to remain within the walls of baldur's gate, and the parts that cry out for escape, that ultimately defines pillars of eternity.

while maddening dreams and an epidemic of children born without souls is what drives the plot of pillars of eternity, the story is really in the conversations between tradition and very colonialist notions of progress, and the very opinionated characters you converse with along the way. likeable characters will hold quietly conservative worldviews that feel natural for them, people will say the right things for the wrong reasons, or the wrong things for the right reasons. friendly characters will have beliefs that are extremely distasteful to you but are so deeply held that there is no way to use the power granted to you by being the player character to dissuade them from their belief system with a few honeyed words. this is not a game where each element works towards a clear thematic conclusion, one that confidently knows what is right and what is wrong when discussing the things it brings up. it is a messy world filled with ugliness and argument and contradiction, and no clear definitive statement on its themes. it has a perspective, but it is not one held with immense confidence. it is a perspective mired with doubts and second-guessing that feels very conscious and deliberate. in particular, the final hour of the game has a twist that recontextualises the nature of the setting, but it's noticeable just how much of the cast, both in this game and in the sequel. find this not to be a redefining moment of their lives, but simply something they have to let sit in their gut like a millstone. it lets them see with new light things they once valued, but they feel unable to simply cast those things aside.

i have a particular distaste for critiques in geek circles narrow their focus on what a work is saying to only the series or genre the work finds itself in, and ignoring whatever resonance it might have to the world outside the fiction, subconsciously because the author has little experience of that world. and yet, it's difficult to read pillars of eternity without looking at it's relationship to baldur's gate and it's ilk, especially given how it kickstarted (lol) the late 2010s CRPG revival that led to breakout hits like divinity: original sin 2 and disco elysium. it walks in the meadows of the past with an uneasy rhythm, constantly expressing it's discomfort with being there but never quite being able to find the way out. even at the end of the game, there is delightfully scarce resolution to the weighty philosophical questions raised by the final act - the immediate crisis dealt with, certainly, but the game ends on a world that has raised questions rather than answered them, and while you may have your own thoughts and perspectives, there is no great victory of ideologies to be found, no grand, world-defining choice about what to do with the wisdom of the past. it's a game that simply ends with you emerging back into a world that is materially largely unchanged but colored so different by the new perspective you have on it. it is a game that is deliriously inconclusive.

one could word that as a criticism - and indeed, a strict formalist lens would probably find it as such - but honestly, it's what i find delightful and resonant about pillars of eternity. i'm someone who thinks generally very poorly about d&d as a game, but my intermittently weekly d&d games with my friends that have been going on since the first lockdown have made some incredible memories, a world and story and cast that i find myself hugely invested in. despite my disdain for a lot of the recurring cliches and tropes of the genre, some of my favorite stories are fantasy stories. and despite my active distaste for a lot of the decisions pillars either makes or is stuck with, and indeed for some of the creative minds involved in it's production (chrs avellne's characters were substantially rewritten after his departure from obsidian to such an extent that neither he nor je sawyer recognize them as "his characters" but whoever was behind durance specifically is doing such a conscious avellone impression that i would be remiss not to note that his presence is certainly felt) i still enjoy it immensely regardless.

frequently, engagement with art is a negotiation with the parts about it that speak to us and the parts that fail to do so, where we may be able to excuse or enjoy parts that others find to sink the entire work for them, and it's unexpectedly moving to find a game that was so visibly having that conversation with itself as i played it, and rang so true for the relationship i have with the things that inspired it.

it's a game that embodies the sticky and troubling way all the games and stories of it's ilk sit in my mind and expresses them emotively through a story that, in fits and starts, writes quite powerfully on the unique pains and sensation of memory and tradition and progress. it's a game that feels all the more true, all the more real, for it's contradictions, compromises, and conversations capped off with trailing ellipses, leading down two roads to an uncertain future and a depressingly familiar past.

oh YO here we go here we fuckin GO BRO

this is it pack it the fuck up everybody they did it it only took them five tries to absolutely goddamn nail it.

At its core, The Final Scene is a game about how there is ultimately no way to escape becoming prey to the machine of capitalism.

But I guess I should set up the story before I unpack that. Nancy and her friend Maya are at the historic royal palladium theater in St. Louis so Maya can interview movie star Brady Armstrong, whose most recent film is about to premiere there before the theater is due to be sadly demolished in three days. Maya enters Brady’s dressing room, a scream is heard, and when Nancy breaks in, the room is empty. Nancy receives a threatening phone call from a disguised voice telling her that if the demolition isn’t cancelled then Maya will die, which gives Nancy a strict three day time limit to find her friend, who is almost certainly hidden somewhere in this old magician’s theater, or cancel the demolition. She’ll work to do both throughout the game, and is met with nothing but skepticism, competition, and outright hostility by a cavalcade of shitfuck assholes who are determined to twist a tragic crisis towards their own personal gain.

It’s a decidedly different tone for this series, and while I strongly enjoy the comfortable creepiness of past entries at their best, Her pulls off a frantic, sweaty energy here arguably better. Nancy, who is only able to be characterized through dialogue and voice performance, is written completely differently in this game – she’s frazzled, and caustic; much more prone to irritable jabs and frustrated outbursts. This is a desperate situation that fucking nobody is taking seriously but you and Lani Minella sells this urgency in Nancy really well.

There’s a general streamlining to the proceedings that goes along with this idea of urgency. The theater might be the smallest space of the series so far, maybe even smaller than the school areas of the first entry, Secrets Can Kill, and you definitely have to do the least amount of backtracking through secret areas that require puzzle-solves to access. Puzzles are also pretty light and breezy in general, which could be considered a criticism but I think is appropriate for the tone and speed of play in the game, and the heavier focus on characters and narrative. This one definitely leans more on shooing you from event flag to event flag, dialog to dialog over solving a grand puzzle or piecing together a historical narrative (that element is present but takes a decided back seat). Once again the identity of the culprit is extremely clear almost from the beginning but it’s fine here imo; the WHO of it all is almost taken for granted, barely played as a reveal at all. There are simply other things going on in this game that are more interesting and important, even with that character (whose identity I will be spoiling along with everything else in the game starting in the next paragraph – if you might be interested and you care about spoilers – play the game! It slaps!)

So, capitalism will kill us, and there’s no escape. Not for the people who are routinely crushed under the heels of the wealthy and powerful, and not even for the people at the top of the heap. We are all grist for the mill, and the wheel never stops turning.

Consider Nancy Drew. A young woman in a world that hates her for being. Nobody takes her seriously, nobody listens to her. Her friend is kidnapped almost literally in front of her eyes and the cops don’t care, they just explain to her all the reasons why the kidnapping probably wasn’t a kidnapping, okay then why it was a hoax, okay then why her theories as to what’s going on that have been investigated and substantiated with evidence are wrong and her friend probably isn’t being held in the building and there’s nothing to worry about. Every man she interacts with flirts with her, condescends to her, or manipulates her for information to further a personal agenda under a veneer of being trustworthy and “one of the good ones,” taking advantage of knowledge of a woman’s place in the world, in the power structure. “You can trust me, I’m [x].” Every time it’s a lie. The only other woman she encounters has given into the system. She is cruel and selfish and urges Nancy to be like her; it’s the only way to be free, or as close to free as you can be, when this is the world. Nancy hates her, but she’s not as different as she wants to believe, as the ending of this and every game attests to. Nancy acknowledges that everything is fucked, the cops are useless or complicit, the kidnapper was barely a criminal and probably needs help and sympathy more than anything else, the people who profited here are cruel and deserve worse. But hey, crime’s crime buddy, you gotta go to jail, and I gotta girlboss, and what are we gonna do not have cops? Not have rich people? Not have bribes? Not let them get away with it as long as the courts refuse to bring justice? Nancy doesn’t have answers. It doesn’t occur to her to think about these things. This is how They get us – by assimilating us into Them, or better yet raising us like that in the first place; just, a lesser version, if it can be helped.

Consider Joseph Hughes, the elderly caretaker of the Palladium, who acts like he’s resigned to pack his shit up and move out of state to live with family when the theater that he’s dedicated his entire life to is needlessly demolished, but who in reality has concocted a slapdash plan to kidnap brady armstrong from his dressing room and ransom him for the landmark’s safety. He’s a desperate person who panics and kidnaps Maya instead when she enters the room before brady does, and things spiral further and further out of control for him until he eventually resigns himself and Maya and at last Nancy to die along with the building that has become his life. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. He makes a point of treating Maya well throughout the ordeal – so well, in fact, that it’s stated during the ending monologue that she plans to testify on his behalf in court. He’s a good man with a righteous cause who plays by the rules and is stymied by a guy who has more money than him bribing the official system to destroy his entire life and getting away with it scot free. And as we so often see in real life, Joseph eventually turns on the other little people around him via combinations of desperation and misunderstandings until he’s made things bad enough that he feels he can’t take them back. This is how They get us - by making us turn on each other instead of on Them.

Consider Brady Armstrong. He is wealthy, powerful, and adored. He is revealed to be the only person known to have an ownership stake in the Palladium and therefore the mysterious person behind the demolition scheme. at the end of the game Nancy begs him not to signal the demolition to begin, she KNOWS that her friend is still in the building and she’s THIS close to proving it. At this point, we know that Brady has been bribing city hall officials to stop the theater from becoming a protected historical site. WE know that there’s a possibility of discovering the other owner if we have a little more time, but HE does not. In his eyes, he has absolutely nothing to lose by letting us look around for her, but he chooses instead to walk outside and begin the demolition, and knowingly accept the responsibility for Maya Nguyen’s death. This is how They all think. This is what it is to be wealthy. The luxury of not having to care about other people, and not having to face consequences for not caring (he doesn’t, either - Brady gets a happy ending). At the same time though, the reason brady wants to tear down the theater is because to him it is symbolic of his own existential dread; he is grossly aware of his own status as a product with a quickly diminishing shelf life. He worries about his wrinkles, his muscles, his rapidly receding hairline; he knows that when these qualities are gone he'll be discarded by the culture that supposedly adores him as easily as he discards the little people around him. Brady wants this theater gone because he looks at it and he sees an old, outdated husk of something that used to be. That he needs a place to break ground on a new business venture to secure his legacy and financial future is almost immaterial; he even admits that he could do it anywhere, which is what he does do at the end of the game when the theater is saved at the last minute.

Because of course it is. This isn’t fuckin full metal jacket guys it’s goddamn Nancy Drew colon The Final Scene from 2001, you bought it for like nine dollars in a cardboard sleeve at Walmart. Her Interactive did not intentionally make a scathing indictment of our entire social and economic world order, they just made a game set in it, starring a person whose values conform to its popular values, and unfortunately it’s really hard to do that WITHOUT making it come off as a scathing indictment. The game ends with the same cheery letter from Nancy to her dad, the same saccharine slideshow telling you what happened to all the characters, the same declaration that next time she’ll be off on another vacation in a fabulous locale without her boyfriend (does she LIKE Ned like are they gonna break up or what serious question when do they see each other). It’s just that this time the events were so stark and the resolution so upsetting that the feelings hang in the air long after the credits roll, suffocating, impossible to ignore.

We are all grist for the mill. The wheel never stops turning.

PREVIOUSLY: TREASURE IN THE ROYAL TOWER
NEXT TIME: SECRET OF THE SCARLET HAND

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

Throwing in the towel on this one. I love a forgotten gem and No One Lives Forever is peak forgotten gem. 60s spy comedy that's been trapped in some ownership dispute for decades that no one is going to solve. No one's rising up to demand Sony figure out if they own The Operative, and no one's can afford to remake it in a new format.

Which is a shame, because I do think there's a lot of fertile ground here with some modern sensibilities. The jokes about foreign cultures and fat people are nauseatingly late 90s/early 00s and it bogs down the experience. But you can tell that the team's design decisions really excelled once they selected on a female protagonist. Cate Archer is flawed in her angry, reckless methods, but she's also hyper competent and underestimated in this 60s environment. The feminist angle is also a little dated, but it provides actual narrative intrigue that makes you reflect on Cate's motives a lot. She's a Scottish thief with no family trying to prove herself to a bunch of British assholes who are all too hopeful that she'll get killed during a mission and they can write her off. The villains are offering better pay and have women in leadership roles. Still, the end result is massive destruction for personal gain, so Cate's decision to stay on team Britain is intended to show some greater heroism and morality. Its not looking to be a revolutionary take about government and crime, even if it accidentally trips over those ideas. Bad guys are bad dissidents and traitors, good guys are good government workers. Etc.

Ultimately though, the gameplay is the real failure. The game is designed as a shooter first and a stealth game second. The end result is that the stealth kind doesn't... work? Run is the default and even crouching down doesn't do much to save you. This wouldn't be too much of a problem, but a required stealth mission becomes one of the most infuriating sections of the game. After taking about a month long break, I reapproached it and found myself running into the exact same problems. The combat's not particularly engaging and it all just kinda bleeds together. I'd love to see this remade with a greater emphasis on stealth options or even making combat more fun. Something to really push this game from an okay to a great.

But sometimes that's just not in the cards. Novel ideas get lost and buried and that's just the way it all crumbles.

Insane that we got one of the most empathetic and compassionate series of games towards people suffering from mental illness in the early 2000s and outside of indie games, nothing has come close since.

It'd be really funny that if Konami brought it back they'd hire the studio with games that are the complete opposite of that.

EDIT (Oct 20th 2022): if only you knew how bad things really were.

i'd wager there are many who try to undertake a more fair critical analysis when writing about this game. for the sake of transparency, let's just say i can't. this isn't about a stringent inability to separate art from the artist, this is about my inability to separate art from its era.
- it is emblematic of a dark period in capcoms oeuvre, in which they repeatedly made awful creative and financial decisions in an attempt to both maximize revenue and appeal to western markets
- it is easily one of the most repugnant, misogynistic games ive ever played; it possesses some of the worst writing ive ever seen in a game while still supposedly aspiring to shakespearean greatness. none of its musings on society ever come together nor can it be enjoyed as a charming romp when so little of its characterization is either endearing or palatable
- the calvacade of capital G Gamers who were thoroughly unimpressed by this title inspired a desperate and petty form of tribalism from the likes of varying industry figures that continues to resurface to this day...
- ...which, inadvertently, largely reminds of a kind of rampant xenophobia that existed in the seventh generation of games, a quiet dismissal of anything japanese in the medium and a refusal to engage with their works on sincere grounds (look no further than the original niers critical admonishment). ninja theory felt completely comfortable disparaging and blaspheming the original franchise that they now held the keys to in an era where inescapable indie 'beloveds' like jonathan blow and phil fish rallied to antagonize an entire country's output to the medium
- ninja theory had zero right to patronize or criticize, by the way, given that itsuno had to babysit them to teach them anything at all about proper enemy design, combat design, and so on and so forth. their action game couldn't even be considered average until the release of the special edition
- honestly think the games environments look like dogshit, considering it's the one thing everyone is unanimous in praise of. 2000s movie poster type bullshit

a stark reminder of an awful time to be a participant in the medium and the sole reason i refuse to be accessory to ninja theory in any financial capacity. sacrilege if im being real. hilarious that dmc5 reconciles with this games western sensibilities to often brilliant effect by comparison

This game is impressive in how it is one of the most soulless, industry plant-type creations I have ever bared witness to, but it is depressingly getting exactly what it wants in the longterm:
-Massive, influential YouTubers and content creators covering the game and giving it publicity it doesn't deserve
-Dronelike theorizing about nothing lore, with TWO videos by MatPat (where even he subtly decries the shady, scummy business practices of some of the people behind this game) regarding the same played-out bullshit story you can imagine
-And massive financial success from greedy, moneygrubbing marketing and merchandising.

The concept of this game being anything resembling "indie" has been entirely erased at this point.

This game is now the Warner Bros. of indie games. And it's genuinely depressing that a game like Five Nights at Freddy's that (while undeniably flawed) was a piece with so much genuine heart, passion, and drive to its creation ended up inspiring such a bland, but unfortunately successful DISASTER of a video game that ends up being just another "children's toys but with a dark twist" product to add to that homogenous glob of indie horror, all while reaping rewards it very much does not deserve.
Fuck this game.

I don’t know if I would describe myself as a FAN of the long-running CW monster hunting show Supernatural, but I DID watch roughly nine or ten seasons of it, MOSTLY because I had friends who were super into it and I liked to hang out in their Supernatural-themed discord. I hope they’re all doing well. I think about them a lot. If you haven’t seen the show, it’s about these two guys, younger brother Sam and older brother Dean Winchester, whose mother was killed by a demon when Dean was a little kid and Sam was but a wee babe, which set their dad down the path of Self-Destructive Monster Hunting and he dragged his baby boys into that life with him. The dynamic in the early show is that after their dad goes missing, Dean, who has always enjoyed The Life, drags Sam back after he had successfully gotten out, and now they drive around mostly the rural American Midwest and every week they stop in a place where something mysterious has happened and then kill a ghost or a werewolf or something. Over the course of the first five season the show finds its groove, s a story arc emerges and is cleanly resolved, everyone likes it, and then the show very divisively continues for eleven more years. This is, I think, the simplest way I can lay this out. I will not get into the nuances of Supernatural fandom that’s not what we’re here for we all know how deep that well is I’m not gonna crawl out of it today, but I will say I think it is GENERALLY AGREED UPON that the middle years of the show are seen as the weakest, where we’re kind of treading water every year between our clearly defined apocalyptic early arc and the inklings of ending of the latter seasons. BUT there were always one or two really good episodes hidden in those really rough middle seasons that I eventually quit watching the show in the middle of, even for a show I didn’t like all THAT much at its best.

One episode in season nine, or maybe ten, I dunno, involved Dean getting a call from a boy’s home he spent time at as a teen about some ghost or something idk and they have to go banish it or whatever. And Sam is like wait when were you ever at a boy’s home and Dean says “OH YEAH I had completely forgotten that you didn’t know about this.” So the truth was that one summer when dean was like sixteen and Sam was like ten or whatever, their dad left them to go do a hunt somewhere, and Dean lost all their money OR SOMETHING (these details don’t matter to this story I promise) and then got caught trying to shoplift food for them, and opted to go to a like, Boy’s Reform School for a few weeks rather than juvie, because as far as anyone could tell he was like, a destitute teenager with no dad, because his dad sucks shit dude.

So when this all got sorted out his dad concocted this story that Dean was also away on a hunt or something to spare Sam’s feelings I guess? This is important, they never really get into why their dad didn’t want Sam to know, exactly. We can probably make a good guess, but we don’t know because he didn’t tell anybody. Sam learns this and he’s like, y’know 30 now or whatever so he doesn’t really care but as they’re leaving he does stop Dean and say “hey, why didn’t you ever tell me this?” and Dean just kind of shrugs and says “I dunno. Dad told me not to, and then the story became the story. I was sixteen.” And that’s all he has to say about it, and that’s all he really CAN say about it, but it’s also all he has to say about it. I don’t know if, at the end of the day, I would call Supernatural a great show, worth the sum of its many, many parts, but I do think it does some things really well, and one thing it almost always nailed was the way people can be just absolutely twisted up by people they love and look up to, the way familial authority wields this incredible power and how harmful that can be when we’re careless with it. That one line from Dean says a lot with a little, and a lot of better written shows wish they could convey the complexity that this one did I think maybe by accident here. I would stop watching SPN pretty soon after this episode, I think, but I think about this moment a lot, and I was thinking about it a lot particularly when I was playing Another Code: Two Memories, a game that is also deeply concerned with the mutability of memory, the way time blends and blurs and confuses us, and how easy it is to take advantage of the people who want to love and trust us.

Ashley Mizuki Robins and her aunt Jessica, who raised her since her dad dropped Ashley off at the age of three mere days after her mother’s MYSTERIOUS MURDER, arrive at BLOOD EDWARD ISLAND on the eve of Ashley’s fourteenth birthday after receiving a mysterious communication from her dad informing them of his whereabouts. This all comes as something of a shock to Ashley because she had been under the impression that he was dead this whole time, and is understandably pissed that Jessica has been keeping the truth from her for her entire life just because her dad asked her to and things seemed vaguely dangerous at the time. When they arrive at the island Ashley’s father, Richard, is not present at the docks where he said he’d be, and Jessica immediately disappears frighteningly, leaving behind only a scream and her glasses, so now Ashley has to search the island which is primarily comprised of the grounds of an enormous mansion complex (once owned by the wealthy Edwards family, now fallen to disrepair since they all mysteriously died or disappeared in the 1950s, earning the island its BLOOD epithet) for both of her missing relations. Before she can really get started she meets the ghost (!) of a mysterious boy who goes by D, because he thinks maybe his name started with the letter, but he just can’t remember! And soon they’re teaming up to explore the mansion and achieve their goals, Ashley to find her family, and D to recover his memories in hopes of getting closure and moving on from this world.

It's not a subtle plot, but it’s a strong hook, and that willingness to forgo an attempt at tact does lead to an incredible thematic tightness. Every single bit of this game traces back to the core themes of the reliability and importance of memory and the precarious strength of familial bonds. As they make their way through this goofy resident evil puzzle mansion, they don’t just uncover the tragedy of D’s death and his father’s, but also the greater tragedy of his family in generations both past and future, a bloodline simply haunted by an inability to make it work, thwarted from being good to each other by disease, by war, by stubbornness, always on the verge of doing right by each other until the choice is taken from them at the last moment and everyone suffers for it, but always the least deserving get it the worst.

In the present, Ashley’s parents were scientists working on some sort of government research into human memories, and it becomes clear over the course of the game that not only did this involve a machine capable of reading memories and eventually creating false ones, but that her mother’s murder was directly tied to it. Ashley was the only witness to the murder, supposedly, a memory she has deeply suppressed, and throughout the game as she digs into D’s past and her father’s work she begins to remember what happened that night, bit by bit, maybe.

Because this is the thing, right? She was three years old when this happened. Even if she hadn’t actively punched this traumatic memory down, time erodes that stuff, inevitably, always. AND everyone in her family, everyone she talks to in this game, is lying to her, or has lied to her about her entire history. Even Jessica, her de facto parent whom she loves unconditionally and whose safety is the primary driving call to action for the first half of the game, is untrustworthy. It’s a lonely place to be, and the only real way to find comfort is via D, an entirely external non-participant in this drama. These kids occupy this kind of gently supportive niche for each other, unable to truly do anything but Be There, which is the best thing they can do anyway. So as her memory starts to unravel into something maybe coherent, and maybe revelatory, and the events of the game become a lot more intimate to Ashley’s family history than she was expecting, the question becomes whether she really wants to know. D asserts that knowing is always better, and y’know, he’s been Not Knowing his own shit for something like 60 years by his own estimation, so he says this with conviction, but Ashley’s version of knowing is suspect at best. It’s a complicated question and I think the game is admirable for letting characters’ anxiety inform the tone of the work almost right up through to the end of the thing even though the actual mysteries of What Happened in both timelines have answers that are EXTREMELY obvious as soon as you have enough pieces to put a picture together.

Because the truth, as far as Another Code is concerned, is that D is right, of course, and you want to hold onto this shit. Ashley may be shaky on her distant past but she wants to hold onto the present. Even the gruff, “I don’t want to hear about it but also I am a wise man in my simplicity here’s some candy” boat captain who takes her to the island at the beginning of the game knows that we hold onto the stuff that matters to us, if we can. Throughout the game, at the chapter breaks, you go through little recap sections where Ashley prompts you with questions about all the stuff you just did to help you keep the mysteries straight in two timelines, but it’s framed as her repeating these things because she doesn’t want to forget again. These things are important to her. The deeper things go in this plot the less certainty there is to be found, and even when concrete answers reveal themselves to both characters at the end, the lesson Ashley takes away isn’t that the answers were there all along; she thinks to herself “I am holding dad’s hand in mine. My grip is tight. His hand is warm.” She’s happy to have found her answers but most of all she wants to remember the feeling. The thing that was missing or lost from both protagonists across a century. It got me pretty good.

I guess I’ll talk about the play of this game? Because in some ways it is the most incongruous thing. This game came out in 2005, and you can tell it was one of those early DS Every Part Of The System Gee Whiz sort of games but this is true of Another Code to a comical degree. You’re not JUST blowing into the microphone, you’re not JUST closing the clam shell to solve puzzles, it’s like, pulling system information from your DS profile to generate Ashley’s in-game birthday, it’s incredible.

It’s hard to be certain how much this game is intended to be like, For Kids, with that in mind. MAYBE it’s so straightforward and easy because of the novelty of the features, but there is certainly a very light touch to the puzzles in general once you get past the unique control scheme. The game also talks around a lot of its DARKEST stuff but it’s still a bloody, emotionally intense affair, enough to earn a T rating in America. I always wanted to play this game as a kid, enraptured by a trailer for it on a Nintendo Power preview disc that I borrowed from a friend, and I think I could handle the content, but I don’t know how much I would have had patience for the double mystery, the past stuff, maybe the degree to which the heavy stuff is implied vs shown would have made it go over my head a bit. It’s hard to say. I think we often don’t give kids credit for what they can handle. It’s so hard to inhabit the headspace of a kid. Memory erodes, right? That’s just time, bay bee.

Hey if anyone wants to mail me a European wii and this game’s sequel uhhhhhhh hit me up my laptop can’t handle emulating lol

I think you can file this one under 'noble failures'. They made an honest effort -- hand-drawn animation, an attempt at real storytelling, fun easter eggs, a logical and realistic progression of levels -- but they just couldn't pull it off. In the end, no matter what the vision for the game may have been, the result is ugly and not fun to play.

The shooting combat is tuned very poorly, making the game much harder than it needs to be. On the medium difficulty, your character can only take about three hits, and your enemies can peg you from all the way across the map if you don't see them first. Due to the Old West setting, they're all hitscanners that look roughly the same, so there's no good way to approach any combat situation besides crawling along at a snail's pace and hoping you catch them unawares.

Beyond the gameplay, the window dressing isn't any more impressive. The character graphics are mostly hideous scanned-in sketches and the story is somehow both perfunctory and overdone at the same time. It's all just a miss.

Hard to believe this is from the same company that made STAR WARS: DARK FORCES a couple years earlier. I don't know anything about the production but it seems to me like this had to be rushed or something. There's ideas but no polish or execution. Shame.

There are many games that offer mostly a story and not much in what is traditionally considered “gameplay”.
Some of them give you options to influence the outcome of the story, or at least let you feel like you’re making choices. Some, including Déraciné, don’t. People like to argue on whether games like this are actually games, but as a linguist I don’t find that discussion very productive.
Being games allows these stories to be told in an audiovisual way without needing to be a movie (or a series), it allows you to experience the stories at your own pace, and sometimes it allows you to experience the story in a unique way.
Déraciné is an exceptionally good example of the last point. Not only does experiencing the story in first person and VR allow for incredible amounts of immersion (and I don’t mean that in the buzzword way), the game makes you complicit in its events. You’re not just watching things unfold or walk around the aftermath of things unfolding. You feel at fault for the things that go wrong thanks to your intervention into this world. This makes Déraciné incredibly special to me.
The story itself is pretty good, the visuals and music are amazing, and even though the characters are fairly flat they’re still likeable enough for the story to work.
Déraciné is such a unique and amazing experience and I wish more people would get to experience it but unfortunately, it is a PSVR exclusive, so it is incredibly inaccessible.

The comparisons are too easy to make. A narrative driven independent game with lush prose that dabbles in magical realism and science fiction as it confronts visions of both the future and past. It also happens to be set in a version of our world (in this case, the American South) that has been skewed, deals with themes of labor politics and the plight of the working class, and draws on and reinvents design philosophies from decades year old games. The comparisons make themselves. That’s why I am doing my damnedest not to say those games’ names, because to do so robs Norco of its own, distinct identity. It’s torture not to draw line after line between its constituent elements to its counterparts for the sake of preserving that identity, maybe especially because I think Norco is experiencing an identity crisis of its own.

Let me be unequivocal: Norco is a good game. I think it’s worth playing. There’s a part of me that feels bad for offering an emphasis on criticism, as if I’m kicking down a darling indie game. So I’m trying to be particularly explicit here: I think Norco is a good game. It’s filled with beautiful writing, unique characters, and potent themes of grief and politics. It has things to say. But I’m not sure Norco is quite sure what those things exactly are.

I have biases, and two in particular that I arrive at here: I care disproportionately about endings, and I care greatly about “aboutness”. Norco’s ending fell flat for me, and I struggle to know for sure what it’s truly about. These are my biases. As I’ve just said, there are so many reasons to love this game. That’s not what I’m going to write about here. I’m going to write about what keeps me from truly loving Norco.

I think I disproportionately weight endings in narratives because they are what stories leave you with. When you walk out of the theater, the thing that is mostly immediately carried with you is the last frames before the credits rolled. Games, historically, do not have great endings. I don’t mean mechanically; there are lots of games with great final bosses and all that. But the narrative ending, the last moments, these are usually unnoteworthy, and it’s usually brushed off. With narrative driven work, however, this is a little harder to forgive. Of course, everyone likes different kinds of endings. I am picky with my endings, I’ll admit, but I try to have a nuanced understanding of what does and doesn’t work with me in an ending. Enter Norco.

Norco’s ending, by which I mean the exact final moments before the credits roll, feel rushed and incomplete. It is in desperate need of a denouement. It’s ironic, because the climax of this game is flanked, quite literally, with two beautiful moments on the left on the right, one of which is perhaps the game’s most beautiful sequence. I will not spoil it, but it is an ethereal, melancholy, and haunting image of memories and home. I almost wish moment was positioned as the Norco’s last moments, because this potency is immediately undercut by the climax, which felt bereft of catharsis. And I think the reason this climax fell so flat for me is because it relied on the motives of the main character, whose identity and desires are opaque and indistinct.

Kay, the protagonist, never feels like she is given the opportunity to become a character of her own. Blake, her brother, almost feels like one, but is mostly off screen. The companions you encounter feel like characters. They have motives, interiority, likes and dislikes, quirks. Catherine, Kay’s deceased mother, who you play as in flashbacks, gets to be a character, too. This is welcome; rather than just being a grief object for the protagonist, Catherine gets to be a person. So rarely are stories about grief as much centered on who we lose as how we lose them. But what about Kay? What are Kay’s feelings? What does Kay want, need? What does she like or dislike? I’m not sure I could tell you anything about her, despite having spent hours in her shoes. I felt more empathetic and understanding of its side characters by the end. All I know about Kay for sure is that she is detached.

A detached character is obviously not a bad thing, and detachment serves an important role here. Kay’s detachment, as I read it, is representative of a response to what feels to many young people like the slow march into a catastrophe by modern industrial society. It is very intentional, and the rare moments where Kay’s detachment is overtly characterized, it is felt strongly. But when a game builds up to a climax which centers on the characters goals, motives, and desires, her own specific relations and history, all of which are deliberately muted and blurred… I struggle to be moved by that climax and its ever brief ending.

Kay is neither a cipher nor a character you roleplay as. I don’t know what she’s supposed to be. She’s not me, but who is she? I can neither imagine myself as her or imagine her as someone else. Like the game itself, the player is in a crisis of identity.

Norco is kind of a mess, both narratively and mechanically. It’s modeled after classic adventure games, but the puzzle design is a far cry from that old school style -- which is not something I’m exactly mourning. Those puzzles were notoriously arcane and absurd, an ethos that has aged in quite a way, and it wouldn’t have worked here. Norco’s puzzles are relatively straight forward and signposted heavily, and you can ask for advice. But Norco also has a combat system. And it has mini-games. A lot of them. Most of these mini-game puzzles are fine. Nothing exceptional, but nothing horrible. There is one bit I did think was excellent and well executed, which I won’t get into again for spoilers, but involves a boat. But I truly have no idea why this game has combat. It’s not fun and just feels silly. And this lack of cohesion is also seen in its thematic underpinnings.

The themes are easy enough to identify: the struggles of the working class, religion’s social role, messianic myth, the desire to find meaning under late capitalism, ironic middle class hipsterism, the ever-extravagant machinations of the bourgeoisie, and so on. But these themes are neither explored on their own fronts nor are they unified by any central theme. The “Mind Map”, which is an interior display of the lore and relationships in Kay’s life (again, trying not to make the comparison here) is dense with connections but not with cohesion. There is some fascinating world-building and cool ideas in here. But where do they lead to?

Obviously I don’t think it’s necessary that a “message” be had in art, but when you neither pose questions nor offer answers, it can begin to feel more like these themes are props. Norco mostly acknowledges and maybe comments on its phenomena. Again, that’s not intrinsically bad, but I have my preferences, and the absence of direction doesn’t work for me here. All of it is cool, sure. But I don’t know what to make of it, and not in a way that fills me with giddy curiosity. I didn’t leave Norco with any questions, for either its world or for my own.

Again, I feel guilt, “damning with faint praise”, but I seem to be in the minority here, which is nice, I guess. It makes me feel a little more comfortable offering criticism. After all, I can find plenty of ecstatic analyses of Norco, but not as much where I’m coming from. I see why others have fallen in love with it. But I never got that far. Maybe I’ll grow more fond after reading criticism and other’s feelings. But this was my initial response, and that counts for something.

Norco, at its core, ends up as a collage, so scattered as to almost resemble a pastiche of itself. It’s soup full of scoopfuls of ideas that have been lightly emulsified. Collages can be good. And Norco is good. Its lack of thematic and structural direction does not nullify all the beauty therein, but it is why I don’t think I’ll ever get goosebumps when I think about it.

This review will contain both minor and major spoilers for Tsukihime, I will do my best to not go too deep into major spoilers unless they absolutely need to be talked about.

Content Warning: I’m going to be discussing the following topics: Sex, Rape, Incest, Pornography, and other forms of violence.

I’ll be completely honest… I have no idea how to truthfully go about reviewing this game in its entirety.

It is something with ideas that are vastly engaging and filled with symbolic and philosophical value to me, but also has some of the worst writing decisions I’ve ever seen in a form of media that I’ve ever seen.

It’s a game where when it’s good, it’s excellent. It’s a game where when it’s bad, it’s fucking terrible.

I guess the first thing I’ll tackle is why I wanted to play this game. I’ll start off with the obvious reason. I saw the huge explosion in Neco Arc memes throughout last year and I found myself thoroughly entertained with the strange and zany situations “La Creatura” would find herself in. I had no idea where she came from, and initially I didn’t really care much.

I just thought that she was funny, from videos of her interacting with people on Omeagle to that one video of a Neco Arc nodding its head while the vine boom sound effect would blare loudly.

What got me curious however was my friend, Simon, going through the game. His reactions were so insane, and the dialogue he would share with me was so goofy that I couldn’t help but be interested. I also eventually joined the Discord server which introduced him to the game, Tokyo Millennium, and ultimately found myself beginning my warrior’s journey into the rabbit hole known as the Nasuverse.

I was surprised to find that Tsukihime was made by the same people who made Fate, a franchise I was at least familiar with, despite not having consumed any of the media related to it. It’s such a popular franchise that it was always on my peripheral. So I felt like I was finally getting my true introduction to the work of Type Moon.

Upon playing and finishing Tsukihime, I am left with a feeling of utter confusion and maybe a bit of insanity seeping in.

From here I’m going to separate the review into sections delving into the individual routes.

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Arcueid:
This is definitely one of my two favorite routes in the game, simply because the writing for the growing relationship between the two is so well done. I genuinely felt like these two were meant to be together by the second half of the route given their natural chemistry, they feel like they’ve known each other forever despite having only known each other for like a week.

The lore for this route in particular, while a bit heavy on the exposition, still caught my interest due to how the game’s version of vampires function. Nrvnqsr Chaos in particular was a great antagonist in The Heavy regard. He was written to be such a hateable and disgusting force of violence and terror, and I love how utterly imposing he was. His ability was also incredibly intriguing to me, but going more into that would be veering way more into spoiler territory then I want to go.

I think the weakest aspect of Arcueid’s Route in particular is the actual primary antagonist, Michael Roa Valdamjong. While his lore is very significant, he is an antagonist that has very little presence. While I recognize he also isn’t the primary focus of the route, I still think that his minimal role as well as lack of screen time caused him to lose my interest, and comparing him to Chaos is like night and day. I think he functions better in another route, but we’ll get back to that.

However, the real issue I have with the Arc Route has to do with its portrayal of sexual assault. At a certain point later in the route, there is a moment where the protagonist Shiki attempts to rape Arcueid. This moment comes almost completely out of nowhere, has a visual CG showing Shiki committing the sexual assault (which in turn is an attempt to entice the reader), and gives the player the choice to actually rape her, which while that is the incorrect choice, should never have been an option in the first place.

The scene then ends with Arcueid blaming herself for the sexual assault. It is easily the most upsetting H-Scene in the entire game, and my reaction to it was to rant very angrily to my friends about how absolutely livid I was with that entire moment.

It doesn’t help that within only the span of another chapter, there is another H-scene where Arc and Shiki consensually have sex, which just feels so poorly paced because I cannot actually fathom someone wanting to having consensual sex with the person who tried to rape them the day before.

It’s definitely the most disgusting use of rape in this entire game, and it’s only the second H-scene you will witness period.

We’ll touch on my overall thoughts on the sex scenes at the very end however.

While still on the subject though, I would be remiss to not bring up a scene near the end of the game where Ciel tries to stop Shiki from going to fight Roa, and in his desperation he threatens to rape her. It’s like, so excessive in my mind and even for such a desperate moment, it still feels like they forced the line to be centered on rape when it could easily be that he could threaten to kill her instead and it wouldn’t lessen the impact of the scene.

I do still think that Arc’s Route has probably the best pacing throughout the entire game, and it was where I was the most engaged.

I think Arc’s True Ending is one of the best in the game and really hits on a poignant emotional level for me. I like the Good Ending as well, but mostly because it makes me happy.

Overall, Arc’s Route is mostly solid, but the negatives that permeate the entire game can be at their utter worse here.

I would rate the route itself as 4 stars.

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Ciel:

Ciel’s Route is usually slept on from what I’ve been told, and I can sort of see the reason why. A good chunk of the route is mostly a repeat of Arcueid’s for the first half of it. There’s also a lot of focus on how much of a missed opportunity it is that Shiki and Arc aren’t together, which is a little further accentuated in that Ciel and Shiki don’t have nearly as good chemistry with each other as Shiki has with Arc.

However, I think the second half of Ciel’s route is excellent and actually makes Roa into more of a sincere threat, despite actually no longer having a physical presence. It was definitely the best usage of his character in the game, and it makes the stakes for Shiki himself incredibly high.

I think Ciel herself is a very interesting character, and the story surrounding who she is and her complicated feelings of what she truly desires in this route creates a unique conflict for the friendship between her and Shiki.

Ciel’s Route also has one of the most introspective True Endings in the entire game which had me on my toes from beginning to end, and genuinely caught me off guard. It was borderline like watching the final two episodes of Evangelion for me, and had me thinking a lot about the meaning of one's own consciousness and desires.

Of course, not all things come out unscathed. There is yet again another moment of sexual assault, fortunately it is not visualized through a CG, but there is a point where Shiki (who is currently in a state of losing his sanity) forces himself onto Kohaku. While the situation is handled far better in comparison to the Arcueid one, since there are genuine consequences for the action taken, and Shiki does not receive forgiveness for the act he committed, it still feels like an excessive use of sexual violence for the sake of shock value. The scene could have easily just had him try to kill her rather than ejaculating on her on top of that. It’s definitely one of the less upsetting examples, but it still feels forced despite it all.

There’s also the topic of the “Roa Boner” or the Broaner as I call it. Basically, in one of the game’s many excuses to have a sex scene, Shiki’s body (currently being possessed by Roa) needs to have a “release” in order to slow down the takeover. Cue the Ciel H-Scene. It’s just one of the really dumb moments that will make you laugh and question who thought it was a good idea to include. It also is part of what makes the Shiki/Ciel relationship feel a little hollow in comparison to Arc’s, in that they need a roundabout excuse to have sex in comparison to just… being in love with one another.

Ciel’s Route also has the worst Good Ending in the game, being almost a borderline parody of itself and it’s very dumb. If it makes you happy, more power to you, but honestly Sun reminds me of some of the stupidest shit I used to watch as a teenager. It’s like watching the like, scene in Evangelion where it’s a typical school day scenario, which in Eva is meant to be this subversive moment that’s self aware. It’s like that but without that self awareness.

I would rate the Ciel Route as 3 stars.

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Akiha:

Ugh.

So, this is the route I honestly don’t want to talk about. Before I played Tsukihime I was told that this route is considered “the best” in the server that introduced me to the game. However, when I brought this up in the Backloggd server, everyone was taken aback questioning how such a viewpoint could exist.

I already had reservations about this route for one obvious reason: It’s the incest route.

Now in reality the characters are not actually related, but the perspective is that Shiki has believed Akiha to be his sister for the past 8 years of his life, and it just makes the whole thing very uncomfortable.

Shiki and Akiha have almost zero chemistry romantically, and while I understand Akiha’s reasoning, in that she knows that Shiki isn’t her actual brother, and that she’s been abused by her father and has to deal with the other SHIKI, she is merely trying to get comfort in the one person she truly cares about, I still can’t help but think that it just doesn’t justify it enough.

Something a friend of mine has said is that the characters of Tsukihime are meant to be subversive, which is true. For example Arcueid. She’s this affable genki girl who you think would get along with anyone, but in reality she’s only acting like that because she has flat out never had friends for her entire life and is still very innocent and naive because of her duty.

Akiha feels like the least subversive of the entire cast, fitting squarely in the tsundere incest sister trope that has been around in Japanese Media for a long time. While again there are reasons for why she acts the way she does, those reasons have also been used in the past in Japanese Media as well for this trope as well as other similar ones i.e. Shinmai Maō no Tesutamento.

The route is also host to both the longest H-scene in the game, and the worst non-sexual assault related one as well. It is such a cringe inducing and painful scene to witness… that you can’t skip the whole way through because there is plot relevant information within the scene. If there’s something I haven’t brought up, it is how amateur the artstyle is. For the most part it isn’t a problem, and I honestly think that it looks pretty good most of the time, but it is at its absolute worst with the H-Scenes and combined with the awkwardness of Akiha’s H-Scene in general just brings nothing but pain.

I’ll be completely honest, the Akiha H-Scene broke me completely for the rest of the game. After that scene I could not feel anything for the H-Scenes that came after because Akiha’s is so inherently awful in my eyes that nothing else could offend me more outside of the sexual assault scenes.

The thing is, the Akiha Route still has good ideas despite it all, and that’s honestly what makes the bad parts of it hit worse for me.

I love the early part of the route involving Shiki’s classmate Satsuki turning into a vampire and trying to turn Shiki as well, and how it leads to a long lasting guilt for him when he ultimately kills her. I like how that moment is mirrored in the endings of this route as well. But then there’s also the part in that moment where he decides to kill Satsuki not for his own sake or for realizing that she can’t be helped, but because ”who would Akiha have to protect her”, it just felt like such a forced and awkward moment for me (made especially more clear given how the next two routes handle this exact same moment) given how early in the route it occurs and how unrelated to the current situation it felt.

SHIKI is also a pretty good antagonist in this route, showing exactly how creepy it is to want to bone your sibling (in this case, his actual blood sibling), and is a very hateable and personal enemy. He does a better job than Roa personally in having presence and actually bringing stakes to the plot.

I also think the endings for this route are pretty good as well, as there isn’t a Good Ending but a Normal Ending. Both are tragic, but the True Ending at least has a light at the end of the tunnel that shows that things will be alright. I personally prefer the Normal Ending as it shows the ultimate consequences of the route and paints the incestual love as what it is: inherently toxic.

I also actually like when the route shows the sibling dynamic Akiha and Shiki have rather than the romantic aspect of their relationship, as they actually work well as siblings and they’re written as being understanding and caring of one another while also having that typical conflict.

It’s just a shame this game is an eroge from the year 2000.

This is the one route I hope gets some major changes to it in the remake because I really think that the incest is what ultimately harms this route the most (y’know, outside of the porn). Definitely the weakest route in the game for me.

I’d rate the Akiha Route as 1 star.

Also Akiha has a long ass neck.


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Hisui:

This is the second of my two favorite routes. It essentially takes the best aspects of the Akiha Route, and removes the incestual plot, while also showing a well written and developing relationship between Shiki and Hisui. They are probably my second favorite relationship in the game behind Shiki and Arcueid as their growth feels incredibly natural and results in incredibly heart wrenching moments in the second half.

I really don’t want to spoil much of this route because I think those emotional gut punches need to be experienced blind for the true experience, but trust me, they hit hard.

There’s only two parts of this route I have a major problem with, that being the use of a CG to show one of the characters after they had been raped, which feels like an unnecessary visualization of something that would have been better off not visualized.

The bigger problem is like with Arcueid’s Route, there is a scene where Shiki has the option to sexually assault and rape Hisui. Regardless of what the guide says, I heavily recommend not going with the option to sexually assault, the scene is disgusting and is nothing but pure excess on the part of the writers. It’s incredibly unnecessary and only appeals to people with a very sickening mindset and is absolutely harmful.

There’s also the part where Shiki winds up having consensual sex with Hisui which is another one of those “we made up an excuse so the characters can have sex” moments the game is fond of. It’s a dumb moment but makes sense lore wise, but still feels really awkward.

The endings for Hisui though are spectacular and among the best in the game, in fact Hisui’s Good Ending is easily the best Good Ending in the entire game in my personal opinion.

Outside of that, I don’t want to go further in spoiling the Hisui Route, but just trust me that outside of those negatives I’ve listed, this route is truly an emotional ride from start to finish and absolutely worth it.

I’d rate the Hisui Route 4 stars.

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Kohaku:

As the finale to this lengthy experience, the Kohaku route mostly focuses on tying up the loose ends of all the other routes. While it is a good overall experience, it definitely has a bit of a pacing issue, and Kohaku herself isn’t really much of a focus of it.

However, I still think that the overall relationship between Shiki and Kohaku and how he tries to help her is a very good emotional core, and I think that makes the second half of the route have one of the better payoffs in the whole game.

I do like Akiha as the primary antagonist as her brocon tendencies are accentuated as being unhealthy, and it shows how someone like her could become just as bad as SHIKI if they give in to their obsessions. I think it’s a natural extension of the character we were shown in her route, but fits better here due to being an antagonist.

I do think the ending is a little weak though, mostly in that it doesn’t feel like there are enough consequences for the acts of the characters within the route, but it’s still something that makes me happy overall and didn’t leave me completely unsatisfied.

I’d rate the Kohaku Route 3 stars.

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Discussing the Sexual Content:

As you can probably gather so far, I found that the sexual content in this game was inherently harmful to the story that was trying to be told by Nasu.

A good chunk of it feels extremely indulgent in what I find are the worst aspects of the eroge genre, creating stupid excuses just so characters can fuck, giving the player the choice in scenarios involving sexual assault to appeal to people with a very unhealthy fetish, and ultimately feeling completely unnecessary in the grand scheme of the greater narrative.

This isn’t to say that I don’t want writers to be able to bring up and discuss subjects and themes like sex and the impacts of sexual assault and rape but more in that writers have to be careful when utilizing such concepts because even the smallest misuse can be extremely harmful in the conveyance of them.

I believe Nasu does a mostly poor job at how he conveys these themes, and because of that it results in an experience that will leave most readers extremely uncomfortable and drop the material.

The H-Scenes in general are written is such a blunt and comical way at points that the game literally feels like one of those bootleg porn parodies you would find on Pornhub, it’s so degrading and ultimately meaningless that it almost makes you laugh until it gets specifically awkward and uncomfortable.

This is the part I’m glad to see be gone from the remakes, and I genuinely hope Type-Moon never does sexual content like this ever again in the future, I simply don’t believe they are competent enough at it.

My recommendation for people who plan to play Tsukihime is to hold the Control button when you get to an H-Scene, it fast forwards through the whole thing and is ultimately better than sitting through them like I did. I sat through them so nobody else has to, so please do me a favor and skip the H-Scenes in this game, I’m fucking begging you. Do not let my efforts be in vain.

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Conclusion & Final Thoughts:

I am Shiki Tohno fr fr, as I can see between the lines that fill this entire visual novel. If I were able to cut the bad (pornographic) parts out of this entire experience to make something that feels less over indulgent in its perversion, I would.

Because, underneath all the schlocky porn, the incest, the dialogue where Shiki talks about ejaculating, underneath all of that there is a story here about the meaning of life and how important our choices are and the consequences of our actions.

It is a narrative that speaks to the inherent humanity within me that aspires to be free from depressive and negative thoughts, and all I want is to be able to experience it in the way it was truly meant to be.

That is why I cannot easily recommend Tsukihime as it stands to you, because as it stands its excess involving sex and sexual depravity is just something I cannot wholeheartedly condone.

If you want to give Tsukihime a shot, here is a link to the English Translation website, run by none other than kohakudoori who I would like to thank for giving us all the chance to get the experience of Tsukihime.

I definitely see myself coming back to reread the Arc and Hisui routes in the future because they’re just so damn good, and I genuinely can’t wait until the remakes are fully translated to English, though how long that will be I do not know.

I would like to say thanks to Tokyo Millennium for giving me the brainworms required for this, and my buddy Simon for sharing his experience with me which inspired me to try the game out.

And last but not least, I want to thank you Backloggd, for keeping me sane during this duration of my life, I love you folks.

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P.S:
Fun fact, but you can easily change the music in this game.

If you are going to commit the act of actually sitting through the H-Scenes (I do not recommend nor condone this for the record), I recommend changing Track 5 to any song you choose. Here’s the steps.

1.“Procure” a music track of your liking (I picked a variety, my last one was It Has To Be This Way for that epic final battle against sex.)

2. Change it to a .ogg file. You can do this here.

3. Download the file and rename it to “track05”.

4. Open the “CD” folder in your Tsukihime folder, and put the new “track05” in there.

5. Replace the file.

Then voila, it will play the respective track in place of Track 5. This should help anyone who thinks they have “the balls” to stand up to the terrible H-Scenes.

Anyways, I need to start working on my “How Close Is This Media To Tsukihime” Tier List, so until next time.

Burennya~~

Disappointed by how the genuinely impressive specificity of place, atmosphere of dread, and the sharply observed details re: class and encroaching capital are left entirely by the wayside around the halfway point (maybe even earlier?) in favor of it's ok-but-not-revelatory plot, which I found significantly less interesting than the place and context and small glimpses of community around which it initially revolves. Unlike KR0 it is to some extent actually about the region its ostensibly about, at least at first, but also unlike KR0 its formalist and structuralist swings feel...not half-baked but maybe a bit of an afterthought, or at least not consistent enough in implementation to fully land. The 4ch/proud boys/Q analogue stuff is just restrained enough to avoid being embarrassing and is generally p funny but ultimately feels pretty toothless idk.

All that said, the first few hours absolutely transfixed me, and I got more genuine laughs out of the jokes here than I have from any game I can think of in recent memory, and that Thou end credits track fucking shreds so this still gets a rec from me! Extremely keen to see what Geography of Robots do next, they've definitely Got Something here.