You KNOW a game is good as fuck when you hit the end and you see a list of research citations in the credits. Holy shit, dude, what a ride. Game that has met near-universal acclaim actually extremely good, who would have thought?

I do think I ruined my experience by taking it a bit more slowly than I would have liked, as I found myself forgetting certain plot threads and characters, but the core is strong enough that I have a lot of great memories of going through the game. There's a lot of stuff that's really stuck with me since I played it, like every end of act going hard as hell. I like Andreas as a protagonist, he's got a very nice balance of being customizable through player choices while also having a very compelling core to him. All the characters were good, actually, even with some minor difficulties in remembering everyone (and that's even with a cheat sheet in the journal...). There were definitely characters I wish I'd gotten to spend a little more time with, because I'm not sure if that was the only time I could've chatted them up or if I just missed out on their storylines.

I also had a great time with all the mysteries, and it was extremely cool how like. Absolutely none of your Big Choices in that regard end up feeling good in the end. I remember completing Act I feeling like I'd made some sort of horrible mistake, and it absolutely ruled. As much as I love it and want to know what happens in other paths, I'm not sure if I want to play it again, because I think in games with choices like this you are bringing a certain aspect of yourself to the playthrough, you know? I'd certainly love to know how things turn out for other people, though. Maybe once I've sat on it a while.

Of course, what originally drew me to the game was the presentation, and it's really incredible. The game looks fantastic, between the speech bubbles with text that suits their own writing style and the period-appropriate art representing characters and their mental states, particularly Andreas's mind palace. Like. God damn. I don't like getting into spoilers in reviews but those fucked me up bad as the game went on!

I know people are kind of mixed on how good the individual acts are, but I'm gonna be real, I liked all of them for their own reasons. Act three is very different, and it threw me off guard at first but I really loved the themes it played with in comparison to the first two, while also really enjoying the first two. Of course it's all meandering to the same thematic core, the center of the labyrinth--but I think it's fun to find your way there yourself, isn't it?

Good shit. Absolutely worth a play or three.

holy hell dude what a wild fucking ride. My journey through this VN was a little weird; a friend of my set up what was basically a Visual Novel Book Club kinda thing where we all read one chapter a week, but that ended up falling through and I ended up completing the rest of it in like two nights, lmao. I knew I was in for something special when I watched what was effectively the intro movie; the monochrome vibes and the music were immaculate.

I actually know of Xeecee first through the Shrieking Shack podcast, which sort of helps me see a little bit of the creative DNA here via, like, asides and literary analysis therein and such. (It's a very fun podcast and I found it pretty cathartic in the whole. "ah i liked harry potter a lot as a kid. what's it like to revisit it now that jkr is like one of the worst people alive who isn't a head of state." kind of thing.) I think it's fun to track artistic influences, and I can definitely see some Ryukishi07 in here, what with there being a certain amount of mystery over whether everything is entirely mundane or if there's something more supernatural going on here.

Of course, it's very much its own thing, too. The art's fantastic, of course; all the characters are very striking and unique looking, and the expression work is great. The music is also totally fantastic, and there's so much of it! There were a LOT of unique tracks. I can't imagine myself getting bored with any of the tracks if they were repeated more often than they were, but damn, there's so much of it. I can't believe the game dumped the sickest track in the world over a debate over how many ducks one nun could kill.

Of course, with style comes substance, and I really love everything going on here. The characters are great! All of them are pretty delightful, even the ones who kind of suck. (Angela sucks in an extremely fun way. love her.) Hedwig is an extremely fun protagonist to be in the head of... well, maybe she isn't, because I'll admit it can be rough. She's, uh, not doing great here. But she's compelling as hell, and so is everyone else, I think.

Darcy is my favorite, of course. Love her. But I do enjoy every character here, and the dialogue and narration are both extremely compelling. I can't WAIT to see where this shit goes. I cannot deal with this being volume one, man. Where's the rest of it!!!! I want to know how the hell the prologue has anything to do with all of this crazy shit!!!! Let me back on the ride!!!

(Also this is a fun companion piece to Pentiment, another medieval mystery featuring an anchoress. It's very funny that they came out not too long apart from each other. I think this should become a trend.)

Oh, so suddenly we're all against women's wrongs? They truly hate to see a girlboss winning and they love to see a girlfailure losing. We should probably do something about the Catholics though. I'm sure the debate about this has been very civil. Love to sit down with big hot cup of coffee to sip loudly while reading any history book on this.

With this and Misericorde, I might be really into nun based horrors, but with very specific presentation. Its too easy to miss the mark, and this really threads the needle. Things that haven't thread the needle for me:
- Sister Holiday Mysteries. Love the idea of a mean punk mystery solving nun, but the noir detective staple of "stumbling into problems and accusing the wrong person" feels like such shit when your character seems to care so little that she's ruining the lives of kids and coworkers.
- Lucifer Within Us: cyberpunk religious story just kind of sucks with its just completely uncritical about the church at all.
- coworker's personal published novel. Self-insert fights sin with a sword. Extremely embarrassing.

Nun dramas that have worked for me:
- this
- Misericorde
- Sound of Music

One day I'll figure out the pattern here, but tonight isn't that night.

They sure did make one of these!

Filled with mixed feelings across the board. The narrative is, broadly speaking, really enjoyable. It's endearing to encounter these characters again in such a new format. Cloud is perfectly communicated as a tryhard, Barrett is a fanatic with the glasses on and a soulful man with the glasses off, Tifa and Aerith are cute. All the key dynamics are beautiful and they feel right. The things that exist in the original game are broadly done right.

Mechanically, it's sort of… muddled. I was surprised to find I actually really enjoyed the action rpg format. I’m a KH nerd, I’m still a sucker. But KH has the advantage of multiple worlds and environments to explore. There’s opportunities to engage with the mechanics and the enemies at your own leisure. By comparison, FF7R is… very linear. Your opportunities to level up or engage with its combat without main-line progression is limited to specific locations, all out of the way of each other. Shinra combat simulators, Collesseums, small enemy zones just outside of limited sidequest chapters. And the sidequest chapters often fall into things I thought we all know got tedious in these kinds of rpgs, chasing down rats and so on. I understand and even sympathize with needing to add time to the clock, to make the purchase worth it, but... man. I just want more character beats. On the other hand, your reward for finishing quests being more character moments is really charming as well. I guess my main issue is that I find exploring Midgar as the city so interesting and fulfilling, while the emptier monster sections feel so constrained and repetitive. Hated Train Graveyard, hated the freeways. I guess it really comes down to the map design. There's so many sections where I just end up staring at the minimap rather than actually looking at the game around me. When the level design is singing, I am in love with the combat and I'm thrilled in each enemy encounter. When the level design is failing, I was constantly begging for the chapter to end.

And then you get to the (I assume well known at this point) rebuild-esque shenanigans, where complicated characters kind of just start repeating the same sort of "I defy my fate" or "the future can be bright" voice lines that just bum me out in a way. While the weird dynamic of the anti-retcon ghosts helping or hindering the party initially makes some interesting narrative complications, the ultimate result is a narrative that just kind of loses my interest compared to the normal intimacy found in the original FF7.

Approaching FF7 decades after the original was a genuinely beautiful experience. I was consistently excited to talk about it, I was never bored or annoyed, all the overhype and preexisting fandom expectations melted away into experiencing Just One Of The Greatest Games Of All Time. FF7Remake looks gorgeous, feels great, and offers so many interesting character moments and divergences. But its broader narrative of trying to reconcile with that overwhelming fan response? Just ultimately kind of goes nowhere for me.

See you in three years when Rebirth gets on PC.

There's a certain power in dissatisfaction. In giving players bad choices. There are many choice-based crpgs that offer perhaps too much choice in how the world is shaped. In how to influence others. Pentiment wisely pulls back on this to build an aching, intimate yearning. A yearning to make all the right decisions. A yearning to keep everyone safe, to choose a killer that will hurt the fewest people instead of choosing a killer based on evidence. A yearning to protect, and a yearning when we've failed. Our main character is not the hero deciding the fate of the world. He's just a guy, in a place and time. How we all leave our mark on history is subject to so many factors beyond our control.

Mechanically, its hard to say every skill has all the uses it could. Skills mainly make certain investigations easier, but they're always multiple avenues to uncover all the evidence you want. But this also means that every skill choice that does provide a new dialogue path feels all the more rewarding for your commitment. The skill choices in the final act of the game, compared to the others, are much more limited in their scope, but the final act is also much more on the rails than its previous story sections. Less time for choices to matter.

Still. Just kind of a truly banger game with incredible artistic sensibilities.

we can talk in circles about the art that may have inspired fallow, we can waste time talking about the long lineage of story-driven rpgmaker games that led up to this behemoth; that won't stop fallow from haunting me.

it is infinitely more than another sob story or moody indie game. it is the metaphorical place where all of us who have been outcast from society reside, brought to physicality. stroll down the dusty hallways of the fallow residence and relive memories that are not yours - and yet they are ours.

when i hear the credits theme, "shame", i do not feel the grief i so often do for characters i've loved or fictional worlds i had to leave behind; i feel something watching me over my shoulder. a comforting kind of sadness that will cocoon me even as everything i loved crumbles away.

on the wall above my desk rests these words: "my sisters and i had a secret wish to die in a place that cared for us". i think i will remember them in those final moments.

The fact that so much of Metroid Prime's 20 year old design not only holds up, but enthralls, is testament to the depth of its exploration and world-building. But, as a remaster, the offering here is largely superficial. The graphics upgrade, impressive as it is, ends up calling attention to the other elements that were left untouched. The save system, restrictive puzzle design, and dated soundscape are all elements that would be fine for a straight remaster, but feel jarring next to the contemporary graphics.

The Norwood Suite brought me new discoveries with every room. With his free-to-play 2015 release, Off-Peak, NYC musician and developer Cosmo D brought his electric, off-the-cuff style of jazz to game space. That energy is focused and brought to life in new ways in The Norwood Suite, one of the best first-person experience games(walking sim, if you prefer) since 2015's The Beginner's Guide. Strictly speaking, you progress through the game by performing menial tasks for the clientele and staff at The Norwood Suite, a demented hotel tucked among the evergreens in the rural sprawl around NYC. But the game’s charm lies in the setting and characters, a storied hotel with intrigue, Dadaist absurdity, and architecture that gleefully folds in on itself. The story goes...places, but it's the music that will constantly nip at your heels (literally, the music always manifests in the world through speakers peppering the estate), guiding you from hall to hall in a world where internet modems have eyes, voices are interpreted as freeform instrumentals, and Red Bull has taken over the world. It's the best world to get lost in, where musical and visual discovery await at every turn.

Night in the Woods made me relive the worst years of my life and I loved it. I wasted two years at the University of Pittsburgh before the marijuana faded away and all I had to show for it was a streak of black outs and insurmountable student debt. Those hazy memories bias me to more closely relate to a protagonist as deeply flawed and, at times, unlikeable as Mae Borowski. But, even without history coloring my experience, the writing from Infinite Fall's Bethany Hockenberry and Scott Benson imbues its world with tremendous empathy and slice-of-life details rarely seen in video games. It deserves to stand alongside works from other media like Bojack Horseman, Scott Pilgrim, and Ghost World--places where the surreality of the world masks our deepest wants, hopes, and fears. Never before has a game so clearly spoken to me personally and spoken for me generationally.