I want it to be known that this review is mostly up for posterity. My refreshed views (mostly on worry of how it can hurt eyes) became more refined in a later post you can read here: https://backloggd.com/u/Erato_Heti/review/664032/

Please do not read this 40 minute review unless you have an obscene amount of time

CW: Gambling, Invoking Queer status to support an argument, quoting other users at length, terminally online debatelording, Russian Roulette, Exceedingly Dry, Lots of Hypotheticals

Est. Time to read: 40 minutes

Policy

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PART 1: THE GREAT VIP CASINO METAPHOR

Vampire Survivors is a relatively easy one stick shooter, with game design that consists of walking as the form of play and no actual ability to shoot. Instead you are tasked with moving around to avoid contact with the enemies as you pick up collectables. You can also pick up chests that reward the player with random amounts of loot with a long and exciting chest animation. As you play a half hour run, you continuously level up choosing between what to level up through a pool of 3 choices, however once you get to the end of a run you will have exhausted the majority of the options in that pool, meaning that keen players can force specific builds after playing for long enough.

There are performance issues with the game, the game produces 'number go up' gameplay through having the player automatically produce projectile spam, but the game starts to chug along and lag out at the end of a run due to the number of objects on screen careening the game to a halt. It is very odd that most people who play this game don't point this fact out at all because it makes it more nauseating and difficult to look at than it already is. However my impression is the reason this isn't focused on is that runs tend to play themselves out in the last 5 minutes so no amount of lag could prevent your character from winning. The game also looks like a visual skunks fart, with the halloween tier 'spooky' castlevania enemies sticking out like a sore thumb over the rest. That being said, while these issues are very grating aesthetically, my overall issue is with the design psychology, not just that it runs poorly or has a bad upgrade tree.

I think you could summarize my perspective on the design trappings of this game through the 2 following premises:

1. The game is a time waster with very little intervention or challenge against the player, since the only thing you can do besides walk around is choose from an incredibly limited upgrade pool that becomes samey and effectively fixed across runs.

2. The prior is an intentional design decision, along with flashy animations and reward jingles that are meant to mimic a sense of catharsis that you would get from being at a casino and to put you in a similar zen state.

Now that's perfectly fine, but I don't just think this is a bad game: I think it's a malicious psychic vampire of a game, and that calling it out from this perspective is seen as weird and histrionic. The question is why do I find this worthy of such an absurd condemnation? To illustrate properly it may be worth turning our attention to the design inspirations for the game: pachinko parlors and the mobile games market. The dev of Vampire Survivors mentions that his inspiration for the game was a mobile game called ‘Magic Survival,’ which I don't think anybody has played, but it's a carbon copy of that game with a new coat of paint. Same UI layout and everything.

You know what phone games I'm talking about: the maliciously designed pay-to-win grandma trap Candy Crush, the actually made by an Australian casino company Raid Shadow Legends, and infinite runner mobile ad junk like Subway Surfers. I don't think most people would come to the defense of these games, and many more would actively condemn them as seedy and gross. However, because Vampire Survivors is so deeply popular as a PC release, people are comparing it positively to games like The Binding of Issac instead and missing that particular connection point.

Anybody who has played any of the games previously mentioned knows what I mean when I use them as a point of reference, but people still find it uncomfortable to actively talk about why mobile games are like this in the first place. It's in part because the primary way you can get apps on your phone is through the monopolized app stores, which are not optimized with customer service in mind. Instead their store algorithm explicitly promotes free games with ads and microtransactions as much as possible. Following this is an issue of immersion through the lens of Natasha D. Schull’s ‘Addiction by Design’, as being in the 'machine zone' where experiencing play in a fugue zenlike fog is the only thing you care about. Phone games do actually have a bit of a problem in achieving this because of the fact that you usually mess with your phone while doing other things. That being said the most successful games are able to pull off a microcosm of this version, Candy Crush has a sordid history for actually addicting its player base, but instead of sitting in front of a large machine for a half hour and losing your money before finally peeling yourself away, you can play a few rounds of it and games like it whatever adware junk in your pocket at the bus, then in line for the restaurant, and then as you're falling asleep. Etc.

I'll concede something here: a large portion of the hangup on this argument, and how intense the discontent is, seems to be that most mobile games at least try to fuck you over with microtransactions and pay-to-play models, which are considered bad. But this game is 3 dollars you pay all at once and then never have to worry again, how bad can that really be? Surely that's not indicative of gambling or addiction and thus needs to be described via something else.

I want to defer to a rather brilliant analogy that Pangburn came up with during a fantastic discourse on the game’s addictive (or in his view, lack thereof) elements:

"I am strolling around a casino, perhaps nursing a drink, and a floor attendant notices me, beckoning me over to a new wing of the facility. it's a VIP room with a low price point of several dollars to get in filled with the same slot machines as out on the floor. the difference here is that once you have paid you have a lifetime of access to the suite, where you can continue to push the one button to your heart's content. the catch here is that there is no payout and you know for a fact that you'll never roll the jackpot for your first few hours, you must sit there and continue to press the button until your odds rise and rise, converging to a near perfect chance of the triple 7s after multiple dozen hours of play. at this point, you can return to this hall at will to watch the triple 7s appear again and again. this is how vsurv sounds to me. I think this sounds fucking stupid and I have no interest in playing it. " in the comments here

However, he contends that he doesn't have a 'moral issue' with it. He then goes on to say that
"the end state is fixed and you're always aware you will reach it at some point. it's not really ‘gambling’ when the odds are always in your favor, right? which is not to say it can't be addictive in its own right, but I hope this makes my thoughts on the matter clear. "

I don't want to deconstruct this too mercilessly but I do want to point out a few interesting things about the VS scenario and how it distinguishes it from this analogy. Mainly the idea that if you play for long enough you will hit the point of getting 7s and always will get 7s. Here's where I find this slightly misleading: the 'jackpot' of VS play is winning which means in order for the analogy to be accurate it would be something closer to guaranteeing you get 7s after waiting and intently interfacing with the screen for 30 full minutes. Although one could argue that the destruction of enemies is also a 'jackpot' reward system, I feel it's actually comparable more to just visual encouragement data like the bright candy explosions in Candy Crush, or the neon bright machines and loud sound effects of slot machines, rather those smaller moments are not the real 'jackpot' you are in pursuit of. Whereas people who play Binding of Isaac are playing to see a new unique run and how the tear effects synergize, its not just about finishing the game in itself.

At the same time there's the assumption that gambling is merely bad because of the house edge, but this risks over simplifying the process of gambling itself. Just yesterday, I played no money poker for the point of prestige and no money was involved, and as such I find that a genuine interest in playing poker as a game seems to distinguish it from a perception of gambling. However, the idea of risking increasing stakes is still there and can thus lead people to take up higher risk poker. Sports betters start off by watching the sport, then they start betting after warming up a while.

However, let me ask you a question: if I played real money poker and I was the best poker player in the world, is that not still gambling? If I was the best poker player, and I was playing with random people, my odds of winning are probably 90%, maybe even more, so is gambling identified by that 10% risk? Is it identified by the house edge? You can come ahead consistently in poker, people play this game for money after all.

Perhaps the nuance here then is that poker is a genuine game that can also still be described as a vehicle for gambling. If that's the case then honestly maybe any game could be a vehicle for gambling, and it's just about how well that engine is tailored to do so. To come back to the "slots'' example then, here's what GoufyGoggs has to say on it when musing about arcade games in comparison:

"No one wants to play a slot machine where you aren't forced to put your money on the line after all. The reliance on leaving outcomes up to chance fundamentally prevents a creative space from ever forming, they’re inherently destructive as Caillois put it. So what you're left with is just the addictive practices and negative impacts on mental health without any of the tangible benefits. " cited here

Now I feel like it's worth comparing this point to something like Blackjack. Blackjack is an insanely simple 'game' that has to a large degree been solved on what number and below you hit and what number you don't. it's automatic, with the only room for discretion being when you should split or double down. There's no room for a creative space of play to breathe, it's a totally static play experience. Poker is incredibly dynamic. They are both gambling. Even so, another question that might be worth bridging: can Candy Crush be called slot machine gambling? After all, the later levels absolutely have a 'house edge'. I'll leave that question for you, but hopefully you can see on some level it reveals a pedantry over word choice and the contexts we attach them to. That pedantry in part implies a moral disgust with gambling where there isn't with single player game experiences, in spite of the fact the boundary between both is very unstable.

PART 2: GAMBLING IS ACTUALLY AWESOME

This is where I start saying things that really just completely veer off the map from anybody else so far: I don't even dislike gambling, I dislike money, and I dislike people being coerced into situations where they feel they can't stop, and I dislike the games that encourage this. Money is not the sole reason Gambling is good or bad. The idea of playing something for stakes, even with a house edge, can be reapplied to other forms of stakes, like Prestige or an erotic form of stakes like strip poker. Gambling can exist in a world without money and sort of already does through shit like 'spin the bottle'. The reason I'm emphasizing this is that the only real concern is that the play needs to be dynamic enough not to mentally fatigue and lull the person interacting in it. Slots and Blackjack get washed out when you remove money, but not universally. Some people still like being in the zone with Blackjack and I can imagine people getting a compulsion to play on these slot machines without money once a habit has been built. It's not really about the money, it's about the habituation through automated play. On the contrary, what we currently consider gambling can be seen as a vector for genuine expressions of creative humor and identity. For example when playing a best of seven of different games, popular streamer personalities Ludwig and Jerma traded out the idea of playing for money for instead playing to see who else has to wear a silly shirt on stream. The games they all played as well were dynamic, in a way all competitive multiplayer games by design tend to be.

This is deeply funny and engaging version of stakes, and the explicit difference that Detchibe focuses on in their own post,
"The issue is that players are largely uncritical of what they are consuming, why they find it pleasurable, and whether or not it is actually enjoyable. Pleasure and enjoyment are not mutually exclusive, but pleasure is something that happens to you, and enjoyment is something earned by you." source

Being acted upon for pleasure under Detchibe's ruleset can only happen through games that don't pass a degree of dynamic threshold, for example playing at the roulette table, the results strictly only happen to you through random chance, a pleasure, rather than being joy seeking in themselves through a dynamic input that causes the results. In poker you have an incredibly wide array of options: bluffing, folding, playing a weak hand to the bridge, purposefully losing hands in order to win later for intel, etc. This is by design dynamic play. Earlier I mentioned the enjoyment a person can get with 'playing for stakes', but I didn't mention how doing this for an ego and without money involved can obviously be bad in both games and 'gambling'.

Some ways people perform self harm with a game is by playing it for far far longer than they should without taking a break. Meanwhile, gamblers often play without 'taking a break' and in the process losing more money or assets than they expected, this process may produce pleasure for them but not enjoyment. To get dark for a moment, there's nothing about Russian Roulette that makes it a non-game, the results just happen to you with minimal player agency and input. Clinically we could refer to russian roulette as technically a pre-established and static 'game' of chance with no input from the player whatsoever besides rolling the barrel until a certain random point, the results are by this metric technically 'pleasurable' for the living player as the operation of death was not done upon them, but not enjoyable. There's obviously the stakes themselves which are awful, but even if it was being done with a nerf dart the game itself is so static and unrewarding if played many times that the only way to have fun with it and produce more pleasure is by either getting in a tantric zone, or by raising the stakes. For people who play static non microtransaction single player games, those stakes are by time and reward catharsis "I will play today until I get 3 wins", which increases to 4, or 5, etc. Playing a static game like slots is the same. The results are static and not deeply determined by what the player does.

It is my belief that the most 'addictive' games in part can come from playing simply for the reward receptors of having something 'happen upon you' and not engaging in your own branching set of decisions and cognitive inputs, and where it no longer becomes about the dynamic play of the player. To tie this explanation to the Great VIP Casino: A team in WoW start learning how to do boss Raids and they are getting wiped, but in a dynamic and chaotic way where random players are rushing in and dying, its hilarious, but the way to win is actually almost perfectly solved and the results of a win or a loss become increasingly unconcerning and unchallenging. Eventually they get good enough at knowing how to build and prepare for the raid that the odds of success ever increase, yet being prevented from 100% by internet issues, physiological interventions, etc. Eventually the issues of pure success stop, that stops becoming the 'jackpot'. They now know exactly how to pull the enemies etc. Now they are redoing this raid for a .5% rare item drop which they are going to sell or use in arena fights, the new 'jackpot'. The only reason for playing the raid is in order to get this next level of jackpot which is inevitable, but takes much stress and many hours, after the point of vastly diminished dynamic returns, to get. The results are not enjoyable, they are pleasurable, they fulfill a compulsion. This is indistinguishable from the VIP Casino except for the fact that the real 'reward' jackpot for play is much more rare, this seems like a very important distinction except when you recognize that this is the exact type of person who would be compelled into a WoW Raid loop after having spent a week at the great VIP Casino.

Fuck WoW and fuck Blizzard (hot take I know) for doing this, this is how this system operates and it shouldn't need to, there's no reason to limit certain items to such a low drop rate, it should just be a test of basic ability and skill not pure compulsion and time gating. The issue with this version of the events is that it encourages compulsion and encourages a raising of the stakes in at least a few problem players. Some players will never stop playing in the Great VIP Casino or they will seek out a version of the casino now with lower odds and higher stakes, or they will play at the Great VIP Casino for a longer amount of time than last time for the same pleasurable results. For WoW raids, a new boss can come out that now has a .1% chance of dropping that item but maybe it takes quite a bit longer and a few more players with no change in the dynamic set to play, this means it takes more time and labor in order to achieve the same base pleasure. For Vampire Survivors then, this can be seen in 2 different ways, either receiving pleasure from trying to get higher win streaks in the original game. Or through playing Clones where the only change is how long a run takes, or if you need to spend real life money to get further. We are assuming that these 'Knock Offs' provide no enhanced player input and are still 1 stick shooters with small upgrade pools. In this case, either Vampire Survivors is an addicting gateway game for static increased stakes gambling (with time, money, or mental acuity) or its a boring game that sucks to play. The only difference being decided by when the player has the decent sense to 'cash their chips' and leave. There's no way to leave this situation untainted.

From this you could say that I hate this type of gaming more than the umbrella medium of 'gambling' itself as the static and hedonically unrewarding nature of a game would stress you to the point of going further and further in order to activate those same pleasure receptors, eventually to the point of either oblivion, self harm, or non-play. Most players will choose non-play, but because of the existence of the primary 2 potentialities, there needs to be various approaches to mitigate or be aware of the mental trappings of play.

Now to go back to Vampire Survivors for a moment. The issue and stakes purported by the game are obviously not money but time. Your reward for doing well enough in the game is that you get to learn and beat it slightly faster, which is an unengaging form of stakes. Compare this instead to the false equivalence examples I've seen brought up within the idle game genre. Cookie Clicker can obviously ask for large amounts of your passive time, months in fact, which by my time wasting critique may seem damning. That said, there's a significant distinction between those idle games where the goal is to find out more of the lore and world like Universal Paperclips or The Longing and games that are primarily interested in locking off content and completion behind time walls that you either have to pay through or play to compulsion to escape out of like Adventure Capitalist. These malicious design traps can exist in idle games but it's not core to the genre, and in fact Universal Paperclips is a great example of a short idle game that conveys its message and gameplay without taking advantage of the player's time needlessly. This is not a genre issue, this is not a gambling issue, and this is not an 'upgrades in games are bad' issue. This is uniquely a game design issue.

That being said it gets quite complicated talking about the nuances of where that difference can be identified so I'm going to outline some common rebuttals I've seen first:

1. All games, especially those you get good at, are about getting to win-states you have to wait out through increasingly minimal cognitive levels of interfacing.

2. Concerns over how the condemnation is described, ie. calling design malicious, evil, or predatory design practices feeling like loaded moral language.

3. The game can be completed 100% in 30 hours, and many other games like CS: GO, League, etc. eat much more player time and are thus more worthy of condemnation

4. Why refer to it as 'morally bankrupt' etc. rather than just unengaging design or simply just a bad game?

For points 1 and 3, I agree that within the premise of being concerned about the excessive waste of player time you could say that any arcade game being functionally endless is just as bad if not worse. However, I think that while the 'jackpot' of VS gameplay very much is connected to finishing a run, not all games are about the compulsion to finish. For score attack games the concern is just to get further, and for shmups the concern is about also completing the game on one credit, not just completing a run in general (though completing the game also is find). Thus, the implicit challenge of a game is its most salient point of consideration. Run completion should be one of many carrots for play, not the only one. VS has nothing implicit in its system that says you should stop playing when you hit 100% or if you should go for it at all but it has nothing of the opposite either. Instead it presents such catharsis through finishing a run and viewing shallow on-screen destruction that your mind will tune out quickly. The only desire for such completionism is in the player who might want to unlock new characters, but even after doing that getting 100% is not seen as a legitimate overarching nested goal in the way it is for Binding of Isaac, nor would it make the play better if it was.

Time and time again you read what people say and they refer to game as 'addictive' and that they 'dont want to stop playing'. This has to be thought of as an issue that is primarily compounded through static play, as what undynamic play can do is cause the player to treat the repetitive task as simply a way to make time goes by faster, and hibernate the mind in a tantric state. This is best expressed in Cakewalking's post on the game,
"I have 50 hours in Vampire Survivors. I treat it like a time machine. I use it to travel 30 minutes forward in time and feel nothing afterwards." source

The issue I have with this is that trying to time travel forward, considering everyone's time on the earth is limited, seems like quite literally a self-loathing gesture (which is why I refer to it as self-harm earlier). A primary argument for why people would want to do this is to quell anxiety or stress, but then this gets you back to those external stressors faster, whereas most games with a challenge tend to slow people's time down. A more reasonable explanation for it is that it's not a consciously-desired process and is instead being utilized for various other means, but I think the primary symptom that arises from this practice is at the very least low self-esteem. Focusing on only a select few games that speed up time means you have far less to dynamically socialize with others, which trends towards social atrophy. You could say that more dynamic gameplay like the Binding of Issac are equal in this regard, however I think the staticness of a game has a freezing effect on the mind such that if the few games you play are more static than dynamic it's much more likely to make you fall into that social atrophy. This may seem crazy or absurd to point out, but I think it's a valid reason to be upset with art that causes this. Less dynamic games register us as less dynamic people not in the sense of making us literally less interesting as a shallow judgment but in that it limits the scope of speech. Currently I've been obsessed with Undercards, and I recognize that's a game that nobody really knows or cares about. That being said, if given a moment to genuinely express and be excited about the game I could speak about it for hours upon end. But the repetitive and limited scenarios mean that you could probably only squeeze the lemon of discussion out of Vampire Survivors for a few drops if that. Similarly, a Candy Crush player has a lot less to say on their game of choice than a Tetris player. This may seem odd since Tetris is, on the surface, a far simpler game, but Tetris experts can talk about various stacking combinations, tricks, and speak about bonding over their hobby with others. Candy Crush players are isolated, and a lot of the purpose of the design, I feel, is to alienate people by crushing emergent gameplay into simple randomness generation checks that can be surpassed by playing over and over, but also increase your odds and thus lower the lack of pleasure from a loss through spending money. If you don't believe me that this actually happens to some Candy Crush players, don't take it from me, take it from the following study called
"Are you addicted to Candy Crush Saga? An exploratory study linking psychological factors to mobile social game addiction"

In the conclusion on the data, where they query the habits and preferences of play of 400 Candy Crush Saga players, they note that:

"According to DSM-IV’s classic definition of addiction, the present study found that 7.3% of the respondents were addicted to mobile social games. Given that there are 215 million mobile online game users in Mainland China (CNNIC, 2014), 7.3% does not represent a small number of addicts." And that, "With regard to the psychological variables, loneliness and self-control were found to be significant predictors of mobile social game addiction."

Vampire Survivors and Candy Crush play vastly differently of course. Vampire Survivors is a numbing experience with a time set that you are moving to complete and finish, whereas Candy Crush is a short series of individual time limited high stress levels. Candy Crush has you acting with swiftness and high cognitive and anxious response. These games on the surface could not contrast more, but both offer only the illusion of control and of outcome. Your results in Candy Crush are only found through how the next set of candies coming in are generated, it's easy to get to a point in Candy Crush where you fail a level by not being able to match the candies. In Vampire Survivors your results are decided by the random generation of the item pool upon level up, meaning that even if you can go for a specific build some amount of the result is left up to chance. The odds of the loss are of course vastly different, but neither provide the player enough agency to breach the upper limits that might come from bad luck nor are random elements forced to make them change and adapt their style of play to what is on screen. I will admit that this specific point may be perhaps the weakest in this whole post by far, but if I was wrong here and that Candy Crush did have a lot of control and variation in play, that would not be a defense of Vampire Survivors, it would be of Candy Crush. Perhaps the best way to quantify how they are both addicting is by highlighting the low amount of player agency and the endless appeasement of play.


PART 3: THE THOUGHT-TERMINATING DISTRACTION POINTS

With all of this settled, I now want to turn to the points of contention that I consider less relevant to the game in itself. Let's start with point 2. The idea that labeling this predatory or evil design is worth resisting. Woodaba put it best when they referred to this as 'tone policing,'

"No, I'm not terribly convinced by this tone policing, I think "predatory" is a perfectly reasonable word to describe a design philosophy cultivated from the ground up to create and reinforce gambling addictions, given that these mechanisms are literally designed to prey upon people. [...]

I think managing tone and tenor in conversations like this can be worthwhile, I just wasn't convinced by your statement that the tone was inappropriate in this instance." comments here

Ironically, even the value-neutral attempt to use the phrase tone policing is getting tone policed, because in our current political climate a lot of words feel polarizing and loaded. I'm not going to pretend I don't understand how these descriptors to a game of leisure would upset or distress people. The phrase 'predatory' is one that I try not to rely on as right now it's a phrase mainly invoked for the purposes of transphobic grooming accusations and thus is tinged with that moral weight. On the other hand, I actually enjoy words like 'evil' or 'amoral' which have been used as negative descriptors by friends in the past see for example Detchibe recently concluding their review by calling Moriyama Middle School "A pedestal for amorality, not a mirror reflecting it." source , which makes me want to seek out and play the game more, not less. This is a struggle that is often core in my relationships with others. That said, even though my perspective on wording is very odd, I can still fully appreciate what they are actually trying to say and recognize that I'm bringing my own over-conscious linguistic baggage and identification with 'evil' to the table which can distract from the discussion. In a way you could say all moral language like this is distracting and meant to apply needless pathos, but these are speaking trends that are also really difficult to get away from in part because using more loaded language gives us a leg up in the attention economies. This is why all of the most outrageous social media posts are strange moral claims. Frankly nobody even tries half as hard to tone police over ableist remarks like 'stupid' or 'schizo' etc. and especially stuff like the r-slur was so common in gaming circles until about 2 years ago when everyone decided that its a no-no slur. I'm not saying increasing sensitivity to that is a bad thing, merely illustrating that there's far more hypocrisy on word choice than people let on. Nobody sits there and studies over each and every word they speak to make sure it's maximally accurate, because someone can just pick the one word you messed up on and highlight it for why it means you're wrong anyway. Doing so can only really be seen as a pedantic distraction. Language is messy and this is why the sentiment of 'good faith' online is so important.

On that note, Point 4 on moral claims, is one that I think is also a distraction point, as morality in general is a murky subject. However, I'm sympathetic as to why people find this worthy of contention. It feels like an attack, especially considering the fact that if you try to make an argument for or against a game or its developer, it can read like the same sort of political censorship that promotes book burning or banning mature video games. As Pangburn points out, "my first thought is that it affirms china's stringent limit on online gaming by minors, but I don't think me saying that here is going to be very popular on either side of the debate LOL"

However I don't think, taking the example of Candy Crush and the negative effects from its players that this is a defacto bad policy if certain games are regulated or restricted, to quote the paper utilized there that issues of self control and isolation were the largest factors of addiction to the game, following this they point out

"Society should be aware of the threats that mobile social game playing pose to players. Research on vulnerable groups has shown that children and adolescents are more susceptible to the influence of the media than others are (Gentile and Stone, 2005). Therefore, parents should pay close attention to their children, and teachers should monitor their students. "

Now I think that the specific restriction of all online games leaves a lot to be desired, and plays into my concerns I'll reference more in depth in a moment. However the actual doing so is based on objective policy data, but it's important not to conflate this meaning of objective and data with the 'my opinion is right because I said so' version. A good analogy might be how smoking regulations happened in response to the negative results of smoking being scientifically proven, it was first outlawed from kids and then warning labels were given to adults. I believe you can do pretty much the same thing and make a similar argument of regulation of a game like Candy Crush or Vampire Survivors.

For me, it's just about pointing out that it’s worthy of condemnation first, not endorsement. I don't want people endorsing games that create negative habits or, more strictly, waste my time. This is literally no different than, say, expressing that you think a story has damaging elements while not trying to actively ban the book. It's just that instead of a narrative, it is design, something people have less awareness of than they think they do.

As for the issue of policy implications in particular I'm just an internet dork, not a politician, and neither are you probably! This also has nothing to do with the point LOL. However, I'll try to address this best I can. Others have positioned arguments that the ESRB should have discretion in terms of highlighting gambling elements in a game, especially to minors, but that sort of regulatory framework leaves a lot to be desired. You could do that nudity popup disclaimer that steam has for games, but that's not a client capacity that can be universalized unless you get the government involved, which is a hefty conclusion. I don't put a lot of faith in the regulatory networks for making a clear distinction between a 'gambling aesthetic' like say Sonic Adventure's casino level, and 'addictive game design elements'', I feel like the core problem here is that we would need to rely on some sort of state policy procedure in which the government could specifically and objectively identify non dynamic and destructive play and properly regulate it. Aesthetics are always in flux even if they are alluring to the right demographic, but as I've pointed out earlier, what we consider truly to be the worst of gambling is only found through this undynamic play. Roguelites could be thrown into this bucket despite the fact that in my view they are the opposite. Take for example a game like Luck Be a Landlord, which has a constant 3 choice upgrade system similar to Vampire Survivors, but also requires a lot of decision making and forethought on what to choose, losing a run is almost entirely within player agency. How do you think a large government entity would perceive a game like that? Personally, I think that they would slap a 'promotes gambling' logo on it, but even if minors played the game (who are the most culpable) the reality is that extended play of it would probably make the less discretion-based system of an actual slot machine significantly less compelling because the play of a slot machine would be automated and have no genuine player input for winning a run.

One last point before we wrap things up. This negation of discoursivity does not just happen in the negative appraisals of our arguments. I want to close this post with what my good friend and critical eye Detchibe had to say about the initial, in actuality quite rushed, insight. I will make sure to leave the full quotation as such in the comments below as the first post, however for brevity there is one sentence in particular I want to harp on: "And as you and I and countless others have stressed time and again, there isn't anything implicitly wrong with a passive model of consumption when done responsibly and with an awareness that it is oblivious consumption." I think that while this might not be the intention of the post it speaks to a 'universalizing' diplomatic impulse that I don't think is entirely true. I think this game is actively mentally unhealthy in a specific way that even slightly more cognitively taxing games like 20 Minutes Til Dawn with its active shot aiming isn't. It's not an indictment of failure on your part, but you got there by a system that is actively taking advantage of you. I believe that this impulse while deeply well meaning and appreciated is actually sort of dangerous as it rushes to assuage conflict and disagreement through settlements of harmony. I highlight this not to shit on the absolutely wonderful words of my friend, but to instead expose that thought-terminating cliches are everywhere. One of the most annoying things about me is that I resist them constantly even when they are well meaning :p , but I'm sure I make mistakes on this too so feel free to call it out if you see me doing it.

I don't want the conversation to end, I don't want to 'let bygones be bygones'. This is perhaps the most important issue in terms of gaining a trust and understanding of each other's taste and improving them. You can still like Vampire Survivors after reading all of this, but the point is to be more mindful of recommending it to others. Again, some people like smoking but almost nobody recommends you become a smoker. So to conclude, Vampire Survivors is a mobile game in desktop's clothing, and has a lot of intentionally addictive design traps. So the console a game runs on should not be the sole point of contention for whether its good or not. It's important to be critical of cheap desktop addictive shovelware.

For now however I think I need to stop and digest the scene for a while before saying more, or using other games both positively or negatively for highlighting this, which is what I hope my newfound Court may help do. Fixating forever on one game can be boring and ironically in its own way a waste of time especially for a game with such polarized opinions. Imagine how much more productive this conversation would have been if it was over the mobile game market instead, a game like Candy Crush, which is more clearly delineated as pernicious. I want people to call games like these out of course, but mainly so I don't play them myself. The main reason Vampire Survivors was called out for this was not that it was just some '3 dollar game' but that its one of the most financially successful video games in recent years.

If you have thoughts feel free to leave them below, I'd love to read them

Note: My original post on the game was in reference to more off topic conversation surrounding the harassment by its fans and speculation about its place as a tool for streamers, which was happening to GoufyGoggs, who I was casually dating around the time this had happened as a result of a mutual crush held for a few months, and has recently become my girlfriend. Initially I was going to revamp this post to 'prove' the level of harassment and make people 'bear witness' to the attacks of character and disrespect leveled at her, however I realized that to a large extent such an operation is painful and excessive, and that it takes the bear minimum amount of research into the subreddits or youtube comments surrounding this topic to sympathize, this type of harassment needs not be immortalized in its particulars. I'm not going to quote people misgendering my own girlfriend for other people lol thats ridiculous.

That said, if you have not read the original version of the post, you can read it here (right now it's a google doc but it will be switched to a cohost post asap). The TL;DR of it is conveyed in the 1st link referenced in that post.

Special Thanks to Detchibe and Pangburn for the wonderful peer review and fine tuned grammatical editing on this, without their help I would not be able to write this half as well as I wanted to. To Franz for the well reasoned moral support and understanding. And to my new girlfriend Heather aka GoufyGoggs whose research on this game was a powerful catalyst to my own.

POST SCRIPT EDIT:

Reading this back I realize that I pretty much just dropped the policy proposal point, negating a policy potentiality out of suspicion rather than replacing it. I did that in part because I didn't want to let my heavy handed socialist ideals get too heavily in the way of the critique. I think one of the main reasons people engage in habitual behaviors like this is because of a desire to escape from labor insecurities, often not acknowledging that the therapeutic element is short term reward for long term set backs. This perception is tracked pretty heavily from Addiction by Design where the 'machine zone' is described as a space for escaping insecurities of life generally. I think that the only real policy proposal that would fix that underlying habitual response is by providing better labor security (slashing the 'gig economy' for example) and not promoting cultures of workaholism and burnout. By having a better safety net for people it would prevent anxious self destructive play. Not just for online gaming or gambling, but for other vices to like smoking and alcoholism. I'm probably playing way more of a game than I otherwise would because I don't want to think about my future: getting a job, a home, food, etc. In that sense I can totally understand uncritical play and can't condemn individuals for engaging in it really. The only way to really fix that quite reasonable anxiety is by eliminating it entirely via radical proposals like free housing, food, UBI, etc. The reason I never explicitly stated it in the original piece is because I didn't want to risk over complicating the network of critique there. Only to then simplify it with anti capitalist rhetoric forcing readers to either accept that as true or throw out the entire script. Hammering about labor rights over and over is not the most conducive to open dialogues I'm afraid. Regardless, even if you don't hold my perspective on that point I hope you can see why more general regulation would have to be done with consideration and care.

The first thing I will say in regards to Outer Wilds is that it is...different. Outer Wilds rejects all sensibilities of form and structure--and for that reason alone, your enjoyment of the game is largely dependent on whether you can attune to the game's quirky and often-arbitrary ideas. As such, it's very hard to give Outer Wilds an arbitrary rating, because the game itself fundamentally eschews conventional notions of what a "good game" should be.

To put it more simply, Outer Wilds is less of a video game, and more of an experience in video game form. Yet, paradoxically, it's perhaps the best example of an experience that can ONLY work in video game form. It's something that for many people, will simply not make sense. For the people who can adjust to its ambiguity and erratic structure, however, it's an experience unlike anything--past or present--in the medium of video games.

Therefore, despite the multitude of five-star reviews that lace this page (including mine), Outer Wilds is unfortunately a game I cannot recommend to everyone, despite my belief in it being amongst the greatest titles in this medium. It is something that takes a certain mindset and experience to appreciate, and without that mindset the game will just feel meaningless. It kind of reminds me of "Waiting for Godot"--one person might see the pinnacle of 20th century drama, while the other person might see two people sitting under a tree for two and a half hours. This is the video game equivalent of that.

In basically every conceivable sense the worldbuilding of Outer Wilds is remarkable. Each planet has a memorable, creative, strikingly unique identity that is fleshed out and toyed with in multiple different directions, the rich history of the Nomai is fascinating, emotionally and thematically resonant, and interweaves with the history of these planets in compelling ways, and then on top of that all of this interconnects like some celestial jigsaw puzzle both in regards to the events in the distant past that led to this point in time and in regards to how the cycle you find yourself caught in interacts with itself. The number of "aha!" moments in the game is impressive in and of itself, but the fact you can make these discoveries in so many completely different orders and still piece together what's going on in a satisfying way is just wonderful and a testament to how compelling this game's exploration can be at its very best.

Outer Wilds is also quietly thematically very dense. If you want to just enjoy the joy of exploration and the fear of the unknown you can do that, but under the surface there's so much to enjoy within here about human nature and what pulls us into this need to discover and learn even in the face of danger, that human urge to develop and grow and quite literally reach for the skies, science and religion and belief and all the tension and questions and confusion and peace these things can represent, death and endings and decay and how we both resist these things but also can learn to accept them as something natural and inevitable. Community, and love, and home. Underneath the solemn unearthing of words long past, places in decay, on your own amongst the silence of space, there is a deep emotionality running through the veins of this game that somehow both interweaves with and yet also runs counter to that calm.

I've heard a lot of people say they wish they could play Outer Wilds for the first time again, or that it's a game you can only really play once, and I can't really relate to that sentiment. I had some pretty marked frustrations with my playthrough, some of the puzzles felt obtuse enough to seriously impede my progress and kick me out of the vibes the game was giving, and the controls are very awkward and took as much as several hours for me to become comfortable with (there's a lot of slow, awkward wiggling around early on in the game). These frustrations feel like they'd distract far less from the game's beauty, wonder and ideas on a second playthrough, and whilst the sense of discovery may not be there in quite the same way I'm still so curious to revisit these records of the Nomai, scattered throughout the solar system, with a more full context of what they all mean. Somehow, despite the game's reputation of being a one-time deal, I'm left both excited to return and hopeful I will fall in love when I do.

Update; heard the Outer Wilds music out of context, immediately burst into tears, decided to come back and add half a star to this review :p This game has grown in my mind considerably after I finished playing it.

(Score: 10/10) A trascendental experience. A meditative reflection on our own mortality, the wonders and horrors of discovery, and what it truly means to belong in this universe. One of the few games to ever actually make me full on sob, and it happened in a seemingly random moment where the reality of what I was playing finally hit me and fully set in. This is a game I wish everyone would play, even non-gamers, and it should be one of the first examples people bring up in the "are video-games art?" debate instead of TLoU (not a diss on that game even though I find it really overrated, but there's simply something about the way Outer Wilds reveals its story to you that can only be achieved through an interactive medium like video-games, whereas TLoU's story could be told through many other different mediums). This game is the first massive leap in storytelling in videogames since Dark Souls and Undertale, and the story it tells is profoundly contemplative and life-changing. An unforgettable experience that I wish everyone could live the same way as I did. The only flaw this game has is that you can only play it for the first time once, but in a way that's also its biggest strength.

Dark Souls 2 is like trying a different seafood for the first time as a child. Sure, you love shrimp, maybe even some lobster, but now you're presented with a dish of softshell crab. You hesitate, it looks so raw in a way. After much hesitation and pushing from your folks you take a tiny bite, and reel at just how unfiltered the "sea" is in here. There's no shortcuts around it besides completely drenching the thing in butter and salt until it becomes a vehicle for it. But of course, it's only natural for a child to develop comfort foods and breaking habits is terrifying at any age, but it is eternally childish to then proclaim it's the least seafood of the dishes you ate simply because it challenges your expectations. I won't lie and pretend softshell crab isn't particularly raw or gamey when served by itself, but it's also not a particularly offensive flavor if you already enjoy seafood anyways.

So why do FromSoft Souls vets have such a hate boner for the only goddamn entry to have the balls to change something as fundamental as healing, despite begging for them to shake things up a little? Quit whining and eat your food, it's only as cold and unfresh as you let it be.

Bearer of the curse, how little self-awareness ye retained after offing the Lord of Cinder, despite speaking of its messages y' retained none. Go then, kill another 4-5 or what have ye, y've probably already forgotten the man who begged you to just remember his name...

-
Very belated update: There is now an exe-level Deadzone fix for PC, huzzah. https://www.nexusmods.com/darksouls2/mods/1200

Despite its title this can't help be feel like as much a sequel to Demon's Souls. Partly this is down to the structure of the game, a central hub area branching off into a few different independent linear routes that you can tackle in any order you want before the game ultimately culminates in you finding and killing the monarchy of this land.

Partly this is down to the almost reckless creativity on display. If Dark Souls took the things from Demon's Souls that really worked and cut away the bits that arguably didn't, Dark Souls 2 has not a care in the world instead saying lets fuck around and find out. This was very much to my frustration in my first playthrough, but returning to this game a year later a lot of the things that previously frustrated me are honestly just endearing. As rough edges go, I think there's a lot of charm and personality to these ones.

Returning to this game in a post-Elden Ring world was also a lot of fun to me. People disparagingly compare that game to Dark Souls 2 occasionally, but I feel like playing Elden Ring taught me a lot about how to enjoy playing Dark Souls 2. It turns out a lot of the parts of Dark Souls 2 that are decried as being unfair are actually much more reasonable when you take advantage of all the tools the game gives you. This playthrough I abandoned my usual approach of just two-handing the chonkiest sword I could find all by my lonesome to instead play an extremely-multiclass build (turns out the excessive number of levels DS2 hands you are perfect for enabling you to dabble in everything) with summons alongside me and I actually had just a great time.

That's not to say there aren't some problems with the game even outside of the notorious Dark Souls 2 weirdness, and the last portion of my run was honestly a bit exhausting; I think the pile of dlc the game has is both very overhyped, and kind of excessive considering how gargantuan the base game already is. That said, somehow, I sit here a convert. Despite all its problems Dark Souls 2 is actually a rather delightful oddity.

I don't even know how to begin writing about Dark Souls II. The game seems to me to be categorically a mess, with moments of brilliance and excitement mixed among moments of frustrating design much worse than anything in the original Dark Souls.

I will say that my average enjoyment for the game was quite a bit higher than the score I'm giving it indicates, but the low-points are so low that I struggle to imagine playing through the game again from the beginning. Heidi's Tower of Flame, Harvest Valley, Earthen Peak, Black Gulch, Shrine of Amana, the Giant memories, Frigid Outskirts, and a significant portion of Brume Tower were all just broadly not enjoyable or even very frustrating. Dark Souls 2 logic also serves as a big annoyance throughout (how to unlock Huntsman's Copse, burning down the windmill that is made of metal at the point where you light it aflame, how to unlock Castle Drangleic's front doors, and everything to do with unlocking the final boss, all required some amount of direction to be given to me in a way I never struggled with in the first game).

None of this is helped by Dark Souls 2's attitude towards worldbuilding. The original Dark Souls is certainly not without its faults (largely contained within the Lord Souls content thankfully), but it builds up a lot of forgiveness from me because the world is so immersive, so genuinely exciting to see the ways it all starts to link together both in a physical sense and a lore and worldbuilding sense. The world of Dark Souls 2 is more chaotic, with an active and intentional disregard for physical reality as it seeks to show a world in disarray, space contorting in the same way that time did in the first game. I don't outright dislike this, and in fact think it's really cool that Dark Souls 2 decided to take things in a very different direction, but the reduced sense of immersion that comes with this makes the low-points a lot harder to shrug off for me.

Of note, Dark Souls 2 alters a bunch of systems and mechanics from the first game. I'm totally fine with this in the abstract, each game exists as its own entity and doesn't really owe anything to what came before it, but some of these changes did land very poorly with me. Ever-reducing health total that needs to be undone with the usage of human effigies, enemies permanently de-spawning from the world after you've killed them a certain number of times, the adaptability stat, and a greater emphasis on resource management and finite supplies, are all extremely well-meaning changes that make sense but feel kind of awful in practice. I do think people often ignore the things Dark Souls 2 does right though; jump attacks are much better than they used to be, back-stabbing and endurance are both thankfully nerfed, there's a greater emphasis on making two-handed play appealing and de-emphasis on shields and blocking, dual-wielding weapons and power stance are awesome additions, you're given a better level of control over the rpg-aspects of your character, and every single change made to how estus functions (other than it being tied to your adaptability stat, which is clearly bad) was great! People talk about the systems and design in DS2 as if they're a strict downgrade, but I think of it more as a side-step; handling some things worse, but also some things quite a bit better.

And gosh the highlights here are so good. Eleum Loyce ranks up there with the very best content in the original Dark Souls. No-man's Wharf was another big highlight, though there are a few different places that are going to linger with me. Dark Souls 2 also just has a great eye for memorable set-pieces; my personal favourite was the ogre chasing you in Aldia's Keep, it clumsily releasing other creatures from their cages one-by-one as you dash away down the hallway.

I might never return to this game because of its low-points, but its high-points are going to stick with me much longer than for any other game I could say that for. Dark Souls 2 is such a mess, but also such a fascinating mess.

(cw for a very brief mention of self-harm and depression)

It seems like a given for disaffectionate weeblings meandering through cyberspace to eventually run afoul of Vocaloid, the siren song of late-2000s otaku culture that refuses to die, and there's no clearer representative for the brand than the poster child of virtual idols, Hatsune Miku. Through over a decade of image reinvention, musical exploration, and incessant irritation, thousands of producers have used the aquamarine automaton as the mouthpiece for pieces ranging from the goofy to the grotesque, shifting and altering the image of the mascot in tune with the work they produce. In a sense, becoming attached to what is, at its most sincere form, an inanimate face for an audio production tool feels odd, strange, dare I say, cringe. Yet here I am, a terminal victim of the brain virus known as emotional bonding, reminded once again that one of the big moments in coming to terms with my identity was discovering Hatsune Miku.

Retracing my steps, the path is obvious: a teenage girl defined by her constant inconsistency, bound by little more than a modulated soundbank, singing songs of isolation, anxiety, self-loathing, intense misanthropy, undying love and occasional lesbianism. Emotionally torn asunder by a yet-unending depression spiral, yours truly could only break as she found someone who was, in no uncertain terms, just like me (for real for real). But tracking the exact point I realized a hyper-femme soundbank was something beyond a passing interest, instead being a key “being” that I find my self drawn to, something that influenced the art I consider worthwhile, something I find relatability in, is… difficult. Confusing.

… And as much as I want to just tie all of my experiences to sitting alone, listening to embarrassing vent pieces written by producers I really need to tell “it’ll be okay”, what stuck with me was always the games; late nights and early mornings spent playing Project Diva F 2nd with a former best friend, where Rolling Girl lead to me opening up to someone about my own history of self-harm; all-night sessions of Future Tone where the first time I came out as trans was backed by Envy Cat Walk, and outed myself to the dulcet tones of 2D Dream Fever. Inherently difficult times, now remembered with fondness, bitterness, regret.

I guess my experience with Vocaloid, and by association the Project Diva games, is less inherently about the gameplay or mechanics of the game (they’re kino, ludo, cracked, etc) and more the way I connect to the music, the characters, the personal recollection every song has with me. Of the 200 songs in Future Sound and Colorful Tone, the grand majority are dug into my mind, a part of my soul encapsulated into memories that refuse to fade despite my growing memory issues and fear of forgetting the past. The way I feel for the songs, the times attached to them, the irreplaceable history I have with Vocaloid and, almost directly, Hatsune Miku… it’s adoration in its clearest form. For all the regrets I have, of the person I am and the media I’m devoted to, I don’t regret how ingrained the funny computer singer woman has become in my life.

Writing this will never be as deep or as coherent as I want; as hyper-personal as I wish I could be with how Vocaloid has affected me and the course of my life, going into it will never not feel a little fake, a little disingenuous. I can only say that this game, this whole franchise, is a source of my fondest memories. It’s priceless to me, without comparison. I fucking love it.

(this ended up having little to do with the game… play Project Diva Future Tone…)

Lost in the nebulous space between the soulless flair of the modern military shooter and the heartfelt kitsch of the retro “classic” shooter, the shooters of the late 2000s and early 2010s were inspired in equal measures by the all-encompassing pop-fervor of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and the deteriorated foundation build by the likes of Doom and Quake. Spurred by the overwhelming presence of Infinity Ward’s absurdly influential franchise, alongside a legion of like-minded contemporaries, Activision sought out a greedy double-dip. As one of their franchises altered the landscape of first-person shooters, the company dug into the established market with a new project cobbled together with the essence of their largest releases, a faceless, amorphous summer blockbuster with the capitalistic purpose of scoring big returns on a low investment. With emotion and heart out the door, and with eye’s on the dollar, Activision tasked Raven Software, longtime icons of the first-person shooter genre, with concocting this husk of a game. Unfortunately for Activision, their wishes for a quick-and-easy turnaround crashed headlong into the creative might of an exemplar of the industry. Budgets ebbed and flowed, deadlines came and went, and the tumultuous project underwent a lengthy stay in development hell.

The shambling corpse, a patchwork of Bioshock, Half-Life 2, F.E.A.R., and everyone’s favorite yearly jingoist genocide simulator, languished in limbo for years under the overbearing boot of Activision until the dawn of the 2010s. Finally free from the eternal prison of middle-management and executive meddling, Singularity sprung forth, bearing the influence of its progenitors on it’s sleeve. Alas, as the game rose to life, so too did it sign a death sentence for Raven Software, now a prisoner to the Call of Duty mines. With its wretched history behind it, and a decade after the fact, how does it hold up under scrutiny?

It’s uh… It’s mid. Maybe it’s the whole “copy the middle points of a hundred other games” thing, maybe it’s the complete lack of personality present, or perhaps it’s the feel of a weary dev team trying their hardest to make anything out of the nothing they’ve been handed. It’s a multi-million dollar project informed not by its own original ideas, but by the constant struggle to do anything original with the ideas it was made to encompass. Fuse that obvious discontent with a development cycle that could charitably be called trouble, and it’s no wonder the game came out in such a half-baked, malformed state. It should say something that the high point of the game was a Russian scientist claiming the way to prevent this broken timeline was very LowTierGod-ian, a succinct “you should kill yourself…now!”. As the game lays broken and rightfully forgotten to the sands of time, I’m drawn not to the game itself, but what it represents. To put it clearly, Singularity is the embodiment of the soullessness, the abject emptiness inherent to triple-A game development.

While not itself guilty of the crimes it represents, the game is a sacrifice to the altar of auteur theory, prestige media, and big-screen hollowness. It’s a game defined not by what it does, but what it’s corporate malefactors did to it in the name of creating a product for the mass market. Singularity breaths deep the fumes of Hollywood action cinema, and hacks out a dull, lifeless imitation. Resting inside the game there’s the shell of something wonderful, a grindhouse alternative history shooting gallery, and during succinct moments that beauty shines through, particularly in some of the truly inspired tools granted to the player to expense with wave-after-wave of Russian soldiers and mutated radiological monstrosities, but surrounding every second of that perfection is a curtain sewn with the express point of snuffing out whatever original light shines from within. Short and simple, it’s a game that, with more time, more care, more love, could have been something special: not influential or astounding, but more than the mediocre slog it devolved into.

The “Dead Rising” I knew was dragged behind a shed and shot in the sweltering summer of 2010, its rotting shell sharing the same name but carrying the soul of an entirely different beast. Stumbling upon the shambling creature, I fell for its ruse, a 24-hour entanglement with a monster wearing a beloved veil. But for all of the carcass’ failings, I couldn’t bring myself to hate it. Glancing upon the decayed remnants of a lost friend, I still could see the remains of the dearly departed; in spite of the malicious current pulsating through its veins, I still saw the “Dead Rising” that I fell head-over-heels for, crumbling away but still recognizable all the same. Laid to rest and buried away, I said goodbye to not only “Dead Rising” itself, but the love I held for it, not out of new-found hatred, but out of acceptance for what it was becoming. In 2013, something bearing the name “Dead Rising” crawled out of that grave, festering and desecrated.

It’s… extreme, to put it in such intense terms, perhaps hyperbolic. However, as time passes and as I expose myself to more and more of the series, my individual story becomes one of watching something I adore be ripped limb from limb, it’s remains cobbled together in a discombobulated amalgam and presented as a new iteration on “Dead Rising”. The spirit of the original has long been excised, and the withered corpse walks, lacking the stylistic flourishes, the mechanical depth, the heart and soul that the name “Dead Rising” usually encompasses.

Yet despite my obvious grievances with the game, I have reached acceptance in my personal stages of grief. Beyond my preconceived notions of what is or isn't “Dead Rising”, of a minimalist structure maintained by the backbone of breakneck pacing and nerve-shredding time limits, something is under the shallow surface. Buried under the murky sands of mid-2010s design philosophies, emotionless browns and soul-sucking grays plastered under a user interface reminiscent of a thousand mobile games, the embrace of freedom over structure flawlessly encapsulated the mindset behind Dead Rising 3. Disregarding story, tonal consistency, and filing away mechanical grain, the city of Los Perdidos becomes a puerile playground, an endless wave of gory, grotesque, goofy ways to dispatch impressive waves of undead practice dummies.

I wish there was more to say, but Dead Rising 3 casts aside most of what I like about the prior entries, with the tone leading in the grimy direction pushed by its direct predecessor, the oversimplification of combo weapons and streamlining of the leveling system. I can’t fairly say it’s a game I disliked; playing online was still extremely fun, but that comes down to the fact that every game in the world can be fun with someone else, even irredeemable trash. As a game building off of one of my favorite series, it’s a massive let down.

So obviously expect a Dead Rising 4 review in a month or so, We Doin’ This

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

If you've spent any time in the early to mid 2010's browsing games forums, you've likely seen a handful of gifs from Coropata. It's certainly attention-grabbing - a cute and expressive airhead character, sweet pastel colour scheme, many sets of sprite animations to match all of the things that she can interact with and respond to. It's all very fluffy and endearing. It released as a Japan-only title on the DS but very recently recieved an English localisation on the PC, which was a nice surprise.

I've been chipping away at Coropata piecemeal over the past year or so during work lunch breaks on my phone, which is probably the ideal way to play the game really. It's a level-based physics puzzle game akin to something like Fantastic Contraption, but your task is more focused on completing a rube-goldberg machine with whatever few objects have been made available to you, all to assist Himawari on her errands. The rub here is that the difficulty curve is comically steep, and not necessarily for any sense of mastery of the game's own logic, your successes are forged through trial and error - repeatedly micro-adjusting objects a pixel to the side until the ball deems you worthy and reluctantly goes into the goal. It truly is just shoddy physics work here, and it makes proceedings so much more frustrating than they need to be. You could move a wooden plank on the complete opposite side of the board a smidge, and it'll make a seesaw it never even touches swing differently.

So, why did I stick with it through to the end? It doesn't seem like many people do. At the time of writing I wholeheartedly could not find a single guide for solutions, the Steam community screenshots don't even go any further than chapter 2... Like games similar to Fantastic Contraption, you just make progress until you can't any more, when the difficulty counteracts however gratifying it is. Coropata is a hard recommend because it’s clearly not worth it for many people.
Besides being adowable, I just think this game has a pretty good sense of humour about its own absurd difficulty all things considered, sometimes I found myself laughing through disbelief when a solution snaps to mind and it plays out like a Harpo Marx sketch. Coropata has a system where Himawari's mood and energy levels effect how she interacts with certain objects, there's something very special about having to construct a complex winding Mousetrap mechanism all to drop a steel ball on her head from a massive height so she becomes too pissed to eat candy and kicks it into a goal instead.

Not a recommendation by any means, but if you were ever curious to play The Game Where the Blue Haired Girl Eats Shit & Dies, you aren’t missing much by finding a rom and thumbing through the Japanese DS version. The story isn’t much to write home about, and gets disappointingly leary from the mid point - but the final note it ends on is genuinely upliftingly sweet.

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04. kohta / "euphoria"
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last year, I played Astro's Playroom, the PS5 pack-in game. it was ok. i was immensely endeared to the way it posited itself as taking place "inside" your PS5, which i thought was a great conceit for kids to enjoy a prohibitively scarce piece of tech that is being taken out of their reach by assholes like me who aren't so much interested in the games available on it now but in the promise of games to come out in the future (Final Fantasy XVI) while they complain about how bad the Demon's Souls Remake looks.

the most interesting part of it, though, was it's reverential references towards the past of playstation, in ways that sit increasingly strangely with me. Certainly, sony acknowledging that they have a past was a breath of fresh air against their landmark launch title, the aforementioned Demon's Souls remake, speaking to a greater desire to obliterate the past with the gleeful cooperation of myriad voices in the industry. but as a launch title, as something that is designed to get you excited about playstation 5, it feels like a strange foot to put forward, spending so much time in the past rather than on the exciting future playstation 5 has to offer. maybe that's because there is no vision for what the future looks like, certainly not a vision that we'd like to live in. what's coming out for the PS5? what does it have to offer? i can't tell, and astro's playroom couldn't either.

Ridge Racer V is not a pack-in game, but it has the essential soul of one. released in 2000 alongside the playstation 2, the year that Ridge Racer Type-4 rang in ahead of schedule, RRV's jaw-droppingly sick UI, smooth rounded Y2K futurism feels molded around the PS2 and it's dashboard, an atmospheric place that feels most at home in the dead of night when everyone else has gone to bed. the use of the PS2's system configuration aesthetic in the save menu clinches it: this is a game intrinsically linked with the PS2, set inside it just like Astro is set inside the PS5, to such an extent that playing it on emulator felt wrong to me, and compelled me to seek out a physical copy and find a way to hook up my PS2 to a TV that has outmoded it to the point of needing a technological prothesis to facilitate communication between the two. the game's use of a a singular, compact space only enhances this sensation: these are the streets of the PS2, a city of pristine tarmac and glass monoliths that reflect the rays of the sun onto the streets, empty save for the machines that ride through them and give them life.

it is a game not only about the PS2 and why you should feel great about having spent money on one, but also about the promise the PS2 represents, about the future it represents, and what it means to be here. in many ways, this makes it the philosophical antithesis to Astro: a game that never once looks in the rear-view mirror for more than a second.

to underline this point, we must look at the front-cover star: ai fukami. reiko nagase was only in ridge racer for a couple installments, but already her presence was ingrained enough in the minds of ridgeheads that her replacement immediately produced frustration and rejection. but her replacement was purposeful. this is a new ridge racer for the new millennium. we're not going to keep anything, even the fake cgi girl you like.

the racing itself is similar kinesthetically to R4 but in practice feels almost completely different. if R4 was about pushing your machine through ultimately forgiving tracks to hit the front of the pack, then RRV is a game of perfection, of mastery of it's language of curves and bends and aggressive opponents, who no longer exist as obstacles to be passed like the wind but as snarling competitors who can and will leave you in the dust if you make even a single mistake. a single graze against a single wall is all it can take to leave you out of the race: nothing less than fluency can be accepted.

this is the future. this is what it is like. it will not wait for you, and will not carry you forward into it. sink or swim. adapt or die.

and i love it. i'm shit at it, don't get me wrong. this is second only to F-Zero GX in terms of sheer difficulty i've experienced in a racing game, it took me hours to complete the first grand prix on the normal difficulty level, but that's why i like RRV, for reasons quite apart from why I like R4. it's a game that demands something totally different, and something that I relish to give it, a sense of mastery buoyed by the genius decision to repeat curves and straights and corners across multiple tracks, simulating the sense of growing mastery in a series that would otherwise risk bringing you back down to zero with a single new track that doesn't gel with you. even when you're on a new grand prix, you know that corner coming up. you know what to do. you're ready.

it's still really, really hard. but no one said that forging a future, staying alive in it, would be easy. lord knows we all struggle enough in the future we've found ourselves in.

racing through ridge city at night on solitary time attack roads made me strangely sad. not because i wasn't enjoying myself, but because i realized that i miss this. i miss this feeling, the feeling that the future is here and god we are so excited that it's here, i miss the boundless optimism we had about how the internet would change the way we talk and think and connect us like never before, before we started talking about hellsites and posting and post-post-post-post-post-ironic self loathing. i miss the sheer unbridled enthusiasm for mobile phones, of cloud strife in advent children whipping one out being given the same triumphant framing as arthur pulling the sword from the stone. i miss when launch titles were so brazenly about the future instead of desperate attempts to relive the past. despite never playing it till this year, i miss Ridge Racer V. i miss PlayOnline. i miss dot hack. i miss The 25th Ward. i miss The Bouncer.

god, do i miss The Bouncer.

i recognise that this is oxymoronic, contradictory, to pine nostalgically for a sense of anti-nostalgia futurist optimism that burned out two decades prior, but i can't help but feel this. i've become more and more invested and interested in this kind of early 2000s futurism over the past year, and more and more eager to find the way it makes me feel in my daily life. because I think we might have done this to ourselves. i see it in how the people i know who are most jaded about Online are the people who actively seek out people to be miserable and angry at, consciously or otherwise. i see it in how we characterize our phones as evil bricks that siphon away our life even when they offer us the world in our hands. i see it in myself, and the way i engage with this website, hyper-focusing on interactions that make me feel miserable and worthless instead of the majority of warm, lovely people i interact with on here.

i'm not advocating for a removal of critical thought, here. there are critiques to be made of all of these things and reasons for why these resentments and frustrations spring. there are a great many things wrong with the internet - and the world at large - right now. but what i do want is to be more optimistic. i want to find that hope that there is a brighter future, that technology can connect us in ways that are positively transformative, and that we can transcend the now and race into a brighter tomorrow, together.

i've been trying to write a book for...too many years now. it's always in mind - not a single day goes by where i don't pore over it in depth in my head. it's about the world, and how i feel about living in it, about two people who are aware that they are living in the last days of the world and how they come to terms with that. because that's how i feel, all the time. my cringe bio on backloggd i've had for a year now is how i feel: stuck at the end of everything, playing video games. and that isn't necessarily a statement of hopelessness: i do think that the world we live in now is corrupt and evil. but it's only ever the end that i think about, there is never a thought about what comes after. that's why the book has remained mostly unwritten: i don't know how it ends. i don't know what comes after this world. but i think i would like to start trying to imagine it, if i can. to change my perspective so that i do not look on the future with an eagerness for the end, but with an excitement for what comes after that.

i want to find that world. i want to find that tomorrow to believe in, the one that Astro's Playroom couldn't discover, but one far away from the world Ridge Racer V arrived in. i don't think i can find it here, and i don't think i can find it now. but, still. i want to believe in it. because sony computer entertainment sure as hell doesn't.