191 Reviews liked by bugtechno
Returnal
2021
I think I’m done with expecting things from summations, or rather, from explications of quality derived from experientialist assessment, in video games criticism. Time and time again, I hear someone or some article wax languidly on the pertaining of an ur-secret amalgamation to any game’s individual alchemy that renders a feeling of unique golden sublimity within software; washes of copper green roof tiling flaked away on the controller, colonnades, or keyboard - an unstiffening from historical input that has become a coral encrusted cloister of routine, religiously cycling through 1-1s or Dust 2s in place of rapture - that reveal the lithe and heavenly joisted, divinely scaffolded, intelligently designed liquid azure which creates the game of life under the crackling veins of half real, half gone painted cages. I hear this proselytising, from street corners and from the corners of the internet, and I rush to play Control because of The Ashtray Maze, or Titanfall 2 because of Effect and Cause, or Mankind Divided because of Prague. I sit in a pew, plug in for 6 hours to wait for that divine spark to reach me, and then once I pass through the sizzling whizz and shimmer of the Roman Candle’s burst, I am left like Eve and Adam and Michaelangelo: somehow apart, despite appearances, from that touch that seemed prevalent to others and made for us all. Maybe it’s beautiful, or maybe poorly restored, but it’s nevertheless the heavenly host hosted online.
That’s AAA gaming’s trick: made for everybody, delivered to every screen, and connected to the lower level of consciousness while being treated as nutrition came naturally intuited when really it is just ubiquitously conditioned. Nothing is challenging in a way that isn’t minute finger pushups, nor satisfying in a way that isn’t a set of exercises coming to their final repetition and mirror shewn form perfection: the rote exercise of wrapping templated interaction in the sheen of revolutionary systems design or narrative design is as shallow as wearing newly coloured shorts to assume a different degree of squat. And look, that all sounds very negative, but it’s not like this isn’t something which wasn’t built to be as it is: all mass market art has aimed for the middle, and much of the most commonly recognised masterpieces of art are these middle brow, carb and salt heavy, mass product ventures. These are movies like It’s A Wonderful Life or The Godfather, ballets like The Nutcracker or Sleeping Beauty, musicals like West Side Story and Les Mis, or games like RE4 and The Witcher 3: all are meant to hit low, hit hard, and connect broadly to get through on second base. Sometimes they are surprise home runs or go straight to the pitcher, but they are designed to get on base, that’s all.
The fact that everyone seemingly knows this, that we are being catered to in a way that explicitly shows that publishers (perhaps more so than devs, but probably not always) want to barely hold aloft the vessel of gaming above the watermark, is what brings me to finally recusing myself of any sort of stocking up expectation from the experiential praise AAA games get on release and in summation come December. Journalists and essayists who monthly extoll virtues and vices, cardinal sins and heavenly virtues, about the ur-tentpole delivering on expectations of not even property but on fulfilment of artistic attenuation, on the promise that the foundational inlay of profit generating internal ecology to the game is finally cohabitant, even dominated by, the accessorised partitioning (post the fact) of accessible humanity within the work do so with the knowledge of the vapid state of AAA games; the lack of identity, depth, or of empathy proffered overtly in these games weekly is met with such drastic extensions of one’s own powers of humanity that studios like Blizzard or Bethesda feel confident in offering flavourless mulch with the expectation that all necessary characterisation of their simulation will be filled in by the player. This has occurred for nearly every AAA game, from one source or another, since the turn towards prestige in the late aughts - all assumptions of character, pathos, or wit are now somehow granted to anything with enough fidelity to create a world which may hold its players seat of human courage, but can only, at best, render its own simulacra of such stillborn.
I’m not saying that any significant majority of the critical writing done on games from the AAA sphere of the medium is bad or dishonest, particularly not that writing which is able to articulate the sphere itself and why these highly sucralose rich products both work and appeal to wide demographics (I think William Hughes from the A.V. Club walks this line frequently with great aplomb), but I do think there is something regrettable about taking a primarily kinaesthetic experience like those listed above and transmuting both pathos and one’s seal of quality because the player was able to map on emotional strife and a conquering of such onto that experiential hurdle, all without the extension in return of the mechanics in the game to a actual thematic purpose, a la Spec Ops. Games should be able to render a language and introspection of quality which engages forcefully with the mechanical and interactive qualities inherent to it, not through sidelong implants of emotional turpitude perpendicularly inseminated, but head on and with appropriate function. Because the games listed above are not what we can, comparatively, call good due to their storytelling nor for their pathos, but most executively for their play, they are failing, in their minor ways, because they offer canvases for spreads of emotion and theme as such but ask the player to BYOB instead of providing nourishment on its own wonderful layout. As works in games ‘mature’, comparisons inflected within by AAA games own referential quality to media articles that are meant to inspire maturity and gravitas in comparison (looking at you MGS V with all that Moby Dick shit), the comparative nature of criticism must develop so as to draw out the cumulative quality, not reflect our own natures of complexity onto the games we play.
FINALLY, that brings me to Returnal. Embarrassingly, I’ve just put a good deal of personal opinion into what is supposed to be my overview of a game, mostly in reaction to a select few critics that I read both in anticipation for the game and in afterward help for the locution of my feelings Returnal elicited, but if this seems unsatisfying as appendix to read, let that contribute to my point. Returnal loops back into my point above as this: the game’s poorly mechanised roguelike structure, with the rote and underbaked narrative pinning its death and restart shuttle running, seems to surround a legitimately compelling, but obviously goofy and gamified play (which is to say gamified with hitboxes and gun mods and what else goes into the play, not the metaphorical layer of hell Selene puts over herself to justify the play. I hope it doesn’t need to be said, but when justifying your player character’s constructs of play within a narrative, herein the eternal penitence Selene’s delusions and guilt force on her through the play metaphor, the play metaphor needs to be justified yet again to the player; we engage in the play, not the delusion, so a further layer above needs to be accessible to us and not Selene.), but fails to, except for under highly specific circumstances, draw any useful or poignant meaning from the interactions between action and strictly narrative text.
The roguelike structure itself is probably the most significant issue in creating a playspace which goes through the gestation of a pregnant theme, despite it also being the aspect of Returnal’s design to note on how all the meta systems - gun stats, artefacts, consumables, parasites, etc. - to those most baked into the looping, which is to say the physics of Selene and her basic abilities to point, shoot, run, and jump; without the roguelike structure, the nature of almost everything that serves to progress play becomes utterly useless cruft, as well as functionless as iterating material to reconfigure and force usage. The roguelike structure is a monkey’s paw wish for game devs, one which allows for as broad as can be desired a system space: if a dev wants to add in 80 different interacting possible arms of their game, they can be assured that more, if not all, of those arms will be interacted with more consistently in a roguelike than in a strictly linear or open world game, simply because sometimes that mechanic will be all the player has on a run. The enormous, hugely hindering, flaw to this is that the mechanic, regardless of its name, function, art, or anything else above the game’s spreadsheet, is reduced to its function alone. When death is the truest end state of a mechanics use case, and as death is the functioning, one could argue insoluble, end state of videogame pathos, then all that is baked into giving the mechanics centred in a roguelike is lost. The ur-roguelike, Isaac, is so inculcated with this that oftentimes common parlance in its community denotes an item name in the lingua franca with its description, not its actual item label. Returnal seeks to bake around this nut with the narrative including a death inclusive meaning, as well as later on, the personal hell narrative. But this then doubles down on the foibles of roguelike structure. Not only is the genre so cemented with its expectations now, but if the player never or infrequently dies, as was my experience, then not only is the value of the typified roguelike mechanical arm stripped of its narrative weight due to the lack of death repetition (something which doesn’t happen so much with a game like Isaac, given that that game draws its narrative weight and iconography from emotions and recognition excited external to play), but also its mechanical weight as well. I never got to experiment with the roguelike possibilities, nor feel the true hell of unstable and chaotic ground, because I died to Phrike once, then steam rolled through the game with only two more deaths total, rendering both sources to possibly draw meaning from inert and barren.
There is also the general issue with the design of the consistent mechanics as well, not just in their nebulously justifiable narrative utility as Selene’s specific hell that is traumatically brought into being, but more specifically herein with how they mesh in the second to second play. There’s no getting past the readability of the levels, which inexplicably were seemingly designed to match the appearances of enemies in such a way as to give them complete camouflage in whatever environment they spawn in (enemies with tendrils are surrounded by anemone like plants, square and concrete enemies are ensconced in a brutalist architecture, etc.). This is an issue which feels like it shouldn’t have gotten past testing both for failing its lack of functioning for immediate play but also for the aggressiveness with which so many lit and moving textures tank performance, but also feels like it should have failed at the start of the project for how generally plain and common the designs are. Nothing really feels, in Returnal, like a unique and specific design, which if it were a pure narrative-free experience wouldn’t be anywhere near the issue it is, but for a highly localised and psychologically terrifying experience, one would hope that the tribulations faced would themselves reveal more about Selene as a character (and yes, they do later on, but in as equally a basic and unthought out way as the generic designs of the earlier, more rote sci-fi, way). The arena rooms themselves are frankly underbaked as well, not just in the too lacking of variety inset within the rotation of them to each zone - maybe 10-15 total per environment - but in how little they seem to complicate and excite possibilities of the mechanical base that is available to an everyday version of Selene in the game. Selene is, in fact, a very fun character to move around and shoot with. Actually, a brief slew of praise for Returnal, because I had a lot of fun playing through it, despite all that I’ve said above
- The amount of interesting cost/benefit choices offered up is incredible: on a minute to minute basis, the player is getting consistent possibilities for pain and pleasure that could knock the run into next gear (although if we’re being honest, unless you’re upping protection or damage, it isn’t usually worth any downside) or knock Selene on her ass. The pain/pleasure dichotomy is so powerful that it feels more of a promise on the Cenobites in Hellraiser than any of those movies ever did.
- Jane Elizabeth Perry’s VO for Selene, almost totally done in isolation of any other characters to draw reaction from, impresses more than any other AAA game’s performances from the last few years. It is a treat, and despite the bungling of the system narrative in my playthrough, carries weight across the entire play as something with genuine pathos.
- As above stated, the movement and shooting never feels anything less than incredible. So much weight is included and accounted for in every action - the shotgun nearly rips its barrel apart with every blast, the pylons screech with searing wounds, and Selene lands so coolly with earth shattering descents that I felt my knees give out with every impact. Kinaesthetic masterclass.
Anyways, all this praise is situated in rooms that don’t really need you to engage with any of the excellent bits, because tight concentric circle strafes will get the job done every time.
To bring this back to the beginning, I am nothing if not disappointed by Returnal. It’s not a bad game but it was talked about badly; the praise for its themes are dependent on highly specific play experiences, as well as on bringing an enormous amount of self implication to any given read that comes across as highly thought of the game. The trials of its design were underlaid in the frenzy that came in discussing the polish a AAA game brought to the already highly tuned roguelike formula, a formula which more suits the indie sphere which honed it to shining. This unfortunate discussion cycle damned my experience with the game, which I suppose was burdened in the concert I played it with my own naivete in expecting depth from a game released for $80. Really, you get what you pay for.
That’s AAA gaming’s trick: made for everybody, delivered to every screen, and connected to the lower level of consciousness while being treated as nutrition came naturally intuited when really it is just ubiquitously conditioned. Nothing is challenging in a way that isn’t minute finger pushups, nor satisfying in a way that isn’t a set of exercises coming to their final repetition and mirror shewn form perfection: the rote exercise of wrapping templated interaction in the sheen of revolutionary systems design or narrative design is as shallow as wearing newly coloured shorts to assume a different degree of squat. And look, that all sounds very negative, but it’s not like this isn’t something which wasn’t built to be as it is: all mass market art has aimed for the middle, and much of the most commonly recognised masterpieces of art are these middle brow, carb and salt heavy, mass product ventures. These are movies like It’s A Wonderful Life or The Godfather, ballets like The Nutcracker or Sleeping Beauty, musicals like West Side Story and Les Mis, or games like RE4 and The Witcher 3: all are meant to hit low, hit hard, and connect broadly to get through on second base. Sometimes they are surprise home runs or go straight to the pitcher, but they are designed to get on base, that’s all.
The fact that everyone seemingly knows this, that we are being catered to in a way that explicitly shows that publishers (perhaps more so than devs, but probably not always) want to barely hold aloft the vessel of gaming above the watermark, is what brings me to finally recusing myself of any sort of stocking up expectation from the experiential praise AAA games get on release and in summation come December. Journalists and essayists who monthly extoll virtues and vices, cardinal sins and heavenly virtues, about the ur-tentpole delivering on expectations of not even property but on fulfilment of artistic attenuation, on the promise that the foundational inlay of profit generating internal ecology to the game is finally cohabitant, even dominated by, the accessorised partitioning (post the fact) of accessible humanity within the work do so with the knowledge of the vapid state of AAA games; the lack of identity, depth, or of empathy proffered overtly in these games weekly is met with such drastic extensions of one’s own powers of humanity that studios like Blizzard or Bethesda feel confident in offering flavourless mulch with the expectation that all necessary characterisation of their simulation will be filled in by the player. This has occurred for nearly every AAA game, from one source or another, since the turn towards prestige in the late aughts - all assumptions of character, pathos, or wit are now somehow granted to anything with enough fidelity to create a world which may hold its players seat of human courage, but can only, at best, render its own simulacra of such stillborn.
I’m not saying that any significant majority of the critical writing done on games from the AAA sphere of the medium is bad or dishonest, particularly not that writing which is able to articulate the sphere itself and why these highly sucralose rich products both work and appeal to wide demographics (I think William Hughes from the A.V. Club walks this line frequently with great aplomb), but I do think there is something regrettable about taking a primarily kinaesthetic experience like those listed above and transmuting both pathos and one’s seal of quality because the player was able to map on emotional strife and a conquering of such onto that experiential hurdle, all without the extension in return of the mechanics in the game to a actual thematic purpose, a la Spec Ops. Games should be able to render a language and introspection of quality which engages forcefully with the mechanical and interactive qualities inherent to it, not through sidelong implants of emotional turpitude perpendicularly inseminated, but head on and with appropriate function. Because the games listed above are not what we can, comparatively, call good due to their storytelling nor for their pathos, but most executively for their play, they are failing, in their minor ways, because they offer canvases for spreads of emotion and theme as such but ask the player to BYOB instead of providing nourishment on its own wonderful layout. As works in games ‘mature’, comparisons inflected within by AAA games own referential quality to media articles that are meant to inspire maturity and gravitas in comparison (looking at you MGS V with all that Moby Dick shit), the comparative nature of criticism must develop so as to draw out the cumulative quality, not reflect our own natures of complexity onto the games we play.
FINALLY, that brings me to Returnal. Embarrassingly, I’ve just put a good deal of personal opinion into what is supposed to be my overview of a game, mostly in reaction to a select few critics that I read both in anticipation for the game and in afterward help for the locution of my feelings Returnal elicited, but if this seems unsatisfying as appendix to read, let that contribute to my point. Returnal loops back into my point above as this: the game’s poorly mechanised roguelike structure, with the rote and underbaked narrative pinning its death and restart shuttle running, seems to surround a legitimately compelling, but obviously goofy and gamified play (which is to say gamified with hitboxes and gun mods and what else goes into the play, not the metaphorical layer of hell Selene puts over herself to justify the play. I hope it doesn’t need to be said, but when justifying your player character’s constructs of play within a narrative, herein the eternal penitence Selene’s delusions and guilt force on her through the play metaphor, the play metaphor needs to be justified yet again to the player; we engage in the play, not the delusion, so a further layer above needs to be accessible to us and not Selene.), but fails to, except for under highly specific circumstances, draw any useful or poignant meaning from the interactions between action and strictly narrative text.
The roguelike structure itself is probably the most significant issue in creating a playspace which goes through the gestation of a pregnant theme, despite it also being the aspect of Returnal’s design to note on how all the meta systems - gun stats, artefacts, consumables, parasites, etc. - to those most baked into the looping, which is to say the physics of Selene and her basic abilities to point, shoot, run, and jump; without the roguelike structure, the nature of almost everything that serves to progress play becomes utterly useless cruft, as well as functionless as iterating material to reconfigure and force usage. The roguelike structure is a monkey’s paw wish for game devs, one which allows for as broad as can be desired a system space: if a dev wants to add in 80 different interacting possible arms of their game, they can be assured that more, if not all, of those arms will be interacted with more consistently in a roguelike than in a strictly linear or open world game, simply because sometimes that mechanic will be all the player has on a run. The enormous, hugely hindering, flaw to this is that the mechanic, regardless of its name, function, art, or anything else above the game’s spreadsheet, is reduced to its function alone. When death is the truest end state of a mechanics use case, and as death is the functioning, one could argue insoluble, end state of videogame pathos, then all that is baked into giving the mechanics centred in a roguelike is lost. The ur-roguelike, Isaac, is so inculcated with this that oftentimes common parlance in its community denotes an item name in the lingua franca with its description, not its actual item label. Returnal seeks to bake around this nut with the narrative including a death inclusive meaning, as well as later on, the personal hell narrative. But this then doubles down on the foibles of roguelike structure. Not only is the genre so cemented with its expectations now, but if the player never or infrequently dies, as was my experience, then not only is the value of the typified roguelike mechanical arm stripped of its narrative weight due to the lack of death repetition (something which doesn’t happen so much with a game like Isaac, given that that game draws its narrative weight and iconography from emotions and recognition excited external to play), but also its mechanical weight as well. I never got to experiment with the roguelike possibilities, nor feel the true hell of unstable and chaotic ground, because I died to Phrike once, then steam rolled through the game with only two more deaths total, rendering both sources to possibly draw meaning from inert and barren.
There is also the general issue with the design of the consistent mechanics as well, not just in their nebulously justifiable narrative utility as Selene’s specific hell that is traumatically brought into being, but more specifically herein with how they mesh in the second to second play. There’s no getting past the readability of the levels, which inexplicably were seemingly designed to match the appearances of enemies in such a way as to give them complete camouflage in whatever environment they spawn in (enemies with tendrils are surrounded by anemone like plants, square and concrete enemies are ensconced in a brutalist architecture, etc.). This is an issue which feels like it shouldn’t have gotten past testing both for failing its lack of functioning for immediate play but also for the aggressiveness with which so many lit and moving textures tank performance, but also feels like it should have failed at the start of the project for how generally plain and common the designs are. Nothing really feels, in Returnal, like a unique and specific design, which if it were a pure narrative-free experience wouldn’t be anywhere near the issue it is, but for a highly localised and psychologically terrifying experience, one would hope that the tribulations faced would themselves reveal more about Selene as a character (and yes, they do later on, but in as equally a basic and unthought out way as the generic designs of the earlier, more rote sci-fi, way). The arena rooms themselves are frankly underbaked as well, not just in the too lacking of variety inset within the rotation of them to each zone - maybe 10-15 total per environment - but in how little they seem to complicate and excite possibilities of the mechanical base that is available to an everyday version of Selene in the game. Selene is, in fact, a very fun character to move around and shoot with. Actually, a brief slew of praise for Returnal, because I had a lot of fun playing through it, despite all that I’ve said above
- The amount of interesting cost/benefit choices offered up is incredible: on a minute to minute basis, the player is getting consistent possibilities for pain and pleasure that could knock the run into next gear (although if we’re being honest, unless you’re upping protection or damage, it isn’t usually worth any downside) or knock Selene on her ass. The pain/pleasure dichotomy is so powerful that it feels more of a promise on the Cenobites in Hellraiser than any of those movies ever did.
- Jane Elizabeth Perry’s VO for Selene, almost totally done in isolation of any other characters to draw reaction from, impresses more than any other AAA game’s performances from the last few years. It is a treat, and despite the bungling of the system narrative in my playthrough, carries weight across the entire play as something with genuine pathos.
- As above stated, the movement and shooting never feels anything less than incredible. So much weight is included and accounted for in every action - the shotgun nearly rips its barrel apart with every blast, the pylons screech with searing wounds, and Selene lands so coolly with earth shattering descents that I felt my knees give out with every impact. Kinaesthetic masterclass.
Anyways, all this praise is situated in rooms that don’t really need you to engage with any of the excellent bits, because tight concentric circle strafes will get the job done every time.
To bring this back to the beginning, I am nothing if not disappointed by Returnal. It’s not a bad game but it was talked about badly; the praise for its themes are dependent on highly specific play experiences, as well as on bringing an enormous amount of self implication to any given read that comes across as highly thought of the game. The trials of its design were underlaid in the frenzy that came in discussing the polish a AAA game brought to the already highly tuned roguelike formula, a formula which more suits the indie sphere which honed it to shining. This unfortunate discussion cycle damned my experience with the game, which I suppose was burdened in the concert I played it with my own naivete in expecting depth from a game released for $80. Really, you get what you pay for.
Another Pokémon Game
2023
Above all, I just want a story, not a barrel of jokes of varying quality. The rest written below is just a heartfelt polemic of me saying more of the same however it applies as much to this one as any other 'joke metagame' you could pull to. The only reason I'm speaking on this one in particular is in fact because it's so short and universal that such a fact in itself may be a great meditation point for which to consider these aspects.
There is plenty of interesting observations throughout its 10 minute runtime on the labor exploitation riddled in profit driven AAA design and how it can create a system of control and suffering. Its cushioned by taking its own world lightly and picking fun at its own existence. This mixture of comedy and labor concerns may on the surface seem like a great form of messaging especially considering the natural aversion people are going to have to 'serious' or 'dark' depictions of the world of Pokemon after the PETA satires Pokémon Black and White (2012) and Pokémon Red, White, and Blue (2013). Not to mention the manufacturing of Game Theory type videos that depict the world as more malicious for free clicks. Or even the no doubt multitude of poorly written ROM Hacks that often try and fail to convey 'dark' depictions. As a result, regardless of the authors own probable bias for prop jokes and dad humor, there is an argument to be made that treating the world of Pokemon and its production with any degree of desperation is in itself poor form.
I disagree with this. GameFreak often takes the franchise itself seriously in small bursts before quietly recapturing them for better sales latter. For example Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness (2005) shows a world of open abuse and genetic mistreatment of pokemon in a much more drab way through 'shadow pokemon', which have had the doors to their heart shut out by messed up science experimentation (think Alphys True Lab experiments if you dont know). Or even earlier, Pokémon: The First Movie (1998), a real tear jerker for many fans for its more dark treatment of genetic sentience along with vengeful mistreatment for Pokemon as a legitimate class. There are at the very least very serious animal testing themes and animal to human bonding stories the world of Pokemon tries to keep serious about. These moments however have been recaptured, Pokemon Go uses the Shadow Pokemon feature but ripped from their initial narrative meaning it both justifies and creates amnesia over the initial reference point. The same goes for MewTwo who in the partial remake film Pokémon the Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution (2020) had much of their musings truncated and turned more into a gruff biped antagonist to be punched.
So if GameFreak is allowed to be serious, I don't think we need to hold back either. In Another Pokemon Game you have a strained 'joke' from one of the workers belaboring why they cant make it in Bitsy and a few people boycotting outside. However the narrative arc does not allow the protagonist to partake in this boycott, nor does it really give room for the possibility that Bitsy should be used as a lot of the jokes in the game reveal an insecurity at its own Bitsy world like the inability to code in Bitsy, the recycling of content, and incorrect sprites. This is because the world is in a tension with its humor and its (meta)narrative design aspects often blurring how the one should or would be with the other.
In that way this 'metahumor' is probably fine for most people in the same way a Mel Brooks film would be. I can't help but this self disparaged referentiality and reliance on easy meme humor (ex. I've fallen and cant get up', She learned it on Mumsnet, etc.) is a disempowerment from the potential of critique. I've felt it as much in Mel Brooks as I have in Stanley Parable or here. Furthermore, I cant help but feel that works as such defang genuine analysis of cultural necrosis within the corporate capture of a franchise. For example when hotelbones discusses the capture of the Muppet franchise in her bitsyessay Man or Muppet (2022) she reflects how
"Then their creator died, their franchise was subsumed by the corporate need to gain capital and they have been swung around carelessly without any understanding for why they existed in the first place on sex joke television shows and life insurance ads"
This is a sincere attempt at grieving over the puppeteering of her favourite characters into corporate husks and how it relates to her life, that's rare. Reflections like Another Pokemon Game as often well crafted as they can be are far more common. Something is preventing us from going all in.
The question for me is ultimately not 'is Another Pokemon Game saying the right things' or 'why are we grieving over our own fictions in the form of jokes'. The issue is moreso why we seem unable to vault over our own sarcasm and laughter to say what's really bugging us. Why can't we ever bring ourselves to be angry and miserable about this stuff and reproduce it in our art and words? Why be so dodgy all the time? It's impossible for me to read Another Pokemon Game as anything other than an intensely repressed work that feeds into a system that there will always be another Pokemon Game and that in a way that should be soothing in itself because at least people are trying. What is there to make of a 'story' that has fatigued its audience over the course of decades? What are we supposed to make of this story via slow time that seems unchanging and unfazed? Maybe this quote from Fisher will aid us here:
"The struggle here is not only over the (historical) direction of time but over different uses of time. Capital demands that we always look busy, even if there’s no work to do. If neoliberalism’s magical voluntarism is to be believed, there are always opportunities to be chased or created; any time not spent hustling and hassling is time wasted. The whole city is forced into a gigantic simulation of activity, a fantacism of productivism in which nothing much is actually produced, an economy made out of hot air and bland delirium." (Ghosts of My Life p. 167)
In order to pull ourselves away from this time force, we should dare to be angry and ferocious in our lives and our memories, my favourite pokemon as a kid was Jigglypuff who was always angry and evasive from everyone trying to pin her down. I want to be a Jigglypuff in life. There should be more mindfulness in the present and I think that reall is found in boycotting the new Pokemon games and films, if for no other reason then escaping nostalgic delirium. It's a road to nowhere, paved in labor crunch and the penman's ash.
There is plenty of interesting observations throughout its 10 minute runtime on the labor exploitation riddled in profit driven AAA design and how it can create a system of control and suffering. Its cushioned by taking its own world lightly and picking fun at its own existence. This mixture of comedy and labor concerns may on the surface seem like a great form of messaging especially considering the natural aversion people are going to have to 'serious' or 'dark' depictions of the world of Pokemon after the PETA satires Pokémon Black and White (2012) and Pokémon Red, White, and Blue (2013). Not to mention the manufacturing of Game Theory type videos that depict the world as more malicious for free clicks. Or even the no doubt multitude of poorly written ROM Hacks that often try and fail to convey 'dark' depictions. As a result, regardless of the authors own probable bias for prop jokes and dad humor, there is an argument to be made that treating the world of Pokemon and its production with any degree of desperation is in itself poor form.
I disagree with this. GameFreak often takes the franchise itself seriously in small bursts before quietly recapturing them for better sales latter. For example Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness (2005) shows a world of open abuse and genetic mistreatment of pokemon in a much more drab way through 'shadow pokemon', which have had the doors to their heart shut out by messed up science experimentation (think Alphys True Lab experiments if you dont know). Or even earlier, Pokémon: The First Movie (1998), a real tear jerker for many fans for its more dark treatment of genetic sentience along with vengeful mistreatment for Pokemon as a legitimate class. There are at the very least very serious animal testing themes and animal to human bonding stories the world of Pokemon tries to keep serious about. These moments however have been recaptured, Pokemon Go uses the Shadow Pokemon feature but ripped from their initial narrative meaning it both justifies and creates amnesia over the initial reference point. The same goes for MewTwo who in the partial remake film Pokémon the Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution (2020) had much of their musings truncated and turned more into a gruff biped antagonist to be punched.
So if GameFreak is allowed to be serious, I don't think we need to hold back either. In Another Pokemon Game you have a strained 'joke' from one of the workers belaboring why they cant make it in Bitsy and a few people boycotting outside. However the narrative arc does not allow the protagonist to partake in this boycott, nor does it really give room for the possibility that Bitsy should be used as a lot of the jokes in the game reveal an insecurity at its own Bitsy world like the inability to code in Bitsy, the recycling of content, and incorrect sprites. This is because the world is in a tension with its humor and its (meta)narrative design aspects often blurring how the one should or would be with the other.
In that way this 'metahumor' is probably fine for most people in the same way a Mel Brooks film would be. I can't help but this self disparaged referentiality and reliance on easy meme humor (ex. I've fallen and cant get up', She learned it on Mumsnet, etc.) is a disempowerment from the potential of critique. I've felt it as much in Mel Brooks as I have in Stanley Parable or here. Furthermore, I cant help but feel that works as such defang genuine analysis of cultural necrosis within the corporate capture of a franchise. For example when hotelbones discusses the capture of the Muppet franchise in her bitsyessay Man or Muppet (2022) she reflects how
"Then their creator died, their franchise was subsumed by the corporate need to gain capital and they have been swung around carelessly without any understanding for why they existed in the first place on sex joke television shows and life insurance ads"
This is a sincere attempt at grieving over the puppeteering of her favourite characters into corporate husks and how it relates to her life, that's rare. Reflections like Another Pokemon Game as often well crafted as they can be are far more common. Something is preventing us from going all in.
The question for me is ultimately not 'is Another Pokemon Game saying the right things' or 'why are we grieving over our own fictions in the form of jokes'. The issue is moreso why we seem unable to vault over our own sarcasm and laughter to say what's really bugging us. Why can't we ever bring ourselves to be angry and miserable about this stuff and reproduce it in our art and words? Why be so dodgy all the time? It's impossible for me to read Another Pokemon Game as anything other than an intensely repressed work that feeds into a system that there will always be another Pokemon Game and that in a way that should be soothing in itself because at least people are trying. What is there to make of a 'story' that has fatigued its audience over the course of decades? What are we supposed to make of this story via slow time that seems unchanging and unfazed? Maybe this quote from Fisher will aid us here:
"The struggle here is not only over the (historical) direction of time but over different uses of time. Capital demands that we always look busy, even if there’s no work to do. If neoliberalism’s magical voluntarism is to be believed, there are always opportunities to be chased or created; any time not spent hustling and hassling is time wasted. The whole city is forced into a gigantic simulation of activity, a fantacism of productivism in which nothing much is actually produced, an economy made out of hot air and bland delirium." (Ghosts of My Life p. 167)
In order to pull ourselves away from this time force, we should dare to be angry and ferocious in our lives and our memories, my favourite pokemon as a kid was Jigglypuff who was always angry and evasive from everyone trying to pin her down. I want to be a Jigglypuff in life. There should be more mindfulness in the present and I think that reall is found in boycotting the new Pokemon games and films, if for no other reason then escaping nostalgic delirium. It's a road to nowhere, paved in labor crunch and the penman's ash.
Good: It's the [ T O T A L P A C K A G E ] with every conceivable feature you'd need without tarnishing an inch of IIDX's core edge. And on top of that, most of the best retro tracks are still here! These fuckers put a camera in the machine so you can record your hands as you play.
The bad: I don't know what the fuck these mobile game popups and alerts are, why did it force me into this course mode thing but then drop me back into regular song selection, what the goddamn hell is going on here
The bad: I don't know what the fuck these mobile game popups and alerts are, why did it force me into this course mode thing but then drop me back into regular song selection, what the goddamn hell is going on here
when i play this game my hands become high precision weapons of destruction so one time at the arcade my friend put his hand on one of the face buttons just as i was about to press it and my finger poked clean through his palm so now all my friends call him "hole hand" honestly its not that bad because now he can carry a roll of quarters in there so whenever we need to do laundry we just call up ol' hole hand and he spots us also they added hare hare yukai to this one so its good
Faren Touga
1999
Faren Touga is a map-based strategy/simulation game with TRPG combat for each node. This game is genuinely amazing, its janky mechanics, menuing, art, music, and all. You play from one of multiple scenarios, and within each scenario the faction you choose changes where on the map you start, what characters and generic units you have access to, and what story events you can trigger. All of this results in a relative difficulty for the scenario that the game marks for you with a star rating out of 5, with 5 being hardest.
Ok but what's the actual gameplay?
Each node on the world map has a unique tile-based TRPG map, and each map provides some kind of unique layout or challenge. Maybe it's an open field with trees on each side providing cover for attackers, or maybe it's a desert with a slice of a snowy field in a corner. The game is actually mostly built for you to try to use autobattle as much as possible, as they're combat is generally guaranteed from the outset if your units are stronger and not as a strict disadvantage, though manual control allows you to perform more in-depth tactics like spreading your units to avoid aoe magic and protect your backline, or using a high move high attack unit to assassinate the enemy leader. Utilizing the terrain and your units strengths to your own advantage is crucial in your pursuit of world domination. But it's not nearly as important as fostering your economical growth.
Each node/"area" is a city under your rule. You station your troops there and they can do one a few actions, or do nothing and passively contribute to the city's stated development goal. Those goals being developing the city (i.e. building houses), repairing the walls, building roads, training, or searching for allies. Developing the city increases the amount of money (aka "ley") that city provides each turn, training gives all stationed units a bit of exp, and searching for allies has a chance to let you hire a new named character for a certain price + upkeep cost, though they can refuse to serve. I skipped the walls and roads though right? So those actually directly affect the TRPG map the node represents. Each point of wall strength corresponds to 1 wall tile on the map, with those wall tiles stopping enemy units from crossing while providing your units with a ton of avoid for standing on them. The roads work the same way, but standing on road tiles lowers your avoid. Having all the roads built also doubles the income you receive from that city, which is a nice bonus if you don't have anything else to do in that city. Also of note is that developing the city adds house tiles to the map, which sometimes give avoid bonuses as well.
Those active actions your troops have are to hire new troops or monsters, move to another area, or attack a neighboring area. Each city can house 20 units and you can only move one unit one node at a time, which can be a little annoying toward the end where you need to fight along multiple fronts.
The gameplay loop is addicting. Like most strategy games of its kind, you need to stay on your toes and predict enemy movements and guess where and when they will strike, having your own forces nearby and ready to prevent their attack. And because of how city development works, you also have "armies" of weak units that you mainly use to bolster your economy as fast as possible. Having two aspects of strategy you're focusing on at once with both of them using the same clunky menuing and garrisons is surprisingly fun, especially when you find nodes that let you hire particularly strong monsters like dragons and have to ferry all of them through your empire over to the battlefield.
For its time this game is incredibly innovative. More than that though, it has this unmistakable charm like nothing else. It came at the wrong time to really make a splash, but it's still inspired multiple fan versions of it, Varen Touga the most notable. Its spiritual successor Lost Technology is also on Steam in English for $5 if you'd prefer a much more modernized version that doesn't have the territory development focus.
I wrote this review as a half-guide to how the game works because there are no resources for this game in English and I genuinely loved playing this game. It's an incredibly soulful and charming experience that I wish more people knew about. Oh, and did I mention it runs perfectly on Windows 10 and 11?
Check out this dragon deathball I used to kill the lizardmen faction leader this one time: https://i.imgur.com/uN0z19z.png
Ok but what's the actual gameplay?
Each node on the world map has a unique tile-based TRPG map, and each map provides some kind of unique layout or challenge. Maybe it's an open field with trees on each side providing cover for attackers, or maybe it's a desert with a slice of a snowy field in a corner. The game is actually mostly built for you to try to use autobattle as much as possible, as they're combat is generally guaranteed from the outset if your units are stronger and not as a strict disadvantage, though manual control allows you to perform more in-depth tactics like spreading your units to avoid aoe magic and protect your backline, or using a high move high attack unit to assassinate the enemy leader. Utilizing the terrain and your units strengths to your own advantage is crucial in your pursuit of world domination. But it's not nearly as important as fostering your economical growth.
Each node/"area" is a city under your rule. You station your troops there and they can do one a few actions, or do nothing and passively contribute to the city's stated development goal. Those goals being developing the city (i.e. building houses), repairing the walls, building roads, training, or searching for allies. Developing the city increases the amount of money (aka "ley") that city provides each turn, training gives all stationed units a bit of exp, and searching for allies has a chance to let you hire a new named character for a certain price + upkeep cost, though they can refuse to serve. I skipped the walls and roads though right? So those actually directly affect the TRPG map the node represents. Each point of wall strength corresponds to 1 wall tile on the map, with those wall tiles stopping enemy units from crossing while providing your units with a ton of avoid for standing on them. The roads work the same way, but standing on road tiles lowers your avoid. Having all the roads built also doubles the income you receive from that city, which is a nice bonus if you don't have anything else to do in that city. Also of note is that developing the city adds house tiles to the map, which sometimes give avoid bonuses as well.
Those active actions your troops have are to hire new troops or monsters, move to another area, or attack a neighboring area. Each city can house 20 units and you can only move one unit one node at a time, which can be a little annoying toward the end where you need to fight along multiple fronts.
The gameplay loop is addicting. Like most strategy games of its kind, you need to stay on your toes and predict enemy movements and guess where and when they will strike, having your own forces nearby and ready to prevent their attack. And because of how city development works, you also have "armies" of weak units that you mainly use to bolster your economy as fast as possible. Having two aspects of strategy you're focusing on at once with both of them using the same clunky menuing and garrisons is surprisingly fun, especially when you find nodes that let you hire particularly strong monsters like dragons and have to ferry all of them through your empire over to the battlefield.
For its time this game is incredibly innovative. More than that though, it has this unmistakable charm like nothing else. It came at the wrong time to really make a splash, but it's still inspired multiple fan versions of it, Varen Touga the most notable. Its spiritual successor Lost Technology is also on Steam in English for $5 if you'd prefer a much more modernized version that doesn't have the territory development focus.
I wrote this review as a half-guide to how the game works because there are no resources for this game in English and I genuinely loved playing this game. It's an incredibly soulful and charming experience that I wish more people knew about. Oh, and did I mention it runs perfectly on Windows 10 and 11?
Check out this dragon deathball I used to kill the lizardmen faction leader this one time: https://i.imgur.com/uN0z19z.png
Lethal Company
2023
taps into the innate human urge to collect trinkets and knickknacks against all survival instinct.
Magic Vigilante
2023
Song Accompaniment
I've only done one cycle using as many continues as I needed, but I'm already convinced this is one of the best titles of the year so far.
A bold stance, so how can I possibly back it up? Well let's start from the difficulty structuring. A lot of SHMUP fans make a big deal about how finishing a game with 0 continues is proof of 'mastery' of the shmup at the bare minimum. That's when you can then properly speak about the mechanics from the standpoint of effective design or not so of course I'm not there. However I do find myself rolling my eyes at this stance because it's an opinion that reifies away the blunt reason for this to exist the way it does in the first place.
See, in the logic of most SHMUPs be it the Cave games or the Touhou franchise, the principle design approach is that you run in with a set number of lives and learn the patterns, die in the process and generally improve. This is all fine and well, with how short SHMUPs are there's a point to be made that it's in fact the main appeal. However, just taking this fact on its face reads as deeply unserious to me: The genuine reason SHMUPs have a 'continue' design in the first place is absolutely to crunch quarters. The genre is heralded for their difficulty on the idea of continuing through failure so you can master it in the reset, but if you step back for a moment it becomes obvious that the reason it's like this at all is because of a desire to play into arcade nostalgia and life design with a certain commercial process. For whatever reason the genre never adapted to early home console life systems, thereby going through a modular difficulty through the accessibility process from there. It never 'tested' out of itself. The translation to how it plays now is fundamentally awkward. As much as I like most of the Touhou games for instance, I hate the raw feeling of play being halted by a continue moment, that 'halt' is literally there for the player to pull a quarter out of their pocket. In a post-arcade era this has been translated to relaxing and finding resolve but since that resolve is usually on the timer there's generally a sense of panic. This is where Magic Vigilante intervenes, offering a slew of difficulties alterations: a modular life system health system that doubles the starting health, stage select, and most crucially a checkpoint based continue system.
On top of all this the designer even openly notes on the Itchio page that "Default value is 4. If you are not particular, I think the maximum value is fine.) Please use it because it recovers to this value when you clear the stage." Thereby openly encouraging the player to play on easy mode and then scale up from there.
For instance it's clear to me how the trajectory of difficulty scaling would work from here, you would play on 9 health until you get good enough to do a no CC run. Then on 8, etc. This along with the stage select allows the player to treat the game less like an endurance test, and more like a rhythm game. This design structure has more in common with being able to practice different movements in the later Guitar Hero titles or Rhythm Heaven than it does with its other genre contemporaries.
That said, SHMUP experts would probably be quick to outline that this random itchio browser title is just the first game I happened to play that does this rather than the first to actually do so, and I certainly concede to that point in advance. However, there's a fair reason to fixate on it anyway: it has a nice domino effect on the power fantasy approach to the genre here. In my view, games that give modular difficulty and encourage playing on an easier mode encourage the treatment of their world and environment as a power fantasy foremost. With a genre all about the fantasy of overwhelming ballistic warfare and competency being built through twitch dodging complex attack patterns, it's a genre almost entirely built for that power fantasy, yet most safeguard it behind the endurance test and I have to admit that I at least, don't typically associate power fantasies with endurance. I'll cut to the chase and say the lo fi magical girl power fantasy is an adorable approach to the genre. The whole experience has you fighting other magical girls and various bunnies in the meantime. The pixelated visuals and simplification of the enemies as red blobs that shoot out red arrows help keep incredible visual clarity, meanwhile the urban street scroll backgrounds. God these backgrounds are beautiful, they are still pixelated but done with a higher level of pixelation than all of the foreground enemies and characters thus allowing for various scrolling effects to happen without being disorienting. It all comes together with grace, feeling like a hazy dream you'd expect from a Cardcaptor Sakura fan.
Finally I will touch on the play mechanics themselves. This is a horizontal SHMUP which admittedly is not something I play often just because they don't generally get recommended. However if I were to hazard why, its likely that having to keep track of bullet patterns horizontally requires more of your peripheral vision thereby filtering the players who already have good periphery already, or forcing people with weak peripheral vision to glimpse back and forth more putting them at a disadvantage. Whereas, vertical shooters have a much more intuitive sense of tracking since the movement of the eye up and down goes faster. Bullet Hell games in general cause a lot less smooth eye pattern movement in particular, that is to say the eye is constantly jumping between points and the points in a vertical space are far easier to intuitate than a horizontal one. I use the terms 'probably' and 'likely' here because I'm not in fact an eye doctor. However, if you want a hypothetical reference point to better understand what I mean, think of how Tetris is laid out, the blocks fall vertical right? Well we could just think of the 'gravity' of Tetris if the game was played sideways as being a game about 'magnets' instead of gravitational measurement. I think you would agree that this Horizontris would be a lot less easy to measure and account for especially if the screen to do so is very large. Less hypothetically I have tended to find that when I play Pacman it's easier to run away from ghosts vertically than horizontally because I can more easily chart my escape route.
The point of this rather strange illustration here is to point out that if this is in any case true it thus explains the vertical dominance in the genre. Therefore it stands to reason that horizontal bullet hells have to in some way justify it through the mechanics. This is where Magic Vigilante shines most then through its main mechanic: Slow down. You build up a slow down meter through beating enemies that you can hold and after a small delay will allow to to more discretely navigate the bullet patterns. If you hold for long enough, you do a powerful counter attack, but it eats more meter in the process. This slowdown actually lasts for a really long time allowing for the player to fully gauge and process the bullets behind the ones you're currently avoiding. On top of this the boss health bar is actually positioned in 2 places, on both sides of the screen allowing for the player to more accurately assess how much more they need to navigate the wave. Finally, the game fixes this through having a wide range of resolution options so you can make the screen smaller or larger to fit your needs. The result is that it allows for a great sense of playfulness that comes from horizontal patterns, giving the odd sense that you are 'squeezing' through the bullets rather than flying past them.
Combine that with an absolutely adorable enemy design, wherein the player is fighting Bunnies and Mice blobs as mini bosses, and a kicking Progressive Electronic Orchestral soundtrack, and I think you have one of the best SHMUPs staring you down in a while! In contrast to the unfortunately benign droll of this write up, the effect is far more minimalist and gorgeous than I let on. It's also far more difficult than I make it sound to. Give it a shot!
I've only done one cycle using as many continues as I needed, but I'm already convinced this is one of the best titles of the year so far.
A bold stance, so how can I possibly back it up? Well let's start from the difficulty structuring. A lot of SHMUP fans make a big deal about how finishing a game with 0 continues is proof of 'mastery' of the shmup at the bare minimum. That's when you can then properly speak about the mechanics from the standpoint of effective design or not so of course I'm not there. However I do find myself rolling my eyes at this stance because it's an opinion that reifies away the blunt reason for this to exist the way it does in the first place.
See, in the logic of most SHMUPs be it the Cave games or the Touhou franchise, the principle design approach is that you run in with a set number of lives and learn the patterns, die in the process and generally improve. This is all fine and well, with how short SHMUPs are there's a point to be made that it's in fact the main appeal. However, just taking this fact on its face reads as deeply unserious to me: The genuine reason SHMUPs have a 'continue' design in the first place is absolutely to crunch quarters. The genre is heralded for their difficulty on the idea of continuing through failure so you can master it in the reset, but if you step back for a moment it becomes obvious that the reason it's like this at all is because of a desire to play into arcade nostalgia and life design with a certain commercial process. For whatever reason the genre never adapted to early home console life systems, thereby going through a modular difficulty through the accessibility process from there. It never 'tested' out of itself. The translation to how it plays now is fundamentally awkward. As much as I like most of the Touhou games for instance, I hate the raw feeling of play being halted by a continue moment, that 'halt' is literally there for the player to pull a quarter out of their pocket. In a post-arcade era this has been translated to relaxing and finding resolve but since that resolve is usually on the timer there's generally a sense of panic. This is where Magic Vigilante intervenes, offering a slew of difficulties alterations: a modular life system health system that doubles the starting health, stage select, and most crucially a checkpoint based continue system.
On top of all this the designer even openly notes on the Itchio page that "Default value is 4. If you are not particular, I think the maximum value is fine.) Please use it because it recovers to this value when you clear the stage." Thereby openly encouraging the player to play on easy mode and then scale up from there.
For instance it's clear to me how the trajectory of difficulty scaling would work from here, you would play on 9 health until you get good enough to do a no CC run. Then on 8, etc. This along with the stage select allows the player to treat the game less like an endurance test, and more like a rhythm game. This design structure has more in common with being able to practice different movements in the later Guitar Hero titles or Rhythm Heaven than it does with its other genre contemporaries.
That said, SHMUP experts would probably be quick to outline that this random itchio browser title is just the first game I happened to play that does this rather than the first to actually do so, and I certainly concede to that point in advance. However, there's a fair reason to fixate on it anyway: it has a nice domino effect on the power fantasy approach to the genre here. In my view, games that give modular difficulty and encourage playing on an easier mode encourage the treatment of their world and environment as a power fantasy foremost. With a genre all about the fantasy of overwhelming ballistic warfare and competency being built through twitch dodging complex attack patterns, it's a genre almost entirely built for that power fantasy, yet most safeguard it behind the endurance test and I have to admit that I at least, don't typically associate power fantasies with endurance. I'll cut to the chase and say the lo fi magical girl power fantasy is an adorable approach to the genre. The whole experience has you fighting other magical girls and various bunnies in the meantime. The pixelated visuals and simplification of the enemies as red blobs that shoot out red arrows help keep incredible visual clarity, meanwhile the urban street scroll backgrounds. God these backgrounds are beautiful, they are still pixelated but done with a higher level of pixelation than all of the foreground enemies and characters thus allowing for various scrolling effects to happen without being disorienting. It all comes together with grace, feeling like a hazy dream you'd expect from a Cardcaptor Sakura fan.
Finally I will touch on the play mechanics themselves. This is a horizontal SHMUP which admittedly is not something I play often just because they don't generally get recommended. However if I were to hazard why, its likely that having to keep track of bullet patterns horizontally requires more of your peripheral vision thereby filtering the players who already have good periphery already, or forcing people with weak peripheral vision to glimpse back and forth more putting them at a disadvantage. Whereas, vertical shooters have a much more intuitive sense of tracking since the movement of the eye up and down goes faster. Bullet Hell games in general cause a lot less smooth eye pattern movement in particular, that is to say the eye is constantly jumping between points and the points in a vertical space are far easier to intuitate than a horizontal one. I use the terms 'probably' and 'likely' here because I'm not in fact an eye doctor. However, if you want a hypothetical reference point to better understand what I mean, think of how Tetris is laid out, the blocks fall vertical right? Well we could just think of the 'gravity' of Tetris if the game was played sideways as being a game about 'magnets' instead of gravitational measurement. I think you would agree that this Horizontris would be a lot less easy to measure and account for especially if the screen to do so is very large. Less hypothetically I have tended to find that when I play Pacman it's easier to run away from ghosts vertically than horizontally because I can more easily chart my escape route.
The point of this rather strange illustration here is to point out that if this is in any case true it thus explains the vertical dominance in the genre. Therefore it stands to reason that horizontal bullet hells have to in some way justify it through the mechanics. This is where Magic Vigilante shines most then through its main mechanic: Slow down. You build up a slow down meter through beating enemies that you can hold and after a small delay will allow to to more discretely navigate the bullet patterns. If you hold for long enough, you do a powerful counter attack, but it eats more meter in the process. This slowdown actually lasts for a really long time allowing for the player to fully gauge and process the bullets behind the ones you're currently avoiding. On top of this the boss health bar is actually positioned in 2 places, on both sides of the screen allowing for the player to more accurately assess how much more they need to navigate the wave. Finally, the game fixes this through having a wide range of resolution options so you can make the screen smaller or larger to fit your needs. The result is that it allows for a great sense of playfulness that comes from horizontal patterns, giving the odd sense that you are 'squeezing' through the bullets rather than flying past them.
Combine that with an absolutely adorable enemy design, wherein the player is fighting Bunnies and Mice blobs as mini bosses, and a kicking Progressive Electronic Orchestral soundtrack, and I think you have one of the best SHMUPs staring you down in a while! In contrast to the unfortunately benign droll of this write up, the effect is far more minimalist and gorgeous than I let on. It's also far more difficult than I make it sound to. Give it a shot!
Re:Fresh
2023
got exactly what i wanted, which was a tiny world that i could cozy into and master in less then two hours. appreciate that there is Some effort to stretch the mechanics in different directions even across the very short running time. kinda janky and weirdly poorly optimized if u care ab that stuff (i dont). i have mixed feelings on both "wholesome" games and solarpunk, but this is a pretty good case for the communal, inviting, aspirational best of both. not the most powerful thing, but i do long for the world that will happen when we finally decide to take care of eachother.
Is it weird that I mostly want to talk about Hopping Girl Kohane EX's progression system? For what is a pretty unusual and weird semi-physics based precision action/puzzle platformer with plenty of questionable design decisions, the boring GDC talk topic is its truly compelling bit.
Said progression, of course, is cute clothes. For a game with a rock-bottom budget otherwise, D-O enterprise have put in a stupid amount of outfits. Legitimately as many outfits as there are stages in the entire game, most with unique models, different hairstyles and stuff for our bubbly protagonist Kohane as she basically plays pogo stick monkey ball. They do also come with stat boosts, which is questionable but they're never over the top and never required to get the S ranks or all the coins on a stage.
And that's the real hook of the progression. Those cute outfits can all be bought from a shop for grinded out currency... or you can get an S rank in the stage they're attached to. And as the balance of grind for cash is obnoxious enough, but you really want to see Kohane in the virgin killer sweater (yes, really, how is this game rated 7+ PEGI), the game pushes you to go for those S ranks, to get all the frog coins.
Which is good, because it's in the score attacks where the gameplay itself shines. Played as just a start to finish game like monkey ball Kohane is a pretty mid game, and it's level design is kinda weak. This is something the original kohane suffers heavily from - sprawling, huge levels that miss the point because the path of least resistance and most clothes is beelining it to the finish. When really, the way of playing the game that is by far the most fun is to route out the maps, go for full combos by constantly be jumping on special blocks, do it fast, get all the bonus coins and dont get hit. And then you get rewarded with a cute bolero dress which Kohane looks so happy in...
EX also generally improves on a lot of the general problems of the original, despite largely being comprised of the same assets and structure. The levels are still wide, but nowhere near as labyrinthe, long and massive as lategame OG. General pacing and game speed is higher, and there are a lot more sections of actual perilous precision platforming that will kill you rather than just hurt your rank upon failure. Moving platforms are predictably pure hell to deal with on a pogo stick, and learning how to deal with their timings and how to carry momentum onto them is particularly rewarding.
Kohane EX is a really telling exercise. The original I found, frankly, extremely mid and this sequel is in so many ways as similar to it as Fifa 23 is to Fifa 22 - hell, it removes content such as the championship mode and multiplayer, which is a bit of a shame even if they kinda sucked, and production values for the story is way lower. And yet, through careful repackaging and tweaking of it's formulas and how it's presented, it becomes something pretty great.
Seriously though, how is this game rated 7+ it's like Dead or Alive Extreme level horny at times.
Said progression, of course, is cute clothes. For a game with a rock-bottom budget otherwise, D-O enterprise have put in a stupid amount of outfits. Legitimately as many outfits as there are stages in the entire game, most with unique models, different hairstyles and stuff for our bubbly protagonist Kohane as she basically plays pogo stick monkey ball. They do also come with stat boosts, which is questionable but they're never over the top and never required to get the S ranks or all the coins on a stage.
And that's the real hook of the progression. Those cute outfits can all be bought from a shop for grinded out currency... or you can get an S rank in the stage they're attached to. And as the balance of grind for cash is obnoxious enough, but you really want to see Kohane in the virgin killer sweater (yes, really, how is this game rated 7+ PEGI), the game pushes you to go for those S ranks, to get all the frog coins.
Which is good, because it's in the score attacks where the gameplay itself shines. Played as just a start to finish game like monkey ball Kohane is a pretty mid game, and it's level design is kinda weak. This is something the original kohane suffers heavily from - sprawling, huge levels that miss the point because the path of least resistance and most clothes is beelining it to the finish. When really, the way of playing the game that is by far the most fun is to route out the maps, go for full combos by constantly be jumping on special blocks, do it fast, get all the bonus coins and dont get hit. And then you get rewarded with a cute bolero dress which Kohane looks so happy in...
EX also generally improves on a lot of the general problems of the original, despite largely being comprised of the same assets and structure. The levels are still wide, but nowhere near as labyrinthe, long and massive as lategame OG. General pacing and game speed is higher, and there are a lot more sections of actual perilous precision platforming that will kill you rather than just hurt your rank upon failure. Moving platforms are predictably pure hell to deal with on a pogo stick, and learning how to deal with their timings and how to carry momentum onto them is particularly rewarding.
Kohane EX is a really telling exercise. The original I found, frankly, extremely mid and this sequel is in so many ways as similar to it as Fifa 23 is to Fifa 22 - hell, it removes content such as the championship mode and multiplayer, which is a bit of a shame even if they kinda sucked, and production values for the story is way lower. And yet, through careful repackaging and tweaking of it's formulas and how it's presented, it becomes something pretty great.
Seriously though, how is this game rated 7+ it's like Dead or Alive Extreme level horny at times.
Ikaruga
2001
Its sometime in the year 2000, and Treasure are finishign up production of the best games of all time, Sin and Punishment, and for some fucking reason, in their after work hours, Programmer Atsutomo Nakagawa and artist/director Hiroshi iuchi have put together a prototype for a new game. Masato Maegawa, founder of treasure and by the sounds of it, the best boss of all time, plays it and basically puts his own money on the line, hiring three guys from G.Rev, themselves scrounging enough pennies to make their metal black fangame to assist, and putting the game into full production.
It is one of those realities that is very easy to forget about Ikaruga, now 22 years into it's stint of being "the shmup", and with that has come some sort of monolithic presence. And certainly with it's truly bonkers level of polish, it is hard to imagine it's origin - an absolute flash in the pan, a game that some top level developers really wanted to make, and circumstance and a little risk taking gave them a shot at it.
And you can't say they didn't take it.
Perhaps it is a byproduct of the "one chance to do what you want" reality of Ikaruga that the game is downright pathological in it's approach. And that approach is really the kicker, and usually the thing that draws contention.
Because Ikaruga is rigid as they come. You really have to cast your mind back to the likes of very early toaplan titles like Tiger Heli and Slap fight to find a game where spawns, bullet patterns and stage layouts are essentially locked in, and the game is almost entirely built around really knowing the stages before you go into them, figuring out the best paths through them and executing it perfectly. There's really more resemblance to some fucked up kind of racing game than a wild game like say, Recca. And yes, a lot of shooting games have a strong emphasis on stage knowledge, but Ikaruga is a game that basically shows you the door unless you're prepared to meet it on it's terms. It is a game that can feel comically impossible on a first approach, with stages 3 and 4 in particular being filled with layouts of enemies and bullet hazards that are fast, complex, and will just kill you before you have a chance to properly assess the situation. It can feel outright unfair, and it's probably worth pointing out the Original arcade version came with something ive never seen in any other arcade game - a trial mode which let you play the first two stages with infinite lives on one credit, serving as an introduction for the player to apperciate the mechanics.
And yeah, Ikaruga is a bit gimmicky. I will admit readly it's a game that really took me a while to actually grasp - it's exceptionally easy to appreciate the things about Ikaruga that are obviously exceptional, but especially coming at it as if it's a standard STG, harder to have actual fun with it.
For me, what unlocked that fun was the scoring. Ikaruga is exceptionally tightly tuned, but the scoring is just wonderful - and for me the secret element that tends to go unmentioned is large parts of it are very in line with games like dangan feveron and thunder dragon 2 where enemy spawns are tied to kills, which makes optimising it's chains of 3 enemies and doing it as fast as possible, spawning more in for more points and then you can get more extends and then maybe, just maybe you can beat this thing, right?
And at least for me, when i unlocked that key, when i got my first good run of stage 1, I got it. And from there the beauty of Ikaruga really shows itself. Because yes, doing a cool run of stage 1 is good gameplay - but Ikaruga then pushes this gameplay as far as it will go, with the claustrophobic and more puzzle-y stage 2 and first half of stage 3, to the notorious, exceptional battleship raid of stage 4 with an almost rhythmical quality to it, to the peak caravan-scoring festival of stage 5, each stage with a completley unique and weird boss that puts different elements of the game's mechanics to the test, and really only the first one resembles a traditional STG boss at all. Oh, and you want to quick kill them all.
Learning all these stages, these bosses, understanding their quirks, and understanding the quirks of Ikaruga's own systems, is just about the most satisfying thing i've done in any videogame. And buried deep in there, amongst the routing and execution, the sponteneity and chaos you were sure that Iuchi and Nakagawa hammered out of the game rears it's head again - sometimes in elements of the game itself, like the completely bonkers bonus chain enemies at the end of stage 3 that Superplayers still havent optimised, and the snakes in the final boss' second phase - but more often in yourself. Ikaruga is a game challenging and demanding to the point that even the very best players cannot execute the perfect route every time, and it is in catching the small errors, the deaths, the chain breaks - like a snap of oversteer going down the back end of the nordschleife, they may be mistakes but catching them is part of the thrill.
I would be remiss not to mention Ikaruga's just unbelievable presentation. The key staff member of Ikaruga I havent mentioned yet is Yasushi Suzuki, who's art direction and particularly his mechanical design is absolutely impeccable. The ikaruga ship is as unique and offbeat as the game itself, the designs of enemies and their sihoulettes is perfectly balanced between flavour and function, and on a simple level, the game is just pretty much the best looking 3D STG out there. And I know it really doesn''t matter but goddamn is his Key art, featured in the steam version as backgrounds, just the best.
And yeah i've got to mention the music. Director of Ikaruga Hiroshi Iuchi is not a composer. His main thing was making backgrounds and his jaunt in directing Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga already seemed like a stretch but just popping out one of the best game soundtracks ever as you do so and then not releasing another piece of music for 22 years is something else. And yes, a lot of it is based around that one motif from "Ideal" but that is fine when your game is 20 minutes long and ideal might be the very best in the long tradition of exceptional STG stage 1 tracks. I simply do not understand how you just do that.
The real cherry on top of Ikaruga is how it works thematically. It's clearly a sequel to the very dour radiant silvergun, a game about breaking the eternal cycle of torment humanity inflicted itself with some buddhist themes, which is hype as shit and awesome in it's own right, but there's also Radiant Silvergun's subtext - that of game development stagnating, devs repeating the same things and refusing to risk - that is really wha the stone-like represents, and Ikaruga takes glee in blowing it up, but it's the game's entire existence and style that refutes it best - and its worth noting in the years between the two, it wasn't alone. In the years between RSG and Ikaruga, in the STG space alone you had the wild Dimahoo, Guwange, Progear, Raycrisis, Mars Matrix to name a few. They, and Ikaruga, are proof that whilst the wheel of samsara might bind us, the capability to change it is there.
The end result of all this is just so special. A lot of STG development history has strokes of lightning in a bottle, but Ikaruga takes the cake. A small bunch of ridiculously talented creatives on the same page (nb. Iuchi has called Nakagawa his "wife" in relation to work on this game) given the chance to make the thing they really wanted to do and threw everything at it. In like a year dev time. I swear, the more you look into Ikaruga the more it feels like an impossible result. And yet it is here, and it is special.
It is one of those realities that is very easy to forget about Ikaruga, now 22 years into it's stint of being "the shmup", and with that has come some sort of monolithic presence. And certainly with it's truly bonkers level of polish, it is hard to imagine it's origin - an absolute flash in the pan, a game that some top level developers really wanted to make, and circumstance and a little risk taking gave them a shot at it.
And you can't say they didn't take it.
Perhaps it is a byproduct of the "one chance to do what you want" reality of Ikaruga that the game is downright pathological in it's approach. And that approach is really the kicker, and usually the thing that draws contention.
Because Ikaruga is rigid as they come. You really have to cast your mind back to the likes of very early toaplan titles like Tiger Heli and Slap fight to find a game where spawns, bullet patterns and stage layouts are essentially locked in, and the game is almost entirely built around really knowing the stages before you go into them, figuring out the best paths through them and executing it perfectly. There's really more resemblance to some fucked up kind of racing game than a wild game like say, Recca. And yes, a lot of shooting games have a strong emphasis on stage knowledge, but Ikaruga is a game that basically shows you the door unless you're prepared to meet it on it's terms. It is a game that can feel comically impossible on a first approach, with stages 3 and 4 in particular being filled with layouts of enemies and bullet hazards that are fast, complex, and will just kill you before you have a chance to properly assess the situation. It can feel outright unfair, and it's probably worth pointing out the Original arcade version came with something ive never seen in any other arcade game - a trial mode which let you play the first two stages with infinite lives on one credit, serving as an introduction for the player to apperciate the mechanics.
And yeah, Ikaruga is a bit gimmicky. I will admit readly it's a game that really took me a while to actually grasp - it's exceptionally easy to appreciate the things about Ikaruga that are obviously exceptional, but especially coming at it as if it's a standard STG, harder to have actual fun with it.
For me, what unlocked that fun was the scoring. Ikaruga is exceptionally tightly tuned, but the scoring is just wonderful - and for me the secret element that tends to go unmentioned is large parts of it are very in line with games like dangan feveron and thunder dragon 2 where enemy spawns are tied to kills, which makes optimising it's chains of 3 enemies and doing it as fast as possible, spawning more in for more points and then you can get more extends and then maybe, just maybe you can beat this thing, right?
And at least for me, when i unlocked that key, when i got my first good run of stage 1, I got it. And from there the beauty of Ikaruga really shows itself. Because yes, doing a cool run of stage 1 is good gameplay - but Ikaruga then pushes this gameplay as far as it will go, with the claustrophobic and more puzzle-y stage 2 and first half of stage 3, to the notorious, exceptional battleship raid of stage 4 with an almost rhythmical quality to it, to the peak caravan-scoring festival of stage 5, each stage with a completley unique and weird boss that puts different elements of the game's mechanics to the test, and really only the first one resembles a traditional STG boss at all. Oh, and you want to quick kill them all.
Learning all these stages, these bosses, understanding their quirks, and understanding the quirks of Ikaruga's own systems, is just about the most satisfying thing i've done in any videogame. And buried deep in there, amongst the routing and execution, the sponteneity and chaos you were sure that Iuchi and Nakagawa hammered out of the game rears it's head again - sometimes in elements of the game itself, like the completely bonkers bonus chain enemies at the end of stage 3 that Superplayers still havent optimised, and the snakes in the final boss' second phase - but more often in yourself. Ikaruga is a game challenging and demanding to the point that even the very best players cannot execute the perfect route every time, and it is in catching the small errors, the deaths, the chain breaks - like a snap of oversteer going down the back end of the nordschleife, they may be mistakes but catching them is part of the thrill.
I would be remiss not to mention Ikaruga's just unbelievable presentation. The key staff member of Ikaruga I havent mentioned yet is Yasushi Suzuki, who's art direction and particularly his mechanical design is absolutely impeccable. The ikaruga ship is as unique and offbeat as the game itself, the designs of enemies and their sihoulettes is perfectly balanced between flavour and function, and on a simple level, the game is just pretty much the best looking 3D STG out there. And I know it really doesn''t matter but goddamn is his Key art, featured in the steam version as backgrounds, just the best.
And yeah i've got to mention the music. Director of Ikaruga Hiroshi Iuchi is not a composer. His main thing was making backgrounds and his jaunt in directing Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga already seemed like a stretch but just popping out one of the best game soundtracks ever as you do so and then not releasing another piece of music for 22 years is something else. And yes, a lot of it is based around that one motif from "Ideal" but that is fine when your game is 20 minutes long and ideal might be the very best in the long tradition of exceptional STG stage 1 tracks. I simply do not understand how you just do that.
The real cherry on top of Ikaruga is how it works thematically. It's clearly a sequel to the very dour radiant silvergun, a game about breaking the eternal cycle of torment humanity inflicted itself with some buddhist themes, which is hype as shit and awesome in it's own right, but there's also Radiant Silvergun's subtext - that of game development stagnating, devs repeating the same things and refusing to risk - that is really wha the stone-like represents, and Ikaruga takes glee in blowing it up, but it's the game's entire existence and style that refutes it best - and its worth noting in the years between the two, it wasn't alone. In the years between RSG and Ikaruga, in the STG space alone you had the wild Dimahoo, Guwange, Progear, Raycrisis, Mars Matrix to name a few. They, and Ikaruga, are proof that whilst the wheel of samsara might bind us, the capability to change it is there.
The end result of all this is just so special. A lot of STG development history has strokes of lightning in a bottle, but Ikaruga takes the cake. A small bunch of ridiculously talented creatives on the same page (nb. Iuchi has called Nakagawa his "wife" in relation to work on this game) given the chance to make the thing they really wanted to do and threw everything at it. In like a year dev time. I swear, the more you look into Ikaruga the more it feels like an impossible result. And yet it is here, and it is special.
an extremely good attempt - much better than you'd expect at a glance - at recreating the mind games of fighting games without requiring that you grind your bones into dust against the controller to practice combos. it's a little opaque (would be nice if the game told me how to identify when the next turn happens instead of a steam guide) but is extremely rewarding nonetheless.
i understand why people keep throwing around the word "chess" when discussing this but i think for non-players this makes it sound like a game that lacks immediacy. you might spend a full 30 seconds planning for a "turn" that lasts 4 frames but those 4 frames can still be more rewarding than any single turn in normal chess would ever be, thanks to some chunky, bitcrushed sound effects. this kinda arrangement extends the satisfaction of a well-executed combo as long as possible and it rocks. game's funny too. nothing better than ending a turn, watching some completely innocuous shit happen for a whopping 6 frames, and then getting a message that just says "shit".
uh, play it with friends though, the playerbase is small enough that people don't always respect the "beginners only" lobby
i understand why people keep throwing around the word "chess" when discussing this but i think for non-players this makes it sound like a game that lacks immediacy. you might spend a full 30 seconds planning for a "turn" that lasts 4 frames but those 4 frames can still be more rewarding than any single turn in normal chess would ever be, thanks to some chunky, bitcrushed sound effects. this kinda arrangement extends the satisfaction of a well-executed combo as long as possible and it rocks. game's funny too. nothing better than ending a turn, watching some completely innocuous shit happen for a whopping 6 frames, and then getting a message that just says "shit".
uh, play it with friends though, the playerbase is small enough that people don't always respect the "beginners only" lobby
Platformer Toolkit
2022
Song Accompaniment
This post-silicon faux introductory approach to platform character programming design, well meaning as it is, obscures information in 2 ways.
1. The toolkit here gameifies entirely around you the player being able to tweak towards a working character slowly through the introduction of new information rather than give you a top down understanding of how a good character looks and plays and working backwards from there. As such the useful part of the information is put at the end rather than at the beginning. I believe this is probably because Mark creates his videos in mind for an audience constantly in burnout so he has to 'slow cook' his observations rather than lead with information. You don't want to risk overstimulating the player with information so you give them 1 thing at a time but the player character themselves is going to feel like shit until you have all the functions to tweak open to you.
2. This corporate silicon mess doesn't feel good no matter what you do, because games are actually more about their visuals and music than they actually are about their 'movement'. As he explains, all the movement is completely up to what style of game you're trying to make, and as such its about the audio visual design. You can't make the character feel good to play when you have a horrible non-progressing mallsoft B-Side trumpet song playing in the background and with the visuals all looking like Paper Mario: Sticker Star put through a smoothie blender. It will always feel like chemotherapy that way. Yes you first start by prototyping the movement with simple pixel art and usually throw the sounds and music in last in these projects at the end, but before you start designing at all you imagine a world you want to externalize, is it a fluffy pillow or an industrial nightmare? You can't make a game with just a base awareness of mechanics and free art assets like this. You need to have an idea of what you want it to look and sound like. It would be remarkably less glamorous but this should have been made with simple pixel NES style limitations, possibly with a black background like how Metroid (1986) or Ice Climbers (1985) looks.
There's a lack of firm data, for example the acceleration and deceleration seem useful but they don't give you frame data of the stop and start points (or even just a second timer). Everything is styled to be interesting but not informative. As an actual toolkit, this is worthless. Like yes the preset for mario is slow, but that's because in mario you run and there isn't a coded run button to oscillate the speed.
Anyway, even if we ignore all that, there's just other functional issues that get in the way. For whatever reason run input information on the controller buffers data so your character always turns with uncontrollably slippery lag after changing inputs. I gave up playing this twice because I didn't realize this was just because of poor coding. The input keyboard controller is the arrow keys and the space button which is also a terrible layout.
This is the part where I'm supposed to say something needlessly snarky about how GMT should stick to making videos or how essayists should stay in their lane. I'm not going to say that. I think information simulation games are great, Balance of the Planet (1990) is an information game and it's one of the most ambitious and informative titles out there. I think Video Essays about Game Design are great, people can have great information without even having a hands on approach with the numbers and coding. Xator has a fantastic video/essay on the Mario bounce, which is relevant here, and from my understanding that's all gathered from historical data and reviews. To his credit, I don't know GMT that well and he seems to make shallow stuff but apparently his Boss Key video inspired one of my favorite levels in a game, the esoteric sky dungeon from Yo! Noid II: Enter the Void (2018).
All I'll say is that good observation comes from thoughtful consideration and research. Not out of being performative or hitting a production deadline, nor by babysitting readers/players with a series of continuous priming statements. Historical comparison or Breaking down a graph goes much further. Even without that, just get to the point, you really don't have to tutorialize the audience constantly. It does help to have a good taste in non-verbal music though because otherwise people will get sick, faze out and click off :3
This post-silicon faux introductory approach to platform character programming design, well meaning as it is, obscures information in 2 ways.
1. The toolkit here gameifies entirely around you the player being able to tweak towards a working character slowly through the introduction of new information rather than give you a top down understanding of how a good character looks and plays and working backwards from there. As such the useful part of the information is put at the end rather than at the beginning. I believe this is probably because Mark creates his videos in mind for an audience constantly in burnout so he has to 'slow cook' his observations rather than lead with information. You don't want to risk overstimulating the player with information so you give them 1 thing at a time but the player character themselves is going to feel like shit until you have all the functions to tweak open to you.
2. This corporate silicon mess doesn't feel good no matter what you do, because games are actually more about their visuals and music than they actually are about their 'movement'. As he explains, all the movement is completely up to what style of game you're trying to make, and as such its about the audio visual design. You can't make the character feel good to play when you have a horrible non-progressing mallsoft B-Side trumpet song playing in the background and with the visuals all looking like Paper Mario: Sticker Star put through a smoothie blender. It will always feel like chemotherapy that way. Yes you first start by prototyping the movement with simple pixel art and usually throw the sounds and music in last in these projects at the end, but before you start designing at all you imagine a world you want to externalize, is it a fluffy pillow or an industrial nightmare? You can't make a game with just a base awareness of mechanics and free art assets like this. You need to have an idea of what you want it to look and sound like. It would be remarkably less glamorous but this should have been made with simple pixel NES style limitations, possibly with a black background like how Metroid (1986) or Ice Climbers (1985) looks.
There's a lack of firm data, for example the acceleration and deceleration seem useful but they don't give you frame data of the stop and start points (or even just a second timer). Everything is styled to be interesting but not informative. As an actual toolkit, this is worthless. Like yes the preset for mario is slow, but that's because in mario you run and there isn't a coded run button to oscillate the speed.
Anyway, even if we ignore all that, there's just other functional issues that get in the way. For whatever reason run input information on the controller buffers data so your character always turns with uncontrollably slippery lag after changing inputs. I gave up playing this twice because I didn't realize this was just because of poor coding. The input keyboard controller is the arrow keys and the space button which is also a terrible layout.
This is the part where I'm supposed to say something needlessly snarky about how GMT should stick to making videos or how essayists should stay in their lane. I'm not going to say that. I think information simulation games are great, Balance of the Planet (1990) is an information game and it's one of the most ambitious and informative titles out there. I think Video Essays about Game Design are great, people can have great information without even having a hands on approach with the numbers and coding. Xator has a fantastic video/essay on the Mario bounce, which is relevant here, and from my understanding that's all gathered from historical data and reviews. To his credit, I don't know GMT that well and he seems to make shallow stuff but apparently his Boss Key video inspired one of my favorite levels in a game, the esoteric sky dungeon from Yo! Noid II: Enter the Void (2018).
All I'll say is that good observation comes from thoughtful consideration and research. Not out of being performative or hitting a production deadline, nor by babysitting readers/players with a series of continuous priming statements. Historical comparison or Breaking down a graph goes much further. Even without that, just get to the point, you really don't have to tutorialize the audience constantly. It does help to have a good taste in non-verbal music though because otherwise people will get sick, faze out and click off :3
Juurru
2023
"I had a dream I was under the ground
My friends and family were buried all around
A worm took a bite of me
And then he washed it down with a bite of you, a bite of you
The same worms that eat me will someday eat you too"
Juurruu is a short grid-based puzzler about sprouting roots from ancient fauna, with 24 caves to dig through.
Three chapters, each with a twist on the same radicle, but Juurruu just knows at what length to tie them up, before they get strained.
Sound design polish like Frédéric Chopin. (Sorry, I can never stop myself)
The 1-Bit creature merrily waddles to the chiptune when you guide them through the door you just opened for it.
I got this recommend by @Erato_Heti a month ago, because Rain World is my favourite game of all time and I can kinda see the reason why, not just for the fact that you play a little white rodant who crawls through boxy shapes, but also for it's desire to go at least a bit deeper. Because after reaching it's depth mechanically, kind of confusingly somewhere in the middle of the game, Juurru almost ditches that effort in favour of a more story-approached conclusion, which I honestly appreciate much more than if it squeezed any small drop left out of it self.
It has it's ups and downs after that inside the levels, but for it's short playtime it is definitely more than worth checking out being a completely free experience.
My friends and family were buried all around
A worm took a bite of me
And then he washed it down with a bite of you, a bite of you
The same worms that eat me will someday eat you too"
Juurruu is a short grid-based puzzler about sprouting roots from ancient fauna, with 24 caves to dig through.
Three chapters, each with a twist on the same radicle, but Juurruu just knows at what length to tie them up, before they get strained.
Sound design polish like Frédéric Chopin. (Sorry, I can never stop myself)
The 1-Bit creature merrily waddles to the chiptune when you guide them through the door you just opened for it.
I got this recommend by @Erato_Heti a month ago, because Rain World is my favourite game of all time and I can kinda see the reason why, not just for the fact that you play a little white rodant who crawls through boxy shapes, but also for it's desire to go at least a bit deeper. Because after reaching it's depth mechanically, kind of confusingly somewhere in the middle of the game, Juurru almost ditches that effort in favour of a more story-approached conclusion, which I honestly appreciate much more than if it squeezed any small drop left out of it self.
It has it's ups and downs after that inside the levels, but for it's short playtime it is definitely more than worth checking out being a completely free experience.
Solar Ash
2021
A well made child of SotC that fails to reach the heights of its lineage due to a confused mix of aesthetics with its tone, small gameplay confusions in the architecture of its boss battles, and an underwhelming (yet necessary) character arc for the PC
Hyper Light Drifter
2016
+gorgeous architecture, excellent pixel art, distinctive character designs
+once the combat options open up it feels pretty rewarding, especially once you get meatier guns that can server the majority of your damage output
+overall I think the text-less nature of the game suits it, partially because each area follows a pattern in terms of progression so there's never any confusion over what to do
+I actually quite liked the final boss in this game, it's easy to fumble a final boss by trying to make it too wild or insane but this boss felt challenging and momentous without throwing the combat design out the window. the bosses in general succeeded when they took inspiration from bullet hell games to create interesting obstacles for the player, and/or had dynamic patterns as the fight went on; the bosses that did this really struck a chord with me
+other than the west quadrant each other quadrant felt like they had a natural progression when figuring out where to go next and what to do. it's more linear than the zelda games it was based on no question, but it felt comfortable to be always moving forward
+exploration is virtually always rewarded, whether with upgrade currency, extra health packs, or even keys or hidden modules
-the west quadrant... wow what a terrible start to the game for me. the modules in this area were significantly more hidden than in the others, and the backtracking to comb over areas where I had already been was not fun at all
-certain aspects definitely reflect the indie game maker development of this game. what stuck out to me most were objects with incorrect priority that would hover over the drifter when they were supposed to be behind him
-boss design is a little all over the place, some seem very undercooked and trivial to take down
-didn't really care for the enemy and encounter design that much. the enemy patterns didn't feel distinctive in how they were meant to be taken down, and "difficult" encounters just consisted of throwing a bunch of enemies at you at once
-aiming the gun sucks lol. aiming in place is never worth it and even when I would move and shoot in a direction sometimes it felt like the bullets would skew
I really did not like this game initially because of the issues I mentioend with the west quadrant, but for the rest of the game I found it to be quite relaxing because of the ease of progression and pretty locales. afterwards I really felt no push to continue exploring, but for the 7 or 8 hours I spent playing it otherwise I was quite content. it's not a long game and pretty cheap, so I would absolutely recommend as a quick game to go through if you're proficient with 2d combat and looking for a solid entry in that space
+once the combat options open up it feels pretty rewarding, especially once you get meatier guns that can server the majority of your damage output
+overall I think the text-less nature of the game suits it, partially because each area follows a pattern in terms of progression so there's never any confusion over what to do
+I actually quite liked the final boss in this game, it's easy to fumble a final boss by trying to make it too wild or insane but this boss felt challenging and momentous without throwing the combat design out the window. the bosses in general succeeded when they took inspiration from bullet hell games to create interesting obstacles for the player, and/or had dynamic patterns as the fight went on; the bosses that did this really struck a chord with me
+other than the west quadrant each other quadrant felt like they had a natural progression when figuring out where to go next and what to do. it's more linear than the zelda games it was based on no question, but it felt comfortable to be always moving forward
+exploration is virtually always rewarded, whether with upgrade currency, extra health packs, or even keys or hidden modules
-the west quadrant... wow what a terrible start to the game for me. the modules in this area were significantly more hidden than in the others, and the backtracking to comb over areas where I had already been was not fun at all
-certain aspects definitely reflect the indie game maker development of this game. what stuck out to me most were objects with incorrect priority that would hover over the drifter when they were supposed to be behind him
-boss design is a little all over the place, some seem very undercooked and trivial to take down
-didn't really care for the enemy and encounter design that much. the enemy patterns didn't feel distinctive in how they were meant to be taken down, and "difficult" encounters just consisted of throwing a bunch of enemies at you at once
-aiming the gun sucks lol. aiming in place is never worth it and even when I would move and shoot in a direction sometimes it felt like the bullets would skew
I really did not like this game initially because of the issues I mentioend with the west quadrant, but for the rest of the game I found it to be quite relaxing because of the ease of progression and pretty locales. afterwards I really felt no push to continue exploring, but for the 7 or 8 hours I spent playing it otherwise I was quite content. it's not a long game and pretty cheap, so I would absolutely recommend as a quick game to go through if you're proficient with 2d combat and looking for a solid entry in that space