Just not really all that enamoured with this one I'm afraid.

People have been telling - sometimes begging me - to play this game for an incredibly long time now. My friends occupy a vast spectrum of opinions yet the one thing they can agree on is "Mira should play this game".

So I did.

And... Hoh boy, where do I start...?

Just to get the good out of the way first: This game is stunning. The animated cutscenes, the first person scenes, the environments, the music, the creature designs, the character designs, everything. If I was rating this game based on presentation it'd be 5/5 and sitting just underneath Disco Elysium on my favourites. Really, that 2.5 is because of the presentation alone.

The rest, though, is kind of exhausting. And not in a good way.

For starters, the gameplay is just... Not fantastic. I've seen an obscene amount of people regard it as a 'modern' take on classic survival horror, which is frankly kind of funny because it clings to survival horror trends that everybody got sick of in the early 00s. That, and the games it's inspired by are old enough to fuck.
I figured that the 6 inventory slot limit was in service to tension, that the choice between "convenience in ferrying items" and "safety in ammo/healing" was going to be a huge thing. That maybe, just maybe, the devs were aware why inventory limits sucked in older games and why even other retraux games either did away with them or had a key item feature.
So, anyway, before I quit Signalis the last two chapters were like 20% playing the game and 80% going backwards and forwards between the storage box and a 'puzzle' to hoist items around. The 'Nowhere' segment is really bad for this. Even with the expanded inventory (8 slots vs 6, also flashlight and screenshot eye don't take up slots), there's still an unholy amount of backtracking. There is, as it turns out, reasons to not be entirely faithful.

Not helping matters is that the enemy design, both visually and functionally, is really barebones? It's somehow worse at this than Resident Evil 1. Not the remake, the PS1 title. There are enemies that run at you. After that, there are enemies that run at you. After that, there are enemies that run at you. After that, there are big enemies that shoot at you and are only vulnerable for brief moments. After that, there are enemies that do nothing but fuck up the screen. After that, there's a boss that runs at you... You get the idea.

Towards the latter half of the game, the developers very obviously give up and just resort to throwing swarms at you. Here's four enemies that rush you, one shoots you, and there's also another hiding in the shadows. Have fun!

Normally, I'd just run past them, but I was informed early that the # of enemies killed affects the ending - for the better.

But none of this is why I quit, no. I have played worse survival horror games with worse inventories. I actually like Alone in the Dark 2008, after all.

No, I quit because this game's relationship to its influences is at best obnoxious and at worst, childish.

In the past I was told that this game was 'inspired' by numerous things: Lovecraft, the King in Yellow, Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Evangelion, and so on. I took 'inspired by' to mean that it pulled from a diverse pool of influences, boiled them in a pot, and created something new.

And there is some original stuff in this game, buried under a thick crust of the just... endless, poorly executed shoutouts to better media. I will give this game one thing: It's a very interesting best-of compilation of media I'd rather be playing, watching or reading.

The core of Signalis is about a Replika (artificial human) named Elster looking for her Gestalt (real human) lover in a mining facility where, to put it gently, shit's fucked. If you're at all familiar with Nier then this will probably start ringing alarm bells, not helped by the fact that the premise of "emotionally unexpressive butch lesbian cares a lot about a waifish white haired girl" is the plot of Nier Replicant. Set amidst a backdrop of what is ostensibly analogous to life in late East Germany under decaying Soviet rule, Signalis uses a non-linear narrative and heavy ambiguity to tell a story with very few solid facts and numerous events which may or may not have happened.

And this is good, I like it. The love story on display here made my heart swell, as did Elster's steely determination to reach her lover and fulfill her promise - which is even reflected in the examine text, dude. It's phenomenal.

The problem is that it's a small minority of what's on screen. Besides the lackluster gameplay, Signalis primarily spends its time making references. References to other games, references to films the creator liked, references to eldritch literature, references to scientific concepts, etc etc. These references are obvious. Painfully, obnoxiously, immersion breakingly obvious. If you thought Nier Automata paying lip service to philosophers was inelegant, this game's intro makes it seem tactful.

At the end of the prologue, when the game truly 'starts', you find a copy of The King in Yellow lying around. Upon inspecting it, the game immediately throws its first mindfuck sequence at you while flashing quotes from Lovecraft's The Festival on screen with all the grace of a Skibidi Toilet skit. After it mercifully ends, you're deposited in a completely different area in a way which defies... everything, really.

I'll be honest and say that this scene kind of immediately soured me on the game's narrative. Perhaps it's because I'm really really sensitive to tropes common in ~mindfuck fiction~ or Lovecraft-derived tales, but it made a few facets of the narrative incredibly obvious. That the first hour has notes describing radiation sickness without naming it, NPCs finding Elster familiar, notes describing an unfamiliar woman around base (Elster) and other things really does not help.
It all comes to a head early on when you learn what "Bioresonance" is: The ability to project one's thoughts and feelings into someone else's mind, perhaps fatally. I think the game blew its load a bit too early with both of these, because it becomes immediately apparent that a lot of what's happening is either entirely imagined or not in tune with reality, and that time is looping.

I want to shout out one of my good friends here, because I wrote up what I thought this story was about and they had the grace to not tell me I was right. And I was, before even entering the worker's quarters, right about everything - except Alina, because I fell for that. Everything after is really just hammering it in, using imagery and references so hamfisted that they're legally considered actual pigs.

For example, it was obvious to me early on that there was a timeloop occurring. Sure enough, the worker's quarters opens with you falling into a massive pile of your own dead body. A generous player might think "Ah, maybe the Sierpinksi staff killed all their Elster units", but there are at least two notes (that I found) which shoot that down outright.

But to loop back to the topic of hamfisted references for a second, I really need to talk about the Nowhere segment. It's very obviously ripped from Silent Hill and not in a way I'd consider graceful or even respectful. The line between homage and plagiarism is monofilament thin but this game manages to stand on it.
'Nowhere' in the first Silent Hill is the final level, and the deepest part of the game's ongoing nightmare. It is covered in rust, flesh and other distinctly /red/ materials. As you navigate it, it becomes clear that Nowhere is reflecting reality to the point where several areas from the town are smashed together in a non-linear, impossible fashion.
'Nowhere' in Signalis is not the final level, but it is the final level of the first half. It is ostensibly the deepest part of Ariane's nightmare, covered in- Look I don't need to keep the bit going. You know what I'm whining about.

Once it's over, you experience what I can only describe as a slideshow of cheap Lovecraft references before the game reaffirms that yes, there is a time loop occurring. Hope you memorized the wall safe code.

To it's credit though, between the Act 1 (as I call it) and Act 2 transitions, there is Signalis' actual story here. And... I liked it. I wonder if people only ever discuss Elster/Ariane (and Falke) because it's the only part of this game which isn't reliant on some other piece of media. As I said up above, the love story is adorable. It is extremely heartening to just see two women be in love in a society which is tailormade to abolish love (and is also rife with allegories for being homophobic). But alas, this is a short segment.

I'm going to be deeply unkind for a moment: I am amazed that this game gets so much praise for its "smart" storytelling when it's so childish in its execution that it often feels like Tommy Wiseau wrote an adaptation of The Mask from The King in Yellow. The overly referential nature of the game isn't even in service to its own story and setting - which are great! - but simply in service to the references themselves. The store page references David Lynch, which is fitting because at times this game feels like Inland Empire if every other scene transition was a clip from a different movie.

Ultimately, it's this excessive abuse of references to horror media that did me in.

Let's talk about the worst scene in the game.

In the first Silent Hill, you meet a helpful girl named Lisa who hovers around and is generally the only friendly face you meet while you explore the game. She repeatedly tells you she doesn't have any memory of anything. After a pretty harrowing trek through Nowhere, you meet Lisa again. It turns out that she got her memories back, and that she's actually been dead the entire time. The Lisa you met is a construct of Silent Hill, and upon realizing that she isn't alive she turns red and basically dissolves - becoming a mook. She comes back near the end, and it turns out she had an antagonistic relationship with the big bad who she then murders.

In Signalis, you meet a helpful girl named Isa who hovers around and is generally the only friendly face you meet while you explore the game. She repeatedly tells you that she doesn't have many memories, and that like Elster she's looking for someone. She has an antagonistic relationship with the 'big bad' and eventually kills him, or tries to.
After a pretty harrowing trek through Nowhere - the deepest part of Signalis' nightmare which represents the gradual breakdown of Ariane's memories and her fear of a radiation induced death - you meet Isa again on Rotfront. Here, she finds out that her sister's been dead the entire time and promptly turns to rust. A short walk reveals Isa was dead the entire time to boot.

Rotfront in itself is painfully and obviously Lovecraft. It is 'the weird hidden village' trope played painfully straight. I don't like Bloodborne's DLC that much because it takes a lot of the implicit Lovecraftian elements and makes them agonizingly explicit with the Fishing Village. Rotfront runs into many of the same pitfalls, complete with a relatively insincere attempt at being a screwdriver for the plot.

I wouldn't know how it goes, though. The Isa scene was the last straw. I just did not want to give this game any more of my time- Or well, I did. But there's precious little Signalis here, and an exhausting amount of other works I'm already overfamiliar with.

At least I get why so many girls I know had Falke icons.

The starry sky now belongs to you.

At the time of writing this I am just about finished with the questions arc of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Hou. This game is probably going to wind up getting a gigantic write-up once I finish it - it should be towards the end of this month! - but I digress.

It's weird to think that Planetarian: The Reverie of a Little Planet is the first visual novel that I have completed, but that's mainly just due to how short of a vn it is. I believe this sort of plays into how efficient of a story it is, though.

The three things that really stuck out to me the most in Planetarian is Key's efficiency, world building, and themes. The writing here manages to pack a massive punch despite it being around a 4-5 hour visual novel. The world building here is quite impactful too, and I again want to emphasize how fucking impressive that is for how short of a game it is!!!!

I think thematically this game really stood out to me, in a way that maybe was not the overall point of the work but I don't really like to think in those terms; I view it as rather binary, and fiction - art in general, really - should not be approached like that. Even so, I am not going to focus on what one might consider the "overall point" of the game because I would much rather talk about what stuck out to me, personally.

In the current world of constantly developing artificial intelligence and a general fear of something out of our control destroying civilization, there's a gentle reminder in Planetarian that technology can be good! Maybe these things that the tech industry is constantly working on building will not destroy society after all, despite the same ones working on further development are the ones pushing that narrative. This visual novel pushes egalitarianism quite subtly at times, sometimes not so subtly, but in a very effective way.

Maybe it's not the scary robots that destroy us - maybe that mass-extermination is entirely internal. Just like it was, here.

I don’t like crying, but I imagine that's something everyone’s not huge on. In the worst cases, the feeling of moisture welling up behind your eyes isn’t one that goes away even if you wipe the tears off your face. It’s uncomfortable, maybe even scary, surrendering yourself to your emotions as the world presents beauty and fragility to you in equal measure; all you can do is let the tears run down. Sometimes you even get this special kind of crying where you just… stop. It's the kind of crying that sees you curled up on a sofa, bed, or even the floor, and you lay there clutching yourself tightly until the icy claws of vulnerability unhand you, sprawling you out to stare at the ceiling as your thoughts begin to seep into that space behind your eyes. I think everyone goes through a few cathartic, really liberating sessions of this honest-to-god weeping in their lives. I know I have.

I didn’t begin to conceptualize crying in this way until I finished Marvel’s Spider-Man on the PS4 when it released. It’s special in that it was the first video game I’d played that I had cried over, but it’s not the first time I had cried over Spider-Man in other media. I’ve pretty much cried over every single Spider-Man movie released before that game. It used to be one of my favorite games for a long time until I drastically broadened my gaming horizons this year thanks to the help of two invaluable friends of mine (I cannot thank you two enough, Cheryl and Jamie). Since then, you can say I've grown apart from SMPS4 as a game, but I still hold its story in high regard (minus all the bits that read as pretty undeniably pro-cop).

I've been a Spider-Man fan for most of my life, and SMPS4 was the first time I played a Spider-Man game where I really felt like Spider-Man, owing to the smoothness of web-slinging, combat that showcases the balance between acrobatics and raw power of the character, and a story that cuts straight to the core of the character.

The archetype of Spider-Man is twofold; Power and Responsibility. The taglines for the two Spider-verse movies sum it up eloquently: 'Anyone can wear the mask' & 'It's how you wear the mask that matters'. Everyone has the power to change the world, but simply having that capacity isn't enough to be a hero; To be a hero means making sacrifices, choosing to help others instead of helping yourself. It's the lesson Peter learns on the night Ben Parker dies. It's the lesson that is reaffirmed when he has to choose between saving May Parker from Devil's Breath or curing New York. It's honestly beautiful.

This ending is what brought me to tears so long ago; it displays such a competence, understanding and respect for this special character that has undoubtedly saved my life.

That competence and understanding is not to be found in this game at all.

What Marvel's Spider-Man 2 does manage to get right and improve over the first game is the gameplay. For most of the first half of SM2, I often found myself thinking back to a tweet I saw from Marcus of the Cosmonaut Variety Hour Youtube Channel, a man who everyone should really stop listening to regarding takes on Spider-Man media (and any takes in general, honestly), saying the new gadgets in this game are way too techy compared to the first and don't 'feel like Spider-Man'. Fuck that, honestly. Your gadgets in the first game include a web trap, a web bomb, electric webs, a goddamn anti-gravity bomb, a concussive blast (fine, whatever), and... literal fucking drones? The most tech-y crap the Spider-Men have in this game is a modified version of the anti-gravity BS the first game had. Not to mention, this game has a lot less gadgets than the first game bringing the total number to 4, and they're utilized very differently because of it. By the end of SM1, the game becomes a gadget spam-fest to keep enemies stunlocked since you just have so many ways to keep crowds off you while you generate enough focus bars to Finisher anyone that didn't get pasted onto a wall or off the side of the building you're on. None of that shit feels 'like Spider-Man' to me.

SM2 greatly reduces the amount of gadgets you have and makes regenerating them a notably slower process, meaning if you try to play this game like the first one, you will have no gadgets and get swarmed before you're probably mollywhopped into the release date for Wolverine. It means you're in fights punching and kicking a lot more than you were in the first game, allowing you to relish in the kind of awkward timing for the new parry mechanic and otherwise web up foes and slingshot them into some poor fuck's Honda Civic three blocks over. You know, like Spider-Man would.

I don't know how broken the Surge Meter abilities are in this game since I kind of forgot to use them the entire game up until today when I finished all the Symbiote nests and the last 3 or so story missions, but at this point of the game I was regenerating Surge like crazy with either character and had near on-demand access to a ridiculous damage boost & cooldown regen with Peter or all the Finisher attacks I could dream of with Miles. Every fight that wasn't the final boss against Venom was extremely unengaging as a result. And I was playing on the hardest difficulty the entire playthrough! The combat should not be putting me to sleep when I'm playing on what should be the most demanding experience the game has available! Especially at the climax of the entire goddamn story! But, as I said, I don't know if the Surge mechanic worked like this the whole game or just during the last few missions, so this isn't a negative I weigh heavily.

Speaking of the story, this is a good a time as any to switch to that topic since I've pretty much said all my praise for the game already. To borrow the phrase from my sister, the story of this game is 'some horse'. Which is, to say, it's ass. It is dookie dog shit. To be clear, I do not like the story in this game. At all. A Carnage DLC would likely only strengthen that opinion. Since this review is likely going to be the new longest thing I've written on this site (shameless plug, deal with it), I'll try to spare you all the excruciating details on how various parts of this game's story stack up with their comic book counterparts and condense as hard as I can, but first I need to talk about Richard Donner and verisimilitude.

For the unaware, Richard Donner was an American filmmaker and film producer responsible for directing a handful of episodes of TV westerns and also a little-known 1978 film you maybe haven't ever heard of known as Superman. He's the man responsible for defining the shape of the superhero blockbuster, to the point that Kevin Feige (once an employee of Donner's), the man responsible for running the MCU into the ground, is quoted with saying he has watched the film every time before he piles more MCU slop into the trough. Perhaps one of Donner's most famous quotes is his mantra for how a film can achieve 'verisimilitude':

"Be truthful. Honor the source material. Believe it, and take it seriously."

Donner believed in the power of comics as a medium to tell enriching, moving stories at a time when they weren't taken seriously. He knew that if he presented fans with a vision that reflected that belief, one that showed the source material as what it was rather than what Hollywood wanted it to be, then he could make a great adaptation, and he absolutely did.

To me, almost every aspect of this game's story shows a complete disregard for the various eras of the source material it pulls from.

Insomniac's take on Venom sucks. The back of the box of the physical version states you can battle various Spider-Man foes in this game like Kraven, Sandman, and also 'an original take on Venom'. This Venom is not an original take. The version of Venom here is Venom in name alone. He's a mishmash of powers and iconography from modern implementations of the character coupled with an origin story that doesn't commit to making him akin to an arch-rival for Peter, and Harry Osborn is thrown into the mix for some fucking reason as if this poor boy hasn't suffered enough. His fire weakness is explicitly written out in a really ugly move unlike a movie like Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 where the whole fire weakness is subtly sidestepped because it never becomes important to the film, and using Harry as the host for Venom rather than Eddie Brock means the game is never able to sell the idea that Harry/Venom despise Peter for what they perceive as his slights against them, which is still something the game tries to go for, though like everything else that happens after Peter gets the symbiote, is incredibly rushed. Venom's motivations are thus swapped from wanting to make Peter's life hell to something more akin to Carnage or Knull's motivations to simply spread and take over as many hosts as possible. Harry thinks he wants this because it's how he can 'heal the world', but why does Venom want this? Your guess is as good as mine.

Speaking of Harry, lets talk about the Osborns. In the comics, the main sticking point between Harry and Norman is that Harry never feels good enough for Norman's expectations thanks to Norman's general coldness and how much better he treats Peter. Harry thus ends up resentful of Peter and has a very complicated relationship with his father, which this game just does not convey at all because, well, everything Norman has done in the previous game and this one has been for Harry's sake. He absolutely loves the shit out of his son (& there is sparse evidence to point to the fact that he sucks letting Harry know that) to the point he is willing to endanger everyone around him if it means keeping Harry safe. There's one scene where Norman hugs Peter, says he thinks of him like a son and thanks him for being Harry's friend, and Harry overhears all this from the doorway and there's all the classic sinister undertones you'd expect reflected on Harry, but also, like,

Where the fuck was any of this before? Are we seriously trying to set up the whole Osborn family dynamic here? Now? Halfway through the game? There was a whole flashback scene to Peter and Harry in high school in the first two hours of the game that could have had some dialogue to establish this earlier, but instead what we get feels like Insomniac waiting to the last possible moment to set up what should be the emotional crux to show the audience how Harry will merge with Venom.

Perhaps I should have fit this somewhere when I was still talking about Venom, but this game uses so many symbiotes when it is already full to bursting with minor villains in the first half that results in a thoroughly bloated package throughout. Carnage is obviously being set up for a DLC, Scream shows up with MJ as a host briefly, and Peter gets Anti-Venom at the end in a kinda similar way to how it happened in the comics when the character was first introduced. Most of these (Scream especially, good lord) end up coming across as cheap eye-candy, key-jingly moments for spectacle to make the player point at the screen like the Leonardo DiCaprio meme every time the game throws another character from the comics they weren't expecting to be in this game at them to the point it feels like whoever was writing this game just really fucking wanted to clock out early and go home to play with their action figures.

I need to pivot to Miles real quick to expand on this 'playing with action figures' analogy and how so much of the writing is sacrificed in favor of the key-jinglefest the writers want to have. The first half of the game frames Miles' arc around him having to learn how to define himself outside of being Spider-Man to write a college admission essay. He's constantly shown struggling to get any words typed, often abandoning the task to answer the call of duty. The game spends a lot of time setting this whole essay issue up similar to Miles' essay assignment in Into The Spider-Verse, but whereas that film's essay is basically not important at all after it is assigned to Miles, the film references it again during the end in a very smooth way to show that the whole film was always centered around answering that essay ('Not about physics, but about you. What kind of person you want to be.') It ties into his arc in that film very naturally. Here, Miles basically has his entire character arc put on hold because he has to help Peter not turn into evil space gremlin. The essay isn't even mentioned again until a post credit scene where Miles talks the whole thing down to Hailey before they kiss and are interrupted because it turns out Miles' mom's new boyfriend is Cindy Moon's (AKA Silk's) dad. Holy cannoli! Wowee! Look mom, it's the comic book character who canonically makes herself and Peter so uncontrollably horny that whenever they're alone they just pop a perc and get straight to fuckin'! Holy smokes, they're going to introduce her in the next game! Or maybe a DLC! Maybe she'll get her own spin-off game like Miles did!!!!! Who gives a shit about Miles' character now that the writers bought themselves a new action figure to play with! Peak! PEEEAK!!!

This game really digs into some of the more annoying 'Triple A Video Game' writing trends during the boss fights, where the characters will just incessantly talk back and forth to each other while they fight. Not short, canned quips about how much of the other person's ass they're kicking, but with the really kind of important shit you wish had been resolved at a point when you're trying to focus on not getting gobsmacked by an undodgeable attack or a blue-threat attack that feels like it never gives you enough warning to dodge correctly. Scream is especially horrible about this, with the game taking the opportunity to basically give Peter and MJ an impromptu couples' counseling session as Scream/MJ talks about how much Peter has fucked up recently while he tries to build up the Focus to work through his girlfriend's four fucking health bars. It's worth noting Venom also has four health bars, but at least you swap between Peter and Miles throughout that fight and thus what all three of them yap about is a lot more dynamic, with Harry accusing Peter of abandoning their dream for Miles and berating Miles for wasting so much of Peter's time.

This takes me back to Donner's verisimilitude and the game's general sense of bloat. It's clear that the story here was much more ambitious than the first game, but I think Insomniac bit off way more than they could ever hope to chew. A lot of what should be important character dialogue is instead pushed into 'emotional high' boss fights that for the most part play the same hand simply because there isn't anywhere else to put the dialogue without making the story much longer and more expensive to implement.

This game is only 'true' to the source in that it is simply not false. There is no 'honor' in throwing cameo after cameo at you when these appearances end up basically divorced from their original context. There is no 'belief' shown to the source material in chopping off the back half of a story like Kraven's Last Hunt and replacing it with what would optimistically be a really middling episode of What If?..., and there is absolutely nothing 'taken seriously' in a story that ends Miles' arc with the same disinterested bravado as the 'Please Wrap It Up' prompt from The Game Awards before throwing another pointless cameo at you.

I hate this story so much. It's old hat for Spider-Man fans to be fiercely opinionated when it comes to 'debating' the topic of which movies or which Spider-Men are the best, but genuinely, I cannot see a case for this being anyone's favorite Spider-Man universe. Believe me, I want to understand it. I think about the shitstorm that fans of this game brewed up when it won nothing at The Game Awards and desperately wish that these people actually had a point, that the dog humping Hideo Kojima's leg that is Geoff Keighley really did have it out for us Spider-Man fans, but unironically I think this game deserved to win nothing. The combat is fine, the traversal works, but the story shit the crib so hard you'd think the pillows were unpainted.

As I experienced Harry succumb to the frailty of his own body before allowing Peter the chance to try and save his life, I wanted to be crying. Here was a man being brought back from the brink of despair, willing to try and fix his mistakes even if it meant forfeiting his life, surrounded by people who loved and cared for him, even if in his darkest moments he had pushed them all away. This is the 'balance' Aunt May talked about at the start of the game. To recognize your burdens alongside the burdens of others and carry that weight together. It's honestly beautiful.

But I didn't cry this time.