Getting Over It gave me a space to think and some time to grapple with my relationship with games. its aversion to any kind of in-game cohesion and its narrative that's based on the relationship between the developer and player makes things incredibly personal really quickly. it's hard to imagine someone getting to the end of the mountain without feeling anything at all. i learned to find amusement in the ironic comments Bennett Foddy made about my failures instead of letting them get to me, and accepted every bit of reserved praise and surprise he gave when i got over difficult sections.

it's a healthy way to approach most games that include heavy amounts of friction! may they be intentional or not. after taking a set number of big falls, Bennett stops with the failure quotes. i spent a good couple of hours playing without as much as hearing his narrative voice. that was a big motivator for me; gone. now i got even more time to chew the words and make my own through play. i got stuck in that big stone-filled climb up the table with the orange for most of my playtime. that's one of the biggest progress-killing sections of the game - an awful place to get stuck. but through my obsession with the beautiful mouse-centric control scheme, i eventually got extremely good at redoing sections and halting potential big falls. at one point, the game gave me the ultimate taunt: the "bad ending" you get by getting your hammer stuck in the transmission tower's pole right at the end. i became entranced. i mustered the will to wriggle myself out of it through some incredibly tense and bitter minutes. it was the final and most mean challenge it could give me, but i found appreciation in between the pain. the act of mastery was actually becoming a motivator.

that's not how i usually work at all. it's a new way of looking at a game that made me reflect upon what i actually value when i take time to play something.

i love getting screwed over; emotionally or otherwise. i get screwed over in visual novels, adventure games with obtuse puzzles, 3d action games, 1st person exploration games, anything, really. knowing exactly what'll come next is daunting for me in any medium. it just feels bad. that doesn't include getting through something i've already seen, but rather when i can predict something based on habit, like knowing the full structure that most Mario games follow. Getting Over It, even in failure, gives you new perspectives to look at its world and construction. it commits to experimentation and weird iterations - even if it's to the player's detriment. it forged a connection with me through my own will to give it a chance to show off.

i've been trying to open myself up for writing again. some time ago, i began losing confidence in the strength of what i had to say and in how useful it was for me to get my thoughts across. i felt as i had nothing to add to any conversation about any work, no matter the medium.

maybe i just gotta let the relationship between myself and a game speak; lend myself to the experience and make do with whatever i get in return.

//
i've been reading that "A Play of Bodies" book by Brendan Keogh, which made this realization way easier to come to while i was climbing Getting Over It's mountain. i really recommend it! it's insightful and offers a novel approach to thinking about the medium.

since this is kind of my return to writing about games, i apologize if this review sounds kinda nonsensical or disconnected. i'm gonna get back to this bit by bit!

Wexew Mexem uses fellow nonsense-titled game Exed Exes' strengths together with Zakichi's signature "stop shooting to score better" mechanic and fast pace to an impressive end. even though i wasn't that big a fan of Wexew's inspiration, the passion that Zakichi shows for Exed Exes in this game is infectious. it's gentler and cuter; still bold though. no traditional bombs here!

you can either manually pick up the points that enemies leave on the screen when you kill them or let go of the fire button to absorb them all at once. this makes a little bar go up! it gradually upgrades your shot strength and builds up to a "hi-point mode" where you're invulnerable and can turn enemies into fruits like in Exed Exes. you can use it at any time, but it downgrades your shot as the bar depletes. good luck if that happens right before a boss on the later levels... still, you can cut the mode short at any point so you don't make the same mistake as me (i did this several times).

it's such a lush system that it can probably make for some fun score run optimizations, though it's effective for survival runs as well since you still have to be wary to not screw yourself over by using it too much. it's really cool seeing Zakichi still making games that are initially fun homages that can't help but eventually transcend into their own unique beasts.

- got a 1cc pretty quickly :) it's not that tough, so it may work well for genre beginners.
- the soundtrack is awesome and unpredictable; my fav song was the credits theme

this seems like it's made specifically for the weirdos who liked the more sparse and offputting aspects of the original Quake. you get way more rockets than rifle rounds, and even though there are more than 50 enemy types, most of what you face are the main enemy archetypes from Quake. its main strength is mixing this very american design philosophy with a particularly culturally specific representation of 80s czechoslovakia (mainly in the architecture), which makes for a strange mix.

those old "slavjank" titles are usually focused on verisimilitude - even if it's oddly represented by the mechanics or structure - while the Quake formula begs for maximum abstraction. Hrot tries playing both sides, but ends up being its own perplexing middle ground. at least it's an interesting conflict to see being wrestled with throughout the 3 episodes, which become gradually more lost until the last few levels from the 3rd episode transform into small, sepia dollhouse arenas.

what a goddamn mess. i wonder what led to this game having like 10 different directions, all eventually coalescing into one extremely entertaining, frustrating, and insane whole. there are like 5 different plots happening at once, and none of them get that much time for themselves.

- it feels like you're seeing the logical end to events in the lives of the cast; an end represented by slightly underwhelming action setpieces that are executed with mild disinterest (apart from the literal bloodbaths) coming from the game.

- it's like you're experiencing a deranged outsourced sequel to a blockbuster drama that really wants to make some callbacks to show good faith to the audience.

- it's impossible to find anything other than pure sincerity here.

- it's honestly beautiful.

no amount of great encounter design can make up for The Last of Us's ugly form. "trust no one", "bond with caution": it has every cliché associated with its genre but the twist is that everyone dies, sucks, or both! you can predict literally every single part of the experience if you simply assume the worst in every character. if it wasn't such a cookie-cutter game it could have probably explored some interesting angles.... but no! get along with your basic ass found family while the game sets up the next arc written entirely around a boringly artificial sad twist.

this game's guitar hurts my fingers. alternating between black and white chords constantly while only using 3 fingers is so cumbersome. also, the FMV backdrops kill most of my excitement for the songs; the fictional bands are generic as hell and weirdly... gendered? it's so funny how there are a bunch of "all girl band" and "all guy band" sets.

the beatmaps also suck!! like, why wouldn't they get a little crazy with them considering the tracklist? there are so many boring and repetitive sections (also partly fault of the weird setlist).