hard to describe what i like about this game. business sim is an established genre but i've never played one that feels so granular and realistic while also being very broad-strokes. there's something about desperately stuffing your shitty used car with frozen burgers so you can personally haul them across town to keep your small business open for the night shift, and you've got eight other things you should be doing instead of that, and you take a left turn too fast and go flying into a telephone pole, and now you need to go into even more debt to fix your car, which you've been sleeping in for two weeks. it is in very early access right now and controls in particular are very bad, but once this adds more depth/complexity and creeps closer to a full release, it'll be insanely good.

a really perfect execution of the investigation game as a genre. complex multifaceted crimes with zero procedural fluff to get in the way of Tactical Investigation Action.

A common problem with other mystery games is the linear narrative structure, where your protagonist needs to work through every clue in the precise order determined by the writers, regardless of how far ahead the actual player has been able to reason. It's a convention borrowed from how these stories are told in other genres, but I've never seen a mystery game take advantage of its medium as well as this one does. it's impossible to get ahead of the story here, because the format ensures that you're able to take advantage of every realization in real time.

i'd play a hundred more games in the same/similar format. really special game.

i probably played this game for close to 500 hours when i was ~11 years old. probably my first singular obsession as a game. this was, for me, what minecraft would be for the next generation.

it's pretty bad.

i don't know that there's another game that shot for the same level of ambition as this, trying to do a simulation of a species starting at cellular life and going up through star trek times. the way they achieved that lofty goal was by basically not having it be a simulation whatsoever. spore is six glorified minigames loosely stitched together with almost no connective tissue between them.

the hook, for both the devs and the player base i imagine, was the Creature Creator, which lets you mold automata from flesh and bone. As a standalone tool, it's the best part of the game, with really rigorous rigging and animation tech to keep things feeling dynamic and responsive to your designs.

unfortunately, this creator is only ever relevant to the creature stage, where creature parts must be individually unlock at complete random on every individual playthrough. While the standalone creator allows for a variety of designs, the actual core gameplay experience demands building a strange lumpy beast composed of optimized parts with no aesthetic.

after the creature stage, the creator downgrades from being "partially relevant" to "completely irrelevant", as every other part of the game will play entirely identically regardless of your creature's physiology. the remainder of spore is a paper-thin tribe-based rts, a paper-thin city-based rts, culminating in a glacially paced space exploration game that locks technology upgrades behind an achievement system that demands an insane amount of repetitive busywork to unlock anything, all in service of cruising around the stars meeting visually-different functionally-identical spacefaring empires, only differing in flavor text and opinion bonuses.

it fails entirely in functioning as a cohesive game, but unfortunately it's infected my childhood brain so thoroughly that deep down, i'm still waiting for someone to take a fresh shot at the same concept. there's individual games that scratch the itch of every individual stage, but nothing else that tries to rope them all together into the same kind of cohesive mega-game, but one where all the moving parts actually meaningfully connect and affect each other.

i am a die-hard fan of the original F.E.A.R and absolute hater for 2 and 3, so this game was largely made for me to be picky about. that being said: very fun! a little short but plenty of side-content to get you your money's worth.

atmospheric component is fantastic. a good chunk of the game looked exactly like what I'd want a F.E.A.R remaster to look like, like it was literally just Armacham HQ, 2023 version. the story is almost nonexistent here, cool but paper thin, which is fine: F.E.A.R's overarching story is pure action-scifi-horror cheese that really doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

both titles achieve the same core thing that i love: being a fucked-out emotionless supersoldier blasting through hundreds of mercenaries in slow-motion through an assortment of abandoned office complexes and industrial spaces.