In one of its previews, Hideaki Itsuno was deliberately evasive when asked about why Dragon’s Dogma II’s title screen initially lacks the II, saying only “nothing in this game is unintentional.” You can draw whatever conclusion you like from that, but I think I’ve a different interpretation from most – it’s less a signal that this is a reimagining or a remake or whatever else in disguise than a display of confidence in how well he and his team understand what makes it tick.

As much as I’ll never wrap my head around how they got the first Dragon’s Dogma running on 7th gen hardware (albeit just about), I would’ve said it was impossible not to feel how much more II has going on under the hood in even the briefest, most hasty of encounters if it weren’t being so undersold in this respect. While my favourite addition is that enemies’ individual body parts can now be dragged or shoved to throw them off balance, tying into both this new world’s more angular design and how they can be stunned by banging their head off of its geometry, yours might be something else entirely with how many other new toys there are to play with. One particularly big one’s that you and your pawns can retain access to your standard movesets while clinging to larger enemies if you manage to mantle onto them from the appropriate angle, but you’ve gotta watch out for the newly implemented ragdoll physics while doing so, since the damage received from getting bucked off now varies wildly depending on your position at the time and the nearby environment as a result of them. Successive strikes create new avenues of offence akin to Nioh’s grapples, pressuring you to get as much damage in as you can before letting one loose and taking your target out of its disadvantage state, while also enabling you to keep them in a loop if you’re able to manipulate their stun values well enough. Layers of interaction just keep unravelling further as you play – controlling the arc you throw enemies or objects in, tackling smaller enemies by grabbing them mid-air, corpses or unconscious bodies of bosses now being tangible things you can stand on top of instead of ethereal loot pinatas… I would’ve taken any one of these in isolation. To have them all, plus more, every one being wholly complementary and faithful to the scrambly, dynamic, improvisational core of Dragon’s Dogma’s combat? It’s i n s a n e to me that someone can undergo even a confused few minutes of exposure to any of this and reduce it to “more of the first” or what have you.

Your means of approaching enemies or general scenarios which return from the first game’re further changed by II’s more specialised vocations. Having spent most of my time with Warrior in both titles, I love what’s been done with it in particular. They’ve taken the concept of timing certain skills and applied it to almost every move, anything from your standard swings to its final unlockable skill becoming faster and faster as you time successive inputs correctly – this is only the slow, basic version of the latter and I still feel bad for whatever I batter with it – with chargeable skills now also doubling as a parry for attacks they collide with, similar to DMC5’s clashing mechanic. It’s emblematic of the devs’ approach to vocations in general; Archer’s relatively lacking melee options and litany of flippy, full-on Legolas nonsense encourages keepaway where its four predecessors were all slightly differing flavours of “does everything”, Thief trades access to assault rifle-like bows and invites stubbiness for being able to navigate this world’s much rockier terrain like it’s a platformer, Fighter no longer has to waste skill slots to hit anything slightly above your head and has more versatile means of defence in exchange for melee combat being more punishing in general, etc. It’s to the extent that choosing between any two vocations feels like I’m switching genres, man. In a landscape where people are demonstrably content with having no means of interacting with big monsters other than smacking their ankles, how is even a pretty simple interaction like this not supposed to feel like a game from the future?

On simple interactions, much of this would be lessened if it weren’t for the loss gauge in tandem with the camping system and how these accentuate the sense of adventure which the first game built. The persistent thoughts of “how do I get there?” are retained, but only being able to fully recuperate your health via downtime with the lads and/or ladesses fills every step of the way toward the answer with that much more trepidation, bolstered further by the aforementioned verticality and on the more presentational side of things by how your pawns actually talk to each other now. It leads to some very memorable, emergent experiences which are personal purely to you – one I’m especially fond of involved resting after killing a drake, having my camp ambushed in the middle of the night by knackers who were too high up for me to exercise my k-word pass and having to trek all the way back to Bakbattahl with barely a third of my maximum health as my party continually chattered about how freaky the dark is. I take back the suggestion I made regarding potential changes to the healing system in my review of the first game, because even superfans (or, maybe, especially superfans) can, and do, think too small.

I realise in retrospect that even I, on some level, was wanting certain aspects of Dragon’s Dogma to be like other games instead of taking it on its own merits, something II’s seemingly suffered from all the more with how much gaming has grown since the original’s release, the average player’s tolerance for anything deviating from the norm and, presumably, frame of reference growing ever smaller. Look no further than broad reactions to dragonsplague and its effects (which I won’t spoil) being only the second or third most embarrassing instance of misinformed kneejerk hostility disguised as principled scepticism which enveloped this game’s release to the point you’d swear Todd Howard was attached to it – we want consequences that matter, but not like that! Even if you aren’t onboard with this being the coolest, ballsiest thing an RPG has bothered and will bother to do since before I was born, how can you not at least get a kick out of starting up your own homegrown Dragonsplague Removal Service? You thought you could escape the great spring cleaning, Thomyris, you silly billy? I’m oblivious like you wouldn’t believe, had her wearing an ornate sallet by the time she’d first contracted it and still noticed her glowing red eyes every time, so I’m at a loss as to how it could blindside anybody. It vaguely reminds me of modern reactions to various aspects of the original Fallout; a game which you can reasonably beat in the span of an afternoon, designed to be played with a single hand, somehow commonly seen as unintuitive because it just is, okay? Abandon all delusions of levelheadedness: if a Fallout game with a timer were to release now, the world’s collective sharting would result in something similar to that universe’s Great War or, indeed, Dragon’s Dogma II’s own post-game.

For as many hours as I’ve poured into the Everfall and Bitterblack across two copies of the original, they’re not what I think of when I think of Dragon’s Dogma (or particularly interesting, in the former’s case), which is adventuring in its open world. In that regard, I can’t be convinced that II’s post-game isn’t far more substantial, comparatively rife with monsters either unique or which you’re very unlikely to encounter prior to it, changes to the world’s layout beyond a hole in the ground of one city, its own mechanics (one actually a bit reminiscent of Fallout’s timer), questlines and even setpieces. It’s got a kaiju fight between a Ray Harryhausen love letter and a demonic worm thing which, as of the time of writing, roughly 2% of players have discovered, and instead of being praised for the sheer restraint it must’ve taken to keep something like that so out of the way, it’s chastised for it?

I’m not sure any other game’s ever made me realise how divorced what I want out of games seems to be from the wider populace. So much of this is 1:1 aligned with my tastes that the only thing that feels potentially missing’s the relative lack of electric guitars, but even then I’d be a liar if I told you that Misshapen Eye, the dullahan’s theme, the griffin’s new track, the post-game’s somber piano keys or the true ending’s credits song among others haven’t gotten stuck in my head at some stage anyway or didn’t perfectly complement the action through dynamically changing. It manages this despite clearly not caring about what you or I or anyone else thinks or wants from it. It’s developed a will and conviction all of its own. It’s Dragon’s Dogma, too.

Thought this would be a fun one to clear in a weekend, but it quickly spilled out into something I’ve had to chip away at over the course of the last month or so, each session revealing some new layer to the game. It may not seem like much at the outset, with SkyGunner’s base difficulty being pretty relaxed, other aerial targets flying lazily around the screen and death being a genuine rarity- taking enough damage only sends you into a “crashing” animation you’ll need to button-mash to pull out of. Combined with the breezy story and charming visuals, and it makes for a very inviting game if you just want to “see” it, (a nice contrast from the initial hostility of many arcade games) but if you’re really taken with it, going for score more than makes up for the initial ease of everything.

There’s a great balancing act in trying to build up your multiplier and keeping your combo timer alive, taking down enemy squadrons to build-up your resources and cashing out by destroying ground targets for their destructive and extremely lucrative “chaining” properties. At the same time you need to prevent your engine from overheating by overusing your abilities, so you have to use your special moves and fully-charged weapons judiciously or plan around the movement penalty incurred by maxing out your gauge, and doing all this while completing its quickfire succession of different objectives; It’d be easy to build up a decent score in a vacuum, but the real test is if you can do it under the pressure of a timer or while protecting an ally, making risky maneuvers to try and clear the skies as quickly as possible. The result is something where you always feel challenged to further optimize your play, where even something as basic as firing your standard machine guns can send you into the red, as it eats away your score- one more great consideration of many to add to your mental stack.

To be honest, chasing high scores is rarely the main appeal of a game for me, but it’s framed particularly well here: you may not care too much about it in the abstract, but SkyGunner frames this is as a competition between the main trio, the minimal threat of the objectives revealing itself to be a race to see who can get to the highest value targets first. Earn a “D” rank at the end of the game and it might not matter so much, but lose the lead in a simulated competition and that might be enough to spark some interest in the scoring system. And, as an added bonus, the extras are only unlocked after getting first place with each of the characters, another nice incentive to see how well the game flows together.

I mention it a lot, but the pacing here really is phenomenal: 5 stages that come in at around 45 minutes if you skip all the cutscenes. No scene here drags out too long or has a chance to outstay its welcome, and even an endgame stretch that initially felt a little dull can be dramatically shortened by helping your companions complete their own objectives for them (thanks for the tip Caim!)

I also want to mention its unique approach to difficulty: instead of a standard set of difficulty modes, it's instead divided up into different characters, who in addition to having planes with unique stats and moves, also end up tackling their own scenarios at specific points in the story. The second mission, for instance, can see you fighting off additional waves of standard enemies as Femme, the game’s easy mode, to destroying volleys of incoming missiles as Copain, the game’s hard mode. Outside of something like The Ninja Warriors: Once Again, I’m hard-pressed to think of a title where your choice of character can so dramatically recontextualize your understanding of the game, the combination of their remixed arsenals and deviations in their stories making for something where successfully finishing it once only leaves you with the realization of how much more there is to experience.

That said, there is one convergence point for all of the characters that I do think is kind of weak: all of them have to contend with the upset that is the final boss, Ciel and Femme the tasked with performing the surprisingly tricky maneuver of hitting it with three fully-charged missiles in a short window of time, a task that asks you to keep track of your ammo and heat meter in a way that no other section of the game outright mandates. On the other hand, Copain gets the much easier objective of simply landing one fully-charged bomb on him and then continuing the fight as normal. It's manageable with some practice, but it’s the one point in where the game feels really inelegant, throwing newer players into a set piece that demands a surprising amount from them, and a strangely flat way to close out the game, dramatically. It might also be the downside of having such a tightly-paced game, it’s one misstep given prominence in a way a longer game might never invite.

There are a few other hang-ups worth mentioning to: the lack of a first-person view has been discussed by the devs as a feature that was experimented with before being cut, but there a few targets where it’s easy to lock-on to some vestigial turret and a waste your shot due to the lack of a more precise aiming option (again, a small thing brought into more pronounced focus on the final boss). Can totally see the art style being a dealbreaker too; reminds me a lot of the self-reflection Jason Rubin had on the Jak games, caught between aesthetics in a way that might be intensely appealing to some, but seems like it’ll ward off just as many. Also easy to imagine another game using the multiple perspectives here to tell a more layered story- for the most part you’re getting different insights into what charming detour each of the characters went on, with only the unlockable character’s story offering some real intrigue.

It’s been hard to articulate why I’ve enjoyed this so much- know a trend in the past for me has been a sense of “completeness,” no ideas left unexplored and where the prospect of mastering the game feels limitless. That quality is probably the reason the lack of a sequel (well, a true sequel) is easier to live with, a sense that developer PixelArt truly understood their own game, successfully creating a title meant for newcomers and hardcore players alike. A rare and excellent thing.

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References

2001 Developer Interview for SkyGunner, https://shmuplations.com/skygunner/

Interview with Jason Rubin (Timestamped for the discussion on the aesthetics of Jak), https://youtu.be/0EkRT7qOMq0?si=qrzfYN9VGL1JEChr&t=2150

Can't think of a more definitive driving game. OutRun's romantic vistas and roadsmart gameplay get translated perfectly to 3D, with tasteful additions like the slipstream, drifting and a cute mission mode where you make your girlfriend happy while driving that are absolutely faithful to the original game's purity. You could argue this sequel is a much easier game than the first, but it's above all a much more cozy game to play. Now you don't have to worry about things like guessing depth perception or playing tug of war with every turn! It's smooth driving and decision making at its most distilled, making for a game that's easy to indulge and explore to your heart's content.

I may have a fear of driving or a massive disinterest in car culture on the whole, but I love OutRun 2.

I tend to not be into games specifically which bake into their outflowing charisma the aura of lovable idiosyncrasy; I can get behind movies with casts of oddballs and quirks, novels populated with surreality at home, comics askew with half remembered figments of characters, but games which can’t make a pure sentimental or quizzical experience of life as we see it caricatured, but also a mechanical coinciding parallel argument, more often than not ape the artificiality these idiosyncratic works try to point out in our everyday social mores. Because something like The 20th Century (2019) is largely spectacular, able to be interacted with as the farce of a dream that compounds into what he revere as history, it cuts through the rote activities that go into creating that spectacle not in contrast to our normalcies that it thumbs at, but because our social construct allows for intra-commentorial reinforcements of its own multiplicity (which is part of why true critique is so hard to maintain without becoming the obsequient second comer to the argument between status quo and mirrored parody). However, when games pronounce this mummery of displaced normalcy, artificialising the pretence of coordinated nature outcropped in our actions, it also must be coupled with the standardised explorative apparatus to function as that critique: dual sticks to transgress, A to interact, upgrades to signify achievements of the necessary progression. Due to this coupling of the obvious interaction model, because, except for the most radical of the avant-garde, there is also rote interaction along the borders of other art objects but in less conscious ways as holding a controller or managing inventories, the inclusive critique of normalcy (by which I mean anything other than a standardised reproduction of the conditions made up for requiring “normal life”) is more thoroughly adopted into the landscape of structural expression bent toward hegemony than is otherwise seen in things such as Dadaist poetry or free jazz.

That said, 24 Killers doesn’t fall into the Undertale ‘it is what it says it isn’t’ trap of these types of games, if only because it doesn’t set out as being so apart with as grand ambitions. It’s a modest game, if you don’t go for the truly bonkers total completion, that attempts to tell an unusual story of a parodic community, but it speaks less to the idea of community than it might if it were to flesh out more towards a true simulation. In most respects, it isn’t an anti-game or a subversive RPG or an adventure game about adventure games; it’s merely a little parable of why community is so regulated and normalised instead of how community is regulated and normalised: because people are pleasant and nice and it feels good to be pleasant and nice. It may be tedious to help a friend, but you do and then you have a coffee and sharpen their beak with a shell given to you by a gigantic fish that lives in a toxic sewer beside a living pile of shit.

What should one expect from a JavaScript game jam exercise less than half the size of a mid-'90s Doom WAD? That's the question Phoboslab and other js13k participants try to answer each year. Some contest entries successfully provide a full game, often a puzzler like Road Blocks or something more adventurous like Greeble. Minimal logic, procedurally generated assets, and ingenious reuse of game systems can go a long way in reducing your program's size. But there's also something to be said for demaking a larger, well-known title into something pushing the limits of this coding paradigm. That's something Q1K3 accomplishes with aplomb. It's not even the first throwback FPS to rank high in a js13k roster, but only this one's received a Super Special award just for its technical achievements.

Q1K3 offers two levels and a few of the original Quake's items, enemies, and weapons to play with. While the opening map largely recreates E1M1, from its dour tech-room intro to the spiral ramp descending towards a slipgate, the second map smashes together memorable parts from other shareware levels. Everything's rendered in the browser, a lo-fi yet convincing facsimile of the source material when viewed at a glance. Sure, the textures and models are way simpler, and the lighting model leans heavily into color banding, but I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking "yep, it's Quake" for a couple of seconds. Pulling this off in only around 13kb must not have been easy!

In fact, a seasoned Quake player can spot all the cuts and simplifications no doubt needed to cram the essence of such complex software into this demo. For example, players can't bunny hop, dive underwater, use Quad Damage and other power-ups, etc. What's here is as minimal as a Quake demake can get in a recognizably modern 3D framework. I'm reminded of the much older but still impressive .kkrieger, a multi-level, well featured FPS packed tight into 96 kilobytes. With less time and less breathing room, Phoboslab's 2021 creation manages to match that preeminent demo in most ways. Player agility and weapon feedback could understandably be a lot better, but damn does this play well for a 10-15 minute romp through a hazily remembered vision of gibbed soldiers and Nine Inch Nails.

There's still some nitpicks I can't ignore, though, mainly with regards to the concept itself. I really didn't need to go through yet another faithful take on E1M1, especially when the map following it diverges from that goal. Swapping out the more predictable bits of the opener for set-piece areas from E2M1 & E3M1 would have made this more compelling to me. Same goes for the weapon selection, which may or may not have simply been curtailed due to the size limit. Shotgun, nailgun, and grenade launcher ain't half bad an arsenal, but I'd have loved to try out the lightning gun too. AI complexity here obviously couldn't match Carmack's work back in the '90s, yet the enemy placement's lacking a bit in attacking you from all angles, or challenging players to move around for better line-of-sight. That extra bit of finesse would go a long way here if Phoboslab ever revisits the project.

If anything, I find it odd that we don't see more low-filesize demakes like this. Maybe the js13k event's involvement with crypto sponsors, including a whole Decentralized prize category in the last couple of years, has turned away interested developers. (Hell, I know I wouldn't mess with anyone giving oxygen to Web3 creeps.) I love the recent Bitsy scene and how it's democratized making games under the most minimal restrictions, but more projects like this pushing the limits of common programming languages are always neat. Of course, nothing but demakes would get boring, yet I think they're a great way to showcase how far this level of extremely efficient coding can push one's creativity. Q1K3's a very short but very fun delve into how low-level this high-level Web technology can reach—play it on lunch break or something, it's that breezy. I ought to give POOM a go now, too, or whichever mad scientist recreates Deus Ex on the Atari 2600.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup puts the Playing Game in Role-Playing Game.

It's the best game ever made. Ok, not really. But good luck finding another strategy game that offers the same level of tactical depth without any of the boring parts.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup simultaneously remains a capital T "Traditional Roguelike" and utterly breaks the mold of tradition by actually caring about the player. There is no grinding. There are no tedious, multi-step rituals to accomplish basic tasks in the name of fluff. It is pure tactics. Everything that is not tactics is taken out. If something is not tactics and they can't take it out, it is automated. It does not require a google search or wiki to play (and beat).

This game is a hundred thousand lovingly hand-written "fuck you" letters to another beloved game called NetHack. Every day they push another commit and write another letter.

One of those epochal clashes between dirty, abrasive, endearing eco-romance and cute, sinister Y2K-era techno-optimism turned satire of imperialism. These angles lock arms in a subtle but ever-looming creation story of what video games, as puzzle boxes and a storytelling medium, could become in the new millennium. Love-de-Lic finally mastered this kind of anti-RPG disguising a clever adventure, and L.O.L's occasional flaws rarely distract from the majesty and sheer emotional gamut this offers. Here's a Gaia of broken promises, uprooted existence, twisted social covenants, and how to survive and adapt in a harsh universe where we're the only love we give.

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Jan. 31 – Feb. 6, 2023

If Moon RPG was a thesis polemic and UFO a dissertation, then Lack of Love was Kenichi Nishii & co.'s post-doctorate trial by fire. The era of overly experimental, often commercially unviable projects like this on PlayStation, SEGA Saturn, and now Dreamcast was slowly in decline. Almost all the post-bubble era investment capital needed to support teams like them would filter increasingly into stable, more conservative groups and companies working on console games. In a sense, they saw themselves as a dying breed, the kind that gets stomped all over in this year-2000 cautionary tale. I'm just glad Ryuichi Sakamoto helped produce this and get it to market, especially given the system's poor performance in Japan. His music and environmentalist/anti-capitalist stance stick out at times throughout the story, but he's mainly taking a backseat and giving Love-de-Lic their last chance to create something this ambitious together. In all the years since, the studio's staff diaspora has led to countless other notable works, and parts of L.O.L. both hint at those while revealing what was lost.

We're far from Chibi-Robo or the Tingle spinoffs here, after all. Lack of Love shows unwavering confidence in the player's ability to roleplay as this evolving, invisibly sentient creature who experiences many worlds on one planet, both native and invasive. Every real or fake ecosystem we travel to, whether by accident or in search of respite, offers enough challenge, task variation, and indulgent audiovisuals to keep one going. I wish I could say that for more players, though. It might not reach the difficulty and obtuseness of much older graphic adventures from the Sierra and Infocom glory years, but I've seen enough people who like classic games bounce off this one to know it's a hard ask. You have no choice but to poke, prod, and solve each environment with verbs you'd normally never consider, such as simply sleeping in a spot for longer than feels comfortable or, well, interesting. It's more than beatable, but I won't begrudge anyone for watching this or relying on a walkthrough. LDL designed L.O.L to be dissected, not gulped down. Tellingly, though, the game starts and ends with a titanic beast possibly devouring you unless you act quickly, instinctively perhaps.

One moment that frustrated me, but also revealed the genius behind it all, was trying to race the bioluminescent flyers on level 5. By this point I've transformed a few times, having become a frilly flightless fellow with plenty of brawn and speed. Darting across this mixture of bizarre swamp, desert, and grassland terrain has led to what feels like a softlock, a set of plant walls I can only squeeze by if I use the right tool. Lack of Love succeeds in telegraphing points of interest for most puzzles, be it the obvious dirt starting line for the night races in this grove, or the cold and minimalistic off-world objects and structures seen later. What's never as obvious is how exactly to interact with other creatures for more complex tasks. Helping out by killing a larger bully or retrieving a parent's lost child is straightforward, but something as simple as just entering the race used a good hour of my time here. Oh sure, I could win the race all right…but it took way too long for the game to recognize and reward me, forcing another long wait from night to day and back again since there's only one lap a cycle.

I recognize that my impatience got in the way of just accepting this, one of life's many setbacks. So I simply waited all day and half a night to repeat the ritual until I got it right. A majority of L.O.L's dialogue with players and critics comes down to how it considers rituals, those habits justified & unjustified which define our daily lives. If anything, the interrogation of normalized behaviors, and the true intentions or lack of them hiding behind, define the studio's short career. As I gorged on helmet-headed stilt walkers and headbutted tree-nuts to slurp up their fruit, it dawned on me how well this game handles repetition. Many times did I get entranced into calling, roaring, and pissing all over each map to see if some cool event or interaction could happen where it'd make sense. Most of these levels are well-built for quickly crossing from one relevant hotspot to another. That desire to see it all through, no matter when I got humiliated or had to slog past something I'd solved but failed to do just right at just the right moment…it makes all of this worthwhile.

Progression throughout Lack of Love isn't usually this janky or unintuitive though. The game's main advancement system, the psychoballs you collect to activate evolution crystals, accounts for skipping the befriending process with some of your neighbors. It makes this a bit more replayable than usual for the genre, as you can leave solving the tougher riddles to a repeat run while continuing onward. I wish there wasn't anything as poorly built as this firefly race, or the somewhat tedious endgame marathon where your latest form can't run. But while that impedes the game's ambitions somewhat, it usually isn't a dealbreaker. LDL's crafted an impressive journey out of life's simplest moments, pleasures, and triumphs over adversity, from your humble start inside a hollow tree to the wastes of what the eponymous human resettling project has wrought. There's only a few "special" moves you can learn, from dashing to

In short, L.O.L. is a study of contrasts: the precious, vivacious yet forever dangerous wilds of this planet vs. the simpler, stable yet controlling allure of organized systems and societies. Nothing ever really works out in nature, not even for the apex predators like me. Yet everything has to work according to some plan or praxis in any form of civilization, something made possible through explicit communication. Love de Lic's challenge was to treat players with as much respect for their intelligence as possible before giving them something inscrutable—no straight line to triumph. This game had to feel alien, but still somehow understandable for its themes and messages to resonate. It's an unenviable goal for most developers. Just ask former LDL creators who have moved on to more manageable prospects. Obscurantism is a mixed blessing all throughout the experience, and I can't imagine this game any other way.

The opening level at least prepares you for the long, unwieldy pilgrimage to enlightenment through a few key ways. Popping out of the egg, swimming to shore, and the camera panning over a creature evolving via silver crystals gives a starting push. Then there's the initial "call for help", a newborn creature struggling to get up. Getting your first psychoball requires not aggression, but compassion for other ingenues like you. On the flipside, you end up having to kill a predator much larger and stronger than yourself, just to save harmless foragers. I definitely wish the game did a better job of avoiding this Manichean binary for more of the psychoball challenges, but it works well this early on. Maybe the initially weird, highly structured raise-the-mush-roof puzzle west of start was a hint of more involved sequences either planned or cut down a bit

Crucially, the following several stages demonstrate how Lack of Love's alien earth is far from some arcadian paradise. The game simply does not judge you for turning traitor and consuming the same species you just helped out; regaining their trust is usually just as easy. One look at the sun-cracked, footstep-ravaged wasteland outside your cradle portends further ordeals. LDL still wants you to succeed, however. The start menu offers not only maps + your current location for most levels, but a controls how-to and, most importantly, a bestiary screen. It's here where each character's name offers some hint, small or strong, pointing you towards the right mindset for solving their puzzle. Matching these key names with key locations works out immediately, as I figured out with the "shy-shore peeper" swimming around the level perimeter. Likewise, the next stage brought me to a labyrinth of fungi, spider mites, and two confused gnome-y guys who I could choose to reunite. Taking the world in at your own pace, then proceeding through an emotional understanding each environment—it's like learning how to breathe again.

L.O.L finds a sustainable cadence of shorter intro levels, quick interludes, and larger, multi-part affairs, often split up further by your evolution path. Giving three or five psychoballs to the crystal altars sends you on a path of no return, growing larger or more powerful and sometimes losing access to creatures you may or may not have aided. The music-box pupating and subsequent analog spinning to exit your shell always pits a grin on my face. Rather than just being punctuation for a numbers game (ex. Chao raising in Sonic Adventure, much as I love it), every evolution marks a new chapter in the game's broader story, where what you gain or lose with any form mirrors the existential and environmental challenges you've faced. As we transition from the insect world to small mammals and beyond, the heal-or-kill extremes ramp up, as do the level designs. I wouldn't call Love-de-Lic's game particularly mazy or intricate to navigate, but I learned to consult the map for puzzles or sleeping to activate the minimap radar so I could find prey. It'd be easy for this evolve-and-solve formula to get stale or ironically artificial, yet LDL avoids this for nearly the whole runtime!

Early hours of traipsing around a violent but truly honest little universe give way to a mysterious mid-game in which L.O.L. project puppet Halumi intervenes in the great chain of being. An impossibly clean, retro-futurist doll of a destroyer plops down TVs in two levels, each showing a countdown to…something big. Nothing good, that's for sure, and especially not for the unsuspecting locals you've been trying to live with. So far it's mostly just been a couple short tunes and Hirofumi Taniguchi's predictably fascinating sound design for a soundscape, but now the iconic tune "Artificial Paradise" starts droning in the background. Musical ambiance turns to music as a suite, a choreographed piece overriding the vocals and cries you know best. Then the terraformer bots come, and the game introduces another stylistic dalliance: the disaster movie removed from civilization. We've gone from colorful, inviting, mutualistic landscapes to invaded craggy rocksides, a very survival horror-ish insect hive where you play Amida with worker bugs, and a suspiciously utopian "final home" for our alien cat and others just like us.

The final levels satisfyingly wrap all these loose threads into a narrative on the ease with which precarious lives and ecology fall prey to not just the horrors of colonization, but the loss of that mystery needed to keep life worth living. Neither you nor the last creatures you help or save have time or dignity left as the L.O.L. project faces its own consequences, radiating across the world in turn. But I'm familiar with that shared dread and understanding of what it's all coming to, as someone living through destructive climate change my whole lifetime. How does one carry on in a land you remember functioning before it was poisoned? What can family, friends, mutual interests, etc. do against the tide of sheer, uncaring war or collapse?

There's a definite rage hiding behind Love-de-Lic's minimalist approach, only rising to the surface at the game's climax. You can taste the proverbial cookie baked with arsenic, a barbed attitude towards living through these times after growing up hoping and expecting a bright tomorrow. To make it out of this world alive takes a lot of seriousness, but also heart and a sense of humor, which Lack of Love never lets you forget. The ending sequence had me beyond relieved, overjoyed yet mournful about how no environmentalist hero's journey of this sort seems to work beyond the plane of fiction. Is it a lack of love consuming us, or the forced dispersion of it? L.O.L. justifiably refuses to give a clear answer, something even its developers are searching for. It's not the most sophisticated kind of optimistic nihilism anyone's imbued in a work, but a very fitting choice for this adventure.

Plot and thematic spoilers ahead

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Friendship, whether convenient or desirable on its own, becomes even more important during the second robot attack you suffer through. A mutual species has been living with your newfound family, and one of these more plant-/shroom-shaped fellows is still mourning their dead feline pal near the bottom of the map. Yet again, though, rituals and routines like the egg worship above supplant the ignored pain and due diligence owed in this community. Shoving the guy away from an incoming bulldozer, only to get squashed yourself, is the most you end up doing in this apocalypse. It only gets worse after awakening not in the natural world, but an eerie facsimile of it, built aboard the L.O.L. spaceship that we saw dive into the planet with a virus' silhouette. Even highly-evolved lifeforms, now able to talk in bursts and build a structured society, lose sight and make mistakes. But only humanity can play God for these fauna and flora, such that you're imprisoned in a hell superficially resembling home.

Gone are the toils of comprehending other species, or stumbling haphazardly through situations that should have killed you long ago. All that Halumi and the humans want from you, their obscure object of desire, is to pass basic push-and-pull block mazes. Imagine sitting down for your high school exams, having studied the world and its intricacies for so long, only for them to hand you an arcane IQ test. There's no assumption of ecological intelligence in the robot's data banks or AI model, just a delight in watching you wriggle through Backrooms Sokoban. Halumi merely chuckles as you clear each room, then lures you into an abstract abyss of phosphenes just to play tag. We then watch the banal. comically on-the-nose mission video recounting humanity's failure to manage their own planet and ecosystem, meaning they must export their hopes, dreams, waste, and destruction to another. Some reward for getting this far in a contrived, worthless series of "tests" they're apparently obligated to perform.

And you'll quickly notice your suffering isn't that unique, either. The quote-unquote habitat caging you is policed by Halumi's robots and, more bizarrely, flying baby androids dispensing this game's send-up of pet food. It's clearly nothing too healthy or appropriate for the menagerie of organic inhabitants imprisoned on this ark. They're literally shitting themselves everywhere they go after eating! And those who fail the tests get treated as literal waste, too. Falling into the scrap closet, with its once-pristine walls peeling and the remaining animals suffering without dignity, shows the depths that this whole "sustainable" planetary resettlement program has sunk to. Some might say the game gets much too unsubtle at this point, which I can agree with. But given the current state of poaching, zoos-as-businesses, habitat displacement, industrial ranching, and careless pet adoption in our own world, maybe these messages work best when they're blunt. Halumi forcing his units to not kill, study, and presumably burn you up after just for failing a test is perhaps the only sign of remorse this antiseptic dungeon offers.

Impressing Halumi with each test comes to a head when we're given a Hobson's choice: the hilariously, insultingly ugly baby-bot or the friend we had sacrificed our safety for back in the pridelands. Predictably, you get thrown in the trash again for making the better choice. Choosing the infant, and all that humanity represents through Halumi and their army, merely makes you a glorified pet for the robot, stuck in the same fancy hotel room as two other dubiously lucky critters (plus Dave Bowman on the bed, out of camera—IDK, this feels like a 2001 reference just as much as the game's intro). Did I mention we haven't evolved for quite a while now? Guess what you become next: an awkward, baleful mirror of the baby from earlier, unable to run and too oversized for these new comforts purportedly made with kids in mind.

No one's at home here, not even the robots if that's even a concept they're built to comprehend (which I doubt). We may be out of hell, but this purgatory isn't much better. After helping the alligator with the shower and the flowery bloke with table manners, the soft but melancholy downtempo lounge of Sakamoto's "Dream" rings out from the hi-fi stereo. Beyond being one of my new favorite melodic ambient songs in any soundtrack, it perfectly conveys how much these "successful" test animals have lost, something we're used to even as we resist the circumstances. It's their last respite, just as playing this game might, for some, be an escape from our own degrading world in which we're seemingly powerless to stop the bleeding.

To the master robot's credit, they aren't too keen on keeping us here at all costs. Halumi's got big plans to fulfill, as they're quick to shoo us off from the ship's bridge. A quick peek outside the rocket shows the beginnings of an American-style highway going nowhere good, and an abnormal dust storm blowing every which way. I tried looking at my map here and found, to both horror and amusement, that there is no map at this point in Lack of Love. The protagonist's been disconnected from the outside world for so long, and exposed to the hubris and demystification of these captors, that only what intuition's left can lead the way out of here. L.O.L gives you compelling, frustrating predicament: stay in the Artificial Paradise—the map of the realm consuming the realm itself, Borges' fabled copy corrupting and then replacing the original—or finish your pilgrimage, an impossible trek through a ruined, desiccated, hopeless bastardization of home?

LDL already knows I'm going to press onward. That’s what they taught me, this new citizen of the earth, right from the start! And of course it's painful, having nothing to feed on as I crawl desperately towards a far-off exit, saving a primate friend in the process. But hope re-emerges when reuniting with that friend from the village, waiting so long to see if we're okay. The story's optimistic views on mutualism within anarchy finally collide with all the forced order and folly of its antagonists. Few moments in video games feel as biting and final as this last set-piece, a forced run away from falling tectonic plates as the L.O.L project finally collapses under the weight of all its systemic damage to the planet. We also have one last metamorphosis, saving you from death by hunger and replacing the corrupted infant form with one resembling an early human, alternating between running on twos and fours. All the player's achievements, elation, and suffering have built up to this, whether there's survival or mere death waiting at the end.

In the end, L.O.L. opts for a happy ending it's done everything to suggest can't happen. The planet rejects the virus, despite having deteriorated so much it loses its magnetic field. All of Halumi and the robots' systems suffer systemic collapse, preventing much more fatal consequences had they continued sapping the global lifeforce. Most importantly, our "hero" and boon companion crest the mountain in time to witness god rays breaking through the storm that had slowed us and threatened doom. I put hero in quotes because, just as with Moon RPG a few years prior, Nishii can't let us leave this fantasy as models to be revered, icons of victory beyond reproach. Even our protagonist had to invade, predate, and take from others their tokens of trust and acceptance, all to reach this point. But in an imperfect reality, this hardly makes us the villain either. This remarkably smart, courageous, and wise duo prevailed against odds not to prove something or selfishly leave this world behind, but to support each other during an eschatological nightmare. Just as that lack of love nearly ruined this world, the overwhelming abundance of it is finally enough to get you and someone else through the end times. Even if it didn't work, would it not have been worth it?

Our story passes on into collective memory, but Halumi's is just beginning. They're an embarrassment to their creators' hopes and whims, the once innocuous but now disgraced mascot of colonialism. Moreover, bots like Halumi and the minions are simply expendable metal to forge anew. L.O.L. ain't gonna stop at just one failure on a single planet, not with humanity's future at stake. So they'll try their luck elsewhere, and probably destroy that wandering rock in the name of civilization. But not this world. This once dominant predator from the heavens is just another vulnerable denizen now, and that's what frees them. The giant who once wielded an army and crushed all biomes to bits now gingerly steers clear of the smallest critter it meets. Halumi's learned to love the world as it is, not from orders on high or as a sandbox to redevelop. And so the circle of life incorporates one more host, a guilty conscience on the way to carving a new, more empathetic destiny from what's left.

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End of spoilers

One has to wonder how delicately and effortlessly this game touches on something as complicated as anarchy vs. hierarchy. Both protagonist and antagonist ultimately seek a place in their world: a mercurial, fluid entity among the bio-sprawl, or a cybernetic King Canute damming the primordial ocean of life and commanding its tides. There's a clear throughline from Moon RPG's evil-hero-good-interloper dynamic to the equivalent in this game, but L.O.L. sees room for redemption. It avoids the easy pessimism this premise could thrive upon, albeit not by asserting humanity's exceptionalism in the face of catastrophe. Halumi's just one more anthropomorphic tool exploited by the powers that be to accomplish their foolhardy wars on worlds they think are beneath them. This weaponized cuteness only works until the illusion of respectability or shared gain has evaporated; now they're just a tin can ready to rust away on an abandoned Eden. It's time to stop fighting. It's time to survive.

Lack of Love leaves me wanting despite all that it's evoked from me. Another late-game stage expanding on the prairie village's growing pains, and the tensions between tribe mentality and complex new hierarchies, would have made me rate this even higher. The best bits sometimes get drowned over tetchy player controls, or poorly telegraphed puzzle designs in a few spots. And there aren't quite enough rewards for exploration like I'd hoped, with areas like the desert near the end feeling very barren of interaction or secrets off the expected path. But these all point to the constraints, low budget, and limited time Love-de-Lic had to realize a vision so ambitious that few are trying anything like it today. More privileged groups like mid-2000s Maxis struggled to realize their own comprehensive story of life growing from nothing and adapting to everything. And then there's fanciful but less compelling evolution legends such as EVO: The Search for Life and its PC-98 predecessor. Still I love those projects for their own ambitions, just as I've got nothing but love for L.O.L, warts and all.

Sadly the general public and most game fans either didn't know about it or had other priorities, leaving Love-de-Lic to disband and try their design approach elsewhere. How sad but fitting that any indelible interactive story this ahead of the times should find rejection until decades later. From what interviews and retrospectives we have, it seems as though Nishii, Sakamoto, and others understood this would be the company's end. There's no glory there, just a resignation to the harshness of the video games market and what it quickly excludes from view. All I want now is for you to try giving this a little love, too. Do for L.O.L. now what was improbable when it released into an uncaring media landscape all those years ago. For lack of a better answer to this indignity, I've ended up playing one of my new favorite games, and maybe you could too.

ᴀʟʟ ᴛʜᴇꜱᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅꜱ ᴀʀᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀꜱ ᴇxᴄᴇᴘᴛ ᴇᴜʀᴏᴘᴀ
ᴀᴛᴛᴇᴍᴘᴛ ɴᴏ ʟᴀɴᴅɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ
ᴜꜱᴇ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ᴛᴏɢᴇᴛʜᴇʀ
ᴜꜱᴇ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ɪɴ ᴘᴇᴀᴄᴇ -quote from 2010: The Year We Make Contact