Heisei Pistol Show is indicative of a lot of the zaniness and beautiful creativity that has come out of the RPG maker community. I had only heard about this game a few months ago with its unique premise and intriguing visuals looking to be up my alley. Having beaten it, practically, one sitting I say it delivered on a lot of its initial intrigue while also not quite matching some of the enthusiasm surrounding it.

You play as Heart, a lolita-dressed hitman who has been betrayed by his ex-lover. Now he is on a quest for vengeance that involves dealing with three fellow top assassins. This initial setup reminds me a lot of "Kill Bill" with a sort of similar structure but is mainly matched with the style and flair in which the story is presented. As you progress you slowly reveal, in typical RPG-maker fashion, that not everything is as it seems.

It surprised me that the game acts as a simple "puzzle" exploration game. I say "puzzle" but all of the obstacles in the game are simple logic and word puzzles including the few gunfights. In reality, the game is more focused on the player exploring the surreal levels the game consists of and how they eventually tie back into the main narrative. It was interesting seeing how a lot of these non-sensical stages eventually made some sense but some parts still felt a lot like the author slapped down some of the basic assets of the engine.

A lot of people seemed to be affected by the game's story which chronicles a lot about "what it means to be in love", "how love is defined" and "how do you maintain your happiness". These subjects were extremely meaningful to the author and to many who experienced it, but I can't say it had the same effect on me. For me, there were a lot of parts of the narrative that felt a little too comical to be taken super seriously with only the last few minutes of the game striking a chord for me emotionally.

Though the narrative did not affect me, I adored this game's style as previously mentioned. For starters, all of the character portraits have this 2000s Deviant Art style that, while maybe ugly to some, I find incredibly charming and wish more of the game looked like this. A lot of the cutscenes of the game also have this really fun energy to it that I have never seen in other games like this. Also, the soundtrack is one of the best I've heard in a while with each track perfectly used to match both the absurdity and emotional elements of the game.

This was not quite the sleeper classic that I was hoping it would be, but I still greatly enjoyed my time with it. Its absurdist style is worth playing alone, especially given its short length. Games like this make exploring the RPG Maker genre worth it.

P.S.: It saddens me to read that this developer passed away as, going off of this game, they had a beautifully creative soul.

drip and swag are all that matter in this world; assimilation is underway

the atmosphere here is so oppressively dense that it almost makes me forget i'm playing one of the worst feeling shooters to ever be released by a professional company. it's like if faceball 2000 somehow ran at an even lower framerate and was intended for people who'd never had nice days in their entire lives

but that fucking vibe is immaculate. the premise is hopelessly bleak without feeling tryhard, the industrial soundtrack is somehow more mechanically clunky than the gameplay itself and the cutscene direction rivals actual fucking cinema despite being from 1994. who the fuck made this??

oh - it's the guys behind gadget: past as future

alright that explains everything

Pretty lukewarm on this, which is unfortunate since Zeroranger is one of my favourite games and I was looking forward to this quite a bit. It definitely has retained some of the strong points of that game, not least the music, which is just as amazing (at least in the levels) and is honestly worth playing the game for by itself, but it’s also brought along some of the weaknesses and exacerbated them. It was clear in Zeroranger that Project Erasure like to indulge in “anime” tropes, which I thought was acceptable there because of the connection between Super Sentai and STGs, and the generally lighthearted tone of Zeroranger also allowed them to indulge in a bit of cheesy anime stuff without really detracting from the overall effect of the game. I don’t think that applies here, the immediate tone of the game is thick and tense, the mechanics engender deliberate, thoughtful movements, and this immediately clashes when you are presented with the corny theatrics of the first dream sequence, full of anime-esque character tropes and pop-culture references and (i’m sorry to be this mean) genuinely terrible writing, littered with colloquialisms and slang expressions and a super schlocky plot with unbelievably saccharine piano pieces playing in the background. It shows its hand far too early and a lot of the intrigue and general interest in where things were going completely evaporated for me from that point. In hindsight I appreciate how minimalist Zeroranger was with its story.

How is Void Stranger as a sokoban then? It’s ok, pretty good, I wasn’t amazed with the solutions and I rarely felt like I had to get truly creative to solve things until a lot later and even then it was rarely satisfying. It’s probably unfair to compare this to Stephen’s Sausage Roll since that’s probably the best sokoban I’ve ever played but almost every puzzle in that game required me to expand my perception of what was possible within the mechanics, which this isn’t nearly as good at. I’m also apprehensive about the lives system of the game. Having extra lives be earned by solving difficult optional puzzles is an excellent idea for a puzzle-roguelike! But when you run out of lives you can either restart from the beginning of the game or accept receiving a narrative “punishment” in exchange for infinite lives and neither of these are interesting. It’s uninteresting to repeat puzzles you already know the solution of, and the “void” mode feels poorly considered: Pretty much all of the tension diffuses when you’re given infinite lives and you never get a rewind ability or a quick-reset ability, so it’s kind of a worst of both worlds situation where you lose the tension of limited lives but don’t get the quality of life options that other infinite-attempt sokoban games give you, which gets annoying in the more complex levels. Sokobans are notoriously persnickety; solutions can often be ruined by one single move being out of order, which is especially relevant in this game as there are a lot of enemy movement cycles to take into account, so losing one of your limited lives and/or having to re-do an entire solution because of something very small can really get frustrating and adds up to that feeling of trial-and-error. Theoretically, everything here is deterministic, so it should be possible to calculate the solution without even moving or risking anything, but in practice I feel it's not common to play this way (I certainly don’t).

The big appeal for a lot of people will be the secrets, which I’m sure will be gradually discovered by the playerbase in weeks to come, and I’m sure some of them will be interesting. Personally, I really don’t care about that stuff, I feel like discovering cryptic secrets without online help is just an exercise in a lot of trial-and-error which is only enjoyed by a certain subset of players that I am not in and I would rather have interesting things presented to me in a structured way (which Zeroranger is excellent at, ironically).

To be honest I should really play more of this but I'm 6 hours in and not really enjoying it. I took a peek at some people further than me and it seems to just be more of what I don't like: More bad anime-esque story, more loops and repetition, so I think I'm just gonna give it up.

I'll admit to not being very enthused by this game when it initially landed in Early Access, both because my older self is uncomfortable with any game that's inherently sympathetic to law enforcement and because the initial serving of Ready Or Not was... Sour. Uncomfortable racial caricatures, eyebrow-raising dialogue, potential right-wing dogwhistles and an odd eagerness to let you go full police brutality on people were what awaited me, which is a far cry from SWAT 4. This isn't getting into the massive technical or balance issues.

101 people before me have said it, but SWAT 4's legacy is less of a cop game and more of a horror game. It knew just how much literally everyone hated cops and weaponized it, creating alienating and hostile environments where everything could be a threat yet told you outright that you weren't supposed to react as you would in other FPS games. The core difference between SWAT 4 and its contemporaries is that perfect play in SWAT 4 meant taking as few actions as possible and ideally walking out with 0 kills.

So you can imagine why RoN's first public version made me grit my teeth and back away. I was content to file it away in the vast wastes of my Steam library and up until now I'd succeeded, but I was bored in the evening and my IRLs insisted it was "quite good no" [sic], so with fuck all else to do and an alarmingly low amount of alcohol in the fridge for a Scottish household, I decided to join them and binge the entire thing in one massive session.

What immediately stands out in the 1.0 version is how a lot of the more obvious copaganda elements are gone, as are the problematic stuff which is most noticeable in the dialogue. It's a relief that I can play the game without worrying I'm going to run into an ulcer bustingly racist comment/accent. The developers also evidently busted out their old copies of SWAT 4, played it to completion and now the game is hellbent on keeping you from firing your weapon at a living person.
Lower caliber weapons offer you the mercy of allowing you to hit someone in the extremities for a non-lethal takedown, but bringing 7.62 Assault Rifle or a Shotgun to a gas station holdup will almost always end in severed limbs and penalties for unauthorized use of deadly force. Call me old, but the first time I accidentally decapitated someone with a stray 12 gauge shot actually made me feel a bit ill, and from then on I've exclusively used an MP5 and a Glock 19.

Where this game deviates from SWAT 4 is that it's very clearly trying to dig into the player's sense of morality to make the need for restraint sting, for lack of a better word. I'm still undecided as to how copaganda this game is on a scale from 3-10 (it will never be below 3, because cops are still sympathetic as the protagonists), but there's something to be admired in how the game will bring you face-to-face with pedophiles, human traffickers, school shooters and libertarians and still demand you keep your team on a short leash, follow the ROE, and try to minimize casualties. In typing that out, I realize that regardless of this game's status (or not) as copaganda, it's very clearly in love with an almost romantic idea of ~equal justice~ that's at odds with the fact you're playing as a cop, a breed of 'person' that in real life views justice as an obstacle to killing people. If you view all fiction as a fantasy of some kind, RoN is a fantasy land where cops actually behave like the image they try to put forward.

I've seen a surprise amount of (admittedly lowkey) debate about whether or not the game handles its subject matter with any grace, and for once I'm not 100% on where my own stance lies. I'd say that the game doesn't actually handle the subject matter... at all. The horrors I mentioned up above are grotesque, yes, but they're portrayed very manner-of-factly. There are no dramatic, heartbreaking violins or horrifying cutscenes in the buildup to the school shooting mission, it's just another mission. The horror comes from carrying out those routine behaviours - skulking around, identifying corpses, trying to subdue suspects nonlethally, praying the person on the floor is just hiding and not dead - in a school. They're depicted, sure, but it feels to me that the game is more about letting you take away your own feelings from the more emotionally challenging missions rather than going out of its way to make you feel a specific way.

I will say that the one exception to this is the swatting level which is, for lack of any better phrases, extremely over the top. It's the second level and comes after you besieging a gas station that's being held up, so I assume the developers wanted to keep the stakes high. The end result is that a 'simple' swapping also features gangsters, a crypto-mining operation, and the implication that the swatting victim partakes in a child trafficking ring. The use of unfortunate streamer stereotypes just makes it feel even more out of place, as if the game is trying to console new players who might fuck up and start firing like crazy. "It's okay, you just hit crypto miners and pedophiles!" or something like that. It's all so garishly out of place with the rest of the game.

Praise must be hoisted upon the visuals and level design, by the way. Brightly lit areas are fucking terrifying because armed gunmen can be literally anywhere, and even the most open levels feel dense and claustrophobic. Darker levels and smaller levels are so much worse, with a flashlight or nightvision goggles only offering token reprieve from the shadows. They really leaned into the 'horror game' thing.

There is, unfortunately, one massive problem hanging over this game like a pendulum, arguably more damaging to it than any potential discussions of its subject matter:

The enemy AI.

If you've ever played Rainbow 6 Siege during peak hours, it's a lot like getting matched against a team of Siege addicts from the Midwest. They possess hyper-awareness, x-ray vision, a total lack of recoil, reaction times measured in nanoseconds, and accuracy that most actual drones would kill to have. Many a time have I lost a mission because someone sensed my tainted chakra and decided to become a bodhisattva for the sake of purifying me.

Through a wall.

With a glock.

Despite me wearing full plate armor and being behind a cabinet as well.

This game lacks a 'downed' state which really compounds my frustrations. My friends and I, despite our years of tactical shooter experience and general FPS capabilities, never finished a mission with the full team alive because the AI is capable of inhuman feats. This applies to all suspect types, too, so you can meet your end at the hands of a panicked D&D player with a Beretta within about a half-second of making eye contact, and then experience the same thing facing down trained security personnel at a millionaire's mansion.

I wouldn't mind this were it the endgame state, or only applied to special enemies (former military, perhaps?) but as it stands it's omnipresent behaviour and results in the game easily becoming an exercise in frustration. The AI roams a lot, too, which can make a lot of tactical gear feel useless. C2 gas is very good when it works, but good luck getting to use it. In general, while the experience is fine enough, the AI hasn't actually evolved from early access and still feels like it's meant to counter players in a game where doors don't exist.

All in all, I'd be lying if I told you I didn't enjoy my time with this game, but even in its much nicer release state there is a small pit in my stomach that turns sour when thinking about it. Despite everything this is a game where you play as cops out to stop a crime wave, and while it's dispensed with the EA version's 'degenerate America' stuff, it still sometimes toes the line in a way that reminds me of a child looking at their parent to see how much of their brattiness is within acceptable parameters, or a cat about to knock something off the shelf.

There are posters dotted around the police station that encourage officers to take the shot, featuring despondent cops who're lamenting that they hesitated. I think these illustrate the cognitive dissonance the game experiences, because you're likely to see one after a tutorial in which a narrator with a cheap microphone repeatedly tells you to shoot last, ask questions later.