a game of tension, tension, tension, and release

in Dark Souls, the tension builds from the players exploring the world, scared to make a misstep because of the fear of losing all that they've just worked to gather to become stronger. as the game goes on, the player becomes a little more fearless. you can just run past everything to the bonfire. you don't care about dying as much because you know you can reclaim your souls. even bosses become relaxing once you've memorized every possible pattern. it's like playing a song you know by heart.

so much of sekiro is an inversion of this. in the overworld, now YOU are the beast that descends from unseen places and one-shots your enemy. you have unlimited stamina to outrun any foe, you have a grappling hook that allows you to reach places that others can't, you have a huge toolbox to get through every encounter. stalking your prey doesn't ratchet up the tension, it's all in the clashing of swords.

with Dark Souls, if you got hit, it was a fundamental mistake: you shouldn't have been standing there, you should have rolled, you should have known better. with Bloodborne it evolved: it's okay to get hit now and again because you can just get it right back if you're aggressive enough. but in Sekiro it reaches it's peak: YES, you WANT to get hit, but you just have to make sure you're getting hit the best that you can.

often times, the fastest, safest, and, sometimes, only way to victory is to stay on your opponent, give them no breathing room, get hit and deflect perfectly, capitalize on openings. coming from being a Bloodborne-first (and obsessed) player, i struggled a lot with staying so close. at first it is terrifying to just sit and wait to get hit, throttling the shoulder button out-of-sync to try and desperately avoid what's coming at you. as time goes on, you feel the familiar boss rhythms like other FromSoft games. you lock into the groove of your opponent. the tension is still there, it just shifts to become anticipation.

the game has some of my favorite moments in all of the post-DS FromSoft. it's playful and macabre all at the same time. also, if you just go for Vitality kills most of the time because you're a bimbo like me, YOU ARE VALID

“An American tragedy. An odyssey of debt, of grief, of broken promises, of hope. A painful, melancholic fable composed of fables and more fables, spreading out and weaving in and out of itself. A dream ebbing back and forth between memory and fantasy. A plea for you to care about something.”

...This was my original review for Kentucky Route Zero. I still think it’s a good description. But on consideration, I feel as though I need to be bold and say it: Kentucky Route Zero is not only one of my favorite games, but one of my favorite things ever made.

This is not an assessment of quality. I am not telling you what to feel. I am telling you how I feel. And Kentucky Route Zero makes me feel a way.

I specifically say “Favorite Thing”, because Kentucky Route Zero doesn’t affect me like a game. When I think about many of my favorite games, I often think of them as games. They are full of mechanics, of challenges, of systems. That’s certainly not all games are, and games can be many things, but in the capacity that they affect me, enchant me, or fascinate me, it is often within this vague category of “game”. But Kentucky Route Zero is different. To call it “my favorite game” and leave it at that misses something. It’s certainly a game, but it doesn’t make me feel the way games usually make me feel. First and foremost, Kentucky Route Zero is a story. It’s unlike most. The main body of this story is a game, but it’s also a multimedia saga. There’s something quintessential permeating my experience of Kentucky Route Zero that transcends that category.

It is a hauntological melancholy. It conjures a world more like a memory than a reality. Kentucky Route Zero tells the story of people who seem familiar but you’ve never met, with jobs that were never really secure, in situations that could never happen, in a version of Kentucky that has never existed. Magical realism constructs a vision not of reality, but of memory, of a sensate fabric that you swear could have been but never was. Americana is a mythic entity made visible, standing in front of me within Kentucky Route Zero, and it’s on its last breaths.

It’s a hopeful story. That doesn’t mean it’s happy. The world around you is a wasteland. Everyone is dying. Everyone is suffering. Everything is weighed down by debt, pulled deep down into pools of darkness. To live is to work, work, and die. But there are other ways to live. There always have been. Should we move on? I think the answer is clear. But that doesn’t make the pain go away. We have to be willing to feel both grief and hope in the same breath.

All of its blemishes are dismissable. Fleeting problems with UI, incidentally clunky writing, weird mechanical tangents, overwhelming scope, these melt away when I take a moment to remember what Kentucky Route Zero is and feel the frisson travel up and down my skin. I'm trying to not be too longwinded here, but it's hard. I can't get into specifics. So I wax poetic instead. I could write thousands of words on every minute I spent with Kentucky Route Zero and still feel like I was forgetting to say something. It is a multitudinous masterpiece, refracting and reflecting endlessly, timelessly, quietly.

Kentucky Route Zero is one of my favorite things.

Kentucky Route Zero is in one way a collection of stories intertwined between ghostly caricatures of the past, complicated stressed and living individuals, and government and environmental factors that work in such mysterious and incomprehensible ways to the denizens living underneath and on it that they might as well be supernatural, and which they are shown as within the entire work.
Every Act has interesting messages to tell, and lives to reflect on and shed a tear with. By the time everyone comes together to mourn the end of the journey, each person is fleshed out further than the featureless faces that adorn them would suggest. The game touches on several aspects of a decaying shifting void that is midwest America, whether that be the brainwashing ghastly denizens of corporations that push people into the neverending spiral debt hole they craft, or the old denizens on the high mountain scattered long after their nature project failed with an attachment to a dingy computer program that sounds constant static. There isn't really a single piece in here that feels without purpose or really in the wrong space at all. It is dense, certainly a less explicit piece than most, and a large amount of factors that make up the whole are something that it intentionally encourages you to research on your own. Each dialogue in their own points to several meta and thematic factors that don't just have to do with the characters at the receiving end of each line.
The visuals and music are just as thematically placed, each a perfect painting and screenshot in of itself. A lot of work was put into matching the perspective of the characters and where the camera is placed. A few specific examples that stand out to me is the revolving passage of time in Act 5, as a cat hearing everyone mourn and discuss where they're going, or the overbearing perspective when you move about the Hard Times. Or my favorite part, The Entertainment, as you bounce between each painfully depressing line.
I won't claim to understand all of what I saw as I played through the game, and honestly there are a lot of things that are too subtle for me to catch on, or maybe I'm just not in tuned enough to just get it. But that's fine. It's still a masterpiece of the medium, something I wish to see considered in high regard for the recognizable future. I hope it inspires people as much as it teaches me on aspects of life I've never been a part of or could directly relate to. It's a perfect encapsulation of what it sets out, and I was very emotionally invested. I highly recommend getting Kentucky Route Zero.

This is currently my favorite game of all time, so making this review was an inevitability, but I found it hard to word myself for the longest time. This entire review will most definitely contain elements of spoilers.

I would I guess, like to preface that it isn't perfect. Much of the known Genocide Route and Pacifist Route is a rough draft in terms of narrative design, pacing is kind of thrown to the road in both of them in terms of how events are revealed, specifically the tapes in the True Lab come to mind, or how it unceremoniously saves all of the genuine good storytelling in Genocide to the latter bits.

It's also quite limiting on a gameplay front, to an extent. I think the bullet hell combat is genuinely good, and by nature of how it's designed, better than most other rpgs. Dancing between bullet patterns as they combine on top of other enemies is a core part of any decent bullet hell philosophy, and seamlessly tying that to its rpg core and narrative is something to be praised and serves far more an execution test than most rpg's knowledge test design where ultimately optimal strategy is a once and done affair for most encounters. It is still limiting however, since only about 1/3 of the encounters actually make use of patterns building atop of each other, and the game saves its strongest bullet hell tests to the Genocide run, and the hard mode is literally an intentional joke.

That being said, and god that last paragraph wasn't even too negative, I'd say UNDERTALE is absolutely brilliant. It's the finest execution of the ensuing theme of "determination" I've ever seen in a work of art, surpassing general examples like Gurren Lagann by supplying its theme at an individual character level and wrapping it around an excellent metanarrative to boot (that you don't even have to be aware of to enjoy).

UNDERTALE works off clear character ideas, humanizing its characters around the world it sets up in extremely well written ways. Alphys is my leading example, which is weird that it's people's least favorite. She's built up as a stingy incredibly annoying type, a character who is increasingly irritating to deal with. She stops you at every point, wanting attention, to be something like the shows and remnants of otaku cultures she was able to consume. She ultimately gets betrayed by her own work, and ends up pushing back her own war crimes she's committed. She's not a justified person in what she's done, but she is sympathetic to understand. Her actions are communicated exceptionally for people to understand what kind of person she is, and the arc she gets is fitting and she learns what it really means to be determined and what she actually needs to do to be loved.

This reflects on every character not just her, and on top of this, is how flawed each of these characters are as people really works back to how honest they truly feel, and they’re all fleshed out personality wise to a point where tobyfox can publish them talking about whatever topic and I could hear their fonts come off the page and imagine them emoting in real time. They're very humanized people.

I'd also like to talk about how UNDERTALE ties its metanarrative elements well. The game in short, is a living breathing game world that operates on world mechanics riffed from a general audience understanding of how rpgs work, using a morality system that is defined on a character to character level rather than strict moral good/bad. You're allowed to kill in self defense, you're encouraged to be pacifist but the game doesn't vilify you for kills, it asks you to reflect on them. The monsters' world is as much a world to them as your own world is to you. And the only basis to understand them is to take them as living people where act of murder or self defense is a last resort. Especially when you yourself have the power to save and reload, so death is never truly an end for you, so death until you SPARE them is a legitimate option that only costs you time.

Even if you don't care for the meta elements, even if the characters aren't someone you jive with, even if the gameplay isn't particularly your own thing, it still has its own comedic writing to back on, and one of the best vidya soundtracks I've had the pleasure to listen to. It's also an excellently paced journey, gameplay and narrative-wise. But I would still be surprised personally, if there wasn't a single character or emotional moment that resonated with you.

I think UNDERTALE stands above all other games I've played in my lifetime so far, and it certainly has had a huge impact on my life going forward that I can't give it any less than my 10/10.

Boy I really do love pushing up racist systematic oppression and fighting against tyranny as completely equivalent. It's especially more fun when I can shooty shooty bang bang the bad guys with my basic ass gunplay. Bruh it's so fucking deep you don't even know man let me grind this rail another time while agency actually doesn't matter to the major parties and everyone is right but wrong as we appeal to all of the broken promises we can for an 8 hour runtime.

I hear Burial at Sea is kinda neat but god forbid I spend another hour on this game.

this is the sequel that Dark Souls players deserved in 2014.

i have a lot of issues with this game: the lack of verticality in its level design as compared to DS1, its reuse of early bosses constantly throughout the game that don't offer anything new or interesting, the tying of invicibility frames and estus drinking speed to a stat, its abundance of bosses that are either "Capra Demon But Different" or "Hey Y'all.... Remember This? ;)"

however, the worst offense is the game's cruelty in its encounter design. in Dark Souls 1, the little tricks and traps in the environment feel like a parent warning you not to touch a hot pan but you do it anyways. maybe you didn't know, maybe you should have known better but you still did it. in contrast, Dark Souls 2 feels like a parent going on an hour-long tirade about how all you kids ever want is pizza for dinner. DS1 feels whimsical and playful, DS2 feels like the game is rubbing your nose in the carpet to show you what happens when you get what you want.

i wouldn't mind this as much if the game's meta-commentary surrounding the nature of its gameplay and cyclical death wasn't so.... forgettable? it feels like it's gesturing toward a thoughtful discussion surrounding fan expectation, demand for sequels, fear of change, and games being "miserable on purpose," but it doesn't have much to say about it. by comparison, Pathologic 2, a game that is VERY much miserable on purpose, feels intentional in its slow, macabre, sadcore plot, because it's trying to fully disempower the player (and not just make them powerful later like DS2) to make them understand that if they were in a similar situation, they WOULD probably die and not be a special hero.

that being said, the game is still very good. it's my least favorite of the post-Dark Souls FromSoft output, but if this game was reskinned as a Zelda game and put out by Nintendo, it would be in my top 5 zelda games. it's only through comparison to other series entries that this game looks as bad as it does.