many years ago, every friday my family and i went to blockbuster. i was allowed to pick out one game. i spotted doa xtreme beach volleyball one night while perusing the shelves, and immediately looked away, as if anyone would care to notice little ol' me, at the tender age of ten, glancing at scantily clad video game women. for weeks straight when i wandered past the shelf this game was left on, i shyly kept my gaze trained to the gummy, navy carpeting. it ultimately took me months to work up the courage to grab it, and even MORE time to ask for it up front. for several weekends, i would put it back, too worried about what people would think.

turns out i'm bisexual. thanks, team ninja!

edited 1/30/22

Covid-19 is intrinsic to Animal Crossing: New Horizon's profile. I have a lot of games I played during this scary time in our lives, but it's AC: NH that defines it; merely days after it dropped, my state went into lockdown. At that point, my family and I were quarantined to try and remain safe in the hopes of weathering out the pandemic. When I think back to those first few months of lockdown, I think of how much of a comfort waking up to play on my island was. I would play for quite literally hours at a time, though I only recently clocked in with nearly 400 hours of gameplay.

All that said, I don't think that this was a game meant to be played for an upwards of 400 hours in less than two years. That might not seem like a lot, but the majority of my playtime these days is firmly settled on maybe an hour a day⁠— when I remember to play, that is.

This game is often, understandably, compared to AC: New Leaf. There's an important piece of that discussion that I feel is often ignored: NL introduced the Dream Suite, which allowed players to create a dream address for their towns they could then share online. This let other players visit their towns without the mayor needing to allow them entry. It essentially was like exploring a cloud backup of a town, and some players got extremely creative with this, giving their towns themes and stories for dream visitors to uncover as they explored. An example of this would be the infamous Aika village. Additionally, the Able sisters' shop had a machine in it where players could make custom designs that they could upload to the internet. Other players could then download it through an assigned QR code that would be punched into the same machine in their game. Players could use this design to customize their town or their character. The 3DS’' touch screen changed the landscape for customization in Animal Crossing. While there was a lot to do in NL, the customization aspect was probably what I most remember and arguably what kept NL puttering along until the big "Welcome Amiibo" update. I think NH is the continuation of that, with perhaps the biggest proof being how quickly Luna was introduced into the game. However, in order to focus on aesthetics, the game has been stripped down to the bare essentials, with Nintendo arguably putting out an incomplete game.

This is a YMMV thing, I suppose. I see people creating in depth, stunning islands, and my immediate first thought when I spot them is that I am frankly not playing the same game as them. In the hands of someone with more creativity than me, I can see how this game could be a personal favorite. Most of the focus has been shifted to online play, trading, and island customization. I've seen "playable islands," which is stuff like island wide mazes, something that Nintendo has gotten in on themselves.

One of the biggest reveals leading up to the release of New Horizons was that your island was fully customizable. You could create your own cliffs, rivers, waterfalls, and there were a number of different customization options for bridges and inclines. DIY’d furniture could be customized, refreshed with a new coat of paint in the absence of Reese and Cyrus’ shop. These two factors, combined with how fast Luna was implemented, seem to indicate that aesthetics were the driving force of development in New Horizons. This would be fine, except there’s a number of problems that become even more strained and obvious the longer they go unaddressed.

Firstly, I would be remiss to not mention Nook Miles. A new addition to Animal Crossing, Nook Miles are a new in-game currency that you could use to purchase different items through a curated catalogue hosted by Nook Industries. You can purchase items, DIYs and Nook Mile Tickets with Nook Miles, but all of these come with a caveat. This title, more than previous titles, has had it’s online play stressed again and again for better or worse. In your Nook Miles shop, you’ll find a street light. Mine is brown, personally, but yours might be a different color; white, maybe. You will only be able to purchase that color from your Nook Miles shop— if either of us ever want a different color street lamp, we will need to get it from a second party every single time we want one. This is the same for any item for sale on the NM shop: Trading is a necessity if you want to focus on the aesthetic of your island, something that is encouraged by the game’s design.

Design surrounding customization and aesthetic in this game seem to be carefully chosen to encourage players to, well, play. Seasonal DIYs drop from balloons. You can only get certain DIYs from completing tasks— if you want the Mermaid series back, you need to hunt for scallops in the Summer so Pascal can pop up and ask you to trade your new scallop for a DIY. Talking to villagers during October can net you some Spooky DIYs. If you notice I keep mentioning DIYs, it’s because New Horizons launched with a limited selection of furniture. The Rococo line is gone, as are a number of others. They could be reintroduced at a later date, but I have to wonder if it’s too little at this point. There are new furniture sets in New Horizons, however: The wedding furniture can only be obtained by engaging in a seasonal daily minigame that loses all its charm the longer you play. The Sanrio furniture line was locked to Amiibo cards that sold out immediately, so your only hope is trading for the items, or buying knock offs of the cards online. Both options technically cost real world money— you need an online membership to trade, after all. I’ve already paid for the game, so tacking on $5 inclements to get more furniture to decorate my island when that’s what was promoted feels… well, not very consumer friendly.

With the mention of real world money and the previous mention of Nook Miles, you might be wondering how strong the similarity between a mobile Animal Crossing and New Horizons is. In talking about New Horizons, I can’t not also talk about Pocket Camp, the mobile version of Animal Crossing that comically enough has more content in it than New Horizons presently does. Part of this is the paywall— you purchase items to decorate your campsite with, but there’s also more fruit to collect in Pocket Camp, more incentive to catch fish and bugs in order to work up to those F2P options. More crossovers, collabs, more promotions; the list is exhaustive. New Horizons, in comparison, feels bare. Comparing the two feels dirty, because a mobile game functions and plans differently from a console game. When I need to pay extra money monthly to fully experience the game as intended, though, I have to wonder if New Horizons is all that different. If you’re still wondering: I wouldn’t say New Horizons has much in common with Pocket Camp beyond Nintendo’s clear greed and anti-consumer fundamentals, but this isn’t new to Nintendo. It’s simply more frustrating to see laid out in plain text.

One of the biggest misses in New Horizons is just how little time it actually spends getting you to play. There’s a severe lack of minigames, and significantly less traveling visitors to your island. Katrina is missing, and famously Brewster, but Kapp’n is nowhere to be seen either, even though there’s a dock on the beach. All three of these NPCs are associated with minigames or game mechanics, which New Horizons desperately needs. For what it’s worth, datamines consistently show that Brewster is slowly being implemented, and Katrina has been spotted on the Nintendo Online app. The dock has been in game from launch. With any luck, at least this trio might be seen in forthcoming updates, but for now, New Horizons is mostly menus and text.

Speaking of text, you read a lot of it in New Horizons.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if a not-insignificant amount of my time in the game is spent doing just that simply due to menus. Since launch, a vocal part of the playerbase has been asking Nintendo to work on bulk crafting options simply because players will often do just that: craft in bulk. As an example, a recommended strategy for the fish and bug tournaments is to craft a multitude of fishing poles and nets beforehand. You go through the same set of menus every time you craft anything, and I can’t imagine that the development team did not expect players to craft in bulk at some point in designing the game— but the crafting menus are not nearly as bad as Orville’s menus. If you want to fly to another island, you’ll need to run down to the airport and talk to Orville, which kicks up a comical amount of menus. Menus lead to menus lead to menus in New Horizons. I couldn’t tell you why. I don’t know if villager hunting was a strategy the devteam planned on players engaging with, but they surely expected us to go to Mystery Islands back to back, right? I’m no longer hurting for resources in New Horizons. I don’t need more fruit or flowers or weeds or trees, so my only reason to go to these islands is to get a lucky roll or find a new villager. In the latter case, I spend much less time on the Mystery Island than in the menus upon menus. It’s odd.

Odd choices are a bound in New Horizons— updates are a Problem depending on who you talk to, but I find a lot of odd decisions are made within them. The aforementioned Nook Miles can also be obtained by visiting the terminal within Resident Services, which is fine because prior to an update where the terminal could now be accessed through your in-game phone, you could only check your new daily set of items for sale by visiting it. Now, you have to walk into the Resident Services, open the menu to get the Nook Miles, and if you’re like me, you already checked the shop, so you just leave.

Another odd decision is that the game functions on a grid. Basically, each part of your island is designed in squares. This means that some items will never be centered, and it makes terraforming— again, one of the Big Promotional Things— a bigger chore than you expect. I understand it fundamentally, but it feels like a midway point where something just doesn’t quite fit. It’s almost there, but it feels clunky and difficult more often than not. Maybe I’m just not good at it.

Additionally, while you can have multiple characters on the island, you can only have one island per console. This is an odd choice for a game where the demographic seems to be families; my younger siblings should be allowed to have their own islands on my Switch. For a game so focused on customization, I don't see why I can't have multiple islands or save datas. Then again, you have to purchase a memory card for your switch in order to have more than a handful of games on it, so perhaps it is simply a memory issue. Regardless, it is a feature I feel is necessary for games like this.

I’ve seen a lot of conversation surrounding the repetitive dialogue in the game, and I will be frank: There is a lot of it. Villagers repeat things, there’s a fair few glitches like villagers “blue screening” and we all had to put up with Raymond in a maid dress. That said, I can’t say it’s better or even worse than New Leaf. I booted up New Leaf because I remembered it very fondly, but after playing around in it for a while, I realized I had run into the same dialogue with my villagers a few times. In my experience, they’re just as lacking as before, but the bare bones gameplay has resulted in this being even more prominent than before. One thing I do miss is being invited over to villager houses at certain times and days, but missing that had no consequence in New Leaf. To be honest, I kind of miss the mean villagers from the Gamecube game. Go figure, right? I want the stress-free game to be more stressful.

This is a lot of text, and you might think I hate New Horizons. To be honest, though, I really don’t I didn’t sink 400 hours of my time into it because I had nothing to do. I got bored of it and moved onto other games: I’ve only played New Horizons in the Spring and Summer, because that’s when I get the Animal Crossing Itch. When I get back to the game, I do spend hours in it. The customization aspect of the game does hit certain points for me, and I have worked a lot on my island. My house is paid off, and nearly all decorated. I don’t open up the game out of spite— I legitimately enjoy it for a half hour or so, and then I’m done. That’s probably the intention of this game, now, but I can’t help but think about how I wish I had more to do in it. How the implication of more is in every corner of my island getaway.

The closed off upper level of Nook’s Cranny, the two empty walls on either side of the top level of the museum, the dock where Kapp’n could park his boat and wait for me to hop on in. The secret beach was eventually revealed to be where Redd docks his boat, and there’s still areas on my island where another building or two could fit. It’s like New Horizons has potential, but it doesn’t know when or how to unlock it. Maybe the problem is me though— maybe I’m looking for something exciting in my getaway package now that it’s started to feel like real life: Trapped in the same routine with no way out, doing my silly little tasks, while I hope for something to shake it up.

Anyway I think New Horizons is not a very good game

ETA: my opinion of 2.0 is reflected in how i took away half a star for it

the path is a video game in which you assume the role of little red riding hood on her way to grandmother's house in the forest. it is a shockingly vibrant game, with an art style rooted in modern pop art and the uncanny valley nature of playstation 2 models, which makes the long trek to grandma's house a blindingly bright experience. it is pure white, ketchup red and vomit green with inspired, whimsical character designs laser-focused on communicating character personality and nothing else. upon reaching your goal, you shuffle uncomfortably through grandma's empty, foreboding house with a sense of unease, and then your character's model settles on the bed next to the corpse-like image of her grandmother, and you get the news. you were ranked with a "failure."

as a walking simulator, the path is equal parts game and art experience. it is a horror tinted vision where the goal is to encourage you to think and relate to the game in your own way. playing the path felt like holding a microscope up to my own recollection of childhood memories, picking out the moments that seemed to echo the path. it is primarily interested in the dissection of childhood and what it feels like to grow up in a world that you're still learning about. each of the little red riding hoods has her own personality, storyline and wolf to encounter in the woods, adding to this feeling of growing up as you play. proceeding from youngest to oldest is a stark experience of growing up from a young girl to a teenager and then burgeoning young woman; it echoed my own life experiences in a haunting way, but perhaps it wouldn't be as such for every other person out there.

decorated with a unique artstyle that indulges in the doll-like appearance of ps2 models, the path also sounds lovely with an ambience that has not be replicated in games since it. it is handcrafted to feel like a fairytale that is held together with wire, drapes and shadows, never quite revealing what it's end game is until you decide you've had enough and want to digest it on your own. it has a vested interest in leading you through an emotionally uncomfortable experience, allowing each player to have a unique take on what they interpreted the game to be about. the closest thing to it is looking at a painting and talking to other people about it: everyone notices and feels something different, so robust conversation that gives you peeks into one another as human beings feels like a component that has been baked into the path.

it is a bug-laden mess that is a pain and a half to get running these days, and when you get it to, there's still hoops to jump through. still, getting it to play feels like hitting a coffin after digging into the earth for hours. it feels like a skeleton you shouldn't be looking at, like the past is haunting you as you play.

it's worth noting that there is simply no user interface to this game. in fact, it probably is one of the earliest examples of a modern game completely forgoing a UI to hammer in the experience of it's stage. it expects you to learn to walk on your own, taking the game at your own pace and exploring as you wish, alongside the red riding hood of your choice. in this day and age, this doesn't quite achieve the effect it did almost fifteen years ago, but i'm sure that it added to the sense of disorientation back then. it just felt like something worth mentioning: there are multiple instances where things feel dated. the intuitive ui is one example, but the writing can be another. overwrought at times with a desperate need to sound like a page out of a fairytale, it can miss the mark when it really cannot afford to.

i don't think this is a game for everyone and i would hesitate to recommend it even to close friends. if you like stuff like night in the woods or what remains of edith finch, this #ArtGame might be for you. it's a masterclass in atmosphere, topped with some of the most uncomfortable gaming experiences i've ever had that were completely on purpose. the path is also arguably the best of tale of tales' gaming catalogue, and the development team's thumbprint is still pressed into the silicon form of gaming today.

i'm an old crone at this point in my life, so i have fond memories of the internet prior to it's sanitization for advertisers. i spent a lot of time online in my youth and was practically raised on the old, moderated nickeloden forums on a diet of spongebob flash games. flash is now dead and in it's wake is links to subscribe to watch, or links to shops. advertisers' chokehold on the internet has forced people to congregate onto the same social media websites, meaning that while i grew up flipping krabby patties or helping blue solve clues, a lot of children are spending hours scrolling through tiktok or even watching not at all child-safe streams on twitch. meanwhile, it's near impossible to have adult spaces because of this. advertisers want everything to be family friendly, but remove all possible child friendly parts of the internet in an attempt to monetize further.

this advertiser friendly internet is the setting for needy streamer overload. the goal is to help ame achieve a seemingly impossible milestone of one million subscribers to her METUBE channel in one month. on it's surface level, nso is a critique of the clout chase or worse yet, Streamer Girl Culture. ame is a vapid young woman who believes her face is one of her better qualities and can do the heavy lifting for her budding streaming career. she concocts a character for her to act as, "OMGkawaiiangel" or "KAngel", the internet angel. prior to every stream, she has a tongue-in-cheek magical girl transformation to represent this change of character.

this separation of identity is a running theme in nso. ame has been raised by the internet, neglected by her family and is seemingly friendless in real life. p-chan is her only companion, and she deludes herself into thinking that they're the only person she truly needs. as an ol' biddy, i remember the pre-advertiser friendly internet being a wild west of sorts. you had your online life and your irl completely separated. now, parasocial relationships are a problem you can take to the bank. ame even counts on this and wants people to adopt a near idol-esque view of kangel. she hides she has a partner from her viewers, and there's even a few comments stating how upset people would be, in universe, if kangel did have a partner. to keep her career growing, she has to make sure this fictional character she acts as never entirely gets away from her, but still give the people what they want. it's a dynamic that sends her further spiraling in her addictive, delusional behaviors.

there are references to the current state of the internet and how things functioned in the past in game. ame dates herself by mentioning she used to record episodes of anime to VHS, a technological advancement that hasn't very relevant since the year 2000. i know plenty of young women like her, who are walking contradictions used to compartmentalizing parts of themselves to be accessible, friendly, or consumable. i'd count myself part of that demographic. it's a tactic born from either trauma or spending wholly too much time online. i spent the entirety of my teens hiding my internet on-goings from my parents, even though they definitely weren't unaware i had internet friends. this wedge between rl and internet has grown even bigger in the recent years as people scramble to figure out ways to monetize the internet further. now, everyone i know has a public twitter account and a locked twitter account. a public persona and a private persona, much like ame herself.

while there's definitely something the game wants to say about clout chasing, it also seems interested in discussing how the current state of the internet encourages people to indulge in the ways ame does. she very clearly has an internet addiction to go with her drug addiction because she just can't seem to log off. she always rises to the challenge of chat's insults, and can't walk away. tying herself to the internet as her way of making money to survive is more than counter-productive to her state of mind: it's actively hurting her. this is represented in her relationship with herself and with p-chan. self-harm through addictive behavior threads itself through needy streamer overload's narrative the same way sutures run along a wound. narratively speaking, i think the game is often misunderstood by people who love it and people who hate it. the core of the game is concerned with self-betterment and in order to get to that point, ame has to see the worst parts of herself. seeing it touted purely as an abusive relationship simulator is a gross misread of needy streamer overload. it's both about logging off as much as it is a small love letter to the internet of yore. i don't think it's a coincidence that NPCs chatter about how the internet doesn't feel like it has a place for people like them anymore. all the same, ame hasn't been helped by the internet before and her shaky sense of identity born out of loneliness is only fed to the wolves here.

despite the surprisingly expansive narrative and wealth of replayability, nso often feels like a slog and a half. i enjoy raising sims but something about this feels tedious. maybe it's ame herself and how uncomfortable it can be telling her what to do, but keeping track of her stats and trying to hold out to the end of the month is less stressful and more of an annoyance at times. some endings are just flat out unpleasant to get, for the wrong reasons. there's one ending in particular that is obviously a doki doki literature club nod and i would truly say it's probably my least favorite ending i've gotten in a game like this in years. in fact, the ddlc nods in nso are frankly just painful to sit through. buuuut maybe it's just me.

not all of nso's inspirations are as cringefail comp to me, though, because the menhera inspired aesthetic sticks the landing. pastel, girly colors accented by the blocky pixel art style reminiscent of both early 2000s anime and RPGmaker games from the same gives the impression of something released around five to ten years ago. i can't help but think of ib or hello charlotte when i look at needy streamer overload. menhera itself is a movement in japan similar to punk where those part of the subculture dress in cute, comfortable clothing with mental health awareness themed coords to beat down the stigma surrounding discussion of one's mental health. i wouldn't call it menhera themed so much as inspired, but mental heatlh is an important conversation in nso. regardless, it's very eye-catching and nice to look at. nyalra's nailed it with their designs and inspirations. the music is also exceptional. i found myself moving in time with the instrumentals often, aiobahn & is a very talented musician. ame is also a realistic depiction of a young internet addictive woman, and genuinely charming more often than not. i hope she logs off often!

reception to needy streamer overload has been a seesaw. people either think it's absolute dogshit or a complete masterpiece. personally, i think it's more of a middling experience with some standout moments from the narrative. it's also a shining example of what an excellent localization can do for a game; i think this would be a lot more niche than it is were it not for how good the adaption of memes and internet language as a whole is in nso. ultimately, i'm wishing the team behind it a long, fruitful career in game dev.

outlast if it happened in chuck e cheese and was rushed out for the holiday season so parents would buy their tweens and early teens the new fnaf game at launch

hilariously glitch-drunk and determined to ruin it's own atmosphere, fnaf: security breach seems to be held together by hopes, dreams, and maybe a little bit of chewing gum as a back up. controls are too sensitive or too unresponsive. you can break the AI, or use it to break the game. security breach regularly interrupts itself, freezing cutscenes to deliver information in an obtrusive manner. it feels like watching someone argue with themselves, and thoroughly disrupts any attempt at atmosphere. i haven't touched a fnanf game in literal years, and seeing the animatronics move around and talk like people saps all the unease out of their presence. they are, more often than not, comical to witness. it's consistently bizarre, if nothing else.

the real kicker is that it's not scary, nor is it particularly clever. even if it had been complete upon release, every detail fine-tuned to perfection, it would have drifted somewhere toward mediocre at best. there is nothing about this that sticks out other than the fact it's a tried and true mess.

anyway, i laughed so hard when roxy cried about not being able to catch a 12 year old on foot that i slapped myself

i made a whole-hearted attempt to revisit this for halloween '21. my first pass of this game was noteworthy for how quickly my opinion of it dropped; i cannot say that a second play through changed that. if anything, it solidified what a disappointment i found amnesia: rebirth to be.

it's worth noting that, i think, the biggest problems with rebirth are it's genre (cosmic horror) and the lack of, to be frank, scares. i have some personal gripes with it, but at it's heart, rebirth is a true gothic horror story. there's only one monster that poses any kind of threat to you through out the game: the ghost of grief. it's a somber walk through tasi's memories, unraveling her trauma and loss. after a while, it felt exploitative at best. i get it, something very sad happened to her and salim. this, combined with how the game shows it's cards early and disappoints on delivering it's scares, served me a slice of frustration pie very quickly. there's a few segments that feel like the dark descent, but twice as many that feel like imitators released on steam for $1.99.

it's a polished game with a lot of love in it. i admit that much. i appreciate the bold choices in it, too. i think the setting was a lovely, unique place to take survival horror. the pregnancy related mechanic was an interesting way to update the sanity meter. i just don't think this had any business being a mainline amnesia title. i have to wonder how it would have looked as a standalone title, allowed to breathe in it's own space.