princessguard
This review contains spoilers
The aughts saw a sudden, loud burst of The Mall Goth come stumbling back into the public view, re-delivered to suburbia primarily by Hot Topic. Though it’s influence in pop culture is always in the background of media at large, goth mostly saw it’s re-emergence through teenagers buying band tees, striped tights, and tripp pants at the mall. This later trickled into the emo subculture (which is a whole other topic), but Hot Topic Goth was and still is a Thing, as far as I’m concerned. A great example of what I’d brand Hot Topic Goth (hereby referred to as HTG) is Emilie Autumn, who has made a career out of catering to young girls whose self-expression was given manifest in 2002 to 2005. Arguably her most popular and well received album, “Opheliac” dropped in 2006, at the very tail end of the Hot Topic Goth boom.
Madness Returns dropped four years after “Opheliac”, which marked the end of that chapter of goth’s history for me. As a result, the game felt dated. Perhaps it entered production during HTG’s initial boom in an attempt by ElectronicArts to capitalize on teenage girls’ renewed interest in ripped, striped stockings and poetry. Maybe it also ended up somehow releasing just when that particular subculture was getting to be less mainstream. Either way, because of HTG, the aesthetic of Madness Returns was of huge appeal to many of the outlets reporting on it. I remember carefully crafted layouts of deep dives on the game’s development that magazines indulged in, how interviews on G4TV would focus on the lusciously dark art style, and how every peek into the game’s development seemed hyper focused not on Alice and her journey as the heroine, but on the artwork within. Everyone wanted a piece of The Aesthetic™.
Make no mistake, Madness Returns is beautiful. Art Director Ken Wong was contacted by American McGee to join his development team Spicy Horse before production had started. Wong had drawn Alice for a fan zine called “Mercury Girl”' back in 2001, which caught McGee’s eye. It’s easy to see why he was so drawn to Wong’s work. The attention to detail his artwork houses leans morbid and visceral, a perfect complement to McGee’s roots as a level designer for 1993’s’ Doom.
Composer Jason Tai certainly had some big shoes to fill. Trent Reznor worked on the first game’s soundtrack, and while this is a completely different tone, it’s still just as catchy. Some of Madness Returns' music is iconic to me, defining the duology even more than Reznor’s soundtrack. Reznor shapes the mood and style, but Tai crafts the story with his compositions. They’re haunting, melodic, and just as likely to burrow into your brain’s crevices so that years down the line, you’ll immediately recognize the menu music.
Alice’s journey through Wonderland is narratively complex but straightforward. She is a fully realized character, fleshed out beyond the bones given to us and snappy one-liners, though I’m pleased to say they made a comeback. Her empathy for others is given center stage in Madness Returns, and it’s possibly the strongest point in the story. As Alice travels through her broken mind, she pieces together her past and discovers what the future holds for herself and the children at their sort of half-way home. It isn’t quite an asylum, but instead something like a rehabilitation center for unwell children— Alice, an adult, is there because of her extreme circumstances, to be clear.
Madness Returns is a game with a story to tell, and it sets the stage up beautifully to do so. The design, music, and style of the game seem to be perfectly held together, like seeing a play and admiring all the fixings. I do feel this is largely in part thanks to Susie Brann’s performance as Alice. While the material is engaging, it’s so easy to perform it as doldrum, hokey and uninspired. Brann indulges, adopting a snarky curiosity that is both unconventional and relatable.
At its heart, this is a game about exploitation and grooming, the abuse women and children are forced to endure, and what it does to our minds as we grow old. It is about the responsibility we, as survivors, feel towards those who are abused in the same ways we were. Themes of abuse have been a constant throughout Alice’s journey. In the first game, we see whispers of it in the ways she interacts with NPCs, in the menu screens, and in one-off comments she makes. McGee and the team he’s selected are aware of the brutalities suffered by the mentally ill then and even now by the system. While American McGee’s Alice had only painted a sheer image of it, Madness Returns is comparatively eager to join the conversation with a megaphone.
Towards the end of the game, Alice wanders into a procession in which she is derided for never speaking up about the abuse her older sister lived through, and the ultimate cause of her family’s deaths. Lizzie’s trauma became Alice’s, handed down to her through a violent loss of childhood. Now an adult, here she walks from metaphorical pew to pew on what's dubbed the Infernal Train, where she searches for forgiveness in echoes of parts of herself she's lost or buried, in the damned and forgotten. It's somber, it's heavy, and terrifyingly human. Alice, too, is a victim in this atrocity. Accountability is just as consistent a theme in this version of Wonderland. It isn’t enough that “how” is explained. The “why” must be answered for, and for every flap of a butterfly’s wing is a loss. Madness Returns is not just content with discussing the aftereffects of abuse, but it delves into discussing how we can move forward in a way that protects those of us who deserve and need that protection. It is not a shock Alice holds such contempt for herself, for her actions— as the sole survivor of the fire, she is forced to live with the memory of her family and the knowledge she will always be the sole survivor. Empathy is the blood-pulse of McGee's Alice. Her family's pain is her own, is the children's pain, is her sister's pain. There, she finds her strength and personhood, reclaiming it from those that would see her as property and little else.
Madness Returns could easily feel exploitative, but never veers into the dehumanization of the mentally ill. It is, after all, about a mentally ill woman fighting to protect the vulnerable. It’s a game about empowering Alice through exploration of herself. An exploration of her trauma, a coming of age story for The Hot Topic Goth. The game does take a long time to get towards this narrative turn, and the journey to it might not seem worth it, though.
It isn’t hard to tell this is an incomplete game that wasn’t given all the time it needed in the oven. Repetitive gameplay could be a symptom of this, and maybe the (in my opinion, merciful) lack of boss fights is, too. McGee’s own admission to EA not allowing them enough time with the game is hardly surprising; while Alice’s story will stay with me forever, I can’t say I’ll miss the combat.
I can’t deny this is my favorite game, a comfort food I come back to when I feel I need to remember that it’s possible to see media that reflects your experiences. I can’t score it well, but I can recommend it if you, too, were called a precocious child by nosy, cruel adults, and found yourself darkly inclined in your teens afterwards. It’s a game for us Hot Topic Goths.
Madness Returns dropped four years after “Opheliac”, which marked the end of that chapter of goth’s history for me. As a result, the game felt dated. Perhaps it entered production during HTG’s initial boom in an attempt by ElectronicArts to capitalize on teenage girls’ renewed interest in ripped, striped stockings and poetry. Maybe it also ended up somehow releasing just when that particular subculture was getting to be less mainstream. Either way, because of HTG, the aesthetic of Madness Returns was of huge appeal to many of the outlets reporting on it. I remember carefully crafted layouts of deep dives on the game’s development that magazines indulged in, how interviews on G4TV would focus on the lusciously dark art style, and how every peek into the game’s development seemed hyper focused not on Alice and her journey as the heroine, but on the artwork within. Everyone wanted a piece of The Aesthetic™.
Make no mistake, Madness Returns is beautiful. Art Director Ken Wong was contacted by American McGee to join his development team Spicy Horse before production had started. Wong had drawn Alice for a fan zine called “Mercury Girl”' back in 2001, which caught McGee’s eye. It’s easy to see why he was so drawn to Wong’s work. The attention to detail his artwork houses leans morbid and visceral, a perfect complement to McGee’s roots as a level designer for 1993’s’ Doom.
Composer Jason Tai certainly had some big shoes to fill. Trent Reznor worked on the first game’s soundtrack, and while this is a completely different tone, it’s still just as catchy. Some of Madness Returns' music is iconic to me, defining the duology even more than Reznor’s soundtrack. Reznor shapes the mood and style, but Tai crafts the story with his compositions. They’re haunting, melodic, and just as likely to burrow into your brain’s crevices so that years down the line, you’ll immediately recognize the menu music.
Alice’s journey through Wonderland is narratively complex but straightforward. She is a fully realized character, fleshed out beyond the bones given to us and snappy one-liners, though I’m pleased to say they made a comeback. Her empathy for others is given center stage in Madness Returns, and it’s possibly the strongest point in the story. As Alice travels through her broken mind, she pieces together her past and discovers what the future holds for herself and the children at their sort of half-way home. It isn’t quite an asylum, but instead something like a rehabilitation center for unwell children— Alice, an adult, is there because of her extreme circumstances, to be clear.
Madness Returns is a game with a story to tell, and it sets the stage up beautifully to do so. The design, music, and style of the game seem to be perfectly held together, like seeing a play and admiring all the fixings. I do feel this is largely in part thanks to Susie Brann’s performance as Alice. While the material is engaging, it’s so easy to perform it as doldrum, hokey and uninspired. Brann indulges, adopting a snarky curiosity that is both unconventional and relatable.
At its heart, this is a game about exploitation and grooming, the abuse women and children are forced to endure, and what it does to our minds as we grow old. It is about the responsibility we, as survivors, feel towards those who are abused in the same ways we were. Themes of abuse have been a constant throughout Alice’s journey. In the first game, we see whispers of it in the ways she interacts with NPCs, in the menu screens, and in one-off comments she makes. McGee and the team he’s selected are aware of the brutalities suffered by the mentally ill then and even now by the system. While American McGee’s Alice had only painted a sheer image of it, Madness Returns is comparatively eager to join the conversation with a megaphone.
Towards the end of the game, Alice wanders into a procession in which she is derided for never speaking up about the abuse her older sister lived through, and the ultimate cause of her family’s deaths. Lizzie’s trauma became Alice’s, handed down to her through a violent loss of childhood. Now an adult, here she walks from metaphorical pew to pew on what's dubbed the Infernal Train, where she searches for forgiveness in echoes of parts of herself she's lost or buried, in the damned and forgotten. It's somber, it's heavy, and terrifyingly human. Alice, too, is a victim in this atrocity. Accountability is just as consistent a theme in this version of Wonderland. It isn’t enough that “how” is explained. The “why” must be answered for, and for every flap of a butterfly’s wing is a loss. Madness Returns is not just content with discussing the aftereffects of abuse, but it delves into discussing how we can move forward in a way that protects those of us who deserve and need that protection. It is not a shock Alice holds such contempt for herself, for her actions— as the sole survivor of the fire, she is forced to live with the memory of her family and the knowledge she will always be the sole survivor. Empathy is the blood-pulse of McGee's Alice. Her family's pain is her own, is the children's pain, is her sister's pain. There, she finds her strength and personhood, reclaiming it from those that would see her as property and little else.
Madness Returns could easily feel exploitative, but never veers into the dehumanization of the mentally ill. It is, after all, about a mentally ill woman fighting to protect the vulnerable. It’s a game about empowering Alice through exploration of herself. An exploration of her trauma, a coming of age story for The Hot Topic Goth. The game does take a long time to get towards this narrative turn, and the journey to it might not seem worth it, though.
It isn’t hard to tell this is an incomplete game that wasn’t given all the time it needed in the oven. Repetitive gameplay could be a symptom of this, and maybe the (in my opinion, merciful) lack of boss fights is, too. McGee’s own admission to EA not allowing them enough time with the game is hardly surprising; while Alice’s story will stay with me forever, I can’t say I’ll miss the combat.
I can’t deny this is my favorite game, a comfort food I come back to when I feel I need to remember that it’s possible to see media that reflects your experiences. I can’t score it well, but I can recommend it if you, too, were called a precocious child by nosy, cruel adults, and found yourself darkly inclined in your teens afterwards. It’s a game for us Hot Topic Goths.
2017
i can confirm that you go into the woods when its night
this is the eighth game excluding the remakes. one has to wonder when the residents will get tired and stop being evil. where is resident nice
2015
life is strange feels distinctly like looking at your friend's photobucket account from 10+ years ago and smiling fondly through the cringe
2015
a game that bravely asks "what if we just made literal children deal with our problems for us?"
2014
Playable Teaser has caused irreparable damage to the horror genre in gaming.
Indie horror games have a subgenre sometimes called “looping hallway games.” These are, to keep it plain, horror experiences in which you control a character walking through a looping hallway and get jumpscared. There was a period where “P.T. Clones” were their own genre of entertainment, something only egged on by the bloodthirst players felt when Konami canned the project. People really, really wanted P.T., and they were willing to do just about anything for it. This game is as much about it’s story as it is the hype that followed.
P.T. uses a style of gameplay that people sometimes call “walking simulator.” You know, in a mean way. Personally, however, I think that’s way too broad: P.T. is more like a digital Halloween attraction. You pay admission to a haunted house and there’s ghouls and ghosts around every corner. The monsters follow you. There’s a constant threat of seeing something you shouldn’t. You walk through the hallway, expecting a jumpscare or a peek of the ghost haunting the house. You descend the stairs into the basement, and there are manic scribblings there. The horrified scrawling of a mad man, alluding to a terrible, terrible thing happening in that very house, maybe just in that room you’re about to venture into. It’s only a suggestion. A possibility. You open the door.
You pay admission to a haunted house and there’s ghouls and ghosts around every corner. The monsters follow you. There’s a constant threat of seeing something you shouldn’t. You walk through the hallway, expecting a jumpscare or a peek of the ghost haunting the house. You descend the stairs into the basement, and there are manic scribblings there…
Progression in Playable Teaser is still an enigma. While P.T. has been dissected and even mined in the years following its release, it’s not actually known what triggers some in-game events. It seems almost completely random, and maybe it is. In horror games, there’s a veil of control between the player and the game— an agreement is made when you put one on, really. You can always shut the console off, or look up a guide. There's always some semblance of control, of linearity, in a horror game. By having a seemingly randomized progression system, P.T. wretches control out of the player’s hands. It breaks the agreement. This isn’t unique, really. Screwing with the player is a common thing in horror games, but P.T. 's execution of it is what made it so noteworthy. Even if it hadn’t been an announcement for a Silent Hill game by Hideo Kojima, Junji Ito and Guillermo del Toro starring Norman Reedus, it would have done surprisingly well for itself based on it's execution.
It isn’t that P.T. is scary, necessarily. It’s that it shows an adept hand at creating tension. There’s moments in the game that feel like a child’s desperate attempt at a jumpscare— the loop in which you wander down the hall and look up to see a shaking fridge while a child screams inside it comes to mind. Maybe that was the intention, though. Part of the long con by the devteam was that they were prepared for people to take up to a week to finish the demo, and they expected people to buy that they were an indie studio during that time. What happened, instead, was that it took one stream that finished shortly after the announcement. The boom was immediate, and heard across the internet.
I could write at length what the experience of P.T. 's release was like, but it’s documented well. The rise and fall of Kojima Productions’ Silent Hill reboot is something that most people interested in games already know. We were all there, and it is intrinsic to P.T. to know it. Playable Teaser is, after all, the announcement for Silent Hills.
A lot of P.T. relies on technology feeling out of your hands, out of your control. The radio pumps paranoia into the hallway by babbling about the tap water, reporting on crimes, numbers that seem random but aren’t, effectively injecting patterns where there aren’t any. The flashlight loses power, and to disorient you further, the game itself “glitches.” Even the technology in your hands cannot be relied upon. Even the trailer that advertised it as an indie game cannot be trusted.
In an interview, Kojima stated that people said they knew there was no way P.T. was made by a small, independent team upon seeing the Playstation Experience trailer. He expressed that he wished he had pushed harder for the game to resemble something by a smaller team, but the Fox Engine renders things in a way that looks distinctly AAA. When you know P.T. was made in the same engine as MGSV, it’s very easy to tell. We’re seven years past the release of the game, and it still looks great. Dust particles dress the game well, with details painted on in an excruciating fashion. The hallway looks lived in. It’s used. It’s a home full of ghosts, of stories, where madness reigns king. There’s a poison infecting the home. You can see it, from the lovingly rendered cockroaches to the revolting vomit coating Lisa’s face.
A lot of the scares are effective, but not because they’re necessarily good or unique. The tension building does most of the work, with foley doing the heavy lifting. Sound in P.T. cannot be underpraised, in my opinion. The steps of the protagonist echo heavily, making the game feel empty when it isn’t. Doors creak loudly, floorboards sigh with the weight of the character model. Lisa’s groans are haunting and filtered to sound unnatural, as if you’re listening to a radio play that’s gone off the rails. A fitting design choice since there’s a reference to War of the Worlds within P.T., likely shoehorned in as a nod to the UFO endings in Silent Hill.
The story of the home is delivered through babbling, through auditory clues and visual hints. It gets hamfistedly explained near the end, but even the closing scene feels mysterious, as if I’ve played a game of telephone with my friends regarding an urban legend. P.T. feels like an urban legend, taped together by people’s memories of retellings they’ve heard. It’s a ghost story, told again and again with newer, finer details that sometimes feel tacked on, like the person telling the story thought it sounded scary. Each hallway is a new retelling. Playable Teaser is a playable urban legend.
P.T. is an exercise in claustrophobia. It asks, “how can I deliver a story in an unsettling, unnatural way in a small space?” To answer that question, it drops you right into the thick of it. You are forced to navigate the obscure clues for progression on your own from the moment you hear about P.T. The game goes beyond the screen— maybe in some way, it’s still going.
Indie horror games have a subgenre sometimes called “looping hallway games.” These are, to keep it plain, horror experiences in which you control a character walking through a looping hallway and get jumpscared. There was a period where “P.T. Clones” were their own genre of entertainment, something only egged on by the bloodthirst players felt when Konami canned the project. People really, really wanted P.T., and they were willing to do just about anything for it. This game is as much about it’s story as it is the hype that followed.
P.T. uses a style of gameplay that people sometimes call “walking simulator.” You know, in a mean way. Personally, however, I think that’s way too broad: P.T. is more like a digital Halloween attraction. You pay admission to a haunted house and there’s ghouls and ghosts around every corner. The monsters follow you. There’s a constant threat of seeing something you shouldn’t. You walk through the hallway, expecting a jumpscare or a peek of the ghost haunting the house. You descend the stairs into the basement, and there are manic scribblings there. The horrified scrawling of a mad man, alluding to a terrible, terrible thing happening in that very house, maybe just in that room you’re about to venture into. It’s only a suggestion. A possibility. You open the door.
You pay admission to a haunted house and there’s ghouls and ghosts around every corner. The monsters follow you. There’s a constant threat of seeing something you shouldn’t. You walk through the hallway, expecting a jumpscare or a peek of the ghost haunting the house. You descend the stairs into the basement, and there are manic scribblings there…
Progression in Playable Teaser is still an enigma. While P.T. has been dissected and even mined in the years following its release, it’s not actually known what triggers some in-game events. It seems almost completely random, and maybe it is. In horror games, there’s a veil of control between the player and the game— an agreement is made when you put one on, really. You can always shut the console off, or look up a guide. There's always some semblance of control, of linearity, in a horror game. By having a seemingly randomized progression system, P.T. wretches control out of the player’s hands. It breaks the agreement. This isn’t unique, really. Screwing with the player is a common thing in horror games, but P.T. 's execution of it is what made it so noteworthy. Even if it hadn’t been an announcement for a Silent Hill game by Hideo Kojima, Junji Ito and Guillermo del Toro starring Norman Reedus, it would have done surprisingly well for itself based on it's execution.
It isn’t that P.T. is scary, necessarily. It’s that it shows an adept hand at creating tension. There’s moments in the game that feel like a child’s desperate attempt at a jumpscare— the loop in which you wander down the hall and look up to see a shaking fridge while a child screams inside it comes to mind. Maybe that was the intention, though. Part of the long con by the devteam was that they were prepared for people to take up to a week to finish the demo, and they expected people to buy that they were an indie studio during that time. What happened, instead, was that it took one stream that finished shortly after the announcement. The boom was immediate, and heard across the internet.
I could write at length what the experience of P.T. 's release was like, but it’s documented well. The rise and fall of Kojima Productions’ Silent Hill reboot is something that most people interested in games already know. We were all there, and it is intrinsic to P.T. to know it. Playable Teaser is, after all, the announcement for Silent Hills.
A lot of P.T. relies on technology feeling out of your hands, out of your control. The radio pumps paranoia into the hallway by babbling about the tap water, reporting on crimes, numbers that seem random but aren’t, effectively injecting patterns where there aren’t any. The flashlight loses power, and to disorient you further, the game itself “glitches.” Even the technology in your hands cannot be relied upon. Even the trailer that advertised it as an indie game cannot be trusted.
In an interview, Kojima stated that people said they knew there was no way P.T. was made by a small, independent team upon seeing the Playstation Experience trailer. He expressed that he wished he had pushed harder for the game to resemble something by a smaller team, but the Fox Engine renders things in a way that looks distinctly AAA. When you know P.T. was made in the same engine as MGSV, it’s very easy to tell. We’re seven years past the release of the game, and it still looks great. Dust particles dress the game well, with details painted on in an excruciating fashion. The hallway looks lived in. It’s used. It’s a home full of ghosts, of stories, where madness reigns king. There’s a poison infecting the home. You can see it, from the lovingly rendered cockroaches to the revolting vomit coating Lisa’s face.
A lot of the scares are effective, but not because they’re necessarily good or unique. The tension building does most of the work, with foley doing the heavy lifting. Sound in P.T. cannot be underpraised, in my opinion. The steps of the protagonist echo heavily, making the game feel empty when it isn’t. Doors creak loudly, floorboards sigh with the weight of the character model. Lisa’s groans are haunting and filtered to sound unnatural, as if you’re listening to a radio play that’s gone off the rails. A fitting design choice since there’s a reference to War of the Worlds within P.T., likely shoehorned in as a nod to the UFO endings in Silent Hill.
The story of the home is delivered through babbling, through auditory clues and visual hints. It gets hamfistedly explained near the end, but even the closing scene feels mysterious, as if I’ve played a game of telephone with my friends regarding an urban legend. P.T. feels like an urban legend, taped together by people’s memories of retellings they’ve heard. It’s a ghost story, told again and again with newer, finer details that sometimes feel tacked on, like the person telling the story thought it sounded scary. Each hallway is a new retelling. Playable Teaser is a playable urban legend.
P.T. is an exercise in claustrophobia. It asks, “how can I deliver a story in an unsettling, unnatural way in a small space?” To answer that question, it drops you right into the thick of it. You are forced to navigate the obscure clues for progression on your own from the moment you hear about P.T. The game goes beyond the screen— maybe in some way, it’s still going.
1998
domino effect meme where the little domino says "solid snake using vents to escape enemy detection in 1998's mgs1" and the big domino says "venting in among us"
my favorite part of this game is when a vampire voiced by grim from the grim adventures of billy and mandy just comes back to life without any explanation, followed closely by when a twunk with a sword he has no training with defeats doc oct on the roof of nyc's federal hall in order to keep the internet free
if you only want to touch one game in the metal gear franchise, make it mgs3. it may not be my favorite of the series, but it is the game that perfects metal gear. gameplay, story and kojipro's love for movies hit a operatic and harmonic crescendo in mgs3 that i've struggled to see replicated in any game since, though many have certainly tried. cinematic gaming is it's own sort of genre for better or worse, and the bones of mgs3 can be seen in every entry in it since. it's a unique experience that deserves it's position in gaming history as a benchmark.
also naked snake can find and eat tsuchinoko, a legendary yokai in japanese folklore in the form of a snake, which slaps i think
also naked snake can find and eat tsuchinoko, a legendary yokai in japanese folklore in the form of a snake, which slaps i think
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
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
2018
played this originally on pc and recently got it on switch to play through it again. it's a fun, solid demo that promises a lot in the future, but it feels very much like a monster of the week formula. deltarune reminds me of a magical girl anime from the 90s thus far, but that's not a complaint in the slightest. i grew up on sailor moon and cardcaptor sakura.
that said, the biggest frustration i had with revisiting it on switch is that it lags, stutters and overall has some performance issues. i'm not sure what causes them, because my nintendo switch isn't hurting for space, and both the dynamic and simple backgrounds have this issue. so far, it hasn't been a problem for battles, so perhaps there's a lot of assets loading in the overworld as you play? i really couldn't tell you. i would recommend playing this on pc over switch, just to safe. if this is fixed any time soon, i'll surely mention it.
pros
- lancer is shaped like a friend
- susie is a surprisingly compelling character with shockingly good development for a 5 to 10 hour chapter
- overall, the character writing is just fun
- the battle system is a marked improvement and the party system allows for more of the aforementioned fun character writing, which means i look forward to the bullet hell stuff more than i did in undertale
- the lore's easy to digest and theorize about which is fun
- it has a lot of heart in it and even when i wasn't particularly enjoying how the game felt, i was able to find something i enjoyed because of that feeling
cons
- it lags and stutters on switch
- upset i can't squish lancer
- ralsei is Cute On Purpose. i actually love ralsei so you'd think this is a pro but it's a con because i hate being told what to do and how to feel about a character but i guess that's kind of the point, also, or whatever
- i can SMELL the homestuck on this one. it REEKS of homestuck
excellent
- i like how if you flush the toilet over and over toriel gets mad at kris and says that if they put a bath bomb in the toilet again theyre in trouble. im going to go put a bath bomb in the toilet rn
that said, the biggest frustration i had with revisiting it on switch is that it lags, stutters and overall has some performance issues. i'm not sure what causes them, because my nintendo switch isn't hurting for space, and both the dynamic and simple backgrounds have this issue. so far, it hasn't been a problem for battles, so perhaps there's a lot of assets loading in the overworld as you play? i really couldn't tell you. i would recommend playing this on pc over switch, just to safe. if this is fixed any time soon, i'll surely mention it.
pros
- lancer is shaped like a friend
- susie is a surprisingly compelling character with shockingly good development for a 5 to 10 hour chapter
- overall, the character writing is just fun
- the battle system is a marked improvement and the party system allows for more of the aforementioned fun character writing, which means i look forward to the bullet hell stuff more than i did in undertale
- the lore's easy to digest and theorize about which is fun
- it has a lot of heart in it and even when i wasn't particularly enjoying how the game felt, i was able to find something i enjoyed because of that feeling
cons
- it lags and stutters on switch
- upset i can't squish lancer
- ralsei is Cute On Purpose. i actually love ralsei so you'd think this is a pro but it's a con because i hate being told what to do and how to feel about a character but i guess that's kind of the point, also, or whatever
- i can SMELL the homestuck on this one. it REEKS of homestuck
excellent
- i like how if you flush the toilet over and over toriel gets mad at kris and says that if they put a bath bomb in the toilet again theyre in trouble. im going to go put a bath bomb in the toilet rn
it's fine. i played the base game years ago on PC and find that the attempt at technological scares is mostly diminished on switch. the atmosphere has shifted as such, and any tension from the previous "errors" is pretty much gone by the time the text scrolls again.
the new content is side stories and new 'lore', presented as new files on the virtual machine DDLC runs on in your console. the side stories are of surprisingly good quality, allowing for each of the girls' personalities to shine enough that you realize what their strengths and weaknesses are. the new lore is confusing at best and pointless at worse; chunks of it are already things people knew or suspected, but i guess it's nice to have it be canonical within the DDLC timeline.
my primary issue with DDLC is it's use of suicide and mental illness as shock value. i can't say it doesn't take the topics seriously, though, so perhaps it's best described as clumsy commentary on the stigma that continues to affect mentally ill people in society. i did find the depictions of anxiety and depression to be extremely fair in the side stories, although pretty twee at times, and the base game focuses on a character's psychotic breakdown. the latter of these things i always actually found far more relatable than media that goes out of it's way to depict it. on some level, it's hard to critique this aspect of the game without mentioning that the demonization and shock value the characters go through is intentional, and something you're likely supposed to feel bad and weird about. it doesn't entirely feel like intentional or deserved commentary, however, even if i do appreciate the attempt at it. at no point did it feel like a bad faith take, merely one that was hot potato'd.
despite what i said here, though, i do love this little romp, and monika is one of my favorite characters of all time. i can only really recommend DDLCPlus to people like me, who still enjoy DDLC after all this time. if you're new, i don't think that the switch version is for you. the psychological horror of a game crashing your PC just doesn't come across on the switch.
ultimately, i'd say this is mostly a collector's item for people like me, who already love the game and were just excited to see it in physical form finally.
the new content is side stories and new 'lore', presented as new files on the virtual machine DDLC runs on in your console. the side stories are of surprisingly good quality, allowing for each of the girls' personalities to shine enough that you realize what their strengths and weaknesses are. the new lore is confusing at best and pointless at worse; chunks of it are already things people knew or suspected, but i guess it's nice to have it be canonical within the DDLC timeline.
my primary issue with DDLC is it's use of suicide and mental illness as shock value. i can't say it doesn't take the topics seriously, though, so perhaps it's best described as clumsy commentary on the stigma that continues to affect mentally ill people in society. i did find the depictions of anxiety and depression to be extremely fair in the side stories, although pretty twee at times, and the base game focuses on a character's psychotic breakdown. the latter of these things i always actually found far more relatable than media that goes out of it's way to depict it. on some level, it's hard to critique this aspect of the game without mentioning that the demonization and shock value the characters go through is intentional, and something you're likely supposed to feel bad and weird about. it doesn't entirely feel like intentional or deserved commentary, however, even if i do appreciate the attempt at it. at no point did it feel like a bad faith take, merely one that was hot potato'd.
despite what i said here, though, i do love this little romp, and monika is one of my favorite characters of all time. i can only really recommend DDLCPlus to people like me, who still enjoy DDLC after all this time. if you're new, i don't think that the switch version is for you. the psychological horror of a game crashing your PC just doesn't come across on the switch.
ultimately, i'd say this is mostly a collector's item for people like me, who already love the game and were just excited to see it in physical form finally.
2021
it's better than good and there's genuine heart and soul in this. i have issues but i feel they might be overturned in the full game, so we'll have to see how it functions. regardless i think queen elevated this to game of the year status for me
2021
this disappointed me more than my own father
2019
steam keyhunt game, painted with a thick brush of supernatural horror. it's fine for what it is, and i admire the consistency chillaz art has. it's not my favorite of their catalogue but i didn't mind it