I think when Retsupurae covered this the guy playing the game for them put it best when he said “AKA: Super Creep Boy.”

Because maaaaaaaan this game isn’t good. It’s legitimately wholesale a ripoff of this flash game called The Company of Myself down to plot structure, narrative framing, and even the main core mechanic but while Company of Myself is a really clever little thing that has enough to be able to give you a little bit of impact, Broken Dreams is… not that. The sprite art is ugly and clashes both with the probably-free-on-backgroundpngs.com backgrounds and the platform environments — you can loosely tell they had to quickly change the sprites for the steam release since previously they were just stolen Maplestory sprites. The gameplay takes the base idea of controlling your former selves from Company of Myself and reduces it to “go to space and deploy shadow person. reset and wait for shadow person to move to space. go to next space and deploy shadow person.” in such an unimaginative way that going through the puzzles is just simultaneously braindead and absolutely tedious. The story… thinks “boy meets girl. boy loses girl. boy tries to get the girl back” is a lot more grandiose than it is, and between the goofy way it has to intermingle explaining gameplay mechanics with telling the story and how absolutely creepy the boy comes off (“I used WASD to control her and she did everything I liked. It was so unreal.”) the plot gets twisted into, like, the story of this incel who inexplicably has shadow clones trying to get back the girl he abandoned and who we’re supposed to root for and, like, man, nothing in this game works. It gets a bonus point for being mercifully short and the way it ends being absolutely perfect (if very likely unintentionally so — it’s probably meant to break the player's heart or something but lmao, no, this guy deserves it) but otherwise… yeah. Just watch the Retsupurae video instead. 2/10.

So this game is, uh, pretty obviously not great. You gun and stealth your way through levels with absolutely broken gun and stealth play and use the absolutely revolutionary revolver conversation system to randomly select responses to a conversation that run the gamut to "instantly get a game over" to "get caught in a shootout where you're shot multiple times before you can even get your gun over to an enemy." Game overs, mind you, put you back at the very beginning of a level because there aren't any checkpoints, meaning that if you don't quite get that you're supposed to shoot the helicopter to stop the final boss from escaping rather than catch up to it (which is what the game signposts) whoops! You're set back, like, 30 minutes of progress. Wanna figure out how the stealth mechanics work during a dedicated stealth segment and an enemy even so much as looks at you? Better hope you get used to seeing the intro cutscene for the level repeat over and over again. It's wayyyy too punishing and it makes an already broken game worse. The game as a whole isn't completely irredeemable — the core gameplay loop of staying crouched to block 90% of bullets, shooting enemies who can't hit back to dead silence is way more fun than it should be, ironic or not, and its short enough that it doesn't wear out the little welcome it has — but, uh, yeah. Maybe not "the 9/11 of video games" like the founder of Giant Bomb purported it to be, but still pretty bad. 3/10.

Alien: Isolation is rad. I don’t necessarily think it’s my favourite survival horror game but I can’t deny that it at least contends for the title. And this is as someone who… didn’t have a lot of experience with the Alien film series, at least beyond what’s been absorbed into pop culture. I remember reading an interview made to hype up Aliens: Colonial Marines where the devs talk about how painstakingly they attempted to make environments look exactly like they were in the original film all for the purpose of fanservice, and stuff I’ve read up on gives the impression that a lot of effort on that front was made here as well but even without that level of devotion to the series I was easily able to understand most of what was going on, plot-wise. I maybe don’t really have the viewpoint to say whether this game appeals to longtime fans — though from what knowledge I’ve absorbed it most certainly does — as someone new to the Alien franchise myself, I found this as good of an entry point as any.

The story follows Amanda Ripley, an engineer who joined the Weyland-Yutani Corporation in order to search for answers to her mother’s disappearance. When she heads to the space station Sevastopol in order to pursue a lead on the Nostromo, her mother’s ship, she finds the place in ruins and most of the crew dead — and the being that caused the destruction is now on the hunt for her. Now she has to scavenge her way through the desolation, hide from the alien, fight through all the other factions vying for her blood, and try and find a way to get off the ship.

And it works. Really well. In terms of gameplay, the closest thing I’d maybe compare it to would be Resident Evil VII: you explore/puzzle your way through a first-person environment, find quite a bit of lore to read through and figure out, craft items to take down unfriendly humans and androids… and then the Xenomorph comes in. It’s always on your ass. Nothing you do hurts it. If it sees you, and you don’t have the tools to get away from it, you’re dead. When it shows up, which it frequently does, it's like life-or-death hide-and-seek — you’ve got to figure out where to go, you’ve got to figure out where exactly the alien is, and you’ve got to figure out how to get from A to B without the alien seeing you. Even when you start getting tools that make getting caught no longer instant death, the alien never stops being a threat. Fuel and ammo are limited by what you can find, and eventually — if you start using one thing too many times — the alien will stop giving a shit and gun for you anyway. Anything you do is only temporary, and nothing will ever keep the Xenomorph down, from the first moment it appears right up until the very end of the game.

It’s not so oppressive all the time, though, and I think that’s something to the game’s benefit. For every moment, like the Medbay, where the alien is a constant threat and you’ve got to think out your every move, you then proceed to get an area like Seegson Synthetics where the only significant threats are looters and you’re given a lot more room to breathe. And just when you’ve gone through a bunch of low-intensity areas just like it… suddenly the alien’s back and you start to realize that all the shiny new tools you picked up only work to show it down. The game knows that constant tension will only leave the player exhausted, and does a really great job at mixing the intensity up and using its best aspects sparingly. I know that there’s been a lot of criticism about how the story goes longer than deemed necessary, but that was never a problem for me? There was never really a point where I was particularly waiting for the ride to be over, and — rather surprising for a survival horror game — I felt like some of the best (and scariest!) setpieces were located closer to the end of the experience more than anything, which I think speaks to how well the game manages to pace itself out.

Another thing I’d like to shout out is the game’s AI. I think most people already know about the wonders of the Xenomorph AI — such as how the game keeps track of the strategies you use to successfully get away from it and slowly makes the AI smart enough to start counteracting them — but something I’m also really into is how the AI for the looters and other regular humans on the ship plays out. They’re super variable in this flawed and human way, and it's clear even though they oppose you they’re mostly just dudes trapped in the same situation as you are. They’ll stop trying to shoot you the moment they see the alien, and some of the little interactions before they inevitably get gored often see you as unlikely comrades trying to survive against a mutual enemy. I’ve heard friends tell their stories about their experiences playing this game, and all their super memorable interactions with the human NPCs, and while most of mine were them being stupid and/or them getting themselves killed by the alien, I think its rad that just one part of the whole experience can inspire so many different stories.

There are other parts that maybe knock the experience down, though. The music is… obnoxious, honestly. In a game where diegetic sound is so important, and listening out for footsteps is the best way to know where the alien is, having generic orchestra cues blare over nearly everything at the slightest hint of the alien got in the way and felt cheap, especially considering the atmosphere that’d already been built without it. Using manual save stations, while it does really help to create tension… I wouldn’t have minded some auto-checkpoints, especially in some of the more difficult sections — oftentimes those sections would stop giving you save stations as frequently and it slowly became very frustrating to tread ground you’d already trodden over and over again when oftentimes the section you actually ran the risk of dying on was at least two minutes worth of traversal ahead. I… also feel like maybe the game could’ve done a bit more to signpost things to the player? Maybe it could be that I’m the actual problem, but there were… way more points than I could count where I just kind of didn’t know what I was supposed to do, and the tools the game uses to point a direction for the player (the map, the motion tracker) didn’t exactly do much to help.

But in general… man, this was great. Maybe not my favourite survival horror, but definitely at least a contender. I’ll be fascinated to see how exactly this stacks up compared to all the other games I play this September and October. 8/10.

man the real horror game is just how shitty the apartment you live in is, like seriously the first ten percent of the game is just coming home, doing the rounds, thinking something spooky's about to happen in your apartment but then realizing that no your laundry's eminating smoke because your apartment's just that shitty. it's hilarious

Otherwise... there's at least a neat concept here. You enter your home, find out somebody's murdered your girlfriend, and that you have eight minutes to figure out who they are and find a way to defend yourself before they come over to your place. It's a cool concept, and I like the feeling of frantically rushing around your shitty apartment trying to remember (or, well, find in this case, but it's the main protagonist trying to remember) where you put all your previously useless garbage... the main problem is that it takes half the game to even reach that point, and then three-quarters of the actual gameplay is spent trying to figure out who it could possibly be trying to kill you (when from the opening cutscene the culprit is INCREDIBLY obvious) instead of doing things like trying to run, blockade your home, try to figure out an escape route etc. etc. It's a neat concept wasted on something a bit too bogged down by a story that... doesn't need as much there as it does (seriously, why is the mystery aspect there at all) and combined with a really poor English translation and confusion as to who's speaking during some of the cutscene... my time with this game was okay enough, but I can't help but feel like there's potential for it to have been a lot better. 5/10.

This… took quite a bit of time to complete, on my end. I started roughly mid-September, played it for an hour before feeling low-energy and stopping, then not proceeding to play it until early October, then playing it until the first story split, then dropping it until November wherein I just kind of blitzed through nearly the entire left side of the flow chart, dropped it and didn’t pick it up until early in the new year, wherein I went through the rest of the game in the space of a couple of days. It was… a lot more sporadic of a process than usual for going through a VN (mostly due to busyness, nothing to do with the game itself) and I think that ended up hurting the game a little bit. For a mystery that focuses quite a lot on foreshadowing and micro-details, losing your memory of a lot of what happens right at the beginning does make parsing future information/figuring out the mystery harder than it’d otherwise be.

But regardless, I finished it, eventually, and… I think this is my favourite Uchikoshi game?

Well, maybe. It’s between this and Virtue’s Last Reward, and although I do love both games in semi-equal measure, I thiiiink this game gets the edge mostly because of its status as a standalone, not needing to stand within the context of a series in order to reach its full potential. You play as Special Agent Kaname Date, a detective investigating the death of his old friend Shoko Nadami. To do this, he and his police department, ABIS, utilize a top-secret interrogation technique called ‘Psyncing,’ which lets him delve into the Freud/Jungian unconscious of a character to find out what secrets lie within. In gameplay, these Psyncing segments are represented by ‘Somniums’ — adventure-game-ish segments where you look around a room, interact with objects, and break your subject’s mental locks in order to come closer to the truth of the case. Somniums often possess multiple solutions — which each reveal separate things — and through uncovering these different ways of solving the puzzle the story can split off in several ways, each branch (similar to other Uchikoshi games, like Virtue’s Last Reward) revealing different aspects of the investigation and, once you’ve turned every stone, coalescing together in the end to give you the full picture.

And I think the way you slowly work your way through the mystery is one of the game’s strongest aspects. While there’s one issue I have — a major component to the mystery that isn’t really teased or foreshadowed at all until it comes up near the end — I think Uchikoshi’s multiple-route-based, plot-heavy, solve-the-overarching-mystery style of VN really works well translated to a whodunnit like this game. The way you get answers and more questions with every little bit of story progression, the way that the plot can twist and turn and veer off onto tangents and yet still make sense with context, the way the story pretty perfectly resolves everything when even details of the mystery itself can change depending on your branch… it’s great stuff. I marathoned basically the entire final act of the game in the space of one night because I knew I had to see how everything got resolved and ultimately, in hindsight, I really don’t regret that decision. I’m pretty happy with how it all went.

And while the mystery on its own is a strong positive towards this game, I think what really made me love this game’s story was the focus on its characters. There’s a large cast of, like, 30 people in total, and while some of those characters are obviously more important than others there isn’t particularly a weak link within the main cast, which is pretty incredible on a cast that runs the spectrum on things like age, personality, sexuality, and how much the game takes them seriously. I appreciate the game’s handling of anime tropes — your main character being majorly horny is a lot better when it’s a. completely optional whether you be that or not and b. actually justified within the context of the story, and I’ve found that tsunderes are a lot more likable when they’re both your daughter and also twelve years old — but most of all I really love the way characters are defined through their relationship to Date, and by extension, you: the player. Date’s core character traits — being aloof and distant to people and unfamiliar with a lot of details regarding the world and the situation at hand yet still having a sense of humour about the world around him — are traits that are very easy for the player to insert themselves onto, and the way you can choose how Date reacts to specific things, what offhanded statements he makes, or where to go first during an investigation really hits that line between Date being his own distinct character while still having the player kinda feel the same way he does about certain things. You too can feel the same sort of frustration when you rock up to haughty, obviously corrupt-and-evil congressman So Sejima’s place for information and end up with nothing because he knows how to “you don’t have a warrant” his way out of any confrontation you want to have with him. You can go off-topic to leer at or flirt with the receptionist and you feel the eyes of everybody else in the room judge you just like Date does. It's a quiet, subtle way of making the main character an insert of the player, and I think it works really well.

And again, I love how a lot of these characters are characterized by Date’s relationship with them, and how certain facets of them are revealed just as Date begins to know them on more than a surface level. I’ve mentioned Sejima above — how Date’s inability to achieve anything every time he walks onto the Sejima estate really does a great job at selling how untouchable the guy is — but I’d really like to shout out Iris and Aiba for really showing just how well the game does with its characters. Iris — the deuteragonist for the right side of the flowchart — is on the surface an energetic and cheerful idol, but from her very first appearance she uses that exact initial appearance to pressure Date into doing exactly what she wants, which immediately works to signify that she’s a lot more relevant to the mystery than she initially seems. Aiba — an advanced AI that functions as Date’s left eye for the majority of the game — mostly functions as exposition and the main source of comic relief, but there are moments where the two of you are alone and Aiba functions as your conscience, helping Date calm down through what’s on his mind and showing that, despite being an AI, she feels things exactly the same way Date does. It’s great stuff, and just an example of how well the game writes its characters. I’m really happy that there are points when even in the middle of the investigation that the characters can just sit down and have some downtime. It really suits this game’s biggest strength.

(and also Mizuki is adorable and easily the shining star of the cast and I’m SO HAPPY that she’s the protagonist for the sequel but also I couldn’t figure out a good place to put this so)

Honestly, the game’s really easily strong enough to be considered excellent, and I’d otherwise consider it as such… but there’s one really major aspect of the game that drags it down: Somniums. The short of how Somniums work is that you’re placed in an area and you’re expected to play around with the items within it until you stumble onto the thing that works and progress. A lot of the game’s irrelevant sense of humour is on full display during these puzzle segments, and most of the alternate options, while not what let you progress, are still worth doing because they’re fun and show a bit more of Date and Aiba’s relationship. Initially, it was fun, and kind of interesting to see all the dream logic stuff, and I was down to see exactly how this core concept iterated as it went on.

How it iterated was by adding a time limit. A really restrictive time limit. One that kind of singlehandedly goes against the best aspects of the Somniums and made me dread whenever they came up.

The way it works is that every action taken inside a Somnium detracts usually at least ten seconds (though these can detract up to 30 seconds or a full minute) from a hard six-minute time limit. Certain actions award you TIMIEs, which you can use to divide/subtract how much time an action takes, but certain actions can award you negative TIMIEs, which then multiplies how much time an action takes. Somniums almost immediately become an exercise in finding the quickest route through, and when the puzzles run on dream logic and brute-forcing through options until you find the right one, this… comes at odds with itself fairly quickly. Later Somniums basically become an exercise of knowing the correct path from the start because if you happened to mess up (or, y’know, do other things so you can get an achievement/read the funny dialogue) too much there’s a point where the puzzle becomes unwinnable and you have to go back to the beginning. This means skipping through (what can be) a lot of dialogue all over again, which… even with the shorter Somniums ends up becoming super frustrating. It gets even worse when some of the later Somniums have major plot beats within. Oh, hey, you want to experience the emotional climax of one of the story arcs which heavily explores the history of these two characters and represents major character development for one of them? Do you want to go through a haunting depiction of a cognitive disorder that paints the medium and heavily recontextualizes everything you’ve thought about one of the weirder characters so far? Get ready to force yourself through the same dialogue over and over again as you realize you have to go back to the very start in order to have enough time to get through. Get ready for what was once emotionally resonant to become a complete chore. Again, maybe if the time limit wasn’t there these would’ve been a lot more fun, but by the time I was ready to push towards the end I just opened up walkthroughs for Somniums and skipped all the potential fun dialogue they could’ve had. Sucked, but it was better than having to deal with repeating stuff over and over again.

More minor, and potentially spoilery, but one thing that did disappoint me about the resolution of the mystery is that… unlike the 999 trilogy, there wasn’t any IC explanation as to why locks existed and why you needed information in order to break those locks? There’s the beginning of an explanation... but then it kinda just goes “no that’s stupid it’s obviously parallel universes” when the topic of alternate timelines was barely even brought up in the game before or afterwards. It’s mostly obvious that it’s just an OOC “you can’t go here yet,” and that it’s kinda needed so that the player doesn’t stumble into endgame revelations/the true ending immediately, but when I ran into a lock the very first route I got onto, and when one of the actual endings just very suddenly cuts off, I kind of spent the whole game wondering why exactly things were working out like that only to… not really get what I was kind of hoping for, that things just cut off because the story requires that the story cuts off at that exact moment. I think the flow chart works really well, I think it’s integral to the game’s structure and story, but when the 999 trilogy always made sure the flow chart had an IC reason for existing… it’s hard not to strike a negative comparison here.

But ultimately, I thought AI was great! The way its puzzles are executed and some quibbles with the flow chart kind of stop it from being excellent, but if you’re into Uchikoshi’s tried-and-true story structure, or if you’re looking for a crazy mystery with great, low-key character writing and an amazingly irrelevant sense of humour, then I’d say this game’s a pretty strong 8/10.

And from the best game of my Halloween marathon to… what was easily the worst. Jack is Missing is a first-person story game which is just so fucking broken. Like, there’s lag on everything you do. There’s no button prompts for anything so you kind of have to guess what you’re meant to do when you pick up an item and want to put it down. Objectives and instructions aren’t generally clear so sometimes you’re left trying to figure out what to do. Cutscenes lock your character in place so whoops, if your head was inclined down when the big jumpscare was supposed to happen then too bad, you don’t actually get to see any of it. Like, I can say that the game wasn’t really a major glitchfest… but when my assumption while playing it is that it is, and when I restart it three times because I think some non-existent signposting is actually the game glitching out and preventing me from progressing, that’s… at least a little bit of an indictment. Combine all that with a… badly written story that literally ends, like, a third of the way through and some really incomprehensible voice acting, and… man, I’m loosely generous and tend to give things the benefit of the doubt, and I wouldn’t call this as bad as other things I’ve given this score, but… I honestly cannot think of anything this game in particular does well, and when the core of this broken mess is something that… wouldn’t have been very good to begin with, I don’t think I’d be lying if I said this was one of the worst games I’ve ever played. Light 1/10.