The other Nitrome game inspired by Lemmings! Unlike Sandman, though, you instead use your mouse to physically draw on the level, providing ways for your Lemmings to make it through the level, both directly — drawing lines to act as platforms to get them across a gap, or walls to change their direction — or by using it to influence something in the level: drawing a wall within an enemy to cut it in half, or turning the line you draw into a makeshift fuse to blow up a bomb. Each new obstacle brings a new way for the player to interface with the draw tool, and the game does a great job at mixing and matching all these different elements: never letting anything drop by the wayside, never making any given obstacle feel overdone. Combine that with level design which at times feels both frenetic and cerebral, a genuinely cute artstyle, and with some truly banger music, I genuinely think this game’s super charming. There are… issues, of course — there are some real finicky hitboxes, and one of the core mechanics where your lemmings must reach several different exit flags (and your progression through the game is gated behind a certain number of lemmings hitting the flag) seems to… straight up not work: so long as you get one little guy to an end flag, it seems like the game lets you through no matter what. They’re minor things, though, and in the case of the second one it just seems to make the game more friendly: if you’re willing to try to forgive some 17-year-old-flash-game jank, and you’re down for an experience that’s… more meaty than any of the other Nitrome made before this, I recommend it! Definitely my favourite of their 2006 output.

“Hey, what if we made Mario Kart, except also all the cars had guns and could shoot each other? Except also the A.I doesn’t care who wins so long as the player doesn’t so only ever target you? And also if the player gets shot they stop moving for a bit which leaves them in a perpetual cycle where they can’t meaningfully get ahead of the pack because the rest of the pack keeps stunlocking them? And also what if the player could never really do enough damage to kill any of the other tanks unless they actively threw the race to do it, meaning that all this mechanic ever amounts to is that the player's car has a health bar and also the comeback AI can red shell you at any time unless and only unless you can get an early lead and maintain it? What if we also made the game control really badly? Where turning is ridiculously slippery and will often cause you to careen into a wall? Where acceleration is non-existent and whether you’re moving fast or moving slow feels super arbitrary? And where the controls are force-bound into a setup that’ll cause intense pain to anybody right-handed where trying to move forward will forcibly scroll the page up in the HTML port we make 16 years later? What if we also didn’t have things common to other racing games like difficulty levels, a minimap on the screen so you can tell what’s ahead, or some sort of multiplayer so that it isn’t solely the player getting ganged up on by the AI? Wouldn’t that be great?”

Having gone through… so much of Nitrome’s back catalogue over… oh wow it’s been a year at this point? time fucking flies, man. But anyway what strikes me is how little I stuck with a bunch of these games — and, in particular how little I played of their… pre-2008 output. In hindsight, it makes sense: my ability to access the internet pre-the-age-of-ten was limited to whenever I’d completed my work early in the computer lab, or whenever we went through the back fence to my aunt’s place every Friday afternoon. Oftentimes I’d go full weeks in between playing games — not to mention how different computers would mean different save files, resetting my progress to the beginning each time — and oftentimes those gaps often meant I had some new toy that took precedence over the Nitrome game I’d already gone through: a new Poptropica island, maybe, or some new website like Crazymonkey.com or the Bubblegum Arcade. My impression is, a lot of times, I’d pick something up, give it my best shot, then never play it again, save for a couple I’d return to, a couple (like Frost Bite or Hot Air 2 or Off The Rails) that stuck around my memory. But even then, there was nothing here I was super gung-ho about beating, nothing here I’d super try to revisit.

Until this one: Dirk Valentine. I can’t begin to tell you just why this game was what kid me latched onto, why this one was what truly began the process of making him a Nitromehead — iirc my family didn’t get access to home internet until, like, January 2009 at the earliest — but god it got its claws in me. It was my first exposure to steampunk, and with no Horrible Histories to tell me otherwise, this was just what I assumed the Victorian era was like. It was my first exposure to the Wilhelm Scream, and even back then eight-year-old-me knew that was the funniest shit ever — he’d shoot enemies that weren’t even in his way just so he had a chance to hear that soundbyte again. He loved the core gameplay conceit: how the chaingun you wield is both your main way of fighting enemies and your main method of getting through the level. He loved bouncing shots off the walls, he loved making those weird webs of ricocheted chains that he could jump up and climb. He loved all the mechanics the game kept introducing, all the enemies, all the ways they impacted the chaingun. It gave me the brainworms, long, long before that word even entered my vernacular… yet I was never able to beat it. I made it far, near the end, but there was always one level I couldn’t beat. I was eight, I was nine, I was ten, and I’d keep coming back, keep thinking maybe this would be the moment I was good enough of a gamer to get through my plateau, but it never came to be. I’d reach whatever level it was that walled me (I can’t quite remember but it was probably Control Room 1) and I wouldn’t be able to beat the game before computer time was over, before next week gave me something else to fixate on. It was… certainly important in the context of my history with flash games, yet I never actually beat it. I never actually saved Queen Victoria from the evil Baron Battenburg.

At least, not until today.

…Playing the game again, in 2024, with whatever wisdom the past sixteen years have or haven't given me, what I’ve realized is that this is a fairly major step forward, at least in the context of Nitrome’s progression as a studio. This is their first game to have a proper story — or at least, more of a story than a ‘congratulations, you beat the game!’ screen and maybe a quick intro cutscene — your mission control’s consistent chiming in doing a lot to lend a sense of context and gravitas to your actions, even if, perhaps, his dialogue could’ve used some commas. I like, too, that the background changes as you go outside the fortress to inside then back to outside again: it’s baby steps compared to some of Nitrome’s later stuff (simply adding a filter to the outside background and then taking it out again), but it helps lend a sense of overall progression as you fight through the titular Fortress of Steam. Beyond that, a lot of what kid me found fun about it still applies today: how cool it is that your gun makes this both a shooter and a platformer, all the cool things the game explores with that mechanic, and how… frenetic the game grows to be, especially near the end (kid me’s dreams to beat this would’ve been absolutely doomed, lmao). I’m still fond of all the sounds you make as you do things: the screams the enemies make when they die, the extremely bitcrushed voicelines as you get a game over or pick up a healing item, they all lend so much character. I think perhaps the boss battles felt rather basic (and a bit of a crapshoot as to whether you get hit upon entering the arena or not), and in general it’s… easier to softlock yourself in a bunch of levels than I feel it maybe should be, but as a whole this was a blast. Perhaps it’s not fully polished to the point where I could call it one of the best Nitrome games nowadays — moving the mouse to move the camera was… rather rough, the recording quality of the music wasn’t that great and there were a non-zero amount of points where shooting the chaingun didn’t feel like it maybe should — but if any game has done enough to earn the right of pet favourite, it’s this one. God knows how much past me loved this. And I reckon he would've been happy to know that I eventually got good enough to finally clear this, even if it, uh, took a good bit longer than he presumed it would.

Nitrome’s second racing game! Much better than the first one! …Not much to say, otherwise. This is a game that’s evidently meant to be played multiplayer, and the fact that this can go up to four players yet at the same time can only be played on a single keyboard perhaps speaks to why it feels… rather limited, compared to the games surrounding it. You move your UFO around the track by tapping the boost button over and over again, you turn to try and avoid hitting obstacles or falling off the course, you complete three laps and win. There are only three courses, only two unique obstacles, and not even any AI UFOs to race against — doing the game singleplayer merely has you racing against the clock, which leaves a game that’s… effectively ‘done’ in ten minutes. Evidently, this was more meant to be something endlessly replayable — something for whenever the eight-year-old me had free time at the computer lab and four friends all willing to play Twister on the keyboard — though even then I’m not sure this has enough here to return to after a couple runthroughs of each of the racetracks. More like a demo for further multiplayer capabilities — and, perhaps, for the non-zero amount of racing games Nitrome would make after this point — rather than something that really stands on its own.

It’s wild what banal memories from these games rush into my head the moment I play them again. I didn’t remember how exactly this game played, or whether this was one of the games I beat back when I was a kid, but I heard the main theme and I saw these anemone decorating the ocean floor and that unlocked something I… don’t think I’ve thought about since before I was ten. Like I just remember seeing those things dotting the bottom of the level and being so amazed and weirded out about how much they looked like brains that they buried themselves somewhere into my long-term memory. Kind of insane. And the game itself is pretty fun, too! You point and click your submarine to move it both under and over the ocean, trying to avoid enemies, trying to find treasure, and using your depth charges (rather reminiscent of Toxic’s bombs) to clear the way, being able to fight back against enemies but only if they’re directly below you. There’s a fun diversity of levels: ones where you have to effectively find your way through a giant maze, ones where you have multiple valid paths through, ones with one path, yet optional objectives you can take if you wanna get more points, and then ones where it’s a tight squeeze and you’ve got to go through the gauntlet. Combined with the ways the game mixes and matches with different enemies, distinct mechanics, you get a rather solid little undersea adventure, that, unlike… a good amount of similar games this dev has made doesn’t become a massive slog in the second half. Perhaps because they… apparently patched this so that you get double the health (which might be why using i-frames to gun through the last portion of a level worked as well as it did) but either way it shows a pretty good amount of iteration and forward progress, and, as we leave 2007 and enter 2008, shows a good bit of promise for the output ahead.

I can’t profess to know fully the timeline of triple-A gaming — just when exactly we reached the shift towards what we’re getting now — but something funny I found as I played through David Cage’s Heavy Rain is how it honestly predates a lot of the trends present nowadays. The core relationship (or, at least, one of them) is between a father and his son, the latter representing the father’s attempts and desires to be redeemed of his past sins. It’s a game that’s evidently attempting to be more than just a game, to prove that the medium can be seen as art, yet, rather than leaning into being a video game, instead tries to achieve this by trying to emulate Hollywood films, with a specific focus on cinematography, hiring screen actors, using mo-cap amongst other things. It got praise in its time for bringing the medium forward its approach of interactive narrative being seen as revolutionary by mainstream critics, showing to the world what the future of gaming could be (and, admittedly, while Cage did not invent interactive narrative, he did make games such as Heavy Rain, games where “your choices matter” a trend for years to come). You even watch your child die in the first half hour of the game. I’m not sure whether it’s necessarily counted amongst, say The Last of Us or 2018's God of War in terms of cinematic AAA gaming, but to some extent it did walk so they could run. For better or worse.

The game follows four particular characters, who, while not initially knowing each other, are tied together in their attempts to find the Origami Killer: a serial killer who entraps and drowns children during periods of extreme rainfall, challenging their fathers to Saw-esque torture games where both their, and their sons, lives hang on the line. You play as Ethan Mars, who, after the accidental death of his first son, Jason, now must race against time to save his second son, Shaun, after the two of them are chosen as the Origami Killer’s next victims. You also play as Scott Shelby, a former cop turned private investigator visiting the previous victims of the origarmy Origami Killer, trying to unearth old clues to find new leads. You also also play as Detective Narmin Norman Jayden, an FBI agent investigating the origammy Origami Killer and attempting to find Shaun, while at the same time dealing with his crippling addiction to drugs and VR sunglasses. You also also also play as Madison, who, after being attacked by dream terrorists in her apartment, goes to a hotel, finds Ethan, and gloms onto him for the rest of the story. But every minute that passes is one less minute to save Shaun, and only through the four’s combined investigation may the secrets of the Origami Killer be revealed…

I’ll give it a few things: I do love all the ways individual scenes can diverge and reconvene and take into account most of the things the player does. While everything on an overall arc level tends to streamline and go down the one path, it’s kind of incredible just how differently individual scenes can diverge based on what happens, and just how many outcomes you can get. There was one early scene as Scott where a store I’m in gets targeted by a robber who doesn’t notice me. I’m encouraged to sneak up and grab a weapon, but then I fail the QTE, which leads the robber to see me and point his gun in my direction. What then follows is… a completely different scene, one where I can either try and talk the robber down, or try and stall for time until I can get close enough to attack. And this is all just from a branch that occurred when I fucked up a QTE. There’s also another moment where you can stumble across something you’re not meant to, finding yourself in a life-or-death confrontation with a completely different threat… or you can get what you need and get out without triggering that branch of the scene, your character not even having an idea of the bullet they just dodged. On a scene-by-scene level, a lot of the way the game constructs its interactive narrative is honestly pretty awesome, and I really loved looking up a lot of individual moments afterwards and seeing just how many different outcomes I could’ve gotten.

I’m also fond of how this game styles itself after detective noir, yet at the same time avoids the pitfalls I’ve seen other noirs trudge into. From the persistent heavy rain backdropping the game no matter where you are in this nameless American city, to the drab, grey, muted colour scheme that avoids the perils of low saturation, the game wears an aesthetic and wears it well, providing a little throughline that helps to suggest its colour and tone. I’m in addition a fan of the way they used mo-cap: not merely just to capture the actor's likeness and such, but also to choreograph many of the QTE action sequences. And not only are they pretty well-choreographed in their own right (they’re clear, they have a bit of slapstick style, you can easily tell what’s happening) but I love how seamless they feel with the many ways they can go. Every action by a bad guy, every action by you can succeed or fail based on the appropriate QTE, yet never at any point did the editing feel choppy or unable to handle a particular combination of wins and losses, providing an overall sequence that’s fairly unique in terms of how it specifically shakes out yet still flows without much interruption.

Unfortunately, before any of that, the first thing you get to experience is just how awfully the game plays. I’m not sure what exactly possessed David Cage to put tank controls in his interactive narrative but good god are they a mismatch. As opposed to moving via tilting the control stick, doing that merely has your character tilt their head in that direction, and you must instead hold down R2 to actually have your character move. This makes things so much more cumbersome than they need to be, between having your characters get caught on objects, getting stuck between camera angles, and in general having a hard time getting to the precise place they need to be to interact with something. The quicktime events… are better and also worse. On default they’re fine, even if oftentimes it’s really hard to see them given the way they fly around (and behind) things in the environment. Other times they don’t fare as well: there’s this one specific type of QTE you have to do which effectively requires you to pretzel your hands across the controller in a way that's so uncomfortable to hold for an extended period. Anything that requires using the Playstation Move controls isn’t exactly great. You’re told to physically move the controller down but because up/down are reversed (and this isn’t changeable) you're actually meant to move the controller up. You’re told to move the controller up and then you get in position to do so and then suddenly you pass the QTE without even trying. You’re told to shake the controller and you have to do it for so long that it could honestly qualify as a form of exercise. Legitimately by the end the motion sensors were auto-succeeding QTEs without any input on my part, which was great when I was trying to get somewhere specific but the game instead pulled me away from it over and over again. I’m honestly a fan of how long the QTE action sequences go on for — they’re the type of endurance test I think works fairly well, imo — but as a whole, this game does not control well. At best it’s stiff and clunky, and at points feels physically painful to have to interface with.

The story also has some pretty major problems. Amongst other, more minor things (this city apparently has at least four separate serial killers) the overall mystery... feels rather slipshod, at points. The game directly lies to you at several points regarding the identity of the Origami Killer, and while that’s not something I hate in theory, the game doesn’t have nearly enough grace or proper consideration to pull a twist like that off. There are little moments that you can point at, in hindsight, but as the game actively goes through with the reveal and flashes back to all the things the culprit did throughout the story, many of the things you see are either things you, the player, never actually got to see, or actively plays a completely different scene to the one you saw, leaving it feeling like the story was actively trying to trick you for the sake of its twist as opposed to providing you any sort of clues or natural progression (and, at the same time, bringing into question why the culprit would’ve done certain things the way they did if they were the culprit the whole time). The game will assume you’ve gone down branches you never actually took, with Madison referring to events that she wasn’t there for, having the contact information for somebody she never meets depending on certain events, and, at one point, being whispered the identity of the killer, reacting in shock… despite, due to what was likely a cut interaction, the killer being somebody Madison has never met before.

And honestly, you can tell that certain plot elements were cut mid-development, yet the vestiges are still present, and leave quite a lot of plot points that never conclude or get expanded on. Ethan explicitly has visions, gets teleported across the city, gets sent into psychic realms, and it’s brought up that maybe he’s not fully in control of himself… and the moment this is addressed as a problem is the last time it’s ever brought up, apparently because they wanted to excise all supernatural elements from the mystery (yet still keep the sci-fi sunglasses?), meaning there’s this whole aspect of the plot that just ends up going nowhere. The game keeps track of how many inches the titular Heavy Rain reaches in every new scene (just like Indigo Prophecy did by showing the temperature continually dropping) but this doesn’t amount to anything, it’s just some background detail that this city is receiving continuous, unending, apocalyptic amounts of rain while everybody runs around and tries to find this one serial killer. Jason and Shaun were aged up from 4/5 to 10/11… yet still act like they’re the former, making it really feel as if this game doesn’t know how children act. There was meant to be a whole backstory beat where Madison is trying to live with her memories of being a journalist for the Iraq war, but then this is never expounded upon, so Madison just has her first scene be this dream sequence of being stalked and attacked by two men in her home, which, speaking of, it’s kind of incredible how literally every scene Madison forces her into some archetype: either being subservient to a man, or being subjected to some sort of sexualized violence. She goes from potential assault victim to being Ethan’s wetnurse to being Ethan’s wetnurse again to potential torture victim to being forced to strip at gunpoint (and of course the way the game frames this is very classy) to very suddenly becoming Ethan’s love interest and giving the player a fucking incredible QTE sex scene. The very first scene she’s in you can interact with a clothesrack and then very suddenly she takes her clothes off and has a full-on shower scene. And meanwhile, unless you look at something rather specific in that same segment you don’t even get to know that she’s a journalist until the game’s almost over. She at least manages to be the main driver of the plot during the endgame — and manages to do so without the game relegating her into some sexist trope, barring her potential endings — but god, is the road to get there so Frank Miller-coded. And this isn’t even getting into the game’s two black characters.

Something that struck me is that the audio quality is, uh, quite bad. And this is from somebody a bit too hard of hearing to notice stuff like this. Oftentimes I’d find that the music, or the titular heavy rain would overpower everything else in the mix, making it impossible to hear anything the characters were saying unless you turned the volume down. The mic quality — particularly for the kids — is rather spotty. Every time I listened in on a character’s thoughts I legitimately thought something was wrong with my setup because it sounds so rough: the echo effect is so loud and tinny and the same channel as the unaltered line and it legitimately feels like the line is playing twice at once instead of merely being an echo filter. And this doesn’t even get into the voice acting. Most of the cast seem to be British or otherwise European playing Americans and it really shows. Everybody seems to be in a perpetual state of fighting with their accent. There are pretty consistent intonation issues across the board: nobody pronounces “origami” consistently, or even correctly. There are a couple of decent performances among the muck — Madison pretty consistently does a good job, Norman tries his best despite being the most hamstrung by accent issues — but a lot of the other performances either strike me as either… bad direction or screen actors not quite being used to motion capture/voice acting. People meme the whole ‘press X to Jason’ thing but it’s clear that there’s some sort of miscommunication between intent and execution: the direction was evidently ‘call for your son’ but absent context it feels more like Ethan’s trying to get Jason to set the table more than he is desperately trying to find his son in the middle of the crowd. So many performances feel kinda apathetic or robotic or like they have a really bad cold, including the two main characters guaranteed to make it to the end. It’s very funny that, among other things, this game mostly predates the trend of using non-voice actors in voice roles (at least for video games — Aladdin and Shrek had long pushed voice actors out of film roles) because it showcases a lot of the pitfalls that doing so can lead into, not to mention all the other, persistent issues with this game’s audio.

…It feels weird, in the end, to place this lower in rank than the two other Quantic Dream games I’ve played thus far. If, in part, because of what Heavy Rain has going for it. As opposed to Beyond: Two Souls, which plays it rather boring except for the parts that maybe don’t stand out for the better, or Indigo Prophecy, which honestly reads like David Cage got concussed halfway into writing it, Heavy Rain does a decent amount well. It builds up a tone, its action sequences are well choreographed especially considering how many permutations of them are present, and it’s really cool to see just how its choice-and-consequence is structured on a scene-by-scene basis. It’s a pity, then, that all these good parts stuck in an overall package that… struggles, between its awful control scheme, its poorly edited mystery, the rough audio quality and how David Cage really needs to drink Respect Women Juice. Sure, compared to everything else, and considering its place in history, Heavy Rain has a lot I’m personally willing to bat for, but under the deluge, after the storm, when the rivers and the creeks have burst their banks and dealt irreversible damage to the ecosystem… it’s rather difficult to care about the water amongst the mud. 3/10.

The third, and final, winter-themed game Nitrome released to close out 2007, and also apparently one of their most popular games? At least up until 2009? I’m a little surprised at that: frankly, like the quote itself says, I would’ve thought it’d be something a bit more flagship, like Skywire or Final Ninja, as opposed to this, which was… not a game I had much memory of. Even when playing it again, the only things that really came back to me were bits of the music and the visual design of the lizard enemies. Other than that, this was… mostly rather unfamiliar to me, but frankly, playing through it, I can see why it caught on! It very much focuses on Nitrome’s strengths, turning a simple concept (walk on the level to freeze it below you, freeze the whole level to win) and slowly ramping it up and up with enemies and mechanics, making something simple rather complex without taking away from what’s fun in the first place. Not to say there's nothing new, though: in particular, I love the use of dynamic music here, the way the main theme starts to incorporate sleigh bells as you freeze up more and more of the level. It's a neat way of tracking how close you are to beating the level, and while it's certainly not as ambitious as some of the stuff you'd see done later on, it's cute, and a fun new iteration this game brings to Nitrome's repertoire.

The game also manages to sidestep some of the issues present in other Nitrome games, or at least the ones up to this point. While dying takes you back to the beginning of the level, levels themselves are short enough that losing is never a major setback, and nothing in particular ever gets to the level of the stupid endurance tests that plagued games like, say, Twang or Headcase or Dangle. There’s a multiplayer mode, but the game isn’t assuming you’re doing it co-op — all it does is add a fun PVP element where you can compete with player 2 to see who can freeze more of the level — and, unlike previous multiplayer game Square Meal, you’re not kneecapped just because you don’t have a friend over. There are problems, of course: I think the game has way more levels than it needs to (even if I do appreciate how gradual this game’s difficulty curve is), and the final levels in particular are rather rough in how they basically become all about keeping out of enemy sight lines lest they undo vast swaths of your progress, but as a whole, I had fun throughout the game’s runtime. Which is appreciated. After going through a year's worth of… mostly platformers, each mostly plagued with the exact same flaws, seeing this and Snow Drift finally put the work in to try and combat those issues… it’s a nice way to leave off the year that just passed, and a decent promise for the one ahead. And knowing just what Nitrome released in 2008, I’m excited to revisit what’s to come.

The third Dread X Collection, released… wow, two months after the second, keeps a lot of the same ideas in play. There are still twelve games in total, all following the same prompt, all wrapped together with an interactive launcher. This time, each game is tied together with a central theme of ‘SPOOPY’ — dancing the line between scary and cute, making things that appear innocent on the surface but become evidently not as you delve deeper and deeper — and, like, man this is so my shit. Weird genre mashups. Bizarre and evocative visual styles. Throwbacks to the most out-there of things, and gameplay conceits unlike many other horror games I’ve seen. And better yet, even though the theming itself is already pretty strong, and well-realized across each of the twelve games here, almost all of them are at the very least really solid in their own right. There’s one or two stinkers in the pack, but all the others are hits, between the fun and weird things they do with the prompt, their perpetual really strong aesthetics, and just how well they play, especially for games each made in ten or so days.

There’s one continual weak point, though: the launcher. Not the game itself — developed by KIRA of Spooky’s Jump Scare Mansion fame — which works fairly well as a wrap-around, solving puzzles in a castle to unlock more games to unlock more areas in the castle which unlock more puzzles which in turn unlock more games. More the… story content. How it screeches the game to a halt just so it can exposit to you for literal minutes. How if you just wanna go to a different game or somewhere else in the castle you’re forced to walk as slowly as possible in the meantime to listen to these two people babble on about whatever it even is they’re babbling on about. How you can mess the game up by walking past a dialogue trigger when you’re already in dialogue, causing it to not trigger and making you have to go all the way back just so you can trigger it and let the game continue. The way they handled the overarching story in Dread X 2 worked well: it was brief, it only popped up a couple of times the whole game, and if you didn’t care for it you could let it become background noise as you went to solve another puzzle/put another game into the VHS. Here they made it so much longer, so much less optional, and so much more boring: seriously, whatever it was they were talking about was really in-one-ear-then-out-the-other. Wasn’t necessarily something that tanked the collection as a whole for me, but man did I dread completing a game and going into the launcher for that exact reason.

Anyway, onto the individual games! In order from which I played them:

SATO WONDERLAND:
Fun! I love how everything comes together here: the retraux graphical style, the odd camera angles, the voicelines that sound cute but clash so hard with the vrrs and buzzes of the machines around you, this game sets up its vibes really well, and as a mood piece is consistently strong. It’s not let down by the writing, either: you’re set up with a breadcrumb trail at the start, and every part you uncover tantalizes you into wanting to know more… yet at the same time brings on even more questions, circling around and around before it all becomes clear at once. I… do think there was room for some more polish on the core mechanics, perhaps? Namely the part where you have to combine keywords: some sort of system where exhausting all the combinations for one particular word removes it from the list could help to ensure the player is continuously moving forward through things, in addition to preventing any situations (like what happened with me >_>) where the player forgets what specific things they’ve covered and start trying to brute force the game/repeating old combinations to try and find something that’ll let them progress. Other than that particular quibble (and some, uh, bugginess near the end) this was solid! Doubt it’ll end up my favourite of the pack but certainly an encouraging enough start.

BUBBO: ADVENTURE AT GERALD’S ISLAND:
So this game takes the style of, say, a Banjo-Kazooie, a Mario 64, like one of those N64 early-3D platformers where you run and jump around a singular large level, doing quests and searching for hidden nooks and crannies to get all the Jiggies and get all the coins. What I think I like most about this is how hard it commits to the aesthetic: characters grunt noises as their dialogue unfurls across the screen, the character models are simplistic but not obviously blocky, and even as the ~spooky~ things start it does so in a way that never truly undercuts the idea of this theoretically being an N64 platformer. Or at least, never really does anything that Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie wouldn’t, tonally. It’s also fairly fun as a platformer. The platforms are simple, floaty enough that you can get away with some jumps you maybe shouldn’t, yet some of the coins/objectives you need to do require enough engagement with the mechanics that you can’t just waltz through the game (let alone all the stuff you need to do for the secret ending). I think perhaps the final challenge is kind of annoying? It’s a fun idea to have to run across the entire island in one mad dash, and there are a lot of cool shortcuts you can take if you’re confident enough to try, but it’s so rough having to go back to the start every time your chaser nothin’ personnels right in front of you when you’re in the middle of a jump. Bittttt of a lowlight on what’s otherwise a pretty fun game. Would otherwise rec, though!

SPOOKWARE @ THE VIDEO STORE:
A horror… microgames collection? I’ve… never actually played any WarioWare, or anything else of that ilk (other than the Smash stages) but when I found out there was a game pack in my game pack I was rather amused, to say the least. And I stayed that way going through it! It almost feels… roguelite/endurance run in nature: to clear a level, you have to complete ten randomly chosen microgames in succession. If you clear one, you get to continue, but fail three times, you’ve got to go right back to the start. It becomes a macro game, both of desperately trying to figure out the rules of the game while you still have time to clear it, and then also hoping you’ll roll the levels you're good at and also come to understand the games that are a bit more ??? to you. There’s nothing more stressful than trying to figure out how a rotary phone works under a time limit. It’s great. Not to mention how cool the individual games are: how divergent they feel from each other, the layered-photorealistic-patchwork aesthetics going on, and all the little jokes when you pass or fail a game, this was super fun. Enough so for me to actually try the endless mode for a good bit once I was technically done with the game. Good stuff. Found out there was actually a full release for this one and honestly… I’m a bit surprised, but I’m happy. Always glad to see which out of all of these games manages to go the extra mile.

SOUL WASTE:
…Another N64-styled get-all-the-coins platformer. Huh. At the very least, it’s considerably different than the one before. You’re barely given any instruction beyond the premise, no real direction the game points you to, you’re merely just left to explore the wastes, searching for the things you need to find while fighting enemies and collecting all the things you can. It’s a vibe, honestly. The game achieves that Goldilocks-esque middle ground between requiring your attention if you don’t wanna die yet also letting you zone out and listen to your friends talk about whatever it is they’re talking about. Patricia Taxxon did the music and it works well: synth-heavy tracks that run the gamut from sparse to simplistic to suddenly loud and complex and frenetic. It’s great. Maybe wish the physics didn’t feel as icy? Maybe also wish some of the enemy encounters didn’t flood you as hard as they do? Made some sections feel a little rough playing through, but otherwise… yeah, I enjoyed this a good deal. Honestly if there were a solo release of this I’d one hundo percent play it again. This was a fun time.

NICE SCREAMS AT FUNFAIR:
Well, they can’t all be winners. I guess sometimes when you only have a few days to make an entire videogame you sometimes won’t be able to make the deadline. Nice Screams at Funfair is, theoretically, a game that involves you scooping ice cream for customers at an undead amusement park. The reality is that it’s a rather buggy mess. Customers think about the ice cream they want for a split second before standing there, listlessly, endless patience in their eyes as they watch you fumble with the tray doors as you desperately try to keep their order in your memory. Putting scoops on the cone requires you to throw your scooper, for some reason, and my booth quickly became littered with pitches that missed or bounced off the cone, almost all the challenge having to navigate the rather fiddly physics. There’s a system where you can try to avoid the gaze of the security drone in the booth to attempt to sneak in tips but also it’s bugged and even if you do it when it’s not looking it’ll catch you out anyway. I tried this once and then a customer came in and gave their order while I wasn’t looking so I was forced to restart the whole game. There’s no real rush to complete orders in time — no mounting pressure of, say, more customers coming in as you try to complete the order currently on hand — so even if the game worked as it was meant to there… really isn’t much depth here. You do like five orders and then the game ends. Perhaps, if this had more time in the oven, there… could be a little bit of something here, but as is it mostly feels like the side of game jams nobody tells you about. Sometimes you make something that’s honestly incredible given the constraints in place. Sometimes those same constraints force you into putting out a rushjob.

CHIP'S TIPS:
I’m sorry, I can’t not love this. It might not necessarily have as much as some of the other games in this pack do but it makes up for it in sheer charm, and just how hard it kinda goes for it. A Blue’s Clues style horror game is a silly idea in theory, and frankly just as silly in practice, but the game does a fantastic job at making you laugh with it, from its rather irreverent sense of humour, its animation, the way the FMV interacts with the pre-rendered backgrounds, it certainly leans towards humour harder than any of the other Torple Dook games I’ve played, but it does it so well. And not to say the game isn’t without its substance: it’s a fairly solid puzzle game as you explore and unlock new parts of the house to tick off all the items on your checklist, and honestly? as a horror game? it actually got pretty unnerving, to the point where I was loosely dreading what was going to happen as things started going more and more off the rails. I… don’t think I can particularly say more about this. It’s very much one of those games that appeals specifically to me. It’s also very much one of those things that you’re gonna have to see for yourself.

SUBMISSION:
(spoilers for this one. this game buries the lede on what it is for a non-zero period of time but tragically to talk about requires one to loosely ruin the surprise. if you were at all interested in playing this one skip this review I guess)

Having played and liked The Open House, a previous game by the same developer, I was eager to see whether this game would be just as fun and inventive, and it didn’t disappoint! Beyond the intro — which is fairly on point for what it’s trying to parody — the core of the game is you, the player, going through the same perils most game devs go through having only a few days to make an entire video game. Find the store-bought assets that don’t clash with your vision! Physically fight the code of the game to get basic mechanics to work! Solve the mystery lying at the heart of all these disparate indie horror stock locations! On sheer conceptual level it’s very, very strong. In practice… it’s a rather solid puzzler, with a decent core of mixing and matching areas and mechanics to open new spaces up and eventually complete your very own video game. It’s fun, clever, and at one point honestly a bit unnerving, though it admittedly did get rather tedious manually creating the mechanics over and over again every time I had to switch from one to the other, especially when I was stuck and a bit confused on what I’m meant to be doing next. Also awkward when you manage to break through and progress with one mechanic… only to then have to go back out and switch it out for another mechanic. Kinda wish there was a way it could’ve been streamlined because it felt rather clunky as was. Not enough to ruin the game — the concept alone super carries this, let alone just how well the game’s style of parody characterizes the whole thing — though perhaps enough to knock it below the upper echelons of this pack.

MATTER (OVER) MIND:
The… third collect-the-notes style platformer, though I wouldn’t necessarily call this retro-styled — the top-down camera, I think, pushes it out of that realm and more into letting it feel like its own thing. On the other hand, I think the top-down style also makes this game feel a lot clunkier than I think was intended. You play a goopy thing that jumps onto people’s heads to take them over, but there’s no way to really be able to judge your height as you jump, which often led me to sail past people’s heads or accidentally hit a platform I’m trying to jump onto. And even if it weren’t for the camera, your jump feels so clumsy: you have to hold down the jump for a little bit to be able to get any height at all which is great when you need to climb up a staircase while one the guards are firing 18 times into your head and chest region. The stealth… felt rather borked too, guards detecting me through line of sight blockers, remaining procced on me even when I’ve left the room, in general not feeling like it works the way it should. There’s a secret ending you can collect if you get all the coins, but dying resets the counter back to zero, meaning that should you mess up a platforming section or should the platforming stop you from getting away from a guard you have to scour the entire facility all over again. There’s certainly a good concept here: I love the “organism wrecks shit in the lab he was born in in an attempt to get free” genre of horror, and I did like the general sense of humour, but I think if any game here suffered from the game-jam time limit it was this one. Polish wise it only feels like it's only partway there.

REACTOR:
Neat little walking sim. Perhaps doesn’t truly go anywhere out there — you can kinda guess the way the story’s gonna go once it gets in motion — but it’s competently told, and even then a lot of what this game is going for is stylistic. The endless desert landscape outside your little station. The stark, blinding black and white all around you, only broken up by the pink of your AI assistant and the red of the meteor. The way walking across the ground feels: the smooth floors and staircases of the station compared to the grooves and bumps of everything else, there’s a lot that characterizes the experience even if the main story doesn’t quite feel so unique. The game was also rather buggy? Driving the car through the desert felt like I was fighting against the game a little bit, and by the end I managed to get myself stuck in such a way that I couldn’t move and had to start the game over again. Maybe gave me a bit more time to notice stuff I didn’t before, but, uh, perhaps something that would’ve been nice to avoid. Sticks out a little for the worse amongst the rest of the pack given how standard this feels compared to the… varied ways the rest of the anthology goes out there, but I’d still say it’s solid.

DISPARITY OF THE DEAD:
My favourite of the… wow there were four separate N64-era collect-the-notes platformers this pack, weren’t there? Not especially a genre I look at and naturally think ‘horror’, but this game in particular I think works in how it leans into it. The afterlife is desolate — disparate platforms dotting an endless void, the denizens left with nothing but to contemplate their life and death for eternity. Plays… a bit odd with the whole “you are a detective finding CLUES and figuring out a MYSTERY” element, thinking about it, but even then I think the writing is one of the strongest parts of this. Death and suicide are fairly common topics of conversation as you jump across the wasteland; specifically, what happens after somebody makes that choice to end their life, and how one ultimately copes with the reality of eternity. At the very top of the world is a payphone that delivers a constant stream of last words, and what struck me most was... forgive me, the disparity between how those about to die approach the end: how much consent they have in the choice, how at peace they are with what’s about to happen. It all builds up to you crossing over and visiting the land of the living, and while aesthetically it’s rather striking… it perhaps plays less well than the 3D platforming you’ve done before. The game suddenly takes on fixed-camera tank controls… and it does not control well: your perspective frequently changes and so do the controls, to the point where I honestly never knew what direction I was going to move when I tried to move. It’s at least a fairly minor part of the whole experience, and doesn’t take away too much from… just how strong this is in general. At least thematically, at least for most of the game's runtime. Honestly, the fact that it’s not first place really just speaks to the strength of this pack. There's some real heavy hitters here.

BETE GRISE:
This one is carried at least a little bit on its aesthetics but man do its aesthetics carry it far. The pixel art is just gorgeous: the bright yet off-colour… colours present everywhere you go, all the little things you can find in the background, and the way Pom always looks ever so off model whenever she’s on screen, there’s so much effort to making this all look a little off and yet at the same time just so visually striking. It made me so happy to see new things for the sake of seeing these new things. Also loved the grid movement, how reminiscent it is of, like, the flash games they used to have on the Cartoon Network website, how it always feels like you’re going to open up the elevator to something you don’t particularly want to see. Do wish there were more minigames to do as you go through the hotel — especially given that the most tedious of the three is the one you do the most — but honestly that complaint feels a bit pocket change: even if it is a bit sparse in terms of content it more than manages to make up just for how well it does atmospherically. Really wanna see what else this dev has done. Perhaps not the most memorable on paper, but not something I’m going to forget any time soon.

EDEN: GARDEN OF THE FAULTLESS:
Have you ever wanted to play the Chao Garden from Sonic Adventure 2 but instead of raising Chao you’re raising biblically accurate angels? Well, be not afraid, EDEN: Garden of the Faultless might just be the game for you. The gameplay loop is simple: you get gifted a biblically accurate angel from above, you ram them into trees to collect fruit, and then you send them off to the races. Winning a race makes all the angels you have obsolete due to stat caps, but that’s fine, all you have to do is get God to give you a new angels, then command all your previous angels to kill themselves at the altar so that your new pet can be even stronger! It’s simple… if rather finicky. Getting your angels to go where you want them to is this whole process where you gotta click on the angel you want, go to the place you want them to go, then watch them slowly move over from where they randomly drifted off. Not to mention how buggy the game is: angels randomly switching names, angels ramming into you and throwing you into the bottomless pit below you, angels randomly despawning and making you think they’ve just disappeared forever… even despite this, though, there’s a fun, if maybe a slightly tedious core. I like that the game… doesn’t actually go full horror with its concept. It’s morbid, sure, but it always makes sure to be a little cute about it, never suggesting a particular tone around anything you’re doing, which then makes the point where it tries to sneak something past you feel much more potent. Perhaps not a favourite — having to grind up an angel’s stats became a bit tedious after a bit — but it was cute, a fun way to spend an hour or so.

Chip's Tips > SPOOKWARE @ The Video Store > Bete Grise > Disparity of the Dead > Soul Waste > Submission > Bubbo: Adventure on Geralds Island > Sato Wonderland > EDEN: Garden of the Faultless > Reactor > Matter OVER Mind > Nice Screams at Funfair

Well this, uh, mostly consisted of me just, like, walking around a mansion and delivering a letter. I get that this is meant to be a loose remake of Jack in the Dark — a quick ten-minute tech demo starring one Grace Saunders, meant to show the game’s engine in action — though I think the difference here is scale: while Jack in the Dark used all-new assets and locations, telling its own self-contained story, Grace in the Dark is in its entirety things that would go on to be in the full game: the mansion, the monster models, even one of the hallucinations you get where the mansion changes shape is one you get in the full game. Evidently, this is meant to give a sneak peek of the story, do a dramatic cast reveal of JODIE COMER and DAVID HARBOUR as the lead roles, and give an idea of what the full game is going to do… which means it loses a lot of its potential impact if you’ve already gone ahead and played the full game. I do like the little glimpse of a not-quite-on-kilter narrator in Grace, and I do like how certain things are utilized differently here than they are in the full game (the enemy models, specifically, and there’s a cool thing you can do on the stairs that you can’t in the main game), but as a whole… it would probably have been capable as a demo, as a little preview of what was to come. On its own, it’s a bit too short and a bit too straightforward to really be... much of anything. It’s no Jack in the Dark, that’s for sure.

Compared to the pop culture behemoth it’d so quickly become, it’s easy to dismiss the first entries in the Pokèmon series as “having not aged well.” And perhaps there’s at least a little truth in that: as the first game in the series, many of the quality of life features present in later generations aren’t quite present, and are sorely missed. It’s certainly rather annoying to be perpetually in contention with the item limit, where often you’re going to have to drop things as routes and dungeons have more things on the floor than you’re ever going to have free space in your bag. It’s certainly rather finicky to have to manually go into the menu and select the HM move you want to use, and it’s certainly rather tedious to have to navigate the PC every time you’re suddenly required to use Cut. Pokèmon learn either every move or no moves, which not only makes training up something in the latter category feel like pulling teeth, but also makes a lot of the game's difficulty fold perhaps more easily than it should: the Ghost type, in particular, being incredibly adept in a player’s hands because so many Pokèmon only ever naturally learn normal type moves.

Not to mention how… it’s a game held together by duct tape and dreams. A type meant to be super-effective against another type actually doesn’t do any damage at all. The so-called “good” AI — an RNG stratagem given to important fights, meant to push them towards super effective moves and away from not very effective moves — is anything but, making it oh so easy to trap certain important fights in a loop because they failed to take into account whether the super effective move they’re programmed to prioritize actually does any damage. Sometimes when you get the catching tutorial and then go to Cinnabar Island you rip the game open, a malignant piece of code emerging from the shoreline, irreversibly corrupting the world around you, before then challenging you to a Pokèmon battle. Between the bugs, between the bits of design philosophy that took years to be iterated on, Pokèmon Red and Blue are more of a stepping stone: important to understand just what the appeal was and how the franchise took over the world, but perhaps, in the full context of what we have now, not the best Pokèmon games to actually play.

But that’s the thing: Pokèmon Red & Blue did not set out to be Pokèmon games, they set out to be RPGs. An RPG with a central mechanic that completely reimagines how said RPG gameplay traditionally works, yes, but an RPG nonetheless, and one that hews much closer mechanically, thematically to being one than any Pokèmon game afterward.

Because, on one hand, it would be easy to say the game folds to any player who knows what they’re doing. On the other hand, that’s coming from a world where you’ve gone through Kanto in so many other games. That’s with the years' worth of accumulated knowledge of the type chart — or the years spent playing games that’ll just tell you if a given move will be effective against another Pokèmon the moment they’re registered in your Pokèdex. Pokèmon Red and Blue, on the other hand, run under the impression that they’re the only games of their kind, for better or worse. Specifically, they kind of run under the old RPG paradigm where finding the way forward often required you to take in context clues, or often explore for exploring’s sake. Kanto is huge, and after a certain point, notably open-ended: moving forward only requires whatever you need to move forward, be that a key item, a HM, or the permission to use said HM. Once you beat Misty the game becomes one huge scavenger hunt, where you’re unlocking something that’ll unlock something that’ll unlock the way forward, and oftentimes, that whole process starts with you hearing what a random NPC has to say, or you just picking a direction and walking towards the horizon, hoping there’s maybe something on the other side.

This approach isn’t limited to merely what governs progress, either. The type chart, and the way certain Pokèmon evolve, while you can certainly find all this out in-game via brute force, exploring the region and listening to what people have to say tells you so much of what you might like to know. From the gym guide giving you the lowdown on what to expect as you go up to face your next challenge, from the guy in the Celadon Department Store who gets traded a Graveller and is shocked to see it evolve, to the random trainer on the seaside who informs you how Nidorino evolves via MOON STONE, you learn so much from the people you meet along the way, and you never know just who is going to give you the exact info you might happen to want. I love how indirect this can be, too: for example, how the positioning of the Fighting Dojo relative to Saffron City’s gym tells you about how Fighting types are weak to Psychic, or Diglett's cave giving you the exact tools you need to beat the gym right next to it. If I got to have all my memories taken of a certain thing, a chance to go through the whole game blind once again… I’m not sure Pokèmon Red would actually be the pick, but man, is it up there. I love how, theoretically, the road to progress is marked by exploration, through interaction, through solving the giant fetch-quest that makes up the Kanto region. It’d be awesome to see how that all works in practice.

What I also love about the more RPG-inspired design is how nearly all the Pokèmon you encounter serve some sort of clear mechanical purpose. They’re not just cute little creatures you sic onto other people’s cute little creatures, they lean into the RPG design philosophy too, and often have a clear role in how the game is constructed. Brock’s Onix and Misty’s Starmie aren’t just each leader’s ace, they’re boss fights: who, should you know where to look later on, you can then adopt into your own team, Shin Megami Tensei style. The Dragon and Ghost types, while they play rather oddly in further generations, make sense here when they each only have one representative: the player needing to figure out what works and what doesn’t against Ghost types for them to reach the top of the Pokèmon Tower (nevermind how you need to do another dungeon to perceive them in the first place) and the Dragon type’s notable strength compared to everything else makes sense when they’re only used by the most powerful member of the Elite 4, thus making sure what the player thinks is the final boss is not a battle you can merely cheese with type advantage. Voltorb and Electrode are this game’s take on the Mimic. Mewtwo is this game’s take on your typical RPG superboss. Zapdos is the boss — and reward — of an optional dungeon, whereas its brethren in Articuno and Moltres are rewards for delving into the Seafoam Islands and Victory Road deeper than the player ever needs to. While mons like Butterfree and Beedrill emerge from their chrysalis early, and are rather powerful for the point in the game you get them, they both fall off curve hard once you start encountering other evolved mons, imparting a lesson in the player that sometimes growing up is letting go of the things you used to cherish. In the same vein, while it quickly plateaus into merely being as good as everything around it, Dugtrio is a godsend for the part of the game where you can stumble across him, going up to level 31 when most everything around you struggles to pass level 20, and singlehandedly allowing you to bypass what could be a difficult boss battle with Lt. Surge. Mankey (at least from Yellow onwards) is an early method of mitigating Brock should you have picked (or forced into) a starter that’s weak to his Rock types. While rather rare Pokèmon like Porygon, Farfetch’d or Lickitung aren’t quite worth the effort it takes to obtain them, that’s partially the point — they’re merely the more tricky steps in the process of catching them all, and the game is nice enough to put the Pokèmon more useful in terms of beating the game right in plain sight. While later generations would mostly shy away from this idea (though with some individual exceptions), the original set of Pokèmon games, even today, stands out for how it makes certain Pokèmon fill specific mechanical roles, and from a game design perspective it's fascinating to see in action, to try and guess what the idea is behind each member of the original 151.

I like how the game counterbalances its kid empowerment plot with its loose coming of age themes. Like, it’s super cool to imagine yourself at ten years old taking on and beating an entire criminal gang, but the game itself addresses that this doesn’t meaningfully stop them: even if you foil whatever caper they’re up to today, that’s not gonna keep them from doing whatever they’re going to do next. Even Giovanni, the last time you fight him, says that this won’t be the end of Team Rocket, and I think it’s this kind of, like, kid’s storytelling of singlehandedly saving the day by sailing through the bad guys’ hideout, combined with the reality of how organized crime is like the hydra growing new heads and that you can't ever meaningfully put them in the ground, that really stands out as a somewhat notable plot beat. I love the loose implication that you’re growing older as you go through the region: your rival’s sprite continually changing each time you catch up with him, starting off as a little kid yet clearly looking so much taller by the final time the both of you fight. I too love the way your path through Kanto more than likely loops you back to Pallet Town right near the end: what once was your home becoming just a quick pitstop, a quick moment to say hi to your mum, before you’re off on your way to Viridian for your last gym badge. For games that don’t necessarily focus on a clear-cut plot beyond the premise — probably in part because of Kanto’s more open-ended progression — there’s a decent amount put into theming here, at least from what I could extrapolate. Maybe I’m just reading a lot from a little (though given Professer Oak saying "You have come of age! You've grown so much older since you left Pallet Town so long ago" upon beating the champion I'm fairly sure that theme was a conscious inclusion), but the fact that the game is capable of evoking those themes so continuously I felt was rather worth note, and a loose highlight of the experience.

There are some other things I quite liked: the music is so continuously stellar, and iconic for a reason. Playing this on a system where the game had backlighting let me see the towns in the hues they’re named after, providing a rather pretty visual shorthand of where the player is at any given time. Overall… I’m never quite going to have that special connection with this particular Pokèmon game that others might have — I never had a Gameboy as a kid, my first Pokèmon experience was a couple of generations down the line — so all I’m gonna see is something… with perhaps a bit less polish than what I’m typically used to with a Pokèmon game, but even then there’s so much here that’s so cool to look at. The non-linear, old-school RPG design. How each individual Pokèmon does something for the overall construction of the game. Narrative theming that, um, perhaps takes a bit for the series to attempt again. Maybe it’s a little buggy, a little bit of a relic quality-of-life wise compared to the juggernaut it’d later become… but this was the thing that ignited the craze in the first place, and there was certainly a reason it managed to do so.

The second of three winter-themed games Nitrome released to close out 2007, and of the three, the one that hews closest to what Nitrome’s bread-and-butter is at this point. All the hallmarks are here: arcadey 2D platformer centred around a core mechanic (in this case, being able to slide on the ice, both as a method to attack enemies and as a way to rapidly gain speed going down a slope), where the game does a good job at introducing new things to keep in mind via new platform types and enemies, which perhaps dips a bit in quality once levels become really long and losing sends you right back to the start. Snow Drift mostly manages to mitigate that last issue, though! If, mainly, because it’s kind enough to pepper the level with enough health ups to at least make the endurance tests much more feasible. Not to say the levels still aren’t difficult, or… rough, in some places, but it becomes much less of a weakness when it only takes four or five attempts to make it through, as opposed to, like, 10+ tries. And it means that you don’t necessarily get tired of what’s specifically fun about this: having to position yourself carefully so you can jump over an enemy and then slide into them from behind, how certain sections constantly keep you on your feet and don’t let you let up right until they’re over, and how whenever you slide its a crapshoot as to whether you’ll be allowed to drift freely or whether the game will throw a random obstacle at you that you’re suddenly gonna have to react to. It’s fun, if not quite smoothed out — felt like there were some weird things with hurtboxes, and there’s this one enemy where getting past him without taking damage felt like kind of a crapshoot — but as a whole this was fun! Definitely the first of their more traditional platformers to really feel like it sticks the landing.

Past the original 90s trilogy, the Alone in the Dark series has, uh, been through some tough times. With the title and influence of having been ‘the very first survival horror game’ there’s enough of a selling point in the IP for Atari/Infogrames to try and cash in every eight years — making some sort of attempted reboot, following whatever trends in survival horror are popular at the time — yet not with enough real thought and care to make them any good. Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, released in 2001, was one of the many fixed-camera, third-person survival horrors to release in the wake of Resident Evil taking over the world, yet unlike other contemporaries (such as Silent Hill or Fatal Frame), New Nightmare never quite iterates enough to feel like its own thing, and for the most part mostly feels like a copy — and not quite an amazing one. Alone in the Dark 2008 is fucking wild: it’s got the action-oriented approach of Resident Evil 4, the parkour of Uncharted, and is also just so ambitious with every stupid mechanic it has that even if it’s certainly not great it still manages to find that special place in my heart. Alone in the Dark: Illumination is like if they made Left 4 Dead 2 but also if they made it shit: even beyond being a Unity asset flip with awful netcode the combat and gameplay are so fundamentally borked that it’s a marvel to see. Atari lost the rights to the series after this point — having sold the IP to THQ Nordic in 2018-ish — and yet, even despite the series going from one publisher to another, some things always stay the same: Alone in the Dark (2024) is another attempted reboot. And once again, it's a mishmash of what’s hot in survival horror.

At least they leaned into the trends pretty well, this time!

Alone in the Dark (2024) is quite a lot of different things, none of them original. The most obvious inspiration is 2019’s remake of Resident Evil 2, what with its third-person-over-the-shoulder angle, its in-game map showing which areas you’ve ‘completed’ and which you still need to find things in, the ability to switch skins between modern and retro models, even the animation for using an item on a lock is taken straight from the RE Engine. A lot of the game’s segmentation seems rather inspired by, from what I understand, Alan Wake — where there are clearly defined sections where you interact with NPCs, solve puzzles, try to find the centre of the mystery at hand, juxtaposed with sections that are primarily combat: scavenging for ammo and health, fighting enemies, going through setpiece after setpiece down a linear path before you reach the end and switch back to solving puzzles. I laughed so hard the first time there was a switch and the game’s soundtrack started playing the fucking Hereditary horns. As a whole, the game is… not exactly making itself its own thing. What it does is employ its inspirations well. It by and large picks and chooses things that worked well, employs them in a way that lets them mesh well with each other, and while it may not reinvent the wheel, and while it might not necessarily iterate on these systems, it works well for what it is.

What I think I like most is its structure, and how it uses its area design to play into that. Decerto Manor is, in application, sort of your hub world. You talk to the various denizens, you solve puzzles to scavenge out rooms and access new wings of the mansion, and, once your exploration takes you to what seems like a dead end, the walls of the mansion twist and turn around you, sending you out into a nightmare world… quite different in biome than the mansion you were just going through. These are mostly combat-focused — interspersed with the occasional puzzle where you get rid of whatever’s stopping you from going down the linear path forward — but what gets me is just how varied they look. You go from a French streetside to a swamp to a churchyard to a harbour to a couple places I don’t wanna spoil, and even the one time it used the city streets again enough, it felt changed enough to still feel like I was somewhere new. It honestly reminds me of just how well the original Alone in the Dark trilogy utilized its set dressing, and it’s so awesome to see that aspect get leaned into here too, even as more and more disparate biomes start connecting themselves to the mansion. I also really enjoyed when the lines between hub and level became blurred — when the room you’re scrounging through suddenly changes and you have to fight a couple of enemies off (even if I hope a patch makes the transitions, uh, a bit more smooth looking), or even when you enter a new area… and it’s a giant puzzle box, the occasional enemy not getting in the way of how you have to primarily figure out the way forward. Throughout the game I was eagerly anticipating where it’d take me next, what new part of the mansion I’d get to unlock, what kind of places I’d be suddenly sent to, and as a whole I loved how the game used physical location to segment its action-heavy sections with its downtime. Really neat to see in action.

I also enjoy how reverent this game is to the original Alone in the Dark trilogy. References aren’t new — all the attempted reboots post New Nightmare try to relate to the '90s trilogy in some way — but this one goes beyond, not just copy-posting names or basic wiki-skim-info just so maybe somebody who went through the original games can do the Leo pointing meme, but genuinely attempting to tie in with their lore while yet choosing to go in its own direction. I was expecting a… faithful-ish reboot, the opening section of you exploring the mansion mirroring the opening cutscene of the original where you go up into the attic, but then the game pulls out the rug from under you and shows that the mansion is filled with people and lets you know, immediately, that this is going to be something different, but yet something that took the care to relate itself to the original game in a way that’s more than surface level. I was surprised, for example, that the game brings up Slaughter Gulch, the attempted movie production that sets up the premise of Alone in the Dark 3: it’s such a random deep-cut reference that you’re going to have to have played that game to get, yet it’s brought up without much of a second thought. Characters familiar to the original trilogy appear, and are reminiscent of who they were then, but are re-imagined for a partially new setting in a way that almost feels seamless, taking the original’s loose cosmic horror and leaning into it in a totally new way. It’s not a rejection of the past, nor is it something that merely pays lip service, this is a game for those who’ve done a deep dive into the original Alone in the Dark trilogy. I’m… not quite sure how many people (especially these days) have actually done that, but it’s kinda awesome to see how the game goes for it anyway.

Combat is, uh, notably clunky. The gunplay works fairly well: they have a good bit of power to them, but this is in conjunction with how hard it is to hit enemies with them. They jolt and weave, duck their head down as they rush towards you, strafe around you faster than you can keep a bead on them… your gun does a good job at killing them, but first you’ll need to hit them, and it’s more often than not that you’ll run out of ammo trying to hit the not!Molded creatures present in the dark. The game does well with resource management in a way that encourages you to keep switching between your modes of combat — breakable melee weapons, picking and choosing which type of ammo you get — and doesn’t let you settle for just one thing… it’s just that two of the three things you can do are rather clunky. I have no idea what the strategy with melee combat is. You kinda just wait for an enemy to get in range, hope you can interrupt them with your first swing, and then spam the melee attack button and hope they run out of health before they can get an attack off. Apparently I can hold the button to do an extra strong melee attack. I never, ever got a chance to actually use it.

The third option for combat is… distractions — bricks and bottles and Molotov cocktails lying around the environment, which, despite the game’s explicit directions, you’re meant to throw directly at enemies to damage them, as opposed to trying to divert their attention. There are two ways to use this, neither of them exactly practical: you can hold the button to hold onto it, letting you arc your throw and also walk extremely slowly to wherever the next encounter happens to be… or just press the button to immediately yeet it on the surface of wherever you picked it up, sometimes auto-aiming at an enemy if they happen to be near. No option to like, pick something up and use it later, you have to either throw it away or force yourself to trudge over to the next opportunity to hit something with it, and while they’re… maybe effective? at doing damage to enemies? it doesn’t quite make up for how janky they feel to use, nevermind how the game doesn’t even explain them properly. As a whole, is the combat good? No, I’d say it’s only one-third of the way there (nevermind how any encounter where multiple enemies corner you will immediately result in you being stunlocked to death just like the original Alone in the Dark in a way that makes the final boss, in particular a rather rough experience) but I’d hesitate to call it bad: even at its worst it’s still perfectly functional, if janky. And, frankly, for a game like this? It adds to the charm. Mostly.

Some loose notes: nottttttttttttt quite sure how I feel regarding the casting of TV actors as the leads? I picked Carnby, so I spent most of the game with Stranger Things’ David Harbour, and for the most part… he was fine? He does a mostly decent noir detective, even if sometimes it's kinda clear he’s reading off a script? I’m just not especially sure what he brings to the table compared to a more professional voice actor, at least aside from name recognition (I streamed this for friends, and one of them immediately recognized ‘Hopper’ the moment they saw him, so I guess that was who the casting was meant to appeal to?), but by and large I guess he did okay enough not to raise too many of my eyebrows. By and large, I love a lot of the background lore, love how they modernized the way the original Alone in the Dark read out its notes to the player… not sure how I feel like a lot of the more traditional cutscenes: it felt like the game was slowing to a halt so characters could exposit things to one another and it didn’t really feel like the correct approach for a game such as this. I like the soundtrack — how it carries a bunch of different influences with, like, noir jazz, southern folk music, the aforementioned Hereditary horns — enough maybe to check it out outside the context of the game. The retro skins are hilarious and absolutely worth the price of admission: talking to people and encountering eldritch horrors as this weird polygon man honestly brought such a smile to my face. I’d… maybe wait for a patch before I buy this, perhaps? There were enough points where Carnby got stuck on the environment, enough points where the game couldn’t land a transition, enough weird graphical things to perhaps get in the way of the experience. It wasn’t enough to be a dealbreaker on my end (I knew what I was getting into buying this day one), but it was enough to be noticeable, and enough to get in the way, especially when it happened during enemy encounters.

Ultimately, though, this was fun! Perhaps not perfect, or even great — the combat is rouuuuuuuuugh, and I’d… never quite say the game rises above its influences, or even does much to differentiate itself from them — but as a whole, as far as reboots of Alone in the Dark go, I’m glad to see one that mostly sticks the landing. With a reverence for the source material which shows in every familiar character you meet, every note you pick up, in conjunction with being a pretty solid survival horror in its own right… it’s certainly not the best thing in the world, but I’d honestly still call this a good time. I’m hoping this sells well enough for this to maybe revive the franchise a bit. I’d love to see a sequel that iterates on both the good and bad here. And I’d love to see just how they choose to cover the remaining two of the trilogy. Here's hoping. 7/10.

I think it’s very funny how people claim this game killed Alone in the Dark. As if the franchise was thriving before this game threw all its momentum away. As if the franchise had an absolutely stellar reputation before this particular blight did it in. As if Alone in the Dark is even that much of a franchise at all, and not merely a dead IP from the 90s, occasionally defibrillated to cash in on its claim to fame of being ‘the very first survival horror.’ What originally set the stage for its genre — listed as a direct influence for 1996’s Resident Evil — has long since become an amalgamation of whatever trends happen to be most profitable at the time, each game past Alone in the Dark 3 being some sort of attempted reboot released ~8 years after the previous attempted reboot, doing its best to imitate whatever the newest Resident Evil is doing. Even the original trilogy wasn’t necessarily immune to changing up its approach: Alone in the Dark 2 is far more action-oriented than its predecessor ever was, for better or worse, and as a whole both 2 and 3 steer away from active horror, feeling more like Indiana Jones-esque romps which just so happen to have zombie ghosts as enemies. To say that Alone in the Dark: Illumination ‘killed’ or ‘betrayed’ the franchise — as most coverage of the game seems to — to me, is mostly an indication that you don’t know as much about the series as you say you do. This isn’t some sudden sellout. This one’s just… a bit more blatant about it. And a bit easier of a punching bag. Like, yeah, this game is dogshit, who could’ve guessed by the Metacritic score of 19, but unlike, say Alone in the Dark (2008), which is at least audacious in its baffling decisions and incredible dialogue, Illumination doesn’t even feel like it was even trying. And, frankly, that’s what truly damns it.

This time, the Alone in the Dark series has been re-imagined as a co-op zombie shooter, a la Left 4 Dead or Resident Evil 6. You get in a game with up to three of your friends, you each play different characters with different skillsets, and you barrel through legions of eldritch forces, solving…… ““puzzles”” to clear a path to the end of the campaign. What distinguishes this game most from its influences, however, is the genre crossover at play: not only is it a co-op zombie shooter, but it’s also a Unity Store asset flip. You know those random Steam Greenlight-looking games that look like shit, look like they play like shit, and always seem to top some publication or YouTuber’s year-end worst list because they’re easy enough targets not to make anybody actually mad they were called the worst game of the year? Yeah, Atari looked at those and decided they were gonna make one of their own.

And god, did they succeed.

Imagine Left 4 Dead except it sucks. Zombies (or, well, “The Creatures of Darkness”) spawn in wherever they feel like, often appearing right next to you without you even realizing it because there are no noises or feedback or anything that’ll let you know where they are aside from physically being able to see them. The core mechanic is that you light up things around the level to drastically reduce enemy defences, and, like, that mechanic is functional, I guess, but when you’re not in the light it’s impossible to tell if I’m even doing anything. Like, I can empty a full SMG clip into their face and they’ll be still standing and I have no idea whether I did damage or not because enemy health is high and there’s no feedback on anything you do to them. Several points where I was fighting this game’s equivalent of a tank, with an upgrade that let me circumvent the ‘enemies need to be in light to take full damage’ and I just had no idea whether they still needed to be in the light for me to hurt them because I was running out of ammo and they didn’t seem any more damaged than they were at the start.

It’s not just the combat that sucks, either: running is tied to this awful stamina system that runs out so quickly and then takes forever to come back, resulting in this loop where you’re stopping and starting, desperately trying to get to wherever you need to go yet at the same time constantly slowing to a total crawl. There’s virtually no diversity in objectives, it’s either fight through a stupid maze or collect [x key item] or go collect [x key item] in a stupid maze. The game is inconsistent about enemy density: a lot of the time it’ll flood you with dudes from the get-go, kill nearly your whole party, and then you’ll go the entire level barely encountering anything else. It also spawns roughly the same amount of enemies no matter how many people are playing, so unless you pick the easiest difficulties it’s almost impossible to do anything doing the game singleplayer. And this presumes that the game chooses to work: that everything goes as intended, that some objective doesn’t break, that the platform you need to jump onto has a visible model, that the explosive you just armed actually bothers to explode, that the game doesn’t suddenly change up how you pick up items for one level, causing you and your party to think the game has bugged out and left you unable to pick up a thing you need to progress. Getting through this game is partially about changing variables until you find a combination that doesn’t softlock you.

I’m going to use the very second level as an example here: me and my friends start the level, we go down an elevator only for it to break, our first objective being to fix it. We’re made to get three batteries. The level only spawns in two. We play for a bit before we proceed to realize the level isn’t actually winnable in this state, so we switch to easy difficulty. The good news: the level actually spawns in all the things we need to pass it. The bad news: sometimes when you put a battery into the machine the game just eats it, taking it from your inventory but then not proceeding to actually advance the objective. We think it’s a problem where we’re placing a battery where there already is a battery, but no, the game’s just broken. We brute force it, and no matter what we always get one battery eaten, and we can’t pass the section. I then switch to doing it singleplayer… and it works fine. I get the batteries with no problem, and after several more sections of having to find [x collectable] in a maze (including one where I have to find a battery that’s just… plopped on the ground right in front of me, right by the thing I need to put it into) I clear the level. I save the run. Me and my friends can go through the rest of the campaign, for better or worse.

Again, that was only the second level. And that’s a glitch, obvious from the outset, that makes progressing through the game impossible without a workaround. Of the game's three main campaigns, only one is possible to clear all the way through in the game’s multiplayer mode. You can tell they really put their care into this game.

There are four main characters you can choose between — and, by extension, four classes you can pick, defined by the weapons and special skills each given to them. The Hunter’s unique mechanic is that he’s limited by ammo constraints. The game intends for him to be The Guns Guy, yet it’s him who must scrounge for ammo while The Engineer and The Priest just get… infinite ammo on their weapons? For the Engineer, that infinite ammo gun is meant to be secondary to their ability to scavenge resources to put mines on the ground… but even if you actually get an enemy to step on them they do jack shit. At the very least, they have an infinite ammo sidearm that’s considerably more useful… but then, as what happened to my friend, sometimes the game just glitches out and doesn’t let you use said gun, forcing you into laying endless mines, all next to each other, in hopes that maybe they’ll actually do something. Priest… man I don’t even know what Priest even does. They have an infinite ammo sidearm just like Engineer but then also sometimes they erupt in a bright flash of light which doesn’t seem to do anything to enemies but sure does make it so that nobody on the team can fucking see anything for the next few seconds. The Witch… oh man. In lieu of traditional weapons, the Witch can instead enchant a light source to do DoT to any enemies in it (useless) or fire a lightning bolt at enemies to fry them. This is limited by both cast time and mana: if you run out of mana, no more spells unless you happen to find a crystal ball to get it all back instantly, or wait for the manual recharge of one mana every five seconds.

It takes ten mana to cast a lightning bolt.

What usually happens to the Witch is this: once the initial volley floods you with enemies, you immediately use up all your mana only for that to merely be a dent in the horde. With nothing else to protect you, you’re near-completely defenseless as the horde proceeds to mob you to death. Theoretically, levelling up will increase your mana recharge/improve your quality of life, but beyond the rather small gains levelling up gives you, you often die so early without party intervention (and the other party members usually have their own drama to deal with) that you don’t gain nearly enough EXP to level up. And even should you survive that opening volley it’s not like you’re not a liability: I was Hunter, my friend was Witch during… this game’s equivalent of a campaign finale, and literally I had to run around, scrounge for ammo, kill the enemies who dropped the items I needed to then be able to damage the boss… while all my Witch buddy could do was superficially shoot lightning bolts and hope that maybe those did damage. Playing Witch is a catch-22 at its core: you start without anything that’ll truly help you contribute to the team and survive the campaign without gaining a couple of levels first, but then because EXP is based on killing enemies/surviving the campaign you don’t actually get the stuff that’ll help you contribute to the team. All the classes (bar Priest) are to some degree pretty borked, pretty counterintuitive, pretty not amazing to play, but man, the design ethos behind playing the Witch is truly something special.

The online, as expected, does not quite work wonders. Admittedly I could be the problem here: I’m Australian, and was primarily playing with Americans/a Norwegian, but even then this is more a “these are funny things that happened” footnote than something I’m honestly gonna fault the game for. The netcode is rough: fatal errors abound, sometimes from being dead too long, sometimes because the game’s just being a Gemini. While my Norwegian friend managed to stick around for most of the first campaign, from the second campaign on it honestly became a bit of a race to see how long we could last before the game eventually took him from us, like a leaf on the wind. One of my other friends pretty consistently got stuck on things and had to wriggle himself out. On one of my other other friends ends I went through some real shit: at one point one of the not!Tanks knocked me down, but on said friend’s end I never got back up, and I was picking up batteries and shooting enemies while sliding across the floor. After a certain point in the campaign I’d randomly inherit the Engineer’s ability to see the auras of light sources all the way across the map upon their death. One time, after they died, they randomly got to free-roam the map and went so high into the skybox they saw God and crashed the game for everybody Another time I guess I just jumped weirdly and after that point was stuck in the falling animation, this expression perpetually stuck on my face. That wasn’t just a thing on my friend’s end, either, oftentimes people would jump weirdly and then just start floating off the ground, nyooming around at the speed of slow. As a whole, when the game wasn’t softlocking or denying progress or doing the things that otherwise made playing it rather intolerable, it was at least rather funny to see the trashfire in motion.

Ultimately… I think, perhaps, talking this much about what makes Alone in the Dark: Illumination rather awful is a bit of a needless endeavour — I feel like the virgin wojak going on for paragraphs and paragraphs while the chad just goes ‘this shit sucks.’ But frankly, I’m just amazed at what’s on display here. I really got the brainworms just playing through it, and honestly just trying to gather my thoughts and write up on everything I wanted to talk about was a ton of fun. This might just be a cash-grab asset flip — or maybe even some attempt to hold onto the IP; like how they kept making Hellraiser sequels just so Clive Barker wouldn’t get the rights back — and it might be a dogshit Left 4 Dead clone, but there’s a difference between knowing something is bad and knowing just how it falls short. And honestly, this was bad in much more interesting ways than I was led to believe going in. From the borked, buggy gameplay and netcode, from how I legitimately had to fight the game just so I and my party could progress, from how none of the characters you can play work the way they’re supposed to, from how the game honest-to-god has a “A Winner Is You!”-type ending in fucking 2015, Alone in the Dark: Illumination is a gem. So much so we have to throw it back down the mineshaft. 1/10.

The first of three winter-themed games Nitrome released during 2007’s Christmas season, Thin Ice involves the player using their mouse to skate across the ice, drawing circles with their movements to break the ground under the enemy's feet, Pokemon Ranger style. It starts simple, and… remains simple. While the game does what Nitrome does best — introducing new enemies and mechanics, then mixing and matching, never letting anything fall by the wayside — the core problem here is that nothing ever feels like enough: most new enemies don’t do much to contend with how they all get taken out the same way, and most new mechanics aren’t generally more than a minor annoyance. There are things around the stage that give you points (just like the game Thin Ice is spinning off, Frost Bite) but also… nothing is stopping you from just going to get them? You get a bonus for collecting five letters spelling out BONUS, yet… because the arena is so small all the letters are usually, like, right beside one another. And when the game isn’t falling over for you… it’s usually being quite annoying, and generally not in a way that feels intended on the game’s part. Some enemies only become vulnerable after doing a certain attack but then you have to wait until they do their attack, and if they do it by the edge of the arena there’s not enough room for you to draw that circle around them so you have to wait for them to hopefully do it again in a place where you can actually interact with them. Obstacles in places where you can innocuously be trying to get an enemy when you touch their way huge hitbox, freeze you, and then send you careening into damage or another freeze obstacle. Enemies that go fast enough that it’s impossible to actually encircle them, either requiring you to do the circle ahead of time or attack ahead of time and hope they randomly clip into it and die. Enemies that clip directly into the edge of the arena and force you to restart the level. If I maybe enjoyed the game otherwise, then all those issues could be merely minor annoyances, but as is… when it’s not being annoying it’s too simple, too easy, a bit unmemorable to feel fun. And that could be fine, on its own, but as the game progresses, and these annoyances start to rear their heads, there’s nothing really there to counterbalance them, nothing to stop the cracks in the ice from spreading, and nothing to protect you from being hit full force by the cold once it all falls apart.

And after the brief change-in-pace that was Pest Control, Nitrome has thrown me right back into the platformer mines. At least this one has a bit more I can say about it. There’s a really fun core mechanic here: using your mouse to pull the platforms like an elastic band to slingshot your guy across the level. It works well: there are a bunch of different platforms that all interact in different ways, a lot of different level types — where the means in how you get to the end is something more than just “use the platforms like slingshots” — and in general the game does great at keeping things fresh as you go through all twenty-five levels. Even the usual Nitrome platformer problem where the levels are extremely long and dying sends you back to the start are… mostly mitigated: while enemies/limited lives/instant death pits exist, a good portion of the game instead measures success on a system… honestly reminiscent of Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, where while success takes you further into the level… messing a section up has a chance to make you fall backwards, forcing you to do the section you just did as you scramble up to where you just were. It’s so funny whenever it happens, and even if it can be a little frustrating it always feels like there’s a safety net in place, making sure you never lose too much progress, making sure you can easily get back to where you were before… at least for the levels that are like that. The rest… truly, truly suffer for not having checkpoints. Do I really have to go through the first part of the level over and over again just to reach the part where I actually die? Do I really have to do fifteen jumps back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back when messing up even once sends me right back to the beginning? I hate harping on this for every Nitrome game I review but it’s easily one of the weakest parts of all of their platformers: taking a fun concept and then stretching out the runtime by making you replay entire levels upon failure like it’s a NES game. I know these games don’t really stay that way forever — I don’t think it’s particularly long before they eventually do start putting checkpoints in — but as is it is rather sad to consistently see games with a lot going for them get drawn back by their issues. Long levels and no checkpoints are a rough combo, especially when you don’t have any tools to really sidestep it.