The Western visual novel is, conceptually, Sisyphus on an escalator.

His hill are the ones who turn their noses up at anything resembling a work that didn’t come directly from the glittering kaigan of 日本. These people, high off a diet of VNDB kamige machine translations (hallowed be Nitroplus’s name), never had any intention of giving the westoids a chance. It’s hard to blame them; every year there seems to be a new developer who gears up to give the world yet another ironic “dating simulator” without adding any of the actual fucking dating, or some Ren’py creepypasta glitch nonsense that was old when Doki Doki Literature Club did it and has only gotten older and moldier since. There are good visual novels made by people outside of Japan, obviously, but they’re almost never the ones that take off. The ones that get big — the ones that get talked about — tend to be the wooden shavings scraped from the bottom of a rotting barrel. Why give them a chance?

His escalator is, by contrast, made up of the westerners who have active disdain for Japanese media in all forms. While they have a passing interest in anime as an abstract concept, anything insufficiently western may as well carry leprosy. To them, all visual novels are “dating sims”, and all of these “dating sims” are creepy. It’s hard to blame them; there are only so many times you can insist to a person that the themes of humanity overcoming all obstacles can only be explored through brutal scenes of sexual assault that are intended for the player to jack off to before they stop talking to you. The western visual novels are easy to discuss, easy to dissect, and open for anyone to pick through and chat about. There’s so little obscurity — a trait inherent to anything not gated behind a language barrier. More and more of them have started including content warnings from the opening screen, and English-speaking communities have an easy time priming people for English games. They’re safe, and they’re exploring novel (to the west, at least) concepts. Why not give them a chance?

So it goes. Sisyphus makes a new game and begins rolling. The hill works against him, the escalator works with him. He gets some marginal degree of success. There’s some discourse. The boulder rolls back down. Sispyhus makes a new game and begins rolling.

Here I am, the great centrist. Slay the Princess is mediocre.

It’s always a bit of a ride to go into a story without any real expectations and then get slapped with the wet fish that is Yet Another Multiverse Tale, but Slay the Princess is so scarcely about that to the point where I never quite knew what it was going for. There’s a narrative woven in here about two godlike entities who were split from one another at some point in the past; the Princess is change, and the player is...something. It’s not quite clear what exactly The Long Quiet is relative to the Princess/the Shifting Mound. She’s the one responsible for “change” in all forms — creation and destruction — which doesn’t leave much for her other half to take care of. I suppose The Long Quiet is the void, is nothingness, but it also has the power to kill The Shifting Mound and create a new world that never changes. There are a long list of implications brought forward that go unanswered in a way that feels less like the author tucking a lore bible behind their back and more like a gentle shrug before the credits roll. Yeah, you’re both actually gods. Make a new world, or don’t, or kind of do, whatever. You’re here for the Princess anyway, aren’t you? This is all just a vehicle for you to see her.

It’s a character drama more than the reality-shaping conflict it presents itself as, but the characters themselves aren’t explored in any particular depth. The extent of their characterizations go as far as “an archetype”, but no further. All you need to know about a particular princess or a particular voice in your head are their names to understand what their characters are: The Hero, The Adversary, The Nightmare, The Fury, The Stubborn, The Contrarian, The Smitten. There’s a version of the princess for everyone. There’s a meek and unassuming princess. There’s a a total bitch ice-queen princess. There are two (three, technically?) ghost princesses. There’s a buff warrior-lady princess who wants to fightfuck the protagonist. There’s a furry catgirl princess. There’s a giant goddess mommy princess. There are even a few fucked-up, twisted, evil princesses for the monster-enjoyers, too. I don’t think this was made with the intent of something like Towergirls where you’re guided in the direction of whoever you want to have sex with the most, but its undeniable that a large amount of Slay the Princess’s staying power online is in the fanart of people who would vastly prefer laying to slaying. There’s not anything wrong with this, per se, but I think it demonstrates how little the story itself connected with most players that they’d rather spend their time in the months since release discussing their idealized abstractions of already idealized abstractions of one character. “I can fix her,” they say. Of course you can fix her! That’s one of the main endings! That’s a couple of the main endings!

The Princess herself is the obvious standout of the principle cast, which is really unfortunate in a work that really only has two characters. The voices in your head technically count as individual “characters”, but they’re even less developed than the many forms taken by the Princess. They exist only to reflect some aspect of the situation that you’re in, which makes them feel less like an extension of you and more like an authorial note explaining to the reader how they ought to be feeling in a given situation. Many of them will bicker among themselves and with The Narrator, always in voices that aren’t quite distinct between the lot, and dropping constant “he’s right behind me”-tier quips to pump the brakes on any real tension. I do not envy the two voice actors who were asked to give a minimum of twenty(!!!) performances for these characters while trying to sound different in all of them. They can’t quite succeed, because they’re not quite Mel-fucking-Blanc. The overwhelming majority of people are not capable of doing this. Their voices are stretched so thin that I can see through them, and I wound up just turning the vocal volume all the way down so I wouldn’t have to listen to these poor people struggle through another line read. The developers are inviting the Disco Elysium comparisons. It’s only by virtue of the fact that I think people are getting tired of me bringing that fucking game up that I’m not drawing said comparisons any further than that mention.

With all of these branching paths, I was gearing up to make a whole bunch of different choices to poke through all of them — much in the vein of your 999s and your Virtue’s Last Rewards. I was caught pretty fiercely off-guard when the game ends after you’ve met just five Princesses. Considering how there are twenty in total, you’re sent to the final confrontation after experiencing only 25% of the game. I don’t know why this is. There’s so much material here, and none of it is bad, just vaguely uninspired. I did, ultimately, still want to pick through all of it. As it stands, the game is over in under ninety minutes despite having enough material to fill four hours, and then have those four hours filled with something reasonably enjoyable. It’s confusing. The only explanation is that they could only come up with five connecting arguments for the final confrontation where all of the various Princesses are brought forth as part of a rhetoric battle, but that’s seriously no excuse. Each of her different forms has an argument written, it’s just that you only ever get to see five out of the twenty in a single playthrough. This necessitates either playing through the game a minimum of four fucking times without ever accidentally overlapping a route, or (more likely) looking them up online. Considering how the devs themselves encouraged people who couldn’t play the game to pirate it due to how important they felt it was to be able to make your own choices, this feels like a wildly misguided last-minute decision on their part.

Why would you not just ask the player to play all twenty routes before sending them to the ending? They’re not long. Each one is maybe fifteen minutes, tops. Those are rookie VN numbers. What’s really not helping matters is the fact that The Shifting Mound is collecting all of these different forms of the Princess in order to become whole again, and she asks that you get as many as you can for her so that she can learn and grow. If there are twenty Princesses, why in the fuck does she settle for five? There’s a perfectly good story explanation for why you ought to get all of them! It’s completely wasted! It’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen a game’s mechanics go to war this hard with its own narrative. There’s zero reason to end the game after just five out of the twenty routes. Did you think people were going to get bored? How little faith did you have in your own work to cut it that short?

Slay the Princess is frustrating, but it’s harmless. That is the damning of faint praise that it sounds like. There are some decent nuggets of writing contained within, but it’s all in service of a game that squanders a lot of its own potential before it’s given you a chance to pass judgment of your own. It reminds me of those people on dating apps who talk shit about themselves and make themselves seem like the worst possible person you could ever consider dating, and then get confused when people take them at their word. Don’t pull the rug out on yourself! If the player isn’t interested in what you’re doing, then they aren’t going to forgive you just because it ended quickly. Have a little more confidence in your work. As it stands, all I really see is a lot of potential that went nowhere except to the worst parts of the game, and I think that’s a really sad outcome. I understand that this was just a side project while the developers worked on Scarlet Hollow, but that doesn’t mean that it needed to be treated like an afterthought. It's so much wasted potential.

The boulder rolls back down the hill.

Kinda crazy how, even tho it didn’t end up using any of Bloodborne’s characters and locations directly and spawning as a joke game of sorts with a really silly idea, it still is a far more interesting and cool use of the IP than whatever Sony has done with it for the past 9 years.

Nightmare Kart is one of those weird anomalies in which I’m completely baffled with how amazing it is even tho I really shouldn’t be; some months ago I watched my girlfriend play the entirety of Bloodborne PSX and I’m still super impressed at how much effort went to what’s essentially a re-imagination of the beginning hours of Bloodborne; all the enemies and NPCs look incredible in all of their polygon glory, the sound effects and compression is top notch, and the whole final section is completely original and has a focus on my man Gilbert! Basically, what I’m trying to say is that Lilith Walther is the GOAT, and that I’ve should have totally seen coming that what was originally meant to be Bloodborne Kart was going to be far more than a thing to point at and say ‘’HA! That werewolf is on a giant wheel-shaped kart!’’… I mean it’s also that but you get my point.

This game is so delightfully silly that I wish it had even more cutscenes to showcase it; there’s nothing better than to see Father Gascoine’s cutscenes being played completely straight only for a bike to appear out of thin air followed by Akira shot for shot references. It keeps the sensibilities and character mannerisms that made the original Yharnam so unique and adds on top of that a flare of stupidity that by doesn’t feel out of place ‘cause of how dumb yet self-serious the whole premise is. Seeing a Skeleton driving on Gherman’s wheelchair fucking sent me for some reason, and the Boar being one of the vehicles is such an obvious decision that I cannot believe I didn’t see it coming, yet is genius!

Till now I’ve been referring to all characters by their original Bloodborne monickers, and even tho all locations and faces are clearly meant to represent the original game and it’s still a shame that Lilith and her team had to rework all of the characters in some way or another, that’d be a huge disservice to the admittedly creative or fucking hilarious some of these characters have received. The main Good Hunter design goes HARD, I love how the Dream Watchers’ heads are replaced by big funny eyeballs, the Matilda Sisters are honestly WAYYYY cooler than their real game counterparts and, to be utterly honest, I’m so glad the rebranding happened if only because it gave us the absolute best change to Nicholas: he still keeps the similar dialogue and big head-cage… BUT HE ALSO GETS A BIRD. A COMICALLY SMALL CARTOONY BIRD THAT SITS ON TOP HIS HEAD WHILE HE DARTS AROUND THE CORRIDORS WHILE SHOOTING A GUN LIKE A FUCKING MANIAC. NOT ONLY THAT, BUT THE CAGE IS ALSO A SELECTABLE KART THAT LETS YOU RUN ALONG THE TRACKS, BUT IT ALSO GIVES YOU THE BIRD. If getting to hear his scream when he dies in any part of the track didn’t already make way cooler and funnier than Micolash, then the bird for sure does.

It gains a ton thanks to its amazing presentation, and on that note, I really like how this one still keeps the whole PSX theme while not being completely binded by it: in Bloodborne PSX it made complete since the whole point of that game was to be a reimagination of how Bloodborne would work on the original console, while in Nightmare Kart is more of a visual throwback than anything else. There still is some sound compression on dialogue and the UI elements are clearly still referencing those of the PS1, but the controls are clearly influenced by more modern Kart racers and the music sounds SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO GOOOOOOOOD, the OST is hella strong, not really sound like anything in the original game at all, but a perfect fit, nonetheless.

But it wouldn’t be enough to make a hilarious kart parody game, ‘cause why not make the gameplay rock? I think I usually like the idea of combat-racing games more than playing them, so keep that in mind when I say that it’s been a while since I’ve had this much fun driving in a game. It all feels so hectic and buttery smooth, the track design is surprisingly great —both as references to the source material and tracks on their own to race on—, the act of shooting enemies both behind and in front on you or using the main selectable weapon is incredibly satisfying and responsive (most of the time), and the sheer variety in battle modes and creativity in the bosses during the campaign had me drooling, the only thing that that I can think of that comes close in what is trying to pull off is that mission mode in Mario Kart DS, and even that would be a bit of a far-fetched comparison considering the amazing hob his game does in adapting Bloodborne’s bosses into this whole new environment.

I even went for the secret ending which grants the final boss, and even if 9I wished at least one of the other two endings also gave some sort of final fight, the lack of any previous final boss made it even more special and cool, phase 2 particularly was simply unbelievable, and honestly, probably better than Bloodborne’s secret final boss. There’s nothing like seeing an eldritch abomination ride a go kart and running for dear life!

Tho if anything, the controls being so good and the battles being so creative makes the game’s biggest downfalls stick out even more, since it makes it the more noticeable when somethings feel more finnicky or unresponsive, like the weapon lock on or how basically all races become incredibly easy once you gain a bit of an advantage and where only one item can hit you. Plus, the enemy AI are clearly not the best, tho that seems to be something that’s being fixed with each update, and with the last one, 1.08, I’d say bosses like Nicholas that were damn easy or dumb have been given a very welcomed upgrade in that regard, and I can see things getting even better as more patches roll.

And that’s the thing, even more work is being continuously put on this game, more hours on top on an already amazing project and brimming with detail, effort, and even content and secrets. What could have been a one-not fan game resulted in an incredible homage, a game that stands on its two legs and offers a racing experience that it’s everything but monotonous. I really need to try free play with friends one day, ‘cause this is honestly an experience I wouldn’t mind going back to in the slightest, running along the nightmare or dashing through libraries in a wheelchair…

… and now that this isn’t tied to the Bloodborne IP at all, you know what that means? We can have merch of Nicholas and the Bird! Forget Bloodborne for PC, this is the real good ending, it was to happen!

A shitpost taken to its ultimate conclusion, Nightmare Kart attempts to capture the setting and characters of definitely-not-Bloodborne in a kart racer/battler. Nightmare Kart's campaign will take the player loosely through some of the key locations and encounters from Bloodborne. All the maps are very recognizable from their source material, and there's a ton of creativity in giving each character their own cool unique karts as well. The structure of the campaign typically alternates between races and battles, and while the races are a fun enough time the battles feel quite poor after the first boss. Combat often involves guns and if you can imagine Mario Kart battle mode where every player is picking up auto-aim guns and whoever shoots first wins, that's about what you can expect.

My feelings on this game are roughly akin to those of JoJo All-Star Battle. It is an absolute labour of love from someone who very much appreciates Bloodborne, but that faithfulness comes at a cost of a game that could feel and play better than it does. Still, it's a free fan game and I am pretty glad it got made, because it at least looks and sounds great.

Goat Simulator certainly had its moment back in 2014, back when LOADS of (usually German made) badly made simulator games were flooding steam and in that moment it felt like a pretty spot on parody product.

Outside of that moment though its a game that exists. Its decent for some fun and giggles but you can tell as the DLCs progressed, the developers were sort of wandering and wanting to make something a little more from this but wasnt quite sure how to do it. As a core game its a perfectly fun enough experience but its also super limited and by the time you've hit the two hour mark you've pretty much seen everything the game has to offer and the joke's worn itself to the ground. Still a fun, if brief time to be had.