the first tales from the borderlands was an intriguing experiment from the getgo. telltale had basically shot itself into the stratosphere, however briefly, and had announced collaborations with IP after IP. most of these were middling, such as the illfated game of thrones and guardians of the galaxy, but many others were quite good! especially interesting was in the post-walking dead world of telltale, was that the poorer the IP being adapted fit to their style, the better it worked. fables was a mostly mediocre comic carried by a solid-gold concept, but telltale managed to turn that into easily one of my favorite titles of the gen. borderlands, a series that had a good story in the sense that it had a really amazing bad guy and lore that made sequels incredibly easy- new evil corporation, new vault to find, bring protags from prior game back as NPCs, was the other biggest surprise of this era.

and now some eight years later, a sequel is announced and release in a three month span. as someone in the unfortunate position of a borderlands apologist, i was easily sold. and what i found here... is very confused. it occasionally hits the same notes as tales, spinning a decently funny tale about the nonpowered, everyday denizens of a world that is built around violence, crime and killing. but when it tries to do anything besides riffs on classic borderlands tentpoles, it seems dead in the water.

the three protagonists are all enjoyable, but they never gel together in the way the game kind of needs them to. anu, an anxiety riddled scientist, doesnt really seem to have a bad relationship with her estranged brother when they meet- but we're told they had a major split. same with fran, who's supposed to be a rageaholic with a tragic past that... is explained away in a joke? when the intrigue of the world takes a backseat to characters, new tales struggles to find footing, a shame compared to how incredible the character dynamics in the og are. this is all made worse by how badly the game tries to have recurring bits for every character in the game, it's insane. there are very few jokes, and a TON of recurring gags and bits- tell more than one kind of joke please! borderlands gore is very funny! do that and never use the word "himbo" again!

i can't say new tales isn't worth the time for a borderlands fan, nor can i say i didn't enjoy it in all honesty. it's a world i begrudgingly enjoy despite it's almost universal disdain on the internet writ large. chalk it up to all the late night skype (later discord) calls with my brother while we farmed loot and raced each other to finish questlines or find items before the other. new tales isn't going to convince you to change your mind on borderlands, nor do i think it cares to. i just wish this sequel gave a little more effort to follow up to its predecessor and a little less to making bits land. (a good half don't, the other quarter are tolerable, the last quarter actually made me chuckle)

the game development equivalent of the 93 chicago bulls developing the video game equivalent of pulp fiction. a game so wildly ahead of its time that it still feels a good twenty years past where jrpgs are at now.

this game thrives on keeping the content lean, briskly paced and engaging throughout. the varipus chapters runtimes give you just enough time to learn a character's toolkit and quirks before letting you step right into the next one. the combat system in the remake is very self-explanatory, and lets you discover most of the nuance to it with time. in keeping with staying lean, it never gets super deep or intricate but it also never really felt like i was on autopilot either. anyone who's played enough jrpgs knows this is a razer thin line to balance on, but some how live a live makes it all feel effortless.

to touch briefly on the visuals, i was never a particularly big fan of HD2D when it first rolled out. octopath's oversaturated instagram lighting had me worried this was part and parcel for the style, but live a live proved me wrong. the environments are gorgeous, the devlopers deftly utilize space to make the world feel large and real without the tacky dollhouse feel that other titles had. props to the team for making bold choices with the visuals, they somehow manage to feel true to the original but contemporary. i havent played the original to know how much was changed, but i can respect and appreciate what was done here.

i think something that hasnt been discussed much is how much agency is afforded to the player and how that connects thematically to the core narrative. i was surprised to see a pacifist and genocide routes, time-based decision making based on player intuition and context clues, and the ability to sequence break and poke around where you shouldn't pop up rather frequently as well. live a live takes a great deal of time to express its care for the player and their freedom to choose. games since have questioned what role the player has in a game's story, either catalyst or observer, but live a live takes a great deal of care in considering the player's own perspective.

in much the same way playing moon earlier this year did, i find myself enriched coming out of live a live and with a better understanding of game devlopment and how things id have had no exposure to growing up were quietly laying the groundwork for some of my favorite works. i hope the small trend of cult classic jp only releases getting worldwide rereleases with this level of care and respect continues and more titles like these can be brought to new audiences. flower sun and rain next please?

nirvana initiative is some of uchikoshi's strongest work, but never seems to transcend or challenge his style or abilities as a writer. coming off of the far more character driven somnium files, i had anticipated that this would further break the mold and defy expectations that the author had previously set. thankfully, what's here is incredibly good because it's just more somnium files.

starting a bit after the first title, nirvana initiative almost immediately grabs the player by showing a shocking murder that seems to be unstuck in time. as early as the scenario of two halves of one corpse appearing at different moments of time was revealed as the set up for the sequel, i was very hooked. so hooked it made me play the original just to see where it went. i don't want to divulge too much narratively, but i found myself very satisfied with how the mystery played out.

the game plays pretty much 1:1 with the previous release, just with some obvious budgetary and QOL with a brand new perspective on the puzzle design. uchikoshi only wrote this game, so his trademark esoteric puzzle design isn't here. the somniums in this title are all much more varied than the escape rooms from the first title, ranging from a riff on pokemon go to stealthing around a secret lab to literally diving deeper and deeper into a cult leader's pyschosis. none of them were particularly challenging, but they all felt very inspired. only a few hours in and i could tell that what the actual mindset of what somniums are designed to accomplish in the story is entirely different than before. there are good things about this, like how they don't feel so samey in terms of how to execute them, but i had a hard time justifying why we were diving into this character's pysche at this point in the story pretty frequently, especially in Mizuki's half of the story.

the story is split (as are many things) down the middle between a few months after the first title, where a new member of ABIS and his new AIBall Tama are tasked with hunting down the half body serial killings. new victims pile up and ryuki, our hero, begins to sink deeper and deeper into an obsessive psychosis regarding the killings. after that route ends, we just six years into the future where the other half of the other victims all start popping up. here we play as Mizuki, my favorite character from the last game, who is joined by Aiba. both duos have great chemistry, but i shockingly found myself way more invested in tama and ryuki than mizuki and aiba. in keeping with the first, the game also has a downright fantastic new cast of characters along with returning favorites. greg chun is having the time of his life playing Date, and new characters like komeji and gen really hit it out of the park with a shocking amount of pathos. i only really didn't care for kizuna and lien, but they ended up being tolerable by the end so it's fine. i guess.

part of me hates to say that i was a little disappointed with the increased scope and the return to a more twist-driven story, but it thankfully doesn't go full zero escape in the ways that annoyed me about that series. there's a lot more brainy pseudoscience in here than there was in somnium files but it thankfully never drowns out the amazing character stuff or murder mystery at the core of the story. it threatens at a few points to buckle under an increasingly "unsolvable" feeling mystery, but manages to stay the course but handwaving the details away in service of letting the characters have the spotlight.

also i think more games should just end on big dance numbers. uchikoshi is unbeatable for doing it twice, that's true Playa Mindset.

kotaro uchikoshi is, depending on who you ask, either one of the greatest writers presently working in the point 'n' click/visual novel/puzzle adventure genre or a complete and total hack whose works are deranged balderdash rehashing the same twists and plot elements for the entirety of his career. i am here to say with confidence after having played his second-most recent work that i lean way more toward the former than i had after the insanely disappointing Zero Time Dilemma. ztd was a complete and total mess, crippled by the sheer weight of having to resolve the hanging plot threads of virtue's last reward compounded by a troubled production and at least in my opinion, the presence of multiple writers. while i still enjoyed ztd attempting to do the writing equivalent of eating a car, a task so herculean that even to try is engrossing, the game soured me on the series and the writer behind it. zero escape is an incredibly fascinating series, laden with as much occult and pseudoscientific narrative intrigue as it is genuinely strong character writing, and anyone who enjoyed all or some of them can easily hop into this without reading any further. ai the somnium files is uchikoshi doing what he does best while still feeling as fresh and new as 999 did when i first played it.

the plot starts simply enough, you are Kaname Date, a special kind of detective who can enter people's dreams with the help of his partner, a sentient ai implanted in his left eye socket. date is investigating the murder of his good friend's ex-wife, whose brutal murder included the removal of her left eyeball. from there the story weaves through multiple routes, some focused on specific people of interest he meets in his investigations while others tease deeper layers to the mystery at hand. uchikoshi deftly keeps the player guessing, and just when a revelation threatens to unravel the mystery, it only proves to go deeper than ever.

uchikoshi is incredibly good at writing nonlinear "puzzle box" narratives like these, and the detective angle makes it all the better. one half of the narrative involves the murder going serial, the killer thwarting date and AIBA at every step, while the other teases a similar twist to VLR only to pull the rug out from the player. like previous works, this complex narrative is buoyed by a great supporting cast, including the minecraft youtuber/conspiracy theorist/d-list idol Iris and mizuki, whose every action made me laugh out loud or tug at my heartstrings. the latter two ZE titles, i feel, struggled to have a cast as beloved as 999 but ai manages to match it with a great bunch of characters i couldnt get enough of.

the gameplay sections are divided into unequal chunks, primarily cut between the visual novel conversating and item examining and somnium, puzzles taking place in dreams where the player (mostly) assumes control of AIBA as she peels back the subject's psyche. the somniums, like the rooms in ZE, very hit and miss. for the first two thirds of the game they offer almost no challenge besides figuring out the predetermined right path to solve them, and the more clever twists on them in the back handful of somniums feel too little and too late. they never frustrated me but they also never felt engaging beyond watching AIBA do funny things or learning more about the characters. this is definitely an improvement over past works, god fuck the bomb puzzle in ZTD and the dice puzzle in VLR, but i still think "not making me actively upset" isn't an impressive bar to clear.

i dont wanna dive too deep into spoiling the game because that kinda kills the fun of an uchikoshi game. but i will say this one had the most satisfying ending since 999. the trademark "brain melting" twists are here, but they feel far more earned and far less integral to the enjoyment as opposed to zero escape. by the end i felt like the mystery was set up and executed in a really satisfying way and left room to play around in this world, but more importantly it left me wanting more. i was skeptical about this title for a long time, and im glad the sequel finally pushed me to play it. uchikoshi is brilliant, and i really am so happy to see him have his own studio with kodaka where the two can experiment and take risks and make cool shit. i may never forgive him for the twist in ztd about phi, but i have to respect him as a Player.

The most shallow KH experience. I've been playing through the series but refrained from reviewing the numbered titles, mostly because II and III came out at crucial points in my life where discussing them would be practically necessary and require me to reveal far more than I'd be comfortable. So let's talk about this one instead...

It sucks! Most of the now tired gripes about KH's narrative and production stem from Dream Drop Distance. The combat now actually is a button masher, the story is convoluted but not in the fun way it is in the other titles, and so many strange gameplay gimmicks are tacked on that serve to make this game feel sluggish, tedious and boring.

The basic physical combo is practically useless, and new keyblades don't differentiate at all. On Proud difficulty and higher you can get combo'd to death incredibly quickly, even after unlocking Second Chance/Once More. The command deck makes an even stronger argument against its own existence with the incredibly broken balloon spells, which the game told me I'd used thousands of times after I was finished. Flowmotion, parkour moves that can connect into physical attacks, do piddly damage and constantly remind you how bad the physics are. Nothing in this game seems balanced, or really developed past the point of "this seems cool let's try it". I admire DDD's experimentation, but it all just seems like piled on weight to BBS's pared down combat system in the worst way possible.

Level design also suffers here, with the new Disney Worlds feeling barren and overly large The films chosen here are actually quite good, playing into the series' strengths by representing older films (Pinocchio and Fantasia), newer fare (Tron Legacy), along with some deep cuts (Three Mousketeers). The eclectic choices here are diminished by how samey they all feel, usually opting for open city streets and wide open fields with little to change it up. There's nothing to do in these worlds but loop between bad combat encounters and poorly directed cutscenes.

Narratively this game is hard to hate, considering how much of it is pure fan service for SoRiku shippers. Their relationship is really sweet, developing as they both try to grow as people and move away from the mistakes of their past. Sadly, the major threat here is one of KH's weaker ones, Xehanort's younger self. He mostly shows up in each world to talk a lot of nonsense at Sora or Riku and then teleport a monster for them to fight. It's a shame after the great streak of villains the series had so far been known for, especially coming after BBS and Haley Joel Osment's terrific performance as the sneering Vanitas matched with Leonard Nimoy's striking portrayal of Master Xehanort.

The least essential KH entry by far, so bogged down by its own bloated systems and narrative. It's a shame that what little to like that there is here is rather good, it just makes the wasted potential taste all the more sour.

elden ring is from software arriving to save aaa gaming from itself yet again. as they did in the seventh gen with Dark Souls (to a lesser extent Demon's Souls as well but that game never reached the same status, but it does a lot of the same stuff. the gamble of console exclusives i suppose...), from has ripped away the comforts and the pablum from gaming at its most mainstream. this time focused with laser intent on stripping as much comfort from the open world action role playing computer games in many of the same ways that dark souls did the more linear action roleplaying game two generations before it. this is only barely exaggeration and the "new fromsoft game" jitters speaking here, i sincerely believe this game saved games from themselves once again.

open world games are in general excrutiatingly boring chore simulators that don't do much to excite any part of the brain besides the part that finds filling out lists fun. office drone twitter bluecheck freaks make these sorts of games for each other now game design's rules and laws are so firmly etched into our brains. hands must be held, stories must do thing a to subvert expectation b to reveal it's actually about (reader's choice: mental health, liberal politics, """""trauma""""). this isn't to say all open world games are this way, but one needs only look at what was supposed to be spring 22's big show pony horizon forbidden west to get a decent grip on what these games are. total ubisoftification to sell guaranteed x amount of copies to please y shareholders and guarantee z biyearly sequels that are each a little bit worse than the last one. (remember when far cry was good!?)

fromsoft has very little interest in doing anything related to that. there is no checklist of things to do, you either stumble onto the sidequests naturally or consult with the vast droves of online help and collaborate with others to solve these things. i don't want to get into spoilers but i'm glad from has continued the tradition of having a "true ending" that tells the journey you're player is going on to fuck off brought about by doing the absolute most to see how putrid the world the player inhabits is.

and this world is putrid. much like boletaria, lordran, drangleic, yharnam and sengoku(?) era japan before it, the world the player is given almost carte blanche to fuck about in is one just about nose-deep into the process of dying. whatever military or political powers inhabited it have no real control, they all seem to have fought every conceivable war they could come up with and have reached comfortably blocked-off stasis. in this state, the only thing left for anybody to do is die and then come back and then die and then come back until their killer loses interest. this is, as we all know, incredibly fucking raw. elden ring's world, the lands between, doubles down as the atmosphere and dread by pulling every one of fromsoft's trick and doing something new with it or iterating on it in a meaningful way.

to (lightly) spoil an early game area, the player is tasked with entering into and then killing the deity that ruled a school that sought forbidden knowledge regarding undeath where its scholars were driven mad or used for cruel experimentation (i think, item descriptions and reading the general air of the area as war machines and and mad sorcerers dot the area only tell me so much). this isn't really anything new for fromsoft, but it all still feels really fresh. partially because it's just a fucking raw idea and partially because it's paced pretty briskly, so you're only given the killer that might've ended up as filler if it were as long as a dark souls or sekiro stage is. ending with a puzzle boss was a no-brainer, but then turning that boss into a real fight that's pretty challenging and fun hits all the right notes here. it's nothing new, but it doesn't need to be when it's this good.

these legacy dungeons are amazing, but for the most part they are used to break up the exploration for the first two acts of the game. the real meat is the near infinite amount of things to find in the game. some of it doesn't add up to much, i've found abandoned fortresses that seemed to be going somewhere only to be quick excursions clocking in at under an hour. but some of it is huge. there are few moments in games that i can think of that took me by complete surprise as the underground portion of the map. at first it just seems to be a themed dungeon, but slowly it becomes almost an entire second open world, complete with its own subareas and dungeons. games rarely feel this deep, like you can kick over the cardboard standee and find something real behind it and not just dead air. i'm going to predict this moment is pivotal to a new generation of developer's understanding of world and level design, much like so much of dark souls was for its own generation (can't believe it's been 10 years...)

combat. it's good. souls combat rocks. i wish it was faster, as always. i liked how post-dark souls 2 a big goal for fromsoft seemed to be how fast they could pace the combat and have the player keep up. bloodborne and sekiro especially are constantly riding the edge of what is possibly too fast for the player to respond to, and elden ring follows a similar path. it's much closer to dark souls iii than sekiro or bloodborne, which i think everyone was expecting but maybe not everyone wanted. thankfully the game is firing on all cylinders and starts the boss difficulty around the prior game's midpoint and ratchets it up from there pretty quickly. while nothing quite hits the dizzying heights as clashing swords with isshin or nimbly moving through orphan of kos' infantile rage, a lot of bosses are on a similar level in their own ways. the final optional boss, one the game has used in a great deal of promotional material, feels like if artorias was upgraded and tweaked without feeling as masturbatory as gael was when it attempted similar things in the das3 dlc

it's nice that skills soft cap a little differently in this one, it was fun to have a melee oriented character that could dabble a little in faith and int with the freed up skill points. not much to add here but it also makes me excited to see the pvp meta even if i didnt touch it in this one.

most of the new stuff feels as tertiary as players want it to be. i didn't touch spirit ashes until endgame but when i did i liked what i saw. the one that just gives you a clone is sick, even if it's completely fucking broken. but breaking souls games is its own fun, so no harm done. can just not use it, obviously.

its crazy that fromsoft was able to move in a direction that feels appealing to diehard souls guys while still honestly feeling the most approachable a souls game has ever been. this whole game is the work of geniuses firing on all cylinders pumping out shit to put most everything released in the mainstream to shame, and i think it's going to be a pivotal moment in the whole history of gaming much like dark souls was. it's a panacea for the doldrums this gen is offering up so far, and it shows that games by committee aren't as infallible and foolproof as they'd like to think themselves as. this is going to sell 30 million copies, the tone is set. the stagnation is gone, the hollowing undone, the humanity restored and the grace returned.

"Whatever happens inside these scrunched, wrinkled fiber-bags of rotten-fruit-colored chopped hollow jumbo spaghetti bits is an accident of liquid physics. Our sentimentality is a coincidence. We are no smooth earnest factories; we are no diagram-perfect assembly lines. We are crowded hard bags of accidents down through which blood and other juices leak; we squeeze and our liquids spurt and rise. We must know the stupidity of this meat and we must permit it to terrify us. We must be afraid of this deadness. We must love each other. It is ridiculous if we do not"
-"just like hamburger;exactly like hamburger" by tim rogers

moon is a game that has been a phenomenon for many, many years, despite a whole lot of people probably having never played it until just this past year. my favorite game of All Time, undertale, owes a lot of its existence to moon's, and toby fox hasn't played it. before you play moon, you are immediately intrigued by moon and need to know more. it is a game that is equal parts obtuse 90s point 'n' click, social simulator and treatise on disarming ourselves and living (and more importantly LOVING) authentically. knowing about moon is a secret badge of honor among the in-the-know, or at least it was until its new translation and rerelease on modern hardware made the barrier of access 20 dollars instead of knowing japanese or using the gamefaqs guide to play a ROM or whatever.

but what about playing moon? a game that describes itself a remix rpg adventure makes it sound a little more complex than it is. it's at its core an adventure game that prides itself on telling you absolutely nothing and absolutely everything. a good portion of the game's puzzles require precise timing, memorizing patterns of both npcs and the environment, and the ability to navigate through surreal dialogue and cutscenes to work things out. but i think the developers also want you to collaborate as you play moon, as many games being developed in the early days of the internet wanted you to. part of my enjoyment of moon was reading along with a walkthrough, one with a writer sharing their own opinions and thoughts and strategies and victories and losses with me. they gave me their love in guiding me through this game, and this review is my best attempt at giving it back. gamefaqs user parrotshake, i love the living shit out of you.

moon's narrative is probably the key reason most people are here, and seeing what there is to see here is like finding a stone tablet with an ancient language's alphabet and grammatical rules inscribed onto it. understanding moon makes me understand a good 30 years of japanese game devleopment much more clearly. a lot has been said about how the developers at love-de-lic disseminated themselves into other studios like square and grasshopper manufacture, and their influence can be felt in games those people never touched. there's obvious titles like deadly premontion and undertale, but i also think games like persona 3 and final fantasy x took some of this game's philosophy to heart. and what a philosophy! in moon, a boy is trapped in his television or dreaming or something and has to pick up the pieces in the wake of destruction left by a traditonal jrpg hero. the most impactful of this for me was bringing the various killed animals back to life, and how much of this game's world is tied deeply to animals. they're deities, they're lifegivers and they're friends. saving perogon or exorcising gramby's summonbeast left me feeling so completely content, to see these characters whose lives were torn asunder by forces beyond their comprehension doing things they aren't supposed to be doing, and then lifting them out of their misery or saving them from it is a joyous act that moon revels in.

the whole game is joyous, it begs you to explore at your own pace and figure out the main story when you feel up for it, if you feel up for it. there's rarely any major pressure and for the most part its equally beneficial to watch filby fly his kite as it is to assemble pieces of a rocket ship. it's less elaborate puzzle box and more a series of events that seem almost unconcerned with the player's intervention or not, even though the player always brings about positive changes and helps the people in the game. it's nice to help people, it's nice to love people, even creepy cultists in the woods who make you memorize their stupid faces or wannabe idols or your grandma who's losing it and isn't fun to be around anymore.

the machines we inhabit are only going to fail us, eventually we will all be out in the woods desperate for someone to sing and dance and recite poems with us or play rock paper scissors with us or walk out dog when we're sick to. moon taught me to love the machine, even when the machine fails me and the machine doesn't want to work and when the machine ends up snapping us in two over and over again. open the door.

Zach, I was thinking earlier about what we were discussing. Movies that are "so bad they're good." I don't think I can place exactly what people mean by this. If something is good, well then it can't be bad. Perhaps what people mean by this is they enjoyed something they feel guilty of enjoying... a "guilty pleasure". Zach, I think people are, in some way, afraid to enjoy things that are too earnest or too raw in their emotions without putting up a veneer of irony. Do you remember when we played Pathologic, from 2005 and developed by Ice Pick Lodge? Oh, that was a great game.

It's often heralded as "janky" a term usually used to describe systems of gameplay that are either nonfunctional or obfuscated, purposefully or not, by the developers. It's a great game, Artemy Burakh's best performance. Its systems are often difficult to understand or directly averse to the player, which many disdained but I think makes it one of the best games of its release year and even the entire generation. The mere act of moving through a town and engaging with its many denizens allowed the player to become more deeply immersed in the narrative. It's even better with the map, which helps you become more easily acquainted with the landmarks and points of interest around town.

Zach, do you remember when we played Deadly Premonition, developed in 2010? What an amazing game, one that as soon as I finished it I knew was going to stick with me. All the details, the lovingly rendered town evoking memories David Lynch's telelvision series Twin Peaks. But there was another nostalgic aspect when I played it on my Nintendo Switch, Zach. Do you know what that is?

Exactly Zach, the early HD era of Japanese game development! The plasticine textures and oversaturated lighting were derided in their time, but I've come to appreciate the artificiality of it all. Zach, all of that was derided when this game was released, on top of myriad performance issues. But those performance issues are hard to fault the developers for in such a tumultuous environment for game development, and luckily the rerelease irons out the worst of them. I've never felt so immersed playing a game that looked so artificial! Even the occasional stuttering served as an almost Brechtian reminder that the world of the game was a false world with layers upon layers of detail building up to create a world that feels so real but loves to remind you that it is false. This veneer is furthered by the narrative, about a town's dark secrets being forced into the light by an outsider. In the narrative, it's not just you and I, Zach, it's the player.

And how does the player play, Zach? A lot of the game's critics would compare it to something like the survival horror titles of the time, but I don't fully agree. The overpowered weapons doled out by completing the real meat of the game, the sidequests, serve to trivialize the combat sections only a few chapters into the game. It's almost as if the shooting is only a further device of alienation. The shooting only serves to divide up the narrative segments, whereas most games do the opposite. It's almost as if the gameplay systems here are all serving the narrative, in lieu of classical gameplay wisdom that it should be the opposite. Zach, do you know what game I'm thinking of that also does that?

That's right, Zach, Pathologic. I can't speak for the director, Swery, but I believe at least a part of him was inspired to build a similarly plagued town falling apart at its seams. The big difference being the unshakable optimism of the denizens until the eleventh hour. Zach, I can't help but smile remembering the twins, or Emily, or any number of side characters who refused to let the world break them, even as it broke around them.

Zach, am I boring you? I'll stop now.

The best part of Demon's Souls, to me, is the arcane and apathetic atmosphere the game is thick with throughout. The characters, the enemies, the bosses, they all are almost incomprehensible and the game hides most lore behind item descriptions, leading to an almost brain fog inducing state on the player. Demon's Souls on PS3 pulses very subtly with profound life as a developer and its world were very surely nearly wiped out. And all of that is gone here, replaced with pretty particle effects and a revamped artsyle that sucks out the utilitarian post-apocalyptica for Blizzard inspired, plasticine HOG WASH! Nothing has ever felt so cynical, truly.

On top of the thoroughly Fucked Up artsyle and ambiance, the game just sucks to play now. Nothing feels right, the signature heft to the combat feels featherweight. Hitting an enemy no longer registers properly, nor does being hit. FromSoft laid this shit all out for them, but Bluepoint apparently believes themselves above the original developers. The breaking point for me was Phalanx feeling less like the opening salvo of horrors-yet-to-come and more like any other unremarkable first boss in any number of recent, genreless "action rpg" mush games. The splotchy-squelching of Phalanx not feeling particularly ooey nor gooey made me drop the game. I was done, just such a blatant misunderstanding of the design of the fight. And the design there isn't even that great! He's a big ooze guy that goes blorsh when you hit him and somehow that's fucked beyond recognition. Hate to see what sacrilege was done to the other bosses, will do myself a favor and never touch it!

Bluepoint, hear me and hear me well, keep your paws off Metal Gear Solid or I will unleash plague upon ye!

We are constantly swirling in the stew of misery, confusion and powerlessness of capital. Every conspirator answers to someone else infinitely until the end of time, and nobody's even sure what they're conspiring toward. Enter the survival horror masterpiece, Killer7.

Few games shock me to my core like this one does. Every design decision is on-point, to the extent that explaining the game's intricacies gives too much away. Somehow an on-rails Playstation 2 shooter is the most liquid and heart-pounding shooter I've ever played. Any enemy encounter can be trivial or heart-pounding depending on the layout of the area and configuration of enemies. The fact that Ulmeyda's town or the final school level aren't mentioned in the same breath as the Spencer Mansion or RCPD is a travesty. Especially so considering the sheer expressionistic brilliance of the levels herein and the enigmatic beauty of its characters.

Suda51 gets written off as "janky weird fun" and other nonsense pretty frequently, but it's only half true. Sure the games are weird but the weirdness, like Lynch's weirdness or any other auteur's weirdness, exists to further express the themes. Suda51's characters speak gibberish and dress like anime characters because they're forcing you further into a state of bewilderment and alienating you from the world just as much as the characters do. He's so constantly forced into the "ooooo quirky" mold that his later titles feel forced into doing, losing their thematic weight. Killer7's reception made Grasshopper the most exciting studio making games at the time and may also have sealed their fate.

All said, I am so thankful games like this exist. It's rare a game matches its gameplay's depth with real narrative depth that feels so tied to gaming, especially now as more and more major releases ape prestige television's episodic-but-not structure. Killer7 is a rare game that makes me rethink and reevaluate games as an artform, and truly speaks to how wonderful the medium is.