bloat turns to rot

i will preface this by saying i genuinely, for the most part, had a pretty enjoyable time with this game. it was very funny at moments and some characters are really good.

aside from that? eh.

the puzzles are a major step down from 999. where 999 felt it encouraged you to think and figure things out and try different options, VLR says you must do it My way, that is the Only solution. i figured out puzzles ahead of time, but because i had not done one specific unrelated thing, to get some kind of dialogue, despite everything else being in place, the puzzle goes unsolvable. it also has puzzles that expect insane amounts from the player, and to have outside knowledge of so many things. god bless anyone who played this game on the 3ds with no internet, i would not have been able to get through it.

the characters range from pretty interesting to not wanting them to be on my screen, which is another step down from 999, in which everyone is great. using each character as a way to define endings also means that some get 'was that it?' endings, and some get the most overblown bloated ridiculous eye-rolling endings ever. i think if about 6 plot elements were taken out of this game it would have been hugely better.

the lack of personality from the player character compared to the vibrant insanity of Junpei in 999 is a shame, but ig they had reasons for it. the change from beautiful 2d sprites to the 3d models also somehow gives them a little less personality and removes the beautiful feel of 999. but i also saw dio being pinned down several times so thats nice.

the games own internal logic leads itself to fall apart, and i've yet to have any sort of feeling of satisfaction from finishing the game, which really just felt like an entire setup for the third game, which i don't want to play yet, because i am recovering from this game, which made me feel like the lowly termite i am, incapable of understanding uchikoshi's mind as i am not a higher being, which is a shame.

anyway yeah, still want to play ztd, still enjoyed 999 a lot, this just really was the schrodingers cats we made along the way

This is one of those games where it's best to come into the experience as blind as possible. This game is crammed with writing that manages to be compelling without falling into pretention. It manages to be open to many interpretations without being unsatisfactory. I will say that the game's many routes are more similar than they appeared to me on my first playthrough, but I still enjoyed exploring all of them. I'll be thinking about a lot of the questions this game asks for a while, which is rare to find with video game writing, so that alone propels Slay the Princess to a higher personal rating.

Resident Evil 4 Remake is a goddamn masterpiece. This is the best Survival Horror game I've played just ever and I am actively struggling to think of something I didn't like about it.

The combat experience is spot on. The game really forces you to choose every option available. When you're unlucky with the last encounter you had and waste ammo, suddenly stealth became a very tempting option to thin out enemies in the next encounter. Getting rough with low damage and no explosives for crowd control, now you scour every single thing you can find with your eyes to work around it. And it's somehow felt good rather than demanding, it's actually amazing. Capcom has also done an amazing job creating the sense of accomplishment when all hope is lost. The way that the back end "director" provides monumental wins for you, such as having no healing left or being low on ammo, is amazing. It allows you to make mistakes but still pull a win out, not always, but when you really are putting in the work. To quote our liege and savior Todd Howard, It just works.

The changes to the narrative from the original game are also fantastic, Leon's characterization is still nailed despite him still very much being a stoic badass, he has depth more here and his relationship with Ashley feels way more natural here then in the original (although it's still platonic, which is great of course). Ashley herself feels a lot more of a "young woman stuck in a situation which frightens her to her core" here then just "high school girl who screams a lot". Just in characterization and presentation alone, it goes a long way to make her a better character and it helps carry through the game.

The game is also so damn pretty, I can't understate that. This actually helps it feel a lot more like a horror game too now, you actually do feel kinda terrified of things that previously where kinda hard to take seriously as a threat, atleast visually. This is no longer an issue here, it's fully lived up to the "survival horror" aspect of this series and did it so brilliantly. It's not topped 2R or 7 in that sense, it was never going too in fairness, but by god it got closer then I would have ever expected in a million years.

I was never that big on the original game in all honesty, but Resident Evil 4 Remake is one of the best games I've played in my life, full stop. I love it to absolute bits and I can finally say I "get it" when people talk about this game in such high regard, I understand it fully. This is my favorite Resident Evil Game, favorite Horror Game, and probably my favorite game of this decade so far. It's a work of art and I cannot strongly recommend this enough. It takes a lot for me to say a game is perfect, but this is one of those cases where the game genuinely feels nearly perfect.

start writing a review
I was a teenage exocolonist (which I will call “exocolonist” from now on because that name is too long) is a beautifully queer game.
Just how queer it is becomes obvious immediately during character creation. The game not only lets you choose your pronouns, it lets you customize them. You can have neopronouns. You can have he/him pronouns but use feminine terms like girl and mother. You can have she/they pronouns and use a mix of feminine, masculine, and neutral terms. Literally every single instance of this game using gendered language to refer to the mc is customizable. And your appearance and physical sex are customizable separately from all of this.
The relationships you can have with the other characters (and that they can have with each other) are also beautifully multifaceted. No romance option is gender locked. Some characters will start (queer) relationships on their own, no one is throwing themselves at your feet. There are multiple trans and nonbinary characters. One character is aroace. Not every romance starts at a high friendship level. Not every “romance” is a romance, some characters are happy to be your friends with benefits. Multiple characters are polyamorous. And some relationships in this game are queerplatonic, which is what queer people call relationships we can’t describe properly but they’re really beautiful.
Exocolonist has the best portrayal of gender, love, and sexuality out of any game I’ve ever played, except for maybe Heaven Will Be Mine.
is that what I want my review to be about? Isn’t this game so much more than just a dating sim?


start writing a review again
Exocolonist is a beautiful game about growing up.
Your experiences shape you. The memories you make become the cards you end up using to win the challenges later in your life. I wish the game wasn’t as committed to being a game in some parts because removing some treasured memory because I need to optimize my deck kinda sucks.
This alone already tells a beautiful growing up story, but what makes the game really special is how your relationships to the world, and especially the other children around you change. You start out doing either simple tasks or learning in school and end the game doing things that require highly specialized skills. Most of the adults go from treating you like, well, a child to treating you like an equal.
Your childhood friends will all develop in vastly different directions. Friends thought to be inseparable become bitter rivals. Some go down dark paths and you desperately try to stop them, not always succeeding. But some also grow to lead happy lives and you’re happy for them.
Exocolonist portrays the journey from child to young adult, both the good and the bad.
did I just write this entire review without mentioning that this is a cool science fiction story?


start writing a review again
Exocolonist is a beautiful political science fiction story.
You live in a Utopia that is unlike anything possible with our current technology. There are some interesting political thoughts in this game like how to encourage art in a (mostly) moneyless society, but it unfortunately doesn’t ever dive too deeply into any of them.
The game is also kinda weird about violence. It presents the positions of “violence is good when justified”, “violence is always bad”, and “violence is always bad but sometimes it is still necessary and justified” but there are multiple instances where you are forced to choose between the first two.
As a sci-fi story it has everything you could want. You’re one of the first children born in space, you and everyone else has cool genetic enhancements, you are part of a small group who are trying to be the first humans to life on an alien planet, there are cool aliens and the story explores the theme of living in harmony with nature or bending nature to your will and there’s a cool AI you can befriend and a wormhole and…
A wormhole
Yes, a wormhole. What was so special about this wormhole? Come on, tell the people

Yes, I know how to review this game now, but I’ll have to spoil a game mechanic that you might discover as early as reloading an old safe or as late as starting your second run. I had it spoiled for me before I started playing the game and didn’t mind at all but if you want an unspoiled experience I recommend you stop reading and start playing now


start writing a review again
Whenever a game has multiple routes/endings, people will replay it over and over. Some games use this to pad their playtime, some use it to tell the same story from different perspectives, and exocolonist deconstructs it to a degree.
In exocolonist, the mc retains some knowledge from previous playthroughs when you start a new game. This allows you to save people you couldn’t save the first time, take shortcuts to things that took a long time to solve previously and just generally makes your life easier.
This recontextualizes replays from being something you the player are doing to see all the content in this game to something the mc is doing to improve their life. No ending is perfect (though some are much closer to perfect than others) so there is always a reason to come back and try something differently.
Unfortunately for this game I played it after I played Everhood, so now a story about constantly relieving your life to chase after some unobtainable perfection feels slightly wrong to me. There is a way to break this loop, but the game portrays this as a bad ending and offers you to restore the loop with basically no consequences.
I’ll just pretend that after I got the ending that is as close to perfection to me as possible, the mc decided to stop this loop. I won’t replay the game again anytime soon. Solana’s happy.

That’s a pretty decent review but I still feel like it doesn’t do the game justice


start writing a review again
No review can do this game justice. It is far greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a queer dating sim, it’s about growing up, it’s a political sci-fi story and it’s a cool meta game, but it’s so much more than this.
This game is really special. Go and check it out.