wherever tifa lockhart and vincent valentine go, i'll be there

shitty in a very distinctly cool way. makes me miss when i'd walk into the arcade of a movie theater or w/e in the late 90s/early 00s and chuck a few of my parents' quarters away on something barely playable that looked rad as hell to my idiot child brain. i love how easy it is to cheese the AI with spamming specific attacks, the whole experience is just a flailing mess and it rules. makes me wanna boot up power stone or something, it's been like two decades since i've even thought about games like this, but i know my life is only enhanced by their existence

tifa's design here makes her look like an action figure for pervert otakus, but w/e i like spamming triangle and juggling the bad guy when they're close and spamming tifa hadouken when they're far away and winning. girls are so cool. i like the powers dog that has a red XIII alt and the animorph girl and the guy who shoots rockets out his leg. don't like the old guy with the annoying stick or the yoyo cop tho. i'll play the minigames and quest mode someday maybe, idk just something about blasting through an arcade mode that appeals more to me in these types of games

adding this to my "games that would fucking rule at slumber parties even though i'm turning 32 in a week and all the friends i could have slumber parties with are productive adults who live halfway across the country from me and also i have crippling student debt" list! shirtless sephiroth tho

Probably the first game in a while that's made me regret not doing scores for games on this website; Children of the Sun is as unwieldy and aggravatingly trial and error as it is aesthetically captivating and mechanically cathartic. I've seen others besmirch it as a poor puzzle game or shitty action game individually -- perhaps it's within that straddling of genre conventions that it never quite finds its way -- yet it's difficult to recall any other game I've played recently that's so confident in its fusion of puzzle-solving and reflexive execution. And while the latter is what ultimately allows Children of the Sun to carve out impactful moments in the player's mind, it's also its most egregious pain point (followed by the semi-optional "strategy phase" whose varying (in)elegance will inevitably filter a lot of players).

It becomes especially damning during the game's later stages where it's possible for the player to have figured out a few viable solutions, but executing the longer sequences of kills can be absolutely excruciating when failure is as easy as a simple misclick -- or your perfect solution gets fucked over by unreliable RNG (?) cycles, among other fiddly (to say the least) annoyances. I imagine this is going to vary wildly from person to person as well; some levels I completed in a single try while others took me upwards of two hours (not including the breaks I'd sometimes have to take). It's a shame when the player's momentary satisfaction is upended by the realization that the next level is the same thing but even more overwhelming intricate. That'll probably satisfy the people who really fuck with Children's unique gameplay toolkit and jazz-like structure, but for others it's going to make playing the game a draining experience, which maybe isn't what you want in a game that doesn't have a whole lot of content in the first place (or maybe that's its saving grace, I don't know! I'll let the gamer reading this decide). The last level was particularly harrowing as unraveling its solution required executing individual pieces of the what is the longest kill sequence in the game ad nauseam, and with its length was probably every single issue I've talked about so far along with it.

This is where I'd love to tell that this is all worth it somehow, that Children of the Sun's ludonarrative adds up to anything, and I... I don't think it does? The striking aesthetic and the revenge porn premise certainly elevate the experience, but the narrative itself feels exceedingly played out. Maybe this will do more for somebody who has had real life experience with cults, or maybe it's just that its story is portrayed through slideshows that are largely disconnected from the gameplay that, despite having pretty great art, don't really impart much upon the player outside of "this cult did bad things, the player character wants to do bad things back to the cult". Which like, understandable, good for her! But it just didn't do a whole lot for me personally. I want to say the ending is maybe saying something? I dunno man, I think I've played too many irreverent and/or Dark Souls-influenced indie titles that I'm just so desensitized to endings like this. Maybe I'm just a heartless bitch tho.

Children of the Sun has its moments though, like, there's a pretty fun quote towards the beginning of the game that I'm expecting fans of the game to repeat an annoying amount. I looooove the main character's design and the cover art itself (honestly it's why I ended up playing it in the first place lol). The whole game has this vibe to it that for some reason dug up forgotten memories of games like Project Rub/Feel the Magic: XY/XX; honestly it'd kinda fuck as a DS game now that I think about it (Killer7 DS real???). Not sure if I'd recommend Children of the Sun to everybody, but if it catches your interest in any way, I'd say it wouldn't hurt to give it a try once it's on sale for sub-$10 or so.

Kinda went into Pentiment expecting to have to "eat my vegetables"; its aesthetic being artistically sound, but not really the kind of thing I'm generally into, and its premise sounding intellectually invigorating in a games industry that's arguably in arrested development when it comes to making mainstream experiences for adults, but maybe not enough to keep me personally going for a playtime of over 20 hours. And well, I was pretty fuckin' wrong! And not even in the Disco Elysium way where after I got over the hurdle of the first hour or two that it finally clicked (not to say that Disco Elysium's intro isn't basically perfect in its own way), Pentiment managed to sink its teeth into me right away. The game's art is also a lot more affective and unique than I would've expected just from the couple trailers I'd seen, and despite the entire game taking place across only a handful of screens (contextualized as pages in a book), there were many times that I found myself stopped in my tracks, contemplating the beauty of a specific moment.

It's also just as real as fuck without succumbing to either condemnation or romanticization. Pentiment's perspective on history and the people who shaped it is complex without cowardly labeling every participant as a morally grey agent -- there are unabashedly terrible and evil people in this world, people who are deceptive in their self-servitude, and even inarguably cruel entities like the Catholic Church house individuals who really do want to make the world a better place in their own way and even people who are in the church due to societal forces beyond their control. Pentiment is a game that tries its best to be honest about the world. It's also a game that's absolutely more intelligent and worldly than I'll ever be, and I really don't think I can do it the full justice it deserves in my own analysis of its setting and themes, so I'll just leave it there.

And yeah, Pentiment is also just a great example of how to make a dialogue-focused adventure game fun. Like, part of that is probably because I chose hedonism as one of my skills and made Andreas into a terrible little boyslut, but you know how it is. The dialogue never bored me, every character feels truly alive -- and that's without voice acting! I actually appreciated that there wasn't any honestly, it's a double-edged sword in a lot of games like this, and it only would've detracted from the bespoke aesthetic decision to give every character's spoken dialogue in "their own handwriting", in quotes because I'm not entirely sure what the implication was for the characters that are by their own admission illiterate (but I did love that Claus the town printer's dialogue is the only one that uses an actual typeface, accompanied by the satisfying thuds of a printing press).

By the end of the game, Tassing really does begin to feel like your home as well, not only because many pivotal events in Tassing's recent history are influenced by the player, but because you've grown close to the town's citizens and watched them grow and change as well. Pentiment isn't a power trip in that sense -- you cannot save everybody or give everybody a happy ending, not that you'd want to with some of the assholes you run into honestly -- but it does manage to encapsulate the warm and fuzzy feeling that despite the world being dogshit, we can still do our best for those around us, be a part of a greater whole with honest fervor. The player and Andreas will inevitably fuck up a lot, but it's something we have to live with, something to learn from. Things like that feel self-evident in the real world and are rarely explored properly in games, but the fact that Pentiment lacks a manual save function really sells that feeling. But even if we can't meta-game Tassing into the perfect little Bavarian town suffering under feudalism and religious oppression, the Tassing we end up with is undeniably ours. I think that's probably why I might never replay Pentiment, which is rare for me, since I tend to replay games I love quite often.

Also the "third act" is pretty good! Saw some people criticizing the shift in gameplay focus, but it was a nice change of pace and was probably my favorite part altogether. Don't normally recommend games on here, but honestly, check it out for yourself. I can't really think of many demographics that'd be outright disappointed by Pentiment. It's good. :)