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Animator, sometimes gamedev. WIll take an eternity to get this list to be representative. Actual reviews at some point maybe?
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With Those We Love Alive
With Those We Love Alive
NieR: Automata
NieR: Automata
Disco Elysium: The Final Cut
Disco Elysium: The Final Cut
Boku no Natsuyasumi 2: Umi no Bouken-hen
Boku no Natsuyasumi 2: Umi no Bouken-hen
Notpron
Notpron

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After a still Cave Story-esque Momodora 3, the series began a transformation of sorts. Reverie Under The Moonlight caught the Dark Souls bug and was all the better for it; a straightforward melancholic metroidvania with beautiful pixel art and a simple-yet-visceral combat system that relied heavily on rolling and limited heals. It might've grown stale given enough hours, but it was just the right length. Minoria sported a new artstyle to compliment its Hack'n slash ambitions. Said ambitions were mostly fulfilled, though tainted by a lack of polish its simpler predecessor didn't suffer from. Still, both were firsts for rdein&co, and Moonlit Farewell's all-new challenge is to improve within continuity. Not an experiment, but a proper follow-up.

And so, the spirit of Koji Igarashi (who is very much alive and well despite the drama of this sentence) was metaphorically called forth to haunt the game's systems. Moonlit Farewell echoes its predecessor in combat rhythms, aesthetic language and the compact recursiveness of its world design, but using them only as a foundation. On top of it: numbers. Moonlit Farewell is Momodora with stuff in it. The doujin game feeling prevails in the small art inconsistencies, the indulgent, horny anime designs and the honesty with which it presents everything, but holding it together is a very robust set of mechanics.

Healing and magic spells now deplete the same bar (a welcome shade of Hollow Knight) and a stamina bar caps rolling/sprinting (a less welcome Dark Souls import that ends up hurting navigation more than it improves combat). Combat itself is faster, not through player input but the literal shape of the game. A higher resolution and a panoramic window shine a spotlight on crowd control and proyectile speed, allowing for new combat situations. It's all fine-tuned beyond even Reverie; the kind of game where you can have fun in a white room with a single enemy just by watching the hitstops, screenshakes and little flashes of light. Beyond that, as previously stated, a hint of Igarashi.

The character has visible stats now, subject to equipment and permanent pickups, which does increase the probability of a decent explorer being overprepared but also creates a wide array of clever synergies. Playing around with builds is notably easier than in proper igavanias and even something like Hollow Knight (whose presentation clearly inspired Moonlit Farewell's), with the drawback being that its possible playstyles aren't as radical the ones offered by those titles. They sure feel like they are when you see the changing damage numbers on screen, though. They have a rhythm of their own, reflective of the strength, range and focus of the player, and they never go away because you're always hitting something.

Punctuating all of the above is fantastic level and encounter design. Every room is an idea. They never repeat (though they do build up) and there's an intention behind each, without a single enemy or obstacle thrown in for no reason. That also means you can consider your equipment and strategize accordingly beyond general preference. The game is short as a result of this essential approach (like 8h for 110%), but that just proves that Bombservice understand good pacing and have been perfecting it over years. And going back to the start of the review, I can safely call Moonlit Farewell a triumph--grown naturally from their previous work to be bigger and better without losing any of its bluntness. It's an artisan's work, humble despite the obvious technical ability behind it.

Outer Wilds is a sort of detective game. You solve the universe one riddle at a time; narrowing great mysteries down to specific questions through curiosity and a good amount of deductive reasoning. Echoes of the Eye is its inductive counterpart, with all the implications that may carry.

(This review assumes very basic familiarity with the base game! I will avoid specific spoilers but lightly touch on tone and design ideas. I'd still recommend you go in blind. It's good.)

After a stellar start that feels perfectly at home in the base game, the dynamic quickly shifts: you're presented with obstacles first and then explore for the right tool to overcome them. It's the opposite of the way the original game conditioned you to think. Yes, you kept problems in the back of your mind so you could identify solutions in the wild, but it was far more frequent to come across new "tools" while still unaware of their intended use. You established a complex web of causality where every discovery would enable several new interactions and progress paths to dynamically hop between. Echoes' game design is a little disappointing to me because the structure of its puzzles calls back, instead, to LucasArts or Sierra adventures.

Its chokepoints are obvious (single barriers that halt all progress) and their solutions arbitrarily specific. Trying to find any given key involves a chain of extremely evocative findings that suggest a plethora of new ways to interact with the world but rarely go beyond the realm of the aesthetic. I wasted many loops making fruitless logical connections before it became clear I'd have to follow the "pair inventory object with environment ptompt" method of Silent Hills past, which ground me to a halt as I had to readjust the entire way I was approaching the expansion. Admittedly, it wasn't exactly like the former Proper Noun comparisons, but it did involve the sort of inference that requires skipping over the exact technicalities the original game would've built its own puzzles around. Also admittedly, the amount of solutions that depended on me not having a notable visual disability didn't make things easier.

What did make things easier was the jaw-dropping sense of atmosphere and tone. Echoes of the Eye is actually a horror game--one far more overtly narrative than the base experience. My dryly mechanical description up to this point has therefore been a lie by omission. Seen as a more traditional story-driven game, the wrinkles in its design start to make sense.

it's an issue of scope.

I haven't researched this in the slightest, but I imagine the story was concieved before any of the level design proper. The chokepoints are there to make a few important events impossible to miss, and the lack of information density around them, the reason discoveries feel more textural than consequential, is that the team just didn't have the time or resources to build something as complex. It's a little sad, but thinking about it helped me focus on what they did right, which is literally everything else.

So many of my favourite images in Outer Wilds come from this DLC. It's sometimes funny, sometimes cozy and frequently downright horrifying. It's esoteric in a way the original never dares to be and evokes not the primal fear of an uncaring universe, but haunting humanity. It's not a literal sequel to the base game, but it's very much a thematic one, and the ending is so cathartic that it has remained a mind-anchor over two days of holiday family antics. From that herculean feat alone, we can infer that Echoes of the Eye is at least Pretty Damn Good.

I'm not much of an expert when it comes to this kind of game but every one I've played has been under Ikaruga's impossibly long shadow. Not only is it obsessively fine-tuned; but shrouded in such a powerful aetshetic it can compete in the same league as most purposefully atmospheric titles.