32 reviews liked by tobin_ez


This review contains spoilers

As somebody who knows the dev behind this and how she is, I can't help but feel I was intruding on a private moment here. In this game, an analogue child of the narrator Curly, waltz around as they proclaim various sentiments on the parafictional world they inhabit.

The meat of it probably comes through both in the second half and on replay. The narrator is a snippet on childhood forgiveness and, I think, not losing your memories of joy to the pain flooding and surrounding them. In that sense the game touches into a specific insight of gender dysphoria often ignored. Yes, most peoples childhoods are miserable and filled with regret, but speaking from experience, trans people often have developed an often more jaded relationship with their past because of the trauma of not even being able to present or know the steps how to present the gender they often feel more aligned to. People often focus more on the dysphoria of the exact present moment, gender dysphoria as a concrete political panic and surviellance from hostile societus is beyond true, but the form of dysphoria through memory and the past, something you literally cant change if you wanted to, is much harder to conceptualize all at once. Because of repression, the relationship with memory is scarred by a smothering and haunting self loathing, if you have any understanding of the Proust effect, its basically based on those involuntary memory floods. Yet they can in turn threaten the present sense of mediocrity through their unpleasance and sense of comparative stagnation they tend to bring.

I feel like that's a fairly core concept for understanding the complexity that undergirds this sort of moment, the lamentations on your past and present inadequacies can intensify and clash into each other, unless you walk it through.

It's good the game ends on a sentiment of self forgiveness. Realizing in the past you didn't really know all that much better and was just trying her best, its so easy for us to cringe at our past selves to the point of it swallowing our current ones. The narrator may be a bit bitter with her childhood upbringing, but the silver lining is the rambunctious childlike passion for games shines bright through. That said, it still feels like I'm intruding on a private moment, so perhaps the name for this thing is more apt than a lot of people are giving credit.

Overall, this is a neat small little game made with a rather ubiquitous itchio engine used to tell these sort of minimalist one shots. But this is the meek quiet vulgar gamepoem, you should know just from looking at this sort of thing in the future whether or not it'll be something your patient with. That said there's one exception to those who want to see some of the most ambitious things this engine can do, if you want something really mindblowing, get your mind out of the gutter and check out Madotsuki's Closet. It's about an hour in length but it uses the limits of this engine as far as it can and is about a transgender pseudo-analysis/memoir on every internet dilettante's favorite indie darling gem, Yume Nikki.

Is it rude to plug a different game by the developer in the discussion around a separate work? Probably so, but I noticed there's only 1 review on the page of that one and its one of the best games I played last year. On top of that, any of the limitations, confusions, or irritations of lack are far more fulfilled by playing the much larger game she worked on just a pigeons walk to the birdbath 5 feet away from you!

Now, you could argue that I should have just made my overview on that game, and you might be right, but most of what I have to say in terms of trying to understand trans experience through game memories applies there, and in general I just have far less to say since its so thoroughly a memoir it can pretty much speak for itself.

tl;dr: dreadx2 is definitely an improvement over this one and brings some nice changes to the table (10 games in 7 days each -> 12 games in 10 days each + introducing a hub world), yet this collection still has some great games worth playing! i'd recommend it, as it's also a bunch cheaper than the other collections.

as this is a collection of games, it would only be fair to review each separately.
it's also worth mentioning that unlike the other collections, this one has no hub world and 10 games made in 7 days. i'm glad they decided to change this in the future titles. without further ado, let's get to the short horror games!(ranked from least fav to most fav) oh and a quick note - i'd say i like the top 4 about equally, those games were extremely hard to rank and i'm still not completely sure about their placements.

number 10 - rotgut by snowrunner games
the most glitchy, meaningless, terribly optimised walking simulator out there, i have no words for rotgut. the devs could have done much more seeing their potential in soda drinker pro.

number 9 - don't go out by secret cow level
the game gives you so many cards which are just useless, there seems to be only one way to get through the night and i got it figured out in under 10 minutes. the pixel art's good though and the game has a fun, unique idea. there's missed potential here.

number 8 - the pay is nice by oddbreeze
has some interesting concepts, but it's really short and has a very abrupt ending i think. not too bad but i can't put it any higher.

number 7 - the pony factory by david szymanski
it's probly the worst game by him that i have played, it's still not bad but the gameplay gets very stale. the ammo refills and medkits are balanced well though and the game's concept is pretty original. oh almost forgot to mention, gotta love the slow down button that this dev puts into his games.

number 6 - mr bucket told me to by strange scaffold
it's a survival horror game with resource management, but the resources felt really janky at times, i couldn't tell how to refill this or that. still a really interesting game, with a good story. this is the first game on this list that i liked quite a bunch.

number 5 - summer night by airdorf games
the gameplay drags on for slightly too long, though the scares were good, the game was unique and the ending was well done.

number 4 - shatter by lovely hellplace
these devs could do so much more with a full release of an rpg(cannot wait for what dread delusion will have to offer once it gets out of early access!) but even as a short game, shatter is very charming and unique, i love it even if it's certainly not the best game out there(it's kinda short too).

number 3 - outsiders by mahelyk
so much better than this dev's title in dreadx2!! at first i unfortunately missed the point of this game and kept resetting instead of dying, but once i figured it out, i can safely say this game was one of the best in the collection.

number 2 - carthanc by scythe dev team
again, miles better than their feature in dreadx2. carthanc has a similar vibe to "to the end of days", but the gameplay here is much more enjoyable. great atmosphere, great setting, great gameplay. my only complaint is that they could make the enemies not be walking screamers, it gets annoying after a while.

number 1 - hand of doom by torple dook
it's amazing. original, very charming and i can't wait for its full release on steam. with each title you can expect torple dook's games to be some of the best, truly unique ones in these collections.

the Seinfeld game adaptation is fire

i love fzero. this is fzero times 99. so this is 99 times better. ka-pow.

This game is wonderful Road 96 delivers on his story, gameplay, aesthetic and much more the only thing that i felt a bit underwhelming was the lack of alot choices! (but all choices matter in the end so that's good)

CN: Shower Thought

Bookshelf Companion

"As all partings foreshadow the great final one, so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper what your room and what mine must one day be. " - Charles Dickens, Bleak House

About a month ago I moved out of my parents house for the first time, and I just want to say I'm very glad I played this first before I moved out because I absolutely would have done what the text here depicts. In Minimalist (2017) you pick everything up to get rid of it, and then you are left with an empty space afterwards.

For a very short time period in 2018 I fell into a few different rabbit holes. I was out as a girl to most of my online friends but still struggling to convince the rest of the irl population I was (depressingly, I still deal with this). Most of those rabbit holes are rather dark, Otakudom, Scientism, interest in reactionary arguments (ie the peterson religiousity trap, skepticism of NB people, etc.). These are all terrible, there was a lot to like about me in this time and I wasn't some horrific bigot but I was a dumb suburban white girl with no political compass. A seemingly more benign interest was in the Minimalist movement, as a lifestyle and aesthetic. A mixture of literal CEO mindset shit like wearing only 1 shirt, and living space decisions like abandoning as much furniture and extraneous shit in your life as you can. I watched stupid ass movies like Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things (2016) on netflix. Consume a bunch of youtube videos which were an aggregate of Tiny House glorification, lifestyle aesthetic videos that showed bedrooms as if they were hospital chambers, and a touch of 'minimalist philosophy' like thinking Diogenes of Sinope was the only good philosopher because of his dedication to 'minimalism'. To illustrate here's a genuine excerpt of what I said from around the time to my girlfriend in support of how I have a smaller rating scale:

"Like in my opinion I've started realizing that minimalism is more or less how I already operate

I'm all about trying to focus on 'good' art, 'good' people (though that can be a tad more complex), etc.

Minimalism is all about trying to focus on what you like, what's helping you in life

Trying to enjoy that, and then discarding the clutter"

In retrospect this plays right into the insecurity about having 'good mental hygeine'. You see it all the time in reflexive anti consumerist sentiments. Later that same year I would buy a bunch of 'girly clothes' and throw a good 3/4ths of my boy wardrobe in the trash. 'Thats it, I dont need anymore things'. This seemed like a logical step of maturity from understanding how my family threw away all the gamecube game boxes and put it in a giant CD case. They even threw away the gamecube itself because logically, the Wii can run all that stuff now anyway. While I heavily disagree with doing that now, at the time I thought well thats minimalism isnt it, no need to keep plastic trash around the house. The problem is that logical next step would be to throw away every game disc for the playstation or xbox since the computer can technically run it. Why not take this 'digital nomadism' to its logical extreme? Why have any objects at all?

...

Well, it's not like I had some profound realization from playing Minimalist, by this point a half decade later I already recognized how silly and empty it is to have no furniture. Hell, if anything woke me up to it its probably the opening of Cruelty Squad (2021) which depicts just how pathetic and depressed doing that actually is. However, Minimalist did make me recognize that I probably shouldn't just abandon everything. I brought some books I loved from before I left, I haven't touched them at all because I read most of my books online but its nice to know that they are there just in case. More importantly, I had panicked about how many loads of laundry I have to do and that I should trash 3/4ths of it again, but this jolted me from following up on that.

More broadly, Minimalist is short and small, to the point its almost unsatisfying. These 'one room' bitsy games are, by accident or intentionally in direct commentary with the first ever bitsy game released Where did I put it? (2016) by Patrick Hale. In which you explore your small space to find something abstract you lost in messy home. Here, its inverted to be an attempt to lose everything. To lose the ego attached to 'objects' rather than trying to find it. Here's what I think is clever though, there's an emptiness in BOTH texts due to a lack of an ending. In one you find out what you're missing but never find it properly, theres no end credit loop like in other bitsy games. Here, you lose that, but you also lose the ability to prompt any more dialogue boxes since you just got rid of all the objects by interacting with them. In Where did I put it? you can technically loop the dialogue thoughts forever in an infernal mindtrap, here you have the opposite, the infernal mindtrap in not having mental prompts.

Every time you choose to own or release an object from your home, you're making an implicit decision of 'memory' just as much as of identity. Having an object anchored lets you remember what you had, so the allure of digitizing all of these memories into the computer makes sense in theory but the problem is the complexity of it never quite goes away. In 2020 or so I lost every single piece of memory stored on my computer. The reaction images, pictures of discussions I had with my ex, etc. It was devastating. Made worse by the fact I just broke up at the time with her and found out that my old discussions with her in Skype are lost to time. At least my version of skype, I lost everything. In a way this is privileged, because most people have more serious versions of this that are marginalized. Being kicked out suddenly from their home, having an abuser destroy their objects, having to flee in a war. By that reasoning, I've come into this realization of memory in its relationship to objects a little late.

On the literary level, I always knew it was there. Yet never really wanted to accept it personally, because I'm a 'digital girl'. However as both these texts accurately represent there is no real distinction between physical hoarding and digital hoarding in both how objects can arrest you and in how 'freeing' from them is just as solemn. I could just as easy consider these databases a form of memory hoarding. At any moment I could panic about how I 'dont remember anything' and try to frantically categorize what I played, listened to, and watched. I've experienced so much art at 25 that its running that panic of incoherent clutter, and odds are if you're reading this the same is likely true for you to. I'm failing in for instance movie trivia and constantly feeling I need to play catch up and create flash cards, only to then simplify it. One day I'll spend trying to categorize every 3D platformer I've played and want to play, the next I'll say to myself 'ok fuck it, only 3D mario matters now or whatever'. Do you remember everything? Or do you like me often find yourself checking quietly in a tab to make sure you're getting the information right? How good is your recall? What is really forgettable to you and how do you organize the stuff you want to remember?

Anyway, I could waffle about this all day to no fruition, but instead I want to just point out something. In Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (2001) you have long voice acted cinematic conversations with the NPCs to move the story along, they are entertaining and endearing. However when you try to speak to them after they tell you what to do, they simply will not talk to you or repeat themselves. They'll tell you basically to leave them alone and go do this. The first time this happens its surprising, because the norm is that you should be able to talk to the dialogue givers for repeat information whenever you want. Similarly to expectations, a person who has played a lot of early JRPGs and point and click games, are going to find the lack of objects you can look at and get dialogue from in Chrono Trigger equally suprising. Yet in both these games it makes sense to do without even though it leaves behind an 'eeriness' for the player. The player being forced to either remember or recognize that they are bothering is more immersive. These 2 games, Minimalist and Where did I put it are not immersive by comparison, they comment on videogame form itself. It's limitations and how those limitations can reflect onto the player. See, this comment response the author left on the page is in my view the real ending.

"Thanks! I wanted the 'end' of the game to be a time to reflect, since there's literally nothing left to do since you've willingly got rid of everything you own. I felt like explicitly stating the character's reasoning to the player would detract from the player coming to their own conclusion. Yours is totally valid, but others might have thought of something else- maybe the character is going off to become a monk? :)"

The real end game is being so distressed that you try to interact with the creator to find a catharsis for the fiction to make sense. Because the 'ending' of the game in the text is so unreal that you cant ever feel certain its really there. After playing enough bitsy games now I've realized not having an ending is just a running bit between these people, probably a satirical response to the 'looping' thats built into the engine when it does end. You'll have to find closure somewhere else. Yet outside of this we should be comfortable with the prospect that we might just be missing the conclusion, or that there never was one in the first place. Not every memory exists to be recalled evenly, and not every game exists to be concluded upon. It's both the great curse and the benefit of gaming as an art form that it brings with it an ambiguity of intentions and expected results. Sometimes its better to just be at peace with it, for instance there was never any 'conclusive' aspect of Gasters in Undertale, yet its there and in many ways that unknown quality makes the game better. At the same time if it doesn't make sense I feel strongly that its fair to think it may be a sly commentary within genre conventions.

In closing, both these games are 'forgettable' except in rare shower excursions, but to lament or feel shame for the mental clutter they bring is silly. It was an experience that happened so theres no use in drowning it just to try and find the top ten list of all games of all time. One should not be so quick to expunge themselves of all consumption or desperately organize it for ego alone. I think its better to just let it all float out there like the junk it is. I'll keep my wardrobe intact, and my word of advice is that you probably should to.

"Actually you can not forget what has happened to you. So, don't trust your memory" - Negativland, This is Not Normal


* I never finished it. I took a 400 course I failed because I was supposed to read through this and couldn't stand it. However, it sounds appropriate enough and that's what matters. Originally I was gonna quote Trainwrecks being mad at somebody in his chat for calling his house empty but I couldn't find the clip. The only reason I mention this is because it reinforces my point about 'mental clutter'. I watched that clip at some point and now I cant fucking find it, I spent 20 minutes trying to do so before giving up. I don't even like the guy I just thought it was funny but whatever, thats life. "So it goes" - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 'Wrong about the events of Dresden ' Five

puta merda etherane consegue fazer personagens tão profundos em um jogo tão curto eu te amo etherane

🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕 Fuck This 🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕

I think this utilization of indie devs as a guerilla advertising force is enormously fucked up. It'll almost definitely dilute the indie scene and what videogames we talk about going forward. However, it's nothing new, in the sense that liscensed flash game shlock to sell products have been around forever (remember those LCD happy meal games? It's just like that but updated). It's a polished face to an age-old exploitation. Instead of giving the substanceless game the respect of actually getting direct scorn, which would ultimately embolden the product's aim of attention grabbing. Or otherwise meming around the existence of this which would flaccidly play right into its hands. Let's do a more 'macro informative' approach. Here's some interesting articles on recent abuses from the company in question to sate the appetite a bit:


Pandemic Racism
"McDonald’s actions speak louder than words. The reality is that 80 percent of McDonald’s majority Black and Brown workforce don’t have access to paid sick leave. That is dangerous under normal circumstances; during a global pandemic, it’s deadly." McDonald’s is Hiding Policies That Perpetuate Systemic Racism Behind Woke-Washing

Sexual Harrassment
"According to the lawsuit, since at least 2017, AMTCR knew about sexual harassment and allowed it to continue, unabated, by supervisors, managers, and coworkers at various of its McDonald’s restaurants. The harassing conduct, which was mainly directed at young, teenage employees, included frequent unwanted touching, offensive comments, unwelcome sexual advances, and intimidation. As AMTCR failed to adequately address the complaints of sexual harassment, many workers found the working conditions so intolerable that they had no choice but to quit." McDonald’s Franchise to Pay Nearly $2 Million to Settle EEOC Sexual Harassment Lawsuit


Corporate Malfeseance
"According to the SEC’s order, McDonald’s terminated Easterbrook for exercising poor judgment and engaging in an inappropriate personal relationship with a McDonald’s employee in violation of company policy. However, McDonald’s and Easterbrook entered into a separation agreement that concluded his termination was without cause, which allowed him to retain substantial equity compensation that otherwise would have been forfeited." SEC Charges McDonald’s Former CEO for Misrepresentations About His Termination

Check out The McDonald's Videogame (2006) by the dev team Molleindustria using Flashpoint to foster a better understanding of these corporate ghouls.

Lounge Companion

Almost as if in tone with this, I just wrote a good 4 paragraphs breaking down the math and average player rate from my bed until I accidentally cntrl a'd and backspaced it all by accident.

People are often too quick to disparage works that are 'annoying on purpose' like this for being shallow and teaching you something you supposedly already know. Yet I never see those know it alls actually bring these 'obvious truths' up when critiqueing other games, especially idlers or roguelites. In particular when rng threshold to win/wait mechanics are introduced. This depicts a more honest and upfront depiction of the gambling machine, it shows the humoring warmth and ambience while letting you actually fully internalize the futility of certain probablity thresholds in real time. The only thing here I think is subpar is the sarcastic commentary that appears under the button which is on the whole memetic and lacking. Even there, Elendow reminds you you are playing and they made the game along with reminding you you can take a break. There's a strong emphasis on trying to not make the player get sucked into the repetitive task at expense of their wellness while still maintaining a strong educational point. I prefer this immensely over the more sneering games of torment like Valefish's Crypt or that Baby ending in Stanley Parable, I think a lot of people don't realize how poorly thought through for player wellness these games tend to be. Instead putting addictive or stubborn play onto the player as a 'personal responsibility' rather than seeing a game designer as a serious preventative occupation. I will sound bitter here, but that's why I stopped bothering trying to write so effortfully on here all the time, whats the point if people think probability thresholds talk is 'histrionic'. It's rarely internalized, so at some point you just gotta put on the shades go out for a drive and stop trying. Props to this guy for making a point through a game structure instead.