It's fucking insane, but it's the *way* it wears its insanity that makes it so ravenously compelling to me. It has a voice, it has something to say, it wants you to take it seriously! - but its voice is either yelling over some of the most absurd events or setpieces you'll ever see, or yelling its point directly *at* you in a way that sometimes manages to be even more unbelievable than the former (they did NOT just call a guy TREVOR PEARLHARBOR?????). Whisk in a healthy serving of spectacle that doesn't mean anything and is just thrown in for the hell of it, and you’re sent on a wild ride where you spend as much time finding meaning in absurdity as you spend *trying* to read into meaningless absurdity.

It's that razor's-edge balance of sincerity and stupidity that defines this game, and it extends further than the plot itself - something I find incredibly interesting is its relationship with gore and death. You'll spend most of your time blasting off the limbs of nondescript humanoid monsters, absorbing streams of blood that billow out, and giving it to the lovely man in the TV to turn into experience points. Yet despite its revelry in cartoon bloodshed it’s still able to pull back and use gore more disquietingly when it wants to - and manages to do so successfully, over and over again - even when the gore itself still borders on the absurd.

Its lace of intent and earnestness is what makes its batshit absurdity really stick. You desperately want to carry on and see what the hell it’s gonna throw at you next, but in a way where it gets you genuinely invested in it. Back that with its strange-yet-satisfying gameplay and a killer aesthetic and presentation, and there’s no way it won’t leave a hell of an impression.

As a grown-ass adult I should probably have more shame than I do for liking the first two Five Nights at Freddy's games, but I will defend my position to the death. Jump scares are cheap, but what makes both of those games so effective is how they constantly ratchet up the tension by essentially being stress management simulators. Throw in a bunch of humor about corporate greed run amok, at the expense of yours and the public's safety, and you have two titles that are as funny as they are frightening. Unfortunately, Scott Cawthon's apparent compulsion to keep churning these out (and their subsequent decline in quality) coupled with a cottage industry of speculative-lore YouTubers made this a series that was just too damn embarrassing to play anymore, and I eventually bounced off.

I am notoriously easy to please when it comes to horror games, though. Really any horror. I own all the Leprechaun movies and I like most of them. I am the way god made me!

Suffice it to say, the first couple of trailers for Security Breach caught my interest, and knowing that development was switching over to an actual studio unencumbered by the increasingly dire imagination of one man made it all the more promising. However, negative reviews and a high asking price scared me off for a while, but one 50% off discount later, and I finally had a chance to sit down and play through Security Breach for myself. My verdict? People are being too harsh... And/or I'm an idiot who thinks Leprechaun 4: In Space is good, actually, and should not be trusted.

In Security Breach you play as Gregory, a boy who is trapped inside the massive Freddy Fazbear Pizzaplex after hours. Befriending the titular Freddy, you have to survive until 6am when the security system disengages, allowing you to escape. You quickly find out that the security guard, Vanessa, has programmed the remaining animatronics to aggressively hunt you, and as you make your way deeper into the Pizzaplex, you come to discover that everything is much more sinister than it seems.

Progress is very similar to a search-action title, with various upgrades and security passes opening more of the labyrinthine Pizzaplex for you to explore. Along the way, you have to hide and creep about to avoid animatronics, and security bots who will raise an alert to summon them. Each animatronic is given a distinct personality. Roxy is plagued by self doubt and narcissism and often gives her location away by giving herself pep talks, Monty is a rage monster that can leap about to cut off your path, and Chica... she likes to eat garbage. Just like me.

The stealth works surprisingly well. You're given a camera system that allows you to scope out what's ahead, but it's never too useful and at times can be detrimental, as using it doesn't pause the game and leaves you open to being jumped. The first person perspective makes it easy to get a lay of the land, in any case. Juking animatronics feels pretty good, and there's some pretty tense set pieces, including a horde of Weeping Angle type enemies that must be carefully maneuvered in the basement level of the complex, and a chase between you and a massive DJ robot that crawls around the complex like a spider.

I also enjoy how Security Breach flips the script, making the security guard the primary antagonist, and eventually tasking you with directly taking on the animatronics, junking them for parts to upgrade Freddy (who is naturally concerned about where all this new equipment is coming from.) As mentioned in my Sister Location review, I could give a crap less about the supernatural elements or the deeper lore that connects these games together, and find that they often hinder my enjoyment of these games. Security Breach only delves into this aspect very late into the true ending route, and otherwise keeps itself focused on being a dark comedy about shitty workplaces.

In fact, it appears that the Pizzaplex has embraced its parent company's dark past, leveraging imagery of past tragedies to advertise itself. The decaying villain of the third game shows up in in-game branding, featured on wet floor signage and arcade cabinets. Text logs reveal all sorts of security protocols to keep families safe, errant behavior reports detail issues with each of the animatronics (such as Chica being addicted to slushies and attacking customers for it), and e-mails detail mass layoffs in favor of using a completely broken security system and all-robotic staff. Intercom messages constantly remind guests to sign waivers absolving the Fazbear company of liability, and gasoline powered generators are stationed in the playplace of the daycare. It's great. It's exactly what I want from this series. At all times the writing should be aiming for Itchy and Scratchy Land.

Security Breach is not without its flaws, though. It's clear that there's some unfinished elements of this game. The endings all feel horrendously tacked on, and Vanny - a creepy fursuiter heavily featured in the game's marketing - only appears very briefly. Apparently there was a cut mechanic where she would be summoned after a meter was filled, and she feels very narratively underdeveloped. The game's performance is also substandard. Frames are dropping all the damn time, especially during a segment in a laser tag arena that becomes absolute hell to navigate due to how choppy it is. I ran the game in performance mode, god help anyone who sets it to fidelity. I thankfully only had the game crash once and it was near a save station, so it was a non-issue, and overall I think performance must have been ironed out by the time I played it. It's still bad, but comparatively it sounds like I had a better time with it than others. However, I question if it will improve much more by this point.

Still, I really liked weaving around the animatronics, I found the story and little memos and e-mail logs you find to be a lot of fun, and I think the focus has been placed precisely on the elements I like the most about this series. I hope they do more of this, and if they do then I also hope they give it more time in the oven. I thought this one was pretty good! You know what else I think is pretty good? Leprechaun 2. In that one, the Leprechaun (whose real name is Lubdan, which I know because I am a TRUE Leprechaun fan) builds a go kart which he spray paints "I WANT ME GOLD" on and drives around terrorizing the main character, who, as it turns out, has his gold! It's great!

I'm a stupid little freak.

daniel mullins' One Weird Trick is a little insufferable, and this felt closer to three undercooked games than anything resembling a coherent three act structure, but in the most grudging ass way I gotta say I sorta admire how hard it goes toward being exactly the thing that it is

mechanically it's a mess: three rulesets, none of them fleshed out or balanced past first glance; all of them crumbling to powder under the slightest scrutiny or (god forbid) munchkinism. each very promising but failing to make good on that promise cos its fascination with cartoon dynamite self sabotage is too heavy

one of those fucked up tonal and pacing exercises that feels like someone starting and stopping a car abruptly over and over for like ten hours. when you finish you unlock "kaycee's mod" — a mode that repurposes its first act as a standalone roguelite — which gives the impression of a white flag or acknowledgement that everything past that point is nowhere near as compelling; some conciliatory gesture that shines a light on the dueling self satisfaction/consciousness that permeates the entire experience

when the smoke and mirrors are set aside it's hard not to be disappointed that its primary feature is an inability to see anything through long enough for it to be meaningfully substantiated. maybe that's the point, but I'm not the kind of poindexter who gets off on that stuff, and aside from a genuine love of card games, ARGs, and fucking with people there doesn't seem to be any meat to latch onto. my good friend Morris always asks me how art makes me feel, and this makes me feel like I'm watching someone prove how clever they are at their work's expense. a series of parlour tricks and sleight of hand routines that amount to very, very little and prompt only the most basic ruminations on Games and Creation — and only as a smokescreen for more bullshit artist wizardry. for my next trick I will saw my own game in half~

but like I said, I do like how strongly it commits to absolute derailure (made this word up, which is my iconic gimmick). takes some sizable measure of guts to unrelentingly make your art worse for the sake of a bit, I just wish that bit was in any way as charming or compelling as it thinks it is

Seventeen years ago, Nintendo released New Super Mario Bros., and they fucking meant it when they said “new”.

The company may as well have struck crude oil for the sheer amount of money that they printed after its release; thirty million copies sold served as the clearest sign they were ever going to get that this was the way the series needed to be from here on out. A decade and a half later, and almost literally every single 2D Mario game we’ve gotten since has been a member of the New sub-franchise — New Super Mario Bros. Wii, New Super Mario Bros. 2, there was even a New Super Luigi U. You can argue that Super Mario Maker breaks the pattern, but I’d argue back that dropping a glorified level editor and telling the players to design the games themselves doesn’t count for much. Besides, Mario Maker is still a lateral step at best; it’s playing the same hits as before, just rolling four previously-released games together to be swapped around as needed. The New Super Mario Bros. mode, funnily enough, turned out to have the most advanced movement tech, meaning that the most serious players and level designers effectively found themselves with yet another New game fairly early into Mario Maker’s lifespan.

Nintendo’s modus operandi seemed to be that if you somehow weren’t sick of New Super Mario Bros. yet, then they’d make sure that you would be. Every subsequent game seemed to scrape a couple of extra flakes of wood off of the bottom of the barrel, desperate to find something else they could extract from this fucking sub-series. New Super Luigi U was a download-only level pack for New Super Mario Bros. U that starred exclusively Luigi, because at least that was different enough from starring Mario to warrant its own game; New Super Mario Bros. 2 put an obscene emphasis on the act of collecting coins, which is almost universally the least exciting part of any Mario game. The 3D entries — Galaxy, 3D World, Odyssey — seemed to be the place where Nintendo was still experimenting and innovating what Mario could be, while the 2D games quietly shuffled along in rote stagnancy for two decades like retirees towards death. There was no zest, nothing fresh, just an endless series of “bah-bah”s and maybe one or two new power-ups every couple years so you didn’t start thinking that you spent sixty dollars for the exact same game again (you did).

Super Mario Bros. Wonder gives 2D Mario a personality again, and it’s a complete triumph for that fact alone.

How truly great it is to play a game like this without any positive expectations, and instead come away with full confidence that it’s some of the best that Mario has ever been. Of course, maybe that’s not saying much — 2D Mario has been almost exclusively New Super Mario Bros. for about half of the entire franchise’s lifetime now — but Super Mario World and Super Mario Bros. 3 are often hailed as the best platformers ever made, so anything that can stand next to them is doing something very right. If I’m being completely honest, I think it clears both of them easily. Call it recency bias, but it’s been a long, long time since I’ve been this impressed by anything Nintendo’s put out.

The game managed to get all the way through prototyping without a deadline, and it unquestionably shows. Wonder has a whole box full of toys that it's eager to show the player, and it almost never lingers on any of them; the majority of level gimmicks here get used just a single time and never again, while the most common returning gimmicks really only appear maybe three times before vanishing forever. All of them feel about as realized as they could be; while it may sound a bit like the game is just throwing out everything in the hope of something sticking, most of these concepts are really only fun for one or two levels, and it wouldn't be wise to try making a full game out of them.

It revels in being strange. As strange as Mario is ever going to be allowed to be, at least. It took me a little bit to make a decision on whether I thought the talking flowers were charming or annoying, but I eventually ended up liking them; as the game goes on, they get progressively more and more unhinged, dropping the "you did such a good job" schtick to just start saying strange shit. One level is filled with green goo that you need to swim through to progress, and the flowers won't stop talking about how much they want to eat it. When you get the wonder seed, turn into a goo ball, and then pass by one of the flowers, he audibly licks you and then says how delicious you are. I think about that flower a lot. What a little fucking freak he was.

The badge system serves mostly to trivialize an already easy game, giving the player the option to get extra mid-air jumps, or a free rescue from a bottomless pit, or adding exclamation point blocks everywhere that cover basically every hazard you could ever possibly deal with in a given stage. It definitely feels designed more to provide an experience than a challenge, and I think that's fine. I would love to see a level pack for this that ramps up the difficulty so I'm not constantly walking around with 99 lives and 999 flower coins, but I'm probably not the target audience for this anyway. Mario is for kids, after all. We've gotta wean them off of this before we start hitting them with the Celeste C-sides. Regardless, though, the badges mostly offer some unique ways to engage with these levels, and there are tons of secret paths in every single one that you can only access by snooping around off the top of the screen or behind brick-covered passageways. There's a shocking amount to explore here, which is extra surprising considering how inherently linear a 2D sidescrolling stage is going to be.

I had an absurd amount of fun with Wonder, and the ten or so hours it took me to breeze through it just melted away without me even noticing. Fingers crossed that this completely buries New Super Mario Bros. from here on out. If this is the way that Nintendo is going to be developing 2D Mario games, then I'm absolutely going to be here for it.

I have to be careful about asking for more like this, though. Nintendo might spend the next twenty years making nothing but Super Mario Bros. Wonder sequels.

"Are you excited for Spider-Man 2?"

If you asked me this question 2 years ago I would've said "Hell yeah man! I love Spider-Man." I was really fond of my playthrough back in 2020 and was also among many others pretty pumped when I saw the announce trailer in September of 2021's State of Play. Needless to say I was looking forward to it at the time but as time passed and my interests changed, so did my anticipation.

My friend Canti did a pretty good job covering how I feel in their Breath of the Wild review. As more developers run out of ways to innovate the open world "Go to this big shiny button on your map" formula, so does my patience and while the web-swinging is fluid, the action and stealth are varied enough and the side content is well there, it reached a point where during my 20 hours spent, nothing really surprised me anymore. I couldn't begin to tell you how eye-rolling it was to hear New York will be twice as bigger compared to it's predecessors especially in a time where games like Elden Ring and Tears of the Kingdom are receiving massive acclaim from critics and it doesn't look like developers won't be trying to cash in on the success of them with Ubisoft's Star Wars Outlaws having just been announced recently.

However, despite all the nitpicking, I can't say I regret the spent with Spider-Man PS4 or Miles Morales. I played this with the initial goal that this would be what I need to retire from the open world genre but I was able learn something from my playthough.

Re-experiencing something can be as ambitious as it is frightening because you might have put aside your bias to keep an open mind and when faced with that reality, you'll come to learn some of the things you loved about it the first time just can't be replicated as you mature and so does your preferences so when something can't extract the raw emotions you had when you were younger, you just have to wonder if those memories were better as just that. Memories.

So where does this all end? A question I'm going to ask and answer for myself.

"Are you still looking forward to Spider-Man 2?"

Yes but I have bare expectations and am so done with open world afterwards.

Oh yeah also this game has a very twisted sense of activism. I'm sorry Insomniac but no amount of pride or Black Lives Matter murals mean anything if you main plot has a eco-terrorist trying to carry out their dead relatives wishes and stop a corporation from making people sick and the best rebuttal you can dish is a grade school ass "Uh guys, that's illegal actually and people might get hurt.".

it's worth noting that Cruelty Squad is not only the first game I've ever 100%'d since Sonic Adventure 2 but the only game i've ever immediately went back to complete again after beating it, and i just today beat a third playthrough (on the Hope Eradicated difficulty this time).

considering games for me are usually one-and-done experiences i'll pick up, put down and just sort of digest for years at a time before going for the odd replay this speaks volumes to just how tight cruelty squad's gameplay is. i'm still finding new potential strategies, routes and builds with which i can approach levels that by this point i basically have memorized

Could really use less confusing level design, particularly in episode 3, but it's insane how well this aged for one of the earliest FPS games released. Definitely as good as people say. It makes you wonder if the team working on this knew at the time that it would be essentially medium-defining for decades to come.

This has a lot of really fucking funny ports out there. Maybe I'll give a few a shot some day or another, purely for kicks. I think I've joked with friends about the 32x version's insanely ass soundtrack for years now.