bought and installed within the first minute of availability, which idk i will ever do for a game again, so feel free to take my autism with a grain of salt. but this is an exceedingly, endlessly lovable piece of art, one which reaffirms just about everything ive grown to believe about art in the first place. the source material , once uncomplicatedly loathed, has been slowly chipped away at by years of collective intimacy...sentences heard as groups of syllables, individual frames of animation immortalized, control quirks forced to be grappled with, npc requests and locations forced to be stored away in memory. this is to say nothing of the dedication it took to create an entire fan remaster, which leads directly into arzette via its lead developer. the result is a combination of nostalgic warmth, a grasp of what is compelling and memorable and striking about those games, and a melancholy stare at the parts that could have been better...a melancholy that could only be sated Through creation.

arzette will be described by many people as "the cdi zeldas but good." having enjoyed the remasters of those games, its more the final step in a process of escalation towards "the cdi zeldas, but there is less in the way of the good." the ultra-memorable quirk and expressiveness of the animation and voice acting are more widely acknowledged as boons now, but arzette also runs with the gorgeous background art, the lush and memorable music, and the miniature zelda experience via an interlocking spread of bite sized metroidvania maps. since its no longer on the cdi, individual screens are much meatier, which does make it slightly longer to recheck places (and rechecking places is what youre doing a Lot in all of these games, but especially this one with its more complex item progression), but it also allows for much more deliberate and satisfying level and encounter design. tricks from the cdi games have their most unpleasant edges sanded off, yet still retain their character. its by any measure an improvement on its inspirations, yet it never once feels judgemental or callous...instead it feels freed and joyus, the result of passion and time and effort and improved technology, chipping away at a dream created almost accidentally by people working with a bad console under tight time pressure.

and more then anything, even with some fun and dry meta jokes, i may not play a game more full of shamelessly earnest love this year. its close proximity with its source material allows it to share a bunch of discoveries its made that its so bubblingly excited about...yet its also an individual and distinctive piece of art carrying with it all the best sensibilities of contemporary metamodern media engagement, a plea to look closely at things that are dismissed and create beauty out of them. its most singular advancements are not its polishing up of rough gameplay ideas, but are in its disarmingly heartfelt and kind story and general tone. i know many people are cynical about pastiche, esp in a world where the same ideas are endlessly recycled over and over...but art should be about the free exchange of ideas, putting them out in the world for other people to respond to, feel about, and create on top of. it certainly cant be dismissed out of hand if it produces results like this even occasionally. hot moose man.

when discussing sable, jacob geller proposed it as the perfect Mid-Sized Breath Of The Wild, a comfortably sprawling point between the massiveness of BOTW proper and the bite-sized single-setting take on many of its aspects in a short hike. lil gator game sits between a short hike and sable on this imaginary scale and as much as i appreciate all these games (especially sable) this may very well be my fave of them all!! its kind of incredibly how expressively each game's runtime informs its overall feel but lil gator game is the absolute perfect Exhaustingly Joyful Afternoon, it somehow doesnt feel like a micro-anything it just feels like a real time day spent in exhilarating childhood antics. even more then breath of the wild or a short hike it reminds me of other works that concern themselves with Imaginative Play: the lessons in empathy across age gaps from spike jonze's where the wild things are, the whisperingly quiet melancholy of what drives reality into fantasy from calvin and hobbes, and the quiet radicalism re: the emotional and spiritual necessity of imaginative play from bluey.

it is very humble and warm, mostly lacking the overt quirkiness that characterizes a lot of the modern flavor of Indie Game Twee (which is something im fond of, if not entirely enamored with) in favor of calmer colors, both literal and emotional. when these types of games fold into an emotional crescendo my response is usually nice enough (i am quite open to these things) but i swear this one even tho its not insistent at all just hit me with tons of Inexplicable Feelings out of nowhere.

i feel like someday i have to take a real hard crack at writing ab Imaginative Play and art about it, prob turn it into something political and spiritual. but at the heart of any such thesis no matter how many big words i lay on top will be a relatively simple texture, an almost mundane ecstasy, and this game perhaps more then any other work ive encountered is essentially nothing but that texture and that ecstasy in its most potent, concentrated form

it's a lot of work to make a game. there are lots of better things our work could be used for then the things we do now. we must re-learn how to imagine things being different

the older i get the more i find myself deeply annoyed at Political Media Analysis that eschews the aesthetic experience of a work in favor of using it as a barely-relevant springboard for didactic (excuse me, Educational) words on the political ideas. i dont wanna say its a worthless approach but it doesnt interest me anymore, and i find it very reductive: in how surface level the ideas are often presented, in how the aesthetic experience is so often held as an entirely separate entity rather then the conducting force, how the material impact of a specific work is often over-emphasized to the point where the impression is that art Creates culture rather then reality where art merely Reflects culture (granted its culture in conversation with itself, but no piece or genre or movement is more important then the ingrown results of how power is structured in our world)

this is a game that promises that u can start a revolution on its store page, and is generally a v obvious product of a cultural shade (familiar to numerous indie games, particularly post-undertale) that mixes Progressiveism and Tweeness (associated greatly with millennials, who are now making most of our art, and also rapidly deteriorating in coolness). i can see the breadtube takes in my head immediately, that its either a Stellar Amazing Communist Psyop or Deceptive Capitalist Opiate That Doesn't Match Up To XYZ Marx Writing And Will Undermine The Revolution, u get it DHJKSDH. i will admit to being a bit shallow here, my high rating reflects the fact that i found the game sweet and playful and memorable in its aesthetic experience rather then me thinking its an airtight political text. but i found it a lil stirring all the same even if its too Comfy and Silly to be motivating in a Fiery Way

what rly makes it work is just how far it leans into abstraction, visually narratively and tonally. its not theory and its not a dense novel and its not a modernist boundary-breaker, its a comic strip. the light veneer of revolutionary politics then becomes more Fableistic then anything, which is the kind of nuance that i dont think ppl allow often enough in these types of works.

and it must be said there is specificity to the veneer beyond just the instinctively appealing age-old Beat The Authoritarian Corporate Bad Guy story. the Bad Guy, for one, does steal the work and individuality and livelihood of the world in exchange for Currency which is acknowledged as completely arbitrary and meaningless aside from the very silly value ascribed to it by those who want a lot of it (the FREE MONEY chant is a genuinely affecting takedown of those capitalist myths that are So Fucking Stupid that u would never believe them if u werent born into a world where yr survival depended on u internalizing them). what impresses me a lot more tho is the differentiation of levels of exploitation even tho they all lead to death. the village in the fields gladly gives up its food because its basking in the coins. they will eventually run into trouble, but not before the village in the forest who will lose the trees they live in, and CERTAINLY not before the worms who have lost their water and arent even GETTING the coins. most of these kinds of somewhat surface level twee works only get as far as working class solidarity among those we would consider peers, but tho we are all doomed we must acknowledge that we are the most luxurious cogs in the machine. that this is all presented with simplicity a child could understand, and never feels overly labored in its metaphors, and that its so in-tune with the welcoming texture, is something of an achievement in and of itself!

plenty of things could be nitpicked, esp if u wanted to run w/ the metaphors i just established. i myself would prob point to the Secret Mission Of Revolutionaries climax as not being as populist as i would like (tho perhaps theres metaphor here too about our ticking clock for our ravaged planet). but ultimately the art will not save the world, nor is there airtightness to many of the works that tap into our slowly dawning collective realization that things are Fucked and we need to make a better world pronto. but the fact that these works exist at all, even imperfect, or outright mutilated, or ultimately, going to fill the pockets of a capitalist, i think is hope that would be foolish to turn down. i'd like to think even the all-contorting force that is capital can only sell our fantasies of escape from it back to us so many times before we realize whats happening!