games

Crow Country is a good modern take on survival horror. It goes for the things that inspire it, but doesn’t forget to put its own spin on it, from aesthetics (kind of PS1 with a dash of Ečstatica) to puzzles (a pinch of Metroidvania thrown in).

Paratopic and The Sirena Expedition are nice, short, PlayStation One-looking, slightly creepy games.

Speaking of survival horrors, I finally finished Silent Hill 3. Obligatory: fuck Konami. Has it aged? Sure, but it still holds up pretty well. To be clear, I think the graphics still look amazing. But the animation, the camera, the acting, things like that, they don’t let you forget that you’re playing a PlayStation 2 game. But at this point, it’s all part of the charm, more than anything. It’s also a sequel to the first Silent Hill, which is the only other one I’ve ever played, and that’s probably going to remain the case with this important but problematic series.

Dot’s Home is a good story about a black family, community and gentrification. It’s point-and-click only in presentation, no puzzles to speak of, almost a walking simulator, really. And it’s free!

I was also pleasantly surprised by ObsCure. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not flawless (there are at least a couple of instances of sexist stuff that come to mind, for example), but overall it wasn’t as bad as I feared. It also goes for a very specific thing, a subgenre of horror that was popular at the time (The Faculty, anyone?), to the point that the characters look like 30 years old actors playing high school kids, which is brilliant! And even with the gameplay, it does some interesting things, from the light mechanic to the ability to just break glass doors.

I also tried the sequel, and that didn’t go so well. From awkward free camera to immediate sleaze through the roof, I decided not to finish it.

While Nimona is great, Wolfwalkers also has a few tricks up its sleeve. For example, the way it uses the art style to tell the story. It divides the world into a square, orderly human part and a squiggly, wild forest part. It also draws some things in that tapestry kind of way, where everything is seen from a birth-eye view, but facing the viewer. Not a bad story, nice characters, all in all a good movie.

It’s easy to see why the Resident Evil formula has survived to this day (hello, Signalis). It works! Even if the game, like Resident Evil 0, isn’t particularly inspiring and mostly repeats things we’ve already done with just a handful of innovations, it’s still enjoyable.

Anopek is a small metroidvania shooter. Nothing special, just nice.

1000xRESIST is inspired by recent history, often directly: expect a global pandemic, immigrant life, high school shenanigans, and other things I won’t spoil. And it’s very cool to see underrepresented people both on and behind the screen, so to speak. But ultimately it is a sci-fi story, and a good one. Maybe slightly garish visuals. A bit. :)

It’s hard to talk about Demon’s Souls, or any Soulslike game for that matter, without, you know, talking about it. I won’t go into too much detail, but let’s do it.

I think the discussion about difficulty in games should instead be about accessibility. And in this case I mean accessibility in the broadest sense. I believe that games can and should be accessible to many more people than they are now. And the fact that we often talk about “easy mode” instead is very annoying.

It’s especially annoying because these games, at least the FromSoftware games that I’ve played – played Dark Souls 1; finished 2 and 3, and now finished Demon’s Souls – actually give you a lot of tools to lower or raise the difficulty (if you can play them at all, that is), and they do it well.

And of course it is even more annoying that we have to have this discussion instead of having one about the games themselves. Because they are pretty good, you know! Even if they just threw out the whole combat system that gives way to this annoying and misdirected discussion, there would still be a lot to like. The world, the exploration, the story, the atmosphere, the feeling of progress. Even muddy and dark in the way games were at the time, but still beautiful visuals. Good, good I tell ya!

Wendell & Wild is funny, macabre, and progressive. Not perfect (the deadnaming bit comes to mind), but still pretty enjoyable.

There is almost a whole genre of speculative evolution, of which After Man is probably the most famous. Scavengers Reign took that – mushed a bit with art by Mœbius, – as the setting for a story about people stranded on an alien planet. People from Nostromo, not Enterprise. And it’s also, like Alien, a kind of horror. I was a little disappointed that the story was not bad, but, for lack of a better word, pretty classic for such an innovative setting. But it’s very beautiful to look at, in that unsettling kind of way.

There are two ways to look at Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō (I mentioned it before). On the one hand, it’s a gentle look at the death of the world. Post-apocalyptic doesn’t have to be violent, cruel, or even unpleasant. We will all die, our cities, our world. So why can’t it be peaceful and beautiful?

You can get the most out of it by watching just 4 short episodes of an animation. The books expand on this and introduce more characters and their stories.

On the other hand, somehow optimistically, it can be seen as a transformation that our world can take – be forced to take – and still be fine. People, even if some of them are robots, will still be doing people things. There would be communities, celebrations, daily work. And maybe it’s better that way.

There seems to be no consensus on how well mental health is portrayed in Hellblade games, and since I’m not an expert, I won’t say more.

What I can say is that it leans a little too much towards punishing the protagonist for my taste. It makes the comebacks more powerful, but I don’t know if it justifies the whole thing. To put it another way, I was curious about the first game when it was released, and felt compelled to follow the story in the second, but wouldn’t be upset if I never played both.

For me to consider something problematic, both the good and the bad should be on a comparable level. It’s not perfect, but Doctor Who seems to have been pushing diversity for a while now. I even started watching it after they announced that there would be a female Doctor.

At this point I have watched everything with the Ninth, Tenth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth and now Fifteenth Doctors. Yes, I skipped the Moffat era.

On the other hand, the BBC seems to be pretty bad in many areas. Is it worth it? Well, I don’t give money to BBC, so sure.

The show has a somewhat weird and unique tone, where it tries to be for as much of an audience as it can, so sometimes it can be too silly or simplistic. But the premise means that almost every episode would lead main characters on a pretty unique adventure, and if you like those characters, then at least it would be fun, if not provocative, gut-wrenching or awe-inspiring, which occasionally happens too.

Botany Manor is brilliant. There is nothing more frustrating than illogical puzzles. It is subjective, but I never got stuck on one in this game. The overall pleasantness of the world with a touch of, shall I say, melancholy also helps.

Gylt is a more light-hearted Silent Hill, I guess. Not particularly scary, but spooky atmosphere, with lots of world to explore, secrets to discover and enemies to fight.

Indika left me cold. Not a bad game, not at all, but if the story does nothing for you, like it did for me, there is nothing else there.

Stitch is an interesting variation of nonogram-like games. You have numbers that tell you the size of rectangles that should fill the whole area. The overall picture kind of helps because you can guess which colors go where, but it can fail in places if you’re colorblind. There are a lot of penguins!

There’s not much more I can say about Star Trek: Discovery now that it’s finished its final season. Also, I tend to judge the thing as a whole, not individual elements. In the end, I’m glad I watched it, but I wouldn’t give it a medal, so to speak.

Fallout is a comedy. A dark, violent, crude, bloody comedy. That doesn’t mean it’s funny, the structure is comedy. Ridiculous and awful things happen to ridiculous and awful people. But yeah, sometimes it is funny. And very good!

Princess Peach Showtime! has an inherent problem: rarity. Mario seems to appear in a dozen games a year, but Peach may appear as a playable character in two, if that. So no matter what happens, the game will be at a higher level of scrutiny. I’m not saying that as an excuse, Nintendo doesn’t deserve it. They should do better!

But if you ignore that for a second, I think the game is pretty good. Not great, but good. Would be a great start to a series! *stares at Nintendo*

Also, it seems that the premise of the game – Peach playing many roles – is the answer to the rarity problem. They want to bridge the gap faster by having 10 games in one. That is probably not the logic the developers had, but it is funny to think that way.