Drafts for reviews of video games which I never finished or had little confidence in. May be missing some.
Left me defeated and nauseated in a way I really didn't expect. Certainly much of the disorientation and even enervation here is intentional and moving; the message box, glyphs, supplementary paragraphs, and "actual" game all competing for your attention is a stroke of genius I think. The sheer scale of the game and the fact that you are far from expected to see all of it on a "first playthrough" is impressive. And there are other surprises that I don't want to spoil. But there's a cynicism here that I find somewhat disconcerting. I can understand why some hate this and others like or love it; is that controversy itself a mark of success?
[...] but the latent cynicism was more surprising and unwelcome. This is certainly a good video game for people who hate video games.
The mythology surrounding Daikatana really sets the perfect stage for a fan patch to make it perfectly playable and defensible by part-time contrarians. The game is, to be sure, a campy, half-broken, unfinished mess; it is both excessive and missing content and features that it needs. What you've heard is not exactly wrong. It's lopsided and phlegmatic, botched and limping with the assistance of invulnerable sidekicks. [...]. The nice word here is "extravagant," and it really is extravagant, overflowing with Doritos and Mountain Dew (the first episode infamously has a lot of green) way ahead of Halo 2. It is certainly a computer game whose lead designer was John Romero.
Still funny at plenty of points, in both the old and new sections. Probably overall it's aged poorly, but I suppose this genre of quasi-British humor in general has when it's actually trying to be funny rather than just absurd and bewildering. The game is not incidentally at its best when it's trying to be bewildering, even atmospheric, rather than funny. But what's truly aged poorly is the metafictional conceit itself. Even Funny Games (1997, 2007) doesn't hit as hard, and at least those films are also moralistic sermons in addition to being metafictional commentaries. This era of navel-gazing, pejoratively-academic art-about-art is over. We can go back to art having to justify itself as socially useful. Thank god!
Very of its era, and not in a necessarily good or bad way. There's something to be said about how much gender relations have detiorated in the 2020s that I was surprised that both the female protagonist and the young, gender-egalitarian friend group which also commits friendcest are both played completely straight; no feminist subversions nor anything overtly gross. Refreshing actually, or it would be if the writing wasn't mediocre--this sort of naivite is only possible in a culture where things actually are (were) going well, relatively at least. Now we just get Obsession (2026); there's nothing wrong with that film--I mean there may be, actually, I don't know--but even its premise is symptomatic of something. The first self-described incel was a woman, etc.
The rather direct lifting of even the auxiliary From Soft tropes is pretty philistine, honestly. Why do a lot of indie games in general do this? It's one thing for films to reference famous shots from other, related films. Another thing entirely to have a game with dodge rolls, white "soul" goo, big pressure-plate elevators, difficult boss fights, a bonfire analogue, etc. titled "[blank] Souls". All the worse that the game looks pretty good and, better, has at least a few interesting ideas here and there.
I think the elevator pitch of this game is flawed. Even if it's not really intentional everything being one-hit guarantees what can be called "rage game" design, which is more than anything else annoying. There're barely any tests of dexterity here, or rather nothing consistent. Every boss is a gimmick boss. Is the idea here that Dark Souls is hard and good and we make it harder, thus better, by making everything one-hit? Dark Souls isn't even actually that hard! That's not what makes it good or special! Whatever.
The simple act of moving around, which you do a lot in this game, is enjoyable, at least. Aiming precisely with a controller is also fun here even if it's rarely put to good use.
Beneath a thick veneer of irreverent transgressive egglike Art Game lies a conventionally-good piss-themed collectathon. Perhaps that's all an Art Game has to be. Appears to be something of a prototype for indie first-person games that wish to be a little fuller than walking sim austerity, the Germs to the walking sims' LSD. Again, because it's easy to understate: this is a good game, not (or not just) in some "meme sense or some Art sense. It's just actually pretty "fun."