How Confident are you in your Beliefs?

“Prepare to face my divine judgement”

I had a rather huge RPGmaker phase growing up. Games like Ib, Misao, Mad Father, were incredibly popular in the online circles I frequented and it helped that a lot of the famous players at the time were playing through each one. I never really had the courage to check them out myself as horror as a concept scared me way too much, but something about them always fascinated me, and now that I’ve sat through and played through a decent amount, I come to appreciate just what this era of online works brought to the table. OFF is one of these games, arguably one of the most popular next to Yume Nikki and one that I always had a fascination of, but never really played. I decided I had enough and finally installed the original release, ready to see what I had missed throughout the years. All I knew about it was the main protagonist, The Batter, and nothing else so I was excited to see what this game had in store for me. What confronted me was a moral dilemma that even now I find myself struggling to decide the right answer.

I suppose I’ll get into the gameplay first as OFF as a game is rather boring to play. It’s very standard RPGmaker combat where you just spam your hardest hitting attacks against every enemy, healing occasionally when you need it, with no real challenge behind anything. Every combat encounter feels the same and the new moves you unlock just become the default to spam to get out of these encounters faster. It also uses the ATB system which, while I prefer it in most RPGS, feels a little miserable to play in OFF due to the repetitive nature, making it more a slog then it could have been, and making some of the more combat focused encounters draining. The puzzle solving isn’t too complicated either, mostly involving you finding a sequence of numbers you write down in order to get past a locked gate with not much variance to it. Expiration is pretty bare bones too, optional pathways are really obvious and most chests aren't that hard to find spots so getting what you need isn’t some monumental secret searching task. This is not the appeal of OFF though, and isn’t the reason why I find myself so fascinated with the game even now. OFF stands so high for its incredible use of story telling and the esoteric nature of everything behind it.

Art style wise, OFF is certainly unique from other RPGmaker games releasing around this same time. While most were pretty straight forward with what they wanted to tell, beside Yume Nikki, OFF is incredibly esoteric in its world design and characters and piecing together what OFF is truly about is the main challenge of the game. Every area you explore here is a mess of utter chaos with no real sense of right or wrong behind anything. There’s a natural formation to everything sure, but the reason why it’s all there and the logic behind it all is so otherworldly and out there that even piecing together how it all works is a challenge in itself. The soundtrack adds to the strange feelings as well, which while incredibly catchy (especially that battle theme), are also unlike any tracks I’ve heard in a game before. It’s this strange mix of Jazz and Atmospheric that blends together into a chorus of music that leaves me distributed and uncomfortable during most of my playtime. Something doesn't feel right here, something feels incredibly off, and I’m left horribly disoriented and confused the farther I get into this game. Why am I here? What is this purification business I’m doing? What are these Spectres and how did they come to be? Who the hell is this Batter I’m playing at and what’s his true goal at the end of all this? These were questions that constantly plagued my mind as I fell deeper and deeper down the rabbithole, and while I believe I have a good idea of what it’s all about, I still have lingering doubts on if I missed the full picture.

OFF has you playing as a mysterious being simply known as “The Batter” who is tasked with exploring the various zones and “purifying” them from violent ghost creatures simply called Spectres. Aiding you is a mysterious cat creature simply known as the “Judge”, and from there things follow the same overall structure. You go to each zone, solving various puzzles along the way, and eventually confronting the ruler of each, simply known as the judges, in order to win. Do that 3 times and you gain access to the final zone, letting you defeat the ruler of everything and finally bring purity to the entire fabric of reality. This world is a creation of chaos, every zone has its own sort of problems whether it be the workplace abuse the people suffer in the 1st zone, the bouts of insanity from the utter boredom from others in the 2nd, the addiction to the substance of sugar and the mental decay that comes with it in the 3rd, nothing here is peaceful and the world feels like it’s slowly collapsing in on itself with the spectators not doing much to help. The world is incredibly bleak and surviving in it can seem like a rather fragile task, and for a lot of the game you can see the Batter as a creature of mercy who is simply trying to free the world of its endless suffering. Yea of course I’ll kill the corrupt ruler of zone 3, he allows his works to suffer addiction and ignores the problems with his zone.  Yea the queen has to be the true threat here, she enabled all of this to happen and clearly doesn't care to step in herself and fix what disaster she brought. I’m the hero in this story, I’m the force of good, and my role as the puppeteer is for a just cause that serves to free the people from the endless suffering that plagues them! At least, that’s what I thought at first.

It’s after you beat the third boss that things start to get complicated. The Judge there urges you to go back and explore the zones that you purified, claiming you have brought upon them an existence of death, causing more problems there than you started. My curiosity got the best of me and I decided to head back and see if there was any semblance of truth behind what he was saying. I stepped into Zone 1 and found it a wasteland with 0 life left over. “Purifying” isn’t just getting rid of the Spectre’s, it’s getting rid of everything, no matter who they are, doing whatever I can to achieve this goal. Walking through these barren wastelands is a disturbing feeling, with the music being a chorus of distorted voices and strange sounds that haunt you as you explore each area. There’s just you and the guilt of what you have just caused, and the game started to make me question if it was worth pushing forward if it was just gonna end with the eradication of everything. Wanting more answers, I pushed through to the final area, The Room, with my sense of justice thrown out the window and my opinions on the Batter falling more and more.

It’s this final area where the truth of everything behind OFF comes to play, and where you start to begin to see what everything has been all about. It’s presented in a rather esoteric way though, and it took me reading through a lot of the lines again and replaying a bunch of scenes with new context in order to maybe gain the full picture. It all starts with a baby known as Hugo, a being possessed with the power of a god who created the world of OFF with the infinite abilities of creation he possessed. Feeling rather lonely in this world though, not helped by the fact his parents had separated at a young age, with his father being incredibly distant and only reading a comic to Hugo occasionally, he decided to create new “parents” of his own, leading to the creation of The Queen and The Batter. The Queen and The Batter were polar opposites in their belief, with the Queen believing in the continued existence of everything and ever longing for peace, while The Batter believed in "purification', keeping everything in a certain state of being and pulling the plug when things begin to breach that boundary. It’s these clash of ideals that causes The Batter to set off on his own journey, ultimately abandoning Hugo and leaving the world to its eventual fate. During this disappearance, The Queen appoints 3 different judges to watch over the zones, urging them to create everlasting peace in each, with each one doing what they thought was best to accomplish this. Life was peaceful, however things slowly started to turn to chaos as the citizens began to lose their mind as each zone slowly began to fall apart. It’s from here where things begin to get worse and worse, with Hugo eventually getting sick and facing an eventual demise, and the appearance of beings known as “Spectres” that are killing everything in sight with no rhyme or reason behind it. It’s this spiral into chaos and despair that prompts The Batter to return, believing things have finally gone past the line of purity, and deciding to end things himself, believing there was no hope left for this dying world. He kills The Queen, violently murders Hugo, and sets off to turn reality “off”, erasing existence entirely believing his goal just. It’s before this final moment where The Judge pops up and deems you a being of pure evil, asking us the player to side with him in order to put a stop to The Batter’s reign. You can either choose to save the world or doom it, and this choice is what made me sit back and reflect on everything I had done, ultimately coming to the conclusion that perhaps The Batter had a bit of a point in his crusade.

If you take things at face value and ignore the nuance behind it, it’s pretty easy to assume that The Judge is the correct choice, with the only appropriate end for The Batter being his demise. I originally felt the same here, especially after the brutal murder of Hugo, and I saw the Judge as 100% morally right for his choice of ending The Batter’s reign. When I sat back and started to examine it all and truly piece together what OFF wanted to tell, I realized that the judge may also have been too rash in his decision. I think the main issue with The Batter that puts him in the villains category is his instinct of ignoring the nuance in everything. The Batter sees everything in black and white (reflected by the color choices the game goes with) and deems anything evil a Spectre, hinted really early on when a citizen calls their judge evil with The Batter immediately deeming them a spirit, despite the citizens insistence that The Queen would never hire a Spectre. That’s all The Batter could see, he had no way to distinguish between who was a Spectre or not, simply basing it off who he saw as evil in the moment. Violence had to be the end goal here, there was simply no solution to them, and any time that viewpoint could be challenged, they pressed on and continued doing the only thing they really knew what to do. At the same time though, is his end goal truly wrong? OFF as a world is on the verge of dying, Hugo the literary creator of everything is nearing his end, and every zone is an utter hellscape devoid of any peace, it’s not hard to really see things as beyond the point of no return. You can have hope that things could be fixed, but that depends if you think that can ever happen! Is it wrong to end a world of eternal suffering, or should you have a constant belief that things will get better, that things will eventually fix itself? When you beat the game as The Batter, things simply end, reality ceases to exist and that’s it, nothing is left to thrive. If you beat it as The Judge, you see him wandering a dead world, with only 2 or 3 survivors left over to suffer an endless fate of loneliness before the eventual collapse of everything surrounding them. I can’t really depict either of these characters as pure in their intentions, I think both failed to uplift the roles placed upon them, and ultimately it’s their fault things turned out the way it is as much as it is The Queens. I think both have valid points behind each other’s causes and ultimately it’s up to what your view points are in order to determine the fate of this world, and I find that moral dilemma to be incredibly interesting, it really made me question everything I had been doing and in a way making me an accomplice to every decision made.

It’s these choices that made me fall in love and be so invested in what OFF wanted to do in the first place. It wants to challenge your moral standing in everything, it wants you to really sit back and think about the kind of person you want to be and whatever you can see behind the veil of black and white everything can so easily come across as. It’s fair to see The Batter as a pure villain, and I can definitely see why someone would have this understanding, hell I even did at first, but to only have that take ignores everything OFF was trying to tell you in the first place. It’s fascinating going through old threads about the game when it exploded in popularity and seeing people’s reactions to the ending, and it seems this was one of the first times a lot of people online were directly challenged by the view points a game presented at them. There are games nowadays that make you question these decisions out there, but I don’t think a lot has really nailed it as well as OFF did, especially with the way it forces you to make these choices and engage in the world itself, literally establishing you as The Puppeteer who aids The Batter in their endless quest of violence. It is a fascinating take on someone’s morals and it’s ending and the way it challenged me will sit with me for a long time. I’m glad I finally gave this a shot and I’m mad at my younger self for pushing it aside throughout the years, this game really is something special. I can fully understand why this game has the beloved status it has nowadays, and I’ll be reflecting on my decisions for a long time.

 

The wait is finally over...

 

After 6 long years it’s finally here…

I remember when Shovel Knight launched and seeing it grow into one of the most popular indie games at the time. I knew this guy in high school who adored the game and randomly bought me a copy purely so I could try it out and I ended up loving it. This love persisted for years as expansion after expansion was released with Shovel Knight himself becoming a huge figure in the indie sphere in general. Due to my love for Shovel Knight, I of course immediately backed Mina the Hollower as soon as it was announced for kickstarter. A gameboy Zelda inspired action indie game made by Yacht Club Games? Sign me up oh my god. Backing it though, I didn’t realize just how long it’d take to release. 6 years felt like forever with how excited I was for the game, and the more news that was released for it, the more excited I was to play it! Well, that wait is no longer an issue now as Mina the Hollower has finally arrived! Finally, I can experience the game I’ve been hyped for for ages! The only question is if it still holds up despite the long wait…

You play as Mina, a world renowned scientist who’s famous for inviting the Spark Generators, massive towers of energy that give power and fuel to the island of Tenebrous. Things start to go awry though as Mina is called over for help as the Spark Generators have been destroyed by a former member of the Baron’s guard, Thorne, who believes the Spark Generators are the cause of the island’s slow destruction. Not knowing who to trust, Mina sets off to find out the truth and puts a stop to whoever is truly behind the mayhem on Tenebrous Isle. Truthfully, this plot doesn't do too much for me as it is incredible by the books with every single plot twist being incredibly predictable here. You know what’s going on by the end of the first area, and most of the game is just waiting for the big reveal to happen, going exactly as you expected it too. Granted, the characters in Mina are great here, having a fantastic blend of charm and humor behind them, but as an overall story it really doesn't do much. It’s not like I expected too much though, I found Shovel Knight’s story to also be a little bare bones with it only really picking up in the other campaigns so Mina having the same sort of setup doesn't surprise me too much. Graphically though, this game is an utter charm, perfectly taking what made the game boy look so wonderful and expanding it as much as possible with modern technology. Every single sprite here is a treat to behold and every single detail is just brimming with so much detail, it really nails making Tenebrous feel like a lived in island, and I’d find myself excited to see what the next area would look like. The soundtrack doesn't disappoint either, you got a returning Jake Kaufman and legendary composer Yuzu Koshiro working on it here, and it creates a soundtrack with constant banger tunes throughout. There is not a single bad track here, and I find myself blasting it from my own backer copy of it as I write this, it’s genuinely incredible.

As I previously mentioned, Mina the Hollower takes a lot of cues from the Game Boy Zelda games, and the overall structure is about the same here. You’ll be tasked with clearing 6 separate dungeons out in order to fix the spark generators. You’re free to tackle them in any order you like, mostly besides two of them that require some extra preparations, and once you clear all 6 you unlock the final dungeon that lets you beat the game. Each area follows the same standard gameplay loop and puzzles aren’t really that taxing with the game’s challenge coming more from the combat instead of the puzzle solving. Mina is quite an agile little mouse and she’ll need as much of that as possible in order to conquer the threats that haunt the island. Her main ability comes in the form of a burrow mood that lets her dig into the ground for a few seconds, popping out in front or behind each enemy and letting you get a quick hit in before popping back in to dodge the enemies attacks. This move is incredibly cathartic here and will be what you use the most throughout your playtime, being the game’s most central mechanic. Burrowing into the ground nerve really gets old either, with it staying just as satisfying as it did the first time throughout my entire 20 hour long adventure. Burrowing at the last second in order to dodge an enemy’s attack, discovering secret burrow points in order to find upgrades to better expand your arsenal, burrowing under pumpkins in order to pick them and smash them at foes, the game pushes this mechanic to its limit and even by the end of the game I found myself still needing to master it even though I thought I already had.  It gives this game an incredible sense of speed and flow state, and since it’s effectively your dodge in this game, combat becomes incredibly hectic and quick, forcing you to be just as fast as the enemies you face in order to not suffer an unfortunate demise.

You can’t just have combat with a dodge though, you gotta have some weapons to back it up and Mina has no shortage of cool weapons here. When you start the game, you’re given a few options in terms of weapon selection such as a basic whip, a hammer, a shield that focuses on parrying, basically whatever playstyle you need fulfilled Mina has you covered, and since you’re allowed to switch weapons at each save point, you can shift your playstyle to whatever best suits your situation. Each weapon can also be upgraded to be way better and they got some pretty sick upgrades hidden throughout the game such as an electric spark for your whip or a bomb jump for your shield, it’s very much worth going out the way for and they drastically alter how you approach each combat situation making the game much better to manage. I stuck with the whip personally as I found that its range and damage output helped fit my specific playstyle though I did wonder if it was a little overpowered as I ended up not dying much whenever I used it, dying a lot more anytime I switched to another weapon. Alongside your weapons you have various subweapons to find throughout your game, functioning like they would in Castlevania, letting you have a sidearm to help ease out the crowds when situations get tough. Most of these are pretty standard such as an Axe or a basic rock to throw, but you got some pretty sick ones like a dash that lets you regain health when phasing through enemies or an army of ghosts that attack anything that stands in their way. I found myself cycling through each of these a lot, as they all have situations that they all excel at with my personal favorite being the dash, as I found the health refill to help out in some tight situations. On top of that you can find various trinkets that grant Mina various little effects that you can mix and match to your liking. These suffer the same problems as other trinkets can in games where some are clearly better than others, but I ended up mixing my trinkets out a lot, never really sticking to one set for long.

Mina is not exactly an easy game though, Mina will test you throughout your journey and a lot of the game’s basic mechanics reflect the intense difficulty Mina has in store. Dying is the simplest to explain, functioning like the death mechanics in Souls game where you lose your currency if you can’t retrieve your spark back before your next death. Just like Dark Souls too, this currency is used to upgrade your defense and attack, making you need to be extra careful in order to save the right amount of bones that you need. As cool as this mechanic is though, unfortunately I think Mina becomes a little too easy to break with it. You can find some spark upgrades throughout the game that let you die more times before losing all your stuff, and bosses can only take away a set amount of sparks before you lose them forever. If you have any basic sense of exploration, you’ll discover all the upgrades rather quickly, and I ended up having 5 total deaths needed in order to lose my bones, with bosses taking a max of 4, meaning I never really had the threat of losing my currency less than halfway through the game. It makes dying more of an annoyance than something that has actual consequences behind it,and it meant I could just throw myself at the same boss over and over again until I eventually won, as there was 0 consequence for dying in said fight. The healing mechanic more than makes up for it though, adding a lot of friction to the standard “Estus Flask” heal. While most games require you to simply find a safe spot in order to heal, Mina will only heal up as much as a yellow bar on her health dictates. The way to increase this bar and heal more is to deal damage against enemies without getting hit yourself, meaning you can’t just duck away from a safe spot to heal, you have to get face first into the action in order to survive, and this led to an incredible tug and pull with the games basic systems. Whenever I needed to heal a ton of health, I found myself on edge constantly, as any single hit could lead to my death, and while I could just heal a low amount and keep doing it that way, I only have a limited number of vials, making me have to waste more resources in some already tricky boss encounters. It’s my favorite addition to this sort of mechanic, as I found the basic safe spot heal to be a little boring. Mina adding an actual challenge behind the health flasks is such a breath of fresh air, it’s easily my favorite new mechanic in the game, and it never got any less tense throughout my playthrough!

Mina isn’t all perfect though, the game’s difficulty curve is kinda terrible here. At the start of the game, I found myself getting my ass kicked constantly, dying left to right as I faced threats that seemed way too much for me. I was enjoying this difficulty as it made me have to learn just how each enemy exactly worked in order to avoid death myself, keeping me tense throughout each area. As soon as you beat the first and second dungeons though, this difficulty kinda became a joke. It was around that point that my sparks were above what bosses could take away from me, and normal encounters weren't enough to drain all my sparks away, so that threat of death simply got erased, meaning I could play it as risky as I wanted with 0 consequence to it. I simply stopped losing my currency by a certain point, and I stopped caring about dying by the end of the game. You can imagine my surprise when I reached the climax and I’m suddenly dying way more than usual. It’s easy to dismiss this as the game just naturally ramping up at this point, but I’m going to be so honest here a lot of the late game portions don’t feel well designed at all. The game will just start throwing a bunch of heavy hitting enemies in cramped spaces that make it near impossible to dodge everything, making me take a bunch of unnecessary hits that just felt unfair. The bosses were especially terrible at this, with some of their attacks being straight up impossible to dodge, and I could feel my frustration building up depending on the fight. I do not mind tough difficulty, I adore a good challenge and I think that friction is important in game design, but I despise it whenever the game starts to feel unfair and Mina starts to lean towards the unfair territory by the end.

I wanted to touch up on this subject matter here, but Mina has a system known as the variance mode that lets you apply certain modifiers to the game, letting you switch up how the game normally progresses. When this was first revealed, I must admit I was a little hesitant about its introduction. It’s not that the system itself is bad per say but I find that a lot of games add this mostly to make the game a lot easier, taking away a lot of challenges by giving you a simple I win button. I was incredibly worried Mina would be the same way as there are modifiers that do take away all the challenge, but Mina blocks you from completing feats when done, including stuff as simple as beating the game, and I really like that choice. I think a lot of games nowadays are too scared to have a proper challenge, with these easier buttons being given as a way to easily take it away with no real downside to turning these on. Mina having these options there at the cost of progression markers being taken away I think is a pretty good step to including them ,and while I personally would rather these not exist as I much prefer a more challenging experience that you can’t really escape from, I can at the very least have my sense of progression taken away, making me have much better reasons to keep engaging with the challenge. The other modifiers are pretty fun too, with a lot being just some dumb wacky stuff like adding damage numbers or turning the floor into lava. There not something I would mess with at all on a first playthrough and I think they should have been locked from the getgo till you beat it as letting you modify a good majority at the start does stink, but it’s cool that these even exist and I can see myself doing a lot of different playthroughs with the hard mode modifiers on in order to give Mina the difficulty it deserves.

All in all, I found Mina to be a pretty great playthrough most of the time! Its difficulty curve is pretty awful, but the combat helps to make up for it, staying pretty fast and hectic throughout despite how easy it ended up turning into. I’m hoping we get some balance patches in the future to help make the final area feel more fair, it really is just impossible to dodge attacks at points, and it’s a pretty big detriment to an overall great experience. It’s not my favorite release of the year, but it’s one that I ended up adoring greatly, and I’m glad that it’s finally out for me to enjoy! I’m excited to go clear up the rest of the feats after a few patches, but for now I think I’m satisfied with what I accomplished. This is an incredible follow up to Shovel Knight and I can’t wait to see what Yacht Club puts out next!

The Mystery Gets Deeper and Deeper

 

“Your eye has been opened.”

Have you ever played the Zero Escape games? I haven’t touched them in years but I remember enjoying them quite a lot and ya know I was a little curious to replay them. That was until a good friend of mine recommended I play the same creator’s other work, A.I The Somnium Files, a detective visual novel that apparently gets just as crazy as Zero Escape! Wanting to make a friend happy I figured hey, why not might as well try it and I booted it up excited to see what awaited me. I should have known what to expect here, but I still had a wonderful time regardless.

I’ll save the story for later but graphically this game is pretty great! The 3D models can be a little offputting at times, but the environmental design is fantastic and the game isn’t really afraid to get a little weird at points, leading to a lot of amazing variety in what the game wants to show you. It makes the game feel rather fresh, and you’re never lingering in an area for too long before moving to the next so you don’t really find yourself getting bored here, it’s a great time! I ended up listening to all the voice work here as well this run and I found myself pleasantly surprised with just how well acted everyone is in the game. I usually expect no effort in these kind of performances just based on prior experiences, but Somnium managed to genuinely surprise me with how well acted it all was! Special highlight to our main character Date here, he is fantastic, and there were moments where I swear he had a gun pointed to him in the studio, it felt so genuine with how much emotion he put into the performance.  The soundtrack here is also great, though considering this is from the same guy who made Zero Escape, it doesn't really surprise me, though I do think I lean towards Zero Escape’s soundtrack more here.

Considering it’s a visual adventure novel, you don’t get too much gameplay here besides reading text, but the gameplay that is here is pretty fun! You’;ll be exploring different scenes, looking out for different clues, participating in QTES from time to time, it’s all rather standard stuff, but the game’s intriguing so I never really got bored during the basics. If it was just that though, Somnimum would end up being pretty standard, and thankfully the game offers another gameplay style that really kept me intrigued, the Psync sequences. These moments have you jumping into the brain of someone else and solving adventure game esque puzzles in order to progress further in their mind, revealing more of the plot in the process. The game encourages heavy exploration, with you trying out various different commands in order to figure out just what to do, but you can’t be too careless as you have a time limit to manage at the same time. Certain events take away a certain amount of time and it’s up to you to choose the correct ones so you can clear it before your 6 minutes are up. It’s not  set in stone 6 minutes though as you can find items known as TICKS that decrease/increase the time spent performing an action. The increase ones are obviously bad, though it’s hard to avoid them and the game makes you take a few sometimes, making you really consider what you do, but the lower time ones come in various different forms such as ½, ⅙, reducing it o one second, reducing it to 10, you got a lot of options here, and the best way to tackle each Psync is to figure out where each one is best used. Psync’s usually show up at the end of a day too, serving as a perfect bookend to that day’s events, and there’s not really a single bad one here or one that felt unfair in terms of how it was designed. The only one I kinda struggled with was one of the later ones as the time limit was incredibly tight, but once I figured out what to do, it became a piece of cake.

You play as Kaname Date, a police detective who’s investigating a case known as the Cyclops Killings, which involves the victim's left eye being removed upon death. As the bodies begin to stack up and up, and you start to get closer andI closer to the truth, Date begins to realize just what exactly he stepped into here, and how much of a mistake this all may have been. In typical Uchisoki fashion, the game’s plot starts rather standard with a pretty basic mystery setup, but slowly unravels itself to be more and more batshit insane the farther you get into it, ending with something you never really could have predicted, but can look back and see the game had been foreshadowing it since the very beginning. Out of all the works I played from him, I think Somnium stands out as my favorite plot wise here, the game knows just how much intrigue to set upon you to keep you further going, while making sure to not hold out too much so you aren’t left frustrated at what the solution could even be. There’s not really a single bad character here, and even ones that are written to be hateable have some soft sides to them, and I genuinely grew to care for each member of the cast no matter how much some could frustrate me, the character work here is simply incredible. Date especially, where he can come off as kind of an idiot, but when he needs to lock in, he does and he’s willing to do anything he can in order to protect the people that he loves. The way he bounces off of other characters incredibly well too, he’s really good at banter here, and it made me wanna see all the optional dialogue purely to see what he has to say next. There’s a lot of heart behind his character, and while I did feel a little indifferent to him at the start, the way he opens up more and more is just great, and I found myself sobbing at quite a few scenes involving him as the game went on.

Much like Zero Escape, the game presents a flow chart to you, as you discover route after route, with one final route being revealed at the end that wraps up the entire mystery. This is also handled great here, as the way you get each route is by solving each of the Psync sequences in different ways. None of these alternate solutions are too tough to figure out, and the game has a pretty good flow chart that helps put you on the right path if you're stuck on where to go. Unlike a lot of other visual novels I played,I can’t really think of any routes outweighing the rest in terms of quality. Each one is kinda perfect for what each one wants to do, though I do wonder how much is based on how I played the game. I kinda lucked out in my playstyle with how I went about it, as the routes I did kinda naturally led to the next ones I did, solving the mysteries set up in the route I beat, working as a giant sort of web that got more and more untangled the farther I got in. None are too long either, each one is about the same in length besides the final one obviously, so the pacing is incredible between each, and they end right before they can get a little exhausting, making me more ready and prepared to head into the next route that awaits me.

It’s not all perfect though, there were a few minor issues the game presented to me throughout my runtime, and while none were game ruining it was enough to be noticeable, and I can’t help but reflect back on the low moments. The QTE sequences here are pretty bad, they don’t really require any effort at all and while they can be pretty humorous at times, actually playing through a few of them can feel like a little bit of a slog, and I was just ready for each one to end by the time I started them. Minor complaint as well but some of the humor didn’t hit as hard as it could have. The game’s hysterical don’t get me wrong, but the game does rely on a few creepy jokes here and there that while I normally don’t mind, sometimes it can take up what a character is, making me groan a little depending who shows up. The game could also feel a little too linear at points, which granted isn’t a bad thing for what the game is, but finding clues really just amounts to clicking through a dialogue tree and hearing what each character has to say. I suppose with the detective setup here, I expected a bit more of searching here and there, and while the game does have a few evidence presenting moments, it's not enough to totally immerse me in the role, and I suppose I just wanted a bit more of that. This could easily be nitpicking though, it was just something I felt as I went, coming off as more underbaked then I would have expected.

All in all, I’m glad I finally had the motivation to sit down and check out the Somnium Files. It was a game that I’ve had rotting in my steam for years now at this point, though I never really gave it the time of day as I was busy with other work at the time,but now that I’ve fully played through it, I’m happy with what I experienced! It’s an incredible journey from beginning to end, and while they got some minor issues here or there, everything else came together to make one of my favorite stories in recent memories, and it makes me a little curious how the sequels hold up. A part of me is a little curious how a sequel will work with how the game ends, but I suppose I’ll see, but for now I’m happy I stepped into the world of Somnium, and I can’t wait to see these characters again someday. 

Was the wait worth it?

 

FINALLY A GOOD GAME!!!

I’m not gonna mince words or anything here, Bubsy finally has a good game after years of utter garbage. I slaved through Bubsy 1, suffered with Furtales and 2, fought the reincarnation of God with 3D, and fell into a year long Coma with The Woolies Strike Back and Paws on Fire, but it was all worth it to get here. Who knew the secret to making a good Bubsy game was to hire an actual competent studio right?

The Woolies… are NOT BACK actually wow! Instead we got the Baabot’s, evil sheep that were kidnapped by the Woolies ages ago who ended up taking over the Woolies homeworld and stole the technology for themselves. They once again steal Bubsy’s Golden Wool and it’s up to him and his “friends” to save the day. They still do not try here plot wise, and the game is short enough to where no one really gets a focus. You’re mostly going from place to place here with each world changing up the next villain. Bubsy is still as annoying as before, though the game is a lot more self-deprecating with its humor, making fun of Bubsy’s past and while I can understand the intention, it does make it come off as more annoying. That’s all Bubsy is after all, a joke of a franchise with barely any positives to it, there’s no redeeming characteristics in this plot here, and my time spent on this story just felt wasted. I liked Bubsy’s niece and nephew I guess, they were kinda funny, but everyone else just spends the entire game making fun of Bubsy, there is nothing more to each of these characters. Graphically, the game is fine, I enjoy the style enough, but environments can be a little bland, and the only real notable world I can think of is the 2nd, as it leans heavily into a yarn aesthetic this time instead of a generic grass and factory world. Granted, the game was made on a budget so I can excuse some of it, but it does mean the game doesn't stick out much from the platformer crowd, and it can be kinda bland as an experience overall.

Levels are pretty standard here, tasking you with getting to the end of each one, collecting various yarn balls and blueprints along the way in order to get some extra goodies to spice up your playthrough. For the first time ever, Bubsy actually controls great here! He still has his intense speed from the 1st game, but this time he’s actually controllable and I had no issues directing Bubsy to where I wanted him to go! He also has a bunch of new moves here making it a lot more of a movement platformer this time around compared to his other works. You got the basic dive back, thought functions a lot more like the Hat in Time dive, just with way more speed and distance with it, but you also got a double jump and a roll move that lets you travel at intense speeds. This is a very fast paced platformer, and this can take someone off guard on a first playthrough, but it wasn't hard to really adjust to and the game offers a sandbox area to run around in if needed in order to better adjust to his controls. While the level themes may be rather generic, the actual design isn’t, being a lot more open then previous Bubsy games, letting you take full advantage of his moveset here. If you go through the game at normal speed, you won’t really have that great a time here, it can be a little boring, but if you try speeding along and aiming for those leaderboard times, you end up playing through one of the most fun platformers I’ve played recently. Bubsy’s moves flow into each other incredibly well here, and there are a lot of instances where you can just zoom past major parts of the level if you're clever enough to do it, so a lot of the fun comes from making your own routes and destroying everything that comes in your way.

It’s not all perfect though, there were quite a few things that held Bubsy back here like usual, and it was bad enough to stick in my mind the whole run through. Collectibles seem neat in practice but the rewards for them are rather lame. Yarn Balls just get you more costumes which are fine but they have so little here that I ended up barely using most of them as you easily default to one or two. Blueprints are the other collectibles, letting you buy various upgrades to Bubsy, further expanding his arsenal and making him more capable moveset wise. The issue though is that a lot of these moves aren’t really that useful and the only one I really got used out of was the checkpoint teleportation move as that helped me get 100% a lot quicker. I also find that the moveset itself can be a little lacking. I feel like there’s not a lot of variety with the moves itself and it started to have the Mario Odyssey issue where you kinda rely on the same move most of the time. The roll makes it a lot better thankfully as the burst of speed you get from that is incredibly exhilarating, but making long distances really amounted to bouncing off from a roll into a dive, it got a little repetitive. I’m also not a big fan of the “walljump” here, it’s very magnetic in terms of how it’s used, so you don’t really gain much use from it and the game barely uses it to begin with. It felt like a let down because I know this team can do more movement wise, but for Bubsy it very clearly got the budget treatment. The game is also incredibly short, you can beat this in an hour and a half easily, it takes no time. The only reason it took me a bit longer is because I idled a bit due to checking in on some conversations and I ended up going for 100% which required me to beat the game without getting hit 9 times. For a 20 dollar price tag too, it’s a little egregious, especially when I can buy other Bubsy games for much cheaper for the same length, sometimes even longer. Granted, those aren’t as high quality as 4D, but I should not be spending more time playing Bubsy 3D and Paws on Fire than this, come on man.

All in all, I enjoyed my time with Bubsy 4D decently enough. It wasn't the best game in the world, far from it, but it’s an actual good game from Bubsy and I’ll take that over yet another garbage release. The main thing holding it back is really the fact that it was made on a budget, and if it was given more time then it could have been something incredible! Still though, I don’t regret playing through this, and for now it seems my Bubsy journey has finally come to an end! Unless they make a new one then I guess I'm back in the mines but let’s hope that doesn't happen! Please save me! Please!!!

Hatred for the Medium and how it can Ruin What Makes Something Special.

 

“It’ll ruin my soundtrack!”

Video games have always been my favorite form of art. The way it uses interactivity has given me experiences and emotions that no other art forms really have, and my love for it has been there ever since I was little. Because of this, I find that the most frustrating video games are the ones that feel ashamed of that interactivity, games that really have no reason to be a game and would be better served as a movie. A game that just doesn't really enjoy the medium that it’s in and becomes a miserable experience because of it. When I was looking into Mixtape, I ran into a lot of discourse on it barely being a video game. Scenes that could be completed by putting the controller down, barely any interactivity, it was something I saw constantly and as someone who was curious about this game, it sort of puzzled me. I don’t like following mass opinion though without experience and curiosity ended up winning over and I ended up installing a copy. Was Mixtape really something that deserved all the hate it got, or is there a hidden gem buried under all the outrage?

Where do I really begin with this story? You play as Stacy Rockford, a 90’s teenager who spends her days committing crimes and causing chaos with her friends Van Slater and Cassandra Morino. These fun times are not meant to last though as Stacy plans to move to New York in order to head to college, ditching a road trip the group has planned out for awhile now and leaving her friends behind entirely. Not wanting things to end on a sour note, the group sets out for one last hangout before fate separates them forever. The plot stays standard and while that isn't something I mind, it does mean that the characters have to make up for it in order to make it worthwhile and I don’t think Mixtape really makes up with its characters.  These groups of friends just feel so surface level, it’s hard to really gauge anything about them besides that they knew each other for a while and that they say cool lingo. It feels so cliche, and if you’ve seen any standard 90’s slice of life movie then you know the exact plot beats it’s going to follow. There’s going to be the fun hangout sequences, there’s gonna be a falling out, there’s a cool party scene, it’s all stuff I’ve seen done before and I don’t think Mixtape really does anything to set it out from the mold. What am I meant to get from these characters, what are their motivations, how deep does this bond go? These are questions I kept asking myself while playing through it and I don’t think Mixtape really answers them. They feel like stale caricatures of what people think a stereotypical teenager acts instead of actual characters with depth to them. I don’t know much about them except that they're close friends and that’s it. It’s sometimes even hard to care for them beyond that because they can act incredibly unlikable (Stacey). It feels like every single scene is just the same exact thing repeating with no real growth coming from it, I was in an infinite time loop and the only escape out was to beat the game.

I find the visual style of Mixtape to also be rather messy in execution. Characters move like a Spider-Verse character does, while everything else moves at normal speed and this creates a weird sort of mismatch between the two. The game opens with you riding on a skateboard at the start and since you’re moving at a lower FPS while the skateboard isn’t, it ends up looking rather strange, though I’m also willing to admit that this could just be my general preference with animation in general. In terms of its accuracy to the 90s, I can’t really confirm. I wasn't a 90s kid, I don’t know if this game is accurate to it and I’m not going to speak on if it is, that’s just not fair of me to do I feel. I will comment though on how it handles its references here. You see the game is built around a music playlist and I don’t mind that as a concept! I think you can do incredibly creative things surrounding music with games and releases such as Unbeatable are proof enough of that idea being used well I feel. Here though, your character will just kinda stop time to stare at you and tell you what the song is and when it’s from before starting it and this takes me out of the experience immensely. I feel less like the music is being integrated with the game, but instead feel like it’s just pointing something out for the sake of it, creating an awful tone shift with what the game wants me to feel. So much of the game feels like this too, whether it be incredibly serious scenes involving abuse where your character has to bring up a reference, or whether you have that falling out and your response is just to name a song you’re listening too, it feels very heavy handed in how it references the time period, and I felt conflicted and confused on what exactly the game wanted me to feel in these moments. All of these songs are from the 80s too which for a game about the 90s I expected a few 90s songs? From what I gathered a lot of 90s kids liked the 80s, but I do feel if you’re going to lean hard into 90s nostalgia you wanna have your soundtrack reflect that too right?
I wanted to dedicate a section specifically to talk about our main character Stacey here, someone who I found incredibly awful to control throughout the game. Now, I don’t mind playing as a shitty person to tell a narrative, I think this can be done rather well a lot of times, but I don’t think Mixtape really knows how to do that. Stacey is a bad friend who constantly hurts the people around her and makes situations worse and the game tries to leave a lot of this unsolved. There’s a scene where she witnesses a friend get hurt and her response is to simply say her soundtrack is being ruined now. You then go on an angry vandalism spree around town over it, and this conflict never really gets resolved! The overall arc does, but Stacey as a character doesn't and it’s treated kinda like a good thing that she’s a dick. The main friend fallout is related to something completely different with her, and her response to that fallout is to just tell her friend what song she’s going to listen to before walking away. What did that add to the scene? Why did you need to tell them what you’re listening to as you’re being criticized, what do you gain from this? She never even really grows from this, your friend is the one that has to apologize for you and I just feel jaded and bitter because of it. I can’t latch onto a main character if they're going to be presented as such an asshole and not learn anything from it. It doesn't feel intentional for them to be like this too, as I said everyone else apologies instead of her having to do that. She has one moment of change sometime near the end, but that in turn gets undermined because she has to throw in a single reference at the end anyway, completely sucking out any tone the game wants to throw at me. Stacey feels more like a vessel to shout out these song references or these old movies she enjoys instead of being a character, and it makes her feel like she was plucked out of Ready Player 1 instead of being an actual person I should cling to and relate with.
What sets a game apart from other art forms is its use of interactivity. The best games for me are the ones that take full advantage of it, you can’t really replicate the feeling a game is going to give you in another medium and it’s a big reason why I find games specifically to be so incredible to me. Mixtape is a game that feels ashamed to be a video game. There is barely any interactivity here, and for a vast majority of these segments, the game ends up playing itself. Take the beginning of the game where you open up riding a skateboard. I was able to complete a good 90% of the segment without pressing a single button, watching my character automatically move and swerve around upcoming obstacles. Sometimes I’d have to move out of the way in order to not get hit, but most of the time I didn’t and there felt like there was no real purpose to interacting with the game. There’s an auto-runner segment later on where I put the controller down for the entire moment and the game just completed it for me with 0 inputs being pressed to get to that end point. Every interactive moment in this game feels like it, and when they do have moments of interactivity, it’s always the most basic form of it, or it ends in about 5 seconds, telling you to get a move on so you don’t get bored pressing buttons. I’m not opposed to “Walking Simulators” or "Interactive Movies” or even “Visual Novels” but with those I feel like I’m engaging with the game. When I play Ace Attorney, I still have to use my brain in order to solve these cases and they function like a point and click. When I play a David Cage game, my choices do matter here and there are genuine consequences to messing up a good bit of the QTEs, to the point that it can even kill your character if you don’t do well enough. These games understand that they are video games first and foremost, that interactivity is an important aspect with them, but with Mixtape none of that is really here. The most interaction the game ever gave me was when I had to move a couch and even then it ended in less than a minute. Most of the “gameplay” here is you walking around a room and looking back on old memories. They feel less like intentional gameplay segments and more like TikTok sensory videos that stop you from falling asleep. I’m not asking for anything too complex here, I’m not asking for anything crazy, I’m just asking for something more than walking forward. I want to engage with what the game is offering to me, but the game never allows me to do that, and that hurts.

I did not enjoy my time with Mixtape here. The way the game presented itself and every decision just kept going and going without much interactivity to it made the game feel like it was taking 5 years to get to the end. The games only lasted about 3 hours at most, but so much of that time felt wasted, and by the end I still don’t know much about these characters beyond the bare essentials. All I know is that they’re good friends when I should know more in order to properly care for them. Whatever gameplay is here is nonexistent with barely any interactivity required, and the constant slew of references undermined any emotional beat this game tried to instill in me. I would not call this game an industry plant, I really don’t think that ever existed, but I do struggle to see much enjoyment in it. I suppose I can see how it might resonate with someone on a very basic surface level and I’m glad people can relate to that experience, but for me I just felt wasted. Maybe the 90s just aren’t for me, maybe this game was just doomed to fail for me playing it, but my low expectations still felt broken. If you’re that curious about the game, I’d say wait for a sale as I feel 20 dollars is asking for quite a lot for what little game offers here. I will forget this game as the days go by, and I’m very happy to have my time done with Mixtape.