2024

This year was pretty rough, ngl. Talking strictly in terms of gaming, I started out ok, but then was in hospital mid-March. That wrecked my wrists (and the rest of my body) so badly that I couldn’t hold a controller to play properly for months afterwards. Then… when my wrists were finally getting their strength back after a lot of physio work, MY TV SCREEN BROKE!!!

I had planned to try and go outside of my comfort zones this year, trying new stuff in genres I like, and new things in genres I’ve never tried before. I prepared a nice handful of games to try, mainly on my PS4 this year, but… without a functioning TV screen, I’m fucked lol. I had to shift focus towards stuff I can play on my handhelds and computer; which, I still had stuff to play for the year... But. Man. I wanted to play Sekiro so bad - the night I installed it I ended up in hospital, and then a few days into playing after I recovered enough to hold the controller, the TV broke! Made me a bit sad ngl!

Anyway, I have a very strange variety of games played this year. I’ve made the decision to skip writing about some of the games I played, as I either dropped them due to health issues OR simply didn’t enjoy them enough to keep slogging through. I generally don't want to write about games like this unless I've hit the credits, or gotten roughly 70%-85% through as the minumum to give it a fair go. Maybe I’ll come back to a few that I dropped, but I really don’t think I can write about my little stints that I played while utterly depressed and struggling with health issues, haha.

Regardless of dropping a few, I think I’ve got more than enough to write about this year. I have also made this site where it’s easier to read everything (on mobile and web!), and spoilers are hidden if you don’t want to see them. I’ve made the decision that the full reviews will be hosted here from now on, as they’re like… the ultimate way to read these. They’re getting too long to comfortably put in a Tumblr post, but I’ll still make posts with each game’s intro and you can decide if you wanna read like usual hehe. If you're here, enjoy da full thang!

Usual warnings for mild-moderate game spoilers and abrasive opinions ahead.

Games Directory

• Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns
• Moonlighter
• The Sims 3 (3DS)
• The Sims 3: Pets (3DS)
• Donut County
• Katamari Darmacy: Reroll
• Hitman: Blood Money
• Power Wash Simulator
• JoJo's Bizzare Adventure: Eyes of Heaven
• Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story (DS)
• Fear and Hunger

Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns, 3DS

Source: gulava on Tumblr

After playing Story of Seasons last year (and loving it!), I was exited to give Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns a go and see what improvements and changes they’d make. However, it was apparent very early on that this was going to be a frustrating play through. And that sucks, cause I love farming games! I gave it a fair go, getting halfway into the second year. Then I lost a save due to not getting my 3DS to the charger in time, and I really didn’t want to redo the previous couple of days...

So, what happened!?

I was very confused; the game still looked decent, clearly using the same engine and model bases as the previous game, it had a nice little story to it that helped contextualise why you move to the country and start farming, it had pretty much all the basic farming gameplay you’d expect… and yet, this felt really crap. I looked up when this game out, and it came out less than half a year after the previous Story of Seasons 3DS game.
So, yeah, that kinda answers a lot for me. Now, I am just assuming that it was a rushed production based on how I felt while playing it, paired with those release dates being so close together- but this was not that fun for me!

You begin by wistfully daydreaming about country life, and have a little spat with your father when you share that dream with him. He’s not keen on you becoming a farmer, despite coming from the farm life himself! Eventually, he concedes, and makes sure your uncle is there to greet you and help you set up everything you need on your farm.
As you start to get acquainted with your new life, you’ll quickly notice that there are two blocked areas you can’t get to, and that you can only access one of the titular trio of towns. To unlock the other towns- and earn your father’s approval -you’ll have to complete certain tasks, upgrade various things, and work hard to thrive on your farm. This is a simple but sweet premise; and on it’s own, I have no issues with it- in fact, I really like that it gives a bit of motivation to do well!
Who doesn’t love a bit of spite-fuelled success?

What ended up sucking about this, was that there felt like a lot of wasted opportunity here, which caused so much of the game to fall flat for me.
A great example of what I mean here: your father will send you a list of tasks to complete, and each time you complete them you’ll gain a little more respect from him until you have his full blessing to live out your farm life. On it’s own, that’s a fantastic way to encourage players to explore their surroundings, and work towards learning and understanding all of the things they can do on their farm while tying it all together with the narrative of impressing your father.
However… The entirety of the first spring was pretty aimless, as this ‘dad’s approval’ list hadn’t kicked in yet. This made spring feel bloated, boring and aimless for me, which sucked!
Having a bit more direction with simplified tasks to complete would’ve been helpful here, especially as a tutorial section; but you’re left to just faff around for a whole season – which lowkey led me to believe there wasn’t much more to aim for other than opening up the two towns I couldn’t access yet. If daddy dearest is going to be such a disproving snob, why not start up right away with a list of things he wants us to prove to him from the beginning?

The actual meat and potatoes of the game are very similar to the previous SoS game; you have a bunch of land on your plot, its divided up into a grid based layout where you can put tilled soil, livestock farms, or special things like seed-makers and dairy-makers. You have the standard tools to till, sow, water and reap crops, along with mining and fishing in the towns that let you do that. The three towns that you’ll gain access to are;
Westown, a wild-west themed country town,
Tsuyukusa, a traditional Japanese themed rural town,
and Lulukoko, a Hawai’i themed beachfront town.
Each town has two sections to it, an upper and a lower area. All three have a common entry point in an area connected to the outskirts of your farm, and eventually you will unlock routes to travel from town to town that are joined in each town’s upper area. There is also a fast travel thing unlocked, but generally the layout was simple and nice enough to traverse, with plenty of area to forage and shop once everything is unlocked. There are also a selection of seasonal events, like food and beverage festivals to compete for making the best recipe, crop judging festivals, animal festivals, dress up competitions and various cultural festivals local to each town. Each town also has a unique way to gesture to each other, which was a bit funny to me.
When you first move to your farm, you’re greeted by your uncle and can only visit Westown, where everyone hugs you. They made a very big deal over the fact that everyone hugs, which I felt was very Japanese of the game, haha. The other towns had bowing and what looked to be a fist bump, so thats a nice enough visual difference, but I wish they went a little further with the variations in culture here.

To earn some money while you wait for crops to grow, you can partake in various part-time jobs in each town. These fall either into the category of chore, delivery or shipping particular things from your farm. It’s generally worth it to go through and complete any part-time jobs you think you can finish in time, as you’ll be rewarded with money upon completion, a bit of friendship points raised for the person requesting the job, and raising the general points towards each town. There are also the occasional special jobs that pop up, which grant you a Super Mario themed outfit to wear when completed, and these themed outfits grant a bonus ability to you for a few hours each morning – things like speed or fishing boosts, or bonus friendship points when doing actions that would give you friendship points to begin with.
When you’ve raised a certain amount of friendship points with characters, if you talk to them while they’re eating, they may invite you to join! This takes an hour out of your day, but it’s a free stamina refill- and if they’re eating a particular dish, you may get certain bonus effects from eating it, the same way you can get certain effects from dishes you cook yourself at home.

The crops you grow and animals you raise have multiple facets to encourage while growing this time as well, and this was a very interesting point for me to figure out and play with. These were called star ranks and animal attributes respectively, and you could buy various kinds of fertiliser and animal treats to grow certain aspects. The crops have colour, aroma, juiciness, size and yield; while animals have size, affection, coat, and their byproduct level and amount. If you win a festival with a certain produce or animal, you’ll get a level up in the rank of that particular thing, resulting in more money your way when you ship it.
I enjoyed this aspect, as once I understood it, it was good to work towards getting the most out of my crops and animals! Once the seed maker was unlocked and built, I was glad to see that turning a crop into seeds will retain the levels of each category, and I could build them up until they were maxing out all their stats. There are also giant crops and golden crops to aim for, which were nice, but I didn’t go out of my way to get them. There was a decent rage of crops and flowers to grow, giving a nice variety by the time you’ve unlocked everything. There are a few new types of animals introduced here too, meaning that all livestock had at least two variations, and some with three. Take the chickens for instance, theres the basic white chicken with normal eggs, the silkie chicken that gives black eggs, and now also a quail with quail eggs. You definitely won't be short on choice!

To unlock the various types of animals and crops, you needed to raise your points for each town, which brings me to the two main motivators for this game. Town Link Ranks, which are the points previously mentioned, and Farming Tips, which is your father’s list of achievements he wants you to complete.
I already touched on father’s list, but it’s very simple in what it expects of you. There were three sets of lists from him to complete here, and they all comprised of things like ‘raise x amount of crops,’ ‘own x amount of cows,’ ‘build a dairy shed,’ - all things that will help you to grow your farm and get the most out of it. Upon completing these lists, you’ll shortly be visited by a family member; your sister, your mum, and eventually your dad. These felt generally rewarding, and its nice to have a visit from a family member and have little cutscenes hanging out with them and showing off your success. However, as I mentioned with the pacing of these earlier, you don’t get your first list until the first of summer. Although these ramp up in amounts of things to complete, they’re not too difficult and are things you’re likely to be doing regardless of the list. I also found it a little frustrating that despite technically achieving certain criteria before getting the list, I had to redo them upon receiving the list or it wouldn’t count.
Like, one of the first goals was to raise three crops, and even though I had definitely done that in spring, I needed to do so very deliberately in summer or it wouldn’t count…
IF there were maybe more phases, but still having them divided into thirds so that each milestone ended with a visit from a family member, that might solve my issues with it. As it is, they just didn’t have the kind of momentum to keep gameplay engaging and provide a general goal for me. I appreciate having some time to muck around and get used to the layouts of my farm and abilities I have, but with most things closed or off limits at the beginning, having a whole season of barely anything wasn’t very fun. Maybe a few days, or a week, max, would be nice to faff about, but 30 days!?

Nuh uh!!

The other thing, Town Link Ranks, were good to keep you motivated and doing various things around each town. These felt a bit more intrinsically rewarding, as you get points towards your relationship with that town by doing various things, like shipping crops to that town, doing part time jobs, and just generally building your friendship with the townsfolk. There are ranks E->D->C->B->A to work your way through; when you fill the gauge up to each letter’s respective rank, it’ll lock you from adding anymore until you complete a special set of tasks in order to continue progressing. I actually liked these as a nice way to show your progress with each town, as each level up would expand the inventory of local shops- giving you new crops, livestock and items to buy. You’ll slowly work towards levelling up by just playing, but with targeted effort, you’ll rise through the ranks in no time.

One of the easiest ways I found to raise the rank, and a way to unlock the next level, is to change the destination of your shipping box to a particular town. Yes, the shipping box is back! We’re not dealing with the vendor market of the previous game anymore, and while I loved the return to something tried and true… Again, the implementation of it’s mechanics felt superficial and really underutilised. Because a major focus is on the three towns, I understand why they had the shipping box work the way it did, but I just think it could’ve been refined to become something a bit better!
When you go to ship goods, there will be a little logo showing which town you’ll be shipping to. At the end of the day, a representative from that town will come by and empty the shipping box, and only that town will get the goods. I thought this was adding a lot of specific details to something that didn’t need to be this detailed- it’s not like you see the townsfolk using or talking about the particular goods you’ve shipped. I think it would’ve worked better if there were dedicated shipping bins in each town that you have to travel to and fill instead. These could be in the outskirt areas next to the entrance to each town, so that it’s not that far out of your way, similar to how Tale of Two Towns had a shipping box for each town. In ToTT, both shipping boxes were effectively the same, as you’d get your money regardless of where you shipped, but that concept could’ve been furthered here.
As it is, you can only ship the contents of your box to the town you’ve set – meaning if you want to split your goods up and ship to different towns, you’ll need to change the shipping destination and wait until the next day for it to take effect. This is basic, and sucks if you take on a part time job, or have two towns at a locked stage that require certain goods to be shipped, as you’ll have to hold onto inventory and wait until you can split it across the towns you want to send it to. As strange as the vendor marketplace in the previous game was, I think a few elements from it could’ve been reused in a simplified fashion to make it a bit more interesting here. As it is, it just feels like it’s stripped away that interactive complexity in favour of making the system needlessly complex. I’ll talk more about this and provide a suggestion I think could help fix my issues with it in the spoiler section, but I like to put those at the end, so let’s move on for now…

As far as the controls go, everything handled fine. It was what I’d expect of a farming game, but I noticed that the start button still doesn’t do anything. Why isn’t that linked to pausing the game!? There were certain other things I noticed that were strange, too.
First, about the part-time jobs… While these are cool in concept, they’re basically the request boards from previous games, but trying to be different and cool. For the tasks that are doing delivery quests or shipping certain things from your farm, they’re exactly how you’d expect them to work. You make sure you have your shipping bin set to the right town and ship stuff, or go to particular people to pick up and deliver what they ask. When you start the delivery quests, one nice thing is that the relevant people to that quest will have a little icon bubble above their head, which helps you keep track of who’s who, in case you forget which names goes with which face – I actually liked doing the delivery requests, mainly due to this QOL feature.
BUT, the chore type jobs suuuuuck. They’re almost like mini games, but too much mini and not enough game. I’d rather this follow the request board style of previous games, where if someone is asking for 10 pieces of chopped wood, you just go out and chop the wood yourself, and make sure it’s in your inventory when you talk to the person in order to finish the quest. I don’t really want to be yeeted into a mind numbing mini game where you load into a section to chop wood, press A 10 times... and that’s it. It takes ages to load, and there’s not enough challenge to bother with it! I only did them so often cause they paid well enough for next to no effort on my part, other than the weed-pulling job in Tsuyukasa, where the weeds would blend in or be almost un-pullable in the rice paddy fields, locking me in this dumbass chore quest until I finally managed to get the last weed and end it. These chores left a lot to be desired, which is a shame, as having little quests of things to do is a nice way to break up the monotony of farming.

When foraging for items to either store or sell, there are certain bugs unique to each area and season you can collect. However, you don’t get to actually collect them, just an automatic catch and release. Why can’t I catch a physical bug and sell them for a bit of money, or have collecting certain bugs could be part of item requests? It feels so pointless to add in a mechanic to catch them if it doesn’t do anything! Well, technically, it does do something, as collecting them all will get a special cutscene and gift from the harvest goddess apparently, but I don’t care if I don’t get the bugs! I don’t even care for bug catching mechanics in games if I’m honest, but what’s the point in such a half baked one here!? Other items like wood and flowers could be picked up and used in recipes or sold for a little money, and you can go fishing, why on Earth are the bugs not included, if not for a quick way to get a few bucks in the early game?

Another thing I noticed is that produce items don’t seem to auto stack into each other when I put them in my storage, and have to force them into stacks manually myself, which is a waste of time. This is the downside to the interesting mechanic of having various aspects for one item of produce – if there’s even 1% difference in a single category, it won’t auto combine without me giving the ok to flatten a stack and get a median of all attributes. Even if they were identical in stats, they still wouldn’t auto stack, which was a pain in my ass!
AND THE ANIMAL BARNS. The doors on the barn are so narrow, my fat-assed cows would always get stuck on the corners and couldn’t enter and exit the barns without a perfectly correct path. Why couldn’t they have had an invisible wall opening out from the doors like an open cone, so I can funnel my animals towards the doorways without being pixel perfect?
Which, mind you, I’M PUSHING A COW TO MOVE IT.

I CAN’T. BE. PIXEL. PERFECT.

Visually, the game was fine. I don’t really have much to say, other than the nitpickies I've already mentioned. It looks fine, there’s good colours and the models of each character and their art was generally pretty cute and nice.
However, they did whitewash the fuck out of the Lulukoko villagers, especially my man Ludus. I was trying to marry him, and he’s clearly meant to have a nice mid-brown complexion, yet his character art while talking to him is basically white!? It left a bit of a sour taste if I’m honest, it’s yet another oversight to not have the art match the models.

Source: Meeeee

Regarding the music, there were a few tracks I really loved! In particular, I’m super glad the autumn theme was nice! Even though I think the OST is a bit simple in general, the good tracks stand out. However, there were some tracks that got annoying, and I particularly hated the Westown theme. It had these awful, shrill eagle screeches playing through it, which are just sound effects on top. I turned the sound effects off in the menu, but turning off ALL sound effects ruined some of the feedback that was helpful in regards to the audio design. Even when I had them muted, the eagle screams were so ingrained that I can hear them even as I listen to the song without them. I hated that fucking track so much that I ended up playing the game on mute for a lot of it and listened to different music or watched youtube. It’s a shame, cause as I said, some tracks were nice, but god, the screeches were awful enough to hurt my ears :(

All in all? I was bored and frustrated with this game.
It had promise, and there were some aspects I liked- they just weren’t enough to keep me playing. It’s a shame, I love farming games and get addicted easily, but I never felt that compulsion to keep playing and indulge the addiction. This game unfortunately sucked.


Autumn
Lulukoko
Festival #2

directory

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Moonlighter, Switch

Source: electricpipeorgan on Tumblr

I’ve had this game for a while, but never got around to it until now. After having my first real exposure to rogue-likes through Hitman’s Freelancer mode, I was curious to try and get a feel for it as a more prominent game mechanic. I couldn’t remember why I’d originally bought the game (other than it was on sale lol), but here was the perfect excuse to give it a go!

You play as a merchant named Will, who’s inherited the sole responsibility for his family’s shop- the titular Moonlighter. In this world, there seem to be two main aspirational jobs; that of the Hero and the Merchant. Heroes go out into the mysterious dungeons on the outskirts of town to collect goods, and merchants sell those goods. Will wants to become the first Hero-Merchant, and ventures off to find things he can then sell at his shop.

This illustrates the two main aspects of the game you’ll be playing through, dungeon crawling and shop simulation. The common thread between both is inventory management- picking which items you’ll be keeping from your dungeon crawls and how much you wanna sell them for.

You’ll quickly notice how the rogue-like elements come into play after a handful of dungeons. There’s three floors to explore, each with their own set of connecting rooms, each ending in a boss to fight, and the final boss of that dungeon found at the end. There are common areas to expect once you start to see the patterns; like, a room that looks like someone was camping in it, some rooms with chests that only unlock when all enemies are defeated, a hidden room you have to find, a warbly preview of the next dungeon, and a healing pond right before a boss. Every time you exit and re-enter the dungeons, you’ll see that the layouts have been shuffled, and you’ll have to explore and find all of the rooms once again.

You have a fixed amount of inventory space, 5 pocket slots and 15 backpack slots. You can equip armour and weaponry before going in; these will not take up inventory slots, however you can equip two weapons and swap between them as you wish while playing. In your inventory, you have a max bundle of 5 or 10 items, depending on what kind of item it is - so you’ll have to get real picky about what you choose to keep!
While your pack fills up with the items you’ll find, either from slain enemy drops or by looting chests you find along the way, you’ll notice that some items have curses. These curses range from needing to be placed in a specific orientation within your backpack or they’ll be destroyed/become destructive to surrounding items, to being hidden by the curse and only getting revealed upon leaving the dungeon. This adds a layer of thought to the literal arrangement of your items, and prompts you to choose what items you’ll be prioritising, and which items you may discard to make room for others.
While this is an interesting mechanic to keep focus on your inventory, after longer, grindy sessions of collecting stuff, it became a bit more of a hassle, and I’d just throw out low-mid tier items with annoying curses. I do think it is interesting though, as the items you choose to bring back with you become the stock you sell to make money, and the items you use to buy and forge upgrades to your weapons, armour and potions. It’s an incredibly tight and interconnected loop.

If you die while in the dungeons, you’ll lose everything you had in your backpack, and only get to keep the five items that were in your pockets. When you’ve made a bit of progress in the dungeons, you’ll get the ability to sell items directly from your backpack and get a small percentage of it’s base value; and you can get an ability that lets you pay a certain amount to return home, or another ability that lets you pay a bit more to warp out and come back to the point of the dungeon you warped out of. This was more helpful during late-game grinding for me, as I had figured out the general patterns that the dungeons were using for the rogue-like, and made it easier to strategise around when I knew I’d be making a lot of money to make up for the cost of teleporting out. When you teleport back in, you return to the same dungeon without it being re-shuffled, and can continue through the depths to collect as much loot as you can.

When you return home, it’s time to sell!
You can only open your shop during the day, so in the early days, its encouraged that you do your shopkeeping during the day, and go dungeon crawling at night. To start making money, you first have to pick from your inventory what you’d like to sell, and for how much.

Yup, you get to figure out how much you want to sell things for. You can pick whatever price you want, and wait until customers come in and react to fine-tune how much everything costs. The expected supply and demand waves are present here, as selling lots of one item will affect the base prices people expect of it.
If you’re thinking this sounds a little overwhelming, it kinda is- but don’t worry! You have a little store inventory book that you can look through to see the history of prices you’ve set, and what price ranges seem to be the best for each item. I really liked this book, as it helped me to guess what I could sell similar items for once I’d started to get a bit of price history through selling. It still felt like a bit of guess-work for me to figure out how much everything should cost, and I’d just eyeball it and hope that I’m not underselling an item I didn’t realise was worth more.

For the mathematically inclined, you could figure out the base prices of every item in the game by calculating the percentage cost of selling items in the dungeon- as they sell for a fraction of their base -or by calculating how much items cost by looking at the prices of another vendor in town, who seems to have jacked the prices to four or five times their base. I don’t want to do math, so in classic Rads fashion- I brute forced and learnt what prices I wanted to charge by using the customer reactions and price book in tandem. But, if you really cared about squeezing the absolute most out of your items, there are ways you could figure that out.

I actually really enjoyed the shopkeeping part of the game, which wasn’t really a surprise, given that I enjoy these kinds of sim games anyway. It’s very simple, but has a few moving parts to keep track of to get the most out of.
There are a few types of customers you’ll get- most are normal, but some are rich, and won’t mind paying higher prices, and some are heroes and are only interested in buying gear and weaponry for travels of their own. However, you’ll have to keep a keen eye on all your customers, as sometimes thieves will try and pinch something from the store! You’re no pushover though, and if you can catch them with a stolen item before they leave the shop, you can recover it and kick them out. There are other little quirks to the shop management, but I’ll leave it at that for now, as part of the fun is to figure it out on your own.

As you progress, making more money and buying upgrades to your weapons and armour, you can also buy upgrades for your shop, and various places around town. You’ll have to invest in the town to get more out of it, livening it up along the way. My favourite things to buy were upgrades and expansions to my store, making more room to sell more stuff, and buying better and better things to make selling stuff go more smoothly. I also liked that you could buy various decorations and put them up in certain areas of the store, as decorations usually had some kind of property to them that benefitted you! Things like calming decorations that make customers more patient while waiting in line, or upping the percentage of tips you’ll receive. While you can’t rearrange the floor layouts, you’re free to lay out your goods on their plinths how you please, and I had a little system of where I’d put certain types of things so I felt more efficient while running to the back and restocking from my hoard in storage.

One of the biggest upgrades you can get is the ability to hire a cashier, leaving the store to her and going off to do more exploring and looting. You’ll still have to stock everything before handing the shop over to her, and she takes a percentage of profits as pay, but leaving the shop to her when you don’t feel like shopkeeping is a great option to have! I still preferred to manage the shop myself, subtly adjusting prices of things until I’d found the exact price my customers and I could agree on; but when just putting out a bunch of goods I know the prices of, I was more than fine to leave it to her.
Another big upgrade is that you’ll be able to take requests for certain items, getting a few days to go gather all the things and return them to the requester. I found out after I’d finished the game that you can mark certain objects with a star, so that you remember you wanted to collect them for whatever reason while in the dungeons, so that’s pretty cool.

In terms of dungeon progression, the more you unlock, the harder they get! I really liked that each dungeon is a legitimate increase in difficulty, and forces you to think about the skills that come with each weapon as you figure out how to fight the common enemies found in each area. There were unique tactics to figure out for each enemy, and there were environmental hazards in each that generally built off each other as a step up in hostility. Things like puddles that slow you down in one dungeon, in the next they’re poisonous and there are enemies who can spit and make more, then there’s fire and electricity in later ones. These are tangible steps up, and as you progress and upgrade your gear, going through earlier dungeons becomes a breeze!

Onto controls, I found everything to be fairly pleasant. It’s a top down style, one clearly inspired by The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past, and although theres 8 directions and it’s compatible with joystick controls, I just found it better to play with the d-pad. It’s always going to be more precise, and I felt more confident using weapons and knowing that it’s never going to accidentally drift away from where I’m aiming due to the joysticks.

While there are a variety of weapon types to choose from, I ended up sticking with a trusty sword and shield + archer’s bow combo. I tried out the spears and longswords and what have you, but just felt that the combo I went with gave the best coverage to fight up close (which I preferred) and the arrows as a good fall back when ranged. I like that there’s options to choose based on what you feel comfortable with, and you can spend your resources upgrading and enchanting based on that.

The visuals remained lovely throughout, I really enjoy seeing modern pixel art like this. It’s clean looking, and the style for this game was very cute. The only real gripe I have here is that the colour of the selection cursor was the same colour as the rest of the UI colours, which had me a little visually lost sometimes and unable to see what I’m selecting. I like the UI in general here, but a bit of a stronger contrast while still in the same aesthetic and colour scheme might be helpful for increased readability.

The OST was pleasant in general too, I like the calmer and more contemplative vibe for some of the songs, and enjoyed most of it. I did find that I’d get a little tired of the songs after a while, particularly the boss fights, but that’s much more of a background complaint. Overall, this OST is nice! The sound design was pretty good too, and one part that made me laugh a little was that during one boss fight, there was a sound that was similar to that violin sting, you know the one, that they use on every US reality show ever. That sound just feels funny to me, I’ve heard it in too many memes to take it seriously.

You might be noticing that I breezed past the story section I usually open with, and well… that’s because there’s not much story at all. It’s a shame, really, if there were just that little bit more lore, something more tangible and neatened up, that would shoot this game up waaayyy further in my eyes. The gameplay loop is solid and easy to figure out, but difficult to master... and the story falls flat.

I also want to talk briefly about inspiration vs imitation. I’d brought this up and discussed it a little for my Bug Fables write-up, and it bears repeating here. I already mentioned that this game is heavily inspired by LTTP, and at first I found this game to be a nice example of inspiration! There’s the hero’s bow and the hero’s sword and shield, there’s even a middle aged guy who looks a little like Link would in this world who comes in to buy stuff on occasion, and those are nice nods to the game.
However, the longer I played, especially upon realising the hero’s gear is the best when fully upgraded, along with the general layout and progression of the dungeons being so incredibly similar to LTTP’s made it feel like it crossed the line into imitation. It’s a hard thing to balance, and I’m not sure what the exact ratio would be, I just feel a bit odd that the dungeons in LTTP are kinda better due to the linear/intended progression they were designed with, and basing one half of the core gameplay loop around a randomised shuffle of that slowly morphed into something a little dampening the longer I played. I think it’s great to be inspired by aspects of other people’s work, and put your own spin on things and bring it to life - I just err on the side of caution when it comes to baking that kind of inspiration into the core identity of the game, as it can easily look like (or become) imitation.
Imitation has limitations; but I’m not sure if I could suggest anything to fix this feeling, other than maybe scaling back on the easter eggs so I’m not prompted to make stronger comparisons between the games as a player. It feels like an unfair suggestion to make, but idk. I think it’s something worth attempting to articulate again, as I’ve noticed it in quite a few indie games (not just this and Bug Fables) and it can add a sour taste to an otherwise fantastic game.

ADD MOONLIGHTER VIDS

Overall, I think I can say I enjoyed the experience. I was very curious about rogue-like games, unsure if I understood how that would be used as a primary mechanic in a game. It was interesting to play, as I now understand it to be something like shuffling details within pre-set parameters, which can be interesting. I think I thought it was something much bigger and more random, which confused me haha- but now I have a better grasp on it. I don’t know if I’ll replay this game, but I don’t feel worse off for having played it. A little frustrated with some aspects, sure, but I can appreciate a solid indie game even if I’m not the exact target audience for it!

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The Sims 3, 3DS

Source: Impulse Gamer

This and the following entry are a call and response, as I played them back to back when my hands had recovered just enough after my hospital visit to hold my 3DS in bed. I wasn’t originally going to write about these, but hey… it could be fun.

Unlike this game.

I thought it would be more fun in the early stages – the character models look so much nicer than Sims 3 DS, and allowed for a better, yet still limited, range of customisation. I just wanted to play out my OC Harland becoming the best nurse in the world while having a fun romance with Magus, but this game made that so difficult!

To start, yes, I’m so happy that you can make multiple sims and build relationships, AND YOU CAN WHOO HOO!!!!!!!
But... they’re not the only aspects of playing The Sims, as you’re balancing their whole life. This was really frustrating to play here, as you don’t have any metres for basic needs. You can’t see the basics like hunger, hygiene, tiredness, ect, through some simple colour-coded bars and see what needs attention, like in every other Sims game.
No, the only way to know what your Sim needs is via any moodlet/wishes that pop up- and this sucks because they usually only popped up when something was way too urgent, or at the most inconvenient of times!

This bled into how difficult it was to manage your Sim’s personal, work and social life. This blind balancing act was so frustrating, and it’d become even more so, as the Sims were incredibly needy and seemed to be programmed against you…

When I’d made Harland, I made Magus as a neighbour Sim who you could come across sometimes and invite out to places once you got to know him. Once I did meet him, I tried to go out to a few places with him or invite him to a mini party at Harland’s, but it was so hard to keep their relationship stats up!
Just having one day where Harland would leave for work, and then scramble at home to get on top of his basic needs like making sure he doesn’t piss his pants then starve to death, was enough time spent away from Magus to make him no longer interested. I can’t see Harland’s fucking needs, and it takes so long to do things like cook something or fix the shower that fucking broke once again.
I’d have to sacrifice Harland’s basic needs and risk him going rogue to attend to them in favour of forcing him to flirt and otherwise get along with a perpetually uninterested Magus. That’s dumb! If we’ve been on five dates around town and spent a couple of nights in watching TV and playing chess, it shouldn’t take one work day for you to forget all of that and think of Harland as basically a stranger...

Everything is so scaled back and limited here, which is partially expected, due to it being on a handheld- but not like this! Even something that should be simple- like getting two Sims in the mood to whoo hoo -was incredibly difficult! It’s been a while since I played on the computer, but off the top of my head, to do that, you just need to get two Sims that are close to start flirting enough that they get a bit saucy, and then some options will appear beyond what you can normally do cause they’ve both got a moodlet that lets you go down that path.
HERE, you couldn’t do anything without jumping through hoops! On the friendship tab, you’ll get pink and red hearts next to your Sim’s special someone, but going from a pink to romantic red heart didn’t unlock options despite spending A LOT OF TIME FLIRTING, you had to do the right things to get to a purple passion heart, and only THEN can you do anything more than make out.
DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW DIFFICULT IT IS TO GET TWO SIMS TO PAY ATTENTION TO EACH OTHER LONG ENOUGH TO GET TO PURPLE PASSION WHEN THEY’RE CONSTANTLY FIGHTING FOR THEIR LIVES TO GO TAKE A SHOWER OR A NAP OR GO TO THE FRIDGE CAUSE I CAN’T SEE THEIR STATS!!!!!!!??????

Even when I eventually got Magus to move in, I would’ve hoped that them living together would make it easier to keep their interest in each other up while they work on their skills and advance in their careers. But no… This game doesn’t really let you play Sims, seemingly balanced in a way that forced me to play a certain way, and not the way I wanted to.
Like, no, I don’t really want to go to town right now because you’re feeling stir crazy, you just got home from work and you’re starving and exhausted, and you can’t even shower cause the pipes burst again and one of you needs to start fixing it before you die from being smelly.

Also, fires frequently broke out on my lot, and sometimes my Sims would get stuck in a never ending loop of panic, despite me queuing up ‘call the fire department’ and ‘put out fire.’ I nearly lost Magus cause he was stuck in that never ending panic loop – not a good look!

I don’t have anything more in depth to say, as I didn’t take notes and was mainly using this as a distraction while recovering from hospital, so beh. Scaling back the game in this way was horrendous. I believe there could be ways to scale back the experience and still have it be fun and feel like a Sims game, but this was a great example of how to make that miserable. I couldn’t play dollhouse in the dollhouse game!

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The Sims 3: Pets, 3DS

Source: Digital Trends

In the Polo to the previous’ Marco, this game was muuuuuch better to play! And, there’s pets!

Immediately, the gameplay was more fun because I CAN SEE THE METRES FOR EVERYONE!!!!! I can tell when they’re hungry or stinky or lonely or tired, it should’t have to be said, but I’m so glad it’s there. You can even see these for your pets, so it’s easier for them to immediately feel like part of the family as you balance their needs as well.

The basic gameplay is the same as previous, but better and more balanced to let you play how you want a little bit more – though I found that it was still a bit tricky, as the Sims were very needy and things were still balanced against you, just less egregiously, so I didn’t mind.
All the things you can do with your humans, you can do an equivalent of with your pets – this means you can help them build their skills with their owners, or alone, and there is always something to do, even if all the humans in the household are out to work or asleep. If you’re close enough with your pet, you can even bring them to work, and depending on your pet’s skills, you may be able to get a promotion too!

Instead of starting from the beginning in my made up narrative, I just jumped off from where I quit the previous game, and made Harland and Magus live-in partners with their cat, Alfador. I wanted to build up their skills and careers, slowly saving up and upgrading their stuff until we could afford to move to a bigger house and live in a comfortable lower-middle class (what an unrealistic fantasy~). It was soooo much more attainable, and venturing out to the various places around town was a little more fun, especially bringing Alfador to play in the park and use his foraging skills to bring in a little extra pocket change.

But… there are still gripes from the previous game that can be transferred here…
It was still incredibly tedious to make sure Magland felt lovey dovey and still liked each other, despite them hanging out to watch TV or play chess after sharing a meal most nights, and the multiple dates a week they went on in town. Just having one or two evenings after work where they needed to fix stuff around the house or work on skills by themselves meant they’d go back to barely liking each other… what the heck!? They got fucking married, yet one evening with minimal attention before bed meant they were basically strangers?

Overall, this game was much easier to get the hang of, despite it still feeling like it’s pulling me in directions it wants, and not letting me truly play the way I want. It was so much more enjoyable, despite the limitations and being so scaled back, but I actually had fun while playing this during recovery!

Also, Harland loved shaking his ass to this song, and I've had it perpetually stuck in my head since.

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Donut County, PS4

Source: insanityisthecure on Tumblr

A simple premise for a simple game – you control a hole, and need to swallow up stuff.

I like that, I had fun playing.

This was a shorter indie game, and I remember when it was a hyped up fad years ago. I saw it on sale while I was getting Katamari as a game that’d have easier controls while my wrists and hands were still recovering from my trip to the hospital, so… why not?

I finished the game in one sitting, over an hour or two, and have come back to play it now and then when the itch hits. I really like the simple puzzle elements of swallowing items into the hole and getting progressively bigger as you swallow more stuff. In later levels, there are more mechanics added to this, like absorbing water which makes items float instead of getting swallowed, or a catapult that you can launch recently swallowed items up into the sky with. These get a few chances to evolve and force you to think about how to interact with the environment and solve the puzzle of swallowing up everything.

The story is simple, everything that did get swallowed is now living in a cavernous underground, and no one is happy about it. As you progress in gameplay, a little more of this story unfolds as you try to swallow up stuff that will help everyone to escape, until it all escalates to a final showdown with a boss fight. The writing itself is quite simple, and you can tell it’s a recently made indie game based on some of the meme-y talk and such, but its fun. The only thing I wish was the ability to skip cutscenes, at least on subsequent play throughs, or having some kind of infinite play/level select without the cutscenes for when you just wanna play. You have to click through the cutscenes every single time, but that’s not the worst in the world. They’re just a little long if you don’t care to see them again and would rather skip through.

This was nice to play on my PS4, but I needed to turn the controller sensitivity wayyy down, as the hole was flying around everywhere and felt better with some resistance. This isn’t a negative, as it’s yet another win for indie games that provide customisation in their settings!

The soundtrack is really lovely, and has a really unified sound with what sounds like a ukulele and some nice synth sounds. It’s a bit alternative/hipster sounding, and clearly inspired by the lo-fi vibe that was very popular around the time it came out.

Overall, this was very cute, and a perfect distraction while I couldn’t play more physically demanding games. I only wish there were more levels, or slightly easier ways to just replay like I mentioned previously. Great game, and a good way to spend and afternoon!

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Katamari Darmacy: Reroll, PS4

Source: prnsn001 on Tumblr

What a weird little game! A really fun one, but super weird. This one has been in my peripheral for years, and I’ve been wanting to play for a while - so it was nice to finally have the excuse to get it.

The game is pretty simple – there’s stuff everywhere, and you need to roll it up! You play as the little Prince, and have a self-absorbed father- The King of All Cosmos, who talks in exclusively in record scratches -who tasks you with rolling up stuff to turn into stars and refill the sky after he destroyed it. To do so, you will be dumped into an area and told to roll up a certain amount of stuff in a certain amount of time, and if you do a good enough job, you’ll get a slightly less condescending response from the King.

The vibe is really fun, with low poly models of everything and a distinctly jazzy soundtrack, bringing a unique and charismatic charm to the game. It’s easy to see why it became a bit of a cult classic, and still seems to be held in high regard from what I’ve seen; it’s genuinely pleasant to play when you get the hang of the controls and immerse yourself in the humour of it all. There are cutscenes here and there following two young children who notice the stars in the sky have disappeared, only to be dismissed by their mother. The more you fill the sky with stars, the more you’ll see what they’re up to, which is a funny but nice way to see your progress.

While the premise of the game is simple, the gameplay is deceptively so. Starting with controls, you have to move both joysticks as though they were the Prince’s hands pushing the ball; ie, both joysticks up to move forward, one up the other down to pivot, both to the side to roll to the side, ect. This took me ages to get the hang of (and I gave myself a bit of extra time to be frustrated, my body wasn’t in working order right out of the hospital!), but once it started to click and I got better with the controls, it started to feel a lot better. There is an alternative control scheme that’s a lot simpler, but when I tried it, it just made me understand why the default controls were the way that they were, and I had to just suck it up and figure them out, haha. Nothing my stubborn ass can’t do, but I feel like the initial learning curve here could turn off a lot of players if they’re not patient or stubborn enough to give a chance to this admittedly unconventional control scheme.
There are other things you can do while rolling around in the levels, like looking around in a pov mode, or flying up real high for a second to get a more birds-eye-view before getting back to rolling, but I didn’t end up using these much.

Onto the actual rolling, while it seems you can get by and complete levels by just having fun and rolling up what you can in the allotted time, if you get to know the levels and employ a bit of strategy, you can grow really big and roll up pretty much everything! The more you play, the better you’ll get at weaving and dashing through levels. If you rapidly flick the joysticks alternating up and down, you’ll charge up a dash and can speed in the direction you’re facing for a short burst. This is imperative if you wanna complete the later, larger levels with any kind of success, as the game will get harder and more complex as you go.

What you can and can’t roll is pretty simple; if it’s smaller than you- roll it up! If it’s any bigger than you, you won’t be able to, and depending on how big it is will depend on if you get any knock-back and take ‘damage.’ There’s not a health metre in this game, but you can lose mass if you roll recklessly. Rolling too fast into bigger objects or walls will cause a bit of knock-back and some items will fall off your ball. You can re-roll those items and pick them up, but it’s a real time waster, making it an apt consequence to keep some challenge.
Some of the living items, like people and animals, can be knocked over to make them easier to roll up when you’re not quite big enough to absorb them immediately, but you’re not small enough to be knocked back by them. This state is special, as you’ll have a few seconds to roll them up while they’re stunned on the floor, but if you don’t catch them in time, they’ll run off and disappear. I found this to be a fantastic gauge for how big I was, as once you can start rolling up a few people, the exponential growth starts to get really fast, making it worth going over previous areas and seeing if you’re big enough to roll over things that used to be obstacles. I found it really fun and satisfying to start the levels in a micro level, and end them more macro.

There were some stages I didn’t care much for, and these were the ones that required a certain theme. Like, only roll up crabs for the cancer star, or get as big as you can without touching a bear or the level will end, and of course that one wanted you to get the biggest bear possible. These are interesting on a technical level... Like, yeah, it’s a lot more challenging to limit the kind of things you’ll be rolling up… but it sucks a lot of the fun out when you have to play around a challenge that’s antithetical to the core method of playing. Some were better than others, but I much preferred the levels where the objective was to get big.

As you play, you’ll notice that the same handful of locations are reused for most levels, just allowing you to see more when you’re able to get bigger. While this can make some levels blur together, I think they did well getting the most out of these levels. When you start really small, the larger parts of the level are obviously inaccessible to you, requiring you to grow big enough to enter different areas. These areas are often gated off by some traffic cones with a sign showing the number of metres you need to be before you can cross that threshold, and as you size up, you’ll sometimes be interrupted by an exclamation from the King as he comments on how you’re going. This seems to be the way that the game is able to despawn the smallest of items that you won’t be able to see at your current size anymore, while loading in whatever data it needs to make the objects at your current size be roll-able.
While it’s annoying to be interrupted, there’s a skip button for it in this remaster, and it seems to be just a quirk of the limitations at the time. Considering in later levels when you go from tiny objects on the floor to rolling up chunks of islands in the sea, I can’t bring myself to be annoyed at it, as it seems clever to only have loaded objects you can actually roll up instead of tanking performance by having literally everything loaded from the start.
You’ll also get the ability to unlock endless mode on three of the levels, which allows you to come back and replay the levels at your own pace and just have fun! To unlock these, you’ll need to be really strategic and go waaaayyyyy beyond the goal, but you’ll know you’ve unlocked endless mode when you see two white angelic figures circling your Katamari ball.

There are also some collectables you can find throughout various levels, your cousins, and gifts from The King. These take a keen eye to find, but once you gather them (and don’t lose them while rolling!) you’ll unlock your cousins, which you can swap with The Prince to play as, and you’ll unlock various accessories from the presents that you can wear. I didn’t bother going out of my way to collect all of the cousins and presents, but that’s a cute thing to further challenge your rolling and observational skills if you’re so inclined.

I already mentioned that the graphics have a cute and stylised low poly 3D style, but it’s worth emphasising how fun the visuals are. It often reminded me of little carved wooden toys for a children’s play set- and with bright and fun colours, it’s super nice to see all the details as you roll everything up. It’s here where the influence of Keita Takahashi’s background in visual and sculptural art can really be felt, and the quick look into the game that I’ve done has revealed some interesting trivia. I really enjoy the fact that Takahashi had an idea, and stuck with it, aiming to create something fun that’s not really been done before. In that regard, I think he’s definitely succeeded!

The sound design in this game is quite hilarious at times, too. There are noises made by pretty much everything you roll up, and I found it quite amusing to hear the screams of the people I’d absorbed during my rolling sprees. I can hear how much fun the voice actors were having, and that brings a smile to my face. The jazzy soundtrack is really nice too, but I will say… not every song was a hit for me. There was one level that had this more… experimental sound, and the song mainly consisted of shrill high pitched beeping. I hated that. But, considering the good songs are really good, I can ignore the ones I don’t care for in peace.
There were a few sounds in the levels that got annoying too, and I’d often lower the volume to lessen the sensory overload of it all, but I wouldn’t change that. I’m just sensitive to that sorta stuff in general, and needed shorter playing sessions so that I wouldn’t get headachey or motion sick.

Overall, I loved this game, and periodically come back to play the endless levels. It’s unique, feels distinctly Japanese in it’s humour, and has a timeless charm that’s aged fantastically. It’s the perfect brain-off game, too.

Just roll up everything in sight, Little Prince...

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Hitman: Blood Money, PS4

Source: haloinfinite-archive on Tumblr

Having fallen in love with the World of Assassination Trilogy, I was curious about the previous entries in the series and wanted to see more of how Hitman came to be. I often hear everyone hype up Blood Money as the best one, so... why not start there?

The story is framed through a series of flashbacks during a conversation between a former FBI director and a journalist. They are discussing the many run-ins they’ve had with the elusive Agent 47, segueing into the missions you play. There’s background information you’ll notice if you pay attention, like the controversial nature of clones and how the current vice president is involved in some kind of political ploy for a rival agency to the one 47 works for.
I won’t lie, the plot felt a little messy and melodramatic to me, so it wasn’t the easiest to follow along with, but on the whole it was engaging enough to keep me interested.

The game starts with a great tutorial, that- while a bit hand-holdy and linear -gave a thorough introduction to all of the main mechanics you’ll need to play the game. There’s basic stuff; like changing outfits, sneaking around, hiding bodies, and using various weapons and distractions to your advantage – but there’s also more advanced mechanics to be mindful of, like how to smuggle weapons, poison food and drink, setting up accidental kills and using people as covers while shooting. Some are more polished than others, with some feeling well executed for what it is, and others leaving a little to be desired.
The one thing that was absolutely busted was the coin. This is a distraction you can throw, and a seemingly infinite one at that. I read into it, and it seems that in higher difficulties there actually is a limit to it’s usage. But, when I saw how many times I could use it, I kinda felt that it sucked a bit of the fun out, and tried to avoid it for most of my play through. I’ve seen some pretty wild techniques used with the coin used in speedruns, so it’s fascinating to see something so jank and/or game breaking here.

Anyway, the tutorial level is quite scripted, intending to cover all bases and force you to use most game mechanics so you understand how they work before spitting you out into the main levels of the game. From that point onward, you read some mission briefs and are plopped into a level, left to do whatever it is you need to do. I actually liked this, having to deal with the mini-sandbox levels and figure everything out myself. I found it a refreshing contrast to the overly tutorialised nature of modern gaming, and though it isn’t perfect, I like to actually, y’know, play the game.
There’s a lot of hints and places of interest if you pay attention and wait around, giving you room to connect the dots yourself. However, I don’t know if it’s a case of modern gamer syndrome (where, in this case, retroactively playing games I have no prior experience with makes me miss certain cultual-context cues or misunderstand the game’s design), or if some of these levels were just not designed all that brilliantly, as there were often times where I was stumped and couldn’t understand what I was supposed to do. You can buy hints with in-game currency you earn from completing missions, and while that’s an appreciated helping hand for those that need it, I often found these extra hints to be too vague and unhelpful. If you’re REALLY lost, and have looked around everywhere and bought all the hints and STILL don’t know what to do, you kinda have to resign to fucking around and finding out. Luckily, most missions do not have a time limit- so barring a few with time sensitive aspects, you’re free to wander around as you try to figure out the patterns and details of each mission.

The in-game currency I previously mentioned is awarded to you based on how well you performed your mission, and a few other things like retrieving your suit and weapons before exiting the level, otherwise you’re forced to pay a fee to get them back. This money is primarily used to buy upgrades for various skills and weaponry, and for unlocking hints during missions – but you can also use it to lower your notoriety. The notoriety mechanic is an interesting one, and one where I can see what it was trying to do… I just think it wasn’t robust enough and fell flat.
Notoriety is something you get by being a sloppy hitman - the more people see you doing suspicious things or find evidence you were there, the more notoriety you gain. You can kinda feel the effects of higher notoriety on a small scale in individual levels, and on a larger scale across the campaign. From what I could tell, you can feel the affects of notoriety in an immediate/isolated sense when you’re caught being suspicious through the alert bar going in the yellow suspicious range, and in a more general sense through people giving you a thinking face and less lenience to get away with acting suss. If you do a shit job and leave too many witnesses- and don’t have enough money to bribe your way out -you get a visual representation of your notoriety in the newspaper’s front page that you get to read at the end of every level. This seems to aggregate your notoriety based on the whole campaign, but is most influenced by the mission you just completed. If you manage to get yourself caught on CCTV and don’t destroy the evidence, a photo of you will be plastered across the front page. Otherwise, a police sketch of the main suspect will be shown; and depending on how many witnesses you left, the closer it looks to 47. If you were only a little bit messy, it’ll simply show a blank silhouette with a ‘?’ over it – but if you were a good little assassin who left next to no trace of yourself, the photo will instead be of the recently assassinated target.
Unfortunately, this notoriety system is largely unnoticeable if you’re good at the game, and when trying to describe this to a friend as I was playing, he put it rather aptly;

‘The game gets harder if you’re shit at it.’

I wanna go more into the newspapers you get at the end of every mission, as I thought these were BRILLIANT. Not only is it an additional peek into everything going on in the main story, but it’s interesting to read the background murmurings of the clone debates and some of the silly side stories and advertisements. If you leave witnesses alive in the level, they’ll detail your description and a police sketch is all but guaranteed.
I think my favourite part was just reading the columns on the front page, as it’s where the humour of the game really showed. It’s a shame that this isn’t something that lasted and was brought back or otherwise revamped in WOA, as it’s a nice little break between levels to evaluate how you did, and have a bit of a laugh. When you’re reading the front page story about your assassination, I noticed that you’d get different descriptions of the kind of killer you were based on how you did. For example, if you shot a lot of bullets, and missed targets, you’d get labelled as sloppy and amateur, but if you were more precise and meticulous, you’ll be labelled as a more skilled assassin.

As far as the actual gameplay though… It left a bit to be desired.
I think the UI was a bit basic and ugly lol, but it did communicate what it needed to well enough. There’s a visible health metre, and you can see decreases in health if you jump off ledges or are getting shot at by enemies. It’s good to keep an eye on that, but if you get in a shootout, you’re kinda fucked. There isn’t really any aiming, it’s just straight up shooting, which got frustrating. There is a first person mode you can enter at the click of a button, but it doesn’t offer any enhancements to shooting, and in fact, takes away mechanics. It feels more limited and just as hard to control, and something that you can no longer do is move the camera to peek around corners! That’s exclusively a mechanic for the default third person point of view, which can be activated in certain circumstances.
The exception is the scope on rifles, which puts you in a point of view mode, and even then… the aiming is jank. Shooting handhelds is just a permanent reticle in the middle of the screen, and moving the whole screen to ‘aim.’ The reticle isn’t just for shooting, though, as it’ll turn red when you hover it over something interactable - like if you’re holding a syringe and point the reticle over some food or drink. While that would seem helpful, it’s actually not, because the reticle is fucking miniscule. You can barely see it- and in fact, a lot of the UI and text elements were too small! They may have looked better on a smaller screen, or a desktop monitor that’s right in front of your face, but I was struggling with some of the visual cues. It was also pretty frustrating finding out that once you dump a body in a cupboard or chest, you can’t access their outfit anymore. That’s something I loved to take advantage of in WOA, so it was a bit of a rude shock to see something mechanically cruder.
I admit that I’m pretty spoilt by the WOA UI and controls here, and most my observations on the gameplay and mechanics are filtered through that, but damn. This was janky feeling and I don’t think I ever truly got used to it. Plus, if you died, the death animation took soooooo looooooonnnnnggggggg……..

One thing I did find interesting, though, was that the idle chatter of characters in the background were often in the language of the location! It was nice to hear, and helped a lot with the atmosphere. However, most levels were set in various states of the US. These levels had varying accents depending on where you were, and I’m unsure if each state’s accent is authentic. Most seemed to be from middle and southern states and sounded very similar to my untrained ear- if exaggerated into a caricature. Some stand-out examples of what I mean are the New Orleans accent in the Mardi Gras level, and the… Mississippi accent in the Mississippi level.

That brings me onto one of my biggest gripes… The subtitles! They’re so inconsistent, and switching them on will only show them during cutscenes, and not during the actual gameplay. This may be another instance of being spoilt by WOA, but c’mon… At least put subtitles for when Diana is speaking to you, or the very obvious and notable characters you will be interacting with?
For Diana’s debriefs, you can find a transcription in some menus, but that’s not the same. On the debrief screens, you’re presented with the info on your targets and location to look through, and Diana is just talking at you raw with no subs and won’t shut up. I can’t read and listen to different sentences at the same time, I don’t think anyone can, so this is frustrating. You either have to stop and just listen, and then read through the extra info, or try and read while ignoring Diana and then read her transcription later. When you’re in the mission, the first time you open that briefing screen again, she’ll start talking - but only the first time you open it. If you open then close then reopen, she won’t speak anymore, and you’re free to read in peace. This is really odd!?
To make matters worse, when you do get subtitles, they’re not good subtitles. Instead of, I don’t know, spelling things correctly, they did the most atrocious thing I can think of when captioning: opting to phonetically write out the accent. This is really bad, all you had to do to convey her thick accent is put (in a southern drawl) in front of what she’s saying. To top it all off, the text isn’t centred, and it’s too damn small!

Accessibility blunder!!

One thing that was definitely a highlight of my playing was the OST! There was a grand orchestral feel with the vocal choir motifs regularly placed throughout the soundtrack, mixed with a modern feeling through some of the beats and instrument choices. It really helped to up the feeling of bad-assery, making it feel more grand as you slunk around gathering intel and offing targets. It just makes it even more of a shame that I didn’t think the sound design was that great...

Apart from my gripe with the subtitles, I only have one other major gripe with the game. And that is: the women feel very… made by men.
There’s only two types of women: fat or sexy. And being originally released in 2006 in the PS2 and Xbox 360 era, you can very clearly tell which type of woman is meant to be derogatory. To be fair, there are only fat or sexy male base models for the NPCs too, but idk man. It didn't feel like they were sexualised the same way, y'know?
The sexy ladies are almost always in something revealing or otherwise sexually suggestive, and sexy ladies are skinny with itty-bitty waists and huge… assets. Even the locations where you see these women are really objectifying, with the pornstar getaway, casino staff and fetish party patrons being particularly sexed up.
In contrast, the fat women are all depicted in the most unflattering angles. They take up space, wear frumpy outfits, are often loud and boisterous in ways intended to be annoying; just designed in a way where I can see the modellers laughing in disgust as they add rolls of fat to them. There’s a certain amount of leeway I can give for wanting to save on resources and only using a handful of base models for generic NPCs and just changing the outfits, but these were so clearly designed to be hot and not.
Theres a scene in the hotel casino where, upon walking through a certain hallway, a larger woman (who is clearly intoxicated) sees you and invites you to her room, coming onto you quite strongly. This is played as an incredibly mean spirited joke, as the humour comes from the audacity that a fat woman dare express her sexuality, AND that she’d think you’d go for her. To top it all off, if you go to her room- which happens to have a great vantage point from her balcony -she starts to dance before lying down and passing out on the floor. When you try to exit the room, you’ll come across her husband, which just adds more layers, doesn’t it?
To be fair, there’s not one, but two instances of ~hot babes~ coming on to you that turn right around and start stabbing you- but that doesn’t feel much better either. Both are scantily clad, leaving nothing to the imagination; and when the veil is lifted, they’re actually psycho babes that you instantly regret talking to.
What a great depiction of women! At least Dianna isn’t sexed up to hell and back, but you barely see her as she’s always obscured when she makes appearances in cutscenes.

Oh well!

Oh, also- while I've got you, I may as well say what most people think about the ending.
It’s a great idea that’s executed so, so poorly. Narratively, it’s set up to be a perfect catharsis and closing point, and it’s let down by how frankly awful the shooting mechanics are. I think it’s further let down by the fact that if you fail to do what it’s very clearly setting up for you, you’ll just have to reload and do it again. Way to end a decent game on a sour note.

Overall, this game was interesting. I found that there were plenty of things that felt innovative and interesting for it’s time, yet also it was very much a product of it’s time. It was cool to see the seeds of mechanics that would sprout into the more refined versions I'm familiar with, and I enjoyed most of my play through- but I think I’ve been spoilt by WOA.
While this game is clearly the blueprint for what I’d come to know and love, I didn’t feel it really lived up to the expectations or hype it’s garnered as a classic. I’ve seen it talked about as being incredibly innovative in the level design, however, I often felt like there wasn’t actually much to do other than the one, maaaybe two intended paths the developers wanted you to use. I didn’t feel that freedom to assassinate how I pleased, rather, shoehorned into adapting my plans to what the game was telling me would be a good idea.
I might come back to this on occasion and play the levels I liked, and try out various things I didn’t think of during this play through, but it’s rather restrictive and I’m not sure how many more ways I can do things.

I’m glad to have played and seen the history, and there were moments I enjoyed… but I think I’ll stick with WOA as my go-to for the Hitman experience.

directory

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Power Wash Simulator, Switch

Source: devileaterjaek on Tumblr

I wasn’t going to write about this, as I didn’t think there’d be much to say… but I got addicted.

And of course I have a lot to say.

After spending something like 350+ hours with the game this year, it’s safe to say I enjoyed it. So much so, that it became a danger for me to play. It was a great brain-off comfort while struggling with shit life syndrome, long term chronic pain and recovering from my hospital trip - and even when I’d worked hard and started to get a bit better physically, I’d still lose days to this game. I even bought the Shrek DLC (which was pretty fun), and would end up just mindlessly replaying my favourite levels over and over simply out of habit.

So, what do you do in this game?

You clean shit with a pressurised water spray. That’s pretty much it.

If you find no satisfaction with that kinda thing, then this isn’t the game for you! The more I played, however, the more I noticed some of the quirks and cool features of this game. So lets get into it.

To start with, this is a game played in first person, and you control the nozzle of your water gun. Walking around and aiming the water is pretty standard for dual sticks, but you can press a button to hold the camera still and only move the nozzle if that’s what you’d like. The main goal is to clean something that’s filthy, and at the end of every level you get to watch a little speed run of your cleaning. When replaying levels (and knowing what angle this speed run view is) I found it fun to clean away the dirt in patterns that’d be more interesting to watch sped up- it’s like one last treat at the end!
As you progress through the game, you’ll get the options to buy and upgrade your gear in order to power wash more effectively. You get various spray heads to work with, ranging from a pin point beam to various widths of spray- all with various pros and cons. The smaller sprays had better pressure, and can blast dirt clean off, but wider beams allow for a greater surface area to be cleaned while needing to be sprayed over slower to actually get anything. There’s a few fancy tips you can get later, that rotate automatically and have a concentrated spray, allowing you to get to those pesky spots that are hard to spray- but I was more of a purist and only wanted to use the two middle widths of spray and be methodical about it. These tips are easy to cycle through, with a click of the shoulder button, so equipping the spray head you wanted was super easy.

Other things you can equip are various soap sprays you can buy, which have a very wide spray and are really good at dissolving dirt when you match the soaps with the correct surface type. These were quite fun, but again, I was more of a purist and preferred to use my two favourite nozzles. You can also choose what extension you’d like; a short, medium or long distance attachments that helps to get everything, from right up close to very far away. As you play through the story mode and rank up, you’ll unlock various water guns themselves that get increasingly stronger in pressure. This allows you to use wider beams of water with stronger force, and allows you to easily clean levels however you’d like. You can also buy cosmetic changes with the in-game currency, and I have bought everything, even though I’m only using the strongest water gun and all it’s attachments. I just needed something to spend all my money on…

You also have three heights to spray at; your normal standing, a crouch and prone. This is great to get the dirt under various ledges and in weird crevasses, but it’s not the only way. Levels that may need them will have a step stool, a ladder or two, and some scaffolding stairs to utilise for those high up places that you can’t reach on your own. While the stool and scaffolding can be moved and placed around wherever there is a flat surface on the floor that can fit them, the ladders can only be placed on specific pre-programmed areas. You’ll see these areas when you pick up the ladder, seeing blue silhouettes of where you’re able to place them, but this was a little bit limiting. It also frustrated me that I couldn’t just put the ladder back on the floor, and instead had to walk around the corner and place it somewhere out of the way. You can run when clicking in the joystick, but you can’t run while holding any of these climbable things, so it really felt like a hassle sometimes.

As you play through the story mode, you’ll find yourself cleaning various vehicles and locations that are caked in dirt. It’s quite amusing that these jobs have things get so incredibly dirty, but it’s all the more satisfying to blast it clean. Personally, I found that cleaning things with wider, flatter surface areas were not only easier to clean, they were just more fun. I liked buildings and location areas to clean the most, not really enjoying vehicles and locations that had too many curves and thin poles and fiddly bits to clean. As fun as it is to play in general, I noticed a few quirks about the cleaning itself that would sometimes get on my nerves.

You see, I noticed that the way the sections get completed is calculated on a percentage of how clean that specific item is- which hasn’t been scaled very well for what that looks like in practice. That probably sounds confusing if you haven’t played, so I’ll do my best to explain.

When cleaning, say, a car- there will be multiple parts of that car to check off as clean. You need to clean the body of the car, but it’ll be broken down into door, window, handle, ect. All these individual parts can be seen when you pause and a menu pops up, and you’ll see the percentage of how much you’ve cleaned of it so far. You can even click on one of the things that’s still dirty, and the entire surface area of that part will start flashing so that it catches your eye. That in itself was great, and I often used this flashing to point out where I hadn’t finished yet. You can even press a button and it’ll briefly highlight all the dirt orange so that it stands out more, so there’s multiple ways to make sure you’ve gotten everything.
The problem arises when you get to small things… When you’re cleaning something with a larger surface area, like the roof of the car, you’ll notice that it counts it as complete despite not manually cleaning off all the dirt. That was a little frustrating, when I’d set up a beautiful line by line cleaning and it gives the ‘ding!’ to complete it before you get to go over the last line of dirt yourself. But, as much as I don’t want to get over it, you can understand that the game doesn’t need you to clean every pixel of dirt for it to be considered complete.

Right?

When cleaning smaller and fiddly areas, like the car headlights, this near-enough’s good-enough doesn’t actually kick in at a reasonable percentage of dirt cleaned compared to the surface area. You have to get right up in there and do multiple passes with the strongest, tiniest jet stream you’ve got, and sometimes it still won’t have gotten all the dirt! It’s so frustrating too, cause even if you highlight it, you can barely see it flashing because its TOO DAMN SMALL!
My theory is that the percentage of clean that results in the completion of that section is just a one size fits all, despite not all the sizes of each section are the same. As a guess, let’s say the percentage rate required for the auto complete to kick in is 99.5% of the surface area cleaned. For bigger surface areas, this is perfectly fine, but also explains why it sometimes kick in too early; and explains why trying to get 99.5% of a teeny tiny surface area clean is just miserable.

The most fun is when you feel like you’ve cleaned it yourself, and had a chance to spray over everything. If I could suggest adjusting when the auto complete kicks in so it’s adjusted to the actual surface area and size of that section, I think that’d make the game nearly perfect.

Cause, as it is, it’s a super nice simulation game that does exactly what it says on the tin. There are a few other little gripes I have that are honestly nitpicky cause I’ve spent way too long playing and noticing these quirks, but that auto complete thing is the one that sucked the most.

Anyway, with the story mode is something unique that I appreciated at first, but found myself glad that it was taken out during free play. See, the whole setup is that you’re starting your business of power washing, and clients will text you throughout your job. There were some that were amusing, like your friend who helps you set up your business and spreads the word- she often elicited an amused exhale from me. But… Some of the clients are downright annoying, and I didn’t find the writing to be very good in general. It’s a shame, cause I like this concept; there’s a vague mystery and some drama about a corrupt politician, and for some reason all the cats are missing? I don’t know, I wasn’t really paying attention cause it felt a little superficial and tacked on. The texting isn’t constant, you’ll just be texted every now and then- and I’m pretty sure you can read the full transcription in the menu somewhere if you are interested.
But I wasn’t.
That’s ok, as although I do prefer strong and engaging narratives for gaming in general, there’s some- like this one -where I don’t really care. All I need to play through the main campaign is that theres things that are dirty and people to pay me. The ‘resolution’ to the narrative was weird and felt kinda out of nowhere, but whatever. It’s easy enough to ignore the texts and not read the briefs if you don’t care, and you don’t get the texts at all when playing on free play modes, so I'm happy!

Instead of any narrative upping the ante, I was very satisfied with the way the levels themselves became more complex. It was nice to slowly earn money and unlock upgrades to buy; going from simple cars and building exteriors, to more complex tasks, like boats and planes and carnival rides. As I mentioned with the whole percentage cleaning thingy, some levels were too fiddly to have fun with, but I can understand and appreciate the stakes getting higher- especially when the levels I liked were really, really fun.
My personal take is that the jobs with very rounded surface planes like the helicopter, or too many thin poles and tiny bits like the ferris wheel sucked, and the places with more structure and surface areas to clean, like the house exteriors, and interiors like the underground bathroom and train platforms were the best! That seems to align with general consensus, as I noticed that a lot of the free bonus content and Shrek DLC seem to have taken that into consideration!

And, lets talk about the free content, cause it was really cool! Any game like this that releases free content is automatically a little bit cooler. They already had a great base game with some challenge modes and free play to access after you’ve played through the story at least once to unlock it all. Adding some free seasonal levels and bonus packs with more buildings and vehicles to clean is the cherry on top! And to add, like, a couple more cherries, there’s a handful of crossover promotions where you get to clean stuff from other IPs.
These crossovers were pretty fun, as they’re mini campaigns to play that let you clean vehicles and locations from other stuff. The Final Fantasy crossover was cool, I haven’t really played any of the games and forgot that mechs and shit are a big deal, so you cleaned a lot of them. I didn’t enjoy the fiddly bits much, but I did enjoy cleaning the bar that they all hang out in! Another that I really enjoyed was the Tomb Raider one; you get to clean Lara’s mansion front, and some mazes and shit, and her secret treasure room! After spending a couple months just playing the main story levels over and over, it was a really fun surprise to find out just how much free content I could access when I realised it was there! It was nice to see that a lot of my favourite parts of levels seemed to be noted and enhanced upon for these updates, and I enjoyed how creative and complex some levels would get. Out of the general free updates, I really liked the aquarium and three storey modern cubist house the most. I’ve played them about 20 times each. And while we’re here, I’ll just quickly say the only DLC I paid for was the Shrek one, and it was great. The levels were interesting and it was really fun to explore the locations you see across the movies. There is just one complaint… and that is...

They would not fucking say that.

Yeah… the texting is still kinda bad. Maybe other people got more out of it than I did, but it was kinda weird to read texts from Shrek or Lara Croft that felt completely out of character, just so that they have something to blab about while you’re power washing. Oh well, they tried, and the levels speak for themselves!

All in all, if my only real complaints are such nitpicky things… thog. I really enjoyed this game, and had to make a conscious effort to wean off it and actually play other games this year. I relapsed again towards the end of the year when some stressful shit was going down, but hey- a new festive level released!

This was the perfect game to just sit and chill with, I’d enjoyed so many YouTube videos, new albums and audiobooks while playing. My friends made fun of me for getting addicted, but I make fun of them for other stuff- plus, it is kinda funny that I played for so long.

Wish me luck weaning off for a second time so I actually play other games for next year’s write ups!

directory

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Jojo's Bizzare Adventure: Eyes of Heaven, PS4

Source: highdio on Tumblr

In my endeavours to try new things this year, I decided to play Eyes of Heaven while I stayed at my friend’s house a couple times this year. I’d watched JJBA parts 1-5 with her when we lived together, and had actually bought her this game as a gift - so why not give it a go?

I have historically not enjoyed fighting games; I just don’t understand the techniques or skill expected of me as a player, and the mechanics so often feel like they're held together with duct tape, resulting in button mashing being your best bet. Knowing this, I genuinely made an effort to try and learn what this game is asking of me, and figure out the best techniques to fight in my favour. That said, there was still a lot of button mashing- but that works. All I really expected from a JoJo game was to muda-muda-muda my way through enemies, and you can definitely do that!

The story was a lot more than I was expecting, and certainly was bizarre; so I was glad that there was a through-line, however vague, to keep players invested and show some sort of progress. The game didn’t recreate or adapt storylines straight from JoJo, rather, combined all of them vaguely in it’s own thing. There’s temporal/inter-dimensional rifts opening up and causing havoc, which connects to various points in the JoJo series. There are a bunch of enemies to fight, and for some reason, friends of the various JoJo’s are acting strange too! You’ll fight friend and foe alike, slowly revealing that you need to collect scattered parts of a holy corpse to save your friends, defeat your enemies, and get to the bottom of all this strangeness. It’s as simple as a JoJo plot can be, and was a clever way to have all the JoJo’s and pals across various points in time (and dimensions!) team up and fight their enemies.

As far as the actual fighting went… It was ok. I’m still trying to figure out if I had fun or not- I think the stickling point is that I feel like I just didn’t get it. That’s not the end of the world for me, as I don’t really play these kinds of games, so schwatever.

When cutscenes are over and it’s time to fight, you’ll be placed in an arena based on a location from that time period and have to fight your enemy there. The arena’s themselves seemed pretty good, there were lots of wide open spaces to brawl, but there were a lot of levels with some sense of verticality or sectioned off areas to run around in too. Think, staircases to a second level or balcony, or a cliff edge in the middle so that there’s a distinct upper and lower half. These were pretty cool, as I didn’t feel cramped or unable to find my enemies while fighting too often – though, some levels were better than others.
There are also items to break and/or set up as traps within each arena, which allowed for more premeditated styles of play. I didn’t end up using these often, as the way you set up traps seemed to be limited to what kind of fighter you had (ie, a Hamon user could charge the item with Hamon as a booby trap, but a Stand User didn’t seem to have that option). I’d often be too preoccupied with the actual hand-to-hand to bother with breaking crates for items or throwing objects at enemies unless I was right next to them, but the option is nice.
I never really figured out what the items did, either. Everything has a fun JoJo style name, often too long to figure out if it’s just a skill point or a healing item, or what to do with them - so I didn’t really pay attention. Trying to read them in the moment would result in an ass-kicking, so I wanted to focus more on the stuff I was understanding.

When fighting hand-to-hand, there are a few different styles of punch you can give depending on your character and what abilities they have. The game gives you plenty of opportunity to try out everyone, as when you travel to various times and places, you’ll be automatically given a character pairing to fight that enemy. As I was playing single player, I would be the primary character chosen (and didn’t bother reselecting apart from maybe two instances where I was really struggling?) and the secondary character would be an AI player.
The biggest part of playing with the two characters, though, is the combo moves you can do. I wasn’t able to figure out what the triggers for them appearing were, but there were two types of combo moves you could activate when it was charged and both characters available. One was more of a hit-combo thing, where the more punches you and your partner got on the enemies, the better- so you’d wanna make use of that time to punch the most. The other was a special move that had a quick cutscene for a few seconds to activate, and were usually great damage dealers. These special moves seemed to be unique for each pairing as well, but as I just went with whatever pairing was auto selected for me, I doubt I saw all of them.
The enemy AI was pretty good, for the most part, and it didn’t really feel like my partner AI was letting me down or that the enemy AI had an unfair advantage. There were a few times when the enemies would get stuck on corners or run away weirdly, but I could see that there were some basic attack styles that they’d use to try pick off one of us and finish the other. The enemies usually felt a little stronger than my players currently were, creating enough of a challenge that I needed to be competent at fighting or I’d lose, but not so much of a leap in difficulty that it was nearly impossible to defeat. My nature of being stubborn and tank-ish paid off, but there was a point mid-way where I really felt disadvantaged.

See, to use your attacks, you have some basic ones mapped to the face buttons. X, square, circle and triangle had some moves, using holding L could change the kind of attack you do sometimes, and R would raise defence. Most moves had a cool-down period, and the fancier the move was, the more it needed to cool down before you could use it again – so as much as it was fun to spam the classic JoJo barrage of punches, it was actually kinda hard to blindly button mash. Pretty standard for this type of fighter, but I was waiting for some of the greyed out attacks to be unlocked. I was getting my ass kicked, despite desperately trying to use some sort of technique with the small selections of attack and defence I had. I was aware that I was getting skill points, and was getting a little annoyed that they didn’t seem to do anything, when I eventually found out that there’s skill trees to spend those points on.

This is the biggest problem I had with the game, and it led to a very interesting discussion with my bestie about how, as it turns out, I kinda fucking hate the concept of skill trees. I discussed this with them for hours, which branched off into examples of skill trees, similar styles of game mechanics and adaptive difficulty in games we’d both played - and that was awesome! Since this style of game was so out-of-the-norm for me, it was good to get my grievances out and make sure I’m not being a total dumbass, so I think I can confidently say that my issues with this are both me having a stupid moment and this concept being irritating.

Here’s the deal; when you fight in this game and do well, you’ll get skill points which you can then spend to unlock branches on your skill tree. The options you get to choose from vary from character to character, but the basics of being able to buy new skills and upgrades to those skills and other stats is the same concept for everyone. The reason why I was struggling at the mid-point of the game was because I only had the basic starting stats for my characters, and had reached the limit of what pure stubbornness could do.

So, why I hadn’t unlocked more of my hard-earned skills?

I couldn't find the menu to open the skill trees...

Admittedly, that’s a bit dumb on my part- but I want to point out that this isn’t the first time this has happened to me in games that have this kind of system! I’m not a fan of stuff that drastically affects the quality of gameplay being semi-obscured behind layers of menu screens that are easy to forget the location of, or otherwise out of the way considering how much they impact the gameplay. AND, due to how many JoJo’s and friends you collect in your ‘party,’ having to go through each individual character’s skill tree and manually unlocking every single skill was annoying! Once I did upgrade everybody, there was a noticeable difference- but only really due to unlocking so much at once. You will feel the difference when unlocking a new attack skill cause, well, you’ll be able to use it now; but stuff like increases in speed or strength of attacks are so incremental that I couldn’t really tell the difference when I was updating the skill tree in a slower, one-by-one fashion that seems to be the more intended route.
I’m more than happy to say that I just don’t get it, but this was a very tedious and frustrating revelation to make at the mid-point of the game. There wasn’t an auto-spend to just fill out the skill tree, I had to go through every single skill on every single character over and over to spend all their points. I also found myself a bit snooty towards the actual flow of the skill trees for the characters – some were branched out and looked like tree roots, and others were a lot more linear. I don’t know all the nuances behind building a skill tree and the presentation of it, but it just felt a bit messy and overwhelming that everyone had drastically different skill tree pathways, with some making more sense than others visually. That’s more of a nitpicking and biased upturn of the nose, but if I can only have one concrete complaint about this system; it’s that I didn’t feel like there was much of a strategy put towards unlocking, which is what made it feel tedious to continually reopen this screen.

Perhaps this is just the bias of the kind of games I prefer to play, but if there’s a skill tree to unlock, I’d like some sort of strategic thinking in what I’m picking to be built into how I go about it. Because every other instance of skill trees I can remember encountering in games have been similar levels of boring tedium- or worse, straight up bad -I think that’s at least understandable when I roll my eyes a bit at this being a feature of a game. If the game devs want to allow some sort of player choice in how you build your character, surely there’s a better way?

When I had that long discussion trying to articulate what exactly annoys me about skill trees, my friend brought up that they’re kinda like a form of resource management. While that’s an interesting view that I hadn’t considered, I don’t think I really agree. At least, not here. I’ll try to summarise, cause the bulk of our conversation spun out into a broader discussion of various game design mechanics and are not super relevant to this review – but basically… If the skills are meant to be a form of inventory management, I want a stronger sense of managing the character’s abilities. I’d like there to be a more involved sense of choice, similar to the way the original RE4’s weapon upgrades and inventory management worked. Otherwise, I think I’d prefer the style of levelling up characters Chrono Trigger has, where the characters automatically unlock their ability when they’ve reached their required skill level to use it, and the options you choose are more based on the equipment load-out that suits your style.
As it is, I don’t see any major advantages or disadvantages towards what you choose to upgrade in these skill trees for the JoJo characters. I have a feeling that most people will work towards unlocking all the abilities when they are available, and then it is simply a matter of boosting stats to make those abilities stronger or faster. Why do I need to be involved in that process through a manual click when it could be hidden through a different presentation, or something that’s not just layers of perfunctory motion? You can grind to get high scores and more skill points to spend, but at that point, you have theoretically infinite skill points to spend, it’s just a matter of time.
I think from now on, I’ll be more actively looking at skill trees in games when I come across them, so I’ll look out for something that clicks with me more and see if I still feel this way, or if it's just that every skill tree I remember has just been mid! The skill trees here are serviceable, I just don’t care; and it was the example that brought these buried feelings of contempt to the surface. So, nothing truly against this specific skill tree system, it’s just an example of a style of upgrading that I don’t like and don’t fully understand the point of. Also, don't hide it in menus lol.

ANYWAY, back to the game we’re actually discussing, I thought the visuals were fantastic! It was nice to see that the distinct style of Araki’s art was translated well to the 3D models, and I think I’ve mentioned somewhere that I like seeing good 3D cell shaded animation! If not, I do, so fuck yeah!

While the arenas themselves could feel a little sparse at times, I don’t think that’s a detriment at all, as you’ll be zipping across the environments while you fight. I also enjoyed that the animations for the characters and their fighting techniques, whether Hamon or Stand based, looked pretty faithful to the mental image of JoJo I’d expect. The outfits were cunty, each character had the kind of poise and exaggerated swagger that feels right for them, and the cutscenes were the cherry on top.

Most of the cutscenes used the in-game character models and just added speech bubbles for each persons dialogue, but there are some special moments where coloured manga panels will depict certain moments. It’s really fun, and this storytelling aspect was one that I definitely appreciated. One thing I will say, however, is that although this is a unique story for this game, it’s unique in that it’s adjacent to the main story you’ll see in the manage/anime. If you are the kind to care about spoilers, or you’ve only watched the anime, there will be scenes that parallel or retell certain sequences (with a few adjustments for this game), so be warned!

And the MUSIC!!!! It was fantastic for this game - appropriate amounts of tension and seriousness for the moments that required it, but most of the OST had a lot of rock influence, and sometimes a slightly jazzy sound which I thoroughly enjoyed. There’s also so much music, every character has their own battle theme, and there’s like. A bajillion JoJo characters. LOVE IT! The soundtrack was definitely my favourite part of the game, so I’m adding twice the usual songs at the end ;)

There were many more aspects to this game that probably went right over my head, and some parts I noticed but didn’t go out of my way to try and understand- like the friendship mechanic you get when you fight with certain duos. But, I reached the end credits and was consistently getting C and B grades, sometimes getting an A or S grade (and of course, a couple really bad grades cause I sucked :P). I didn’t really understand what the contributing factors to those scores were, but I seemed to be doing something right.
One last grievance I have with the gameplay (that I promise isn’t as tangential as the complaint about skill trees) is that… this game could get reeeeaaaaallllyyy tedious. There were a lot of repeat fights, as in, fighting back to back in the same arena, and I just got bored. The combat didn’t feel as challenging as I wanted in the way I wanted, so it was easier to pseudo button mash and get the combos I needed to blast through. Button mashing was sooortaaaa encouraged, as repeatedly pressing the basic move would trigger the classic JoJo barrage of punches, but still. Sigh. Fighting games like this really aren’t my style...

Oh, and cause I don’t have anywhere else to neatly slot this in… The target locking system here was kinda bad. You can click the joystick to turn it on, but I couldn’t really change which of the targets it was reliably. Was it flicking the joystick? Was it pushing the camera? Was it proximity? WHO KNOWS!?

Overall, an interesting experience, and one that was enjoyable enough given that I’m familiar with JoJo, and despite it being a genre I don’t play. I don’t think I’ll come back to this, and it’s a shame there is no couch co-op, but it was a chance to try something really outside my comfort zone and challenge the internal thinking of why.

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Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, DS

Source: suppermariobroth on Tumblr

As someone who loves Paper Mario 64, I was talking with a friend about it, and he mentioned that he LOVES this game. It’s a game pitched to me as similar enough to the other Mario RPGs, but not quite the same as Paper Mario. I didn’t know anything about the game, and don’t think I’d really heard of the Mario and Luigi series properly until he brought it up, so why not give it a go?

Immediately upon booting, I noticed that this game world seemed quite flavourful and full of character, which was nice to see! I miss this sort of thing in Mario games, and it’s not something I’d expect to see out of any mainline 2D or 3D Mario games, especially not these days.

The plot started strong – the Mushroom Kingdom has been overrun with an epidemic of… the blorbs! Those suffering with a case of the blorbs will find themselves ballooned in size, feeling quite rotund, and unable to do anything. It’s quite the problem, so Peach holds an emergency meeting to figure out what to do. Starlow, a representative of the Star Sprites (who will be known as Chippy for most the game), has been sent to help, but even she can’t cure the blorbs. Just as Mario and Luigi arrive to this meeting, Bowser makes and appearance too. This causes a ruckus, he gets upset when he sees Mario, and havoc ensues. Mario quickly puts an end to it, and Bowser is yeeted out of the castle by Peach; and then you play as Bowser. While in his introductory section, you’ll come across Fawful - who is initially disguised as some kind of mushroom vendor, who gives Bowser a suspicious looking shroom. When he eats it, some kind of magical ploy starts up where Bowser inhales a whole bunch of stuff, including Mario and Luigi. The rest of the game takes place between Bowser and his stomach, as he tries to take back his castle and put Fawful in his place.

Now, I don’t really know what I was expecting from this game, and I knew literally nothing other than the title and that it has action battle elements; but I felt a little… off-put by being literally in Bowser’s stomach. It’s not that the scenery itself was overly gross or anything; it was quite stylised and had some interesting platforming challenges, its just… I’m not sure. Something irksome about it. But, pushing through to see what this game had to offer showed some really interesting game mechanics!

The main schtick of this game is that each character has a dedicated button to press. While playing as the Mario brothers, any action command you need to perform, like jumping, must be done individually. Mario will jump with A, Luigi will jump with B. This is further emphasised in battle, as performing each brother’s respective move requires you to press their button. It was interesting to see the ways that this would be iterated upon via their special moves in battle; one of my favourite moves being the green shell one, where you repeatedly kick the shell between each brother after each hit to the enemy, needing to time the A and B presses so they align with the right brother to continue the combo. This idea worked much better in battle for me, as platforming with both Bros jumping individually meant that one of them would get caught on something, and you can’t keep progressing if you don’t have both bros.

Similarly, when playing as Bowser, his moves are mapped to X and Y. This made it quite easy to differentiate between who you were playing as, and made for a great quick-swap when needing to move Bowser to change something inside him before resuming as the Bros to finish the platforming puzzle inside of him. While the A and B buttons are pretty clear for Mario and Luigi, I did get tripped up sometimes with how the X and Y buttons change in the overworld vs battle for Bowser. See, his battle moves are X for every action command and Y for defence (since he can’t jump to dodge like the Bros), but in the overworld, pressing X will make Bowser punch and Y will breathe fire. In battle, the fire move is an action command, so it’s played with X… nitpicky, I know, but it muddled the mental map for me if I’m honest.
Bowser was also unique, in that, his special moves during battle made use of the stylus. This is a mild point of contention for me, because I’m left handed. While his moves are not impossible to do, there’s very little room to see and react to certain moves which made it very clear that it was only designed with right handed people in mind. There’s not really an easy solution to fix this either, as the battle sections have whoever you’re playing as on the left, and the enemy on the right. While for RPGs with 2D turn based battles like this, it wouldn’t normally matter which side of the screen you’re on, I think the intention was to have the enemies right next to the A/B/Y/X buttons so you didn’t need to look too far into your peripheral to see which button your thumb is over- or just to keep a strong mental connection between the attack buttons and who you’re attacking. As a right handed player, one can easily arrange or tap on whatever they need, and their hand will only be partially obscuring the enemies, which isn’t too big a deal. As a leftie, however, this meant either awkwardly holding the stylus or DS to still see everything, or feeling like there was a significant lack of time to react to whatever I needed to tap as stuff is partially obscured by my hand on THAT side. The move I remember getting frustrated with a lot was the goomba one; as while it was doable, it was frustrating. The move consists of a small army of goombas running from left to right and jumping on the enemy, and you need to tap on each goomba before it passes a certain point (right before the middle of the screen) and light them on fire with Bowser’s fire breath to supercharge them. THIS ALMOST CRAMPED MY HAND CAUSE IT’S SO AWKWARD FOR LEFTIES. I eventually figured out that I could do a better job by turning my DS on it’s side, so the goombas were now coming from the top down - but that’s not really a great fix, especially when other Bowser special moves couldn’t be as easily navigated with a new orientation. Luckily, Bowser is pretty tanky, and I barely ever needed to use his special moves.

However, this brings me to one more type of gimmicky fight. There are certain sections where Bowser becomes huge, and you fight by turning the DS on it’s side, and Bowser will be on the left (touch screen) and the enemy on the right. I can’t remember if I had the option to choose my handedness for these fights, but I wonder how they feel to play as a rightie? Anyway, these fights often utilised the touch screen, and mic, which you’d blow into to breathe fire as Bowser. While I can see these being more fun for younger kids, I personally didn’t care much for these sections. Without spoiling story context for them, I just felt bored during these oh so epic fights, and the one with the train was… Tedious. If you know, you know.

Anyway, back to the normal fights and boss fights that use the turn based RPG fighting style, this was definitely the highlight of the game for me. See, I don’t know if I really enjoy RPG style games as much as I thought I did (which is strange, considering Chrono Trigger is my Number One Game Ever, and I like action RPGs like Paper Mario 64…), and I remember trying RPGs that seem cool, but finding myself quite bored with the battles. Not here, as there were some interesting ways that unique button schtick works when battling.
When fighting enemies, you have the chance to add a little oomph to your attack if you time it right, which I something I love. Stuff like holding your hammer and releasing it at the exact right moment for the most damage, or risk fumbling and getting the least damage if you wait for too long, or pressing the action button while jumping to get a perfect bounce and jump a second time for double damage. WE LOVE TO SEE IT!!! This goes for defence as well, as timing things just right allows you to get less damage, but it’s taken one step further by allowing you to counter attack if you time stuff correctly. For example, if an enemy is running up to you to attack, depending on when you hit jump, you can either jump over the enemy and dodge the attack completely, OR jump on them and they take damage instead. Bowser had an equivalent of being able to punch someone as a counter attack if you timed it right while the enemy attacked, it was just genuinely really engaging.
All the enemies had ways of telegraphing what kind of attack they were going to do, so paying attention and having good reflexes is rewarded by slinging together great combos during both the attack and defence turns of battle. When talking with my friend about this, he mentioned that this was also one of his favourite parts of the game - and that theoretically, you could play the entire game and never take damage if you’re good enough. The enemies you fight during boss battles also required a little more involvement or pseudo puzzle solving to the attacks in order to create the right opportunities to really hurt them.

There was also an addition to battle that shook things up, though I thought it arrived kinda late into playing. While you can equip things like clothes, gloves and shoes to enhance certain stats on all three playable characters, there’s one extra unique thing you can do with the Mario bros to tailor your battle experience; the badges. The badges are something that can be equipped, and each brother can pick one half of a boost to their stats. These were things like getting extra health or special points, among other things, during battle. The way these work is that every time you perform an action command well, it’ll move that respective brother’s badge half forward in a bar at the bottom of the screen. The better you do, the quicker you’ll be able to access your tailor made reward, making it a nice incentive to time your hits well! When the badges meet, you can click on it to use your reward, and you start from the start again. This was really cool to see, and I liked that it wasn’t too hard to achieve the rewards even if you fumble a few hits here and there. What was a little frustrating is that it arrived about six hours into my play through, which is really late to introduce such a big mechanic to the battle system. It was also really annoying to have a distracting flashing bar at the bottom of the screen while I’m trying to concentrate on fights. But, given how useful it can be, I guess those two complaints can slide. Overall, the attention to detail within battles was well worth paying attention to; so while simple, I still found it engaging and enjoyed the active participation of it!

Outside of battle, there are various abilities you unlock through the game that open up new ways to traverse and interact with the various levels. These are things like the Mario bros being able to whack things with hammers, spin together across large gaps, burrow into the ground and have Luigi smack Mario with a hammer to make him miniature and crawl through hard-to-reach places. Bowser also unlocks a few special abilities, such as his iconic fire breath, a punch-dash thing, a ground pound and rolling around in a spiked ball. These open up opportunities to explore and find extra little goodies while trying to figure out the general platforming and traversal challenges of the main story routes, and make sure that there’s still stuff to keep your eye out for while backtracking.

In some instances, there will be challenges that Bowser faces where he’ll need help from the Mario Bros to stimulate or resolve an issue in the relevant body part inside his body. These were a bit hit or miss for me; some stuff was fine, like stimulating his muscles being a rhythm tennis type thing, but other challenges like the sneezing one were kinda terrible. There were a lot of moments that just felt gimmicky, for lack of a better word - and if that wasn’t disappointing enough, I was really frustrated with how many tutorial sections there were. I can appreciate that I’m much older than the intended audience, but my god, there was a lot. I think even kids would get annoyed at it, and it’s a shame as there were a lot of sections that had interestingly designed sections that could've stood on their own. It’s also not helped by Chippy, the companion character of the game, who would most often be giving the tutorials, being a character that wasn’t very fun or interesting to me. She’s just a circle with some shoes that floats around, and she was kinda rude and mean at times that weren’t very funny or enjoyable. Just not for me I guess…

Visually, I enjoyed the 2D sprite work of this game. It was colourful and felt nice, and I really liked how expressive and animated all the characters felt. The Mario bros in particular were really fun, they were bouncy and full of character in battle! The various areas of this take on the Mushroom Kingdom were nice, feeling visually distinct and cohesive to themselves, while also err-ing on the safer side in my opinion. It works, that’s not a bad thing!
My only real feeling of being let down is that you spend so much of the game in Bowser's stomach. Again, I don’t really know what I was expecting- I guess something more thematic or metaphorical about a new side to Bowser we haven’t seen yet, and not his literal guts. But, to be fair, this was a unique way of stylising his insides that made use of various bodily motifs to create the platforming needed to play through various sections. It’s just really not for me.

The music was pretty nice, and although it took a little bit for some tracks to grow on me, I often found I had a few tracks stuck in my head when I wasn’t playing. Everything sounded like it fit in well with the Mario sound most of us have come to know the series by, while still sounding unique to this game. Like this track, The Road Leading to the Secret, which has a moment that reminds me of Yoshi’s Island. While not the most memorable for me, I enjoyed some tracks a lot, and liked the overall sound here. Another notable part of this game is that at certain points, Mario and Luigi will talk in a gibberish approximation of Italian, which I thought was rather fun. It helped to characterise them alongside their vibrant animations, which I genuinely enjoyed.

And, well, I’m running out of things to say. This game has some great stuff about it, and I enjoyed the mechanics present for the battle, and appreciated the way they stuck by the concept of the individual buttons assigned to each character and tried to work all the platforming and puzzles around that… I just didn’t really like the game overall. I just found myself bored for most of my play through, pushing through in the hopes that something would capture me, but it didn’t happen.

I already mentioned I wasn’t that enamoured with the companion character, but I also wasn’t that keen on the way they characterised Bowser here if I’m honest. He just came off a bit juvenile, in ways I’d expect Bowser Jr to behave, and not the man himself. Now, I’m willing to admit that maybe my idea of Bowser has skewed in my head over the years, but the way he kinda toes the line bordering stupidity and competence just felt off to me. He’s not an idiot savant, at least not to me. I can say I really enjoyed the characterisation of the Bros, I liked that Mario and Luigi are genuinely supportive and cooperative, and that Mario uplifts Luigi and tried to correct Chippy when she dismisses his previous achievements or is rude to him. It’s just a shame that despite Bowser’s development through the story, showing him gradually becoming more polite and considerate at the behest of Chippy, it wasn’t really recognised or met with anything other than Chippy still being curt and rude. I just didn’t like her, she wasn’t giving me a good time...
I also just felt a little let down by the narrative. It started so strong, and then I felt really bogged down by the meandering and kinda boring petering-out-of-the-plot. I don’t really know what to say, I just didn’t feel invested, and often felt vague on what it was I was supposed to be doing and why – which for more story based games such as RPGs, isn’t something I want. I fully intended to play through to the credits, but when I was around 75% through the game, I was putting some stuff on my 3DS’ SD and accidentally deleted my save data. I don’t know how it happened, but it did, and that sucked, cause I was NOT going to replay all of that just to finish it. I watched a play through of the remainder of the game, and all the feelings of disconnect with the story were still there by the time I reached the end. The final boss battles looked cool though, wish I could've given that a proper go.

While this game didn’t really click with me, I enjoyed most of what I played. There was charisma, mostly solid writing, cute visuals, the general polish you’d expect of Nintendo, and a battle system I really appreciated. It’s a shame that I lost my save riiight near the end- but I got far enough that I’m confident in writing for it fairly.
Writing about this game has been hard, though. I didn’t hate the game, but I didn’t love it either. I think it may just be a case of me outgrowing the prime time to play, and having no prior nostalgia for it didn’t help…

But... I can’t say I feel like I would’ve enjoyed it more as a kid if I had played. Whatever, I can definitely see the appeal, and the active battle system was fascinating to me- so overall, I’m glad I played!

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Fear and Hunger, PC/Mac

Source: pocketdaan on Tumblr

I wanted one last game to play before wrapping up the year and writing these, and I had two games on my computer that I really wanted to get to, but didn’t get the chance to squeeze both in because of my health issues this year. I was lamenting over this with my bestie, and they suggested I do a coin flip.

Funny, that, as flipping a coin is not just a mechanic of the game, but something I consider to be the main motif of everything this game is about. But, I’m getting ahead of myself here. This game is dreadful, leaves you feeling heavy and ick-ed out- and I love it for that.

Before I get too far into this review, I do want to preface some warnings about the game. It has a lot of dark and disturbing themes, and does not shy away from them – so take the trigger warnings seriously. I cannot talk about this game without covering the subject matter in depth, and I do not want to gloss over it for the sake of being ‘palatable,’ as that defeats the point.
If depictions and discussion of nudity, sexual content, rape, drug use, substance abuse, suicide, bodily harm, dismemberment, or graphic depictions of violence and gore are too much for you, take this as the warning to skip over this one.

I went into this game pretty blind- all I knew is that it was an indie cult hit, the battle system intrigued me, and the dark themes drew me in. Now having played, I feel like that’s the optimal way to jump in; blindly trying to figure stuff out as you go. But, if you want a little more context, I’m certainly going to go in depth, so let’s get started.

You start the game by picking a character. There are four to choose from, each with their own motives and skills that’ll direct your play through with them. As you play out their text based intro sequence, you’ll be given choices that pick your starting stats. While you can skip this character building, I’d suggest not to, as you’ll want to build your character based on your choices, and see the context for why your character is making their way to the Dungeons of Fear and Hunger. All four have their reasons, but the common point between them is a man named Le’garde. He is in the dungeons, and everyone has a reason to try find him.

When you begin playing, you’re just dropped in. No tutorials, no guides. Nothing. If you’re observant, you’ll quickly be acquainted with the basic mechanics of the game. There’s a bunch of barrels and crates around that you can loot through, a dead horse you can beat, and two entrances to choose from. It’s easy to piece together that you should look through your environment to see what options you have, check everything in case you pick up something good, and that some choices don’t really do anything- like beating a dead horse. You can’t take too long, though, as you’ll start to hear the snarling of wolves - and if you stick around, they’ll trigger a fight. This is where most players will see how the battle works, and how fucking unfair this game can be. I’ve heard this game described as ‘the game that hates you,’ which isn’t that much of an exaggeration. The battle is quite simple on the surface, (and simple by sheer fact that this is an RPG maker game), but also has it’s complexities when you start to wrap your head around it.
While it’s a familiar turn based battle setup, you’ll notice that instead of picking which enemy to attack, you’re picking which body parts of the enemy to attack. For these wolves, you can choose to attack their individual legs, their torso or their head. You could hit their torso, giving them a decent whack but leaving the wolf strong enough to still do major damage on their turn to attack. You could hit their head to kill in one blow, but risk them having a higher chance of evading your attack. You could pick off their legs one by one and destabilise them, giving you a better chance to hit their head with less evasion or kill them with steady blows to their body. That’s such a fascinating strategy for battle, and one that is equally nerve wracking when it’s your turn to take some hits. With every enemy that you can slowly dismember to increase your chances of landing the finishing blow, you risk the same happening to you. And, let me tell you, once a limb has been cut off, you’ll have to manage the rest of your play through without it.
You’ll have the options to use items or special moves during battle as well, which functions similarly to any other standard RPG system- apart from one move. Talk. You don’t have to fight your way through every encounter, or run away as soon as the opportunity presents itself; you always have the option to talk to your enemy and see what they have to say. Some won’t say anything, maybe just a grunt or two, but some will have a conversation and share interesting details about this world. Some enemies aren’t hostile until you provoke them, and some can even be defeated with words. It’s usually worth the risk of having a chat instead of going straight for the offensive, but I just really like that there is that choice within this battle system. You’re not limited to using this only in battle, either. If you have multiple party members, you can go to the skills menu while walking around and talk to people in your party to hear what they have to say. Sometimes they’ll say something more casual or observational, and other times, when their mind is low, they may not be as conversational.

This brings me to the next main chunk of the gameplay, and that’s inventory and party management. As you explore the dungeons, you’ll come across various items you can keep on you. This ranges from food and healing items, to weapons and other equippables. You’ll also need to take care of your character’s stats- extended to the entire party if you recruit anyone while in the dungeon. The three stats to look after are body, which is your physical health, then mind and hunger, both of which will steadily drain as you play.

Mind is pretty simple, and there are two aspects to it; fear and phobia. Fear is what will drain your mind stat while you’re in the dungeons - it functions kind of like sanity where the lower your mind is, the less reliable your character will be. While you’re in the dungeons, your mind will steadily deplete, and depletes faster while you’re in the dark. Lighting a torch while exploring can help slow that rate down, but you’ll only have a certain number of torches at any given time – so use them wisely. The dungeons are so dark at times that you literally cannot see where you’re going, but in the easiest mode your character will have a dim light around them at all times for an extra helping hand.
To restore your mind, you’ll need to gather things like alcohol or drugs to consume and numb your character for a while. Alcohol can be found in big casks across the dungeon, but you can only retrieve a limited amount, and only if you have an empty vial to fill it with. Drugs like tobacco or opiates need you to have that drug and a smoking pipe for each individual use, so you’ll want to make sure you’re well stocked on both. There are also certain elixirs and special moves that can be used to restore mind and other ailments, but they aren’t as available as drugs and alcohol in the early stages of the game. Once you start to learn special abilities, you’ll notice that they cost mind to perform. This all adds up as part of the balancing game; do you want to heal someone at the cost of some mind, or use up a healing item? Is the damage on this special attack worth the mind that it costs, or should I risk a physical attack?

Every character will have also have a phobia that affects them, given to you in the intro sequence based on your choices and a little bit of luck. In my first play through, my character had teratophobia, the fear of monsters and malformation. Given that pretty much all the enemies you come across- at least in the first few layers of the dungeon -are some kind of monster or malformed being, I wasn’t doing too well. After a couple of hours failing in the earliest rooms available, I restarted with the same character and chose a few different option in the intro, and was lucky enough to get zoophobia, the fear of animals. This made things MUCH easier, especially as I was getting the hang of the basic mechanics to juggle and knew what I wanted to do.
You seem to have a higher rate of fumbling attacks in battle (especially if the enemy triggers that character’s phobia), and coming across certain cutscenes or triggered events if you have characters in your party with low mind. If you let your mind get too low, you’ll learn suicide, which allows you to kill yourself and be sent to the main menu. You can exit the game from the menu at any time while you play, so it’s not like you have to kill yourself – but the option is there. What’s even more brutal about this is the fact that you’ll be unable to kill yourself if you have no arms, and just be taunted with some text telling you there’s no point in trying.
Another thing to note; just like how letting your mind get low enough will make your character start to contemplate suicide- if your mind drops to zero, you’ll have your phobia permanently replaced with panphobia, the fear of everything. Some phobias are better than others, but there is always an enemy that will trigger someone’s phobia – from ghastly figures and the undead, to genitals, malformations and even things as simple as magic and animals. The fear of everything combines all of the above, and makes battle just that little bit harder than it already is. Not to mention, there was a certain enemy that fights not by draining your health, but by draining your mind. If they scare you, you’ll notice that when you exit the battle and check the menu, the character portraits of those attacked have aged. There’s some wrinkles and a general weary and aged look about them if they’ve been spooked, which will progress to much deeper lines and a very gaunt look if they’re spooked for a second time. And on the third? Your character will die of a heart attack in battle. It’s a dangerous enemy to go up against, and I was so amazed by the fact that this was so simple, yet so effective!

Hunger is also pretty simple; the hungrier you are, the sooner you need to eat. You can feed yourself with food you find around the dungeon, but some food is better than others. You can eat mouldy bread or berries no problem, but they won’t fill you up for long. You could try eating raw meat, but that risks you ingesting a parasite that you’d need to kill with a particular poison, then cure yourself with an antidote. If you leave the parasite in your body, it’ll drain your hunger twice as fast - and as you go through the various stages of hunger, your body will slowly shut down until you’re starved so much that your legs don’t work, and then die of starvation.
Luckily, as you progress through the game, you’re likely to find various recipes for items, and will be able to make some food and elixirs based on the ingredients you have on you. This is as simple as it can be, like needing four berries and a sack of flour to make a blueberry pie, or certain coloured liquids to make a more potent vial for healing or destructive endeavours. If you come across a stovetop or campfire and use a tinderbox to light it, it’ll stay lit for the remainder of your play through. You’ll have to option to grill any raw meat you have in your inventory, eliminating the chance for parasites and providing yourself with a better piece of meat. It’s all a branch off of the inventory management, a simple question of how many of each thing do you have and how much are you willing to use.

Another thing to mention are the status effects you’ll get during the game. Some statuses are only active while in battle, like getting dizzy and having to skip a few turns, or getting paralysed and forced to skip every turn- but statuses like bleeding or getting an intestinal parasite from an attack needs to be managed, either through a turn in battle to use the appropriate items, or waiting until you’ve finished the battle and healing up afterwards.
There isn’t an in-game guide for most of this, you just have to figure it out or look it up on the wiki if you’re still confused- but I really liked the initial puzzle of trying to figure out what each status meant and how to cure it.
If you get an infection from an enemy attack or by stepping on a rusty nail, you need to heal that with the appropriate items before your character dies from it. If you get poisoned, or lose a limb, you’ll have to remedy that before it kills you- so what resources are you willing to use? Keeping on top of the fear, hunger and physical status of your party is a constant thought that nags at the back of your mind, and will affect how you want to approach battles and exploration.
One of the worst statuses, in my opinion, is blindness; as once your player character has their eyes pecked out, not only will they will be dogshit in battle, you will no longer be able to see outside of battle either. This is effectively a game over, as it’s nearly impossible to progress any further without the ability to see where you’re walking, even if you technically won the battle or escaped with your life.

The permanent nature of some things can become really frustrating, which adds to the despair of it all. If your bones get broken, that’s a permanent reduction in your max health. If your limbs get cut off, or you need to cut off a limb with a bone-saw to prevent an infection from killing you, you can’t regrow that limb. The same is true for enemies, and if you prefer to err on the side of caution, you could enter a battle to cut the legs of an enemy, then escape the battle - and their legs will stay cut for the rest of that play through. This means that when they spot you and start to chase you down the hallways, they won’t be as fast and are easier to dodge in future. Or, you can use this as a tactical retreat, and come back when you feel more confident in your weapons and skills to finish the job. You have to use a lot of gameplay choices that you’d typically find yourself using in a survival horror: anything to conserve resources and get as far as you can with minimal risk.
There isn’t even an incentive to kill enemies, other than your own peace of mind. There is no experience points to gain, no levelling up, nothing. Battles are always a risk, so enter at your own peril. Well, okay, maybe there is a small incentive to killing enemies- more like the reward of resources if you have the required skills and equipment to defeat them. Remember how I mentioned you could beat a dead horse at the beginning? That was actually a good introduction to the idea of examining dead bodies, and not just a demonstration that some actions in this game will be pointless. Though, there definitely are some things you can do that are pointless. Not every enemy will have something, and even fewer will have something of value, but if you check the corpse of your recently slain enemy, you can loot them! You will also have the option to kick them, just to make sure, and will get a description of how it felt on impact.

I love that the game allows for a bit of leniency in play style, and that you can shake it up as you replay and become familiar with how the game works. This is helpful, as depending on which character you picked, you might change the way you want to approach certain challenges and manage all your stats.
There are little text boxes that pop up and alert you to some of what’s going on, so it’s not like you’re completely blind or likely to forget how your party’s going because you went too long without opening the menu. These help remind you when your characters are getting low on certain stats or otherwise need attention, and sometimes the alerts are more ‘flavour text’ to set the mood, which I thought was interesting. Some of these alerts are pretty plain, like ‘you are starting to feel hungry…’ or ‘you are getting paranoid from fear…’ - but I’m glad for them, as it keeps important info at a glance while you’re crawling through the dungeons. Though, one thing that frustrated me a little bit was that these pop ups disappear as soon as you move to the next room. This wasn’t helpful when you’d get a pop up less than a second before walking through a doorway, and having no idea if the text you missed was just flavour text or an important pop up.

Now might be a good time to go a little more in depth with the differences for each of the four playable characters present in the game, and why they’ve ventured to the Dungeons of Fear and Hunger.
Cahara, the mercenary, is a very balanced character to play as. He’s nimble and quick, giving you the options to start the game with skills like lock picking or a more reliable escape from battles. He’s after Le’garde so he can collect the bounty on him and escape poverty for a better life, having grown up as a thief and wanting better for himself and his pregnant partner.
D’arce is a Knight of the Midnight Sun, of which Le’garde was the captain. She was loyal to a fault, and after their group led a vicious siege, they went from being seen as a potential ally to a notable threat, and were forcibly disbanded. Le’garde was sent to the dungeons, and D’arce has gone on a solo mission to rescue him. Similar to Cahara, she is quite balanced in terms of stats, but starts with her knight’s armour, which gives the best starting defence.
Enki, a dark priest, uses magic and knowledge to get through the dungeons. By far the weakest of the bunch, you will not want to rely on his physical strength in battle- but rather, opt for magical attacks. He seeks knowledge, far beyond that of what he is currently able to study, and sets out to find enlightenment in the dungeons after receiving a vision of Le’garde- whom he believes is key achieving enlightenment.
And lastly, Ragnvaldr, the outlander. He is a hardened warrior from the North, and as such is incredibly strong. He has the choice in using a sword and shield or bow and arrow for combat, and has journeyed to the dungeons in order to find Le’garde and avenge his wife and son, who were slaughtered in a recent siege.

All four of these characters have their own strengths and weaknesses that lend themselves to certain styles of play, but as you progress through the dungeons (and depending on what difficulty you’re playing) you get the chance to recruit the other three starting characters as you come across them. There are also a few other characters around the dungeons that are recruitable, so keep your eyes peeled and options open.
If you unlock the necromancy skill, you can recruit certain enemies, like skeletons and ghouls, to join you. These, along certain recruitable characters, aren’t controllable like your player characters, and will auto fight in battle without your input. The only thing to keep in mind when recruiting characters is that you have a max of four party members - who you choose to fill it with is up to you. If party member dies, you can still recruit more, but the amount of party members you have can make or break your play through. The more you have, the better chance you’ll have to get through battles, but the more resources you’ll have to use to keep everyone in check.

I started my first play through with Ragnvaldr, as I’m a stubborn player and tend to prefer tank-ish styles, so he seemed perfect. It turns out that he was even more perfect as the introductory character for me, as I found his perspective to be quite compelling and set the scene for me- which is likely to be the last perspective you’ll see if you go through the characters in order.
See, Le’garde generally meant something positive to the other three; D’arce is blinded by her love for him, Cahara will get stacks of gold if he can retrieve him, and Enki is hoping that he’ll lead him to the knowledge that he seeks. Ragnvaldr, on the other hand, has come solely for revenge. Le’garde led the siege that ransacked his village and killed his family, and his sole goal upon approaching these dungeons was to make sure he’s dead. Le’garde is an interesting central character in that way, so much seems to revolve around him, yet he’s being held in some of the deepest layers of the dungeon, and you’ll have gone through all sorts of hellish areas while you search for him.
But, he’s not the only important side character. In the first layer of the dungeon, you’ll come across a little girl locked in a cage. If you can unlock it, she’ll join your party and follow you around. She’s doesn’t say much, you’ll only know what she’s feeling by the text that describes her expression and demeanour; but she’s clearly been through some shit, as there isn’t much that phases her. At one point, you’ll come across a small dagger, and another point where you come across a crude looking doll- both of which you’ll have the chance to give her the items if she’s in your party. Both times she is surprised by your gesture, as she seemingly hasn’t received such kindness in her entire life. She’ll follow you to the darkest depths of the dungeon, fighting alongside you despite being rather weak, and doing whatever you say when certain opportunities arise. Sometimes, you’ll come across characters that want the girl- they don’t often say what they will do with her, but it’s very clear contextually that it isn’t anything good. If you wish, you can sacrifice her, or exchange her for some goods or service. If you hand her over, she has no choice but to leave – her life is in your hands. I think that a lot of people would instinctually feel the need to protect her in some way, and keep her alive to escape the dungeons with you if you recruit her- so the fact that there are often opportunities to pawn her off is interesting, especially when some of the rewards to exchange her for are quite appealing. You could view it as heartless, or as a matter of ruthless practicality, but there is always the option, if she doesn’t die in your care first.

This brings me to the contents of the dungeon itself, most of which is definitely inappropriate for children. The first layer of the main entrance is pretty simple, there’s lots of rooms and hallways to explore, and a guard roaming around that will chase you if you get too close. If you enter a battle with this guard, you’ll get the first taste of many depictions of exposed genitals- though to be fair, in this instance, it’s a long stinger that pulses and spits projectiles at you. So while it is quite phallic in function and appearance, it fits in with the rest of this guard’s brutish and malformed appearance. He’s going to introduce you to the rest of the main battle mechanics, too. He has a huge meat cleaver in one hand- and will cut off your arms with it the first chance he gets -and has a coin flip attack that will end in your death if the odds aren’t in your favour.
The coin flip is something you’ll come across often, in and out of battle. Here, fighting this guard, you’ll have the choice of heads or tails before the guard attacks, and depending on what you flip will result in either an instant death or a lucky dodge. This is true of pretty much all coin flip attacks you’ll get during battle- though they don’t always equate to an instant death. Much later in the game, if you’re doing pretty well with the right equipment, you miiiiight be able survive by the skin of your teeth; but regardless, it is deadly.
Outside of battle, you’ll see the other uses for the coin flip as you explore the first floor. There are some bookshelves in a little library area, and these will have books you can read if you obtain them. Some shelves will have a guaranteed pick up, but others rely on the coin flip as to whether you find anything or not. This may-or-may-not is something you’ll also get when you’re looting through armour racks or opening chests; if you flip well you’ll get something good, and if you don’t you’ll get something a bit crap, or nothing at all.

If you manage to make it through this first layer, you’ll pass through a door that leads to an outdoor corridor of sorts. Though you’re outside, the thick oppressive nature of these dungeons still lingers, as the short path to the next section of this layer is lined with rotted corpses hanging from wooden poles. At this point, either in this outdoor corridor, or somewhere within the first indoor section, you’ll come across a door with a strange insignia on it. If you have the right talisman to open it, you’ll find a hexen table. We’ll come back to this in the more spoilery section, as for now, there’s nothing you can really do with it.
Moving forward to the next indoor section, this is where I encountered my first instance of an enemy that didn’t immediately chase me. There are these strange priest-looking guys standing around a human sacrifice, and they are far too preoccupied with that to bother with you. Unless you disturb them, in which case, they will fight. Somewhere near here will also be a huge mass of partially merged humans, all fused together into one massive, writhing hydra. They are rude and demand a sacrifice. It’s up to you whether you talk to them, give them a sacrifice, fight them or ignore them. They not only foreshadow something I’ll talk about later, but they are yet another instance of choices that may or may not benefit you.
If you want to talk about choices that definitely don’t benefit you; on this floor, there will be a disgusting looking toilet somewhere that you’ll have the option to investigate. If you choose to jump down and see what’s inside, you’ll find yourself trapped in the shit pit, with nothing to do other than kill yourself. While funny, I think this is the last great reminder that the choices you make can and will fuck you over sometimes.

The two other aspects on this floor to take note of is that there is a torturer named Tortur in one wing, with blood stains and various tools and devices littered about; and a library in the other wing, where you can read some lore and books that help expand your abilities.
On the torture side of the dungeon, you’ll find an NPC named Buckman, who is frightened and has disoriented himself in his despair. He can’t remember how long he’s been in the dungeons, the same mystic qualities that drain your mind and hunger having affected him as well, and he is petrified of Tortur, who wants to, well, torture him. You’ll eventually meet Tortur as well, whether by taking a nap somewhere, or by a little prompt in a specific area asking you to choose whether you hide from him, ambush him or try to talk with him when he’s about to enter. He can be dangerous if you’re unprepared, but whether you choose to fight and kill him, to try talk with him, or even offer up Buckman in exchange for your release is up to you. Just know that if you die against him in battle, or otherwise fumble while wandering around this wing, you will enter a post-death cutscene where Tortur has you chained to a bench and dismembers you, with particular enthusiasm while mutilating your genitals. If you manage to defeat him, or distract him by sacrificing Buckman, you’ll find a key that leads you to a staircase that leads down, and you’ll have the option to venture further into the depths of the dungeon.

On the less scary side, the library has many bookshelves for you to rummage through and find out more about this world. Some bookshelves are coin flips, so sometimes you won’t find anything readable, but there are a few guaranteed bookshelves where you will get something. You’re likely to find lore books that discuss the gods that are worshipped, or other things of note that build upon the world. Some books that are great to find are recipe books, they will teach you how to make and use certain items to get the most out of them. Once you’ve read these books, their recipes will be automatically unlocked in the making screen, so provided you have the right materials, you can start combining them and making stuff! Recipes, and sometimes skills, can only be unlocked after reading about them in their respective books, so make sure to go through your inventory and read all of them!
While you’re in the library, unless you’re playing as him, you’re likely to encounter Enki, who is reading by himself. While not immediately recruitable, you can interact with him – and how you do so will impact whether or not you are able to recruit him in future. The main thing, however, is that there is a bookshelf nearby filled with false books. If you were diligent in rummaging through all the bookshelves in this area and the previous, you will have picked up a fake book to place here and unlock a secret doorway. Who doesn’t love a cheeky secret doorway behind a bookshelf?

If you venture into this new, secret area, you’ll find yourself in a walled garden. Straight ahead is a statue of the ascended god, Alllmer, who is depicted in crucifixion. If you walk up to it and try to interact, you’ll have the choice to pray to a god. Pray to the correct gods at the correct places, and your affinity with that god will raise- which is good to keep in mind for later.
To the right of the statue, there is a collapsed wall that you can blow up if you have an explosive of some kind, and to the right is a garden orgy. There are multiple people wearing bunny masks, lost in the trance of ecstasy while they perform the orgy as a ritual to one of the old gods, Sylvian. You’re invited to join- and your first time is free -where your player character will fuck a masked bunny man, and you’ll find your health fully restored upon completing the ritual. Doing so raises your affinity with Sylvian, and you’re welcome to come back, just at the cost of a coin flip. If you fail the coin flip, you’ll succumb to the mindless pleasure and get a game over, joining the orgy for good. As far as bad endings go, this is one of the better ones.

Everything you need to know about the game is able to be figured out on this first layer, you just have to be observant, and stubborn enough to push through how difficult and nerve wracking it can be. You will die. A lot. And you can only reload from your previous save, so if you die and haven’t been able to save for a while, it can be a major setback. To some, that’s already enough to know this kind of playing isn’t for them – and when they find out that there’s only one bed to save in that is truly safe, that turns off a lot more players. So, let’s talk about the saving, and why it isn’t as bad as it seems.
To save, you must find a bed and sleep in it. That’s an easily understood trope for this kind of game, but still with the scary part of no auto saves and not replenishing any stats after a rest. The beds you come across for most of the game will be unsafe, as there are monsters lurking in the room. When you try to sleep on the beds, you’ll be prompted to flip a coin, only able to save if you flip correctly. If you fail, the nearest enemy will wake you up by the bedside, and enter a battle with you. This is quite logical, and makes sense in the same way Minecraft won’t let you sleep when there are monsters nearby – it’s just the fact that it is a coin flip that frustrates people. Until I got a little further and found a bed that had a safe sleep for me, I thought all the beds were unsafe and that I’d be unable to save, which was a daunting and frustrating thought. That single-snooze bed is still able to be slept in after that free save, but you risk a difficult boss spawning right next to you as you drift off. That bed was what made this saving system click for me, as all the beds are safe contextually. If there were no enemies left alive in the room, and I tried to sleep, failing the coin flip would just mean I wasn’t able to save, and I could try again with no other punishments. The game is hard, but not to the point of torture.

Plus, the most important thing about this game is that every death contains knowledge. You know a bit more about the area, you know what didn’t work in that battle, you know to be more conscious of that status effect, you know what you want to try next time.

Sometimes I fucked up, or got hurt in such a disabling way that there wasn’t much point in continuing in any serious way – so I just used the opportunity to explore. It’s not a true waste of time or resources if I plan on restarting an earlier save anyway, so what’s the harm in a little fucking around and finding out?

One of the worst ways to go, in my opinion, is when your only option is to give up. You have no limbs left, and are simply given the choice of whether to keep trying or stop breathing. Although the many ways in which your character is violated and mutilated are disturbing, I enjoy that they are this dark. I like that this game is not afraid to depict these things, and I never found that they were gratuitous or glamourising anything. They were just the consequences of losing in a dangerous dungeon. Everything has gone to shit here, and these violent endings helped to contextualise the threats that you will face.

The deeper you delve into this dungeon, the worse things get, and I got addicted to trying to push further while piecing together the little bits of lore and environmental story telling strewn about. The presentation of the story is so interesting, and definitely a strength. I mentioned earlier in my write up of Moonlighter that I was a bit disappointed by the lack of depth, and lack of lore in general – Fear and Hunger scratched that itch in such a satisfying way and actually pulled off most of what I had suggested there. There’s various types of lore notes, you can read through some diaries, and various myths and history books as you find them. Not all of them are strictly factual, as some of the historic passages had details that didn’t always line up, and left room to think about the authorial bias and even just the lack of knowledge at the time that book was written. As you find out more about the old gods and the new gods, you’ll start to piece together the gist of these legends, and it was so enticing to come across some new details that changed the perspective I’d had up until that point. You can talk with the sparse handful of NPCs that pop up, who each have something interesting through their dialogue or just the context in which you find them in that adds to the narrative. You can even find out more by talking with certain enemies and learning just how connected everything is. There was just so much stuff to think about while crawling through these dungeons!!! I loved trying to figure out everything, so much that I became so engrossed in figuring out just how the religions and gods affected this world that I forgot I was here for Le’garde.

Up until the point where you find his cell, his presence is more of an overhanging absence- the man almost becoming myth with how much seems to concern him in these dungeons.

At this point, you have the option to leave. It’s not a glorious ending, but you escaped. It’s unfulfilling to end it here, and it felt like the dungeons had enticed me enough to want to stay, so I went deeper.

All of this is endlessly fascinating to me, but it’s time to start heading towards the end of the game. If you managed to get the right stuff, you’ll unlock some ancient looking doors and find yourself in a giant mausoleum. There are traps, puzzles, and undead creatures out to kill you, but there’s also a device you can interact with that changes everything around you. If you can get through this area and into the next, you’ll find yourself inside an ancient city. There’s more of those devices around, and interacting with them will change whether you’re seeing the city in it’s dilapidated present, or ancient past. As much as I love to spoil things, I really think it’s best to simply say that the better endings are connected to this ancient city, and that a lot of questions will be answered, and you’ll be given new questions to ask. The religion and theology of this world were fascinating to uncover, and if you get this far into playing for yourself, there’s a good chance you will feel just as intrigued.

When you get to your ending (and replay to try get them all), if you’re anything like me, you still won’t be fully satisfied. There were a lot of interesting choices to make, and many paths to take that led to dramatically different outcomes, but that’s just on the normal difficulties. This game is hard, no denying that- but when a game’s difficulties are named fear and hunger, terror and starvation, and hard, you just know you’re gonna get fucked in hard mode. The step up from fear and hunger difficulty to terror and starvation was a pretty good one; you’ll notice that you had a lot of helping hands and slightly easier odds to contend with while in the easiest mode. Hard to believe until you’ve played the next level up, I know. But, getting that next level up is the perfect preparation for eventually tackling hard mode, as hard mode is in a league of it’s own.
The game mechanics change up significantly – not only are things somehow even more brutal, but you will not be able to recruit anyone into your party (save for skeletons and ghouls you recruit via necromancy). Everything from terror and starvation seems to be the same, like not being able to see well in the dark without a torch, some lootable items being replaced with rotten equivalents, enemies being harder to fight against and escape from, and even some new enemy encounters. What hard mode adds- or rather, takes away -is some lootable areas will be empty more often- and some actively hurting you if you fail the coin flip, some endings are unachievable, and the ability to save is unavailable.

That’s right, you have to go through everything in not only the hardest difficulty, but all in one go!

I think this is so awesome, and despite not finishing all of these special endings myself, I know for a fact when I pick this up again and replay, I will be trying my best to beat them all. This is great for replays and upping the ante in terms of difficulty and keeping things fresh, I love that there’s a unique ending that does a lot for each character, and I don’t feel like any of them were disappointing or left too much up in the air. It’s rewarding, in that cruel way for having made you brute force your way into the ending you wanted.

There’s only one part about these characters that makes me a little sad, and that’s the way your character will kinda change based on whether they’re the protagonist player you’ve chosen to play as. When you’ve picked one of your starting four to start your new game with, they’ll settle into a kind of silent protagonist role. There’s all the implications that they speak to other characters and enemies throughout the game, and there are times when flavour text helps you to understand what’s going on in their head, but their personalities are pretty stripped back for the sake of ease while playing.
When encountering the other playable characters you didn’t pick, they’ll talk and interact with certain prompts in ways that show off their personality and such. While they’re all relatively simple characters, it’s a shame that this kind of warped the perception of whoever I’m playing as. It felt a bit jarring to have spent so many hours with Ragnvaldr as my first pick, and only hear the way he talks during a flashback sequence right near the end. It was even more jarring when I was trying out the other characters and came across Ragnvaldr in the dungeons, and saw the way he spoke and interacted with everyone.
I’m not like… heartbroken over this. I actually think it was pretty clever to have the protagonist assume a silent protag role so that it’s both less obtrusive to the player and probably something that was much easier to code instead of having that much more individualised dialogue. It’s just a shame, which is easily remedied by playing through the game multiple times. Ha ha.

The visuals of the game were awesome, showing off the unique art style of the solo developer in what seems to be a blend of pixel art and digital art. All of the overworld, the parts where you’re controlling your character and walking around the dungeon, are with visuals that look like the classic 16-32 bit RPG. That’s in major part due to RPG-Maker of it all, but I think the game looks great for it. The environments and enemy sprites looks dingy and disgusting, while still being interesting to look at. The various locations are all visually distinct, too, so you’ll know what layer of the dungeon you’re in once you become familiar with it all.
Though, I will say, sometimes I found myself very frustrated with the way sideways doors work. The edges of the space are just plain black, which is fine. But when there’s a door, or other sideways passage to go through, you can’t see anything other than a black beam blocking the way. I don’t really know how I missed them the first few times, but I spent a significant amount of time near the end lost and wandering around cause I couldn’t find the next area to go to. For doorways, I kinda get it, cause I couldn’t see the actual door and didn’t know I needed to unlock it or whatever I needed to do, even though I swear at one point I was desperately hugging the walls and interacting with everything. But there’s this one sideways passage to an area that’s just… a tiny jut out from the black nothingness of the borders. It did look suspicious to me, and I tried to go through it and see if it lead anywhere, but I must’ve fumbled it somehow cause I didn’t manage to get through it until coming back much later. Looking back, I feel like this is partial user error, and partial design error. I can remember similar times trying to look for paths or doorways in SNES RPGs and getting similarly lost, but in other top-down games like Link to the Past, I never had that issue due to the perspective showing all borders of the room. That perspective obviously isn’t the one the dev was going for here, but that was something that bothered me a bit. At least it bothered me enough that I’ll never make that same mistake again!
Probably...

I loved the detail of the character portraits and enemy designs in this game, which depict everything in a stylised semi-realism. It’s nice to see the party members in something a little more detailed, and I loved that details like their arms getting cut off were updated in the menu. I already mentioned the enemy that scares you and changes these menu portraits- but in general, I just loved that they are staring you down every time you open the menu.
The battle sprites are similarly more detailed, but you only see the backs of your characters while fighting. The monsters that face you look grotesque and straight up yuck sometimes, so there was always some interesting visual component to each new enemy you faced while you figured out which order you’d like to dismember them in. Something cool to note with the battles is that when the enemy attacks you, the body part they are attacking with will briefly flash. Paying attention to these will let you know which parts of the body you’ll wanna cut off first. They’ll flash again in a similar way when you select them in battle, and when they get hit by you. If you do the finishing hit to that body part, it will change into a severed stump, or in the case of legs, heavily cut. This is a great visual indicator of what damage you’ve done, and you won’t be able to select those parts again when they’ve been fully cut.
On the topic of flashing though… There is a brief full screen flash when you enter into battle, and that was starting to hurt my head after a while. While the body parts flashing weren’t nearly as much of a physical pain for me, the two of them being regular flashing that you can’t really avoid is a little annoying. I tried looking up mods and discussions on reddit if there was a way to reduce or take out that flashing, but alas, all I found was the usual- incredibly unhelpful -reddit snark.

The OST is very ambient, mostly comprised of various sounds and noises instead of there being frequent melodies. There are some tracks with more of a song-sounding-sound to them, and I think that their sparsity enhanced how beautifully they contrasted with the dark ambience the rest of the places had. The battle themes are where some of the more memorable tracks come from, but I also found it quite eerie and beautiful when walking around in a late game area and hearing a faint melody and eerie vocals. It was enough to make me stop and just appreciate it, all while trying not to enter a battle with some of the creepiest enemies yet. The noises and ambience stick with you- just listening to the tracks again and hearing the sparse percussion, creaks and groans and straight up unsettling air takes me right back to specific moments of the game.

And the sound design- my god! It fit right in with the unsettling sounds you hear within the soundtrack; from the sounds of enemies to the sounds of cutting off limbs, everything had an oompf to it that I’m glad to hear. Even if it’s gross. Like, the sound of the bone-saw as your character cuts off one of their limbs… it goes on for a while, long enough to make me wince, but not long enough to over do it.
Similarly, there are certain audio cues for things within the game that did their job of striking fear in you. Like, when you’re exploring, if an enemy spots you, they’ll get a little exclamation mark over their head while a jarring piano key plays. It made me jump multiple times, even when I was expecting it. And, later in the game, there will be a stalker enemy hunting you down. You can tell they’re in the same room as you when there’s text pops up saying, ‘there’s a terrifying presence in the room…’ paired with a droning sound that could be a siren wail, or some kind of pained moan.

Now… There’s one really important aspect to this game that I haven’t really mentioned yet, and that’s that the game is pretty buggy. From my understanding, this is the dev’s first game, so it’s not surprising that there are a few things a little out of shape. While these bugs aren’t too obtrusive, there are some that can softlock you out of certain areas and endings through no fault of your own. The worst of these that I came across was really frustrating – if you kill an enemy and their corpse falls in front of a doorway, you’ll be unable to interact with that door for the rest of the game. This seems to be because as you stand over the corpse- which is in this case in front of the door -pressing the action button will start and stop with the options to interact with that corpse, and there’s not a secondary pop up for interacting with the door afterwards. The corpse is hogging all of that, so if you wanted to go through that door, you can’t!
Most of the other bugs you’ll encounter are certain sequences of events during battles can get a bit bugged, and certain enemies will be so bugged that you can’t even battle them and they either instantly die or cause some kind of glitch that makes it difficult to keep playing. There are also a few debug spots still available that do things like spawn items and party members, or infinite pickups of certain items, which are kinda fun to find and use when you’re feeling cheeky.

But the most frequent issues I ran into seemed to be due to me playing on Mac (ugh, yes, I know). The most common issue I’d get is the game crashing with a null error during battles. This usually happened when I died anyway, but it was still annoying on the occasions I could've made it through. I could put up with that, but the visual errors I had in one particular area was straight up awful.
See, in this area, there’s supposed to be a vignette filter that blurs around the edges of the screen, giving it a dreamy and hazy look.

What I saw? Incessant strobing as the graphics failed.

It was pretty bad, and as I’m getting more sensitive to stuff like that these days, I was not very happy about it. Luckily, it seemed to only affect one screen of that area, but I don’t think the correct filter was applied at all to the rest of the screens in this area. Sucks, but I don’t know why it did that and I know it wasn’t supposed to do that.
Lastly… there are some parts where you can type in some stuff to name or unlock certain things, and this was fucking awful. I’m playing on my keyboard, and was able to rebind most keys to how I want them- which is pretty good. However, if I have the directional arrows set to wasd, then when I’m trying to type in a character by typing normally on the keyboard, it’ll move the cursor with the wasd while also sometimes typing that character? It was bad, I hated it, and I fumbled through so many one-time-use items cause the keyboard was working against me.

I would encourage people to still play despite these bugs- although I didn’t have much luck on a cursory search for any mods or patches to help with the battle flashing that happens throughout the game, I know there are plenty of bug fix mods from the dedicated fans to help reduce the amount of crashes, improve the quality of life, and actually let you play some of the bugged battles you can’t otherwise do.

There are also a few notable spelling and grammar errors throughout the game, and I’m pretty sure there’s a mod for that, too. I’m more willing to give this a pass and not take it too seriously, as I was still able to understand the intent behind what was written and got really sucked into the themes and ideas I was enjoying. And, it’s an incredible effort from the dev to write in a second language, all while using very complicated themes and complex language. It was still evocative, and got the point across, but is unfortunately lacking that polish. This game only has options for English and Russian, so if you want to play in any other language, you’ll have to see if there’s a mod for that, too.

Another mod I’m aware of are the couple of censor mods, that cover up or obscure the depictions of sex and genitals in the game. If you’ll allow the little soap-box incoming, I do have a few thoughts and observations about the player base that were a little off-putting and baffling to me, and the censor mods- while I can appreciate them -are a good example of what I think is so baffling.
See, this is the kind of game that I’d argue that the violence and sexual themes are the point. It’s a horror game, and it’s an indie game; both facts that culminate into how provocative this game was able to be. There’s definitely a discussion to be had about the line between tasteful implication and depiction vs glorified and gratuitous torture porn. I’m not here to make any final judgements or act like I’ve got all the answers, as this is a line that often changes from person to person and from media to media. Horror as a genre is one that has always aimed to shock and disgust the audience, while also being one that allows for very raw and thought provoking messages through it. There’s a reason why most horror media has warnings that it’s for mature audiences, and thats because it can be really intense sometimes. To try and water down or remove the parts of this genre that are divisive and cause an uproar is a really shit way to neuter it. In Fear and Hunger, there are multiple, explicit scenes featuring sex, violence, and a combination of the two. If those are themes you can’t or don’t want to see, you don’t have to play. But if you’re curious to see, I don’t think the depictions are as bad as the reputation made it out to be.

Firstly, for the sexual stuff, all of that is done with the overworld sprites. That’s the more stylised, simplistic models of the characters and enemies- and while crude and easy to understand, it always felt to me more like an evocation of what was going on and allowing me to apply extra detail or meaning to it as the player if I wanted. If it truly wanted to be more on the side of depicting for the sake of, these scenes could’ve been made with the more detailed digital art used in the battle, menu or final cutscenes.

But it wasn’t.

All the sexual stuff, while uncomfortable at times, still felt pretty tasteful for what it was. For people who are more sensitive to that that I am, it’s probably still too much- but that’s when it’s up to you to decide whether you want to play or not. All the positive/rewarding instances of sex within the game have some form of consent, and you can’t force it as the player. There are even some instances where trying to perform a sexual act in a way that crosses the line will be punished. You don’t have to perform in any of the opportunities for it, but you can, that’s your half of the consent.
Also, there are only two instances of explicitly erect genitals I can remember off the top of my head, and both were humorous. One is the stylised depictions in statues or other set dressings, which were so stylised that it took a second to register as a phallus. The other- which is even funnier to me -is a particular moment where you can perform necromancy, and all it does is transform limp into erect. I won’t say much more for spoiler reasons- but in regards to all the enemies you actively fight with varying degrees of nudity… it felt pretty neutral, and there’s plenty of both the male and female form.

If anything, I could see the argument for the violence being over the top. I disagree, but I see how one could think that. Cause the violence is everywhere. It’s in the overworld, it’s in the battle, it’s in the decorations and set design of most locations. It’s unavoidable.
The more detailed character art for your playable characters and enemies is where you see the very literal limbs getting cut off in battle. Violence is a staple for horror, so it’s to be expected, but I will say that this is some of the most matter-of-fact violence I’ve seen in this kind of game. I’ve already gushed multiple times about how enjoyable I found that, and yet… It kind of irks me to see censor mods for the exposed genitals and sexual scenes but nothing for the gore and violence. I don’t want mods for it, but can you see the weird double standard?
I can cut the limp penis or breasts off an enemy, but the depiction of them by themselves is an issue?
There is no amount of modding or censoring that can make this game more safe for work, it’s inherently not safe - and to try skirt around or obscure the themes of the game for it to be more ‘comfortable’ to play is just… puzzling.

If you’re not willing or unable to engage with the dark themes present, I don’t understand what interested you.
This game did blow up a few years ago and has a bit of a cult following, so I understand the fomo of it all. But, if looking into it and seeing things that are a turn off to you are very much in the game, why are there so many people pushing through to play it anyway, just to decry it foul and unjust?

It’s like something I say to my youngest sibling often, that I learnt the hard way myself.
Sometimes you can be aware of the dark themes and understand it all, but it’s not about understanding necessarily; it’s about whether you’re able to handle the things you understand. If you’re not ready or haven’t learnt how you hold yourself around those themes, or can’t filter through seeing something without absorbing and reenacting everything you see, you’re not mature enough to be engaging with this stuff. That’s what the mature in mature audiences means, at least to me. The content warnings you get are guidelines and not limits, and it is really tiring to see (an admittedly vocal minority of) very immature people yelling and kicking a fuss.
All this to say, I don’t hate the censor mods on their own. I can respect for the two main ones available; there are options for if you just want stuff blacked out, or to have some more clothing and different animations to obscure stuff in the same style so it's not obvious. They will be incredibly helpful for anyone who wants to stream or talk about the game on other platforms that have stricter community guidelines.
There’s of course a bunch of memey mods too, but that’s a given for pretty much every fan base.

There’s another thing I wanna talk about that I’ve observed, and it’s the way people talk about the dev and other fans. This is a far more personal gripe, but I just hate the way such common dismissal and borderline racist generalisations are so normalised when talking about this game.
I had a lot of fun reading general fan theories and forums, and watching videos people have made on youtube about Fear and Hunger, but it seems to be an unspoken requirement to crack some kind of joke about how ‘only a Finnish person could think of something this fucked up.’ Pair this with a lot of assumptions that because this game got a massive following in Russia, everybody who enjoys this game is a fucked up freak, or something.
I suspect it’s the same kind of people who are squeamish about seeing genitals that are making most of these statements, but I’ve seen plenty from people who otherwise indicate that they aren’t, and people who generally love the game. It reeks of a certain white and westernised mindset and it’s hard to articulate- but the people complaining have also played, or at least watched/read into it to know enough about the fucked up themes, right? What makes them better enough to say that they’re the only ones that can enjoy this game with nuanced thought and everyone else is a sicko that missed the point?
NOT TO MENTION!!! You can see the blatant inspiration the dev has taken from stuff like Silent Hill and Berserk. Those are both Japanese!

Those were both my two main controversial gripes about the game, and it’s more about how the game is talked about, so lol.

In regards to the actual gameplay, the coin flip, and randomisation, seem to be the most controversial aspect of the game – other than the dark themes and subject matter depicted. I have a hunch that this is due to a misunderstanding of how these work due to quitting early and not seeing how it all builds upon itself the further you get.

There’s the violence, and how what ever you can do to the enemy, the enemy can do to you. You can kill enemies, ruthlessly wiping out areas and looting their corpses just for your peace of mind. Partaking in a cannibalistic ritual late in the game gives you the chance to replenish your hunger, or you risk joining the never ending feast. You can cut your own limbs off just to prevent succumbing to a fatal infection. You can sacrifice members of your party in the name of violence and unlock more powers for yourself...
There’s sex, where it is both a punishment for losing certain battles, and a chance to regain what you’ve lost. You will be violated at the hands of enemies who use you and toss you aside after. Joining in a ritualistic orgy replenishes your health, or you risk writhing in mindless pleasure for the rest of your days. You can cut off the genitals and sexual organs of enemies. You can fuck consenting party members in the name of love and fuse yourselves into a marriage...
There’s a certain despair that is captured in this game by tying everything to the two sides of the same coin.

Flip a coin, you violently attack.
Flip a coin, you are violated.
Flip a coin, you found some armour.
Flip a coin, you’ve lost your mind.
Flip a coin, you’re safe, for now.

There’s a randomness applied to some stuff; like when rummaging for items, and a random pick for what floor layout the dungeon is at the start of every new game- along with a few other events that may or may not happen, but so much of it is up to you. I don’t really see a difference in looking through the crates to get items vs flipping a coin to see what’s inside the chest, other than seeing the chance that it could’ve been a better item with the coin flip. That visual and tactile element of flipping the coin and seeing the outcome is still running in the background while you rummage through stuff to pick up resources, it’s just easier to gloss over cause you can’t see it.
Everything in this dungeon is meant to wear you down, in the hopes that you succumb to it – so the coin flips being such an integral part of how you play; both actively choosing and leaving it up to fate, especially when weaving that concept in with the themes present in the narrative, is brilliant.

Plus, there’s an item called a lucky coin that you can find a couple times. To use it, hold shift when picking heads or tails and you get to flip a second coin, doubling your chances of getting the option you picked. Once again, the game isn’t needlessly cruel, it's just mostly cruel!

For a mechanic so controversial, and that I often see people talk about removing- it really does sum up the whole experience. There will be stuff that’s enjoyable, stuff that’s uncomfortable, but it’s all part of the same game. I’m curious to see what the sequel is like, and I definitely want to keep an eye on this dev. For his first game sold, this was a great experience. I loved my time with it so far, and I have a feeling I’ll be coming back periodically over the next few years at least.

I may have escaped the dungeons for now, but they’re calling me back in...

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