I’m a big fan of many James Bond movies. Not because they’re deep or they’re excellent film making but because they’re fun, sometimes nonsensical, romps that have a predetermined ending of Bond winning in some way. So when it was announced years ago that IO Interactive was making a Bond game I was ecstatic, as many people were. Some were hoping for a super spy experience where you’re basically playing Hitman with a Bond skin. Not me though, that would be boring and not true to the actual history of Bond cinema (haven’t read the books). What I wanted was a movie like Casino Royal. Something that, sure, has spy moments of having to infiltrate certain areas, having to be stealthy, having to use the environment and situation to your benefit. But also has massive action moments that make you feel like you’re in a roller coaster, especially when the calmer moments arrive as well.

Well, as you might have read by now since the game has been out for a while and I had other things to write about so hadn’t done the review yet, what I wanted out of the game is exactly what we got. 007 First Light is not just a Bond story, it’s the definitive Bond journey in my eyes, at least for now. It has everything you could possibly want from a Bond story and has a mix of multiple past Bonds in the style of Spy that this Bond is (I’m saying Bond way too much). I genuinely adored First Light, as many of my fellow reviewers did as well, so let’s go over why I loved it.

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The Premise

It’s the year 2026 and James Bond is not a 00. More so, he’s not even close to being one. But once his squad gets taken out and he has to fend for himself in a large group of unknown bad guys, he manages to make it out with survivors because of his wits, and the fact that he disobeyed a direct order from a British Secret Service handler named Moneypenny. Bond isn’t someone who blindly follows orders, he’s his own man, someone who does what is right. And that, that makes him a perfect candidate for earning the number. So then, will he manage to become the 007 that we know? Will he get out of the situation he’s in completely unscathed? Will he earn the respect of his colleagues? Will those he cares for die horribly? And most importantly, will he get to drive a really fancy car like in all the movies? Only playing the game will allow you to find out!

The Good

The core aspect of a 007 journey is that it is a roller coaster. The ups and downs, the tense moments of knowing the calm can’t last forever, the moments where what you think you knew gets turned upside down only so you can then turn it back to what it should be but with a new perspective. All Bond movies are roller coasters. First Light had many moments where I was unsure what was gonna happen next. Moments where I thought “well this has gotta be leading into the end right? Like where will it go from here?” only for me to be proven wrong and then shown that, in fact, there’s a lot of runway left. Particularly the thing that really solidified the experience wasn’t just the journey but the James Bond that we played as. Bond is a clever and witty bastard, he always has been. He’s gonna say shit that most people wouldn’t, he is damn good at pretending to be someone else, has very good intuition, and is damn funny. This Bond is all of those things. I’ve seen some people criticize the writing for this Bond as him being too quippy but the thing about Bond is that he’s literally filled with quips at the opportune moments. He knows when he needs to be quiet and when he can say something funny (like the video below). That’s a core personality trait of Bond, he likes to be funny, even if it’s only funny to him. So to say that him making any kind of quip or witty comment in the heat of battle isn’t Bond-like seems to be showing that you haven’t watched enough 007 movies. But I digress, the journey and character of James Bond in First Light are top notch and I am truly stunned how damn well IO did at capturing the magic of a 007 experience.

Of course a game would be nothing if the gameplay was absolute trash and ,thankfully, First Light does not disappoint. From the moment you take control of a gun the game is incredibly responsive and I always felt like I was doing some kickass spy shit. There were many moments throughout the game where I remembered how in prior games I had played recently I would shoot an enemy a bunch and they would take forever to die while here, on the lowest difficulty to be fair, I would shoot an enemy a max of 3 times and they’d be dead. Headshots were also instant death. I was able to feel powerful, to feel like a 00, even before Bond actually earns the number. It was amazing

Course there’s also other gameplay besides gunplay, The hand to hand combat is also rather fun, although I was not very good at it. I constantly found myself failing to dodge when I had to, but that’s my fault not the games fault. Instead of dodging I was often going for other things, I was constantly focusing on throwing things. In most areas you’ll be fighting there are things lying around the environment that you can pick up and throw at your enemies, it can be to stun them or to actually do damage to them. Either way, any time I saw that prompt pop up I made it my mission to throw that damn object. Sometimes to my detriment. But that’s the thing about playing on the lowest difficulty, you can have fun like that. I was able to throw wine bottles at my enemies, keyboards (video below), bricks, it was all glorious and I adored every second I was able to do that. Sure, I might be bad at the dodging, but only because the game has other parts that distracted me because of how fun they were. That’s a positive in my book.

Then there are the gadgets which are great, if a little subdued. They’re centered in Bond’s Q watch which is cool to have a watch do all the hacking things that I wish I could do in more current games (Watch Dogs 2 is still the king of hacking in a modern day world though), but it’s also a little limiting. Basically, the gadgets are great, they feel great to use, they allow for different playstyles and a lot of different ways to go about some of the more spy-centric missions. I just wish they were more developed. That IO pushed the envelope more. That’s not even a criticism, it’s honestly a kinda positive. It means there’s a lot of room for them to push into for a sequel (as long as they’re the ones making it which, hopefully, they will be).

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Finally, as I’ve covered the story and Bond and the gameplay, I have to gush about the other characters in the game as well. Q, Moneypenny, Greenway, and M are all wonderful personalities that allow us as a player to become attached to them so whenever something might happen to them we feel it just as much as Bond does. But those aren’t the only characters in the game. The thing about the Hitman games were that there were a lot of unimportant side characters that were only really there for a different path to an assassination. Well, here, there are so many different side characters that, instead of being paths to an assassination, are paths to simply gaining intel as a spy. For instance, in the Vietnam level there’s a group of Americans who are wholely and entirely annoying, but that’s kinda the thing. They’re rich fucks who are annoying but wonderful to fuck with. The dumbness enhances the games depth. In the same level you meet, through various means, a more mob boss like character who has tremendously interesting characterization all in just a few minutes of screentime. I met him as a fake yoga instructor and being able to easily go in, tell him some info, then as I’m leaving of my own free will I also leave his yoga mat that I had found earlier to be able to get into the house all while mentioning it. It’s this really interesting moment where this character who had barely any screen time, gets a ton of characterization that makes you very intrigued by them. The core cast of the game are great, of course, but the game really shines with the side characters. I adored them, every level comes with new ones and each time it was an opportunity for just as much fun and intrigue as you might expect from some of the more interesting Hitman levels. Truly a wonderful amount of world building from IO.

The Bad

I’ve been trying to think of flaws to the game as much as I can, but at the end of the day I can only really think of one. The game is going to have a sequel. Now, that might seem good, I mean it is good, but the problem is that the game has many many characters that are loose threads that don’t get tied up. This isn’t horrible, but there’s times where I felt like the only way to get closure on a character was for them to die. Honestly, that is the only real flaw that stuck out to me.

The Meh

A minor annoyance is that for the majority of the game you have 4 gadget slots in your watch yet for most of the game I couldn’t use that 4th slot. Even after the first time you use the 4th slot you eventually get it taken away from you just a mission or two later only for it to never return. It genuinely sucks. The gadgets are a lot of fun in the game and giving me that fourth slot only to unceremoniously take it away feels cheap and like you thought the 4th slot was just too powerful even though the game has been leading towards that 4th slot and it will always feel better to have it and use it than to not have access and just see it, sitting there, empty, taunting you. Annoying.

The Ending - Reaction

I genuinely loved the ending to the game. It had action, surprises, near misses, and an all around great drive to get you to keep going to the last moment. There was pay off for several aspects the game had teased earlier that was really cool even though that payoff only lasted for a few minutes. The game then ends with one main loose thread left untied so that the player can see that there is something bigger going on. It’s a cool little detail even if it does play into the complaint I had in a prior section. Regardless, it was a fantastic ending and I was damn happy with almost every aspect of it.

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The Conclusion

The thing about James Bond is that he’s not just some super spy. He’s a quick witted jerk who still manages to be suave and sometimes even a person you can feel bad for. He’s funny, he’s smart, he’s often underestimated, and he’s just so damn good at his job. 007 First Light shows all of these things. It is the best Bond experience I have ever had. I’ve watched almost all of the movies, I’ve played the games, but all of them, every single one, pale in comparison to what 007 First Light managed to accomplish. It made me enjoy being bond and seeing bond succeed far more than anything had prior. It’s the quintessential Bond experience and likely will be until IO makes a sequel.

Course, it’s also 70 bucks and that’s always a tough price to justify. It took me about 15 hours to beat the game and I adored every second of it but at 70 bucks...I dunno. I don’t think any game justifies that price. 60 bucks would have been the perfect price for it, I’d recommend it in a heartbeat. Frankly, I do still recommend it in a heartbeat, but I would say try to get it under 70. Not because it’s not an amazing experience, but because 60 is just a better price. I got mine at 60 from greenmangaming (was 60 to preorder) for PC and was very happy with that price, most new games I play that are 70 bucks I get from there because I just don’t like paying 70 bucks. So if you want to experience the best Bond adventure ever made into a game then keep an eye out and the moment the game gets to 60 bucks or less snatch it the fuck up.

So anyway, do you have a favorite Bond movie or game? Is the idea of playing 007 First Light intimidating? Do you even like the 007 franchise? I mean, it’s had near constant issues with sexism. But most importantly, do you have a movie series that are one off adventures so rarely tied to each other that you desperately wish would be adapted into a videogame? We recently had the best Indiana Jones game ever, and now the best Bond game ever, what’s next? Or rather, what do you want to be next?

Meow,

Cat

On Monday Xbox’s rather new CEO, Asha Sharma, decided that they needed a “reset” which meant laying off a bunch of people, getting rid of a few studios by either selling them or letting them go independent, and “exploring the future of Arkane Lyon with the French government because that’s the law over there before a closure or other massive change in a company”. This has lead to renowned studios like iD software basically cutting their workforce in half to the point where them making their own games again seems rather unlikely, possibly dooming them into being a support studio. These are not popular decisions in the workforce, Xbox was already facing a hell of a precarious position with confusing decision after confusing decision under Phil Spencer, now Asha is cleaning up a mess at the exact moment when a mess is most needed to be cleaned up and cleaning up messes are hard and risky.

All of this leads me to worry. Not just because of the loss of jobs but because I’m suspicious that Microsoft putting Asha in charge is them engaging in a sadly common occurrence of putting any kind of minority in charge of the company during times of risk for the company and when decisions are gonna be made that are incredibly unpopular among employees thus possibly leading towards the minority taking the blame and, eventually, resigning because of the unpopularity of their decisions. This is called a Glass Cliff.

Today I want to cover how these decisions could lead to an actual resurgence of Xbox gaming where they’re not focused on Gamepass as the end all be all of their business, or it could lead to closures of studio after studio and a far larger shrinking of Xbox as a whole. But, first I want to go into more detail of what a Glass Cliff is and what other companies have engaged in them before. Finally, I’m gonna end with my hope for the future for the industry and what I think the workforce needs to do to fight back against the c-suites insistence on cost cutting coming down not on their heads but on the common employees heads. Let’s dive in.

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What does Glass Cliff look like?

Let’s start with some examples. Back in 2021, Liz Truss became PM of the UK. It was a hell of a time for the country still dealing with the Brexit clusterfuck, COVID shit, the economy falling apart, and the former PM (Boris Johnson) facing a massive scandal about how he handled COVID as well as his own disregard for his own COVID restrictions. As such Liz Truss was put in charge and was not someone that people expected to succeed as, since 2016, they had been through 3 PMs. So she was coming off of a hell of a run (they are now actually preparing for the 7th in 10 years). She also was not at all charismatic and people just genuinely disliked her. She did a horrible job, both because her policies just couldn’t fix what the economy was going through largely since those policies were partially the cause of it and that the impacts of COVID around the worlds economy was just getting worse.

So, after 50 days, she resigned. She is a great example of the Glass Cliff because she was put in an impossible situation where she just couldn’t succeed (course I completely disagreed with her politics so I never thought she could succeed as her policies were part of the problem), there was even a meme about if her time in office would outlive a cabbage (the cabbage outlived her). The next PM was Rishi Sunak, who faced a similar situation of being a minority and someone who just wasn’t able to succeed. His party eventually lost an election in 2024 and he left office. The Glass cliff shows that these people are elevated to positions of power during times of strife because of multiple reasons, but one of the most relevant to this article is because it makes the company, or governmental party, have someone to blame when shit falls apart and so they don’t have to risk the crashing and burning of their “more valued employees”.

CEO of Pinsight, Martin Lanik, phrased it like this1:

“In times of crisis, companies don’t want to risk the loss of who they believe to be their most valuable, high-potential talent—white men. In tough times, they are more likely to sacrifice employees who they perceive as less valued and more dispensable—women and racial minorities,”

As you can see by my totally relevant example to the segment of my readers that aren’t in the know about UK politics (which I only am because I’m a political nerd from the States), the public sector is guilty of the Glass Cliff phenomenon as much as the corporate side of the economy. An example of that side is Marissa Mayer who was appointed CEO of Yahoo in 2012 when the company has lost massive market share to Google and was headed towards irrelevancy. Not 7 months after her appointment she made the decision to completely ban remote work for employees. A tremendously unpopular move inside the company made worse by the fact that she had spent money to make a soundproof office at her home so she could have her newborn son at work. So she banned remote work but was actively engaging in it, which went down as well as you’d expect. A few months later Yahoo bought Tumblr for a billion bucks, a massive deal for the time and a dumb one as Tumblr very quickly lost value post acquisition. Which, given that the company was having less revenue, seemed rather odd.

Then, she implemented a performance review system that was incredibly unpopular and lead to a multitude of firings that might have actually just been layoffs disguised. Despite all her “attempts” to save the company there wasn’t a whole lot she could do. She was put in an incredibly risky situation to somehow turn a shrinking business into a success and even though the stock price for the company increased for a time due to a decision to buy Alibaba stock made prior to her tenure, her time as CEO was a dud. She was pushed to resign by multiple stakeholders for what they believed was poor performance and eventually did about a year and a half later after she sold Yahoo to Verizon for 4.48 billion. I mean, the only successful thing she lead to was her getting richer when she got a 23 million dollar payout for resigning after Yahoo was bought by Verizon. Sure, the company didn’t collapse, which was great, but Yahoo is still irrelevant in modern day, the only people I know who use it are older folks.2

Importantly, everything I’m saying here about Mayer and Truss are massively understated. They aren’t even the Cliffsnotes, there’s just too much that happened for me to fully go into all the details that make both of them perfect examples of the Glass Cliff phenomenon for both the public and private sectors. They both suffered from times of difficulty for the jobs they entered, they both ended up failing at what they were hopefully brought in to do. They both made unpopular decisions and were blamed and made fun of (mostly Truss for that one) or heavily criticized because of them. They were then both pushed to and eventually did resign due to being unable to fix the problems they were in charge of fixing.

So basically, the Glass Cliff isn’t about women or minorities being put in charge being a problem, that would be just blatant sexism or racism or even both depending on the person. It’s about women and people of color being put in charge as a scapegoat. As a way of keeping the “more worthy” employees safe while these not white men make the tough decisions that lead to backlash. This is what is starting to happen at Xbox, Asha might be making decisions that she thinks she genuinely has to make, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t also lining up with the Glass Cliff phenomenon. The real question is what will come next, and particularly, if Asha will stick around for years to come (I actually hope so). Which, actually, this is a great segue to the next section.

Two paths diverge in an Xbox future.

Asha has talked about these decisions as a reset for Xbox. It seems like she’s wanting to re-frame what the future of the company should be. With the reintroduction of exclusives (a damn difficult genie to put back in the bottle), the question becomes, what’s next for Xbox. What path will they head down. Personally I believe there are two paths in their future (hence the title of the section).

First, they might end up collapsing. Asha stated that in a typical year they lost 64 cents for every dollar they invested3. That’s not a sustainable model. Now, they might be turning a profit but not a sustainable one. They’ve poured so damn much into Gamepass that the fact that it’s not growing as much as it used to has really fucked them. So, if that doesn’t change it’ll just get worse. This change in direction might seem like a reset when you layoff some of the teams that are actually producing games instead of getting rid of layers of management like you mentioned there’s only so much you can do before you’re not making many games anymore. With a shrinkage in good games that you’re making you’ll end up having less and less reasons for people to buy into your ecosystem and, even worse, as it seems Asha is also wanting to drastically change Gamepass (maybe even eliminating third party games from the service), people won’t even want to use that. So then what do you do? Continue cost cutting, because you don’t know how else to have a successful business.

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This is a spiral path where layoff after layoff will continue to happen over and over and over and over again. They’d get worse each time until eventually the only studios actually making games at Xbox will be the Call of Duty studios, Blizzard will continue churning out Overwatch and WoW stuff, Bethesda and almost all of Zenimax will be solely focused on Elder Scrolls 6, Forza Horizon games will continue to be one of the successful parts, and Halo Studios will crash and burn just like it did before the rebrand from 343. Gears might get a new game here and there but it won’t be successful leading to that being put on Ice. Put simply, this path is one of restructure after restructure that, while not Asha’s fault as she didn’t make the mess that Xbox got itself into, is absolutely up to her what direction she heads down and how much time she is willing to give Studios to start producing stuff that people want to play. This spiral path also comes with price increases to games, Gamepass, and consoles.

Then, there’s the second path. One where this reset for Xbox actually is that. It undoes the fuck ups that happened under Phil Spencer’s tenure (and even Don Mattrick’s from back when the Xbox One was announced). This path would start with this massive layoff, help studios re-asses where they want to go, then hire some new folks for their next game, or simply become more focused on the game they’re making instead of incubating other projects needlessly, where Asha could give them some actual time to produce a game that doesn’t have mismanagement everywhere. Plus maybe she could even allow some games to not cost 70 bucks (for instance, Avowed should have cost 50 bucks and would have sold much much better at that price as it would have been a great game for a great deal, like Clair Obscur).

Now, the problem here is that, as you are probably already feeling, this doesn’t seem possible and is a damn nice reading of the situation currently centered in Redmond, Washington. But that’s the thing, this is the positive path. A path that leads towards a resurgence. In reality though both paths have one thing in common, Gamepass needs to change. It’s an unsustainable part of their business, cannibalizes sales, and has lead to a lot of really good games falling by the wayside because other games on gamepass take the spotlight a lot. The positive path is a good path for the company, but it’s also a long term one. One thing about business is that you don’t think years and years ahead, you think by quarters and single fiscal years. That’s it. So this positive path isn’t going to happen without some massive leeway from Microsoft’s own c-suite. Which, while possible, seems unlikely.

Technically, there is a third path (gasp) that’s actually just a mix between the two. I think a mix of both is most likely, I don’t think Asha will be able to undo all the BS she has to, and I don’t think she even wants to. She is there to make unpopular decisions and finally make Xbox more of a “sustainable” business (despite already being profitable that doesn’t matter in business because you gotta keep growing, she’s even said in her letter to Xbox that she wants to reach a billion players a DAY). She’s changing the direction of the company and even though these paths I’ve put forward are just the directions I see, it doesn’t mean I’m not missing something, I’m not a Jason Schreier, I don’t have any inside knowledge, I’m just an outsider who is basing my thoughts and opinions on the shitty industry direction we’ve been headed towards for a while, and my own views on how unsustainable the current corporate approach to business is.

The industry workers need to respond.

So with all the layoffs happening in the industry, there’s a real possibility this could lead to a flashpoint moment for the common workers. What could that flashpoint lead to? Put simply, unionization.

The tech industry is not a fan of unionization, which is rather disappointing. Workers collectively advocating for each other is democracy in action and is often the only way many of them will get respect. I mean, all the benefits we know as workers in any industry is because of unions. People died for the ability to collectively organize, and all industries should take advantage of that ability. Videogames though have started on their path towards industry wide unionization but the problem right now is that they’re all studio unions or even just department unions, not industry wide unions. This is a massive problem.

See, the industry is facing AI massively changing the landscape for workers, it’s being integrated everywhere by corporations and people are being laid off because of it. The problem is that when only one studio unionizes to try and limit the integration of AI to only specific aspects of development, something that a union contract can definitely do, it only helps that studio. Other studios still suffer the problems that that studio managed to keep at bay. If an industry union emerged for videogame developers in general then they as a whole could fight back against AI integration.

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What’s more, unions provide recourse or, at least, warning and requirements. When a layoff happens there’s not a ton a union can do but they can provide public political pressure to the company so they face ramifications and, even more, they can limit how layoffs are implemented and provide requirements for when layoffs happen both in how much warning people get and the amount of benefits people get in severance.

Unions might not have prevented all the layoffs and studio closures that are sweeping the industry. But they could have limited the impact, saved some people’s jobs, and helped people recover post layoff for a time with good severance benefits being required.

Unionization also strikes fear in management. Management that is currently going largely unpunished for the decisions they made that lead to these layoffs. They deserve to be afraid. They shouldn’t be patting themselves on the back that they managed to cut costs (through layoffs) to meet profit expectations, they should be quivering in their fucking boots. Management needs to take a pay cut, they need to be fired more often, they’re the fuck ups, not the developers who just poured their blood, sweat, and tears into a game. Strikes do this.

Imagine if this situation happened again and again (like it currently is), well an industry wide union could have had a clause that layoffs can only be implemented when all other avenues for cost cutting have been exhausted, including managerial salary reductions, and if that didn’t seem to be happening then they could strike or even pursue legal action. Strikes aren’t perfect of course, paying for your bills during that time can be difficult, but it’s still possible. The Screen Actors Guild recently struck (if you consider 2023 to be recent), as did the voice actor equivalent, both of which lead to improved union contracts. And AI can’t scab all the jobs that the striking workers filled. What’s more, when a contract expires the union could put forward terms of a new contract which included some level of limitations of how and when a layoff can be implemented and if the different studio/publishers didn’t agree to that then the union could initiate a strike to get their demands met (this was the actual situation happening with the SAG-AFTRA strike).

Again, put simply, the recourse to all of this, the flashpoint and call to action this needs to be, is that the industry needs to collectively bargain together, not studio by studio. I believe this is possible, course I’m not an expert. And anti-union propaganda is so ubiquitous that its a tough battle to convince people. But I still think it’s possible.

Important note: I am not an expert on unionization, I know there’s a fuck ton of work that goes into negotiations and creation, I fully accept that I am drastically oversimplifying the whole process and what can happen because of a union. That doesn’t change though that industry wide unionization is the correct direction for developers to pursue.

The Conclusion

So with that, I remain concerned about the future of Xbox. I think competition is good and, as you can see with how Sony has been acting with getting rid of physical media without introducing any kind of extra features to make up for the loss of being able to do things like loan your friend the game (maybe a Steam Family like thing), they need to be knocked down a peg by competition. Personally, I think a big change for Xbox that needs to happen is to drastically change Gamepass, maybe to more of a per game rental service, similar to Kanopy where you get a certain amount of tickets per month and you can choose to use those for specific games that you want to play and different ones cost a different amount of tickets (my partner came up with this kind of idea, I had originally thought that Gamepass should just be phased out). There’s a whole lot more to go into there so that’s a completely separate topic for a different article but still.

The industry is facing a cliff, and Asha Sharma is facing an incredibly risky situation that might collapse around her causing her to be blamed in a classic Glass Cliff situation. Or she’ll be one of the lucky ones and survive for a decade like Phil Spencer did. Who knows, certainly not me, I left my future telling cards in my other pair of pants.

What about you? Are you concerned about the future of the industry and Xbox? Do you have an idea that you think might help them pull through? Do you think these recent decisions will lead to collapse of the Xbox brand or that they’ll lead to a resurgence in their relevance? And most importantly, what do you think are ways developers could fight back? Sound off in the comments!

Meow,

Cat

This is my 100th post! I’m closing in on 2 full years doing this blog and it’s been kinda insane how much it’s grown. I have over 170 subscribers and have gotten more attention than I ever expected to get. Truth be told I expected nothing, this was originally just a place for me to write down my thoughts instead of me just talking to my partner about them despite them not understanding said thoughts since they hadn’t played the game. But now it’s much larger and I am so so grateful to everyone who has been here to watch it grow.

Anyway, with my 100th post I thought I’d do something special, I’m gonna go over my favorite games ever. Specifically my 10 favorite games ever, in no particular order. This was a tough list to come up with and I had to eliminate some games that just weren’t up to snuff for the top 10. I’m an easy girl to please so I genuinely wish I could make this my top 20 or top 50 but I’m not up for starting a series of this or for making a long as fuck article so anyway. It’s just 10 games and many games were narrowed out of this list because they just didn’t stack up when I went back and played them again recently or years ago so while I’d love to include games that I have fond memories of alone, if it doesn’t stack up in replay then it got left behind. Now, let’s celebrate 100 posts together as you find out more about my taste in games!

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Mass Effect Trilogy

Yes, I understand this is a cop out since this is 3 games. I don’t care, nowadays if I play them I play all 3 so they may as well be 1 game. I’ve talked about Mass Effect many many times, I even have a tattoo of a Mass Relay. I adore the series. From the opening of Mass Effect 1 to the closing of Mass Effect 3, the trilogy is a journey unlike any other in gaming. I’ve written about it before as one of my comfort games in my Finding Comfort in Non-Cozy Games series and all I said there still holds true. Truth be told though I haven’t played it in a while because doing this blog has taken up a lot of my gaming. I don’t really replay games much anymore. But the Mass Effect Trilogy still holds a space in my head that draws me back to it, makes me want to play it again. I’ve recently been working on some world design for a TTRPG that my partner and I have been developing and Mass Effect is a massive inspiration for it. As such I can’t not have it as one of my favorites.

Persona 5

Okay, I know what you’re thinking, Persona 5? Not Persona 5 Royal? But you wrote about that one in your Finding Comfort in Non-Cozy Games series! And you’re right I did. So then why Persona 5 and not Royal? Put simply, Royal added a lot of bits into the game that, while complimentary to the journey, aren’t quite in line with what made the game special to me. Royal got distracted with its new character, it made tons of Quality of Life improvements but that doesn’t change that the game also peeled away from what made the game great. Case in point, it changed parts of the ending. It made the impact of your final decision on Christmas much less impactful. By the time the third semester was over you only had a 2 week jump where the rest of the Phantom Thieves did their work to help you out. It just made that part feel rushed. While in the original ending it felt just...better. More so, the ending where you leave on a Train instead of driving off with your friends is also less bittersweet. Kinda depressing honestly. The original ending can still be achieved in Royal, mind you, but you have to ignore parts to do it. The original Persona 5 holds such a fond place in my heart and while I adore Royal, I would say the original beats it out for the spot on this list. It just feels better. More cohesive.

Life is Strange

The original Life is Strange was a monumental moment in gaming for me. It was the only episodic game that I truly adored, that I was sitting on the edge of my seat to see what was gonna happen. It was an experience that gave me more than just a simple story and gameplay, it gave me emotions that took me years to truly progress through. It helped me see myself in a game far more than I had before. I’ve always been mildly similar to Chloe, I saw myself in her. Her punkishness, how she gets so attached and falls apart when something bad happens, her thickheadedness, her willingness to put herself in danger because she trusts those around her so much to be there for her. She was a character that inspired me. Of course, with time has come more understanding of the character she was and the more complex aspects of the bad parts of her personality. Then, with the recent Life Is Strange: Reunion (review here) I finally saw the character as an adult with a more formed and mature personality. The original Life is Strange is where Chloe started and, in many ways for myself, it’s where I started to accept myself. It means a ton to me and I adore it.

Cyberpunk 2077

This one was a game I never expected to love as much as I did. I kinda expected to just find it mid, I mean, a lot of other people did. But instead when I played it after it launched I found a game filled with depth, amazingly realized and written characters all of which felt rooted in their world, a wonderful story filled with twists and turns, and a game that didn’t have enough time to fully realize all of it’s grand ideas (which it did years later). What I find strange is that many still look at it as one of those “Why couldn’t it have been this other thing that literally isn’t the same game?” Claiming that it just isn’t that good, that it feels contrived or just badly written, but I find that incredibly far from the truth and that usually that’s out of a want for what they wanted it to be in their head as opposed to what it is. The game feels amazing to play and you can easily get attached to the characters, you can even play a trans person which I, as a trans person, found amazing. Cyberpunk also is one of the principle inspirations for that TTRPG I talked about in the Mass Effect Trilogy section and it holds a place in my heart for that as well. Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t the game many thought it was gonna be, instead it was a game that was an amazing experience with characters that had personality and were fucking weird and filled with different political ideas behind what they believe. It was exactly what a Cyberpunk game should have been, it was a game with the personality and punk of the TTRPG and with the characters to match (and that I wrote about in that Finding Comfort in Non-Cozy Games series I’ve mentioned twice already). It was and still is amazing.

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Infamous 2

Back in 2008 I bought an Xbox 360. Within a week it had red ringed, so I returned it and got a PS3. Now, I could have just gotten a new 360 because I wanted to play games like Halo and Gears of War, but that wouldn’t let me play a game I had recently discovered. That wouldn’t let me play InFamous. A game all about being Cole MacGrath, an electric Super Hero in Empire City. When it eventually came out, I adored it, even though the jankiness of the cutscenes and character models, and even the shooting, stuck out as outdated. I still loved it and its story and its characters and its villian, but I knew a sequel would turn it up to 11. Well damn was I right. Infamous 2 came out and I immediately adored the fuck out of it. Sure, I missed the vibe of Empire City but I still loved New Marais. Sucker Punch updated their engine and ability to make cutscenes that didn’t look Janky and from the PS2 era, and they made the gameplay much, much smoother. Plus they introduced new powers and continued to develop the characters and gameplay. It was a great game not just because of what it was, but what it built on top. I think my biggest issue with it is that I just wanted to see Cole again in the next game but nope, we didn’t meet him again, sadly. Still love it though.

Watch Dogs 2

Strangely, I’ve found many people actually hate Watch Dogs 2. They view the original Watch Dogs as a great serious game with hacking that the sequel took and ruined with humor and fun. I actually view it the opposite, I think that the original Watch Dogs was boring with its seriousness that it was trying desperately to make you feel something and be cool and it just all fell flat for me. Aiden Pearce was a boring character personality wise and the gameplay was very much kneecapped by the seriousness of the whole thing. But then, with Watch Dogs 2 they took it in a direction that I fell in love with. Not only were there fun characters who didn’t take themselves too seriously you also felt like you were actually doing something. You had far more opportunities gameplay wise, they got rid of the BS unlocking of the map, they jumped right into the game without some boring slow introduction to hacking for Marcus, our main character. The hacking was far more fleshed out as well. The whole story and characters were great, I loved them all. The ending fell flat but I think that’s because it just needed a bigger climax instead of the middling one it got. Then the series took a story with awesome and fun characters and a wonderful main character and said “What if we had no real personality for our main character because anyone can be the main character?” which just absolutely ruined the game to me. Legion was boring, it took the lessons of Watch Dogs 2 and threw it all out the game window. Watch Dogs 2 is the definitive Watch Dogs experience for me and I will always love it for that, hacking in it has never not been fun and I wish we had another game that came even close to the magic it had with the blend of hacking and non-serious characters.

Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction

As I covered above, I grabbed a PS3 in 2008, but I needed a game with it right? You can’t just buy a console without a game! So I bought Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction of course! I hadn’t played the stories of the prior games in the series, but I had played the multiplayer so I knew some of the characters. Tools of Destruction introduced me to the world, the amazing characters, the dumb weapons, the fantastic platforming, and just to a wonderful experience that kept on giving and giving. The game wasn’t perfect, but no game is. I think back on Tools of Destruction incredibly fondly as both my first PS3 game and my first real Ratchet and Clank game, it is what got me truly into the series. Without playing it I wouldn’t have wanted to play A Crack in Time, or Rift Apart! It holds a place in my heart because of what it gave me at the time and for the future.

Batman: Arkham City

In my Legacy of the Dark Knight Review I talked about how Batman is my favorite super hero. Well, obviously, that means an Arkham game had to be on this list. Arkham City felt like the natural selection purely because it was the game that I felt had more of an interesting amount of Freedom and character interactions to it than Asylum. Sure, I loved Asylum, the puzzles were fun, the characters were fun and fleshed out, everything was awesome. But I still loved City more. It felt bigger, more interesting, more varied, and just more different. I loved being able to go around the whole of the sectioned off city as Batman, gliding around far more than you could in Asylum, and doing far more detective like stuff than in Asylum with it being so much more varied. It felt like a far more realized Batman game than Asylum did. It also felt far more cohesive and true to the idea of the adaptation as opposed to Knight which, while having some amazing moments and such, was just never going to live up to the fact that the Knight was actually just Red Hood while Rocksteady insisted he wasn’t. But he was, even using a red tinged mask at the end of the game. They tried too hard to make it seem like they were making a new character when in reality they were trying to do a twist and a very poorly hidden one. Because of that City takes the cake for best Batman game for me.

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Nine Sols

This one is the most recent addition to this list. Last year, I played Nine Sols and absolutely fell in love with it. Not only did it provide me with a cool as fuck sci-fi story with characters that felt like they had depth and all in a really well written and, occasionally, well drawn Comic format way. But it also brought along with it two accessibility settings that really set the bar for what I wanted out of hard games difficulty wise (check out the review for more). Going around the map, finding different secrets, getting as close as I, someone with difficulty doing fine motor control movements enough to be amazing at hard games, could to mastering the parry mechanic, and seeing Yi get revenge on those that left him to die. It was an amazing experience that made me want to get more into Metroidvania games, that made me want to try to find games with difficulty or accessibility settings that are supposed to be hard. It made me feel more capable of a writer because it allowed me to see what I wrote about that I wanted out of something like Silksong but actually in practice. It got me to play Lies of P, another game I adored. It is one of my favorite games ever because of all of this and I still think about it months and months later.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

The original Uncharted was good, it had issues but the characters were solid and the foundation was great. So with Uncharted 2 it was a big moment for the “treasure hunting” genre of games. It took the series from being about fun treasure hunting to also being about characters. Uncharted 2, to me, gave me the same memories of watching Indiana Jones films, it gave me feelings of running around through multiple environments and fighting bad guys only to come across a more paranormal (or at least weird) treasure that ends up corrupting the bad guy that has been searching for it the entire time. Uncharted 2 had moments that felt like movies with big action set pieces like a moving train and moments that felt like the characters were actually having a tender moment. The game set the standard for me for what I believed cinematic experiences could be in gaming. The next game in the series was good of course but this same feeling wasn’t replicated again until Uncharted 4. The Last of Us took part of what made Uncharted great, the characters, and developed it further but it still is not as good as the Uncharted series to me. Of course early on in my time writing on here I wrote about this and I still stand by it. Uncharted 2 has an amazing and wonderfully fun story that you can replay without being stressed or getting emotional. It’s wonderful.

The Conclusion

Well, that’s the 10. There’s a lot I wish I could have included. Making the short list were games like Metaphor: ReFantazio, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Portal 2, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, Witcher 3, Dishonored, Danganronpa 2, Wolfenstein: The New Order, Ikenfell, even Hi-Fi Rush. I’ve played so many games during my over 30 years of time on this earth and I love that I now write about them. This being my 100th post I figured I should end it with something special, but really all I have to say is that I appreciate everyone reading this, everyone who has provided advice, everyone who has given their thoughts in my comments, and all the lurkers who like my stuff but never interact. I’m here not just because I like writing but because it feels good to know other people like my writing too.

So Anyway, what are some of your favorite games ever? Do you agree with some of my picks? Do some of my picks really bother you? Do you think some of my picks make sense, but for completely different reasons? And do you have a game to recommend me that you think, if I played, would be added to this list? If you’ve thought “yes” to any of these let me know in the comments, I love reading them!

Meow,

Cat

Right off the bat it’s important I say that the price is, obviously, a disappointment. Coming in at $1049 US Dollars is a tall ask when I can get a pre-built at my local Micro-center for 999 and have it be more powerful. My partner and I have been off and on having the discussion for weeks of if we are getting the Steam Machine, if there was a price that was too much, what we might get instead, if we should just keep using our Media Server Computer that’s hooked up to the TV already, but is less powerful than the Steam Machine and sometimes is being used for Plex at the same time we might want to play and if we wanted a specific controller to come along with it? All of these are things that have been going through my mind for weeks and when, on Monday, the price was officially announced as below our “no way” budget, they started to become more real.

My partner and I decided that we are gonna get the Steam Machine. Frankly, it just fits our use case really well and, best of all, it’s the closest thing to a console-like experience in our living room while still having our Steam Library and still being a PC. So today, I want to take you, my dear reader, through the same thought process that I had with my partner. I want to go over how yeah, you can buy a more powerful PC for the same or slightly cheaper cost, how that doesn’t really matter because there’s more to the Steam Machine than power, and how the current market is absolutely borked when it comes to prices so this price isn’t even that unreasonable.

I also want you to know my thought process by no means applies to everyone, this is just how I’m thinking of it. You might, and probably will think differently, and that’s perfectly okay! It’s good to have a variety of people voicing their opinions on this out there, I am simply one among many.

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To Build or to buy a pre-build?

That is the question. Cause yeah, the Steam Machine isn’t an incredibly powerful machine. It’s a rather modest machine, one that is easily outclassed.

The argument goes that for 1049 you could easily buy or build a more powerful PC for the same or slightly cheaper cost and that this obviously means the Steam Machine is a rip-off. I mean, take a look at this PC:

It’s got a stronger GPU, CPU, slightly faster RAM and more storage. All for 50 bucks cheaper since it’s on a deal over at Micro-center. Yet, That thing is bulky. I’ve been to my local Micro-center, I’ve seen it in person. It isn’t a tiny PC like the Steam Machine. It’s larger, even if smaller than my current Desktop case. But should that matter? Is the only thing you could possibly want to do for the living room is play your games all on high even when you have a perfectly good Desktop in another room?

I mean for some l, definitely. I get that people want their games to run as best they can. Why suffer 80fps or even 50fps if spending 50 bucks less will get you well over 100? It’s a reasonable ask. I myself have been playing a lot of two games recently, 007: First Light (amazing game) and Monster Hunter Wilds (also an amazing game). Both of these games run amazingly well on my system and I’d like them to run well in my living room too. I don’t know if the Steam Machine will handle Wilds super well though. So Shouldn’t I want the best possible chance at that?

Even if I chose to build my own PC for the living room, instead of going for a pre-built I would likely be able to make a more powerful PC for around the same price. Every tech Youtuber is doing what they can to build a “more powerful than the Steam Machine” PC right now for the same cost because...well...the algorithm. Building a PC also gives you more opportunity to go for something even smaller. For those not in the know, there’s something called SFF (Small Form Factor) builds which are basically just super tiny PCs, most are specifically done with a motherboard size called mini-itx. It’s the smallest motherboard size for commercial sale currently on the market and it can get you some tiny ass builds. I did some looking and found some really nice cases for that size motherboard, which, if you’re interested in the Steam Machine, you want a nice case for your machine. This one is particularly popular:

But with SFF builds so too comes an SFF premium cost. mini-itx motherboards cost more and these tiny cases require specialized and more expensive power supplies. Plus you are limited on the size of your CPU cooler and GPU. Add in the tremendous pain in the ass building something so tiny is and that when it’s all done it’ll probably be insanely loud and run hot.(Compared to the steam machine) All in all, this is the closest to form factor you can really get to the Steam Machine while building it yourself and you’ll probably spend a bit more or around the same cost for, sure, a more powerful machine, but also one that is far more of a hassle and is that really worth it?

Another aspect is that building your own or buying a pre-built PC also leaves you with room to upgrade in the future, that you can upgrade the CPU or GPU eventually to make it even more powerful years down the line. This is a very good point. It’s probably the best point against buying the Steam Machine. But is that really the thing that should decide if you buy something? Just because it’ll be upgradeable eventually? For some yes, that’s the most important, while for others they might just want a hassle free experience and not have to worry about any of that.

I realize I’m constantly putting forward these arguments as questions and that might seem rather contrived. It’s not that I don’t think these are legitimate points, it’s okay to want these things. But when you choose to do those things you do give others up. So let’s talk about those things.

You’ll always give something up for something else.

The Steam Machine offers three things that no other competition in this market can beat, a smaller form factor, HDMI CEC, and software developers at valve and other game developers out there looking to squeeze every ounce of power out of this specific hardware. In many ways this is exactly what a console boasts. Yet the Steam Machine isn’t a console, it’s an open platform. Valve has talked about how they view this not as a console but as an extension of PC Gaming into the living room and I can’t help but agree. The Steam Machine isn’t meant to be the PC console, it’s meant to evoke a console-like experience in its simplicity.

More than that, the Steam Machine is going to be far more customizable than any other box that you could put into the living room. The Steam Deck has something called Decky loader that allows you to change the design of your decks home UI and, even more, add stuff to it that you wouldn’t be able to otherwise, so why would an equivalent not be made for the Machine? Even more, the Deck allows you to get super granular and fine tune your CPU clocks so it would make sense that the Machine would, at least eventually, allow you to do the same with your CPU and GPU. With my Steam Deck and my Legion Go S I’ve used this feature to make games run better when some of them actually benefit from lower CPU clock speeds. Now, to be fair, much of this is because of the APU powering the Deck which is a CPU and GPU combined and the Machine doesn’t have that, but that doesn’t mean the same kind of software isn’t possible. I fully expect to be able to get super granular with the Machine and be able to get every ounce of power out of the thing.

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Okay, so the customizability though is technically something you could do on any other PC, but the granular potential in the Machine to be able to easily change things without any fiddling through different applications and such is a lot more enticing to me. Then, there’s the form factor. See, I have a small house, 721 sqft (about 67m²) and my living room is already pretty cramped. Shoving another PC in there would mean I’d have to do a lot of maneuvering around, I’d have to get PC Stand to hold both my Server and this new PC and I’d have to find a place to move the bookcase that my server currently sits on. For me, in a small place with limited space, I have a spot under my TV in my TV Stand/Entertainment Center thing just big enough for the Steam Machine. I wouldn’t have to move anything, I’d just plop it into that space and boom I’d be gaming in mere minutes. That’s what I want. I don’t want to have to figure out where to move things in a tight space that I live in, I want to get something that already fits my space. I am giving up some of the upgradability sure, and some power sure, but that is something I’m willing to do personally.

Then there’s HDMI CEC, which for a long time I didn’t even know that’s what it was called. It’s the protocol software thing that allows your TV to turn on when your Console or Roku do. A normal PC, both pre-built and built myself, does not have that without a lot of extra finagling. It’s not an OS thing, it’s a port and software thing from what I understand. This means I never have to touch the damn power button. On a pre-built I’d have to press the button, turn the TV on, then turn my controller on and sit down. With the Machine I just press the Steam button on the controller and boom everything is on. Just like a console. Convenience is something a lot of people are willing to pay extra for.

So sure, I’ll give up some power, and some future upgradeability when I buy a Steam Machine. But for me, that is a cost I’m willing to pay so that I can be hassle free, especially when if I want to deal with the hassle I always have my own Desktop PC to deal with.

At the end of the day though this price isn’t what I was hoping for. I’d ideally have loved to pay about 200 bucks less for it. I still think it’s a reasonable price but that’s purely because the prices in the market have completely skyrocketed.

Up, Up, and Away!

When the price for the Machine was announced I immediately started to do some price researching. I was just going around and looking at different components even more than I had been recently when I bought some RAM at a far too high a price. I especially was comparing parts that I currently have, the price I got them for, and the price they are now worth. A lot of them weren’t that different. The bundle I got my CPU, Motherboard, and the original RAM before my replacement in was only about 100 bucks more expensive. But that was the bundle. The individual parts were several hundred more expensive overall. The GPU I got for 630 was now 1000. The CPU Cooler I got for 100 bucks was now 150 bucks. Even the RTX 3060 I had gotten a couple of years ago before I upgraded was 100 bucks more than when I got it. Everything is more expensive now and it absolutely sucks.

Then, there’s the recent news that the RAM makers out there are so flooded with business that they have no need to negotiate with Valve directly saying that if they tried to negotiate then the makers would just never talk to them again. Saying in a recent interview with Gamer Nexus:

“Look, there’s no contracts, there’s nothing. Like, those guys…they are…they give us a price every month or something and they say ‘You can buy that many’ and it’s yes or no. And if we say no, then they never talk to us again.”

So the RAM market is absolutely nuts right now, but so is the consumer market. Like, sure you can build a better PC for cheaper than the Steam Machine, but for most of the history PC Gaming that has been true. I, myself, have advised people around me to build their PC instead of buying them pre-built because it would be cheaper and more repairable. But they still elected to buy a pre-built. Only now do most pre-builts come with better specs than you can afford to build yourself, but that’s also just dependent on deals you find. My point is that the market is fucked and the price that the Steam Machine is, $1049 US for the base version, is as reasonable as it could have been in this market. I mean sure getting it to 999 would have been great for the brain thing where we thing that’s cheaper. But I just don’t think that’s that big of a difference.

There’s not a whole lot we can do honestly with this market. Sure you can build a better machine right now, but what about in a year? Two? I would fucking hope prices will have come down by then, but what if they’ve gone up? The Steam Machine is an unreasonable price if it was in the prior market but it’s not. Right now, as much as it fucking sucks, it’s a reasonable ask.

Of course there is the subsidization point of whether Valve should have sold the machines at a loss in order to gain market share but the reason why console manufacturers are able to do that is two fold. First, they make back a ton of their money in subscriptions and game sales on their locked ecosystem that the Machine doesn’t have. And Second, the one that I don’t see most people talking about, Moore’s Law. Which, if you’re not aware, basically says that technology that exists today will get cheaper over time. So the subsidization has been possible because it’s a temporary thing and they don’t expect to always sell their consoles at a loss. But with prices going up frequently and the market being so messed up, it’s not guaranteed that a 100-200 dollar loss that Valve could conceivably sell the Machine at would stay that much a loss. If prices go up and they sell at a loss now then all of a sudden that loss will drastically increase. It’s a fucked situation and nothing can really be done about it...well....unless the AI bubble popped. Then that would likely lead to massive decreases in cost...and loss of millions of jobs. But hey, cheaper RAM!

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The Conclusion

So that’s kinda what has been going on in my head since the announcement on Monday. I’m on a list to buy a Machine, I hope to be in the first wave so I can play games in my living room. But I also have no idea since they’re randomizing it. The Steam Machine may not be the best deal you could get, but that doesn’t mean its gonna be trash. And, most importantly, you might want to take reviewers with a grain of salt. Pre-release software is usually drastically different than at and post-release. Once people have had the release version in their hands for a month or so then we can start to have more of a conversation about how the system performs and how it might perform over time. Until then, who knows. I do know though that I will be reviewing the Machine. I mean, I may as well right, I already reviewed the controller last week, so why not do the Machine too! I’ll get to the Frame eventually, a future tattoo has taken over that cost and VR isn’t as useful to me as playing games on my couch would be.

Well, with that, what about you? Do you despise the price of the Steam Machine? Are you still intending on getting one? Did you ever want to get one? Do you think it’s absolutely insane the market is so borked at the moment? And, most importantly, do you think next-gen consoles are gonna be even more expensive than the Steam Machine because at this rate, and with the current gen still being pretty expensive, it’s not impossible that it’s at least close to that price? Maybe next-gen consoles should just be delayed, they really aren’t needed, this gen felt so short because of all the cross-gen stuff. I dunno, that’s a topic for a future article, not here at the end when I’m suppo-

Oh it seems my editor has told me I need to stop because I’m just meandering instead of ending. They’re right, as always. I hope to see your thoughts in the comments!

Meow,

Cat

It’s finally time for me to fulfill my sites namesake, I’m reviewing a controller. Obviously, I’m talking about the Steam Controller. This is something I’ve been waiting for for a long time.

I loved the original steam controller, I literally own 4 of them including 2 still in their original packaging as backup if the others broke, but what ended up pushing me away from using it more was the lack of a second thumbstick. Steam Input though was such a powerful tool it was astonishing what you could accomplish with it and I couldn’t wait to see what came next. Then, the Steam Deck came and I also fell in love with that and the controls.

So when this Steam Controller was announced I was ecstatic. I couldn’t wait to see how it felt to use and how I could use Steam Input for some nuts things, as it is for. Well, I’ve been using it for just under a month and I’ve found some really awesome uses for the buttons and track pads and I’ve basically found my new fulltime controller for literally every game.

This review is gonna start with how it feels to play a variety of games, I’ve played a ton of different types of games with it so I could try it out. Then I’m gonna talk about Steam Input and how it makes the controller into the perfect controller. After that, I’ll go over any downsides that I’ve experienced in my month of playing with the controller. Finally I’m gonna give my general thoughts and my recommendation on if you should spend the hundred bucks, or more for those of you reading from outside of the States (which according to my analytics is a whole lot of you). Now, let’s push on and finally fulfill my ultimate purpose, reviewing a controller.

Important Note: While I originally intended on including a section where I would compare the controller to others I think that’s not really possible in a written format without sounding quite....abstract. As such all I will say comparison wise is that I found it more comfortable than the 8bitdo Ultimate 2, the original Steam Controller, and the PS5 controller and about on par with the Xbox Controller. There have been some who called out the screw holes as uncomfortable but I never had a problem with it. And as I really like the next to each other thumbsticks I found it quite nice to hold and use overall. As did my partner whom has their own that they’ve been using as well and, despite having an adjustment period, quite likes it.

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Variety is the spice of life

I’ve had the controller for a month now and I’ve played a lot of different games with it. I play Mixtape, Monster Hunter World and Wilds, Baldur’s Gate 3, Peak, 007: First Light, Lego Batman Legacy of the Dark Knight, Helldivers 2, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Final Fantasy 16, FlyKnight, Far Far West, Devil May Cry 1, Flock Around, Webfishing, and The Division 2. There’s a lot of variety in that list of games and if there’s one thing playing that much has taught me it’s that the Steam Controller can handle anything.

Now, of course many of these required some tinkering, I messed around with my Baldur’s Gate 3 set up a lot so I could do some really helpful actions and so that I was basically playing it like I was on Mouse and Keyboard instead of a Controller. Primarily just because it was easier to deal with. Others, meanwhile, just lead to me adding a couple changes like my standard screenshot and recording back button usages. All of them though I was able to use the controller for.

That’s the thing about the Steam Controller, it can handle anything you throw at it. Of course, many people have wondered whether using the right trackpad for a mouse while also still using the other buttons and even joysticks and such would feel good, which is a very reasonable worry. Well, I can say that at least for me, someone with small-ish hands, it felt fantastic. Baldur’s Gate 3 was the real test in this department as I used literally all of the buttons and touchpads and thumbsticks for something and it genuinely felt fantastic.

If you have a game that you are wondering if it would work well with the controller then the answer is yes, but it might require some tinkering to get it just right for you. Which, actually, leads me to my next point...

Steam Input? I hardly know her!

Okay so let’s say you’re new to the whole Steam Input thing, what is it? Steam Input is a powerful piece of integrated Steam software that allows you to not just change what button is bound to what for your controller, but also allows you to make it do whatever button(s), keyboard inputs, mouse inputs, or just system inputs (things like taking a Screenshot or activating a screen recording that does in fact record the whole audio on your PC not just the game) that you could want. It’s an incredibly powerful tool that let’s you make the game play how you want it to play.

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For instance, as an example of something I used Steam Input for while on my Steam Deck. In Animal Well you get a cool bubble power which you can jump on top of. The thing is that you can, if you press buttons quick enough place down another bubble next to you and jump onto that one which can allow you to cross massive gaps in areas you really shouldn’t have been able to. Well, I had such trouble tapping two things at the exact same time despite them being right next to each other so I decided to make one of the back buttons be those two buttons. Because of that whenever I pressed that back button I was able to take the action of pressing those two buttons in one button press and do the fancy trick everyone was doing with the bubble. All because of Steam Input. It literally let me play the game more comfortably.

But wait, that’s with the Steam Deck, what about the Steam Controller? What have I used Steam Input for now not years ago? Well, that’s a good question. Recently I’ve been playing a lot of Monster Hunter Wilds (a truly wonderful game) and in that they introduce something called a Focus Mode. Essentially when you hold the left trigger you get a reticle in the center of the screen and any attack you do goes in the direction you are looking instead of the direction the character is facing. This was a way of making the game more casual friendly as people like me have been frustrated by how I’ve tried attacking big ol’ Monsters in Monster Hunter World but because I ended up facing the slightly wrong direction nothing connected. The Focus Mode does that and reveals Wounds which allow you to do extra damage. It’s a whole mechanic and makes the game feel so much better to play. But holding the left trigger for that, when you’re someone like me who is gonna probably always be using it, kinda sucks and hurts. So what’s a Cat to do?

Well. I decided to use Steam Input to do two things. First, the left trigger also zooms in and out of maps and goes through some things in menus so I let that stay by making that a normal action but then having a separate action that, when held for a certain amount of time, toggles the focus mode. Because of that I can just hold the trigger for a couple seconds, toggle it, and have focus mode on as much as I want. Then all I have to do to un-toggle it is just press the trigger again. Not even hold it again, just press it once. It’s an amazing thing about Steam Input, it literally helps you play a game more comfortably.

But that’s not even talking about Gyro. Personally, I was skeptical about using Gyro for anything, but then I tried it. In Far Far West (another truly wonderful game) you play a cowboy running around doing Helldivers 2 like stuff around a map. It’s an FPS, has great gunplay, and is a ton of fun to play, particularly with friends. Well here I decided to try using Gyro for aiming. What people recommend is using it for fine movements after the main aiming does majority of the work. But how could you do this you ask? Simple. Use Steam input so that Gyro is only turned on during a full pull of the left trigger. This means that when you sorta half pull the left trigger you’ll do the characteristic aim down sights to get a good look. There you can aim for the enemy all you want. But what if you have a large group of enemies and you killed that first one yourself but the others are slightly next to it but not next to it enough that you want to use your thumbsticks? Well simply fully pull that trigger and boom you’ve got Gyro and can move the controller to get those enemies easily when it’s set to Gyro to Mouse function. With that function you can change a bunch of settings, but particularly the most important is the sensitivity. Do you want slight movements of the controller to move it a lot or a little? That’s all changeable.

The thing about Steam Input is that it takes your controller from being something a developer decides how it should work best and makes it into something you get to decided how you want it to work best. It makes each game into a more personalized experience. It allows you to play how you want.

Plus, there’s also the tremendously powerful tool of Community Layouts that allow you to try to find someone who has already done all the work for that thing you want the controller to do and then use their layout for the controller (something that already has a ton of options for because of the button parity it has with the Steam Deck). You’re then able to change it to make it yours as well! The community is honestly one of the best parts of Steam Input because you can see what others have done, use what they have done, and still make changes. Steam Input is one of the defining features of the controller and I am so glad it exists.

Any downsides?

The thing about Steam Input is that it often mixes inputs. So the majority of the controller will have normal controller assignments (the A button is the normal A button) but then we introduce the touchpad which, in some games, is best not being a controller assignment at all. Many people like to use them as a mouse while keeping the buttons as the normal controller buttons. Or there’s the Gyro which, for now, is best used as a mouse input. These lead to mixed inputs on the controller which for many games is fine, many many handle them like nothing at all. Some do just change the button prompts during the different input, but others....struggle.

For instance, I was playing 007: First Light and really enjoying it on the controller. During the training montage at the beginning I decided to use the gyro as a mouse for minor adjustments to my shot, something I went over doing in the prior section because of how great it was. Well, here in First Light the game fucking panicked. It didn’t know what to do. So when I used the Gyro it worked sure, but then it wouldn’t go back to controller for a bit. It was stuck as mouse and keyboard and I had to pause and unpause the game to get it back to working.

Now, you’d think that there are several modes to the Gyro so maybe using it as a mouse here just wasn’t recommended and wouldn’t work like it did for me in Far Far West. I then changed the Gyro to be a joystick and it just...didn’t work. I mean it would work sometimes, but often it didn’t and usually when it did it was after moving the controller around far more than it needed to be moved in the mouse mode. See, it turns out that the Gyro to Joystick mode is kinda broken at the moment. This is a purely software issue so it’s not the controllers fault, but it is still a frustration. Steam Input is basically the most powerful part of the controller, but when one part of it doesn’t work it jumps out at you and gets really annoying. Course you can figure out ways around it but that takes a lot of messing about and sometimes what’s best with software that’s kinda broken is to just wait for it to get fixed.

There have been no other downsides to the controller.

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Thoughts and Conclusion

Overall the Steam Controller is one thing to me, and that’s exactly what I wanted it to be, near perfect. Sure there is the one downside I talked about but that’s the thing about every piece of tech out there: nothings perfect. The Steam Controller has done what no other controller has managed to do for me, not even the original, and that’s provide me with a satisfying tinkering controller experience that allows me to play how I want to while remaining comfortable. One that doesn’t feel limited by others decisions, one that let’s me mess around enough that I can experiment and find something that feels best. It also is just more comfortable for me than any other controller I’ve used and I just adore every second I’m playing a game with it.

So then what do I recommend? Should you buy it? Or, rather, should you reserve it and hope that Steam sends you an email to get one sooner rather than later? Yes. Yes if you play with a controller and want one that let’s you handle literally anything you throw at it then you should buy it. And if you thought that because it only works with Steam it’s a no buy then rejoice! There is software that exists to allow it to work with whatever you want. It’s an amazing controller that deserves to be your main controller for all your PC gaming needs.

And with that, my blogs purpose has been fulfilled, I have reviewed a controller. I can finally leave my corner. What does that mean you might ask? Absolutely nothing, it’s just a nonsense joke. So then...let’s talk about you! Have you bought the controller? If you did how do you like it? Have you found any use for the grip sense “buttons”? And if you haven’t bought the controller, do you intend to? Have you just reserved one and are desperately waiting for Steam to send you that damn email? Let me know in the comments!

Meow,

Cat

There’s really only one superhero I enjoy almost all media of, Batman. I’ve got tons of comics, movies, a poster, have played the Arkham games multiple times, and have way too much space on my media server all dedicated to that one character. So when a new game comes out that is all about him I just have to play it. Just last month, LEGO Batman Legacy of the Dark Knight came out and I was instantly having a great time with it.

Yet something stuck out as a big problem with it that frustrated me. Something that I also enjoyed parts of. The game is a complicated experience and not just because there’s a lot of side content collectibles, but because I have mixed feelings about it. So let’s get into it.

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The Premise

Welp, if you’ve ever wanted almost all of the live action Batman movies adapted into Lego format all in one seemingly interconnected story instead of choosing between films like the Lego Star Wars games did then that’s what this is. You play as Batman and others in the Bat-fam and play through all of the live action Batman movies. All with some minor divergence here and there for smaller references to other Batman stories. And you do this all in a beautifully realized Gotham that is bustling with traffic and people all for you to run down and into with your batmobile. Plus you get to customize how your characters look with different suits, shaders, and different Batmobiles. It’s basically the ultimate Lego Batman game.

The Good

Let’s start with the elephant in the room, the game is basically Lego Arkham lite. It’s fucking awesome. Not only is the combat a more simplistic version as that series, but the sounds of the menus are almost the same, the gadgets are almost all there, the Riddler puzzles are there, you use grates in the floor and perches to sneakily take out enemies, the brilliant characterization of the villains is there. It’s honestly kinda nuts how much this game is just an Arkham game with a Lego skin and I am so damn glad that it is. If you love those games as much as I do then you will adore this one.

The game is filled with references, because of course. The thing that surprised me is that it’s not just references to Batman and DC stuff. There’s just plain old film references as well. Sure some of it is because of the actors who played those parts in the movie, but it’s still other film references. For instance, early in the game we have the scene where Bruce has arrived back from his time training with the League of Shadows and has, after some small adventures with Gordon, gone to Wayne tower for the first time since returning. Here he has to produce his card to the receptionist at the door to be able to go and see Lucius Fox. Well, there’s a character next to him when he produces his card who, after Bruce leaves to go see Lucius says “Look at that card, that color, is that eggshell?” and continues on doing a reference to American Psycho which Christian Bale also starred in. This was a hilarious reference that sets the tone for a ton of different referential humor later on in the game. There’s stuff for the villains going on who played them in the movie like with Danny Devito who played Penguin. There’s stuff just throughout the world with small references to other Batman or DC stuff, like the whole intro to Batman The Animated Series. There’s graffiti all around with small referential stuff there for if you’ve read some of the comics, there’s billboards all around with in-universe references for both the movies and the comics. The game is absolutely filled with references to so many things and I adore it for that (even the damn Akira slide, video below). I laughed a ton and was that damn Leonard DiCaprio meme with him pointing at the screen a ton while playing. It was a great time.

The gameplay overall is a lot of fun. I enjoyed flying around the city, or driving around with the batmobile and running into objects and cars and people because it was fun and sometimes gave me studs, the in-game currency. The combat is just a simplified version of the Arkham games but does have it’s own spin on it given that there’s a second character who has their own unique abilities. That second character adds a lot of depth to the game. While in the last Lego Star Wars game that second character wasn’t that important, here they’re fundamental to almost all of the puzzles and are also useful in combat. For instance, one of my favorite character abilities in combat was how Catwoman is able to spin enemies with her whip like a damn top. There’s so many cool aspects to these characters that get extra depth as you unlock different aspects of their abilities. All of this makes for some great core gameplay that keeps the game fun and engaging even when the story takes a nose dive.

Then, there are the puzzles. Oh my, the puzzles. Something so awesome about the game is how we got Riddler stuff just like in the Arkham games and oh my does it deliver. Sure they’re not as complex as some puzzles from Arkham Knight, but the fact is that they are still there. They still make you think, they still make you wonder how you’re supposed to do something and then when you realize it you still get a “I got it” moment. It’s a great little thing to do while you’re going around the city. Personally, I never specifically went around just doing Riddler and other puzzles, instead I just grabbed them whenever I was in the area because of my driving or flying around. It was a way of not making them feel like a chore because there are definitely a ton of puzzles across the map of the game and it can feel overwhelming.

Finally, the mission structure is fantastic. I loved going through each different area, from the Iceberg Lounge in Chapter 1 (where there were a ton of references) to the Grayson Circus in Chapter 3, to the Dark Knight chase scene in Chapter 5, the game has some damn good missions that, even if the story behind them isn’t amazing, is still a lot of fun to play. There’s also collectibles throughout the missions that if you destroy 5 of you can then use them to decorate parts of the Bat Cave! Either you can find out what they are by trying to destroy everything, or you can just pause the game and it’ll show what the collectible is so you know right away what to look for. The missions are also super good at utilizing that Chapters new character and their abilities. Just, all in all, great mission structure and I thoroughly enjoyed my time playing through them.

Also, sidenote: there are quicktime events in the game, but there’s a setting to disable them. While it might lead to some awkward pauses in moments when you would normally be mashing a button, it makes for a much better experience. So I’d recommend turning on that setting.

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The Bad

The core problem with the game is that it is, at its heart, an adaptation. This comes with all the positives and negatives that adaptations suffer from. For instance, the first few chapters make a decent amount of sense. Sure they will often do concurrent stories of different movies at the same time but it still has an easy to follow thread. But then when we get to the Christopher Nolan films it all falls apart. The Dark Knight, for instance, is done primarily with one mission without some of the best scenes, it’s mainly just the chase scene for it. Then Arkham Asylum has its first mission adapted all so we can have the joker interrogation scene from Dark Knight. We have characters that don’t really make sense to be in certain scenes like Talia Al Ghoul who is evil in The Dark Knight Rises but somehow a friend in The Dark Knight mission and the Arkham Asylum mission.

Essentially, none of it makes sense. It feels like the team at TT ran out of time to put more work into the recent movies and that just fucking sucks. I adored the Dark Knight Trilogy, I have a big poster from Mondo Posters on my wall, it’s one of my favorite movie trilogies. While there is tremendously accurate replication of the directing style of the trilogy, it’s done dirty with how little adaptation it actually gets as they were obviously running out of road for the game and, for some reason, decided not to fully adapt The Batman. The Dark Knight Rises does get more attention, which is something, but that’s mainly because it is the climax of the game. Basically, adaptation wise, the game is really fun early on, but just absolutely falls apart in the last two chapters and that holds the game back from having a truly fun last third of the story. I think they should have just adapted animated stuff instead, doing the live action films when they are so disconnected style wise just puts them in a bind of how they are supposed to deal with that stuff. It’s a tight rope that they walked well for a while but then plummeted off.

Finally, something small that really bugged me was how you are constantly coming across puzzles in early game that you literally cannot complete because you haven’t unlocked the character necessary to be able to do it. This sucks. It’s an annoying experience to be going around the city, have the Riddler pop in over your radio and insult you with a challenge and then to find out that actually you can’t beat that challenge because you haven’t unlocked a character yet. The cool thing about the city is that Gotham does change somewhat over the course of the game so I would have loved if the puzzles that you can’t complete without certain characters only showed up once you had unlocked those characters. Thankfully, the map does show a lock on the ones you can’t complete yet so you don’t have to just spend a bunch of time trying to figure out how to complete something only to be disappointed, but I still think there was a better way than still showing you the challenges you couldn’t complete. Plus, it would have been cool to see Gotham populate more and more with different side challenges over the course of the game and this would mean that you would continue to have the lovely experience of going around the city and coming across a challenge without worry of inability to complete it. Just disappointing.

The Meh

One thing that particularly made the Arkham games was side content. Not just collectibles and Riddler trophies. Yet here, the only side content is the stereotypical Lego stuff, running around collecting stuff. They’re all batman themed of course but it’s still rather bare-bones. There’s no story there, at least not really. There’s just...puzzles. And if that is your thing then awesome, you’ll love collecting everything. But, as I’ve stated many times, I am not a completionist person so to me it was more of a mere distraction when I wanted to grab some things that allowed me to upgrade more or tried to get new suits. It was overall, rather boring. Of course, being a simple Lego game, I didn’t really expect more, just kinda hoped for more. Hence why this is in the Meh section.

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The Ending - Reaction

The ending was an ending. To be honest I was really curious how they were going to bring together the ending of The Dark Knight Rises when, spoilers of course, Batman fakes his death at the end. They did a good job, although the ending of this was obviously not the ending of the movie. That’s kind of a big theme of the game. Sure it’s an adaptation, but it’s more of a retelling with completely different aspects that don’t have to do with it being a Lego game and entirely to do with the fact that it’s really hard to tell the story of a bunch of non-interconnected films without a mess of a story. The ending was exactly the same in that way, a mess of a retelling, but at least an enjoyable one.

The Conclusion

Overall, LEGO Batman Legacy of the Dark Knight left me both happy and frustrated. Don’t get me wrong, I adored the vast majority of the game. It’s a ton of fun going around and playing as the characters, customizing them, playing through the movies as them, it’s all enjoyable. But those last two chapters just...ugh. They really hold the game back from being an excellent experience. They’re my biggest problem with it. It’s a frustration that has lead to me struggling to really nail down a rating for the game. But after much deliberation both with myself as I walked around debating it outloud to my house and as my cats watched me, and also with my partner, I finally came to a conclusion.

This is definitely an amazing LEGO Batman game. I think, if you like those games, LEGO games in general, the Arkham games, and particularly the live action Batman movies, then you will have a mostly great time with it. You might even love it. But if you’re expecting something just as good as the Arkham games, something that ties together all the films in a somehow amazingly well done fashion, or something with any amount of side missions, then you will be disappointed. Either way, I’d say if you can manage to get it at not the 70 dollar asking price then I’d do that. 60 bucks is a good price for it. Have that as your maximum. Sure it’s great, but 70 bucks is too much for any game.

With that, do you have a favorite superhero? Have you enjoyed Batman movies and shows in the past? Do you have a favorite Lego game? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Meow,

Cat

I try to play a wider variety of games with friends. We play as many things as possible varying from something like Super Battle Golf to Baldur’s Gate 3 to Monster Hunter World. Usually we play games based off of one of the groups suggestions. For Baldur’s Gate 3 that suggestion was mine, same with Helldivers 2. But recently, or rather at the start of the year, my partner made a suggestion for us to play. They suggested the indie Kings field-like game FlyKnight. It was a game they had suggested them and I play for a while and they managed to get the group on board so we grabbed it.

It was...certainly an experience. One that I have many thoughts on. While I was genuinely considering if I actually wanted to review the game or use it to have a conversation about something else, I landed on just reviewing it and then maybe later having the conversation this game brought up in my mind at a later date in a more thorough article that focuses on multiple games instead of piling onto FlyKnight.

So then, lets get into that review of FlyKnight, because it’s definitely an experience to be had, and one that some will definitely like more than others.

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The Premise

You are a fly and a squire who has to prove you are worthy of being a Knight by defeating the evil Lunamoth who has taken over and cursed the kingdom preventing your fellow flies from growing wings. You will delve into the depths of a dungeon to defeat her and the bugs that fight for her. And you can do so solo or in co-op of up to 4 players. Will you, and possibly your fellow friends, earn your knighthood? Or has the witch Lunamoth doomed the kingdom to certain destruction? It’s up to you to crawl through the dungeon of caves, swamps, and a castle to find out.

The Good

The atmosphere of FlyKnight is what kept me from getting so annoyed at the game that I suggested never playing it again. The game takes place in a world wonderfully realized by the art team and wonderfully experienced when you play the game. From the swamp area that has way too much water and enemies that will push you into it, to the abandoned castle in a later area that has fly corpses controlled by magic who will run at you and knock you over to attack you on the ground. The game is short, but what is there is absolutely filled with atmosphere. Add in that you can change the amount of appellation, or crunchy-ness as the game calls it, and also giving you several filter options you can add on top of the graphics and you have an incredibly atmospheric game that lets you choose the atmosphere you want. It’s awesome.

The design of the whole game is also rather good. The game is rather linear, which my friends had some issues with, but personally I preferred that. The level design is simplistic because of the atmosphere of it all. You feel confined, it’s claustrophobic even in the open swamp area. Sure there’s a couple directions you can go but you’re always moving forward and those paths with usually meet up. It’s meant to make you feel like you have no choice but to keep moving forward. The only time you get to calm down are when you come across your campfires. Most campfires come with an NPC that details some lore for the story and several also come with a fishing section (fishing video below). All of this makes for a wonderfully designed game that is very souls-y while also still having it’s own style. And again, while there’s a lot of linearity, I just don’t think that’s a bad thing. You’re not meant to get lost in the tunnels (although the small amount of path variance that exists in some levels can still lead to you feeling lost), you’re meant to move forward and defeat the scourge on the kingdom. Linearity serves that purpose, at least it did for me.

Finally and a rather small aspect, I adored the magic in the game. From conjuring up a line of vines that damage enemies rather significantly to shooting a damage-over-time spell at enemies and staying back while they slowly die. The magic is a great aspect and I just wish it was more in depth.

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The Bad

Okay, I think the most annoying part, actually the really only annoying part, is the combat. The problem here though is that the combat is the core of the game. You have multiple types of weapons you can find over the course of the game that all have different moves and designs and such but they all have the same problem. Slowness. The game feels very much like a Kingsfield-like game because you’re not able to move fast. I mean the fastest weapons were the knives that I used and I was still moving incredibly slow. The whole point is that the combat is supposed to be a very deliberate and committed action. You’re meant to think about when you act, how long it takes you to act, how much stamina you have. All of that.

The problem arises that you can have that and not have such slow combat. I felt like the character I was playing was attacking at a snails pace, often it seemed like the enemies were able to attack twice in my singular attack animation. And that was with the fastest weapons I had. The weapons were all just so damn slow it felt painful to attack anyone. This gets exponentially more difficult in co-op when there are usually not a ton of enemies so you, and up to 3 of your friends, are attacking one or two enemies which often leads to friendly fire and taking much more damage than you’d think.

The game is, like all souls-likes, about strategy. But it also never really felt fair in that. Now, I hate a lot of the difficulty of Soulsbourne games. Hell, I will always think difficulty accessibility modifiers are easy things for them to do and would enhance the game exponentially, but at least in most of the ones I’ve played of those games the strategy felt more fair. Particularly, I find that in those games you find better weapons that are still in your wheelhouse of preferred weapons, you never feel like you’re being held back by the weapons you choose to use. While here I used the knives I had for almost the entire game because I wasn’t given any other types of knives until near the very end. They were knives you get in the literal tutorial. Sure, I tried using other weapons, but they moved even slower.The knives allowed me to feel like I could actually attack at a more decent rate. More so, they didn’t have a massive amount of the animation for just getting back to the start. There were several weapons where it felt like the longest part of the attack animation wasn’t actually attacking, it was waiting for your weapon to stop moving. All the while you’d be moving rather slowly and...it was just upsettingly slow.

And again, I understand this was the point of the design. The developers intended on making the game slow, on making you feel like attacking was pulling teeth so you’d do it only when you knew you could do it successfully. But that didn’t make it fun for me, it made it excruciating. Now, my partner adored it, and they’re reading this right now as my editor disagreeing with everything I’m saying here, but this isn’t their review, it’s mine, and I just did not like it. Below is a video showing differing speeds of some weapons, it feels slower than it might look (partially because of how slow you walk) but you can definitely see why I like the knives, just much faster.

At it’s core, FlyKnight’s combat is slow, the enemies knock you back a fair amount which leads to you having to wait a very long time to be able to stand back up and attack them again all while they can continue attacking you, the animations take forever to finish, the enemies move much much faster than you, and it just doesn’t feel fair. It’s the biggest problem I had with the game and one that I could likely continue talking about but I don’t want to repeat myself more. Basically, combat too slow, I hated it.

The boss fights are also kinda hit and miss. Some of them are really interesting with different mechanics, while others are just...a big thing in the middle of the room that you attack without much of a worry. The ones with different mechanics also had those mechanics come out of nowhere, there was no slow buildup and introduction of those mechanics from earlier enemies or bosses, they just all of a sudden had that mechanic and you had to work around it. So that kind of boss design and slow introduction of boss-like mechanics could have been done much better.

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The Meh

The base walk speed, which is what you’ll mostly be walking at since running takes your stamina up super quickly, is incredibly slow. Then when you’re out of stamina, which will happen sometimes, you’ll move at a snails pace. This section is essentially just becoming my own personal pet peeve section where I almost always bring up slow walking but this time is a little different because it’s not forced slow walking for contextual reasons. It’s the base fucking walk speed. I’m not even saying I think it should be the speed of the running, I just hate how slow it is. It kinda plays into the core aspect of the game that I covered above that I hate the most though, the slowness might be the point but it definitely isn’t always exceptionally fun.

The Ending - Reaction

The ending was...an ending. I mean the game had a story of course, you had to beat the evil witch Lunamoth. But the game took a lesson from similar games of its kind and decided that featuring the story to any significant extent wasn’t a good idea. So while I beat the game and felt like the final boss was satisfying, I didn’t feel like the story was a satisfying conclusion or anything. Actually, even more so, the game sets up a sequel quite directly, so I felt like the ending was very boring and overall anti-climactic.

The Conclusion

FlyKnight is a short adventure, my group finished it in about 3 hours. During that time you’ll be immersed in a tremendously well realized atmosphere of bugs in caves fighting with magic and weapons. But those fights are slow, annoying, and just feel unfair. It’s not a game that you should play if you like combat that moves at any reasonable pace. Instead, FlyKnight is a game that you should play if you liked, or wanted to experience a game like, Kingsfield. It’s incredibly slow and unfair combat mimics that game quite well and is only for someone who wants that. Although, if you have 3 friends as well then you’re able to play and beat the game together rather easily so if you’re willing to suffer through the slower combat to experience the wonderful atmosphere, maybe grab some friends and play it together, it’s only 6 bucks on steam.

Personally, I hate slow combat games like FlyKnight, I’m so tired of having to be methodical and slow going instead of getting in and out quickly. I want more Bloodbourne like games. So what about you my dear reader? Do you like slow and methodical combat? Or do you prefer something either at a more normal or a much quicker pace? Let me know in the comments! And most importantly, do you want to see me talk more about my problems with slow combat? Because I have so much more to say and fully intend on writing more about it eventually.

Meow,

Cat

Destiny 2 is over. Or at least it’s about to be when the last update happens on June 9th. After almost 9 years of the game and 3 years of the original game the series is now over, at least for now. This means a lot for those in the community, people are losing the game they hoped to play “forever”. They’re going through the stages of grief, trying to organize ways to show Sony and Bungie that D2 is worth keeping around, that the franchise is worth investing in, but that won’t change anything, the game is done. That’s it. No changing it.

I’ve written about D2 a few times in my closing in on 2 years writing on Substack, both directly in my Why I Quit Playing Destiny 2 article that I put out just a couple months into doing this and more recently in my Abandon Casuals and Kill Your Game article. Both are articles that I stand by fully and I think are unusually prescient for the time in the community. However what I have never written about is what Destiny 2 actually means to me. Or, rather, what it meant to me. So today I want to do that. I want to talk about the memories I gained in the game, the drive I felt to continue it, that it was the only thing keeping me going for a couple years there, and that all things must come to an end, even an unexpected one. Let’s dive into the most personal article I’ve written in a while.

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Thanks for the Memories

There’s one thing the Destiny community all shares, we have memories of these games that we love and cherish. For me, those mostly were in the first game. Back when Destiny came out I had gained a new group of friends through my job working at a local library as the shelver and bed bug checker (unfortunately I found many but that’s a tale for a different situation). One of them bought Destiny and wanted to play it together. So I grabbed it and we started playing in February of 2015. Then, I got introduced to her brother in law and his friends and I all of a sudden had a group of people to play the game with that I had never met in real life but that I was still able to relate to and form memories with.

This was in the first year of the game, it wasn’t the best time in the history of it. The mode Trials of Osiris came out and we all sucked at PvP but it was the only consistent way to get to max level so we tried and tried to play the mode and always failed. It was brutal and anger inducing. But we still made memories. There was this one time when the three of us were able to do something we were absolutely terrible at and snipe the opposing team over and over again completely stomping them until the last round when we got wiped. But then one of us did a “self res” where you were able to come back from death, revived all of us, and we beat the team. We all partied, we triggered our supers and were ecstatic to have won one of the matches. We all felt the high of doing something that we never expected to be able to do. Of course we lost the next one but hey, it was something.

This is what made Destiny for me, moments of excitement and partying with friends. For instance, when the second expansion came out for the game there was the Raid (a 6 person activity that is built around mechanics and difficulty) Wrath of the Machine and there’s this encounter where you have to pick up certain parts for a machine and put them in the correct spot in a very tight amount of time while dealing with enemies, mines that slow you down, and a debuff that meant that once you reached the max stacks you couldn’t grab the part for a period of time so you had to keep changing who was carrying it. It was this really difficult moment in the Raid that we all had issues with and we kept failing and failing. Often just barely too, it lead to so much anger for us, to rage quitting, to just being done and going to play something else for the rest of the night. The experience went from being something we were enjoying to being a wall we were beating our head against. More so, it took us weeks and weeks to actually beat that encounter, but once we did it wasn’t just a moment of relief, but a moment of ecstatic joy. We felt good for the first time, we even jumped off the edge of the bridge the encounter was on with as much excitement as we had had in years dying in the process because of the joy, we felt like we could conquer the entire Raid after managing to defeat that bitch of an encounter. So we did, we got so good at it that we managed to beat the next 2 encounters, meaning we beat the final boss. It was an awesome moment where we kept dying but I managed to keep reviving our team throughout the rest of the raid.

See, the thing about Raids was that, back then, you had unlimited revives (Destiny 2 changed this so that in each encounter every person only had 1 revive so the experience of saving the run just disappeared) so you had the ability to have an almost complete team wipe and be able to have one person, usually me in my team, go around and revive everyone allowing us to continue the encounter and beat it. These were some of the best moments for the original game. It was a wonderful experience and was when my friends who played the game really felt like a team, a group of people who were capable and good at the game. Then things changed in Destiny 2.

Destiny 2 made a bunch of changes over the course of the life of the game and every single one lead to less and less people playing the game. It was this sad moment where I stopped playing with those people and lost those connections but those memories remained.

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I eventually made more memories with new players, like when there was a glitch to get up to 12 people into a Raid, but nothing quite beat the originals magic memories. Those memories are still with me, they still make me feel all fuzzy inside about having that time with my friends at the time, being able to just chill and have saves that allowed us as players to feel powerful. That’s what Destiny 1 and 2 were, memory machines.

It’s hard to let go

There’s this thing that happens in brains that makes memories with certain games: we fall in love with the gameplay and experience. We go from thinking of it as just one of many games to the one game giving us the memories that we crave. This drove me to continue playing the game even when it was just me. As I said above I ended up losing the friends I had who played the game, they stopped playing, but I sure didn’t. I still felt the drive to keep going. What mattered wasn’t the new memories I was making, but the memories I had made. At least for a time. Eventually things progressed to a different attachment, but that’s the next section.

This, for lack of a better word, addiction I felt was hard to let go of. I tried to pull new people into the game, my other group of friends who only really wanted to play GTA Online, but it never worked. They always fell off or just weren’t even interested in trying. You’d think this would make me less interested in continuing as the game was a multiplayer experience, but nah. What mattered was the attachment. The past with it. Not the possible future I had with the game.

Feeling the drive to play a game can often lead to you only playing that game. For me, that didn’t happen, but I know for many it did. People became so attached that their drive exceeded mine. I eventually dropped off the game after I realized it wasn’t for me anymore, but that didn’t lose my drive to be attached to it. I still checked in on the community, still looked at what was coming next, because that drive never left, it just changed.

The only thing that mattered

As I said above, there was once a time when Destiny 2 began to mean more to me than what I’ve talked about prior to this. In 2020, just before COVID I broke up with my abusive Ex. It was a brutal experience that left me feeling lost. Then COVID lock-downs happened and I lost what could have brought me new adventures. I didn’t know what to do. I started to see a new therapist, dealing with childhood trauma and the ramifications of it, but that only went so far. One day I told my therapist that sometimes the only thing that kept me going was Destiny 2. That it was what mattered most, not because of the memories I had in the past, not because of the connect I currently felt to it, but because I just wanted to see what happened next.

I’m sure many people have dealt with bad break ups. Especially during COVID when a lot of people were breaking up after having to spend so much damn time together. We all needed something. Some found new hobbies (I did this too eventually with gardening that I still do to this day), some found new friends online, some lived because of spite to outlive those in the public sphere. But me? The thing that mattered for a long while was just Destiny 2.

It meant the world to me, it meant that there was always something coming next. They had just announced 3 new expansions so I knew there was a future there, the only future I knew was definitely going to happen. So that’s what I attached to. Eventually, I found other things that began to drive me forward but Destiny 2 was still there for me when I needed it. It was there for me when I had nothing else. When I had lost what I held dear to me and when I didn’t know if I even wanted to continue in this crazy world we call life. Without it, I’m not sure I would still be here, that I’d be writing this. That I’d have over 150 amazing people who like to read my writing, who find what I say well formed thoughts instead of ramblings like I often think they are. Destiny 2 saved me, at least for a time.

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But all things must end

With all that I’ve said you’d think I’d be more upset with the soon to be last content update for the game. Sure I haven’t played it in almost 2 years, I’ve literally written about how much it bothered me that I felt abandoned by the continued direction of the game. Yet, I’m just relieved. Not just because I felt like the game wasn’t for me and now I can feel like I’m not missing out on possibly really good content or progression back towards what feels like a game that is more accepting of casual and non-hardcore oriented fans. I’m relieved because this is it. It’s over. It’s finally done.

The thing about relationships is that they all will end one way or another. Those of us in the Destiny community have had a relationship with the game. It’s had ups and downs, but it’s always been there, it’s always been changing and creating new things. There’s never been an end of the road.

But now there is. There will be one last moment of that relationship and sure we can try to cling on for dear life, sure we can try to bargain and convince ourselves that we as a community can convince a multi-billion dollar corporation to change it’s money oriented mind, but that’s not gonna happen. It’s over.

And that’s beautiful in a way. The game happened, we gained those memories, we felt joy and happiness, we felt sadness when characters died, we felt anger when changes were made that ruined the game in multiple ways. Those emotions were real, those times were real. They didn’t mean nothing, they weren’t a waste, they happened and that’s more than most games get. Destiny 2 was always going to end, it was headed towards this since The Final Shape (where I finally stopped playing the game). The ones who refuse to accept that, who decided to trash on Marathon as a way of making themselves feel better, who talk about trying to bury that game as a way of showing that Destiny as a franchise is the actually right direction for Bungie to head down, they are acting foolish. They are clinging to a game that was running on it’s last legs. There is always an end, there always was going to be an end.

We can argue over how we would have liked that to happen, how it would have been great if the game had ended years ago with Final Shape, or that they should have put out the next expansion as a grand finale, but that’s not reality. The reality is that it’s over. For so many reasons, there’s no future there past June 9th, and it’s time to accept it like those of us that dropped off of the game years ago. It’s time to play new games, even if they’re not quite the same. It’s time to make some new memories in new ways that you’ll cherish just as much as the ones you made in Destiny 1 and/or 2. You can do it. I believe in you.

The Conclusion

This got personal for me, but it was always going to. Destiny meant a lot to me as a franchise, I wanted it to thrive, to change back into something I actually desired to play. But I was always aware the path they were going down had this at the end of it. This was likely always going to be how it stopped. The sad part isn’t the game ending, it’s the failure of management to keep the game going, it’s the failure of management to communicate to the team that they shouldn’t be working on the next expansion because it would never come out, it’s the failure of management to divert so many resources away from the game that had such a dedicated player base back when Forsaken came out in 2018 and decided to make 2-3 more games. It’s the failure of management to think that it would be possible to be this kind of studio. And finally, it’s the failure of management that this will lead to layoffs while many higher ups will likely skate by without any repercussions for the absolute train-wreck that their decision making lead to.

All that said, I still am glad with the time I had with Destiny 1 and 2. But what about you? I assume if you’re reading this then you played Destiny 1 or 2 at some point. Did you make memories? What were your favorite ones? Was there anything that made you realize that the game had lost you? And are you sad about the end of the game? And even more, do you expect there to be any more games in the franchise eventually? Let me know in the comments, we can commiserate and reminisce together always remembering that there was a time when things were brighter for the franchise.

Meow,

Cat

Occasionally, I look back on the industry as a whole and think to myself, what if I could finally, for the first time, play one of those games that people loved back in the day (mid 2000s or earlier when I could have played it but didn’t) and review it now? Well, that’s when I run outside searching for a phone booth, remember that those have been completely phased out, get disappointed and just start spinning trying to replicate the time shifting effects of a phone booth only to remember that that wasn’t how that worked and I have just made myself so dizzy that I’m all of a sudden laying in my grass while the world spins, then I get up and go back to my couch in sadness only to sit down to play a game that has a reputation in the industry as something influential or as a cult hit. Today, we are doing a Throwback Review!

The Introduction

I enjoy a good character action game. They’ve provided me with some of my favorite times playing games. One series I always wanted to play from the start was Devil May Cry. Sure, back when DMC 5 came out I got it for free with my then partners GPU, so I played that completely unaware of...everything that came before, but that kinda misses a whole lot of the experience of the series. Because of that I always thought about going back and playing the 4 that came before that. Then the DMC HD collection (incidentally HD here only means 1080p, not anything higher) went on sale recently and I snatched it up so that I could play them. I expected to find some jank of course and maybe even kinda hate them, but I wanted to form my opinion myself instead of making any assumptions based on past knowledge of the series and time it came out in.

Surprisingly, I ended up finding myself having a good time with the game. Even more, I was having fun. Sure, there were some issues, but there was one thing that shined through those, this was a good game. It was a fun game. In spite of one of the core aspects of the game being a massive annoyance, I had a great time with Devil May Cry. It’s a game that’s almost 25 years old now and that’s pretty nuts when you think about it. That a game that old could hold up and be just as fun today as many thought it was back then. So, let’s dive into the reasons it holds up, and a core aspect that is a fundamental problem that bugged the hell out of me.

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The Premise

You play as Dante, a demon investigator guy who goes around pursuing demons all to try to find and kill the one that offed his mother back in the day. One day a woman that looks just like his mom comes into his rinky-dink office, beats him up until he fights back, then asks him to come to Mallet Island to stop Mundus, the Demon that Dante blames for the death of his mother and also happens to be the demon emperor, from escaping the prison that Dante’s dad put him in and entering the human world so that he can take it over and such. Dante and Trish go to Mallet Island without a second to spare and he has to explore the Island after Trish ditches him at the start, what he finds is a strangely abandoned castle on an island filled with different creatures and demons that he has to fight with his trusty sword and both of his pistols. Will he, the son of one of the strongest demons out there, survive the fight? Well, yes, there’s 4 more games in the series, of course he survives, what matters is how.

The Good

Devil May Cry originally started as a Resident Evil game but they realized it just didn’t fit that series so they made it its own thing, a very good idea. That said, the Resident Evil blood still runs thick through its veins both in a good way and a bad way. In a good way, the thing that I actually wanted DMC to inherit from Resident Evil was the atmosphere and, to me, that was on point. The small rooms filled with shuffled papers on a desk, that you can destroy that you couldn’t in RE, the large areas empty but for the uncomfortable question of why they’re empty, the objects in the game that don’t have a purpose at the start but once you keep playing or get to the ending they actually have a super important purpose. Some enemies hanging from the ceiling ready to drop down to lumber towards you and throw shit at you as you swipe at them with your weapons or shoot at them with your big guns. The strange tech magic things that just exist across the Island with seemingly no way to access them until later on in the game. The atmosphere is staggeringly wonderful in Devil May Cry despite the game only taking place on one island and without a ton of different scenery.

Even more RE exists in the game because you have to wander around to find keys and items that then allow you to unlock new areas of Mallet Island which will lead you to find other new items and so on. Resident Evil did a wonderful job gating progression in this way and DMC does as well. Although DMC chose to drop most of the puzzle elements and I think that makes a lot of sense since this is a more fast paced genre. I think some of my favorite moments in the short 4 hours of my playthrough came when I found something I could interact with but didn’t have it yet and then just searched to find what I needed and then once I found it I was ecstatic! That’s a good feeling and one I cherish as someone that loves games.

The combat is a lot of fun if simplistic, combos really come into their own later in the series as far as I can tell. The weapons are all fun, hit hard, and a joy to hit shit with. The guns are especially great. One of the things about DMC is the mix of gunplay and swordplay and, while the fluidity of the future games isn’t here, I still adored swiping with my sword and killing an enemy only to start shooting with my grenade launcher at the other enemies further away. It was great fun.

Finally, the story is...pretty bare bones. I mean we don’t know a whole lot about Dante besides that he’s the son of Sparda and goes on excursions to fight demons and such, we find out much more about him later in the series and he really comes into his own later on as well. But this Dante, the more subdued Dante, is still fun. He’s cracking jokes with bosses, he’s poking fun, while the more cheesy nature is in future games and I wanted to see that, I still enjoyed the subdued cheese that Dante engaged in here. There are really only 2 characters in the entire game, Dante and Trish, even the bad guy doesn’t really have a character to him besides EVIL and that he wants to take over the world. But again, what was there was enjoyable, I just look forward to the future games in the series so I can have a more in depth and dumb ass narrative that’s fun and interesting.

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The Bad

So here’s the bad part of the Resident Evil DNA, the fixed camera angles and the tank controls that go along with them. Much like I experienced in my Resident Evil HD review, multiple times I had issues where I was simply trying to move forward and the camera would change 3 times within a few steps and each time would bring with it a disorienting feeling of how to control the character. Once I adjusted it I’d be fine but then the next camera change would happen and I’d have to adjust...again. I’m so damn glad this design got dropped from both later DMC and Resident Evil games because it is just brutal looking back. Which is a real shame, I loved so much about the atmosphere on Mallet Island, but instead of being able to thoroughly enjoy it I constantly found myself fighting with the camera and the controls. It always felt like there was just one too many camera angles for each area when the game, multiple times, showed it was able to both push in and move around when the developers felt like it would be beneficial. It was exhausting.

The biggest problem here then comes from how the combat is MUCH faster in DMC than in Resident Evil. In RE you have a chance to adjust because the enemies are relatively slow for most of the game. You’re able to take a sec to reposition your hands. Meanwhile, in DMC the game is a character action based combat so you’re doing multiple attacks that are sweeping in their movement and oftentimes you’ll find yourself just on the edge of a camera angle mid fight and mid attack and going back and forth between the angles because of how your attack goes and because there are many enemies around you that do significant damage. If you let them. Now as you get more powerful this does help because you’re able to do more damage with your guns from a distance and not have to worry about the sometimes finicky camera. Then, add in that the game sometimes requires some platforming on very small areas and you just have yourself a recipe for annoyingness.

This is the biggest issue with the game and one that is, at its core, a product of the times. It’s understandable that there is this style of camera control given the Resident Evil blood in the games veins, and I wish the sequels would have fixed this issue because in future Throwback reviews for the series I’m going to have to just point to this section for the exact same problems.

Also, important note: Fuck underwater sections in older games. They’re all terrible and I wish I could skip all of them. Devs were still figuring out how to make the controls feel good in a 3D space and they always failed, at least for all the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube games that I’ve played. Thankfully here in DMC there weren’t a ton of them but there were still too many with horrible controls plus forcing you into first person for the sections so it was overall just damn bad and I am trying not to hold it against the game for those issues.

Dante would buy me coffee

The Meh

Honestly I really didn’t like how short the game was. My partner, and the internet, tells me it’s because you’re meant to push for S rank for all 23 levels but I’m just not a completionist, never have been and never will be. One time through was enough. Because of that once I finished my 4 hour play through I felt a little surprised it was so damn short. In Resident Evil you could play as the other character and get some other little tidbits for the story, but here you always play as charming and cheesy Dante and, while I liked him as a character, I just had no reason to keep playing once finished. When I played DMC 5 it was a much longer experience so I can only imagine they will get longer as they go on, but I guess that’s a future Cat discovery not mine.

The Ending - Reaction

The ending was just as cheesy as one would expect from this kind of game. You have the characteristic fighting of a god as well. It was honestly a lot of fun and showed even more of the RE DNA when there was a time limit to escape the island. Predictable? Sure. But not in a bad way. In a cheesy way. Just all around good cheesy stuff.

The Conclusion

I’ve done two throwback reviews on here and when I picked DMC because of a recent sale I kinda expected it to end up being just as much of an annoyance as Resident Evil HD and Psychonauts. Instead, I found myself playing a fun action game with a massive glaring flaw in the camera structure. I had far more of an enjoyable time with this than I did with my other older reviews. In fact, I’d hazard a guess to say that I think, despite the abhorrent camera, DMC is still a great time that holds up remarkably well....if you can look past that damn camera. I definitely recommend playing it, especially since it’s actually pretty short if you’re not wanting to get an S rank on all levels. Plus it comes with DMC 2 and 3 so you get several of the early games if you want to play the whole series, like I intend to.

But what about you? Have you played DMC? Do you have a favorite one of the series if so? And were you just as annoyed by the camera as I was? Do you have another older game that you think meant a lot to the industry that you think I should play? Let me know if so! I need to play more older games and I always forget to do so.

Meow,

Cat

I’ve been having an issue deciding what game I wanted to play next after finishing Life is Strange: Reunion (review here). It left me feeling kinda empty, that feeling you get when you finished something that meant a lot to you and took up so much of your thoughts. Well, last Friday, I got my Steam Controller and I knew I needed to play something to test it out. So I decided that I wanted to test not any of it’s special features yet but actually just what it’s like to use it as a normal controller. Which lead me to a game I was seeing receive massive praise around the Internets, Mixtape.

I heard it was more of a walking simulator as well and, personally, I enjoy those types of games. What Remains of Edith Finch was a thoroughly enjoyable experience for me and one that left me wanting more. I feel like games come in all types and there’s plenty of room for games that only really have a story without much complexity gameplay wise. So it was easy for me to sit down and play it without being fixated on how I wasn’t going to get anything complex.

What I found was a game that made me feel, that was filled with nostalgia that, even if I didn’t get all of it, made me remember both good and bad parts of my childhood. I found a game that might have some issues, but one that seems to not be held back by them. One that might have missed me on some things because of my unusually different late teens, but that still allowed me to relate to it because of the emotions being rather universal for the age of the characters. Mixtape is a game that isn’t long, but it is intriguing and wonderful and one that kick-started my want to play more games again. Plus, playing on the Steam Controller was easy peasy, although that won’t come into this review at all. So let’s get into it and find out more about Mixtape and why it’s a game I think you should play despite a pretty glaring flaw.

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The Premise

Mixtape is a nostalgia fueled trip back to small town 90’s American culture. You play as Stacy on her last night in her home town before she takes a trip to New York City to try and make it as a person that finds the perfect song for every moment. She’s spending the last night with her friends as she skateboards between her and their houses, drinks underage, goes to a party of people who are largely college aged, has emotional last night fights with said friends because of her leaving causing the ruining of plans that had been set up for months, and ends up doing everything she can to make the last night in what she has so lovingly named The Big Suck a night to remember forever. Will she succeed? Will everything fall apart in a characteristically teenage filled drama that is very filled with nostalgia for people who had drama filled teenage years? Or will things go completely according to plan as she has completely predicted the night down to every last detail? Time to find out that the last one is definitely not a yes.

The Good

I’m not someone who got to live through a lot of the 90s as a conscious person, being born in ‘94, I was only aware from ‘98 on. But I do remember a lot of what the characters were doing, primarily because I went through some similar experiences with my own teenage years in the mid-late 2000s even if there were obviously some differences. The thing is, the nostalgia still hit home for me. I remember a lot of what pre-9/11 America was like. I remember being able to run around my neighborhood with my friends without my mom being super worried about us being kidnapped. I remember burning CDs and watching VHS tapes on my CRT TV. I remember, in my teenage years disliking some of the restrictions my parents put on me. I remember wanting to be able to escape the town I grew up in. I remember being hurt by my friends not being willing to make plans with me because they were deliberately making plans without me and then hiding it so I would never know but then when I found out I felt like my world was caving in on itself and turning into a black and white moment of depression and all of this happening over a damn landline (just like the video below). I remember putting the headphones of my Walkman on to drown out the anxiety that my life was filled with during the really tough moments. I remember a lot of these things that the characters went through. I fully believe that the game doesn’t just apply to 90s kids, but also kids who straddle the line, who were born in the early mid 90s and were able to remember the times of optimism that the 90s centered on, even people who were born in the 2000s will understand some of this even if they don’t remember a time before social media like the rest of us do.

Mixtape’s nostalgia is also applicable to many. Our main character, Stacy, absolutely hates the world she lives in, she wants out and wants to be able to make a career somewhere new that will allow her to use the talents she’s developed in her small town and bring joy to the rest of the world. She’s smart and, even though she’s abandoning her friends to pursue her dream, she’s willing to accept that this is what she has to do in order to succeed. Now, whether or not that would actually come to fruition is anyone’s guess, but that’s not important. What matters is the promise of the future, that it seems to be ever brighter and it’s coming at us like a skateboarder going down a very steep hill (very fast and cannot stop).

Now, on to the gameplay as opposed to just the nostalgia. I genuinely adored what little gameplay existed. There were moments of wide ranging emotions conveyed simply through interaction and moments of simply walking around and investigating certain objects so you could find out more about the characters like other games of this type. The gameplay wasn’t as prevalent as I might have wanted, but I think what was there was excellent not because it was deep or complex or intense but because the simplicity of it expressed far more emotion and introspection than anything more complex could have.

The game is structured like a Mixtape (go figure) with each moment being defined by the song that Stacy decided fit that moment perfectly. She tells us, the player, with a fourth wall break the song and why it fits. It’s this really interesting way of showing not just the kind of character Stacy is, but the kind of thoughts she has flowing through her head when the moments present themselves. She’s not just a kid who is reading a script, she has made deliberate decisions about why certain songs fit more than others. Then, when the night goes haywire and her songs no longer fit the moment she’s able to come up with songs that fit this new moment on the fly. Obviously, this was written for the character, but the way it happens, the way it develops all feels natural. Teenagers are this awkward, this emotional. They are consumed by their lives that, as adults, we feel were more carefree. The characters even talk once about how crazy it is that adults say teens have a carefree life when it doesn’t feel that way to them. That perfectly captures what it’s like to be a teen who has the privilege of not having to worry about society beating down on them or of questioning their existence and how the world views people like them. I knew I was trans as a teen, I even had a conversation about it with my high school girlfriend. But I was worried that everyone would hate me for who I was (a lot of people do of course) so I had that massive weight pressing down on me. I also went through some medical issues in my late teens causing me to finish high school online so I had my own body betraying me before I could even vote. While that impacts my own personal experience of being a teen I can still see what it was meant to be like, I still think about how care free just going to school was before that. Sure I had issues, just like these kids, but they weren’t necessarily as intense as they are now. I mean, now I have a mortgage.

Finally, I want to talk about camera direction. Games aren’t meant to be movies but they can learn from them. I learned a lot in film school about how certain camera angles and other techniques convey emotion with a simple framing. Mixtape uses this knowledge in some rather influential ways. For instance, when we first meet Cassandra’s cop father the camera is almost like a go-pro on his chest looking up at a very low angle on his face. We, as the player, feel disoriented and intimated by how he is portrayed. We feel like how the characters feel, uncomfortable. Then when the shot that I show above happens the framing has Cassandra inside the little window made when your hands are on your hips. It conveys that her dad views himself as controlling her, as he is what decides who she is going to be, not her. She has no escape from him, he owns her. This then is further conveyed both before this scene where we find out that her mother is the one who decorates the entire house including Cassandras room which keeps her in this annoyingly pink princess room that obviously clashes with her personality, and after this moment where he decides that she isn’t going on her road trip with her friends, that she isn’t going to college. He is embarrassed of her which is also shown when we see her listening to her parents talking about how she is, essentially, a screw up who needs to be controlled for her own good. The game conveys so much of this not just through audio but through the camera. Even near the end of the game we have a moment where the camera moves in closer and closer to a character by jumping and pushing forward causing us to feel both the excitement of the moment and the anger the character is experiencing. The game, while could be called a more movie like experience, uses the techniques of movies to tell a story that conveys emotions through the interactivity, the writing, and the camera all in one. It’s truly a wonderful experience all in a pretty tight package.

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The Bad

The biggest issue with Mixtape, in my opinion, is that it’s too emulative of the 90s. Specifically, it focuses largely on the experience of small town white and generic folk and their lives back then as opposed to us seeing more of the experience of those outside of that kind of small town world. Now obviously this is simply because of how the game is structured, how the main characters aren’t really very punk when it comes to their personalities, and how the game as a whole is more focused on the idea that the small town sucks without us seeing the actual reasons it sucks. We see beautiful landscapes, memories with friends, the ability to explore the town before people like Oprah and such decided that kids needed to always be looked after and unable to explore the town without supervision, even easily accessible underage drinking. This town isn’t perfect but we still don’t see the bad side of it, the side of it that makes our main character hate it so much, besides just wanting to find a career in a field that doesn’t really exist in the town.

This isn’t necessarily a horrible thing but I think it left a missed opportunity where we got to see more negatives. I mean the worst thing that happens in the game is one of the characters of the group gets grounded by her asshole cop of a father and Stacy gets arrested without any actual consequences as she doesn’t end up actually being brought to the police station. Also the closest thing you get to seeing the unease around cops that many of us experience every day is in the clip below when cops drive by the trio while they’re headbanging in the car and that only lasts for a few seconds, and for many of us would be a very nostalgia filled moment where we remember headbanging in a car with our friends (seriously, I loved this scene, it was great fun). Basically, there should have been a reason to show why the town sucked because whenever Stacy called the town The Big Suck it just kinda fell flat.

This actually emulates the idea that the 90s were a more idyllic time, but the nostalgia of it is actually more emulative of the media of the time. Things like Friends, Seinfeld, The Nanny all centered on white folk. Hell, even shows like Family Matters and Fresh Prince focused on black people who were palatable to a white audience. Same with the late 90s Will and Grace that provided palatable Gay folk that allowed white straight culture to see us as real people. The 90s were a time when we were slowly moving towards progress that culminated in the massive progress of the 2010s, but it wasn’t perfect. While I adored Mixtape, I just feel like the game could have explored a theme like this more if it wasn’t trying to focus so much on the feeling of the 90s just being a better time for all of us.

The Meh

Slow walking was constant whenever you are in one of your friends, or your, rooms. It sucked and, while I understood it since the areas were small, I didn’t like it. But at least there was an FOV slider (looking very pointedly at recent games of a similar caliber like recent Life is Strange games and Lost Records). That’s about it.

Skate on over to Buy me a coffee

The Ending - Reaction

A game that has to do with nostalgia and having to face that nothing last forever, the future will always arrive, really needs to stick the landing. Fortunately, Mixtape manages to do what most of these types of games don’t, stick that fucking landing. When you see the last few moments you feel the bittersweet nature of the situation, you can remember yourself when you had to face the ever coming future. Having that emotional connection, with these characters, the nostalgia of the moment, all of it swells into the last scene that just has you sit in the ever coming future which just won’t let you go. To me that means thinking about how much time after high school I spent in the hospital, how much time I spent with friends that I eventually lost, how I never could have predicated having what I have now back then. Mixtape’s ending is perfect.

The Conclusion

I agree with much of the relational criticism of Mixtape. Yet still I find myself thinking of it a week later after I played it all in one day. Not just because of me writing this review either, because it was a meaningful experience. Sure I couldn’t relate to all of it, sure it wasn’t perfect and I wish they showed some of the negatives of small town American culture of the 90s, but it still is something special. It’s something I think people should play not just if you grew up in the 90s but if you had a childhood that made you wonder if the future is going to be bright or if the fact that it is coming at you full force is a terrifying prospect. You should play it because it’s a short experience that, while not able to relate in every part to everyone, has a little bit of most peoples childhood in it. I highly recommend it.

Overall though, it is 20 bucks for a 3 hour experience. That is....a mildly difficult prospect. I was able to get it at 18 or so and that helps, I mean it’s close to a movie ticket with more time and interactivity and you get to experience it home with all the snacks you have there. It’s also on gamepass so if you have that then you should definitely spend a few hours of your life playing it. If you can find it on a sale then you should get it, it’s a great little indie game and I want to experience more games like it. Not all games have to be complex gameplay experiences afterall, sometimes you just want to sit down and experience a story that makes you feel things.

Meow,

Cat

I recently had a conversation with my partner about the games Marathon, Destiny 2, and Helldivers 2. The conversation pertained to how many live service games seem to cater to the people who are hardcore fans as opposed to the casual people who, while are more likely to leave and come back to the game periodically, don’t spend as much money or time in the game. They are viewed as the “real fans” that the developer needs to cater to. The problem arises that when they cater to those hardcore fans it pushes away the casual player of their game.

For instance, if we look at games like Helldivers 2 and Destiny 2 you find communities filled with people who either in the past or present have complained that the game is just too easy. Both games have difficulty settings, but both have people claiming even the easiest or the next level up are just too damn easy. This has lead to both games having the developers trying to inject “challenge” back into the game. Which as also lead to some people simply dropping off from the games.

So with that, today I want to have another discussion about difficulty but it’ll be about how live service games that have some kind of balance to them can very easily lose the audience that gives the developers success. I’m going to talk about how when developers abandon the casual gamer they leave them behind and start to slowly and slowly narrow their audience leading to a more and more frustrating game for us casuals. I’ll be using some of my own personal experience here as well. Then I’ll talk about Whales, how these developers often drop casuals because they’re not where the real money is, just a few whales can make up for a bunch of lost casuals. Finally, I’ll talk about how the best thing developers can do is have the ability to withstand the accusations of being “too easy”. That when they hear that they shouldn’t make the whole game more difficult but instead focus on the high end of the difficulty scale. With that, let’s dive in.

Important note: when I refer to casuals in this piece I don’t usually mean casuals in general, I mean casual players of that specific genre or game. People who don’t spend all their time playing that one game or genre and sometimes go months without playing it. I am not referring to people who don’t usually play games and thus enjoy the hobby very very casually.

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Narrow won’t sustain you

Let’s look at 2 games for this section, first: Destiny 2.

Destiny 2 was a game I played from Release until 2024 where I finished my time with it after the Final Shape expansion. It was a game I adored and had a ton of fun with both by myself and with friends and randoms. But there was this accusation made against the game for most of the time I played it that it was simply “too easy”. This was primarily said by hardcores on the subreddit and streamers. The whole basis was that the players were just so strong and the AI was just not that good so you could just walk away from the game in some of the end game content with enemies all around you and come back 10 minutes later and still be alive. This isn’t wrong, you could do that. But only if you had an amazing build with the system Bungie had created. A system that had a trash on-boarding process and didn’t teach you how to actually make something that strong. Instead you had to go and use a browser tool to get a good build going.

The problem arose then with the Lightfall expansion that Bungie wanted to “Bringing the challenge back into Destiny 2”. What this meant was increasing the damage of the enemies a fuck ton and make all areas that had that tuning an absolute slog to play. Even worse, they introduced different level scaling. Before you were able to over level for some of the hardest stuff in the game which made it all around easier. It was great because you could be a higher level and be able to do lower level stuff allowing you to feel strong. But with this “difficulty” pass they decided that you wouldn’t be able to over-level anymore. So no matter what you would be capped at that level in that content. This meant that you would always feel like you’re only just able to do whatever you were doing.

The best example of this is Patrols. Those are just when you go to a planet and are able to free-roam around the different zones and do different activities and stuff. It had always been a chill experience literally since the first games original release in 2014. But then, with this change, they made this newest Patrol zone absolutely brutal. Suddenly it was incredibly difficult to do events that, on other planets you could solo, but on this one you had to have others. This was just absolutely annoyingly unfun. And it showed, after an expansion the newest location is usually the one with the most players but very soon after this one launched this newest location was mostly empty. This meant you could barely do most of the events because they were meant to be super hard during what used to be a chill experience.

Bungie decided they wanted to listen to the vocal minority that were crying out about the difficulty, particularly the streamers. What this lead to was a big drop off of players, and it didn’t help that that years content wasn’t the best as well. They eventually made it worse with Final Shape when they introduced Power Deltas that locked you to always being under-leveled for almost all pieces of content which was horrible.

The point though is that they narrowed their view of who they wanted to play their game, and because of it they lost a ton of players and now, with the newest expansions not really being very good and there being large content droughts, the game is underwater and may as well be in Maintenance mode (I think it should be, not all games have to live forever).

You’d hope then that Bungie would learn from this with Marathon but nope (to be fair, Bungie never seems to learn since they make the same mistake over and over and over again just with years apart because well “maybe it’ll work this time”). Marathon is an extraction shooter, one I haven’t played more than just the server slam. But I’ve paid attention to the community because I’m a curious person. The game is rather hardcore, even if there are some more casual aspects compared to other games in the genre. At its core it’s a sweaty experience where you have to constantly be anxious and worried about being shot on sight by other players.

Now that might seem like just all extraction shooters but Arc Raiders proved that’s not accurate. You can make one that appeals to casual players by letting PvE be a viable alternative to PvP. Marathon though was originally started by the Destiny PvP team so it makes sense they’d push into that. The problem arises that the game at the start was more casual friendly but because of both some minor changes Bungie made and, primarily, the way the endgame is structured, the game loses casuals very quickly.

This is because the game has a narrow focus of who it wants to attract. During development Bungie would have a bunch of creators from other more hardcore extraction shooters come out and give feedback, they wanted those people to jump ship over to Marathon. The problem is those other games don’t have massive player bases like Bungie seems to want. Instead they have a more moderately sized dedicated fanbase that adores their games and are unlikely to jump ship.

During the initial first Alpha for Marathon the game was criticized for not leaning into the hardcore extraction shooter aspects enough. So with the actual release of the game they made changes and leaned into it more. Personally I think that may have been a mistake. Not because they might not have made good choices, I think some of them were likely well thought out. Instead I think it’s because those choices drove away the possible casuals that might have gotten sucked into their game and actually played it and enjoyed it instead of trying it and dropping it almost immediately because of how it’s structured, like I did.

At the end of the day both Marathon and Destiny 2 have allowed themselves to be impacted by vocal minorities in the community that have seemingly forced their hand to structure their games in certain ways that are very off putting to the casual enjoyer of videogames. What is someone to do when they want to play an extraction shooter and be able to just primarily play PvE and team up with all the players they come across? Because they won’t play Marathon, they’ll play Arc Raiders. And as for Destiny 2’s player base...well...they’ll just move on to different games.

My point here is just that when you narrow who you want to attract to your game you drive everyone else away. You drive away the people that have been playing your game off and on for a decade, you drive away people who enjoyed playing your game for hours and hours while listening to podcasts or while they just turned their brain off, you drive away people who might have been interested in the genre your game exists in, but aren’t interested in a sweaty experience where they’re constantly stomped because they haven’t played the game for a hundred hours in around 2 months like others. If you drive away the casuals of your playerbase then you will kill your live service game.

Find me being a casual on Patreon!

Whales aren’t the lifeblood of a game

Okay, I definitely hear you say through your phone screen that I assume you read this on, casuals aren’t the ones driving the game, they aren’t the ones actually invested in it, the hardcore players are who keeps the game alive! Well guess what, you’re...mostly wrong. Now I am not saying that hardcore players aren’t the ones who are still logging on to the game even in times of just absolutely nothing to do, they absolutely are. But does that really mean they’re the ones keeping it alive? Given the massive spikes games experience when new content comes out wouldn’t that imply that there are far more players who exist out there that come and go from the game but still adore it and recommend it to their friends?

I myself am one of these players for Helldivers 2. It’s a game I’ve played off and on since it came out and I have loved almost all of my time with it! But because I haven’t played a thousand hours I’m somehow not helping keep the game alive? The hardcore players help, don’t get me wrong. They’re the whales in playtime and monetary purchases, but are they the real playerbase? Unless developers narrow their scope so much that they drive away everyone but the absolutely most hardcore players, which doesn’t usually happen, then it would make sense that these Whales are in fact a minority. That they’re the ones who are so in love with the game that they barely play anything else.

But they still aren’t the ones driving the game forward. That’s the casuals. Casuals are there off and on, just like me with Helldivers 2. They’re there when they want to be, they’ll spend money and they’ll recommend it to their friends but they’ll also not be super duper demanding to the developers. They’ll enjoy what they get and have issues with what they don’t, but they won’t push towards persecuting the developers to the point of death threats like what once happened to a Destiny 2 developer. Casuals aren’t what keeps a game going during content droughts but they are what keeps a game growing during a content flood. Whales are okay, but if you have a fuck ton of casuals who come and go from your game, who will be there when something happens and will also be willing to understand that your game doesn’t have to be everything for them, then you’re gonna have a game that grows, a game that thrives when new things come around.

Like nature, there’s an ebb and flow to a games playerbase. In nature, droughts happen and some things thrive during that drought (the whales) while others don’t (the casuals). But eventually droughts end, a rainstorm comes in and the things that weren’t thriving or were dying during the drought now come back. They bring the life back to the environment, even help it spread and grow lusher than ever before. The casuals of games drive them forward, not the whales.

Buy me casual Coffee?

Resist the difficulty injection temptation

Games have difficulty, I get it. I’ve written about difficulty before (primarily here), it’s one of my most passionate topics. I want games to be able to both meet the demands of people who want a difficult experience and those who want something easier and more relaxed. I think all of the games I have talked about in this are capable of that. All they have to do is resist the temptation and pestering of a vocal minority to narrow their focus to just hardcore players.

I know that’s hard, I mean, those players are the ones playing the game during droughts, the ones who constantly buy a fuck ton of your micro-transactions (a video going through all the Helldivers 2 Micro-transactions can be seen below but at least there you can earn the currency by playing). But I believe all developers are capable of meeting both sides of the argument. It’s not impossible to allow casuals to have a space and difficulty masochists to have one too.

I just desperately want games to have the ability to be for as many people as they can be and if you get pushed away from a game because of the difficulty I don’t think it’s a skill issue I think it’s often a game issue. Again, I’ve talked about that plenty, but I still believe it and will make it known.

All three games I’ve talked about are able to do this, they are capable of appealing to both sides of this debate. What they have to do is just ignore the vocal minority demanding the games be more hardcore, deriding casual players. Those people aren’t worth listening to.

The Conclusion

I feel like some of this ended up being more of a rant than I anticipated. I am arguably more of a hardcore “gamer” (in quotes because I really hate the negative connotation that word has earned since GamerGate) that most out there, I play a fuck ton of games and I adore them. They’re my comfort. But I’m also a casual for some games, like Helldivers 2. I want to play games that I have fun with and if Helldivers 2 introduced more and more difficulty into the lower difficulties of the game then I, and my friends, would stop playing it. Arrowhead would have lost 4 casual players because of listening to the demands of the vocal minority. That would be depressing. So because of that, and of course the conversation I had with my partner that I mentioned at the top, I felt like I had to write this.

At the end of the day, what matters is returning players. No game should be the only game a person plays, and studios shouldn’t try to make their games that. Instead devs who have a big patch yearly or just are live service developers need to make a game that keeps people coming back even after they’ve left. You can always have people get hooked on your game and stick around, but if you can get a large amount of people who return and return even after months and months and months of not playing, that’s the real sign of a long lasting community. And casual players are who drive that. I mean just look at the longevity of WoW and Final Fantasy 14 for an example, people will continue to come back if you make something worthwhile.

What about you? Do you consider yourself casual? Do you agree with my points about how casuals are actually what drive live service games growth? Are you annoyed when live service games that you used to find comfort in introduce something that completely ruins the experience for you? If so tell me about it! I want to hear your thoughts on any of these questions and anything I said during my article.

Meow,

Cat

Last week marked a massive anniversary for millions of people who love games. The 40th anniversary of the Konami code was officially on the 25th of April! For those not in the know (wait, how do you not know?) the Konami code was basically the first ever cheat code that was so damn popular it elevated a game from good to great. It started in the 1985 NES game Gradius and it was originally a way for the developer of the port of Gradius to get every power up easily so they would be able to test them without having to play the game through, as it was very hard. It then was promptly forgotten about and ended up in the final game before they had the ability to patch that shit out. Thus, the Konami code was born!

The code has obviously been everywhere in all of the videogame industry and is often referred to with other names like the Contra Code but in truth it’s the Konami code and that’s the only real name that fits.

But this isn’t an article about the history of the Konami code or the history of cheat codes, the second one is a cool idea but has been done. This is an article where I, a lowly Substack gaming blogger, making a plea to the industry to bring back cheat codes. Seriously, I know some developers read this, bring them back!

I intend to go over today why I think Cheat Codes are good for the industry, why I think they’re good for the games, and why I believe that if we brought them back it would help chill the whole industry out. So then, let’s press up up down down left right left right B A (and sometimes select start) and begin.

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They help the industry have fun

In the past decade most of the industry has taken a swing towards the serious. Games like The Last of Us and Red Dead Redemption 2 were viewed as cinematic milestones that made the industry look like it had the chops to be taken as a serious contender in the art scene as opposed to children’s toys. This similarly mirrored the maturing of the film industry which largely went from more slapstick stuff early days into more and more serious storytelling.

The thing is that when you go down that road you lose a lot of things you had before. Many times that’s completely reasonable, losing some of the slapstick and, particularly, non-silent aspects for films allowed them to breathe more and become more of an interesting experience to behold. But games have always been a different beast. Games are interactive afterall.

In an industry where tens of thousands of people have been laid off, where more and more games are coming out that try to be taken seriously and fail miserably, where AI is starting to allow for more ripoffs, the industry feels stifling. Imagine working on a game for 7 or 8 or 9 years and it’s been everything you think of and it comes out and it flops magnificently. Far more than anyone expected. That’s soul crushing.

So what the industry needs right now is to find a way to have fun again. I believe part, and I must stress only part, of the way to do this is to bring back developers putting things in game that are hidden through cheat codes. Not easter eggs necessarily but dumb shit. I love me a good hidden part of a game but Cheat Codes are on a whole other level.

Developers still make games they love, don’t get me wrong, but why not go another step with it. I believe they need to stick in a big head mode into their games, or maybe a mode where everyone is facing backwards, or where every time a gun goes off it’s actually a duck quacking. These things are dumb, but they’re fun. They make people laugh and they would make the developers laugh when making them. They wouldn’t laugh because they are slowly losing it after being forced to work 16 hour days for months on end even coming in on weekends and then end up shipping a game that gets critical acclaim and the best sales of the whole series of games only to still get laid off because it “didn’t meet targets” leading them to realize that no matter what they do as long as they keep working in the games industry it’s going to keep meaning that they will only work at a place for one project until they are laid off at the end of it and likely have to relocate to another city, state, or country. Instead they’d laugh because they’re having fun making dumb shit to hide in the thing they’re making.

They are something missing from modern games

Modern games have a lot going for them over their past iterations. Not only is it currently the easiest time ever to make a game, it’s also the time with the best processing power to make basically any kind of game you could possibly want and make it look however you want as well. There may as well not be a limit on your imagination. Yet, modern games still do have limits.

Sure in most ways that’s monetary limits and managerial limits. But when it comes to Cheat codes they got dropped largely in the PS3 and Xbox 360 era and basically entirely dropped in the PS4 and XBone era. No longer could you tap in codes on the main menu and activate some weird shit. This was something that millions of gamers adored to do. I still remember being online and seeing people talk about this new cheat code they discovered in a game, but I’ll talk about the community aspect in the next section.

In many ways, these things were either dropped or brought over to settings. The Last of Us 2 has a whole setting menu (which you can see above) where you can activate different things that used to be something you would have to do with cheat codes. I’m not opposed to that kind of thing, but with that movement it should mean cheat codes have to be more imaginative not just be left in the past.

Modern games have so much going for them, why not bring back something from a prior era? An era where games were less serious, even if some did take themselves seriously? Modern games need to be more fun first. There’s lots of ways to do this and the indie scene is fucking thriving with putting fun first, but I think a large step towards doing it would be to implement cheat codes again. Don’t tell people you’re doing it, just do it. Have fun with it, allow players to discover things like they currently do, but then make one much easier to activate than others so all of a sudden you happen to get the code and boom, your characters now all look like floating controllers.

My point is that the modern, mainly AAA, gaming space needs to be thinking more about enjoyment of the players and sometimes that means breaking your game, or being willing to let yourself be taken a little less seriously than you intend. Because it’s fun. Because it’s charming.

Up Up Down Down to find me on Patreon

Important note: I think cheat codes should be for dumb stuff primarily. Things like Big Head mode. This means that you can have some funny shit in your game while not impacting achievement systems or difficulty. Keep difficulty to accessibility settings as opposed to cheat codes. Of course if you decide to also introduce the kind of Last of Us 2 menu that I showed above then just deactivate achievements when those are on. Honestly, I have more thoughts about achievements in general, but this is probably the simplest solution.

They bring charm to their community

Something literally anyone who is in any specific games community online will tell you is that they often have a tendency to get quite filled with vitriol and hatred. I was a part of the online Destiny community for a decade and it was always the same thing of you list million reasons why you hate the game, talk about how horrible it treats you, how the game itself is just kinda crap in a lot of ways, and then you play it for 2 thousand hours and spend a bunch of money on it. People would talk about how much Bungie fucked up this week, eventually death threats were thrown around and the whole thing came crashing down.

Communities for games are meant to be places you go to share things you enjoy. Sure, some things will be annoying and you want to talk about that, but the core aspect is that you and the people in that community all enjoy that game, or series, and you’re there because of that.

There are many games out there that, when released have moments of “oh I figured this thing out, has anyone else” and you post about it and it brings to light a brand new thing for a large section of the community. That’s awesome! But those things can often just be mechanics, or better ways to use an item, or advice on a boss, or any other number of things that pertain solely to the core game experience. You usually don’t get people sharing “oh, did you know there’s this one setting that makes the game funny?

Well, that’s something cheat codes could bring back. To be clear, this used to be a thing. Back in the day, you used to be able to do cheat codes in loads of games and random shit would happen. I mean who doesn’t, if you’re old enough, remember buying those massive cheat code books that show you different weird shit you can do in the games you love? That stuff was awesome and being able to take those codes and share them with the people in the community or your friends meant that you all could laugh together, could have weird dumb fun together. Not that you’d just play the game better, but that you’d just have a more fun time.

This is what Cheat Codes bring to the table for the community. Connection. Charm. Dumb fun. These are simple things that might actually allow players to have more fun in games and not focus as much on the annoying thing they want to hate that week.

For a quick example, the most enjoyable moments in Destiny for me almost never had to do with how I was supposed to play the game and had to do with how Bungie didn’t expect us to play it. There was once a moment in 2021 where a glitch happened and you could connect a bunch more players to PvE activities than would normally be allowed. This meant you could do a Raid or Dungeon (endgame activities) with 12 people. And a Raid is meant for 6 and a dungeon is meant for 3. You could literally do nuts stuff. I was able to play the, at the time, most recent Raid with 9 people and it was the most fun I was able to have in the game in years. Not because we stuck to the rules but because we broke them. The community was flooded with enjoyment, people forgot and moved past some of the absolutely insanely bad decisions Bungie had made in recent years. Instead, what mattered was the fun.

Buying me coffee is a real life cheat!

Gaming communities are meant to have charm to them, they’re meant to be an enjoyable space where you can go talk about a game you love, not a place where you avoid because of the Hatred. Cheat codes could bring some of this back. Hide a bunch of them in your super large game, like a Crimson Desert, and watch as the community starts to explode with love not just for the cool things in the game itself but for the ability to make the game be dumb and funny alongside those other things.

The Conclusion

At the end here, I really can’t stress enough that I know there’s a ton of issues with the current industry approach to profit oriented development. I know that a ton of developers are losing their jobs, that management fucking sucks right now, that executives are breathing down their necks to develop games that make a gajillion dollars, that live service games are being developed in a time when the chance of a new one popping up and being a smash hit is very unlikely (even if possible). But those aren’t things that seem to be going towards being fixed. And I, as a random person on the internet who just writes about videogames, can’t have any impact at all on any of that. But I can bring forward the idea that there are other ways to improve how fun a game is and that one of those ways is god damn Cheat Codes.

Rant over.

Okay but what about you? Do you have memories of spreading a cheat code or learning about one from a friend? What about buying those big cheat code filled books? Would you like or love the reintroduction of cheat codes to games you know and love? I would love to hear from you in the comments! Even if I don’t end up responding to them I still read every one and appreciate you for posting them!

Meow,

Cat

The cool thing about all media is that there are one offs and there are franchises. This as a structure allows for a lot of refinement where people want it and innovation where people want it. Sometimes there are also pieces of media that become franchises that were never expected to. Like how Dragon Age: Origins was initially made as a one off game which was why they made many of the decisions they did, but other times there are games that deserved to be made into a series or to have a sequel made but never got that chance. Whether because of financial failures, no real interest in sequels from the creators, or other various reasons, some games have had a future sequel snatched from them.

So today, I wanted to talk about some of those games. I’m going to go over 5 games that I think deserved a sequel, but never got one. Importantly, I think it’s worth mentioning that some of these didn’t need a sequel, and that’s completely okay. You don’t need a sequel. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t good enough to deserve a sequel. So with that let’s start with the list.

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Star Wars: Outlaws

Star Wars: Outlaws (review is technically here but it’s the first one I did so isn’t as structured and I’ll likely do a re-review eventually) is the most recent game in this list and, while a sequel is theoretically possible, plans for one were canned when the game under-performed for Ubisoft who likely expected far more sales than they should have given the all time low feeling of the Star Wars brand. Yet still, Massive Entertainment, makers of The Division, made a game that puts you into the world of Star Wars and gives you what Han Solo said was always better than the Force, a damn good blaster at your side. You play Kay Vess, an up and coming scoundrel criminal who is thrust into the life of an outlaw due to circumstances surrounding a botched job. She was left behind to take the fall and managed to escape only for her to have to flee the planet she grew up on and go on a planet hopping adventure with her trust buddy Nix and, eventually, her best deadpan droid buddy ND-5.

The gameplay was pretty good, although the game at launch suffered from waaaay too many instant fail stealth sections. The characters were great, engaging, and honestly it was the best time I had exploring a Star Wars world since I was a kid playing the Jedi Knight and KotOR games. Massive understood what it takes to make a Star Wars game that doesn’t get all hung up on the fancy force stuff or the galaxy spanning narrative of the main trilogies. They were able to make me, as a player, feel not just for the characters but for the world, all without having a Jedi in the frame.

They did a really good job despite the fact that the story was, honestly, kinda dry. It was eventually a heist story but took too long to get there and when it did it didn’t have the punch of the best heist stories out there. It felt so much like a great intro to Kay Vess, to the Outlaw she became over the course of the game, and for the characters around her. The potential for more of Kay to get explored was immense. Depressingly, i think there’s multiple reasons for this (including general hatred for Ubisoft which is understandable given the companies history with dismissing sexual assaults) but what I think hits the worst to me is just that I really don’t care for the Jedi games made by Respawn. Sure they’re good but I’ve done some Jedi shit a million times in a ton of games. Outlaws gave us a game that did something different in the modern Star Wars landscape and it was damn good. A sequel would have refined the already great foundation to make something truly special.

I mean imagine if we play Kay Vess 3 years later, after the fall of the Empire during Return of the Jedi and we get to see not just how she dealt with that but how the galaxy underworld as a whole is dealing with that. Maybe she has learned to let things go and started to work with prior enemies because of the power vacuum that was created. Maybe she manages to take advantage of that power vacuum and become head of her own underworld syndicate. Maybe she finds a way to overthrow the Hutts from sectors of Tattooine with the death of Jabba. Who knows, what matters is there’s room for growth!

Tyranny

There’s a lot of criticism in modern games that RPGs need to allow you to be evil to be good RPGs. Games like Baldur’s Gate 3 allows you to literally rule the world and the illithid army that rises from the destruction around you. You can be incredibly evil. People want that in more games, but that’s more complicated than it’s given credit for and doesn’t often fit story wise. If you’re meant to be the hero of the world why would you have the chance to be evil as fuck? Well once there was a game that let loose on the idea of being evil. It was driven by the Obsidian devs with the core idea of “okay so being super evil doesn’t fit in our other games, so let’s make one where that’s the whole point”. Thus, Tyranny was born.

You play The Fatebinder, a higher up in the army of the authoritarian ruler of the Tiers, who is dispatched to put down a rebellion by siding with one of the 3 sides, 2 are the different armies assaulting the rebels and the other are the actual rebels. In this world you are allowed to be as cartoonishly evil as you could possibly want. It’s cheesy, it’s over the top, and it’s fun as fuck. Sure it doesn’t feel as dark as some parts in BG3 but that’s because of the contrast. Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t have darkness as the primary story. Instead you have heartwarming moments, you have love and happiness and compassion. You have these moments that allow for the drastic horribleness from the cartoonishly evil Baldur’s Gate 3 evil choices to stand out. Meanwhile in Tyranny, you have many, many moments that are just as evil and dark, but because there’s no heartwarming contrast in the world it feels less dark.

Regardless, the awesomeness of Tyranny is that if you’ve ever want to let loose your inner fucked up self, you have the possibility to do it without the feeling that you’re destroying something beautiful. The game felt rushed near the end though, at least to me back in the day when I played it and I always felt like it would be a great world to have more depth in. Obsidian built a really interesting world and, with all of the darkness in the world right now, I kinda like the idea of a game that allows me to be cartoonishly evil in a controlled fashion as a form of catharsis. While BG3 allows that to an extent, I don’t think it can be as effective as a Tyranny 2 could since that would still lack that contrast. The whole point of the game is to be evil and embrace that inner fucked up you. You don’t have to have the weight along with it. It’s like a kink thing, expressing/experiencing something horrible in moments of control makes it easier to cope. So in other words, we need Tyranny 2 for similar-to-kink reasons.

Tyranny 2 could bring with it not just more evil gameplay but maybe now you’re the ruler of the authoritarian country and you’re having to send others out to do your bidding and then deal with the worry of facing the same fate as your predecessor. Or maybe the game becomes a series of games where you play a new Fatebinder who works towards overthrowing your prior character so they can sit on the throne? There’s a lot of room for a sequel to grow.

Sunset Overdrive

In my High on Life 2 review (here) I talked about how I love me some meta jokes. Well Sunset Overdrive really solidified my love for that in games. The gameplay overall was characteristic Insomniac chaotic fun, even if the enemy variety was incredibly disappointing. You play in a world where the energy drink OverCharge has turned the majority of your city into easy to kill monsters and it was made by your now former employer FizzCo. Your Janitorial job was lost when the city was quarantined from the outside world so now you get to wander the city having weird fun and, eventually, figuring out what the fuck was in that drink so you can help everything get back to normal. This could be the set up for a more serious game but Insomniac doesn’t play like that. They made a game that is completely focused on movement. The core gameplay of the game is Third Person Shooter but that’s only the start. See, you grind on the power lines, you bounce on cars, you bounce on umbrellas, you bounce on air vents, you are encouraged to never stop going. And you do so in hilarious fashion especially when you’re playing with Insomniac’s characteristically crazy weapon design which is still here.

What really makes the game though is the fantastic humor. Humor that doesn’t just exist in the writing of the game but in the literal jokes of the world. For my best example, I would like to reference this video.

This is a video of all 18 possible respawn animations for the game after you die and it just shows that the devs of the game really had fun with it. They had ideas and they did them even if they didn’t necessarily make sense in the world, because that’s fun.

The game felt, if anything, like an InFamous 1 game. It felt like a great introduction to the idea of the world. Gameplay was established, characters were solidified, the style was known, everything was great and there was plenty of room to go for a sequel. One never came to be but I think it deserves it. The game was so wacky, it was so damn weird and fun. Sure it was cheesy as fuck and some of the jokes didn’t land (not all jokes will land when you’re throwing out so many) but what mattered was that it stood out from the pack of serious games out there when it went from something fun and dumb. It was great because of that. Sunset Overdrive 2 could have been so much more. In an age of games taking themselves incredibly seriously, we need more games that don’t. High on Life is a great series that does it but why not also have a sequel to an older game, why not also have Sunset Overdrive 2: A Sunnier Drive (or something, I’m not good at naming things).

A sequel could go all Infamous 2 and bring us to a new city where a new version of Overdrive was released and FizzCo swears it doesn’t turn you into monsters this time so it’s approved for release and then, lo and behold, it turns you into a mutants, but this time since the flavor is grape the mutants are all purple and they’ve got new abilities. Maybe we stay in the same city and just deal with the ramifications of the outbreak, maybe FizzCo goes belly up but then out of the blue a whole new company appears named Oczzif that releases a brand new energy bar that turns people into spider mutants. I dunno, none of these are the best ideas but they show that there is room for a new game to be made!

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Immortals: Fenyx Rising

Immortals: Fenyx Rising is a massive failure of one thing, naming. Originally named God’s and Monsters, a pretty decent name, it was renamed to the current horrible one that exists now. You play as Greek Soldier Fenyx (hence the name) after you crashland on an island where the Greek Gods have gone all wacko. You then have to Breath of the Wild your way around the world saving the big island by going through puzzles, puzzle dungeons, fighting Greek monsters, and having some cartoony fun as well.

The game itself isn’t super inspired as it was rather similar to the core gameplay loop of Breath of the Wild but what makes it great is the humor mixed with the puzzles and combat. The game isn’t difficult and it has great difficulty settings and it’s a great time. It was made by the Assassin’s Creed Odyssey team and it shows. The Greek blood runs thick in this game. Which makes me, a person who is second generation Greek, a little biased in its favor.

Personally, I think the game definitely has flaws, but if there had been a sequel the best parts of the game could have been refined and made into a damn good experience. Best of all, this Ubisoft open world might have had a bunch of stuff on the map, but it was also not a massive map. You have a pair of wings, Icarus style, and you can pretty easily glide across about half of the island once you’ve upgraded those a lot. Plus, the armor is fun and cool looking, the weapons are interesting, there’s transmog, and again the game is just a whole lot of fun. It deserved 2 things: a sequel and a better title.

Fenyx Rising always gave off the idea that there would be a sequel with the naming. Specifically, Immortals being the main title implied they could easily make a new game that has nothing to do with Fenyx. So maybe we have an Immortals that’s focused on Sumerian mythology instead of Greek! Maybe instead of an Island of Puzzles it’s an archipelago of puzzles. Maybe the whole shtick of the series becomes taking different mythologies that haven’t had enough humor injected into them and inject some damn funny and cheesy humor into them? Sumerian was the first one that came to mind for me because it’s never really been focused on and having another Norse game would be exhausting. The whole point is there’s multiple directions they could have gone with the series whether they stuck with Fenyx or made a whole new cast of characters, there were multiple paths that they could have gone down.

Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical

Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical (review here) is the second Greek God game on this list and I swear that’s not why it’s here. Stray Gods created a world where the Greek Gods existed in the modern world and then you, as the player, had to deal with being thrust into that world that you didn’t know existed and that you were pretty sure you didn’t belong. But the reality was that, as Grace, you were able to solve a murder mystery, possibly fall for one of the gods, and move forward with a future of singing.

The game wasn’t super detailed gameplay wise. I mean it could hardly be described as having gameplay at all really. It’s far more visual novel experience but with a Bioware-like conversation twist. Grace could make people divulge themselves through singing. She used this to push and pull on their psyches to figure out whether they’re the murderer of the Muse that she witnessed die. It’s this really interesting structure where, depending on the choices you make in the conversation wheel, you’re able to determine how songs go. They can get more confrontational or more sympathetic. It’s all about finding out who murdered the Muse and that takes a lot of goading. This can, in turn, change how different Gods view you and whether they’re more likely to come to your defense later. It essentially determines aspects of the ending. That’s basically the majority of the gameplay. You can of course go to some places, use a menu to inspect different aspects of those places or talk to people there, but overall it’s a very basic experience.

This experience though has significant potential for another entry. It doesn’t even have to be with Grace as the main character, the DLC was with a different main character so it’s completely feasible a second game could be as well. That’s the beauty of Stray Gods, it didn’t just create characters that I want to see continue, it created a world with potential for more avenues for a story. Now, the game felt like a very one time thing, as the developers have since moved on to another game. But I just think that a second game could be something special. Particularly I think the biggest improvement would be changing the game from being a series of still images with the audio layered on top to be more like Dispatch where the characters actually move with their conversations. That’s a higher budget thing but I think the sequel would deserve that. Of course, it could deserve that and still not get it because that’s not how budgets works.

It could allow you to actually walk around the world in a physical space. Maybe the next game would have you play the next Muse after Grace and we just have to deal with the ramifications of something she did near the end. Maybe that next Muse has to deal with the clashing of the Gods that left the city coming back and find a way to have everyone not break out into a war. Maybe the game introduces some new gameplay mechanic besides just the singing. I dunno, I’m not the best at ideas for musicals. Regardless I just loved the world of Stray Gods and I think there’s so much more potential there that could be explored if they just scratched the surface.

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The Conclusion

So that’s my short list. I had a lot of games that I wanted to go through but I didn’t want the list to be super duper long and this article to be far longer than it needed to be. Plus a lot of the games I thought deserved a sequel people have already talked about wanting a sequel to for a while so I figured I’d try to largely avoid covering games that have attracted that kind of attention, except I guess with Outlaws. Personally, I know it’s good to not always franchise everything, as I stated at the top, but I still think there are a lot of games out there that deserved sequels. I wish I could have covered more.

What about you? Are there games that you loved that you think deserved a sequel? Did any of the games I talked about interest you? And even more so, if you could make a sequel to any game, what would it be called? That last one totally isn’t me trying to figure out how I can get better at naming things. Sound off in the comments with your thoughts, I hope to read lots of good sequel ideas!

Meow,

Cat

I am not a rock climber. I climbed trees as a kid and even did some mild climbing on rock walls at a local Rec Center but I haven’t done so in decades. More so, I haven’t played many climbing games either. But I’m not opposed to the idea of playing them.

Enter: Day, the Steam Spring Sale has started and I decided to buy Cairn because...well...why the fuck not. I heard good things from The Besties podcast that did an episode on it back when it came out so I figured I could always try it out and if I hated it because of the survival aspect then I could return it within that 2 hour window.

What ended up happening was not something I expected, nor something I quite realized had happened until I wrote this review. I adored Cairn, not just because it’s a good game but because it’s a good experience. One that made me feel emotions, one that I related to immensely, and one that I think even more people should play if you haven’t already. So let’s get into more detail about what I thought and why I thought it and...actually I’m just gonna get on with it now.

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The Premise

You play as Aava, who is trying her best to climb the mountain Kami as a way of avoiding life and all that it entails. She meets people on her journey up, learns about the people that used to live there, and sees people who failed at climbing the mountain. And is still continuing to avoid life and all it entails. Obviously not a story that many people can relate to. But will Aava make it to the top? Will she give up and come back down? Will she ever actually face what life is putting on her plate? It’s up to you to help her climb and find out.

The Good

First, as I’ve talked time and time again about accessibility (mainly here in my difficulty accessibility article), I think it makes sense to cover this at the top. I went into Cairn incredibly apprehensive, I’ve played two climbing games before and had mixed success (Grow Home was not a good time for me but Peak was fun). But once I turned on the game and saw the accessibility options and different difficulty modes I instantly knew I was going to love this game. First off, the game has 3 different difficulty modes, I played on Explorer. Essentially, this mode lowered how intense the survival aspect of the game was and also allowed me to rewind after every fall that I had. Then in the assist (accessibility) settings I was able to actually deactivate ALL survival aspects of the game and also give myself infinite climbing gear resources and allow the game to autosave every time I came to a solid surface to stand on. These all changed the fucking game for me. Gone was the nerve racking worry about falling because of Aava being super finicky with her controls, gone was the frustration with survival mechanics that annoy me rather than make me feel more entrenched in the games atmosphere. All of a sudden I could enjoy the game how I wanted to enjoy it. The Game Bakers gave me a game about overcoming your own mountain, finding the thing that you’re stuck on and learning to either overcome it or fully let go of the fixation you had, and they let me do it how I wanted to do it. That’s the quintessential thing I want from videogames and the fact that Cairn gave that to me made me adore it so much and I have already plugged the game to multiple friends as a game they would like and totally should play (especially to my friend that actively is a rock climber). I mean, look at these difficulty settings:

They allow you as the player to decide how tough and realistic of an experience you want instead of forcing everyone into the most exhausting version. Then, look at these accessibility settings characterized as the Assist Mode (à la Celeste):

The Game Bakers obviously put the player experience first and show they want people to play their game, to learn how to overcome Aava’s mountain and work towards overcoming their own. TGB have made a game that is a labor of love that they want as many people as possible to play and I respect the hell out of them for that.

The story is also rather interesting, which I wasn’t expecting. Playing Aava as she continues to ignore all of her responsibilities was something I deeply related to as someone who plays games to avoid my real life responsibilities like doing the dishes, laundry, or working on my game. You hear, over most of the game, different people from Aava’s life call her and leave messages where they express their frustration or their sadness over what she’s doing. They are obviously dealing with the grief of having a friend get so stuck on a fixation that they’re driving everyone away from them. Plus with the character Marco, the teenager who is climbing Kami by himself (don’t tell his parents), also being there as a foil to Aava’s relentless push to climb the mountain even when continuing almost guarantees death it allows for some great character work that helps you to really tell how hard it is to both be the person stuck on a fixation and the people around that same person. It’s a beautiful and timeless story and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it.

The art style is also beautiful. The game is able to convey the important bits of the cliffs you climb on while also being able to make the cliffs in the art style and aren’t too detailed to feel out of place. Slowly going up Kami, seeing the sky change, an Aurora appear, storms come and go, and stars shine bright is a beautiful experience and I adored it. Look at this picture I took earlier in the game with the absolutely fantastic photo mode (which all of my screenshots were taken using because I love that shit):

Just beautiful and I loved seeing the game change and the green parts of the scenery disappear and the ruins of the former Kami residents start to show up and the snow be introduced and the ice appear and all that during the course of the game. Very well made.

The core of the gameplay is, of course, climbing and the game has some jank but manages to handle it rather well. Often I would find myself accidentally using the right leg to go left and vice versa and while this would not at all be possible in the real world it was perfectly possible and really helped the game feel smoother. You’ll frequently come to moments where Aava slips or loses her grip because you either didn’t place your feet on ledges or holds that exist or they were too small for those and lead to Aava being in pain. There are pain killers and food and chalk that can help you grip better, be in pain less, and just all in all do better at climbing. Plus you can quickly place Pitons which allow you to hang for a moment and catch Aava’s breath. These Pitons also mean that you can fall and just end up being caught by the rope connection to the piton which is great because at least you don’t fall to the ground. Of course if you have the rewind assist setting active then the moment you fall you can just rewind back to just before the fall and continue climbing. Which is also infinite so you can use it to just keep climbing without dying at all. Yes, this is usually how I did that because I am cheap and don’t like having to redo so so so much climbing progress with how high some of these cliffs are. The mountains are also very well crafted and feel like there are real handholds and areas that allow you to climb easy peasy and areas that are super duper difficult and it’s just very well put together and feels rather realistic.

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The Bad

There were multiple times later in the game during ice climbing when I just didn’t know why Aava was having issues. Her grip was solid, I didn’t have survival stuff turned on, the ice climbing picks and shoe spikes were shoved in as hard as I could, I was using chalk, I was pausing so she could catch her breath, I would shake my arms to recover, and even better, I had a bunch of effects activated from food which were supposed to help me. Yet still, until I placed a Piton, Aava was struggling a bunch consistently back to back. It made little sense and was likely just me missing something but it was still bothersome.

The Meh

If you, dear reader, have read some of my other reviews you will have realized how much I absolutely despise forced slow walking for prolonged periods. Well, Cairn is, largely, free from that (which i didn’t realize for too far into the game until I had a popup tell me that RB was fast walk). Except for one of the endings. For around 45 minutes you are forced to walk super slowly. And if you try to move just a little faster with the speed walking then Aava says “Not...too...fast” or something similar while catching her breath. I get why this is a thing, it contextually makes sense and does enhance the feel of the tension, but I still just...I hate slow walking. And for it to be for such a long period of time and only be broken up by climbing just absolutely sucks. That said, I’m putting this in the Meh section, not the bad, because it is quite frankly a me thing that I hate, not a knock on the game itself.

The Ending - Reaction

The endings (yes, plural) to Cairn were either heartwarming and bittersweet or rather fucking sad and emotional. I got both during my playthrough and both had their own merits, although I prefer the heartwarming one. Personally, I felt like the game lead up much better to that one, it started to show actual growth in Aava, while the other one shows that no matter what she’s still who she’s always been. That said, both of these endings have a payoff to the themes of the game and of Aava’s character and her story and the story of other past climbers of the mountain. I just have a preference. Overall, the endings were good and I felt like they were satisfying, just in their own different ways.

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The Conclusion

Cairn is a magical experience of a game. It’s not that long, my first playthrough took about 7 hours, and then I played another 3 of another playthrough to get some extra things I missed on my first and to get some better screenshots to show you, dear reader, in this review. The game sticks with you though, it makes you think like Aava about how to overcome a mountain, about how focusing on the mountain is often the only thing you can think about even when it pulls you away from those you love most. Cairn is a game that isn’t just something that you can play it’s something that you can experience.

I highly recommend grabbing Cairn and giving it a thorough playthrough. It’s usually 30 bucks which I think is a decent price but if you manage to find it on sale for closer to 20 then you are in for a treat that is worth it at that price 10 times over. I just think you need to go in and be willing to turn some aspects of the game off if you don’t like them, or focus on them more than me. I know that if I hadn’t been able to turn off the survival mechanics then I wouldn’t have had as much of a fun time so you should be willing to find the experience that fits best for you. After all, we all have our own mountain and we all deal with that in our own unique ways.

Meow,

Cat

Just over 3 weeks ago Crimson Desert came out and has been taking over a lot of people’s time since it’s so big. Which is great. Personally Crimson Desert doesn’t interest me because it feels far more generic story wise than I care to explore and massive open worlds are just boring to me nowadays. If I reviewed it I probably would have a lot of issues with it. And I’m not the only one who has had (or likely would have had in my case) issues with it, reviews have been rather varied, some adoring it and some just not enjoying it much. This is genuinely how reviews are supposed to be.

But now, people are trying to make the excuse the bad reviews from a wide variety of people are not them just not liking the game but are people having a vendetta against it. They do this through using other reviews from the same outlets as reasons for why to dismiss those reviews. Specifically people focus on Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Concord a lot, particularly when it comes to IGN. IGN has a variety of different reviewers and each of them have their own opinions on games, they experience them differently like all people that play games do. These “gamers” love to ignore that and say the entire outlet reviews the games as opposed to individual people.

This has thus been super bugging me because of the seemingly misunderstanding of what reviews actually are. So today, I want to go over how reviews are subjective, not objective. I’ll be talking about how you can’t use reviews for games you dislike that praise it to invalidate reviews for games you love that disliked the game. I’ll touch on how there has been, in the past, a disconnect between reviews and their scores, or reviews and the gaming community or reviewers and the gaming community. And finally I’ll finish with a plea to the broad gaming community and to reviewers like myself about how we can do better as a community for understanding how reviews are not Gospel and never should be.

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Subjective, not objective

First, some definitions!

Subjective: based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.

Objective: (of a person or their judgment) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts.

Now, moving on.

This is at the core of my issue that I believe too many people don’t want to or genuinely don’t understand. Reviews are not objective, even if they’re being portrayed that way. They never have been and never will be. The point of being a reviewer isn’t to stick the landing and say that a game is the best thing ever even if you didn’t like it just because you know other people will like it. The point of reviews is to give your honest experience with the game regardless of what that means to your score or to how it is viewed by the gaming community.

For instance, the main focus people use as context, including in several articles here on Substack, are IGN reviews. They focus on the idea that IGN has to review games “well” because they’re being paid or are trying to push certain games as opposed to those games were just something the reviewer genuinely enjoyed or genuinely didn’t. This is most apparent with Crimson Desert recently where the press played the game before the day one patch that added a lot of things so they had more issues, even more, they played before a more recent patch that helped with the janky controls that was a key complaint for a lot of reviewers. Crimson Desert got the short end of the stick because of how reviews are meant to be done before release, they’re meant not to be done in, often, their best states. Rather, they’re done in the games worst state. This impacts scores a fuck ton because more people will have different experiences with certain aspects of a game that get fixed early in the life of the game.

At their core, reviews are not meant to be something that pinpoints the absolute quality of a game, or that “pushes an agenda” they’re just an opinion. That’s okay, that’s even ideal. We should gravitate towards people that have similar tastes to us and that’s what makes, arguably, the idea of looking at a place like IGN or Polygon as all-knowing entities that review games so damn flawed. People are the reviewers, not a media company.

Even I gravitate towards people that I have similar tastes to. I have significant issues with many bigger reviewers out there who like to concentrate on some games in ways that, to me, seem incredibly unfair (I will not name them as I don’t like calling people out and making beef). Some I think are incredibly thickheaded with not getting themes or not understanding parts of the game or not being willing to view the game for what it is as opposed to what they wanted it to be, or even barely playing enough of the game in order to see all of the mechanics or something as simple as one day/night cycle, but this actually brings me to my next point of just because you disagree with a review and how that singular person experienced the game doesn’t mean you can use other reviews to invalidate that review.

Don’t just blindly invalidate

I’ve already mentioned the IGN of it all. Specifically, the IGN reviewer of Dragon Age: The Veilguard seems to have adored the game. They had a genuinely fun time with it and really connected with the characters and with the story. They saw that even though it wasn’t perfect, it still had so much there and was still a Bioware Dragon Age game. Many, many, many people disagree with that, even going as far as to call it Disney or Marvel-like and say that the reviewer was actually handling the game with kids gloves and couldn’t possibly have enjoyed the game that much. All of the same accusations that were lobbed at Veilguard are ones that were lobbed at prior Dragon Age games (back then it was Whedon-esque dialogue as the criticism buzzword), including the original, and even Mass Effect games. I remember all of the gaming community criticizing them at the time, shitting on Dragon Age 2 for not being a Dragon Age game, for getting rid of the edge. But now people find that game to be one of the better Dragon Age games, at least in the Dragon Age community.

Okay, I’m talking about Veilguard too much, I already went into plenty of detail about my thoughts on this here in an older article so if you want to know more then check that out. My point is people look at the review from IGN of Veilguard, a 9/10, and then compare it to the Crimson Desert review, a 6/10, and say that they have to be reviewed differently. That these can’t be adequate judgements of the games. “How could the gaming press be so wrong?” they ask. How could IGN give Concord a 7/10 and Crimson Desert a 6/10 when the latter is very clearly such a better game.

They use this discrepancy, which is explained quite simply by reviews being purely subjective, and try to invalidate the reviews of Crimson Desert. They say that the people that reviewed Crimson Desert have a vendetta against the game, that they hate Eastern developed games (despite many in the Korean press also disliking the game), that they’re going after it for the same flaws that exist in other games. This is, quite simply, horseshit. It’s not that there might be people who hate the game and take that to create a vendetta against it, those people exist for literally everything and in every industry out there. It’s that these games are designed in ways that sometimes gets under people’s skin in specific ways to them and if there’s nothing to redeem the game in their eyes then it will just pull down the whole experience.

As an example of this, let’s look at a game that I reviewed very early on in my time writing Cat’s Controller Corner, Kingdom Hearts 2 (linked above). A game that many many people adore. Well, I fucking HATED it. Now don’t get me wrong, it had good bits, but dear god did I have issues with it. From the irritating combat to the quite simply underwhelming use of Disney properties that completely ruin many aspects of that Disney property (specifically I mean different shots and aspects of the movies style, not because of the other Disney characters being interjected, I found that interesting and fun). To me, as a film person, it got under my skin and made me just hate the game. I wrote a lot about why I hated it in the above linked article but it is much different than my reviews that followed so I’d just recommend keeping that in mind, I would likely change some of it if I could go back and redo it.

Simply put though, my experience with Kingdom Hearts 2 is fueled by my time with other things in my life. But you can’t just take my experience and say that it isn’t valid just because you disagree with it. That’s not how opinions work. I have one that says that Kingdom Hearts 2 was a shit game to experience, but I also understand why people enjoy it and won’t begrudge people for liking it even if I will gladly point out my problems with it if they ask. You can’t blindly invalidate a review just because you can’t believe someone would think a different way than you do. Doing so is the fallacy Argument from Incredulity or the divine fallacy: a fallacy where someone says something can’t possibly be true because it doesn’t line up with your own personal expectations or beliefs.

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Disconnects exist

I’ve been participating in the gaming community for 20 years, I’ve seen my fair share of contentious reviews. I know that there can often be a disconnect between the written review and the score. Those things give reviewers a bad rap. Essentially, there are many reviews out there over the last 20 years that give off the idea that they just generally dislike a game and have many, many problems with it, but then rate it rather high. It’s a confusing reality of how some reviews were written because of being afraid of larger publishers getting a vendetta against that review publisher and pulling early game keys from them. It can also come from people who try to nail that consensus idea of what a game will be to the wider community as opposed to what their experience is. This is but one of the disconnects that exists.

Not only that, there’s also the disconnect which is the “reviewers are bad gamers” of it all. Back in the day there was a reviewer who made a joke online posting a video of how he was having some issues with the tutorial for Cuphead. But it was a joke, the guy didn’t actually have the same amount of issues playing the game as the video would suggest. That joke though took on a life of its own and spread the idea that reviewers are just plain bad at games. That they’ll give some games bad scores because they just weren’t good at them so had a vendetta against them.

This does have some truth to it in that some reviewers are bad at some games, that’s called variety of experience. Not everyone is amazing at games and that, again, doesn’t invalidate that experience, even if it frustrates people who are plenty good at the games. The reality here is that reviewers are like everyone out there, are like steam reviews and twitch streamers. They all have a variety of opinions on games and that leads to disconnects sometimes between the review and some in the gaming community.

But, bringing this back to my main point here, there is this idea that the disconnects between scores and reviews written are actually because people are paid for the score they give, whether through money or other means. This was actually the whole basis for the original GamerGate dumpster fire where Zoë Quinn, an indie game developer, had a slanderous accusation thrown at her from a vengeful and abusive ex that she slept with someone for a good review. Something that was impossible as that reviewer never even reviewed her game and they had never met.

Shills exist, don’t get me wrong, but the idea that everyone who reviews a game and gives it a score that you disagree with is a shill is just plain wrong. I completely disagree with a lot of reviewers out there, but I know they’re not shills and would never make that accusation. The gaming community needs to learn how to understand that these disconnects exist, both between the score and the review (which I personally believe is all about trying to nail that general consensus of the game as opposed to being rewarded for good scores), or between the review and many in the gaming community. That’s okay, it doesn’t mean you have to get upset, it just means you have a different opinion.

We can do better

That brings me to my final point. We as game reviewers, and as a gaming community, can do better. The broader community needs to let go of fixating on a review score being bad means that the game you adore is being slandered. Letting go is what we all need to do sometimes and that’s a large part of what capital G “Gamers” need to do. We need to start reading reviews as the subjective experiences they are, not as an objective Gospel on the reality of the game.

The gaming community as a whole have a responsibility to understand that reviews are opinions, not objective fact. They have a responsibility to not hold a grudge against certain reviewers or publications just because of one review they disagreed with. They have a responsibility to search for reviewers and publications that share their opinions and use those people to inform themselves on how they might experience a game. And even more, this responsibility reaches out to include looking at new games that you might not expect to like, but because of a reviewer you like enjoyed it you decide to give it a try. Going out of a comfort zone is a part of this responsibility as well. Seriously, people have been doing that a lot with a lot of games I love in the last year, seeing people play games like Veilguard and Avowed and actually love them despite them having believed the hate campaign working against them is awesome. More people need to go remember that there is more to the world than their little corner.

And then we as gaming reviewers, or at least other gaming reviewers since I’m already working on this and have done with my own review scoring system which you can find out more about here, need to let go of the 1-10 score. More so, we need to let go of what scores have meant for so long. Games are a subjective experience and, more so, they’re about fun. They’re not about the massive quality of the games story, or the perfection of the smooth gameplay, they’re about having a good time relaxing. That’s literally it. This applies to every type of entertainment media.

I had conversations in Film School about this very thing. Personally one of my favorite movies ever is Sharknado. Not because it was the most brilliant film around, or that it was amazingly well made. Instead, it was because I had the best time and the best memories surrounding it. That’s what games are about as well. We as reviewers need to pick up a new scoring system that focuses and pays attention to the broader enjoyment you had with a game not as something with more weight. Whats more, we need to drop the idea of a perfect game, or the worst game ever. Each game is a unique experience for every player, no game is perfect, no game is absolute trash. We need to drop the idea of there being 10/10 games that are perfect. We need to look at games as just an experience.

What’s more, we need to adopt a system that uses all the fucking numbers. Despite what people think, the review of Crimson Desert has legitimate criticism in it, but it also says very simply, the game isn’t for everyone. The writer knows that some people will adore it and some will absolutely hate it. A 6/10, similar to the Starfield review of a 7/10, is not a bad game. It’s just not the best game the reviewer has ever played or their favorite in a while, something that’s taking up all their time, and is a more mixed experience.

We as a gaming community and as writers can do better. Now, am I, the writer of this article who has her own unique review system that focuses on enjoyment of a game as opposed to it’s overall inherent quality, somewhat biased? Yup. But that doesn’t make me wrong.

Also maybe we should stop having reviews come out before the game is released when it is in its worst state, particularly for large games. I dunno, it just doesn’t feel like a good option. There’s many possible solutions here and I don’t have one right now because that’s not my job but the current idea of putting games out on release day or before release just isn’t fucking working.

Like what I said, maybe buy me coffee?

The Conclusion

Overall, I guess I just wanted to say that it’s okay to disagree with a review, it’s okay to find flaws in it or to find something that the writer experienced as a flaw that you would love. These are perfectly fine things to have. What’s not okay is to look at a review and take it as a slight against the game that you adore. Unless of course that review is solely based around any kind of bigotry, a sadly prevalent aspect happening in some spheres of the gaming community. Then, you can dismiss it because bigots don’t have points, they just have shit coming out of their mouths.

I hope you have thoughts on what I said, that you didn’t dismiss it because of just one sentence you disagreed with (which would literally be doing what I talked about in the article). If you want to have a nuanced discussion in the comments that doesn’t devolve into me deleting your comment and blocking you, then please feel free to voice your opinion! Nuanced conversations need to happen more in the community and, as anyone who knows me personally understands, I adore nuance and see it everywhere. So to be able to have an adult conversation about this topic would be a joy and a lovely change of pace.

Meow,

Cat

About a year ago I wrote my review for Life is Strange: Double Exposure. It was the return of the original protagonist Max a decade after the first game with a lot of character progression since. She had become a teacher of photography and an award winning photographer, but Chloe was no longer in her life, even if you saved her at the end of the first game. I had issues with the game, primarily I thought it didn’t deal with the paradox of it all that well and it got too distracted during Chapter 4 of the game so it didn’t feel like the actual narrative progressed at all. I had some other issues but overall the game was a step in a good direction.

Then, there was the announcement just a few months ago that Life is Strange: Reunion was a thing and that Chloe was coming back. Personally, I was ecstatic, I thought Double Exposure laid some great ground work for a better sequel and was really intrigued to see what Chloe had been up to and how she had grown up as a person. I even wrote an article last week about how Life is Strange Will Always be Special just because I was so excited for Reunion.

So then, with me having played Reunion, rather quickly I might add, what did I think? Did it live up to my excitement? Were there flaws? Were those flaws something that made the game feel like shit? Or was the game finally a triumphant return of the Max and Chloe super team? Okay you’ve read the title, you know it’s great, so let’s go over the good the bad, and maybe a brand new section of my reviews where I go over the “meh”.

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The Premise

About 9 months after the events of Life is Strange: Double Exposure, Max and her friends have progressed as people, but most of them forgot about that giant storm that happened at the end of the first game and the powers that Max has and those two timelines merging. Those 9 months have lead to continually increasing tension between Caledon University and the town of Lakeport and, interestingly, Max’s original powers returning. After a birthday weekend in New York to be showcased at an Art Gallery, Max gets back to the school on Sunday and she finds it on fire. People are dying, buildings are burning, and she has to witness it all. After seeing some people she knows falling through a roof, she just so happens to find a picture of the selfie she took on Friday, a few hours before she was supposed to drive to NYC. She then uses her fancy returned powers to jump into that photo so she can go back in time and hopefully save everyone she can. Will she manage to save everyone? Will she have to use rewind a lot to do so? Will her ex girlfriend Chloe show up because she is dealing with the ramifications of the merged timelines from Double Exposure and needs to talk with Max about why she’s having the issues she’s having? Will that ex girlfriend then help Max uncover the reason the fire happened and how to stop it? Yes...probably. I mean it’s kinda up to you if you manage to figure it out.

The Good

The gameplay for Max in Double Exposure was a massive letdown for me. You had to go to specific points to shift between realities and it didn’t feel good going back and forth in order to have similar conversations over again and talk to the same characters again and again. It was disappointing. Yet, here in Reunion it was completely different because they got rid of that disappointing mechanic and brought back Max’s original powers. This was a really great change. It made the game feel like it should, like Max was doing what she was always meant to do. I mean the game just felt like it made more sense because of it. Less timeline fuckery leading to unsatisfying paradoxes and seemingly dropped plot points and moments of getting distracted, all of which Double Exposure suffered from.

The story is really really good. It moved fast of course, which I talk about more in the next section, but what was there felt so damn good. The characters had moments to shine, they each made sense in what they were doing, nothing really felt disappointing overall and, again, there wasn’t a significant distraction that Double Exposure seemed to have when dealing with the multiple timelines. Chloe particularly was a highlight. Seeing her having grown as a person, still being somewhat unsure about her future and traumatized, but also being an adult version of herself who wasn’t as reckless as she was as a teenager, and who had a full blackout sleeve coverup of the tattoo she had in the original game likely because of the trauma associated with it. She represented the punk adult who was that reckless kid but grew up into a less reckless but still punk adult who also manages a punk band because of course. It was great. I really enjoyed it and, as I really relate to Chloe as a person, it was emotional seeing her go through it. She thinks she’s doomed and I get it, I get it a lot. The writing here was top notch to me and I loved it.

Also I just want to say I really enjoyed the Humor of the game. In Double Exposure Max brought her characteristic wit and cheesy jokes to the game while here, not only do you have Max again, but finally you get Chloe and her standard punky jokey shtick that also comes with a lot of references. One that particularly made me laugh was she makes a Pepe Silvia joke. It was not something I expected and that’s kinda what I like about the writing of the humor in the game, it’s cheesy, sure. But it’s also fun and not trying too hard. It’s just enjoyable and that’s all that matters.

There were also many, many more key moments in the game, as opposed to Double Exposure, that really stuck with me and were fun. For instance, there’s a moment where Max has a...trippy experience where she learns that you might not want to look in a mirror when you find yourself tripping over some balls. There are many more moments that are very memorable but don’t want to spoil and I think that’s what the original Life is Strange also had, so Reunion hit that experience to a T.

These all add up to provide a game that brings me back to playing the first a decade ago. It brings me back to what I was going through back then. It helps me see not just how much these characters have grown but how much I have. The beauty of Reunion is that it provides a new experience of seeing the growth of the characters between games, not just nostalgia. Of course there is some Nostalgia, but it’s not the main push in my experience.

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The Bad

One of the core gameplay mechanics is supposed to be Chloe’s backtalk where you, through your responses, convince people to believe something or tell you something. Yet, during the entire game I only did that 2 times and missed the other 1 option (and to be fair might have missed another, it's hard to be sure). It felt like a significantly underutilized gameplay mechanic which made me sad as I was looking forward to using it as a way of mixing up the gameplay. Instead Chloe segments felt more like going around and talking to people and investigating, but not really doing anything that was uniquely hers, besides her personality. I still loved her segments but not using backtalk more felt bad. I think this likely has to do with how condensed the game felt given that it was likely built in around 18 months.

Which, speaking of. I think that’s a core problem with the game. It was very short. You could really tell that it was built quickly. They reused a ton of things, which I actually appreciated, but everything took place over the course of 3 days which made the game go by very fast. Overall it took me probably close to 9 hours, comparable to Double Exposure which I also thought was too short but this still felt shorter somehow. Maybe it’s because it was very fast paced. It didn’t feel like there was enough room to breathe, let alone enough time for Chloe and Max to feel like they did in the original. Many of the best moments came when they were apart and that kinda sucked. They had great moments together, don’t get me wrong, and I loved that you were able to decide how each of them responded to each other when they were in conversations together. But I think the quick pace of the narrative made me just want more. I mean I beat it in a couple days. I didn’t even feel like I played THAT long. I just wanted more. In a perfect world I think it would have been a week before the fire so we got a ton of extra time not just with Max and Chloe but with the characters we came to love from Double Exposure. Again, this is at it’s core the reality of how the game was built so quickly, it’s hard to make a long game when you have a year and a half.

Something the game does NOT communicate to you is the “time state” or something to that effect. Essentially, the more you rewind to get the “perfect” choice of yours, the worse state time ends up in. Wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff. It’s a really interesting mechanic and all but there is zero communication of the state you are currently in. So, for instance, what I think would have been beneficial is if in the menu you could see how bad or good your time state was. Honestly, I’m thinking similar to a Dishonored situation where if you killed more people the city would get worse and it told you as such after every mission. I wanted something like that. Just some way to know this mechanic exists and have it represented somewhere so I can see what the state is. This state has outcomes late game so not being able to know how bad things are means I don’t know if I have to replay the entire game to get an ending I desperately wanted, or if I just have to replay the last half hour. It’s very frustrating.

The Meh

There’s two Meh things here, mainly that the game didn’t fix two problems I had with Double Exposure. You walk too slowly, even when you run, and there is no FOV slider. Max and Chloe take up a third of the screen and that was just too much. Let me see more of my surroundings, and let me run faster along side it. The game is perfect for these two changes but it really feels like Deck Nine are resisting allowing the characters to move faster because it would make the world seem smaller. And that they don’t want to increase the FOV because it....I dunno...it doesn’t feel like there’s a reason for this one especially since Unreal Engine has a integrated FOV slider (I say as a person that uses Unreal for my indie projects). It wouldn’t be that hard, it wouldn’t hurt the intimacy of the gameplay, they just need to do it. I mean, more and more games need to increase walk speed and include FOV sliders but aren’t. I hope that trend doesn’t keep going because it’s exhausting even if it’s something that is my particular pet peeves about many modern games.

Rewind to Buy me a Coffee maybe?

The Ending - Reaction

I mostly enjoyed the ending. I liked how I was able to come to a solution to save as many people as possible, I liked that several of my earlier decisions came into play. I even liked the “one week later” segment. What I didn’t think was the best was that there wasn’t the best closure on one of the main aspects of the game. I thought there was going to be a larger resolution instead of just finding ways to cope. In some ways that is a more realistic ending, not everything can be resolved or fixed. Sometimes you just have to find a way to deal with your problem and cope, even if it’s hard. If that’s the goal then I think it did a great job, I think I just expected resolution. It’s still a good ending though! Even the final decision is one that I appreciated, I even went back and quickly did the other option, which was actually the one I preferred. Most games don’t let me go back and try the other ending again without significant replaying so being able to do that was really nice. There also seemed to be hints that, if the game is successful, there might be another game that doesn’t have to directly do with Chloe and Max but might still include them as side characters or something, which I hope happens because I want more. I also found out that there was an ending montage I didn’t get but really wanted to and thought it was what was going to happen in the ending I got but didn’t like. So if you want that montage, maybe use Max’s power very very sparingly. Overall, I liked it even if I had nitpicks.

The Conclusion

Life is Strange: Reunion is the best Life is Strange game I’ve played since the original and almost exactly what I wanted out of a game like this. It’s got great characters and writing, a great story, and much better gameplay than Double Exposure. But the flaws still exist and because of the brisk pace of the story, likely from the brisk pace of development, it feels like there’s less time for the narrative and characters to breathe. That fact just holds the game back from really being fantastic. It’s still great, but the flaws are noticeable.

I think if you’ve experience Life is Strange at all then you should play Reunion. Not only is it a great experience, and a pretty quick one, it’s one that only costs 40 bucks. Even if you didn’t like Double Exposure I still think you should play Reunion. It allows you to get closure in a way we haven’t had with these characters before and I adored it for that. Also if you get it on sale then that’s a super good deal because it’s well worth the 40 bucks but less than that it’s even better. And also remember you can save everyone and if you want the best ending then use rewind sparingly. Or don’t, rewind to your hearts content, just know the game will remember it.

Meow,

Cat

Back in 2015 I was dealing with a lot of shit. Particularly my dealing with the realization of being queer, the realization of what the gamer community that I was a part of was becoming with Gamergate (thanks Steve Bannon and Jeff Epstein), and the fact that I was continuing to deal with significant health issues as I had been diagnosed with MS not much earlier. It was in this environment that the game that would become one of my favorite games that I have ever played would be released.

On January 30th of 2015 Life is Strange Episode 1 was released, back when episodic games were all the rage because of the massive success of the past few years of Telltale games, particularly The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us. The game was developed by Don’t Nod, a developer that I had never heard of and I went into the game with little idea of what it really was.

Or at least, sort of. See I didn’t start playing the game until episode 3, I had heard of it but I was already tired of episodic games, as everyone was starting to be. I didn’t expect to love it so much and I didn’t expect Life is Strange episode 3 to hit so damn close to home since I had, multiple times by this point, been in a hospital and having to have people I care about surround me with worry and sadness just like Chloe did in an alternate universe that Max created.

This solidified the game in my mind as one that meant the world to me and when it continued to develop the romance between Max and Chloe and the tragically ended before it really got going romance between Chloe and Rachel, I fell in love. So with Life is Strange: Reunion coming out tomorrow (at time of writing) I thought I’d go into some more detail about why Life is Strange means so much to me, how Double Exposure only grew that love, and how I am glad to finally be getting closure to Max and Chloe’s stories.

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The love never dies

The original Life is Strange covers a murder mystery in a small town on the coast of Oregon called Arcadia Bay. You play Max, a teenager in a fancy school concentrating on photography because she’s really good at it. It starts rather simply and develops into a love filled and depression causing ride that ends with one big choice: Bae or Bay. I picked both over the course of 2 playthroughs but I can only ever look back on how much I loved the Bae ending. Don’t get me wrong, sacrificing all of Arcadia Bay for Chloe is a shitty thing to do, but I get the feeling of you being willing to do anything for the person you love.

The love for that game survived through the years. I look back on the original game and I think about the characters, about the story, and about my life. As I covered, I had a lot going on at the time of release and the game helped me make progress towards accepting myself, something I will always be thankful for. Strangely, what mattered so much wasn’t even the story itself or finding out who the murderer was, it was the characters of Max and Chloe and how they very obviously loved each other, even if in an unhealthy way. It taught me that sometimes what matters most isn’t about focusing on what others want out of you but on focusing on what you want out of life.

Life is Strange is so special because of my life at the time, but, even more, that love has never changed because of my life since. The game was formative to me despite coming out in my early 20s. I saw myself in the angst of Max, in the anger at the hand one was dealt in Chloe. As time went on that just became more solidified. Not that I didn’t grow past it, mind, just that who I was at the time was reflected in many ways that the game captured. That’s the magical nature of Life is Strange. It’s not that it was something completely new or incredibly original, it’s that it was done so well that it meant a lot to a ton of people and allowed a lot of people to finally see themselves in the game.

Particularly because this was one of the first games that really allowed you to see queer teens in real life. Not the actual first, as I covered in my History of Queerness in Videogames article series (here’s part 1 if you haven’t already read it), but was during a time when the industry was becoming much more accepting. Even as Gamergate fumed at the edges of the community before it engulfed large swathes of it, the acceptance still existed and Life is Strange was a pillar of that acceptance and representation. It means so much to me because of the acceptance it had and because of my life at the time and how I just kinda needed acceptance. It showed me that while life can be strange, it is still mine and I have to live it how I want to.

Double Exposure doubled my interest and love

Many in the Life is Strange community think Double Exposure is a bad sequel to Max’s story. They think that if you picked to save Chloe at the end of the prior game then you experience a Max who was hurt immensely by Chloe who up and left Max. They view this as character assassination or at least very out of character. They think the game as a whole is just bad. Even I had issues with it (as you can read in my review from a year ago), but I still enjoyed the game a decent amount despite those issues.

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All that said, the game still pushed me into appreciating Max as a character even more. See, she grew a lot during the years between the original ending and Double Exposure. During that time she became an even better person. Someone who would still do everything to save her friends but also someone who had been so hurt by her original journey that she was still dealing with the trauma from it all those years later.

Max had depth in Double Exposure. More so, the characterization in her journal provided tremendous context to her as a person at that time. Particularly, her time detailing her and Chloe’s journeys and the eventual breakup. Chloe in the game started to realize she wasn’t quite what Max needed and that she was never quite sure whether Max had rewound time to “fix” their relationship, despite Max promising she hadn’t. Essentially, their relationship was doomed to fail because of the context of the events that lead to it. I mean if your partner sacrificed your entire hometown in order to keep you around how could you not feel guilty about being together? How could you not think she made a mistake? How could you not think that maybe your whole relationship wasn’t based in quite the same amount of affection for each other when she literally sacrificed a town for you? How could that relationship ever be actually healthy? Chloe and Max grew as people and that lead to Chloe second guessing their relationship, regretting being together, realizing how unhealthy it actually was which lead to thinking they weren’t right for each other, and then leaving. It wasn’t character assassination or even out of character. It was character development. Chloe changed as she became an adult just like we all do.

This is something fundamental to Double Exposure that I loved so much, seeing Max as a fully formed adult and having been through a ton between games. When the first game came out I was a completely different person than I was when I played Double Exposure. I mean it came out a decade later. By that point I had made friends, lost those friends, gone to college, started film school at that college, transitioned, got into a terrible relationship been told I wasn’t allowed to continue the production track of film school because my work wasn’t the right fit, dropped out of college, got out of the terrible relationship, went back to a community college, got into a much better relationship, got a certificate from said community college, bought a house, and started writing this very blog. Max and Chloe had both grown, just like I had. Sure, Chloe had grown differently than expected but how is that surprising? People don’t always grow up to be who you think they would be.

Double Exposure did something with their main character that most games haven’t been able to do, largely because of how most games don’t have sequels come out a decade later that have the same main character, it had the character grow with you, alongside you. Except you only found out about it if you played the thing.

Getting an ending means so much

Having Max and Chloe grow as people, including growing apart, having Max become a fully formed person with a career and new friends, having her use new powers again, and now having her have to face her ex again after a rough breakup all are things that people can relate to. Well, except the powers thing. But besides that, Max and Chloe were great characters back in the day because of the depth they had, because they were beautifully written and acted characters who loved each other and were willing to do anything for each other.

So now over a decade later we finally get a conclusion to their story. We get to see what they will have to deal with in their final moments together in the game (I dunno if anyone dies this is me just talking about how the game is the end of their story). This will hopefully provide some kind of closure. It’ll give you, the player, an idea of what Max and Chloe mean to each other even all these years later.

The finale to these characters could be disappointing, it could be just kinda...fine. Or it could be a finale that finally feels like it allows the characters to rest. Honestly, I don’t know what it will be, but I know it will be controversial in the community. Yet, it still means so much because of knowing what the characters endings will be. Who knows what those endings are but honestly I don’t know if I care right now as much as I am just glad we are getting an ending.

Rewind over to maybe Buy me coffee?

The Conclusion

Life is Strange: Reunion comes out in under 24 hours. I am tentatively excited. I know I had issues with Double Exposure, as I mentioned, but to be able to see the finale to Max and Chloe’s story is kinda nuts considering how it seemed like there wasn’t going to be another Life is Strange game after Double Exposure didn’t sell super well. I don’t know if I’ll feel satisfied with the story. I don’t know if having Max’s original powers back will feel good, although I think it’ll feel better than the reality shifting from Double Exposure. I don’t know if it’ll feel good or bad to play as Chloe one last time. I don’t really know anything, I haven’t played it yet after all.

What I can say is that no matter what happens, I will review it, I will cherish the fact it happened, and it will not change the fact that I love Life is Strange. It will not change how much Life is Strange meant to me. No development could happen in the game that changes that.

Meow,

Cat

The original High on Life came out in 2022 and it was a lot of fun but quickly embroiled in controversy due to Justin Roiland being an asshole of a person. Many didn’t know if Squanch Games would make a game again but here we are 4 years later and, amazingly, they’ve made a sequel! But is it really that good?

Well, I played it and I had a surprisingly fun time with it! Not only did it end up being better than the first game but while the first game felt largely just like a Justin Roiland shooter, this one feels like it brings more to the table that the first one could ever have managed. It actually feels like there’s more of a personality there when it comes to the gameplay as opposed to just the world. I want to go into more details so let’s get on with it!

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The Premise

After the events of the first game where you defeated the G3 cartel who were using humans as an illegal narcotic, you became a celebrity. But celebrity status only lasts so long when you’re a bounty hunter. Instead of saving humans from being a drug the push for using them as one has simply gone corporate and now Rea Pharma is trying to make a pill called Humanzapro that gives you all the same effects as the G3 cartel version gave you but in a suit. So what will you do? Well your sister has decided she wants to be a freedom fighter and try to take down Rea Pharma so that humans are never used as a drug again. You’re gonna end up joining her of course but first you have to betray what you built up and, even worse, learn how to use a skateboard. Can you do it? I dunno...probably? You’ll have to play to find out...okay fine yes you can do it, I just wanted to end on a fun question, geez why you gotta judge me.

The Good

Close to an hour into High on Life 2 I got plopped into the actual world you’re running around in for the rest of the game. I started to skateboard around until I came across a guy yelling at me to stop and see something. He said he was immortal and then...was going to say something else but I shot him to test it and he in fact was not immortal (obviously). Even better, he said as he died “agggh I didn’t expect this! I thought I was immortal!” This comedy is what makes High on Life 2 such an experience. The first one had this humor, but often it wouldn’t land. Here, It always felt like it landed. I mean, even a bit earlier in the game than that fake immortal you save your sister from some bounty hunters and you’re given the opportunity to kill her or shoot your fellow bounty hunters. If you shoot her the game’s done and credits roll (yes, I checked) but if you shoot the bounty hunters they’ll be confused and one of them will say “hey um, I think you must have mistook us for the target, but it’s okay we do kinda look alike”. Again, this random off handed comments that are just fucking dumb funny are exactly the kind of game you would expect and it’s fucking fantastic.

Also I’m a big fan of meta stuff, I know many people don’t like it but personally it’s my shit. There’s a moment where one of the bosses breaks the fourth wall to an extent and causes you to question what’s the game and what’s just in the world. It’s a wonderful moment that ends with the above image that is not inherently a spoiler, but if you don’t want to see it then feel free to skip it. Following the image, the game loads into a whole other experience which reminded me of my time recently playing Romeo is a Dead Man (review here) with how out of the blue it was. The humor is so much better than the first and I wish I could detail more without spoilers. So if you like meta jokes and moments you’ll love a bunch of the jokes here.

Now, something I genuinely didn’t expect to like was the movement. In the game you have a skateboard for you to get around faster and I figured it’d feel like trash since it’s a first person skateboard experience and I’ve never had one of those. Instead I found myself having flashbacks to Sunset Overdrive with how fluid and fun the movement is. The world is designed with the movement as a core mechanic and it allows you to get around super quickly if you’re able to perfect your jumps and grinding. I mean, just look at the video below, it’s really fun! Plus you can personalize and upgrade your skateboard to your liking which is also really nice.

The movement actually changed how I enjoyed the game. I’m not really a go around and collect things or open chests kind of person, usually. Well this movement is so damn good that I liked to zoom around on the skateboard and collect the different Lugloxes (chests), do the different skateboard letter collecting challenges, and find weird shit in the world. The movement made me a collector, nigh, a chaser of collectables. Of course I didn’t get them all because that’s not something I care about but I still got a ton of them.

Also, there are many, many moments throughout the world and story that provide you with opportunities to have a damn fun, and out of the ordinary, time. From escape rooms to comedy shows to kissing booths you’re able to do a lot of these things and it leads to some fun moments that add both twists and just weird ass shit that the game may as well be known for. While I wish there was more, what’s there is great!

Finally, the story has some really great moments, as I just mentioned, but particularly has things that kinda come out of left field that I never saw coming. There’s one moment about 3/4th or 2/3rd of the way through the game where your character has a big thing happen to them and you end up with a Half Life 2 gravity gun in all but name and shape and that’s fucking awesome. There’s a lot of swings it takes while sticking to the idea of you being a bounty hunter type person who chases after specific targets. So, generally, it’s a fun time.

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The Bad

The starting guns might have great personalities that are left over from the first game, but they’re still not the best guns. Gus (the shotgun) is useful but Sweezy (the needler) is just kinda an annoying experience to shoot. She’s a great character though. Eventually you get multiple more new guns that are significantly more powerful than the guns you started with and even than the guns from the last game so you go from having to fire at enemies multiple times to being able to take most of them out with 1 shot with the chillaxin’ bow aptly named Bowie. I just wish the base guns were more powerful so you didn’t feel like the game was starting so slow. The gunplay itself also isn’t super good, they don’t feel like there’s a whole lot of weight behind them. Specifically, when your shots connect it doesn’t really feel like much, there’s not much feedback. I think they could seriously improve that aspect in a third game and make these lovely buddies feel much better to shoot.

You aren’t able to go back to the unique locations for the main missions. This fucking sucks. There’s some damn cool levels for each target, places that have some really interesting design and make you want to explore but if you don’t bother to then, unfortunately, you can’t go back. The devs did think about how you might miss out on upgrades because of that so they added characters that’ll sell lugloxes from previous levels that you missed. That doesn’t change though that I wish I was able to explore the levels again without the pressure of a main mission. Some of these areas contextually make sense as to why you couldn’t go back but I don’t think that’s really a good excuse in a game that could just make up some meta reason for the ability to go back.

Importantly, while the story has a lot of good parts and is overall fun, I don’t think some of the side characters had much of a character arc and I think the story sticking to some of the formula from the first game held it back a bit. I mean, I think the best parts of the game were moments that tore you away from that formula and made you have to do different things. If there is a third game, as Squanch obviously wants to make, I hope they take more of those risks. I want them to introduce more weird shit that takes you away from being a bounty hunter person going after select targets. Risks are good and after what I’ve seen in this one I think they’re plenty capable of it.

The Ending - Reaction

Surprisingly, I actually really liked the ending. I thought there was payoff, they made all their baskets (that’ll make sense when/if you beat it), and it felt like things throughout the game actually mattered. More so, the final boss section does an absolutely wonderful job at using all of your weapons abilities and all of the movement stuff you’ve unlocked over the course of the game, as well as revisiting art styles and moments from previous levels. It was genuinely a great ending. Plus after the credits all the characters do their meta thing about you finishing the game and how hopefully the devs are making a third one and stuff. It was a good bow to a really fun journey.

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The Conclusion

I had a ton of fun with High on Life 2. The game made me keep coming back, it made me want more fancy movement in my FPS games, it made me believe there are in fact ways to introduce a concept to a genre that doesn’t usually have it and still manage to make it work. The game definitely has flaws and feels like just a taste of what Squanch Games is really capable of, but I think it’s a worthy successor and significant improvement over the first one. I can genuinely say that this one is a very good game.

All that said, it’s 60 bucks and I think it’d do better at the 50 dollar price point. I do think it’s worth 60, so if you’re interested it’s not a horrible value, but at 50 it’d be such a good deal and experience that I’d say you should grab it as soon as you’ve got the money and if anything I’ve said sounds interesting to you. Overall, the game isn’t perfect and could have taken more risks, but damn is it fun to play and experience and, especially, laugh at.

Meow,

Cat

There has been a trend in a lot of games in the last decade to making them more Realistic. Many developers and consumers argue that it is, in fact, very fun to have gameplay that doesn’t acknowledge that you are playing a game and it is not and will never be real life. I find this infuriating.

Not because trying to make some things realistic is a big problem, but because this trend towards Realism has become such a problem in the Industry that the fluidity and speed of gameplay has started to be sacrificed in favor of that idea. I’ve touched on this a couple times, both in my Indiana Jones and The Great Circle review and my Sea of Thieves not-review, both times I talked about different aspects of the games that were realistic that were just an annoyance for the overall gameplay.

So today, let’s talk about my opinion, about why I’ so damn tired of Realism as a mechanic in games. I’ll be touching on how it often leads to the loss of real fun and hurts gameplay, how it adds bloat, how not all Realism is bad, and how we as developers can implement realism in a way that doesn’t cause these issues. Obviously this is gonna be a bit long, but hey that’s what these kinds of articles usually end up being. So let’s dive in to make sure it’s not longer than it needs to be.

Oh also, Realism in this article isn’t about graphics, it’s all about the gameplay. Just to get that out of the way.

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Realism over fun

What do I mean by this? Well, put simply games are meant to be fun. There are definitely a lot of ways that you can find fun in games but at they’re core they’re still an experience that you are expected to derive enjoyment out of in some way, just like all pieces of media. But then there are moments where games have decided that the fun can take a back seat sometimes so the game can put realism first. So the game can make something tedious that you have to deal with every single time as a way of being “realistic” but not as a way of being fun.

For instance, let’s look at a game that many many people adore with a fiery passion, Red Dead Redemption 2. Specifically, it’s hunting. There’s plenty of things in the game that are realism first but it’s hunting is, I think, the most frustrating aspect. When hunting in real life, skinning the animal you shot is a whole lot of work and takes a long time, even someone like me who has never hunted knows that it can be a messy process depending on the animal. In Red Dead 2 they seemingly wanted to emulate as much as possible that long time of doing the skinning by having you wait while Arthur, your character, skins the animal in a too damn long animation. This is a way of trying to implement some kind of realism based “mechanic”, emulating the long time it takes to skin an animal, which slows down the game waaaaay too much. Plus it’s not really a mechanic either, hence the quotes, it’s a fucking animation. It’s boring. And all they had to do to was add a setting or option to skip the animation if you want, it would not have been difficult, options are always better.

This very same mechanic is actually present in other games as well but they get something right that RDR 2 doesn’t. They realize that players don’t like waiting for long animations. They realize that as a player you’re going to want to spend maybe a couple seconds having the animation play. Far Cry, for instance, takes a measly 5 seconds. Red Dead Redemption 2 can take up to almost 20 seconds depending on what animal it is. Is it “realistic” that bigger animals take longer? Sure. But that can easily take you out of the experience when all you want to do is get moving again and the animation has to finish.

Some games even do away with the skinning animation all together because they figured you’re playing a game, do you really need to have every little detail like that in it? Which, no. You don’t. What matters is the flow of the game, allowing the player to not feel like their time playing the game is interrupted by these moments of attempting to emulate realism. Red Dead Redemption 2 chose to put realism over game flow, arguably over fun.

Bloat is the enemy of enjoyment

Let’s move on from Read Dead Redemption 2 so it doesn’t feel like I’m picking on it too much and instead focus on a game I mentioned at the top, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. This one is a game that I adored, a game that made me feel like I was playing as Indy and was actually going on an adventure of his that spanned the globe. Plus I got to punch Nazis in it and I do love doing that, but there’s one part of it that bothers the fuck out of me: the bloat of the realism.

Now there isn’t a ton of realism in the game, I mean you’re literally going on a punching spree around the Vatican while surviving bullet wounds. But then there are the keys. I talked about this in my review but when you need to use a key you need to select it in the menu to be your item you have on hand, sometimes you then need to pull it out, then you need to stick it in the door when you’re at the exact right spot to press x to put it in, then you have to turn the key with the thumbstick. This is an introduction of realism where it’s emulating how you would actually use a key in real life. The thing is, keys are used rather easily in real life, they’re mundane and not important. The introduction of this realism does only one thing, introduce bloat.

All of a sudden you can go from enjoying your time running around as Indy to having to do annoying key things. This isn’t necessary and it interrupts the flow of the game, just like with Red Dead Redemption 2. Except here they try to make you more a part of the experience instead of it just being an animation. Yet it still feels bad. It still feels like all they needed to do was let you click a button to open the door instead of having to do the annoying other movements. The game is sort of an Immersive Sim and most im-sims don’t make you do these things for opening doors because they realize how annoying that would be when you’re trying to sneak around or do something.

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This is my frustration with games like this, they are often very good but then introduce some kind of mechanic that just breaks up all of the fun and adds bloat or monotony. Here in Indiana Jones they could have just had you have to pull out the key if they wanted it to have some kind of “realism” to it but to also have to do the key movements yourself to open the door is just bad. It feels bad, it will always feel bad, and it will always be that they have a mechanic that is pure bloat and annoyance instead of continuing to allow the players to enjoy their time.

Some realism can be good

After all this I think it might seem like I don’t think any realism is good. That I think the very concept of realism is a plague on the industry. But the reality is much different. See, my point in all of this isn’t that realism is a horrible thing but that it needs to have a point to it. Realism that I have talked about is realism for the sake of it, not for the purpose of creating a new mechanic or some kind of interesting aspect to the game.

I might not find the implementations with a purpose to always be interesting but that’s a taste thing not a problem with the mechanic. However I do have some friends who actually really enjoy realism when it has a point. Here’s a quote from one of them about the game Vintage Story (a realism survival minecraft-y game):

When I think of realism, I’m not talking about the corporate standard of only focusing on realistic graphics, I’m talking game mechanics and systems that are balanced with immersive environments. Graphics don’t matter if the environment is poor and/or the systems are not engaging, and adding in a irl autonomous system into a game (Like a breathing mechanic) when your game’s puzzle doesn’t require it/it breaks you out of a game’s evironment/story is also not good either. There needs to be balance, and it’s why I like Vintage Story because what systems/mechanics it has in depth it is enveloped in an immersive and engaging environment with a slower progression system which allows me room to appreciate my crafts I make (something we really need in an ever exploitive attention ‘economy’).

This is what I mean, realism can be good if it is implemented effectively. Now part of it is up to the developers to figure out ways to implement realism in a mechanic function as opposed to just bringing down the player with annoyances but that’s their job.

For instance, in the Portal games realism is implemented through the physics system that allows you as the player to use realistic physics to solve puzzles in creative, and sometimes completely unintended, ways. The realism here doesn’t hold back the player, it enhances the player and gives them more capabilities.

Or there’s RimWorld which has implemented realism through their injury and medical system. RimWorld is a colony sim and when your citizens don’t have any health, instead they live and, if they become injured, they then need to be healed. But the quality of this medical care is what determines how effectively they are healed. Realism enhances the experience where you have to have a doctor who is good in order to have your injured citizens survive just like real life. It intertwines mechanics of the game to make it have even more depth.

Then there’s also Steep which is a snow sports game (that I’ve talked about before) which uses a realistic physics system and environment to be able to make you feel like you’re actually snowboarding or skiing or paragliding around the area. Because of this realism it enhances the experience of playing the game without getting in the way of the player.

Realism can be implemented well, it just has to be done well and with a purpose that doesn’t get in the way of the player and the game flow.

There is a better way

Essentially, I think developers who want realism in their games need to take a good long look at their goals with their game. Are they introducing a mechanic with the realism that would mean the realism has some kind of purpose? Does the realism interrupt the flow of the game meaning the player has to either just wait for something to be done when they could be playing or have to do some kind of combination of button presses and such in order to mimic the experience of doing something like that in real life? Does the realism introduce a mechanic to the game that feels completely out of place in the grand scheme of things and is simply only there for some kind of difficulty aspect?

There are genuine ways to implement realism, ways that can provide depth to a game, like what my friends find enjoyable in Vintage Story (a game that I will never play because it does not sound like my thing). Or there are ways that you can implement realism that hold your game back. If you are sure that you’re right in how your realism might do some of the bad things I’ve talked about but “it’ll be different because I’ll do it right” I simply must ask you to add some options to change how realistic that thing is. If it’s animations let the player skip them. If it’s annoying going through menus then doing some button presses and shit to mimic something like real life, maybe add an option to simplify it.

Buy me a very realistic coffee?

And most importantly, do playtests, don’t think that you know everything, let the public play your game to see if some of the things you are doing are actually fun (this one should be obvious but given the recent failure of Highguard I guess it needs to be stated).

The Conclusion

Well at the end I just want to reiterate I don’t hate all realism. I find some of it rather interesting mechanic wise. But I’m a picky player and I make my opinions very obvious about aspects of realism that bother me in games I play during my reviews. Realism is a trend in the industry for a lot of developers and I want it to stop, but it doesn’t have to fully go away. It just needs to be implemented with care and with balance in mind with game flow.

So that’s that, do you have any opinions on realism? Do you disagree with how I’m saying that realism needs to be a balance? Do you have favorite moments where realism has enhanced the experience of playing a game for you? Let me know in the comments!

Meow,

Cat

I adore weird games and years ago I heard about El Paso, Elsewhere and how good it was. It was made by Strange Scaffold, a developer who has become known for making incredibly weird games. So with my partner poking at me to go play their games and me already knowing that I love weird experiences, last year I bought the entire Strange Scaffold catalogue that is on Steam when it was on sale and today I am launching a brand new series that I call the Strange Scaffold Double Feature!

See, their games aren’t usually long so I figured I could lump two of their games together. Also, I’m going chronologically from their first game on Steam to their newest. I was genuinely surprised how much fun I had with this week’s 2 games and despite having issues they were very enjoyable.

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An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs

This is the first game from Strange Scaffold that is on Steam and, while not their first game ever, you can definitely see how this is the game early on that they started figuring out the kind of game the team wanted to do. Strange Scaffold on Itch has prior games to this, but they’re all either browser games or more visual novel-like as opposed to a game you have more gameplay in, like this one. An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs is rough (haha) around the edges but it’s the beginning of the Strange Scaffold team finding their footing, their identity as a developer.

The Premise

What is An Airport for Aliens Currently Run By Dogs, however? Okay, imagine a series of airports across the solar system run by 2D images of dogs. Then, imagine playing one of the last 2 humans in existence and you have to go around these airports choosing to do things for these dogs because...well...what else would you do after the whole human race has been destroyed? Over time you’ll also meet up with your fellow human survivor, your fiancé Karla, who is a scientist working for R&Dog. You’re engaged, but long distance so she can do her science...things and you can help dogs across the system. And now, imagine that these dogs are fucking strange beings that make little sense and just have absolutely nonsensical personalities. And that they ask you to do things that sometimes either dont make sense or have questionable reasoning. This game you’ve imagined is exactly what An airport for Al...fuck it, this game you’ve imagined is exactly what Dog Airport Game is about. Because this is The Premise section and describing the games’ premise to you is what it’s for.

The Good

The weird ass writing in the game is one of the best parts of it. I’m aware that’s kinda the shtick of most Strange Scaffold games, they’re weird and make you laugh or at least have fun above anything else and the game definitely made me have fun in this regard. I enjoyed talking to the different dogs, helping them do the things they were doing might have been tedious but the hilarious dialogue were what really solidified my enjoyment of the game.

There’s also just weird shit. Like when you find a dog that has another dog with it and apparently is sitting on missiles which it will then give you one and say it better not regret doing that. Or the dog that’s been cursed to be a human and you have to help them figure out how to be a dog again. Or the dog that sells briefcases but hates briefcases, which also is when you’re able to express your dislike of briefcases as well which is fuckin hilarious. Or the dog who wants to give you a souvenir so gives you an “Actual Gun”. Or how the ticket dog for the route to Uranus often chuckles before saying it. Or how when you ask for 50 boarding passes the dog says “you like to live dangerously” which is a hilarious reference. Plus you can keep requesting 50 boarding passes over and over and over and...well...in the first 10 minutes the video below happened. I couldn’t help myself okay? It was just so funny! The game is just filled with this dumb hilarious shit that makes ya smile.

The Bad

The game essentially boils down to a bunch of fetch quests (how the turn tables with the dogs making the human fetch). The way to progress is by going from airport to airport to grab items from some dogs and give them to other dogs to get items from them and give them to other dogs. With a couple cats mixed in. The worst part of this is just how boring it is running around, finding dogs in the big maps if airports that exist, which can sometimes be difficult to navigate. Plus you don’t run very quickly and the area is large so much of the game is just walking. It sucked.

A frustration I had was also kinda just a core part of the game in that not all airports go to other airports. So when you’re doing the fetch quests and going to find Karla at different locations you’re often just going around, slowly, from one airport to another to the one you actually want to go to. I get that’s kinda part of the point but it just didn’t feel good that not only did I have issues knowing where the gates are each time, but I got so damn tired of moving so damn slowly around the maps. It got tiring and eventually once I had done most of the fetch quests I just said fuck it and went around to find Karla and finish the game.

The Ending - Reaction

The game is very loosely strung together, but it did kinda have a good payoff. It also had a good message, enjoy the time you have with those you love because it will eventually come to an end. Kinda sad but there is some hope there for what the future of the characters will hold. It was also rather satisfying to be done with the game and not have to run around so damn slowly.

The Conclusion

The game has some issues but I was expecting that. What I wasn’t expecting was the absolutely wacky game that I played. I never expected to find some of the things that I did, to get items like an alien orb or a Dog (Doug) Dimmadome ultra big hat, or even a Polaroid camera. I expected something weird with some jank but not something this weird. And that elevated my experience with it significantly. Add in that it’s only about a 4-5 hour game, depending on how many dogs you fetch things for, and you get a nice experience.

I genuinely think you should play Dog Airport Game but maybe wait for a sale. Sure I’ve scored it high but for 20 bucks that’s a lot to ask for such a short game. It’s definitely worth a playthrough though and I highly recommend it.

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Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator

The jump from Dog Airport Game to Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator is a drastic one. Not only is it a completely new type of gameplay for Strange Scaffold to be making but it’s also a game that very quickly shows that they now know what type of stuff they want to make. They went from a much more basic game with not a whole lot of interacting parts to this much more ambitious experience with multiple mechanics all working in tandem to create the experience that is Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator. This is the game that really shows me the Strange Scaffold I have heard about time and time again, Dog Airport game was the teaser, this one is the actual starting point of the out of the blue game styles and wacky shit that the studio has become known for.

The Premise

You are a Space Warlord who trades Human and Non-Human Organs on the space trading market. It’s time to earn some money by fulfilling the requests of consumers and maybe use that money for upgrades and playing the Organ Trading Stock Market. Will you get to all 11 endings? Or will you get absorbed in the craziness of the organ trading world and forget that there even are endings? I guess it’s up to you.

The Good

Ya know, I never expected to enjoy anything about this game. It doesn’t really interest me and it just overall seemed rather boring. Yet, I still found myself coming across things that made me keep playing. I continued to play and play and play and, even better, I found myself actually wanting to play. I was house-sitting during my playthrough and when I couldn’t sleep I would play the game, it was addicting and satisfying to slowly get more money, unlock more things, game the stock market, see the weird shit that exists, see the often hilarious writing of the blurbs for the requests. They all made me interested and kept me going, even when I got tired of other aspects.

Actually let’s go into the core gameplay since I mentioned the majority of it but haven’t gone into detail. Essentially you’re an organ trader who buys organs to fulfill requests from buyers. But when you buy these things the organ stock market fluctuates accordingly. You start your stock trading day which lasts 2 minutes and 30 seconds and during that time you pick up requests, buy the organs, fulfill requests, and try to buy things before other organ traders (run by the games AI (not that kind) buy them. You have to also manage how much money you have and grab things that you can afford and requests that you’re sure you can get within your budget. Then your trading day ends and the possible request board is closed and you can no longer buy new organs, but you can still fulfill any requests that you have already picked up. Then you can then use your picked up requests to game the stock market before and after your trading day. You also have the opportunity to upgrade your storage and pay off other traders so you don’t have to fight them for organs and/or up your reputation by paying other traders for favors. You also have moments in the trading day when an event pops up, like you possibly having to pay taxes or just an influx of a specific organ to the market. That’s basically it. All of it together might sound complicated but it’s honestly pretty easy to grasp when you sit down and press play.

The game also moves fast. Those 2 minutes 30 seconds might seem like a decent amount of time but it is not. In reality the other traders move super duper fast so you just have to move quick. But with how the controller controls are (more detail in the next section), it just takes forever to get to the organs you need. While the ID of the organ shows the info you need to know, I did not remember how to read that and my dyslexia kinda makes that difficult anyway so I have to click on every organ to see the details I need.

With that, there’s an amazing accessibility setting (which you can see in the video above) that allows you to slow down the game pace significantly. You can literally make it more than double the time and at will, there’s no locking you in to your selection. Each second is stretched which means you’re able to go through all of the organs and buy the ones you need while still being able to go back and forth between the requests you have and the organs because who can remember all the organs you need when you have 6 different requests and each requires multiple organs? This setting literally saves the game from being something that is just kinda annoyingly fast and keeps it from being super fun to actually being able to be played without being as super focused.

The Bad

All of my frustrations stem from the controls. Specifically scrolling through the organ menu. Even more specifically you have to use the right stick to scroll but it doesn’t really scroll the selection. Plus when you’re not used to this you try to just scroll down with the left stick and you will go down to the last organ visible and it won’t keep scrolling through the list but jump to the menu item below. I think it was probably designed for PC with controller as secondary so it makes some sense that it wasn’t perfect, it just takes getting used to and doesn’t feel intuitive.

The Ending - Reaction

There are multiple endings to the game but what kinda bugged me about them is how they came about when I wasn’t expecting them. I was never clear on how to make them come about, what the goal was, or when I would end up getting an ending. They take the form of specific requests for you to fulfill so I did like, know when they were within reach, but not what got me to the point where I was even able to accept them.

Despite that I found the multiple endings I got fun and enjoyable. Weird and wacky. And even better, satisfying. Sure I had more endings to go until I hit 11 (which I didn’t end up doing) but each one (after the first one) still felt like it wasn’t a bad place to stop.

The Conclusion

As I said earlier, I really never expected to like this game. I expected to just be bored, to get annoyed with all of the...well...everything. That held me back from starting this series for a long time. But once I started it I just kept playing. Sure, I had a few days there where I didn’t charge my Legion Go S so I couldn’t play it on the couch but I was still itching to play it and kept thinking about it. Again and again I thought “I need to charge that, I want to keep trading those organs”. This is what makes a good game. One that worms its way into your brain and just keeps you thinking about it even when you’re playing other games. As such, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator is a damn good game.

It’s very much worth the money it costs, and if it’s on sale? Grab this shit if anything I have said sounds interesting. Sure, there’s some issues but all games have issues, this is a great experience that is very unique and fun. Plus, it teaches you a little on how to play with stocks...a bit. I mean it’s not super accurate but you’d be surprised how accurate it actually is.

Part 1 - Conclusion

Welp, that’s the end of Part 1. Two interesting games, one more fun and weird and one not a game I expected to enjoy but I ended up having a great time with! The interesting thing is seeing the Strange Scaffold team go from just finding their footing to actually seeming to know what kind of developer they want to be and I’m looking forward to seeing them improve on that vision in part 2 which will come...eventually. Hopefully about a month from now but I’m unsure depending on how things go.

Buy me a coffee?

Part 2 will be about Witch Stranding and El Paso, Nightmare. Strangely the second one is a side story for El Paso, Elsewhere which is their better known Max Payne-like game that came out a bit under a year later. That one will be in Part 3 but I’m getting ahead of myself. What matters is that Part 1 is in the books and I can’t wait to play more Strange Scaffold games. They’re genuinely a developer that if I had the opportunity to work with then I would jump at it without any hesitation. Maybe one day...

Meow,

Cat