It’s a full house again this week as John, Lily, Crystal, and Nikolas sit down to talk about the Nintendo Direct and the games they’ve been playing. John’s been playing Resident Evil 4 Remake, Marathon, Boltgun, and the Parasite Mutant demo. Lily’s been stuck in PS2 purgatory with Bloodrayne, Shadow Hearts, Mercenaries, Dark Cloud 2, and Evergrace. She’s also been playing Alabaster Dawn‘s early access version and Sekitori. Crystal is in Final Fantasy hell with Final Fantasy XII and watching Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children while Nikolas dug into Etrian Odyssey.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, John, Lily, Crystal, and Nikolas

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 94: Rayman’s Giant Hog appeared first on Gamesline.

The Gamesline Podcast is back for another week at the Pikmin factory as John and Crystal sit down to talk about the week in games. John’s still just as Pikmin 4 obsessed as he’s been while Crystal has been playing Fuser and all the extra stuff from Final Fantasy X-2 like Last Mission and X-2.5 -Will-. She also attended the digital Endix Expo. In the news, we’re getting Kowloon’s Gate in english.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, John, and Crystal.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 91: Endix Cards appeared first on Gamesline.

This was streamed live on our Twitch at https://www.twitch.tv/gameslinetv, go follow and subscribe to it so you get notified of future streams!

The post 2026 Endix Expo Day 1 with Crystal! appeared first on Gamesline.

Console manufacturers have largely moved away from motion and touch controls, though they vestigially persist through the Joy-Con and DualSense controllers. Their unique capabilities are occasionally exploited for optional control schemes or minor gimmicks, but it’s very rare to find a game primarily designed around the features that make a new pair of 2017 Joy-Cons cost $89.

By comparison, all modern smartphones are still pretty much variations on Apple’s 2007 design; your phone probably contains a touchscreen as its primary hardware interface, and some kind of tilt sensor that sees less frequent but still common use. What ludic possibilities can be realized with these enduring tools? 

Well, you can simulate drinking beer.

Video games are toys, and the simple joy of movement present in a great platformer has its parallel in the joy of tilting a phone towards your mouth to make your virtual beer flow off-screen. When you press A in Donkey Kong (1994), pixels move across a screen, and a speaker makes a noise. We call this “making Mario jump.” Somehow, our brains not only translate this sensory information into a meaningful schema, but produce pleasure in response to this spell of light, sound, and movement.

So it is with the warm golden glow of a bubbly beer with a perfect head of foam, accompanied by the sound of flowing liquid and the motion of my hand and lips. What’s missing? Well, there’s the taste, but in my experience, the taste of beer never quite lives up to its appearance. It pairs okay with greasy food, I suppose. The component of a real beer that I miss more is the feeling of an ice-cold glass sucking the warmth out of my hand.

But there are also a few things virtual beer can do that real beer cannot. It can make a friend laugh, if only once or twice. It can give a kid the thrill of imitating adult behavior, without really breaking any rules. And of course, it can lead Crystal from Gamesline to meditate on the values of entertainment software, and how they change across history.

What I played for this review is not the original 2008 iBeer by Hottrix, for it no longer has an up-to-date Android app available. I did download an old APK of iBeer, but the basic features and low-resolution graphics put it behind the current premier iBeer knock-off on Android: Beer Simulator ‐ iBeer by Just4Fun Mobile. This version has much more obtrusive ads than the original iBeer ever could have, for iPhones of the era lacked the kind of connectivity that allows the free version of Beer Simulator ‐ iBeer to quickly fetch a full-screen sound-on HD video—or worse, a playable demo of a mobile game!—every time I finish a beer. However, Beer Simulator ‐ iBeer does only charge $2.49 to remove ads, versus the $2.99 price of the original iBeer app.

Derivative games poisoned by the worst ads in history are pretty much what you can expect from a mobile game storefront these days. There’s also the casinos, and the not-quite-casinos that are designed to continually extract money through addiction. Of course, video games have been praised for their addictive design since at least the 80s, including early mobile hit Angry Birds, so the currently dominant model of daily-login freemium games grew out of deep roots in the industry. But for a brief moment in the late 00s and early 10s, phone games were primarily structured as a one-time purchase between $1-5. And one of the most popular iPhone games of 2008 was a simple beer drinking simulator.

The post Beer Simulator ‐ iBeer Review — Software-Assisted Pretend appeared first on Gamesline.

In this city, one hope shines through the night: The Gamesline Podcast starring John, Rose, Lilith, and Nikolas! John enters the pastoral world of Pokopia while also returning to Raccoon City in Resident Evil 9. Rose played many games, including Resident Evil 9, Nioh 3, Marathon, Slay the Spire 2, Trails Beyond the Horizon, and Mewgenics! Lily played ULTRAKILL Layer 8: Fraud, Trails to Azure, Monster Hunter Rise and numerous Next Fest demos, including Annihilated, Cicadamata, and Firestarters. Finally, Nikolas has also been playing ULTRAKILL and Mewgenics!

In the news, Nagoshi Studio is in danger of shuttering, Nintendo is suing the US government over tariffs, PlayStation isn’t going PC ports anymore, Xbox is officially making a new console, Pokemon Winds and Waves was announced, Highguard is shutting down, a new Hunter: The Reckoning game was accidentally revealed, and Cookie’s Bustle is free from spurious copyright claims.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, John, Rose, Lilith, and Nikolas.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Crystal with video production by John

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 84: Cookie is Free appeared first on Gamesline.

With Game of the Year coverage out of the way, the gang sits down to finish it all off for a topical discussion of the year in games. Scott is joined by Spencer, Crystal, Elvie, and Lorelai to go over as many topics as they could in 12 20-40 minute segments.

Part 1: Friend-Type Games – Crystal
Part 2: Dynasty Warriors – Lorelai
Part 3: Silksong – Spencer
Part 4: Blue Prince – Scott
Part 5: The New Age of Handhelds – Crystal
Part 6: The Remastering of the Classics – Lorelai
Part 7: Final Fantasy Tactics asks us What is a remake? – Scott and Lorelai
Part 8: We have to talk about Rematch – Scott
Part 9: Unique Artstyles and Designs of 2025 – Elvie
Part 10: Nightreign – Scott
Part 11: Questions – Everyone
Finale: What do we want out of 2026? – Lorelai

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, Scott, Lorelai, Crystal, Spencer, and Elvie.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Lorelai and Produced by Lorelai, Crystal, Elvie, and Scott

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 81: Game of the Year Special Edition appeared first on Gamesline.

If I truly only cared about my own reaction to games, I would keep a private journal. Instead, I post my thoughts online so others can read it. Actually, I’m more likely to post about a game that I played by myself, because that means I haven’t gotten to talk about it with someone else yet. Even if you only read this article, I have still communicated to you. However, I’d love it if you said something back to me in the comments form below.

11. Collective Unconscious

Collective Unconscious is currently unavailable for online play, but it’s the Yume Nikki fan game I spent the most time with friends in on Yume Nikki Online. Honestly, I don’t think I could distinguish one Yume Nikki fan game from another; I just appreciate coexisting with others in odd little RPG Maker maps with ethereal music.

I don’t like pressing the run button in Collective Unconscious, nor do I ever want to have a full understanding of every world and secret. I like walking slowly and making lots of stops and sitting on a bench to quietly chat. Games can be toys, but they can also just be a pretty interactive screensaver for Discord calls.

10. Demon’s Souls

My haughty intelligence-type royal came to Boletaria to plunder the secrets of sorcery from the demons, and mercilessly slaughtered all who opposed her quest for greater power. Some have quibbled over the placement of the apostrophe in the title of Demon’s Souls, but its meaning is clear to me: I am the singular Demon, and I am gathering Souls. There is little vagueness to the story of Demon’s Souls: the truest narrative of a game is what you do in the game.

At the lowest point of the Valley of Defilement, beyond a lake of piss and shit and whatever other disgusting byproducts an animal’s body can produce, dwells an immobile Archdemon who dares to absorb the impurities of those who have been abandoned by God. Like all other Archdemons, you must slay her and take her Demon’s Soul, so you can turn it into a spell, or a sword, or a couple points of Endurance.

There are few highly-technical boss fights in Demon’s Souls, as there are in its descendants; bosses are mostly characterized by a single gimmick or setpiece that demands patience, not skill. The greatest challenge in this game is carefully navigating through dangerous terrain where your footing is unsure and darkness obscures the distance. You must judiciously prepare your limited inventory to endure a whole level with no checkpoints, which makes any shortcut enormously valuable. Dark Souls III remains a fan-favorite because it’s a smooth fast-paced ride from boss fight to boss fight, but Demon’s Souls constantly asks you to slow down and observe. That might give you enough time to think about what you’re doing.

9. The Endless Forest

The Endless Forest is a social screensaver, as described by its developer Tale of Tales. You’re meant to leave it idling in the background, which many of the long-time members of this 20-year old community do. When I played this game with Ava, we found numerous deer sleeping peacefully in the forest, each in their own little spot. There’s not much to do in this really-quite-compact forest, but there is a lot of ambience to absorb.

We were just about satisfied with our time in the forest, when one of the deer woke up and started casting appearance-altering spells on us. There is hidden magic in this forest, and this veteran player was excited to share it with us. More deer arrived to greet us, and we danced and ran and rested at all the places they were excited to show us. New players don’t seem to come too often, and I was immediately identifiable as a new player because I started with a fawn character, rather than a fully-grown deer.

There is no voice or text chat in The Endless Forest, only movement, expressions, and spells. There is, however, an active forum filled with art, writing, and friendly conversation between the dozens of veterans of this niche community. I’ve never felt more like a tourist than reading the beautiful detailed character profiles people write for their deer, or reading reminisces of years-old holiday gatherings in the forest. It’s not my corner of the internet, but I’m really glad I got to visit it.

8. Combat

I played Combat in online netplay with three different people who had never tried the game before, and it was a hit every time. Decades of increasingly complex shooter design have been unable to match the pleasure of curving a bullet around the edge of the screen to hit your friend from behind and hear them say “Holy moly!” Forget left-trigger-right-trigger, forget reloading, forget aiming at a distant target on the z-axis. In Combat you have one screen, one button, one enemy, and it made me wonder why I ever desired anything more.

7. R4: Ridge Racer Type 4

Style goes a long way. Every run through R4 is the same eight tracks in the same order, with the same thin visual novel storyline per difficulty setting. It’s a joy to play through every time, because the whole game looks and sounds like that. It’s so much easier to play an amazing 1-hour game 50 times than to play an uneven 50 hour game once. Especially if you have a rival to motivate you.

6. The Chrono Jotter

Even in a world filled with horrors, you still have to go to work. Ran Ibuki’s situation is even worse, because she hallucinates horrors that feel as real to her as the actual horrors. Her most meaningful relationships will not make these hallucinations go away, nor will her work as a cool paranormal detective. She must simply persevere, for the sake of the most important thing in this world: complicated love between women.

Even so, Ran is a gloomy and untrustworthy character. She isn’t easy to love. She will crash out for reasons the people around her do not understand. She gets angry at people who try to help her in the wrong way. She has unsettling habits, like eating pages out of a diary that feels like her girlfriend’s skin. In other words:

5. Peak

I’m often disappointed by environmental challenges in video games. Death Stranding is supposedly a game about keeping your footing in unsteady terrain, but it never actually made me sweat. Climbing in Assassin’s Creed carries no risk of falling, unless enemies throw rocks at you. Peak made me seriously think about how the hell I’m even supposed to make progress, and it was willing to harshly punish me for being careless with my movement. I lost my grip at crucial moments, I fell off cliffs, I slowly starved until I no longer had the stamina to climb.

My favorite memory is spending too much time in a dead-end cave with KB, to the point where we could no longer escape the creeping fog that was coming to kill us. We went through all the stages of grief before finally accepting our fates, and we sat together and talked while waiting for our destined death.

That bittersweet despair is also balanced by frequent moments of faith and friendship. Hand-holding is a major mechanic, and many seemingly-impossible jumps can be made, to my surprise every time, by simply reaching out my hand to the friend who is reaching out to me. It’s equally thrilling to be on the other end, assuring my friend that they can make that jump if only they trust me.

I’ve played a ton of Final Fantasy this year, a series that can’t tear itself away from themes of hope and despair, but none of them have been half as effective at communicating those themes as surviving a grueling climb to the top of a mountain to roast marshmallows with the people who helped you get there.

4. Seabed

Seabed loves the tiniest mundane details of life. I don’t know how many sentences I read exhaustively describing every step of making dinner: deliberating over what ingredients you want, going to the store, buying the ingredients, going back home, chopping your ingredients, cooking them, eating them in the proper sequence, and washing the dishes. 

I doubt I would have made it to the end if I played Seabed alone, but reading it with Isabelle over several months provided a stable ritual of using all these mundane details as a springboard for conversation. How do you make dinner? Where do you like to visit? What do you think of the San Francisco Fisherman’s Wharf crab sign in front of the Applebee’s? Life is a string of small moments, not dramatic events, and those moments become memorable when they’re shared with a loved one.

3. BS The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets

Ancient Stone Tablets is simultaneously a 50-minute score attack version of Zelda 3, the secret precursor to the NPC schedules of Majora’s Mask, and a testament to the magic of ephemerality. In its originally designed play experience on the Satellaview (one 6pm-7pm broadcast per day over four weeks, with a new episode each week), Ancient Stone Tablets does not give you enough time to fully dissect it. What secrets could be hidden that you simply missed before the timer ran out? Once the broadcast season ended, months would pass before you got a chance to play a rerun, and one day it was simply gone forever.

Due to the efforts of many dedicated fans, I was able to approximately simulate that original play experience alongside Cameron and Monica. We played one episode per week, with the additional constraint of one play session per episode, and gathered afterwards to compare our scores and experiences. I don’t remember who got the highest score, but I remember the way these conversations recaptured the enthusiastic wonder of discussing video games during recess.

The 50-minute clock really does make Hyrule feel bigger, denser, and more mysterious than it actually is. As the hero, you are tasked with completing two dungeons in that time, and it’s very possible to fail your objective if you’re not taking it seriously. (I was genuinely worried I wouldn’t even see the final boss!) The dungeons are not any more grueling in terms of combat or puzzles than any other Zelda game, but combination of haste and impermanence make each second you spend on a screen more meaningful.

Since I was competing for a high score, I also felt the tension of finding as many items and exploiting as many scheduled events as I could. If you look at a walkthrough, you can see that there isn’t really *that* much to find in this world, certainly far less than any modern-open world game. But where those games suck away the hours with the dull hypnosis of a gameplay loop in a world of endless content, Ancient Stone Tablets both magnifies the world and keeps my brain engaged simply by adding a time-cost:score-reward analysis to every treasure. I can’t afford to waste this much time thinking about how to get that heart piece, especially since I only have 30 seconds left to get a discount on the Zora’s Flippers!

Ancient Stone Tablets is a portal fantasy where your avatar in The Town Whose Name Was Stolen, the hub world of the Satellaview, gets transported to Hyrule for one hour of “Zelda time”, only to be transported back at the end of each episode. After defeating the final boss, I had only a few minutes left to be Hyrule’s Hero of Light before my little project with this game ended permanently. I spent my last minutes saying goodbye to my favorite NPCs, thinking all the while how much better it feels to visit Hyrule than to live in it.

If you’re interested in another simulation of the Satellaview experience, I highly recommend the Satellaview+ project. It has not yet been able to live-broadcast Ancient Stone Tablets, but you can explore the hub town that changes seasonally and download a scheduled selection of broadcast games. It’s cool!

2. Final Fantasy VIII

Squall Leonhart wears a necklace of his lion OC that inspires him to be strong. He loves to project a stoic demeanor while resentfully ranting in his thoughts. Squall’s the kind of guy who locks in at work and then cries in bed as soon as he’s alone.

Squall loses himself in trying to live up to his lion OC. He forgets crucial details of his life, but the vivid memory of his childhood abandonment persists through the fog. He often flashes back to this old trauma, emotionally regressing to his child self, as if all time and space has been compressed into that moment. He can’t escape it, no matter how hard he thinks about it, not by himself.

In a moment of true romantic connection, time feels frozen. You might want it to last forever. Perhaps the world around you disappears as you daydream about that moment. Its warmth is always there for you, no matter how cold the world gets when your lover is gone.

A beloved memory carries with it an impossible wish: what if you could compress all time and space into that beautiful, final fantasy? Perhaps it would look something like this:

1. VRChat

As you may have understood from my inclusion of Collective Unconscious and The Endless Forest, I love the quiet ambience of a virtual space. Few games offer as many virtual spaces as VRChat. I’ve continued to explore and socialize in VRC quite a bit since hosting A*RAVE, and the psychological influence of virtual embodiment has not lost its effect.

Videos, music, and conversation are just more engaging in VRChat. There’s something to the glow of a television softly illuminating the environment, or the spatial processing on music and voices, or seeing yourself and another reflected in a mirror as you talk on the couch. There’s an intimacy to it that I didn’t think was possible to achieve in screen-mediated interaction, and nothing is more valuable to me than intimacy.

The post Crystal’s Top 11 Games of 2025 appeared first on Gamesline.

This review contains spoilers for the events of Horses.

Horses was originally Andrea Lucco Borlera’s final project as a Cinema, Television and Multimedia student at Università Roma Tre in 2018. The game was shown off at the 2019 IndieCade and A MAZE. events, and even got a nomination for “The Most Amazing Game” at A MAZE. Borlera wanted to expand and distribute the project, but he had no luck with publishers until a fruitful meeting with Pietro Righi Riva, producer at Santa Ragione, and his former game design lecturer at IULM University.

Horses has been derisively compared to a student film, perhaps in part because it basically is an expanded student project sponsored by a sympathetic teacher, even though Borlera graduated 7 years ago and is a teacher himself now. (Talk about the slow pace of game development!) Student films have a bad reputation as is, but worse, Horses is one of those pretentious European art films, and even worse, it’s a video game pretending to be a film, and worst of all, it has the audacity to just be decently okay despite bearing aesthetics commonly perceived as self-important. That would be the limit of the expectations placed on Horses if it met its destined fate as one of those games you buy in a bundle and get around to eventually or never. Breaking even on small-time games through bundles is the business that kept Santa Ragione afloat for 15 years.

Valve ruined that relative stability with two actions in 2023: they denied Santa Ragione Steam keys for their 2022 game Saturnalia, so they couldn’t sell it in an off-Steam bundle, and they banned Horses from releasing on Steam, making it impossible for Santa Ragione to get funding from an external publisher. Horses, a $50k project to help out a novice game designer, quickly became the last hope to keep the company operating. Riva borrowed another $50k from friends to finish and publish Horses, but how could they sell an already niche game to the small fraction of the PC audience that doesn’t use Steam?

The only promotional move left to Santa Ragione was to sell Horses as a game banned for being too transgressive, which of course it is, as a matter of historical fact. This approach got an audience for a game that may have been otherwise overlooked, but that audience came with inflated expectations for how profound Horses should be, as if the game had a responsibility to justify its own rejection by Valve. Art gets censored even when it’s less than a deeply affecting classic. Did you know that one of the most challenged books in the United States is the Captain Underpants series? Both Horses and The Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants deserve to be widely accessible, unburdened by the impossible expectation that they will blow your mind.

Thus, despite its cultural weight as a prominent example of video game censorship, and the flashpoint for a good week or two of discussion of Steam’s unjust policies before that got swept away by The Game Awards, I tried to approach Horses with the same open-minded neutrality as I would any $5 game that is buried somewhere deep in my Itch library. Horses indeed did not blow my mind, but it’s a pretty decent first-person adventure that made me feel a few things.

20-year-old protagonist Anselmo has been sent by his mean dad to work on a farm for 14 days, so he can learn about the real world and cease his trivial academic pursuits and bug collecting. The farm is populated by enslaved, brainwashed humans who are naked except for their animal masks: a bunch of horses and one dog. A single Farmer operates the place, but sometimes his friends will come over too, such as the Priest, the Veterinarian, and the Businessman and his daughter.

Some days Anselmo does a list of farm chores in a manner reminiscent of Adios. Other days involve a single scene or objective. Generally, Anselmo’s available actions are tightly restricted. Every item in his inventory has exactly one use in one place. The Farmer’s commands are clear, and quickly become routine. The Priest gives Anselmo a speech about the importance of certainty as he delivers some more trafficked humans to the farm.

Anselmo cannot verbally respond in a conversation, but he can express approval or disapproval about what others say to him or ask him to do. Anselmo and the Farmer’s abuses of the enslaved horses will continue regardless of Anselmo’s approval or disapproval. Sometimes, a horse can even become an inventory item, complete with an inspection screen where they rotate at 600km/h at the slightest mouse movement. That’s the kind of power Anselmo has over them, as a slave overseer. He is a very good little fascist, even if he frowns about it.

Late in Horses, Anselmo must solve a real genuine adventure game puzzle that requires some actual thought. It’s easily the strongest part of the game, a mechanical representation of Anselmo escaping the rigid directives of the Farmer and finally thinking on his own. This sequence is followed by the game’s most impressive aesthetic achievements: a visual representation of oppressive sound in a way I’ve never quite seen before, and a sublime silence when Anselmo finally conquers it.

Let’s talk about the aesthetics a bit, since they’re generally more effective than the writing or gameplay. Horses is styled as a black-and-white 4:3 silent film (particularly in conversation with the classics of Luis Buñuel), complete with intertitles and the ever-present sound of a spinning projector. The occasional additional sounds are odd and unsettling: chicken noises when you cut your chicken dinner, wet nibbles and gulps as you eat, the buzz of a fly as you carry horse shit to the manure pile. When music appears it is loud and discordant, or ironically comedic.

The scratchy silent film aesthetic was extra crunchy for me, because I had to turn the resolution down to 720p to get a playable framerate. The low resolution, film artifacts, and stark lighting combined made the environments look more real, similar to the VHS sequence in Resident Evil 7. These realistic environments are contrasted by the clearly artificial character models, with their strange expressions, leathery skin, and plastic hair. Equally artificial is the digital pixelation effect to self-censor parts of the screen. Breasts, genitals, and even ass are pixelated. Wounds are pixelated too. This effect reminds me of the pixelated corpses in the camcorder-style Kane & Lynch 2, and just as in that game, the intentional censorship suggests a more disturbing image than a detailed texture could.

The film aesthetic is accompanied by split-screen, picture-in-picture, and transparent overlay effects reminiscent of Alan Wake II. These effects often appear suddenly, and the whole of Horses is filled with impressively sharp editing that is rare to see in a video game. Dialogue involves uncomfortable sudden close-ups like Pathologic 2, and every line is emphasized by the intertitle format.

The live-action FMV always feels like a jarring intrusion. It pointedly avoids clear depiction of humans, and the abuse of horses never happens in FMV. Typically it highlights some kind of quick act of physical labor, be it scooping slop into a bowl, watering crops, or chopping wood. This made it difficult for me to fully sink into the routine of farm chores, as if I was feeling Anselmo’s ambient discomfort with the pen of enslaved horses always nearby. These FMV shots are very zoomed-in, just like the conversations. It seems that Anselmo is a guy who really pays attention to what he’s looking at.

I’ve painted a dour picture so far, but Horses is pretty good at inserting moments of dark comedy into its surreal horror, such as a sharp cut to Anselmo’s blood-covered face after a horse offers to make him feel good with her mouth.

The horses are horny, you see. These are people whose deep-seated sexual appetite persists even through their brainwashing. Fornication, specifically the Catholic understanding of fornication as sinful consensual heterosexual sex between unmarried people, is the primary crime that these horses have been punished for. No, homophobia is not a theme of this game, nor are other forms of sexual persecution. Horses zooms in on the religiously-motivated dehumanization of heterosexuals who have casual sex.

Sex is always in the specific form of heterosexual penetration from behind, an implicitly animalistic position known as “doggy style” in English and pecorina (“sheep style”) in Italian. Indeed, the horses fuck so dispassionately, to the point of comedy, that seeing them feels like seeing dogs going at it: a thing to chuckle at and be on your way. Well, I’d chuckle and be on my way. The Farmer tells a story about how his father made him castrate a dog because it was humping everything too much. Later, Anselmo finds the Farmer’s drawings about his father killing two actual horses for fornicating.

The Farmer likes to get drunk and go out at night wearing a chastity belt and a horse mask. The mask marks him as a fornicator, that is to say an animal, for indulging his sexual urges: to masturbate to the enslaved horses by rubbing himself just outside his chastity belt. Sometimes he gets the Priest to punish him in this outfit. 

The Farmer’s anti-fornication position is rooted in Catholicism and childhood trauma, and his verbalized grievance is appropriately childish and pathetic: he thinks the horses are making fun of him by fornicating. He punishes male and female fornicators with equal harshness; this is not the kind of nominal pro-abstinence that praises boys for scoring while harshly punishing girls for failing to guard their virginity. The Farmer calls a misbehaving horse a “bitch”, but notably avoids the words “slut” or “whore”, despite the fact that he is talking about sexually promiscuous people.

That said, it is only a woman who is the victim of the game’s rape scenes. Megan Farokhmanesh is correct that Horses badly mishandles themes of sexual violence, and that this aspect has been overlooked by critics who characterize Horses as tame because it’s less intense than Salò or Irréversible. I’m going to talk about the details of those scenes now, which I think are both the most shocking and the most poorly-done aspects of the game.

A horse gets raped by the Dog on-screen at oblique angles, while the Farmer watches and masturbates despite his chastity belt. The next morning, Anselmo loads the unconscious horse into the shed to get raped to death by the Veterinarian off-screen. Another horse is blamed for it and Anselmo holds his legs still as the Farmer cuts his dick off with scissors, spraying blood all over Anselmo’s face before he staples the wound shut.

According to the official website, Horses uses challenging, unconventional material to encourage discussion. It invites players to examine why something feels the way it does, what it says about the characters and systems at work, and where their limits lie. 

So here is my examination of why this sequence feels crass: it develops the characters who perpetrate the sexual violence, but the horse who gets raped to death is a prop. Her shallow role is only to be a victim of terrible violence. There’s no reaction from her, no additional layer to discuss. We learn about the Farmer’s loophole for his sexual repression: sexual gratification is okay if it’s entirely about dominating others. We learn why the Dog is the best-treated slave: he is willing to be a rapist, while the other horses have consensual sex. We learn why the Farmer trusts the Veterinarian: behind his feigned shock at how poorly the Farmer has treated the horses, he enjoys inflicting terrible violence too.

But I don’t even remember the victim’s name. Essentially, the script participates in her dehumanization.

The horse physically emasculated for these crimes does get an additional layer to discuss. He kneels idly in the field, breathing heavily under his mask, refusing to work the plow. The Dog gives Anselmo multiple attempts to motivate him with either violence or carrots. The emasculated horse does not respond to the carrots, so Anselmo eventually resorts to hitting him, which does get him moving the plow. Here we have a simple but effective portrait of a man with a broken spirit that attempts resistance through inaction, but still reverts to being a horse to escape the acute pain of a whip.

The other two horses with a significant role in the story are Linda, a horse that takes a liking to Anselmo for being a less than completely enthusiastic overseer, and Fiero, a horse that managed to escape the farm. Together, they plot to free all the horses, and recruit Anselmo to their cause.

There is a moment in the middle of this plot that may be a programming error, but I hope Santa Ragione never patches it out. Anselmo successfully makes a hole in the fence for the horses to escape, but the next morning the Farmer has covered the hole with wood planks. Only, those planks are nailed into nothing but air. And you can walk through them.

Here it is: the world outside the farm that Fiero escaped to. There’s nothing out there. Of course there isn’t, because this is a video game and I’m outside the boundaries. Yet the surreality of going outside the boundaries fits perfectly with the surreality of the game-as-intended. As a narrative, Horses is a fable where the social dynamics of the farm represent the social dynamics of the broader world. In the code of the game, the farm is the whole world, and Anselmo cannot escape it any more than you or I can escape the horrors of our world.

Linda and Fiero’s plot ends with an act of radical forgiveness that embraces the animalistic freedom of fornicators, and gives that freedom to the Farmer and Anselmo. Who wants to be a human, when humans are so much crueler than horses? Horses presents the persecution of promiscuity in a simplistic and unrealistic way, which makes it difficult to draw any applicable lessons from. But its heart lies in the right place: against the cruel authority of fathers and priests, and for happiness, free, for everyone, and let no one be forgotten.

Horses is a difficult game to evaluate numerically because it’s mostly okay, has a few high highs, and a big low low. The mishandling of sexual violence is so bad that I would have dropped the game there if I hadn’t committed to this review, and yet the game mostly won me back by the end. A 3/5 can denote a pleasant mid, or it can denote a highly uneven game like Horses that I don’t blame anyone for disliking. However, there is enough good here that I hope Andrea Lucco Borlera gets a chance to do better next time.

The post Horses Review — Ugly Derby appeared first on Gamesline.

Scott, Jackson, and Maverick sit down for a full-spoilers discussion of AdHoc Studio’s 2025 animated superhero adventure game Dispatch, written by Telltale veterans and voiced by a celebrity cast.

How does Dispatch interact with classic superhero themes such as multiple identities, heroes vs villains, and the burdens of power? How did the experiences of each of our players differ based on their choices? How have the writing sensibilities of the independent AdHoc Studio changed or not changed since the Telltale days? You’ll have to listen to find out!

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on Social Media @gamesline.net, Scott, Jackson, and Maverick.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Theme song by Scott

Edited by Crystal

The post Dispatch Spoilercast appeared first on Gamesline.

“I felt that in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, we were able to perfect the formula that we’d been following in the series up to that point, where players race on individual courses. That’s why, this time, we wanted the gameplay to involve players driving around a large world.” — Kosuke Yabuki, Mario Kart World Producer

What else could Mario Kart World do but go open-world, the fate of all long-running franchises? Not only is every track smoothly connected to adjacent tracks, but they’re wider and longer than they were in previous games. To accommodate the new 24-player races—doubled from Mario Kart 8!—they have to be.

Mario Kart races were chaotic even when constrained to an 8 player limit in Mario Kart 7, and that once-charming characteristic has become nearly unbearable with 24 players constantly throwing out items. Many have criticized World’s boring straightaways that connect the “real” tracks, but I found them a welcome opportunity to just breathe a little bit. The artists of Kosuke Yabuki’s team have crafted a beautiful world, but it’s difficult to notice amidst the heat of a race where I can barely hold on to an item long enough to use it.

Thus I found myself enjoying the peaceful atmosphere of free-roam mode more than any races. There’s nothing to do, and it’s better for it. The open-world genre is burdened by association with endlessly repetitive quests, which has only obscured the simple pleasure of noodling around a really big virtual space.

Grand Theft Auto III did not take over the world because of its mission design, but because it offered an atmospheric city to explore and cause chaos in. 16 years later, Breath of the Wild stole everyone’s heart not because of the quality of its questing, but because even a total novice can roll a rock down a hill, set grass on fire, or chop down a tree. Personally, I don’t like Breath of the Wild very much, precisely because its mechanical intricacies are poorly utilized within its quests and dungeons, and because there is little worthwhile treasure to reward exploration. But the best times I had with that game were when I turned off my desire for an objective, walked slowly, and just sunk into its wonderful sound design.

In truth, Mario Kart World isn’t totally free of free-roam missions, but they’re so minor that I can’t resent their presence. There’s some collectibles to collect and some rings to fly through. You might even get something that’s actually fun, like taking over a 16-wheeler to ram through traffic. Mostly, I just like seeing how the courses fit together, and finding the weird little places nestled between them. I use the auto-accelerate option in races, because otherwise there’s very rarely any reason to let off the gas. But I turn on manual acceleration in free-roam, because then I can smoothly coast to a stop to soak in one area. When would you ever have a chance to do such a thing in racing mode?

By the way, I also use tilt controls. As a former teenager of the Wii and PS3 era, I feel a certain guileless nostalgia when I use unnecessary motion controls. Perhaps it brings back memories of a time when next-generation hardware could distinguish itself by more than performing the same computational tasks faster, but there is also something to the kinesthetic experience of drifting by tilting a gamepad and holding R. It makes my hands do something that they usually don’t do; a novel exercise of the muscles. And it helps that the stick is still there if I need to emergency-adjust my awful tilt controls turn.

Imprecise tilt control turns do add some needed challenge to the single-player Grand Prix, which is otherwise way too easy to entertain a Crystal of my gaming caliber. I cherish every time the CPU manages to get my heart beating a little bit by dropping me all the way down to 3rd place. However, my gaming skills are not so great that they can reliably get me to even 10th place in online matchmaking. Thus I am without a happy medium of challenge in racing, the so-called main attraction of Mario Kart World.

Knockout Tour comes closest to solving that problem by including the threat of elimination in every lap. In normal races, there’s really no difference between Lap 1 and Lap 3; it’s just one long stretch of chaotic moments. That’s why Mount Wario really stood out in Mario Kart 8: each lap was different! Well, actually there is one important difference to Lap 3: it matters who crosses the finish line first. Those final moments are where all your speed boosts and items really count, in a way they don’t at any other point in the race. Why use a Bullet Bill in the middle of Lap 2? Because you’re going to lose it to a Thunderbolt in 5-10 seconds anyway, so you might as well use it now.

The real Mario Kart World pros might cite the above as the reason why I’m mediocre at best in online matchmaking.

Knockout Tour sparks my competitive spirit more effectively than the 24-player races, because it gets less chaotic as it goes on. 4 players are eliminated each round, from 24 down to just 4. That Bullet Bill in Lap 2 feels exciting because it can get you from 18th to 16th just in time to survive, but you still want to keep a big lead, because someone else’s Bullet Bill could knock you down from 12th to 17th just in time to be eliminated. Every lap has tension and excitement; the opportunity for both triumph and tragedy. Each successive lap has less item chaos, and so victory depends more on proficient driving. Even if you only get 10th place, you can still enjoy the small wins of surviving the first three rounds.

I felt all that only in multiplayer of course, the single-player Knockout Tour is still way too easy. For the single-player experience, I can only recommend the humble joys of free-roam mode, perhaps paired with an episode of The Gamesline Podcast.

Listen, it’s Mario Kart. You can always rely on it to entertain some party guests. But don’t let yourself pay $50 (God forbid $80!) for it if you’re not hosting a party. A free-roam YouTube video in 4K HDR is free.

The post Mario Kart World Review — Does An Open World Need Quests? appeared first on Gamesline.