The trailer shows a continuing focus on the “one camera” cinematographic presentation that Santa Monica Studios has been consistently proud of. Sequences seamlessly transition from gameplay, to quick time events, to minute-long cutscenes. This was one of the most talked about aspects of the 2018 game’s design, commonly referenced with the words “immersion”, “scale”, or “consistent”. This approach mostly works with the presentation of the game as a road trip-esque trek across a fantastical Scandinavia, mainly because Kratos as a character is built like a tank you literally could not stop. You don’t need to worry about time’s passage, fatigue, or moments of enforced rest when your character is the quintessential angry guy who’s going to rush his way through every conversation and situation.

It works a little less when you’re a woman who is alternating between resurrection, doing air combos on plant monsters, stumbling down hallways, and being imprisoned as she’s held down by enemies she’s going to unmake within moments.

This is not a problem unique to the one camera format of the post PS3 God of War games, and it’s not even a problem inherent to the AAA cinematic approach that Sony has made their bread and butter over the last decade and change. While Ludonarrative Dissonance is perhaps best known by its usage in discussions around characters like Uncharted’s Nathan Drake and his propensity to alternate between quippish “I’m just a little guy” routines and the slaughtering of dozens, it’s a problem continually plaguing games big and small year after year. In all the years since, this situation hasn’t improved in the slightest..

Part of this is caused by video games’ propensity towards violence. While every medium has expressions of conflict, video games—being a mechanical and heavily interactive format—are understandably dominated by replications of the most visceral form of human engagement. People have always yearned for the physical sensation of impact (take a look at any sport to understand this), and gaming functions as an extension of this. We yearn for the crunchy hit stop, and the particle effects of collision and destruction. 

The other, more simple answer, is that in any creative field, people are going to rely on shortcuts or “standard” solutions to any problem they run into. We expect all fighting games to have a move list, so it becomes inherent to the genre; visual novels should have a text log; live service games demand a battle pass, and so on. Often these conventions are desired, but just as often we run into ideas that exist simply because it’s viewed as a necessity, e.g. the deluge of open world games adding loot systems straight out of Diablo even when designed to be static, or gacha games 1:1 copying the UI of Genshin Impact half a decade out from its release. 

The most egregious of these obligatory concepts to me has always been what I colloquially refer to as “the microwave hallway problem”, after Metal Gear Solid 4’s scene where a suffering Snake pushes his way through a hallway that’s killing him with radiation, as the imagery jumps from perspective to perspective.

In Metal Gear Solid 4, this scene is about Snake, as an old man, pushing himself through absolute misery for a moment of heroism. MGS4 itself is a fairly slow game focused on stealth, so a paced and deliberate moment like this doesn’t feel too out of place, and matches the artisanal tone that director Hideo Kojima has historically gone for. It’s iconic and remembered for plenty of reasons, especially for its place in gaming at a time when the average storytelling for mainstream titles was done through a purely divorced cutscene and gameplay split.

Unfortunately, this concept has been used again and again throughout countless games in the decades since MGS4’s release, and typically without much direction beyond the surface level. 

Cyberpunk 2077 is a game ostensibly about the dying V, a struggling mercenary whose brain is being torn apart by an entire other identity forcing its way through them. Aside from the consistent interjections from a ghostly Keanu Reeves, this fact is mostly removed from the player’s standard means of engagement, in favor of the expected techno-power fantasy… except for the random moments at ends of quests (and similarly-timed event triggers), where V will suddenly double over with a pixelated and messy screen, and start to move at 0.25x speed, before immediately regaining full and complete motor function without the slightest inconvenience. 

On the surface, this is the visual and mechanical language we have come to expect from cinematically driven video games, many of which are often free-form and non-linear. Developers, of course, can’t plot a set course with moments of defined strength and weakness if they’re providing you a venue with which to do things in any potential order. At the same time, however, is anything truly being gained from these moments of appropriate tonal resonance amidst a sea of completely untethered gameplay? Are these moments of weakness displaying a peek into the intended narrative, or are they showcasing just how limited the language of the common game is?

Countless games follow this format. There’s Red Dead Redemption 2’s concept of tuberculosis that involves the occasional cough and hallucination in between hundred-man slaughter sprees. There are several Resident Evil games that do this, but most notably this year’s Requiem, where Leon Kennedy’s T-Virus infection temporarily makes everything slow, blurry, and blue, before restoring perfect parry and suplex potential almost instantly. Even Kingdom Hearts 3, a game I broadly love for its absurdism, isn’t immune to forcing Mickey Mouse through a slow moving facsimile of the microwave hallway.

To reiterate: what do we gain from these moments of control? Indeed, putting the player behind the wheel of an ailing character is a powerful tool of empathy and connection, but when you jump away from that almost instantly, does that empathy persist beyond a fleeting moment? Does the dissonance not showcase the cracks and limitations of what you’re trying to do with the medium, and fall back on the base expectations of what a video game is rather than what you want it to be? 

It’s easy for me to armchair game design over here from my ivory tower of gaming critique, but we don’t have to conceive of new and innovative ways to fix these problems, when they’ve been executed on in multiple games since the genre’s inception. 

The Fear and Hunger series has a constant potential for characters to lose limbs and abilities as you face down the many horrors of that world. Kenshi, or freeform sandbox games like Dwarf Fortress and Caves of Qud, are able to showcase all sorts of gameplay systems related to loss of power by changing the means of engagement in a tangible and permanent way. Action oriented titles like Sifu or Eternal Sonata are able to demonstrate the gain and degradation of stamina and means of engagement as their characters go through various stages of life. Hell, many FromSoftware games are predicated on the concept of an “unpowered” or “hollowed” form that can only be temporarily salved. Even games like Final Fantasy IV, a mainstream RPG from 1991, work with the concept of mechanical and narrative intertwining through the character of Tellah, an old man pushing himself to the brink with dwindling stats on each level up. 

Indeed, an argument posited against many of these examples in the wake of their larger budget contemporaries would be that they’re more elaborate or hardcore games for niche audiences, despite games like RimWorld selling over 4 million copies, and persisting in popularity many years down the line. Another could be that these moments of disconnect function fine as abstraction; surely the core act of playing a video game is abstraction from reality enough that we can accept these limitations (this one I’ve seen in opposition to discussions on ludonarrative dissonance consistently). 

Regardless of reasoning, I believe these limitations come not from the medium of games, but from the nightmarish production management of many modern titles, as well as the expectations of capitalism; from operating under the belief that the market is truly something that exists, and not an artifice propped up by manufactured evidence and stubborn belief. 

When we look at how games are made, especially when it comes to titles with larger budgets, the creation process reinforces this issue. That need for a common language—a blueprint that can easily be executed on—becomes a requirement when we think about how many games are being created by contract workers. 

Looking at something even midscale in budget such as last year’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, we can see that hundreds of contractors were hired temporarily to work on things like art, rendering, sound, and quality assurance. If we look at Halo Infinite’s development, we have consistent reporting that workers were limited to 18 month contracts and then placed on a 6 month cooldown before being re-hired, to suit arbitrary leadership requirements and skirt labor laws that would afford these employees more rights in their workplace.

It’s not hard to imagine the difficulties faced by these contract workers in a broad sense, especially when it comes to getting to grips with the project they’re working on, or asserting creative agency over it. They have to learn the toolsets, the project outlines, the deadlines, where the last contractor was forced to leave work unfinished… so on and so forth. In the process of all this, there’s also the unending fear that they could be laid off on a whim, so there’s not going to be much of a desire to shake the boat with more radical creative interjections. From the side of more stable employees as well, things are consistently in a state of flux from the hands working on a project having to be retrained, with pipelines consistently altered like the Ship of Theseus. 

Taking all this into account, it’s easy to understand exactly how so many games end up eerily similar, or formulaic to a fault. Sure, this applies to things like Unreal Engine 5 becoming dominant throughout the medium as workers are able to pick up that shared understanding of how something works, but it also applies to how these works end up being made. If you’re pushing through a logistical nightmare, why wouldn’t you rely on the most commonly used or easy to understand tools? Why wouldn’t you frame a scene as so many other scenes have done before because that’s what’s easiest to convey to your detached creative team? Management has to be appeased as well, so there is a pressure towards showing them something that wouldn’t feel out of place in another successful game, matching the tone of another rather than cultivating it organically through the creation process. 

This is made worse through the intersection of marketing, management, and manipulation. When we talk about the artifice of things like focus testing or evaluating what an audience might “want” (an unrealizable notion, given that the “audience” isn’t a real group of people, but rather a handy abstraction of guesswork), it’s not an exaggeration to refer to it as an “unreality”. There are lessons to be learned through experience and inquisition, but they cannot be done through the means of our current economic and creative climates, lest we continually repeat the sins of things like the hastily edited ending to the theatrical release of Blade Runner.

When we surrender to the idea that games should be more than pure idealized “fun”, or more accurately, when we give in to the notion that fun can only be defined by unlimited player control and power, we limit the ideas of what the medium of games can be. Fun can be had in planning around and experiencing things like a dismemberment in Fear and Hunger. There’s joy to be found in those moments of overcoming the challenges of a game like Demon’s Souls. Not everything is killstreaks and SSS combos; sometimes a power fantasy can come from overcoming incredible odds, situations, or indeed even the way we control a video game.

A few years ago, I had a lot of fun with the presentation of Citizen Sleeper; a sci-fi game about functioning as a being trapped within a proprietary and expensive robotic body, trying to make ends meet and solve problems inside of an old space station. The conceit of the game is great—balance the needs of your mechanical body (allegorical of chronic illness), the needs of your community, and the imposition of societal pressures working against you—but in practice, it unintentionally becomes this oddly weightless and almost dismissive work. 

Within an hour of starting the game, the idea of balancing meters, or struggling against any sort of representation of chronic illness, can be thrown out the window with relative ease. Minigames let you play the stock market and gamble for infinite money. You can get a trait to start repairing your body infinitely with very little effort or risk, eliminating any chance of experiencing the detriments of disability. You can solve the issues of every NPC you meet, and complete the main story without friction or fear. On a certain level, I admire the game’s willingness to take the conceits of an economic manager and try to instill the idea that it’s all artifice and can be changed with luck, but it’s also limiting and ineffectual as an experience. 

I don’t expect every game to be Marathon—a complex and punishing game wherein the core experience is determined by a mechanical conceit that suits the type of narrative they’re trying to tell—but we can do better than serving (and in some respects, outright conditioning) an audience that exists in our most insecure assumptions. It’s understandable to rely on what’s easy and known, but we show the most interesting parts of ourselves when we mold what’s known into something only we can.

There will always be abstraction and ludonarrative dissonance in video games. There will always be that struggle to separate what a character should be able to do within the bounds of the narrative versus what makes an engaging and interesting game to play. However, this does not mean we should accept the absurd compromise that these patchwork microwave hallways provide. The medium of games allows for collaboration between creatives and viewers in ways other art forms could only dream of, and we should be trying to cultivate that charm, instead of abruptly ending the dialogue out of convenience.

The post In Cutscenes, You Can’t Double Jump appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s a full house this week on the Gamesline Podcast. John is joined by Lorelai, Maverick and Rose to talk about the last week in gaming. John’s still obsessing about Pikmin when he’s not playing Digimon cards or Pokémon Channel. Lorelai was Final Fantasy pilled at the Final Fantasy XIV Fan Festival which got her playing Final Fantasy XI again while also digging in to Vampire Crawlers on her long road trip. Rose of course played more Marathon, Mina the Hollower, Saros, and Forbidden Solitaire while Maverick played a bunch of Hades 2.

In the news, we go over the interview Mike Fisher gave where he annihilated Yuji Naka, The Witcher 3 is getting more DLC, and a bill addressing the Stop Killing Games initiative is moving forward in California. In other news, Dark Horse Comics is unionizing after their new Embracer overlords started shutting down Things From Another World and shifting focus to Games. If you’d like to sign the petition to support the unionization effort, you can do that here.

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

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 92: Fantasy Solitaire appeared first on Gamesline.

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

The post Lily Tests the Steam Controller! appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s a biohazard this week as John and Rose tackle the most difficult challenges of Leon S. Kennedy’s career! John is playing Resident Evil 4 (2005) on Professional difficulty, while Rose platinum’d Resident Evil 9 with less than infinite equipment durability! Plus, they discuss Pragmata, Marathon, Vampire Crawlers, and Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo! In the news, there’s a new Star Fox remake, a Switch prince increase, one-of-a-kind Mindseye DLC, and unionization amongst the developers at Double Fine and Magic the Gathering: Arena!

After that, there’s plenty of listener questions this week, including: What did John enjoy most about his vacation? What games do John and Rose play to lull themselves to sleep? What is the most edible physical video game? What do they want to pulverize with a blender? And what video game feels like eating a stale Dorito?

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, Rose at fatamorgana.bsky.social and John at john.gamesline.net!

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 89: Finite Knife Durability appeared first on Gamesline.

After a brief stop, the Gamesline Podcast returns as John, Lily, Lorelai, and Rose sit down to talk about what they’ve been playing. John’s been big into RetroAchievements with games like Community Pom, Hatsune Miku Bomb Squad, and Azure Dreams while also digging deep into Pokopia, Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, and the new Umamusume scenario. Lorelai’s also been in that one when she’s not playing Monster Hunter Stories 3 or Nioh 3. Rose has been digging into Vital Shell, Resident Evil 9, and Crimson Desert when she’s not Playing Marathon with Lily whose been getting up to shenanigans in the Final Fantasy XIV Occult Crescent and Trails to Azure.

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

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 and Produced by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 85: The Tale of Kliff McDuff appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s a work that thrives off of its continuous nature; a rarity in an artform filled to the brim with resets, reboots, and retreads. Years pass, technology changes, and every person you’ve met along the way is molded by the events you all experience. It’s among the closest video games have gotten to a grand scale epic like “The Odyssey”, only instead of Odysseus possibly cheating on his wife, you watch a goth girl grow up to invent Linux. There’s nothing like it in games, and oftentimes I feel as if there will never be anything else like it when it inevitably runs its course.

As the thirteenth consecutive entry in the Trails lineage, and the third in its respective arc, Trails Beyond the Horizon is a fascinating step forward for the story; delivering not only the warm community comfort we’ve come to expect, but also a recontextualization of what everything we’ve seen up till now has meant. We’re past the era of NPCs talking around large scale issues, and Not-Organization XIII’s hiding in the shadows whilst opining about the “Truth.” We’ve learned about SiN, we’ve launched a rocket into space, and we’ve gotten payoffs to some of the longest laid bits from nearly 20 years ago. 

Trails Beyond the Horizon takes place a few months after Trails Through Daybreak II, with the Calvard Republic’s plans for the first ever manned flight into space quickly underway. As a space boom hits the continent, Van Arkride is doing his best to keep up with the various schemes and circumstances that rise to the surface amidst the turbulent times. There’s cults, political intrigue, and the everpresent meddling of Ouroboros to worry about; but also more mundane situations like stock scams, charity fraud, and all the standard troubles anyone can run into during day to day life.

There’s a balance to Horizon that matches a lot of earlier games in the series, like Trails in the Sky FC or Trails of Cold Steel. Those games spend a lot of time slowly eking out their broader conspiracy with small-scale events that gradually lead to a bombastic finish. This is a hallmark of Trails in general, but it’s a bit odd to see it done in what is ostensibly the Daybreak arc’s third game, which can definitely create an amount of friction or fatigue if you’re the type of player that somehow gets thirteen games into a series without appreciating its core conceit. 

I joke to an extent, but it is odd, especially when paired with the title change and overall belief that this would be one of, if not THE final game in the Calvard Arc; and previous third entries like Cold Steel III were able to marry a large amount of rising action with an explosive climax that sets up its finale. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the “calm before the storm” approach of Horizon, but it does mean you’re left wondering just how everything is going to play out a lot longer than you would in a more thrilling, chapter based entry like Trails from Zero or Sky SC.

A big part of that dissonance is due to the route-based structure Falcom has leaned on since Trails into Reverie once again making a return. Van shares his protagonist spotlight with Cold Steel’s Rean Schwarzer, Sky’s Kevin Graham, and to a lesser extent the ever funny Rufus Albarea who deserves so many games of his own. Each chapter has you ping-ponging between these character’s perspectives, and each has their own party composition, plotline, and resolution largely unrelated to the other. It’s an interesting format, showcasing the strengths of the series for sure, but at times it can exemplify the breaking points of Trails’ many tropes. It’s one thing to be tested by a couple tough guys as Van Arkride and his kids, it’s another to be tested the same exact way by eight other tough guys across the various routes over and over. A route change should feel more meaningfully different, but here it just feels like we’re model swapping who’s dealing with what.

Taking all this into account, we’re also back to encroaching upon the dark times of Reverie where 50 people file into a room to share their thoughts and ideals against a singular antagonist, but mercifully the overall party member count stops at 24. That is, however, still 24 different characters that the game has to balance and attempt to do justice over the course of your adventure, and inevitably this means many characters get sidelined with the assumption you sort of get them already and we can focus on something else. This is a little frustrating with characters like Fie or Crow who have a lot going on but chill in the background; it is even more egregious with characters like Kevin who has been conspicuously absent from the series for over 10 years, and seemingly almost reset to an amalgamation of what you’d expect a pre-Sky 3rd Kevin to be like.

Equipping all these characters can be exhausting too, especially with the sheer amount of quartz, spells, and accessories you have to kit in and think about across every party. Kevin’s party in particular stands out as uniquely frustrating to work with since they lack a core dedicated support unit, relying entirely on the hope and prayer that Nadia’s silly healing teddy bears will be enough (they aren’t). 

It’s not as bad as it could be, mainly because a large portion of the combat is cordoned off in the “Grim Garten”, a dungeon crawling side mode that lets you use characters from all three routes in your team building. While it’s about as exciting as the Märchen Garten from Daybreak II (read: not at all), it’s aided by at least having an actual story attached to it with really charming Ouroboros characters fooling around, which is always a series highlight. There’s surprising revelations about the mostly forgotten Professor Novartis from Trails to Azure, and new character Ulrika is a standout as a streamer who spits some of the most insane lines in the entire series (done via galmoji in Japanese and modern slang in English).

Ulrika uses “power words” when she speaks that allow her to control and manipulate certain aspects of the people around her (though she insists she never uses them on-stream), which is reflective in-game via the new Shard Command system. These commands are an iteration on the Brave Orders from Cold Steel, and let you activate various passive effects for a certain amount of turns i.e. +60% Physical damage with a small part wide heal. This system is usable by enemies as well, making some boss fights a real nightmare of buffs and debuffs. Just like Brave Orders this almost works, but the inability to use it in the midst of an enemy deluge often makes it feel like it’s just sort of there. If the system worked similarly to the turn order interrupts of the series staple S-Crafts, this would be a great addition! As is, like much of the combat in the Trails series, you can pretty much forget it.

All this whining may seem odd, especially if you slid by those five stars at the top, but here’s the ultimate truth: I had a smile on my face the entire time I was playing Trails Beyond the Horizon, and the theorizing and cliffhangers it’s left open have kept my mind buzzing nonstop as I pore over the older games in the series to go “OHHHH” at. I haven’t felt this burning intrigue in my heart since the secret endings of Kingdom Heart games. At the same time, the quiet slow buildup of the game as I wandered around the now-familiar Calvard checking in with all my favorite NPCs to see what the hell everyone’s doing is like heaven to me. Synthesizing everything I love about Trails into one game, with perhaps the most bespoke localization I’ve seen in games…yeah, you can understand why I might be pretty pleased with Horizon.

Similarly to my Daybreak II review, I wanna run through the appeal of all these characters, because it’s the intersection of world building and character writing that makes Trails Trails. 

Van Arkride continues to impress as the slowly healing traumatized guy who wants to pretend he’s actually twisted and evil. Watching him continue to make the safe choices and focus on improving his interpersonal relationships with others in a way he never has is heartwarming. There’s a scene with his ex-girlfriend Elaine you can get where he finally explains exactly why he has such a fixation on sweets to begin with (this is what romance is all about). I really like how characters notice that he’s being more normal in this game too, with a lot of the more adversarial allies getting closer and conceding that he’s not the bad boy they made him out to be.

Agnes is in peak loser girl mode in this game. While there’s a lot of layers to what she’s doing and the reason she acts the way she is, I adore seeing her stumble more than anything. She wants that problematic age-gap relationship so bad, and I really can’t blame her, but also it’s so over for her. The next game is probably going to go all-in on an Agnes focus too, so we’ll finally be able to see if Falcom is #Woke or #DarkWoke.

Risette got a big boost in Horizon as the story starts to actually dig into exactly what her insane backstory might be. They do a good job of balancing various possibilities of what may have been before you finally get a clearer picture near the end of the game. A big thing that’s hit Trails as it’s gone on is this idea that you can sort of get what a character’s archetype is going to be within a few minutes of meeting them, and that persona can easily overlap with one who’s come before. There are like 3 girls who act like Tio Plato in the Trails series, and they all work at the same place. Risette could almost fall into the same gang of “disaffected voice tech women”, but her fixation on learning where she came from and how that relates to the world is uniquely cool, and instantly sets her apart.

Judith continues to fail and her mom is really hot.

Aaron has some of the worst lines I’ve ever seen, as he should. There’s a meme going around where people post a picture of a character they hate/love and say “you can tell from their eyes they genuinely think they deserve to live”. That’s Aaron. When he said “I stay in shape by going to pound town every night” I wanted to lock him in a box and throw the box into the ocean. A+ work.

Feri is…a child so she still once again doesn’t have that much going on. At the very least her brother Kasim finally had something approaching a personality in this game, but the Al-Fayed family continues to be the biggest “yeah sure” of the game. 

Quatre has another great event related to their gender identity, as well as a separate absolutely insane one. I think it’s really interesting to continue leaning into what it means to be a gender non-conforming person in what has ostensibly been a very conservative world up to this point. Falcom has basically confirmed HRT in Zemuria! Persona could never! There’s this really charming bit where Quatre’s friends show up to hang out with him in the city for a day and talk about loving his anime girl v-tuber streams. You get the real energy that they have no idea what gender he is transitioning to at any point and I eat it up. 

Bergard is an old man, so I adore him as always, but he continues to just be there. There’s always been this undercurrent in Trails that the Old exist to guide and light the way for the Young and it feels like it’s really hitting its culmination with what Horizon sets up. It’ll be very interesting to see if there’s anything more to his bizarre circumstances given the ending’s revelations.

As for the other parties, the Cold Steel party is extremely the Cold Steel Party. Crow is putting on the “I’m not gay” show, while gazing longingly into Rean’s eyes and recoiling in fear from women. Towa is continually the perfect woman, and Fie continues to be chilling since she’s found her calling in life. I wish they had a little bit more going on beyond the classic “haha oh Rean you are dating 10 people” joke but at the same time, when they make a joke about how Rean is never going to marry anyone because he’s dating 10 people… I’m just saying some real people might find that a little relatable.

Kevin and Rufus’ group is a little disappointing, but only by virtue of how strong these characters usually are. Kevin is almost a decade out from overcoming his trauma, but at the same time it feels like he isn’t allowed to do that much, especially bereft of his sister Ries. There’s this interesting angle of Kevin trying to sacrifice his ideologies for the sake of the world that could definitely be approached, but as I mentioned earlier, it almost comes across as a retelling for the sake of nostalgic remembrance. Like “Oh you know Kevin! He had a darkness to work through underneath that funny guy bit! He’s back at it again!” which hits a little rough after Sky 3rd dedicates so much time to bringing him out of that darkness. 

Which is a similar problem for Rufus and his picnicking front, though it is much less severe given Swin and Nadia’s fleshing out in Daybreak II. They continue to have a great Team Rocketesque vibe going on that stood out to many when they hit the scene in Reverie, but a lot of that is stifled by their representation of a morality that Kevin must adhere to. Rufus can say he’s evil and crooked all he wants, but his actions will never reflect that because the situation will never demand it. Lapis is allowed to suck though; we all love a faildaughter.

Though I mentioned a big part of the issues with this game is the routes not feeling distinct enough, it’s not really because of any specific problem with any given party, but more Horizon’s nature as the third entry in an arc. When Van meets up with that NPC you know from previous games, there’s an immediate rapport and remembrance; we’re continuing something here. When Rean or Kevin run into someone Van’s group knows for one of their quests, they usually bemoan that Van isn’t there for a moment, before jumping right in as if the group had that level of familiarity with them.

From a player perspective this works just fine because of course We know what’s been going on with these storylines, but for the in-game narrative vibes, it sort of throws a weird wrench into things. Trails sidequests can take up most of any given game’s runtime because we’re seeing a community grow and learn interdependence as any relationship does; we’re getting the payoff of watching how all these characters change and address similar issues as they grow and learn. It’s a lot harder to get that full payoff feeling when it’s Rean Schwarzer going “oh hello, child Van helped escape from his abusive father in game #1, I guess I’m going to talk to you like I vaguely know you now.” It’s not the worst ever, but it does create a little narrative dissonance that I hadn’t really run into in past games, especially since Reverie is so uniquely structured, and Daybreak II’s routes always ensured there was a member of Van’s group around to give context. The quests are still good, but they’d hit harder if they were actually tied to the characters experiencing them, which is a problem that’s just… never come up before.

I mentioned that these quests range in severity, but things feel very similar to Trails to Azure in this department. You’re running into a lot of storylines that relate to what’s going on behind the scenes with the bigger picture, and oftentimes acting as a result of that bigger picture. Particular standouts involve dealing with the continued exploitation of migrant workers, and a homeless artist who’s turned her life around struggling with the idea of her art becoming commodified by the wealthy she disdains. These are really great contemporary concepts that wouldn’t be too out of the norm to find in an RPG, but the level to which it’s dissected and examined, as always, sets Trails apart.

Bolstering all this is an absolutely stellar localization that I was continually stunlocked by. Every character has a distinctive voice (aided by a consistently improving English dub that I can easily recommend), helping the prose sing in a way that showcases the quality of the translation. There were over six writers credited under translation, and just as many editors; their hard work and genuine passion shines through in every crass line from Aaron, every detached nicety from Risette, and all the shits and fucks they’ve managed to cram in. An interesting aside about the informing of the original text on localization changes, Mirabel is a character that now speaks with a southern accent since she’s supposed to be from the same area of Zemuria that Kevin does; which is very funny to see from the outside as some sort of Forced Cowgirlification.

As the Daybreak games take place in a much more familiar and modern setting than past titles, they’ve understandably leaned more into the type of slang we see in our real world. In previous games this manifested as the occasional “same” or “rizz” drop, but here we’re firing on all cylinders 24/7. When you see the new Ouroboros enforcer call The Thousand Oathbreaker Unc while they talk about him getting ratio’d online… it’s cinema. It really helps elevate the vibe of this place that’s almost like our real world, but ever so slightly different. 

This has actually been a major issue some people have had with the Trails series—technology moving incredibly fast—but Horizon takes great strides in maintaining exactly what makes sense for the setting, and also why these technological advancements might happen to begin with. It’s one thing for Apple to organically create the iPhone over a period of decades, but it’s another for Apple to receive the iPhone in 1980 and then reverse engineer it over the next few years. Human nature is all about learning and mimicking before making something our own, so it’s great for a series to examine just how far you can take that concept when married with fantastical concepts. 

It’s soooo cool that as you go around this country stupefied by the Space Launch, you’re seeing younger people watching YouTube on their phones, while news broadcasts are plastered on giant screens in the streets of popular town hubs. This is a world that never had TV! This is a world that jumped from Radios to an iPhone! That’s so cool! They don’t have a stable output of cinema yet because there’s no home market pipeline of VHS to DVD to Digital for anything to be based on! They just re-run that shit every few months like the 1900s! It rocks!!!!

It’s one thing for a world to suddenly pivot to future tech (think Final Fantasy), it’s another to gradually integrate and interrogate how the medieval peasant would be affected by the advent of the Dorito. It reminds me a lot of Ascendance of a Bookworm, one of my favorite light novel series, because Trails genuinely cares about the world its characters live in, and how it informs their world view and vernacular. Bookworm does this with the implications of what providing the working class with literature and information does to change society, and Trails approaches it from every conceivable angle. We watched our own world change dramatically as telecommunications technology developed rapidly over the last 50 years, and it hits even harder in this world where countries once separated by monsters and mountains are able to intermingle and uncover things about themselves and the world.

I don’t want to spend too much time just talking to you directly about what precisely the ending to Trails Beyond the Horizon is—everyone who’s played a Trails game knows that there are endless cliffhangers and absurdist revelations at the climax of most—but I will say the most surprising thing it did for me was improve upon what Trails Through Daybreak II had fumbled with; which is something I’ve rarely seen a game do retroactively and well. By the time you finish Horizon, you have a complete understanding of basically everything going on with the previously uninspired and confusing antagonist of Daybreak II, and not in the sense of “oh they fleshed out his backstory now with a text log” or something, but because it appears your confusion at his diatribes was intentional. It’s such a novel and interesting concept that works perfectly within a series with a defined lineage like Trails, while even series like Kingdom Hearts has stumbled to maintain cohesion.

That’s really my continual message with the Trails series distilled: it’s able to consistently pull off and do things that every game could have the potential for, if the limitations of industry and marketing didn’t get in the way. When I think of my childhood yearning for series like Dragon Age and Mass Effect—these big interconnected epics that spawn multiple entries and remember your every action—I find it meaningfully accomplished here in the budgeted and ambitious world of Zemuria. Sure you might not have the sweeping grand set-piece moments, or sexy AAA fidelity elves crooning into your ear, but the heart is here, limited only by the time they had, rather than what they think it must be, and that makes all the difference.

The post A Great Beyond – The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon (PS5) Review 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.

After a break for Game of the Year celebrations, The Gamesline Podcast is back in full swing. This week, John sits in the host chair and is joined by Lilith, Nikolas, and Rose to talk about everything they’ve been up to. John finished up Trails in the Sky First Chapter and started up Bravely Default while Rose played Trails Beyond the Horizon. She also got up to Abiotic Factor, Blue Fire, and Dragon Quest 1 HD. Lilith has been playing Trails to Azure, Pathologic 2, Void Bastards, and Game of the Generation Nioh 2. Meanwhile Nikolas finished Fire Emblem 3 Houses and started Fire Emblem Engage and is also playing Koudelka while they wait to start Final Fantasy 8.

In the news, MindsEye’s CEO is accusing people of sabotaging his game, Nintendo had a partner showcase direct and Overwatch 2 became Overwatch. It seems we’re also getting a Poker Night at the Inventory remaster along with rumors starting about more Xenoblade coming. I guess Sony is also doing AI Podcasts now too.

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

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 with video production by John

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 82: Classic Flavor is Back appeared first on Gamesline.

The ease of distribution and access to game dev tools has no doubt been a boon to the creative world; look at bold independent projects experimenting inside of under-explored genres like Voices of the Void, or even less innovative, yet still impressively engaging independent forays like Megabonk. While we used to be in the chokehold of either weird PC games you had to go to a special site to find as an alternative to the typical high budget fare, we are now gluttons for choice. Won’t they think of poor innocent women like me who are interested in learning about everything before we experience cultural paradigm shifts like this?

I joke but really, I think I am playing more and more games every single year as time goes on. It never ends. I think this year I’ve counted over 65 games that I’ve tried at any given point, and don’t even get me started on the freaking gacha games. It feels like every week I join my Final Fantasy Raid Call and I have to commiserate with my friend Eric over how there’s a brand new puzzle game that we now have to accelerate up the list. 

It never ends.

Anyways. Gaming. For as good as a lot of things were this year, I wouldn’t say there were that many stand-out moments of absolute shock and awe. I definitely found a lot to admire within the bevy of releases I fooled around with, but it felt like I had pretty big caveats with everything to a certain degree. I’ll get into all that, down further, but honestly you know me, I’m kind of gushy.

There is no order to these games. I used to fruitlessly order games like oh yeah I definitely love Number 6 15% more than I love Number 7, but I don’t think I can live like that anymore. Everything has its own contexts, its own meaning. While we can draw comparisons easily, it’s a lot harder to create a meaningful bar of quality to evaluate with when all these works are so fundamentally different. You can’t really compare Silent Hill f to the aforementioned Megabonk in a way that doesn’t make you seem completely unhinged? Well, maybe you can, go off if so, but for me, I’m just going to start rambling.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

The game is good! The music is really fun and the breadth of variety is truly astounding. I think most areas had like, 4 unique songs in them used at different points. It felt great, this is what JRPG gaming is all about.

I don’t think I had the revelatory experience many had with this title because uh, I actually play JRPGs. Expedition 33 isn’t shy about its inspirations, you can see every major team member’s favorite games on the Sandfall Interactive website, and if you’ve played those inspirations, I mean, you kind of already got the bits. I too like Lost Odyssey and Xenoblade Chronicles 3, and yes, I think it was really fun to parry in Sekiro.

That said, the unevenness of the finished work and desire to actually represent the things the developers liked about the games they like, means that Expedition 33 perfectly encapsulates the feeling of playing something like Final Fantasy 8 for the first time in a way that most RPG juggernauts have struggled to. Does the draw system in Final Fantasy 8 work great? Not really. Is it cool? Hell yeah it is! That’s the type of thought process I went through in my time with the game; is it annoying that you can sort of mitigate all damage by learning parry windows, and sort of accidentally stumble into broken builds? Definitely. Did I care at all? No, I was having fun playing as a god damn Blue Mage in a brand new video game for the first time in years. 

RPGs used to mean something…

Its story is rushed, its character writing incredibly fascinating but woefully underbaked due to what almost feels like an inherent fear of the player becoming bored and leaving, but the heart is all there, and it shined through all the way to the end. Games can be funny without being comedies! I hope that whatever Sandfall Interactive works on next adds something like Skits from the Tales series, because even just that would have transformed their work from an RPG great to an RPG all-timer.

(You can tell I live for critique because this game has a red hair girl turn into a white hair girl in a fucked up house and I just said it was alright)

Umineko

It’s fine.

Silent Hill f

We finally got an actual Silent Hill game after 20 years. AND it’s about women? Holy…

Silent Hill f suffers in a lot of really weird ways that only really make sense when you realize it was written by someone who can usually get away with making 8 different Visual Novels to slowly drag out his story because he likes the idea of slow dissemination; and that developer Neobards’ experience making games has been mostly old Capcom remasters and whatever the hell Resident Evil Resistance was. 

That said, I don’t really care because ohhhh my god hitting enemies with a pipe is what every girl wants to do forever.

The story of Silent Hill f may be lacking in deeper subtexts, and you can pretty much get what’s going on after your first playthrough, but it’s an absolute delight to hear any of its characters start to talk about Space Wars like it’s the most serious thing in the world. I probably would be even more forgiving if I hadn’t finished my fourth playthrough of the game (required to get the true ending), a week before they let you skip over half of your repeated playthroughs. We gotta do something about games taking 3 extra months to actually be done.

It’s odd to me that the game doesn’t have more variety in what it’s dishing out when it wants you to go through it again and again. It’s cool to see different variations on the last few cutscenes, but why am I going through the whole town in the same order every time? There could have at least been some sort of alternate routing or unique combat encounters to make things feel a little less monotonous. 

Bonus points for being one of the only games that can get away with Unreal Engine 5’s sludge world shit because Silent Hill is supposed to look terrible.

Silent Hill Ascension

It’s sooooooo bad but please you gotta check this out. 

I watched all of the archived episodes for the failed interactive story game Silent Hill Ascension and I love it. It’s not good at all. The acting is terrible. The story is barely sensical. The two minute chunks of presentation are completely insane.

I think about it far more than I should.

The First Berserker Khazan

Didn’t even play this one before they added the ability to turn Khazan into a girl and I already thought it was peak. 

I think the Souls space is getting to the stage where a lot of people roll their eyes at new entries, but really, there’s always the potential of a new Lies of P…for those with eyes to see.

I don’t think Khazan quite hits the high highs that Pinocchio did, but damn if it didn’t feel good in a way I still think about. Three kinds of situational parries that aren’t just reactive to a fancy glow the enemy does. Moves you can do after filling up a meter instead of moves you can’t do because you ran out of a meter. Defined weapons that all feel different and fun because they didn’t just make 80 variants of a sword because they felt like they had to and 70 of them feel bad. It’s so good.

CloverPit

Pretty poorly balanced but also…it’s gambling. That’s how gambling works. It’s no Balatro but I had a lot of fun figuring out the best ways to win.

Elden Ring Nightreign

Nightreign suffers in a lot of the similar ways that Elden Ring did, but it has an “Arcadey” modifier that makes the whole thing so much more bearable. 

If there was a problem I had with Elden Ring, it was that unlike other Souls games that I could replay endlessly, I never wanted to play it ever again. The copy-paste dungeons and weirdly strict traversal options with very little meaningfully changed from its predecessors were just too tough a pill for me to swallow.

Yet here it all works. Maybe it’s being forced into different weapon builds by the whim of RNG. Maybe it’s the fact I can play as a spellcaster and literally never run out of mana if I’m playing well. Maybe it’s because I can be a doll girl and then immediately switch to being a nun. Maybe it’s because bows and arrows feel good for the first time EVER! The list can go on.

Nightreign might be miserable to play on your own, but in a world where me and my girlfriend have spent hours over the years trying to hide our summon signs in the right place to hopefully get connected for co-op in Dark Souls over and over again, it was the ultimate panacea. 

Silksong

I’m only halfway through Act II oh god. 

Listen it’s not Silksong’s fault that everytime a game shadowdrops I get thrown off because I perfectly plan out every game I’m going to play in random chunks, and it happened to line up with a Trails game I had to review. I promise I’ll get back to it. I promise it’s not cheating that I played two other Metroidvanias since it came out. I’m so sorry. Hornet please you have to forgive m-

Lone Fungus: Melody of Spores

I really liked the first Lone Fungus, even if it wasn’t a game about super cute mushrooms. I think that its fixation on tough platforming with traversal is one that more Metroidvanias could learn from, but it did become a little much at times.

Melody of Spores basically solves all the issues I had with Lone Fungus, and also takes things in a decidedly GBA-style direction. As someone who recently played through every single GBA Castlevania game, this was amazing to see.

I think something was lost, when we pivoted entirely to handheld consoles with comparatively immense power that don’t even try to have a unique control scheme. When you play a GBA game, there’s a level of deliberate design at almost every stage that makes it clear they know you could be doing this shit on a bus for 20 minutes and then have to go. Nowadays, some of that sensibility can be found on Steam, especially with the advent of the Steam Deck, but things feel almost entirely lopsided towards something like a Balatro or Vampire Survivors.

Melody of Spores gives you a whip, and it changes everything. Where combat in Lone Fungus was a pretty simplistic affair, and it arguably still is, there is such an absurd breadth of build-crafting that you can do with the new equipment system that feels straight out of Aria of Sorrow. Do you have to engage with it? Not really, the game isn’t that hard. Is it fun to realize you can just chuck a vase at a boss over and over again? Absolutely. 

Making the more absurd platforming challenges completely optional and detached from the world helps a lot too, and things never get as hard as the endgame gauntlets of Lone Fungus. I remember being incredibly sad when this game originally failed to meet its crowdfunding goals, and I’m really glad they somehow managed to get it out the door regardless, because it reminds you that sometimes a developer just needs to keep getting chances to hone their craft, and watching them improve can be the most beautiful thing in the world.

Infinity Nikki

I love dress up games. I hate gacha games*. Alas, they made a Dress Up Gacha game that has an actually fun to explore open world, so here I am.

I think at launch Infinity Nikki was very charming, but clearly unfinished. Core systems were missing, the absurdity of the Nikki series was present, but noticeably muted. They actually on-god had pulls that would expire!

A year out however, basically everything has been ironed out into an incredibly easy to engage with format. Do I still hate the gacha? Yes of course forever. Can I mostly ignore the gacha because every 5 star is just a ball gown in different colors? Yep.

I think it’s impressive that several members of the Super Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild development team worked on this, because it solves a lot of the issues I had with those experiences. While there’s still entirely too much space, it’s almost entirely solved by being able to dress my Nikki up exactly how I want, and at a base level, aren’t video games all about looking super cool and aura farming in various locations with an incredible fit?

The 2.0 update specifically was incredibly good for the game. Where a lot of open worlds can suffer from being wide expanses of nothing, Nikki went extremely dense, and at times, vertical. The rainforest-like setting of the mushroomy Itzaland actually feels like a place where you have to constantly climb through layers of canopy, and pay attention to your surroundings in all directions, rather than immediately in front of you. I love turning huge in an instant and just trivializing a platforming challenge. I love talking to a baby mushroom and randomly getting pulled into an incredibly dire life-or-death sidequest about the saddest thing you ever heard. 

I hope someday the stuff that makes games like Nikki can find their place in a more traditional video game.

* a lie.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II

One of the weaker Trails games and I still loved basically every minute of it. Just play these for the love of god if you like RPGs at all. Please.

Metro Gravity

We do not get enough 3D Metroidvanias, and this delivers in not only that, but also Gravity Rush! Wow!

Cannot recommend Metro Gravity enough mainly because I struggle to think about a game that is actually meaningfully analogous to it. Yes, you do Gravity Rush stuff, but like, it has more substance than that (no offense to Gravity Rush).

The boss battles specifically really got my ass. They’re kind of rhythmic-based parry fests, but they’re so immaculately designed and tied to a song playing that it encouraged me to learn how to optimize everything I possibly could to feel good. I rarely get into time-attack style stuff, but it was just so much fun learning how to best slingshot myself around planets in one boss fight, or just how many hits I could get in between deflective parries in another. The soundtrack is incredibly distinctive and fun, the art style’s mishmash of pixel art and low-poly is the shit I love. Man. What a good video game. The type of game that makes you happy from seeing someone just give their all.

Labyrinth of the Demon King

Combining King’s Field with Silent Hill is genius, why hasn’t anyone done this before?

I specifically really liked the weird obtuse ways you could upgrade your broken-ass starting katana into a whole host of different weapons depending on what you gave to reforge it. What a cute idea. I picked the evil blood one in case you were wondering.

It’s also really neat that the enemies will just start beating the shit out of each other. One of my favorite parts of certain Dark Souls games is when you find two guys just fucking going at it. Like those guys outside the Abyss Watchers in Dark Souls 3. Hype Moments. If you’re going to put me in hell, it should feel like other people are trapped in hell too! Why the heck should they get along where I can’t?

Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist

Insanely good Metroidvania. I’ve talked in the past about Ender Lilies, and this does everything that it did but better. 

I love the way the map slowly fills in with color if you’ve done things, genuinely telling you if you’ve done everything you can in a room without forcing you to rely on guide websites for just the basic question of “did I do everything I can here”. 

There’s an actual story here outside of the Dark Souls apocalyptic item descriptions of the original. I loved whenever I sat down at a checkpoint and one of my ghostly oomfs wanted to just talk about some shit that happened in the evil rich people house. Awesome.

Mushroom Musume

Third game of the year with Mushrooms!

This is a really cute raising simulator about raising a bunch of fucked up awesome mushroom daughters. You can give them knives. You can teach them magic. You can get them lost in a Resident Evil Mansion. You can send them on quests. It’s awesome. 

I was really impressed by how many unique events there were in this game, which befits the sheer amount of mushroom daughters you can make. In raising sims, you’re always going to see repeat events, it’s kind of intrinsic to the nature of the thing, but the sheer originality on display here was inspiring. When your poor mushroom daughter goes out into the real world away from your sheltered wooded home, and has to learn what the Tooth Fairy is? That’s real shit. When people try to get high off of her body parts because that’s kind of what mushrooms do? Messed up. 

I still have so much more to do, but I was in love with every second of this game, especially with its menagerie of unlockables that ranged from a weird gardening mini-game that lets you min-max your daughter, to palettes that just changed all the cutesy colors of its incredibly charming UI presentation. It even has Pokémon-ass mystery gift codes! Cute!

Death Stranding 2

Kojima learned women have rights for once. He didn’t do it perfectly, but I’ll be honest, I didn’t think he was capable of this. It’s been like 20 years since MGS3 and every game he’s released since then has at least 4 insanely offensive displays of women. Here we have women who actually do things! Rainy is cracked!

I think this is Kojima at some of, if not completely, his best. The storytelling is insane, the concepts are outrageous, the direction is sublime. Italian Solid Snake is hot.

The game part though, I don’t know what the hell happened man. I get that he loves Mad Max, so a car-driven game in Australia makes complete sense (even ignoring the Tarman shaped George Miller in the room), but it completely ruins the balance that made Death Stranding’s first outing so iconic. Death Stranding was never a hard game, and the Director’s Cut made it even easier, but Death Stranding 2 is almost mindless at times with how little friction there is.

I remember struggling and optimizing my ziplines in the snowy mountains of Death Stranding so that I could deliver all I could as best I could, and being incredibly satisfied when I managed to make the routing work with floating cargo carriers in-tow. In Death Stranding 2, I just get in my car that holds 30 packages with no downsides and drive up the whole mountain over and over until it tells me I don’t have to anymore. It was sad. You can in fact make a game too easy. The Dark Souls easy mode deniers were secretly right all along…

of the Devil

🙂

Lies of P: Overture

Holy Fucking Shit.

Fromsoftware’s DLC efforts have always been better than the base game they spawn from, but Round8 has taken it to another level. I am in awe of Pinocchio’s exploits in this game, and its surprisingly more in-depth narrative. Gepetto is the biggest bastard of all time, there’s genuinely something severely wrong with that guy. 

Dreams of D is going to be the greatest game ever made.

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-

This was just a normal visual novel with the bad Utawarerumono combat, I really don’t get why it was such a big deal (Half Joking).

Danganronpa games are fun, but they always have an issue where writer Kazutaka Kodaka loves to just be insanely embarrassing and offensive out of nowhere and it sours the whole thing. Shockingly, possibly because he brought on the incredibly bad Boruto writer to make him look immaculate by comparison, he doesn’t have many of those problems in Hundred Line.

I wish that it actually delivered on the concept of 100 unique endings, but that would be insane, just as many were suggesting in the hype cycle lead-up to the release where Kodaka insisted each next day may be his last. As is though, it’s still a pretty fun visual novel, especially now that some of the more cloying gameplay mechanics have been streamlined or improved. I still think this is a game that’s incredibly poorly designed from an engagement perspective (It really was JUST like trudging through the Utawarerumono weightless combat after a while), but it’s fine because the story is still generally pretty fun. Kodaka has an incredibly vibrant way of writing characters that always impresses, and I’m going to be thinking about Eito Aotsuki forever now. I think I finally understand Komaeda people.

Lethal Company Modded So That Pikmin Follow You Around and Your Friends Spend Way Too Long Gambling in a Casino

Beautiful, perfect, no notes. The true king of Friendslop.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure

Awesome cozy-core game that lets you be friends with Cinnamoroll. It took way too long to get to the point where Cinnamoroll can follow me around all the time but we got there folks. 

I think it’s a weird game where it was definitely made as a phone game you log into everyday, but it really just feels like Animal Crossing at its core. It’s lacking in the level of polish something like a Nintendo can do, but at the same time that means they’re way more free-form and experimental. They put Wish Me Mell in a weird pocket dimension! Big Challenges is here and makes you do Big Challenges! They confirmed that Tuxedo Sam is gay!

I think it’s a little bad at actually making you want to decorate houses, between the weird crafting system, and the lack of diversity in the actual furnishings you can put down, but that’s fine. If you treat it as a nice little place where you can run around with Kuromi while you do tasks and she’s kind of rude about it, it’s perfect.

Blue Prince

Dude Blue Prince.

I love roguelites and puzzle games so it’s no surprise I love this game sooooo much. I think that ultimately it made me realize that while I might not lack the imagination of the average gamer, I think I might have too much anxiety to actually engage with a lot of methods of play unless I’m actively forced to. Like I said with Nightreign earlier, there’s something about having a game just direct where we’re going today that brings peace to my soul. 

There’s plenty I could say about Blue Prince’s design, the layers upon layers, but the real reason I loved this game? It’s because I played it with my friend Trevor.

Playing with Trevor meant that I had a second set of eyes to look at everything I was doing, and his skillset from playing a million games about optimizing numbers meant that he could cover me in spaces I would’ve otherwise stumbled in. Do you think I could have managed my step counter on my own? No chance. Would I have picked a good room to place in the corner on the run that I was finally close to winning? No I would’ve died right then and there.

It was really neat figuring out things like how the Garage worked, how to get more resources for future runs, and actually getting the damn boiler room working. I get why some people might have struggled with some of the RNG mechanics, but the subtle ways you can manipulate the RNG to guarantee most things before getting to the more obtuse and multi-run puzzles meant I was never really frustrated by it. Is it as tightly designed as something like Return of the Obra Dinn? No, but that’s fine, it wasn’t trying to be. It’s trying something new; it’s trying to be itself.

I love puzzle games, but I think they shine the most when you have someone else with you to see angles you can’t. There were just as many times where Trevor had no idea what was going on, but I, with my own skillset and knowledge base, was able to immediately discern what I had to do. It was so much fun, easily the most fun I had with a game this year. Thank You Trevor.

The post Rose’s Games That Were Played That Didn’t Hurt Her (That Much) In 2025 appeared first on Gamesline.

of the Devil Episode 2: his due, picks up a month or so after the events of Episode 1, with our lead lawyer Morgan getting pulled into representing a bodyguard for the Ikariyas, one of the wealthiest families in its dystopian hell. Similar to Episode 1, she has personal ties to the case itself (albeit with a MUCH different context), leading her to wrestle with what she knows about the crime against what she can actually talk about or use in court. This struggle creates an incredibly interesting push and pull as she pieces things together, and really exemplifies the unique nature of the game’s perspective, how it can be utilized to sow misdirections and freshen up what would otherwise be well-trodden tropes.

What stood out to me immediately in Episode 2 was how things fire on all cylinders right from the get-go. Both the prologue and Episode 1 leaned towards treating the nature of Morgan as a serial killer with the gravitas of a twist ending, and I was a little concerned that most of her evil would be committed off-screen and handled as pure reference. Nth circle isn’t shy about their inspirations—unless you somehow missed the referential humor scattered throughout—and I’m glad to see that stays true for gradually utilizing Morgan more and more, the same way a similar character like Makima from Chainsaw Man slowly gains, for no want of a better term, hype and aura moments.

By making Morgan the perpetrator of most of the crime she has to defend someone else for, Episode 2 is able to have the tension of a Death Note “can she get away with it” without sacrificing the core mystery and investigative elements that make up the murder mystery genre. This is a great way of avoiding the common issues in mystery games, where key information has to be kept from the player’s perspective, even if they’re meant to be seeing what a specific character is seeing. A perfect example is Heavy Rain’s killer reveal, where they have to go out of their way to actively misrepresent a situation to the player in order to deliver their twist. By maintaining that Morgan “only knows what she knows”, the story can deliver intrigue in the same way suspense stories like Death Note or the better parts of Danganronpa do without falling apart in the process. 

Equally impressive are the continued updates to animations and the consistent willingness to go off-model without becoming tonally inconsistent. Episode 1 has some really great Monogatari-style cutaways where the screen will change color and deliver a single line; but Episode 2 doubles down with noir-style typewriting, more non-ADV style visual novel sequences, and cute one-off bits like cutting to the old VN classic photoshopped jpeg of something in 4:3. Morgan’s big murder scene is a particular standout, changing the perspective from sprite-to-sprite communication to a more sinister front-facing shot that properly captures the darker and uglier side of the protagonist. 

Every new and returning character is absolutely fantastic. It’s easy to describe of the Devil as an Ace Attorney-like, but where it really succeeds is the way in which it humanizes even the most annoying member of its retinue. Morgan herself is a bit of a fail-girl, but so is everyone, and seeing a little bit of that for the folks you run into helps capture the most important part of Cyberpunk fiction: the humanity subdued by the society. Cyberpunk is a genre that all too often fails because its works’ ideas of humanity are limited to either traditional conservative essentialism, or transhumanistic neo-religion. Here, there’s a distinct understanding that Cyberpunk is speculative fiction; it’s ideally formed from ponderances on where exactly society could go when scientific or societal shifts change the paradigm. All too often, though, (as seen in works like Cyberpunk 2077) these stories become a selection of aesthetic choices and tropes rather than considered analysis and critique. Ace Attorney treats its setting conceit of injustice and absurdity as a means to an end for a video game; of the Devil is intent on showing you exactly what makes its city, and the people in it.

And there are so many people to love! Android Serra continues to be a standout, leaning all-in to her martial-arts fetishism as it (sometimes) relates to the case. DA Emma Rockford works great as a continued rival, and the way the narrative plays with her absolute confidence really sells the way she acts and the intent of her actions. Both detectives Reyes and London return, and gain more interesting layers to their personalities that sets up future threads putting them apart from remaining the incompetent police lackeys to the real investigation. Robotic Adjutant 84 once again demonstrates you can improve on the standard old judge with a big beard by making them a manic blonde woman.

Episode 2’s new characters are also exceptionally well presented.  Every case-specific character in Episode 1 had something interesting to contribute, but they had to work double duty by being the functional introduction to the game’s world and the overall format of power dynamics the player has to acclimate to. Now that things are more or less understood, the characters can get more silly with it, and it really pays off. Every member of the Ikariya family is charming, even if they’re among the more morally questionable characters in the setting (which is saying something). 

It’s easy to fall into tropes, especially when going for the more strict formatting of something like a trial-focused visual novel, but what matters is making the tropes fun to engage with through character dynamics and prose. Yes, new character Diamani is the archetypal Cyberpunk bartender, but his charm comes from the way he’s teaching Serra cringe memes and getting serious with Morgan. Han is half the lesbians I know. Makoto Ikariya is every cloistered rich-kid in an anime ever, but it works because the way he talks is incredibly charming, and seeing the way he bounces off the other members of his family (especially his grandfather, huoh) fleshes out their relation to the setting and what this world makes of its people.

The theme of focusing on humanizing everyone you meet, contrasted against Morgan’s sociopathy, just hits soooooo good. This isn’t a Death Note situation where you’re seeing one weird freak’s specific world view, and a lot of functional characters that serve to maintain a narrative conceit. You get a weird, messy, and inconsistent series of events that match the compromising world under late capitalism. Especially in a story with cops, arguably the most hateable group you could think of, being able to distinctly capture the humanity buried underneath the evil and performance without inadvertently forgiving their existence (a commonality of detective fiction) is an incredible feat.

It’s so hard writing about of the Devil because I genuinely get so effusive every time. I’ve said it in my last two pieces, and here again, but do you know how bad every single Cyberpunk work is? Do you know how hellish it is to play Cyberpunk 2077 or Shadowrun and see such a surface level engagement with politics on such a baffling level that you’d struggle to believe the people writing the game even come from the same world the rest of us do? The intricacies to which of the Devil goes to represent labor, medical exploitation, and economic divides comes across as far more real than the average “here’s the dirty cyber slums where the drug addicts (who are all crazed killers by the way) live”. Most of the plot for this episode revolves around the economic implications of a construction plan in poorer areas and just how big of a deal it would be! It’s real! 

To go further, one particular plot point draws directly from something we’re seeing in our world right now; the way the different crime families engage with the legalization of a recreational drug. One of these organizations utilizes a front-facing pharmaceutical company which allows them to benefit directly from the legalization, while the other is about to lose access to this revenue stream they’ve established over the years, affecting various sectors of impoverished people. In the midst of learning about all of this, you can also read about the continued price gouging impacting sufferers of type-2 diabetes, even 60 years into the future. 

This is exactly what speculative fiction should be doing! It captures a nuanced, obviously fictional take on a concept that we’re familiar with (the gradual legalization of previously criminalized substances changing communities in different ways across the world) and marries it with an even more concrete example of social commentary that’s a natural extension of the same environment, if not a different aspect to it. There is fiction in the concepts and names, but reality in the actual subject matter, which establishes the work’s theory and praxis. This isn’t Cyberpunk 2077’s nebulous and abstracted “cyberpsychosis.” This is a relatable critique that discusses and evaluates the real issues we’re currently facing, getting back to the genre underpinnings of warning at what is, and what could be. 

So yeah, again, really excited about everything happening here. There are 3 more of the Devil episodes planned, and I absolutely cannot wait to see what the hell happens, and how the story will balance the prospect of a more focused main plot versus the procedural episodic nature. I’m excited to see whatever sick outfits the fantastically stylized art brings, I can’t wait to see Morgan kill more people, I can’t wait to see how Serra owns Morgan next, I-hey wait come back I haven’t finished telling you about how much I like of the—

The post of the Devil – Episode 2 Review appeared first on Gamesline.