In a sea of games showcasing technological advancement through facial pores and scope creep, this was a surrealist Shoot ‘em Up where you watch all your millions of projectiles bounce around and collide with complex enemies in high-definition space. It was incredibly impressive to see, and had me cheering at what people so often call “next-gen” tech for one of the first few times in my life. 

It’s not the hardest game, nor is it the most interestingly unique mechanical sandbox ever created. At the same time, however, I was consistently drawn in by the mystique the game gradually unwound without ever fully answering. Returnal isn’t a game you solve; it’s an experience you meditate on and engage with as you explore its hostile, impossible alien architecture.

All this prologue is to say that when Saros was unveiled last year, and seemed to be a more mechanically nuanced successor to Returnal, I was incredibly excited! Returnal with parrying, shields, and The King in Yellow? Hell yeah sister, pass me some of that! Expanding upon the established baseline with more dynamic environments and a more considered meta progression seemed like one of the most straightforward slam dunks in gaming.

Unfortunately, even though it succeeds at so many of its goals, Saros disappoints specifically because of how safe it feels, a concept completely antithetical to the uniqueness of its predecessor. 

Saros takes place in a future where a hyper capitalist Earth ruled by Mega Corporations has ventured out to colonize and pillage the rest of the known universe. You play as Arjun Devraj, an enforcer for the Soltari Corporation who’s been sent out to investigate three waves of colonists and research teams that have gone missing on a mysterious planet named Carcosa (one has to assume that The King in Yellow doesn’t exist in this world, or else the old adage about the Torment Nexus has held true). Upon arriving, Arjun and his team quickly realize that the situation is far more dire than they could have imagined, as they face down an ever-changing landscape, horrifying bio-mechanical creatures, and eldritch forces corrupting their bodies and minds. 

If you’ve never read The King in Yellow (which you really should), Saros will probably come across as an incredibly original game, much in the way Returnal’s fooling around with cosmic horror felt fresh and bold. If you have read it, or anything directly inspired by it, you can kind of guess the broad strokes of where Saros’ story will go. There’s corruption, confusion, gestures towards romance and time foolery, so on and so forth.

As one intimately familiar with surrealist horror, The King in Yellow has always stood out to me as a particularly influential work. Yes, of course, the concepts of corruption and paranoia, alongside pivots towards breezier themes, can be found in countless works throughout history. Its specific portrayal of an almost “frame narrative” conceit with its titular play feels so astounding for its time, and has clearly influenced nearly everything like it that’s come after. Think of every creepypasta about a cursed movie, something like The Ring, cursed object narratives; they all take concepts and executions directly from the 1895 collection. It was an incredible breakout hit, and at the time there just wasn’t much like The King in Yellow.

However, it is no longer 1895, and we have access to pretty much every successor you could dream of in the far flung future of 2026, which hurts Saros in ways Returnal never quite had to deal with. 

Returnal is ultimately a story about trauma and loss, and it tells this story not through traditional cutscenes, but with first-person exploration sequences through mundane locations that instantly feel out of place in its setting of an overgrown alien world. Finding a contemporary and perfectly intact house in the middle of the wilderness, going in to slowly explore and experience things in a different perspective…it hits all of my strikezones as someone who pops off at all those times NieR suddenly becomes an isometric Zelda game. The spaceman is fantastic as well, a featureless observer stalking you through the world, adding mystique and ever more questions; effective for a game with exactly one character.

Saros delivers its take on the Returnal narrative quirks via gradually unlocked sequences where you slowly walk through surrealist contemporary environments with light visual storytelling (things like magazines with keywords, or clubs named “The Yellow Club”). The perspective doesn’t shift from the standard third-person method of play, instead slowing you to a crawl as you make your way through alleyways, hotel rooms, and apartments. It all comes across as incredibly banal; something you could find in literally any other big budget game.

Coupled with this, Arjun is not alone on his foray into Carcosa, and works alongside several Soltari employees who he has the option to talk to in between the exploratory runs into the mechanical wastes. These conversations are delivered in the classic style of stilted one-off conversations where rhetoric and quotations are spouted off, and the only back and forth dialogue is half-hearted “stay safe out there”s. Though I appreciate a different direction from the isolation of Returnal, where main character Selene only has herself to talk to (both literally and figuratively), Arjun’s aping of the static NPC interactions from the Horizons and Ghost of Tsushimas of the world doesn’t quite fit for a work so ostensibly absurdist.

But the story is such a minor part of both Returnal and Saros that it feels secondary to the real meat of the experience: its run-based roguelike center. If you played Returnal, you know exactly how Saros is structured. You enter a biome, explore along a Metroid Prime-esque map with side rooms and optional challenges that serve to bolster you with artifacts that can modify your play style, randomized variants of a few different guns, and, if you’re lucky, base stat upgrades that make you stronger as you go on.

To repeat myself: if you’ve played Returnal, you know exactly how Saros is structured. This isn’t just a hit on the same old rocky space Giger-inspired world, but that so many of the game’s procedurally generated rooms are almost 1:1 copies of several found in Returnal. There were countless times where I would walk into a ramped room and immediately flash back to fighting my way through as Selene, letting me predict what enemies will spawn and where with ease. On the surface, this feeds into some ludonarrative resonance with the mystique of just how many times Arjun has been experiencing his cycle of death and rebirth and how much his body remembers versus his mind. But, from a tangible gameplay perspective, it makes me realize just how little Saros has meaningfully evolved from its predecessor.

Which isn’t helped by an inherited problem also suffered in Returnal; rocky ruined terrain is great for making a wide open space a video game takes place in, but it’s not exactly super compelling to look at. The unique biomes in Returnal were a desert, a mechanical forest, and an underwater grotto; the pivot from grey to red to blue worked reasonably well for keeping things fresh. Saros, unfortunately, is less inventive with its biomes, and thwarts its own attempts at colorization. 

The first area of the game is a ruined marble palace on cliffs with lots of red flora peppered around. When you initiate one of the game’s core mechanics (“the eclipse”) to progress further into the level, everything is immediately subdued into a brownish-yellow sludge that removes all pastoral vibrancy. This goes for the areas with more muted colors as well: a mechanical mine glows more sinisterly yellow, a swamp becomes even more brown and yucky, the sea becomes orange and…you get the picture. 

Once again, in terms of thematic resonance this is a great mechanical execution—we see Arjun accept power that dulls the world around him as a means of fitting the role he must—but as players we also unfortunately live in a world of brown and gray sludge games literally everywhere since the advent of 3D titles. Coupled with the level design familiarity for players of Returnal, Saros falls into one of the worst pitfalls of modern big-budget gaming: an experience that quickly becomes samey and uninteresting.

Which is a shame, because a lot has been tangibly improved from Returnal. You no longer rely entirely on the modern action classic of dodging for survival, since Arjun has a shield that allows him to absorb most projectiles (while charging his weapons), and a parry that can be used to negate several attacks. This allows the gameplay to feel more interesting than Returnal in terms of how you engage with each encounter, without sacrificing the speed and impact of what you can do. There’s an illusion in games that shields go hand in hand with a slower and more methodical method of play, but realistically, shields should allow a player to execute on ideas with a speed otherwise not afforded. The best offense is a good defense, as they say.

I also appreciated the guns a lot more than Returnal’s arsenal, though much of it feels comparatively streamlined. You still have your shotguns, pistols, and assault rifles, but the new chakrams and crossbows feel really good to fool around with. Instead of a set of 8 or so traits on a weapon, Saros opts to create 3 core variants of each weapon, with two different sets of passives slotted on top. My favorite of these traits auto-fired my bullets directly at any enemy nearby, letting me focus on dodging and parrying over actually aiming. The way Saros is about quicker levels you deliberately choose to go to rather than the “One Big Run” format of Returnal means that having a greater variety of guns that may prove potentially useful compared to a deluge of Rotgland Lobbers with useless defensive modifiers is incredibly welcome. There are definitely still bad guns, but the ratio of good to bad, and how fast you’ll get them, changes the game substantially. 

Now, more divisively, I have to get into my Rosarie Rant that may or may not alienate you, the reader.

To me, Returnal was an absurdly easy game. I defeated almost every boss on my first attempt, and much of my time spent in the game was on the more repeatable post-launch DLC tower and co-op with friends. That first foray of exploration was intriguing and intoxicating, but it was also over in about 8 hours (with 6 extra for trophy cleanup). There wasn’t much meta-progression, and a lack of modular difficulty options meant I was left pining for the scary Shmup experience that could have been.

Saros is just as easy, if not even easier than Returnal, and the two features I was pining for have done little to mitigate this. 

The improved meta-progression allows you to become significantly stronger as you continue to play the game, meaning that players who are struggling with specific breakpoints can almost “grind” their ways out of frustration, but very little has a meaningful engagement with how you play the game beyond this. When I think of a game like Hades—one that inspires you to progress through interacting with different weapons, different passives, and building up your home base—I can see how people dump hour after hour into such an experience, because things feel increasingly different over time. Saros doesn’t create a meaningfully different experience with its progression, it just makes an easier one.

On the flip side (or perhaps, alongside), the modular difficulty options and sliders we’ve come to see in games like The Last of Us Part II or Doom: The Dark Ages are here in the form of Carcosan modifiers. These modifiers let you make your experience even easier, or more difficult. For the most part, there’s no deep or tangible reward to this, unlike something like the Tales of series’ encouragement to crank up the difficulty while grinding for better drops. There’s a balancing act of sorts where you aren’t allowed to launch into a run if you’ve made the game too easy, but you aren’t really getting anything out of making the game harder other than personal satisfaction.

This would be fine if the imposed challenges were actually interesting, but in practice they’re just making Arjun more fragile, or your enemies beefier. There are a couple more interesting limiters like losing weapons and passives over the course of your run, but those only went so far. I’m glad they tried more with Saros, but it really feels like their focus wasn’t on making unique experiences for players interested in an easier or harder time, but rather catering specifically to a mass production ideal of players. On the surface, modular features for difficulty seem like a no brainer, but in practice, you lose out on the curation of level design and tuning that’s had people trying to 1cc their favorite shmups for decades.

Another problem I have with Saros is, dear God I’m going to say it:

I don’t care about angry men.

I’ve been beating the drum of how dull and insipid the worst parts of Sony’s catalogue have been for the last decade or so, and it just seems to get worse every year. God of War does a “character redemption” by turning Kratos from a parodical avatar of rage into the realistic avatar of rage; your dad. The Last of Us Part II couldn’t stop its cast of mostly female characters from fixating on the past and present futures created by angry men. Ghost of Tsushima is almost entirely about angry men getting mad at you, and Ghost of Yotei threw in your brother just in case you thought you were finally free. Indeed, it’s almost harder to name a Sony game that doesn’t have the stereotypical rage of a masculine force as a major theme, and Saros is no exception. 

Arjun is an interesting character for sure, and gradually eking out this backstory, and the absurd directions things take on the larger scale, has a degree of intrigue to it. Compared to Returnal though? A story about cycles of maternal abuse and self-reflection? Hearing about a guy who’s upset he fumbled his ex-wife is not exactly the most compelling narrative experience for me, especially when it’s wrapped up in the absurdity of a Lovecraftian draping. I get it, a lot of the creatives behind this game are men, and the same goes for much of the medium of game design, as the machinations of Patriarchy and its intersections with Capital collide to consistently exile women from most things. That said, however, was there really nothing more interesting you could have Rahul Kohli do than yell about how he needs to find his ex-wife? Like, that’s the depth of the emotional nuance we get out of him for 95% of the game? 

At the end of the day, the most damning thing I can say about Saros is that you could find its experience almost anywhere. Its blend of high budget and roguelike is still unique, and if you didn’t pick up Returnal, it’s probably still a very distinct experience in a lot of ways compared to the slurry of genericism you’ll find elsewhere in the AAA gaming space. I expected more though, and I will continue to expect more. Housemarque has consistently shown with games like Resogun and Super Stardust that they have the shmup chops and technical know-how to make something really interesting. Seeing something truly compelling like Returnal become just like everything else in its sequel is an unfortunate disappointment. 

The post Don’t Stare at the Sun Too Long – Saros (PS5) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

Relooted introduces new members of the heist team every few levels, and makes sure that you feel the problems that they’ll solve for you. Trevor, who has the power to open and close doors, did not initially impress me during his tutorial mission. He’s a little slow to activate, he can only keep doors open before the alarm goes off, and he seemed to self-consciously embellish his unimpressive skill by announcing his self-given epithet “The Locksmith!” every time he was activated. I took Trevor for granted and failed to prepare him in the right position before my escape. I scrambled to call on him to open a door as the alarm blared and the timer ticked down, and he smugly highlighted my mistake: “It would have been faster if you had me ready!” I finished the heist in time, but Nomali had to bear the indignity of letting her chuuni little brother embarrass her.

That kind of clever narrative design kept exciting me throughout Relooted. Immediately after a level where an otherwise lightning-fast Nomali must break the momentum of her escape by slowly jogging up and down stairs, she echoed my thoughts in a cutscene: “We have to do something about those stairs.” Then came a tutorial sequence for the acrobat Ndedi, who swings and grapples Nomali across large vertical and horizontal gaps that would otherwise have to be cleared by taking stairs or pushing tables around. I smiled as I felt the dozens of seconds Ndedi was shaving off my run, precisely because Nyamakop made me use the stairs so much in the previous level.

So it is with additional team members Fred the Inventor, whose drone lets you case the joint, Cryptic the Hacker, who neutralizes robotic guards and turrets, and Luso the Muscle, who throws Nomali through glass barriers. Each of them facilitates one of the most fundamental satisfactions of video games: getting from point A to point B in as little time as possible. Even with a perfect plan, the escape sequences require technical execution from the player to maintain Nomali’s top speed, but Relooted never let me forget the value of each team member. Sometimes, a team member will be unavailable for a heist, and I always felt their absence while constructing my well-oiled platforming machine.

Higher difficulty settings decrease the time you have to escape, more severely limit the locations that team members can be assigned to during the prep phase, and reduce the amount of information that Fred’s drone Nunu shows you. The first two features demand even greater appreciation for your teammates and more careful planning, but I preferred to receive detailed information from Nunu, especially the recommended route which shows problem areas that need to be solved. Getting unsolicited advice from my team members made me feel more like part of a team, and not just an omniscient being that orders my pieces around. In real group projects I always cherish when someone takes care of a problem before I even notice it. Who wants to make every decision all the time?

The heists are organized by Nomali’s grandmother Professor Grace and her protégé Etienne, who provide information on what you are actually stealing: African artifacts (and some from other colonized regions) stolen by colonial powers long ago, and kept in museum basements and private collections to avoid an international treaty that demands the repatriation of any publicly displayed artifacts acquired illicitly. Loopholes like these have challenged the Professor’s decades-long campaign to repatriate this stolen cultural heritage with by-the-book methods, and she can’t bear to reach the end of her life having accomplished so little. Thus, she devises a plan to reloot stolen artifacts, and ultimately return them to their proper homes.

Indiana Jones, the fictional archaeologist who the most despicable character in Relooted compares himself to, once said “That belongs in a museum!” Complicating the claim of some reviewers that Relooted is opposed to that maxim, Relooted does believe in the value of the museum. More precisely, it believes in the value of The Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar, Senegal. That is where the relooted artifacts get dropped off. Yes, the Museum of Black Civilizations will only hold the artifacts temporarily before sending them to their proper homes, but it is the Museum that is trusted to appropriately foster and distribute the cultural heritage of Africa.

In the case of the Akan Drum, its proper home is identified as an African-American History museum. But for the most part, Relooted carefully avoids the complicated question of where exactly the “proper homes” of these artifacts are, which does not necessarily have a straightforward answer in theory or in practice. That’s for the scholars and bureaucrats to figure out. The immediate victory is that those discussions happen in Africa, by Africans, without any conditions imposed by colonial museums. When 90% of the material cultural legacy of sub-Saharan Africa is found outside of the African continent, just getting 64 artifacts to Dakar is a triumph.

The movement to repatriate stolen African artifacts has seen momentum since Felwine Sarr and Bénédict Savoy’s 2018 report, as well as sympathy from popular culture. What sets Relooted apart from other pro-repatriation media is that the targets of your heists aren’t elven artifacts, they’re not from a fictional country, and they weren’t stolen by the Villains’ International League of Evil. Relooted is set in a sci-fi future with comicbooky characters, but the artifacts in the game are digital representations of real, physical objects that were really stolen from real human beings that really breathed air on this Earth. I’m emphasizing this point because it’s so rare to find a video game with a historical perspective that isn’t clouded by metaphor and artistic license. Assassin’s Creed will always bend history to fit its metaplot, Dragon Age will always flatten the complexities of political struggles to better suit a heroic narrative. Relooted’s Africanfuturist storyline is always anchored by real history, and might even spark you to look up more details than its quick art history lectures can give you.

Relooted takes a Pan-African perspective, but takes care to highlight the cultural diversity of Africa: the heist team is audibly multicultural, and artifacts are always traced not just to a general region but to a specific indigenous group. This is in contrast to games like Far Cry 2 and Resident Evil 5 that create fictional African nations as an excuse to deploy stereotypes of Africa as backwards, corrupt, and dangerous. As a bit of cheeky payback, Relooted refers to its late 21st century Europe as The Old World and the United States as The Shiny Place, except when recounting real historical details.

Nyamakop took a “thrones, not teacups” approach to selecting which real artifacts would be represented in Relooted: it’s not just that these artifacts happened to be objects made by African indigenous groups, but that they carry deep meaning to the people they were stolen from. It should be obvious why it’s unacceptable for funerary statues plucked from Mijikenda homes to exist in Andy Warhol’s house, or the skull of anticolonial leader Mangi Meli to sit somewhere in the archives of a German museum.

Despite the scope and cruelty of the colonial looting of Africa, Relooted takes a deliberately soft approach to the issue, and largely maintains a cheery atmosphere where the most destructive thing the heist team does is break a few windows. Without indulging in shocking depictions of violence, Relooted is still capable of clearly communicating colonial injustice and anti-colonial justice. Most importantly, Relooted can be enjoyed by all ages, and is particularly attractive to guardians who want their kid to learn puzzle-solving and history at the same time.

Nyamakop’s first release, Semblance, avoided distinctively African themes in order to appeal to Western markets. This is a common trend for South African games, even as developers elsewhere in the continent, such as Nigeria’s Maliyo Games, Ghana’s Leti Arts, and Cameroon’s Kiro’o Games consciously develop games that are immediately recognizable as African. As for why South African games tend to blend in with Western games, I’ll quote some members of Broforce’s developer Free Lives, from a 2016 Gamedeveloper.com interview:

“As white South Africans, our culture is Western,” says programmer Ruan Rothmann. “It’s not like we have a unique and segregated white South African culture that’s isolated from America or Europe. We watch the same movies, listen to the same music, speak the same language.” Most other South African indies are the same. “South African game development is something like 92 percent white male or something along those lines,” adds studio director Evan Greenwood.

In a 2024 Gamesindustry.biz interview, Nyamakop CEO Ben Myres affirmed the whiteness of the South African game development scene, and shared Nyamakop’s long-term goal of creating a more diverse generation of South African game developers:

“There are a lot of studios in South Africa [but] there are only really six major ones, and all of them are run and owned by white men. And I think that has a large knock-on effect of the inability to take that risk. I’m not going to tell their stories, but a lot of my ability to do Nyamakop is based purely on privilege and generational wealth, and the crazy safety net you have. I think the South African games industry, last time we did a survey, is like [80%] white men.”

Looking at South Africa’s 2022 census, Black Africans represented 81.4% of the population, followed by Coloureds at 8.2%, white people at 7.3%, and Indian/Asian people at 2.7%. The games industry in the country is in a sharp contrast with this reality.

Nyamakop is trying to bring some balance, with Myres estimating that around 80% of the studio is people of colour.

“Our leadership team is very diverse at least,” he says. “If you aren’t able to take the risk to start your own studio, how are we ever going to make the industry more diverse? And the only way you do that is by allowing stable employment for diverse folks to get into the industry. Because really, in the long term, where we need to be is PoC-owned-and-run studios. But if there’s no way for you to enter the industry stably and get good at making games, we can’t just jump there automatically.

“[When] a person of colour leaves Nyamakop to stay in the industry, that makes me happy. We haven’t really had anyone leave and not stay in the industry. It’s very sad to see them go, obviously, but the fact that they leave to stay in the industry means Nyamakop can become a place that’s stable, safe, and fun [for South African people of colour to enter the industry].”

Relooted is the largest single project by team scope, size and budget in Sub-Saharan Africa to date, perhaps only rivaled by Kiro’o Games’ ambitious 2016 RPG Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan. The African games industry is growing, and Relooted will likely be remembered as a milestone in future histories of the growth of African game development. The in-game heist team returns cultural heritage of the past to Africa, but the Nyamakop team is creating new African cultural heritage for the people of 2099 to remember. Perhaps more importantly than the status of Relooted as an individual artifact, it serves as the first project for a new generation of game developers who will go on to make something even better.

The post Relooted Review — Reclaiming the Future appeared first on Gamesline.

Sometimes you want to play something short and sweet; sometimes, you just want to shoot a high-powered, double-barrel shotgun. Sweet relief washed over me as I received the notification I had been hoping for: The Steam Summer Sale.

I acquired a few things and, unfortunately for my future self, that also included yet more games too long for my own good(it’s probably fine, she and I haven’t been on speaking terms lately), but for the most part, I did what I set out to do. I purchased a mercifully short game which had caught my eye: Captain Wayne – Vacation Desperation.

Yet again, I found myself drawn into a GZDoom-powered first person shooter.

My first impression was positive. Compared to the literal mountain of demon-killing Doomlikes, it instead goes for an aesthetic which I can only describe as early 2000’s flash animation pirates. Typically, the aesthetic of the humble buccaneer is not something I enjoy; forgive me, I’ve never been much of a pirate person. Having said that, there is an immense amount of charm in the art style. I’ve seen quite a few GZDoom games utilizing the painterly, latex-model-like sprites of classic Doom, so it’s refreshing to see something so cartoony. The enemy sprites, for instance, provide a great amount of visual interest while also being readable and contrast well with the polygonal environments. 

Presentation is one of Captain Wayne’s strongest points, between its eclectic, overdriven music, art direction, and general bawdy tone. You’re not picking up health kits; you’re munching on fish guts and doing shots of rye whiskey. Electric guitars blare as the good Captain blasts a double barrel into—in his own words—a “dumb motherfucker.”

Captain Wayne isn’t exactly trying for something perfectly refined and, for me, such a thing oozes personality and intention. Cutscenes often have an intentionally rough look with limited animation, voice actors often have varying qualities to their microphones, their acting is delightfully strange in a way only something trying to be so intentionally goofy can be. You got me the moment you introduced a detective doing literally every single detective stereotype at once.

Much like a cartoon, the comedy centers around a lot of intentional farce, silly characters, and visual gags. One standout example is pushing a switch which, most of the time, opens a door; instead, it explodes, pushing you backward and leaving a perfectly Captain Wayne shaped hole in the wall. Wonderful, very silly.

On the gameplay front, this is a standard Doom-like. In a world where Hedon and Selaco exist, this may sound like an insult, but Doom is still Doom; we all know that Doom is good. You hunt for keys, you clear rooms, what is here is still good even if it doesn’t break new ground doing it.

Even the weapon selection is standard in this respect, albeit tied to Captain Wayne’s mechanical arm. Instead of holding a shotgun, your arm is a shotgun, minigun, lighter, plasma gun, immersion blender, etc. Even if it’s only on a technicality, we can throw him in the limited pantheon of left-handed shooters. The weapons are all satisfying to use, with handy alt-fires, but you’ve seen this loadout before in many games.

What makes your kit shine is the level design. Every stage is an interesting pirate-themed romp which avoids many of the more tired genre trappings, or at least freshens them up enough that you won’t be bothered. Sure, there are ancient ruins, but it’s also doing a fun non-Euclidean infinite stair trick with Eldritch nightmare monsters. Unique terrain, varying levels of elevation, cover, set pieces; it’s all very wonderful. It’s also worth noting the game’s smooth sense of pacing and guidance. I never got lost, and always had a clear idea of where I should be moving. It’s easy to forget design intent is a cultivated skill and the devs had a deft hand at making it seem effortless.

Enemies are also a big standout. I have seen games with four times this length with half as many enemies. You have your standard grunts, Mike Tyson-esque boxers, seagulls with grenades strapped to them, shoggoths, sentient oil barrels, and more. Each one mixes up the engagements and multiplies complexity. This cast, within the game’s eight levels and nine wave-based horde maps, are a recipe for a diverse set of experiences

The only thing I have to give a non-committal shrug to is the story. Captain Wayne himself is an archetypal shooter protagonist of the early 90s; someone stole his things, he would rather them not do that, there are several homicides about it, The End. I can’t stress enough though that this is hardly worth mentioning. In a genre where many games barely even articulate this much, it’s not bad. It’s the barest conceit to have an action game happen. That’s fine! More than fine even, I’m glad the story is completely out of my way for the most part.

Captain Wayne is the vacation I needed in a sea of lengthy games. I know that’s a bit like complaining that my meal is too rich and decadent, but I’m a simple woman. The gameplay is not breaking new ground but more than anything, I cannot stress enough the level of craft on display. I have to give a hat tip to any game willing to give multiple reload animations to a double barrel depending on how many shells are in it. Captain Wayne’s own hat is visible on screen at all moments of gameplay! That’s hilarious! I can easily love something where the creators clearly had as good a time making it as I had playing it.

Admittedly, it is on the easy side for a boomer shooter—ignoring the fact I’m a freak doing nothing but playing Ultrakill’s Cybergrind all day. However, I do think Captain Wayne is great for people who want an introduction into the genre with a fun presentation. Here is a game, lovingly crafted, brief, and will give you every tool you need to succeed. An easy recommendation.

Now, I fall back into an abyss of RPGs and games meant to break my spirit and hurt my heart.

The post Fistful of Fishblood — Captain Wayne – Vacation Desperation Review appeared first on Gamesline.

Fuck’s Quest II is a game where you play as Fuck. He is the character you play as. He has decided to break the curse put on the land, and to do so he must gather two Bible Crystals and defeat a variety of ugly monsters. Everything about this game is irony poisoned; the characters are MS Paint-esque abominations, and their dialogue is comprised mostly of swears and insults. Hiding under this layer of complete stupidity is a solidly designed game, calling to mind 2D Zelda with sword and bomb-based combat and a few dungeons to explore, each unlocking new abilities for Fuck to use. 

Unfortunately, a lot of why I liked this game is the jokes, and just listing a bunch of jokes in a review is lame and helps nobody. I will still tell you a few to try to convince you. You can get a free health refill in dungeons by pissing “forever” into a huge hole in the ground, or on a guy you hate’s gravestone later in the game. “Sex Food” makes you move faster for 20 seconds, which is apparently analogous to how long Fuck lasts in bed. The hub town is called “Cleanville”, which I keep thinking about every few hours, and I laugh every time. 

To me, the humor lies in how batshit the world is in its consistency. Everyone is unflinchingly cruel in language to each other, but they will also help and be helped at the drop of a hat. Fuck will tell someone to go die in a hole and then immediately take on a lifethreatening quest to find an item for them. The absurdity is key, but so is the weird sense of heroism throughout. There’s no reason for Fuck to be doing any of this, he sucks ass and girls don’t like him. But he does it because everyone else sucks ass and that’s just how it is. As someone who often tells people I would die for at a moment’s notice to shut the fuck up (jokingly!!!) at least once a day, you can see why I gel with this.

I initially wanted to say “if you can look past these things, there’s a well put-together game here”, but no. You need to think this brainrot is hilarious or don’t bother. I can only recommend this to people who love YouTube Poop and similar things. This is a consistently rewarding game for people who know what a Dinner Blaster is. I’m kinda surprised it’s not in this game, to be frank. There are so many little nooks and crannies to dig into, item interactions to discover, and dumb jokes to set up by slamming your stupid abilities together; it’s very impressive that something so dumb is also so smart. 

There’s a variety of puzzle and skill based challenges in the world, and I enjoy how ridiculous some of the answers can be. One event involves the creator of the game, covered in bed sores, asking you to help fix a bug as the environment around him disintegrates. You have to chase an actual physical bug using Sex Food to speed up, and once you do it clears up the horrible pixelation layered over the room the dev is in. He then gives you a boat-pothole removing tool, which lets you help a rich guy get his boat out of a pothole, which you then jump into while screaming. It’s a bit difficult to do a few of the quests, but none of them feel impossible, unless the joke is that you’re not supposed to be doing this or you just have to come back with a new item.

These side quests and extra items you can get are completely optional. It’s possible to mainline the game and blow through it fairly quickly, but once you scratch the surface and use different items in different places, the world expands exponentially. I would say this is a “you get what you put into it” kind of game, where you’ll be rewarded with new jokes and abilities by sticking your head somewhere you passed by before. Sometimes you end up getting a health upgrade and nothing else, sure, but other times you’ll stumble into a “lockpicking” minigame that is an impossible Snake-like that constantly shows you how much time you’ve wasted on attempting it. I did not finish it in my playthrough. You may call me weak if necessary.

Another thing to highlight for folks without irony poisoning is the soundtrack. There’s a wide swath of songs that hit many random genres, but they’re all solid. I’ve had a lot of the music stuck in my head, which is especially funny since it results in Fuck’s stupid walk sprite gesticulating around in my mind’s eye. The “voice acting” also rules, in that each time you talk to anyone they say an insane voice line such as “My farts, my rules! Deal with it!” which yes, I have added that to the “stim archive”. 

Fuck’s Quest II is a very stupid game made by someone with solid game design chops. If you want to play a 2D Zelda game where you call everyone an asshole and have a fart propulsion ability, this is that. It’s very much worth checking out for many reasons, but for people with broken senses of humor like me, it’s almost essential.

The post He Can Fart To Fly Around, Too – Fuck’s Quest II Review appeared first on Gamesline.

There hasn’t been much innovation in the format of these tactile interactions in quite some time. The Wii came out twenty years ago and what innovations have been made in the realm of VR haven’t quite filled living rooms in the same way the white monolith did. The Steam Controller managed to attract my attention because, regardless of how small, it has attempted to recapture a feeling of innovation.

I am pretty particular about controllers and interfaces at the end of the day. I love a well-lubricated machine honed down into something hyperspecific and intended for one use. I’m a freak who predominantly writes with fountain pens, types on mechanical keyboards, and uses a DAP—a digital audio player—to contain my music. I love a mechanical switch.

This comes, without going into too much detail, from a chronic condition which heavily limits the amount of sensation coming from my hands and arms. Touch screens and non-tactile inputs are my enemy. So, yes, me ruining your Discord call with mechanical clicking noises is due to a very sensitive medical condition. This, in addition to my chronic baby hands disease, means I care a lot about the ergonomics of my interfacing technology.

Such interfacing has been structurally homogenized over the years as games have less and less incentive to be truly exclusive to one platform. Nintendo, Sony, and the other one have found a shape that works and stuck with it; you don’t truly get a ball controller to play Half-Life 2 and Portal with that vibrates and throws all your shit off your desk anymore.

So, this new contender, back again from Valve’s prior experiment in 2015, is having another hack at it. How’d they do?

Others Have Prevented me from Calling It the Puck

Just about everything with the Steam controller at first blush was pleasant, down to opening its minimalistic packaging. A single cardboard box contained within another cardboard box and a pull tab was all that kept me from my new plastic son. Its contents: a cable, a manual, and the charger/dongle (my partner requires me to type chongle at least once in this review, you are welcome, it is now your turn to make dinner.)

Holding it in my hands, I could appreciate the subtle intricacies of its curves, weight, and shape. A single twirl of both of its joysticks told me all I needed to know: this controller feels pretty good. It lacked its predecessor’s airy weightlessness and disconcertion that it could be twisted in half by a sufficiently determined newborn. This impression held water after the immediate four hour breaking-in period, subsequent, equal length breaking-in periods, and a Twitch stream; anything to procrastinate from actually writing about it.

After a brief updating period for both the controller and the chongle (two dinners, keep up), I finally got to the software side of things. The sheer number of windows, menus, submenus, could kill the elderly; but I think this is a good thing. In the case of electronics with so much modularity, having the ability to actually get in deep and play with everything really makes the controller what it is—a tool to create a futzer’s paradise.

Playing through Blood, a classic boomer shooter, was eye opening. Seeing the detail with which the community offered control solutions for a game never intended to handle this way was amazing. Input layers for maps, rotating sub menus designed to sort through the myriad weapon choices of a classic FPS, and quick-save and quick-load were all bound with enough intuitiveness to easily grasp in less than a level or two.

With so many optional buttons—some not even apparent if you count the grip sensor as an input—you can make a controller the weight of a plush toy into a helicopter cockpit. It isn’t technically praise owed to the Steam controller in particular, as you can utilize the various bits of customizability inherent to Steam itself on any controller, but the way it integrates and interacts with such modability immediately makes you feel like you can tailor the play experience to whatever you want.

The tiny innovation the controller has, in the form of the twin touchpads, makes for an immediate interest point. The haptic purr of the pads feels pleasant and, once the sensitivity is properly dialed, shockingly accurate. From a person who could pen several strongly worded letters to the creator of the laptop trackpad, I am just as shocked to be saying it. Both on stream and on my own, navigating around games typically associated with mouse and keyboard control never stopped feeling strangely novel. I am probably never going to be a professional 4X or RTS player on them, but it made the games feel immediately more comfortable and approachable.

Ultimately, the ergonomics of simply holding the controller are pleasant. My particular issues aside, I didn’t ever feel fatigued or like the controller was anything other than lovely to use. A small detail I felt pleasantly about was the detailed haptic vibrations; once tuned correctly, I could feel them appropriately, something I often feel left out on with games, as silly as it sounds. The amount of times I’ve put down a controller during an important scene, only to scare the absolute piss out of myself upon realizing it was vibrating the whole time, is too many to name. It’s a minute detail for most, but it’s nice to be included.

Overall the controller is great, and offers new ways to engage with games I previously thought I had “solved.”

Where I feel the problems start are things entirely independent of the controller. Namely, Steam itself. Without the connection to Steam, the controller is basically useless. Steam Support suggests adding any non-Steam game to Steam as a means to ameliorate this problem.

Now, it may seem petty, stupid, insipid, etc, to mention that a controller called the Steam controller requires Steam to function, but the fact that it is practically a brick while not working through their frontend sticks in my craw. The PC game space is cross-pollinated by many game front ends and avenues for playing games. The limitation of these means, even if rectified with a minute of effort, feels wrong. I’m sure if the controller has any actual staying power, someone, someday, will mod in general use; for now however, it makes me uncomfortable.

My biggest problem with the Steam controller admittedly comes from a personal place—the actual price. At $100, it is far from the most inexpensive controller on the market. $100, to me, is a large amount of money; that’s nearly 50 asset-flip hentai games! That’s too many hentai games for anyone to own.

Economics, Plastic Baubles, and Joy

Once again, I risk being a little foolish, standing on a soap box to say something that has bothered me since acquiring this lump of plastic and circuitry. When the Steam controller’s price was made public, my immediate gut reaction was that it was simply too much to spend on something like this, on me. There are so many other things $100 could go to. My personal guilt complexes about receiving any amount of money aside, there are reasons I bring this up.

I generally avoid talking about pricing or any kind of economic value in my reviews. I don’t like games being reduced from the art I see them as to something I need to justify; the same way I need to justify a fourth gas station energy drink run in a single week. A controller is not necessarily immune, despite the different kind of art that goes into crafting it. I am sometimes struck with awe: any given object on my desk is the product of thousands of people’s efforts to deliver me a piece of plastic that I am annoyed by owning.

I am not a particularly insightful voice here. I cannot tell you why the Steam controller is $100. I am not a R&D specialist, logistics specialist, or even single-celled businessmen determining what the ideal bottom line for a product is. What amounts to a “fair” amount of compensation for such a product is not something I feel comfortable stating. I do not know how many sleepless nights and arguments went into making this controller.

I don’t imagine that pricing is congruent with quality, in truth. Many many material factors construct a reality where basically everyone I know has experienced some kind of stick drift or catastrophic failure of an integral piece of technology; I can only tell you that they happen, and no price point has ever seemed to stop it from happening.

I can spend $20, $100, $300 on a desk chair and I will still find myself collapsed on the ground wondering why my chair decided the middle of Marathon’s Cryo Archive was a good time to explode into Ikea shrapnel(småbitar, if you prefer). The price of what constitutes a good, well-made product always seems to be approaching a vanishing horizon.

“Oh, $300 isn’t what a desk chair costs; at minimum you need to spend around $1500, get like a Herman Miller or something.” It seems like hyperbole, but it’s a repeated sentiment with a changing price point and a changing noun depending on the particular hobby or need; yet it always seems to be far more expensive than one would prefer to pay. Ultimately, it is a willingness to pay the price point which determines what the price point shall be. I am one of the rubes who will.

But then, here I am, too, on the opposite side of the spectrum. My old controller, the GameSir Tegenaria Lite, casts gloomy stares upon my new acquisition. It is grey, sturdy, and cost me $12. It has comfortable sticks, chunky triggers, and reminds me of my beloved Playstation 1. I plug it into my computer, and it controls games. I love it.

For the low price of $12, you can have 80 percent of the Steam controller’s features. If you are so inclined, you can do the exact same amount of fiddling and futzing in Steam’s menus and create an elaborate chain of controller commands, making a twelve to fifteen button controller the equivalent to a Steel Battalion command console.

The adage “you get what you pay for” feels less true in matters such as this. I have had $600 pieces of tech explode upon coming free of their packaging; a $5 nameless knock-off bauble has lasted me nearly a decade. I am unsure if a $100 controller is worth it, no matter how nice, attractive, and scream-filled it is.

The key thrust of my argument here is not that the Steam controller is somehow a moral problem, an economic problem, or even a problem most people should even care about; my consideration is personal. How much controller do you actually need? Is any new gadgetry enough to fill a hole of materialistic deficiency? Did I get exactly $100 worth of joy out of this new piece of plastic obscuring yet more surface area on my desk? I think your answers will determine if the controller is right for you.

So, in the attempt to reassert this is a review and not yet another anti-capitalistic spiel: is the Steam controller worth your money? It depends on your needs and use cases, as many things are!

Will it change the face of gaming as we know it and take us to a new golden age of controller interfaces yet unheard? Probably not, but that gyro is pretty neat.

Should I buy it from a scalper for $200 not including shipping and handling? You should absolutely never do this, for this controller or any item.

Should I buy approximately 50 hentai games on Steam? Sister, you are the master of your own destiny.

The post Holding Hands with Plastic — Steam Controller Review appeared first on Gamesline.

Out of the many FPS released in the past decade, Cruelty Squad is the game which had the most impact on me. It’s made me ponder my own writing, my relationship with the genre, and my personal relationship with aesthetics and what they say about the art you make. It is also just a rollicking good time. Naturally, this is high praise coming from someone such as myself who spends a lot of time being drafted into first person shooter engagements at the behest of numerous people. I could wax poetic but, in this instance, I think I will simply show you.

This is what an early run of Cruelty Squad—a 2021 first-person shooter and organ commerce simulator made by Consumer Softproducts—might look like.

And here is what a late game playthrough of the same level looks like.

Understandably, your first reaction to those two clips will likely be “what the fuck?”, but I assure you I will endeavor to unravel the tangled ball of nonsense I just plopped in front of you. Cruelty Squad is one of my favorite games, dominating my thoughts and resonating with my own anxieties and pessimism surrounding the world I occupy.

I will abstain from indulging in my first instinct, which would be to prattle on about the natural beauty and rhythm of the gameplay mechanics. Instead, I will engage with what an immediate first impression would be, and the reactionary negative response therein. So, in my urge to give the best possible impression of this game which has captured my heart, I have an obligation to disabuse some notions.

Let’s talk about why Cruelty Squad looks like that.

Visions of a Puke-Choked World

Immediate responses to Cruelty Squad’s aesthetic sensibility can be described as “divisive.” The presentation of Cruelty Squad, from its menus to the first combats, feels like an audio-visual attack. Many responses to the game ultimately culminate in saying the game is good despite what it looks like, or reveling in its appearance as a sort of in-joke—a game which refuses those not capable of seeing past its surface level. I don’t particularly identify with either of these ideologies. The aesthetics are not aiming for a refined peer-reviewed art style or sound. It can be summed up in a single word: ugly. Yet, this is not the condemnation it sounds like; intention is the difference.

My enjoyment of the putridity of the presentation of Cruelty Squad feels like the manifestation of a contention within myself. I enjoy dark, frightening, abrasive things. Often, this results in interrogation from other people.

“What is there to be gained from enjoying something like this?”

“Why do you do this to yourself?”

Then, from there, it becomes assertions.

“You are lying if you say you enjoy something like this.”

“You only enjoy this for attention; it isn’t possible to enjoy something like this.”

All comes to a spoken or unspoken conclusion.

“There is something wrong with you for liking art like this.”

People who appreciate such art often spend many dozens of words publicly performing self-awareness; a ritual of showing they too are aware of the grisly, unsettling, or unsightly nature of the media they partake of. Perhaps it isn’t immediately inaccurate: as someone who dumps all her music into one gigantic “liked songs” granfalloon, shuffling from rebarbative death metal to insensate baby music for evil gay people, there are probably more than a few things wrong with me.

Despite saying that, I refuse to deliver an insult upon an art style I genuinely find compelling just to have the appearance of being “in on the joke.” Yes, admittedly, there is an enjoyable teenage-boy-showing-a-classmate-a-particularly-gross-bug factor to repulsing others with art you enjoy. Just so often though, it is isolating. Around the third time someone asked me if my mental state was okay upon streaming this game publicly, I stopped being amused and started thinking those people were incurious at best, and fucking dumb at worst.

No matter how many times I’ve written and rewritten this passage, some level of acrimoniousness creeps into my words. The college professor who lives in my mind is presently shaking their head and reminding me that insults to the audience are generally not convincing; and they’re right, I know that. I have no obligation to defend this game from other people because of the strength of my own convictions—yet I seem to over and over. Even within the words of this supposed “review” I find myself treading the same path I walked in my review of Beyond Citadel and even my more personal works. But such defensiveness feels necessary, months have passed and I still see thumbnails, articles, reviews, all asserting derangement from the art I love. Once more I feel compelled to articulate what seems obvious to me: an inability to understand art does not make it incorrect, “psychotic,” or the spontaneous generation of an intoxicated artist.

Then, I won’t pretend and I will simply say, now many paragraphs in, Cruelty Squad’s aesthetic is both hideous and flawless. Art has no obligation to show you only beautiful things, and the world of Cruelty Squad with its unchecked capitalistic transactions and violence is far from beautiful. Contending with a stock market which runs on human organs as easily as it runs on business acquisitions would not work if the world looked like Cyberpunk 2077. Cruelty Squad’s world is adorned in noisome beiges, nightmare gradients wielding the word PUNISHMENT like a sword; the mall of Cruelty Squad is just as likely to have a zombie-infested meat crypt as a Gamestop containing no games and only selling funkopops.

The music is just as dissonant and frictive as the visuals yet enjoyable enough that I’ve carried it out of the game, much to the chagrin of anyone in proximity to me and an aux cable. The tracks are noisy, unpleasant, and immaculate, from the pulse-pounding “Combat Cocktail” to the menacing yet serene “Divinity of the Office”.

In all the aesthetic presentation of Cruelty Squad there is violence. The rejections of normalcy, of representation of life turned off kilter, is a reconstruction of what is; You are then forced to see what you took for granted from a new perspective. Contained within are sights which I cannot claim to have seen anywhere else. Novelty can be powerful—I have certainly never seen a swamp-themed casino run by a screen contorting cognitohazard—but I also think there is a loudness to the way it rejects normalcy. Some aesthetics, like that of extreme horror, are loud as to be unignorable. The aesthetics of satanic metal are loud; the aesthetics of Cruelty Squad are loud; and so too are the aesthetics of violence.

Seizing the Iron with Your Own Hands

Violence is Cruelty Squad but not in the sense one would traditionally expect of a first-person shooter. Violence pervades every system, the world building, and the architecture of the story itself. The first cutscene prior to picking a mission consists of your protagonist dispassionately watching a mass shooting outside their apartment window before being headhunted into some violence of their own—a gig economy of assassination. 

The repulsiveness of the aesthetics immediately becomes apparent within the mechanics themselves. Instead of the traditional push-button reload, a staple of the FPS for decades, you are asked to hold down the right mouse button and sharply pull the mouse backward and then back up again. This realization and the subsequent clumsiness will likely result in your first death; after which the game will politely inform you that you are a flesh automaton animated by neurotransmitters. You resurrect from the inconvenience of death at a flat rate and then go at it again.

All missions follow the same structure: you have a target—wallhackingly displayed at all times—which you must murder to progress. Most of the time, they aren’t even aggressive; you can strike up a friendly chat about their world views and then discharge a firearm into their head which sounds like it was remixed by Merzbow. 

Hitman, this is not. There is no particular reward for precision, no complaints for misapplicated bullets. Nameless victims get in your way and the only real impact on gameplay is a minor annoyance, bodies blocking bullets meant for more relevant targets. Often this results in their meaty and hyperbolic explosions into viscera, bone, and organs—a monetary windfall to be sold on the stock market.

This is what I alluded to before. Violence is Cruelty Squad in ways beyond the dispensation of firearms. The business of killing is a transaction and so too is the aftermath: to kill someone is to gain the net worth of their organs, and the rest is someone else’s concern. The stock market can be opened, traded on, and manipulated in real time. One can intentionally manipulate the market by watching the targets line up with businesses in game, then flooding the stocks once they react to your murders. One mission, requiring you to kill a political figure, causes the stock market to rapidly inflate with no upper bound. Leaving the game on while this occurs nets you an essentially infinite amount of money and renders the game’s monetary progression meaningless. Wealthy players can purchase everything they want, acquire all resources, and then never need to think of money as anything other than a high score.  

This is both exploit and commentary. The paltry death-inflicted sums of $500 mean nothing when you can generate infinite wealth from someone’s spinal cord. The only real punishment from death is in the form of irritation from your handler; they turn you into some kind of flesh-eating slime beast which lowers your difficulty setting. The cheapness of resurrection, and of life, is also the canonical explanation for mission replayability: the wealthy resurrect and your duty is to cause them to suffer the repeatable inconvenience of death.

Much like the real world, the rich live sheltered lives; they build themselves in cocoons of lavish, unimaginable wealth, sheltered away from the suffering of lesser people. Death, too, is rendered meaningless in the infinite avarice of the high wealth individual.

Meat Grinder God

The story of Cruelty Squad is completely unobtrusive if you allow it to be. On a mission-to-mission basis, you are given a context-establishing text crawl. The missions themselves often provide context-building dialogue either from targets or random NPCs wandering around the location. Generally however, the plot, the reason for your actions, is intentionally obscured and distorted, whether it be through multiple layers of intentional deception or just the way people talk in this universe.

This is not an obstruction to the actual gameplay in any way. You can plunge deep into the gore of Cruelty Squad and not once pay a single thought to the why of it all. With the previously established target-seeking wallhacks you have, a person uninvested can ultimately play through the entire game gathering nothing but the essentials and still see an ending. You can speedrun death until it is as transactional as the stock market ticking away in the background. 

Cruelty Squad is a game where its mechanics tell the story. The mechanics tell you of a world where someone can endlessly resurrect, have a menagerie of firearms and organ-replacing biomods, and murder people in a way which only meaningfully affects stock prices; this is storytelling of a variety where nobody needs to explain how the world works. What lore messages there are tell you of weapons meant to cope with this reality, firearms which scramble DNA to make resurrection harder or other technologies. You live in this world and shoulder the discomfort as a person not made for it; when you see a cruise ship powered by engines made of flesh or a rich neighborhood configured in the shape of a pentagram, it is the player who must understand, not the character.  

That isn’t to say there isn’t a story to dissect. The endings in particular have intrigued me since I 100%’d the game for the first time. There are three; each ending is a response to the world at large. The first one is the most immediately obvious: you simply take the easiest path, free, liberated from context and just following orders. Walk ever forward on the leash your handler tugs, pull your triggers, and then go home. Second, is the hateful path: climb this pile of undying bodies, stand atop it, and feel pride in yourself for being one of the few who makes it. There are thousands beneath you, but this is beyond your concern: you won the game, the economy is yours. Last, you can take the hard path, doing what nobody else can. Where many others roll down this endless hill, you stand up and end it. You break the system nobody thought was breakable. Like a god, you make a new world and everyone else is forced to live in it; through divine idiocy, you bend the world to your individualistic whims.

Thank goodness; finally, after all this time, the first nonpolitical video game.

This is a breathtakingly stupid video game if allowed to be. It is exactly the blind violence aging parents of numerous generations have declared video games to be. Violence for entertainment, pointless and therefore—to many—harmless. This is a viciously cynical video game if allowed to be. A nihilistic story where the world is without death, endlessly wasting its time on banal amusements to no end. A story where nothing matters; make the number go up because skinner boxes have replaced actual value and the stock market ticker is the only thing still moving. In the world of Cruelty Squad, Death, like a transaction, is value. A deathless world is one where life becomes meaningless, an expectation, forever for the sake of forever. Thus, I can find hope in a bleak message. To restore death is to give life weight and have the finite life mean something.  

Gutter Cruiser

I have been critical of the genre of cyberpunk for a long time. Once something with teeth, a prophetic critique of the terror of untamed capital, now just empty aesthetic. Neon tubes, rain on city streets, the distant sounds of firearms popping, and corporations which rule everything. This is no longer fantasy, or even a prediction of the future—it is just reality.

I was shocked by Cruelty Squad’s ascendance of the Cyberpunk aesthetic. It made a world I would absolutely on no level want to live in, yet I must acknowledge its similarities to our own. It eschews paths which would have made for an easier story to tell, an easier pill to swallow. The mechanics are intentionally rough, the story opaque. Its aesthetics are abrasive and avoid the comprehensibility of much more “put-together” games.

I initially played Cruelty Squad at a time when the capitalistic pressures of the world were utterly suffocating me. Healthcare and its bureaucracy were grinding me to nothing while I watched people with more net worth than I can ever dream of pay to avoid the lethality of the world. The bodies piled in the streets, and I found this game, harshly cynical and putridly honest; it resonated. When I first saw the trailer, with its aggressive grinding music and despair-inducing messages, I felt something. It was not positive, nor negative, just a fragment of my soul echoing. Just then, the trailer gave a message, like it was just for me.

“Does this even make you feel something?”

I can answer now, in full honesty, that it does.

I felt the crushing despair of capitalistic grinding teeth. I felt the hollow joys of a power fantasy: perhaps if there are a thousand evil people with guns, one good person with a gun could solve some problems; the same delusion which has ruled American media for centuries. I felt a quaking shadow of a future where one can choose to accept falling down the mountainside, letting the machinations of others define your life trajectory. And I have felt Cruelty Squad.  

The post An Incision Tracing the Stock Market Curve — Cruelty Squad Review 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.

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 the game, Scott’s bandmates are taken by an unknown entity aided by the mysterious Metal Scott. In order to save his friends, Scott teams up with his girlfriend Ramona Flowers, former Evil Exes Matthew Patel, Lucas Lee, Roxie Richter, and the robot that the Katayanagi Twins made. Each character has the same basic abilities when it comes to movement, strong and light attacks, and ability to throw opponents. They also have their own special abilities and additional tech moves activated by pressing up or down with Triangle (we’re a Dualsense household, sue me). These moves add variety between additional precise strikes or moves that give you room as enemies start to pile on. A variety of side characters shine as support moves you can trigger with L1; from Wallace Wells giving you an attack buff, to Young Neil causing a screenwide attack to clear mobs. As the enemies get tougher, you’ll also need to stock up on health items along with accessories to juice your stats, like health and attack power, to survive the ruthless streets of Canada.

The world of Toronto is lovingly filled to bursting with retro gaming flair, but EX‘s map is one contiguous section which lines up closer to River CIty Ransom than 2010’s homage to Super Mario World. “More” is the central ethos when it comes to how Tribute wanted to design this iteration of The Global Second City. Rather than go through one level at a time, Downtown Toronto is splayed out for the player to freely roam about with mysterious portals ripped open which act as the more involved levels you’ll be fighting through. This gives some more freedom in theming as well, which isn’t bad but it’s notable that the first level in the 2010 game was set in the depths of Northern Winter before you get to the gig, while here we walk through a portal to get to an ice level with a dinosaur version of Todd and Cavewoman Roxie as the bosses. Still fun, still creative, but also a key distinction between Ubisoft Montreal’s attempts to condense a book series that sprawls one year into one game, and EX being much lower stakes as if it were just happening through the weekend. If there’s any conversation around what reclamation of the term “cozy” would be, I don’t wanna be in that convo, but I’d at least bring up Scott Pilgrim EX as a step up with how it blends being hard while being super easy to pick up. 

After Metal Scott steals your friends, you go through a variety of quests in order to save the day. A lot of the game is getting from point A to point B and fighting bosses. Again, it’s aggressively simple of a concept as are most of the beat ‘em ups that precede it. Then again, that’s still part of what makes this game so fun! By the end of my playthrough I managed to clock in 6 hours total, and that’s something I won’t mind going through with friends for the next time or trying out New Game Plus mode. Friends are able to hop in and out as well with the introduction of online co-op right from the jump, something that the 2010 game had to wait much later to include. You can even hop onto other people’s sessions freely in a quick button press! It’s never been easier to bust up vegans and robots with some friends than now.

The key feature of the 2010 tie-in game alongside its art was its soundtrack from Anamanaguchi, and they’ve once again come through to soundtrack Scott Pilgrim EX. The chiptune crew from Brooklyn recently put out an album this past year as an evolution from the capital G Gamer tone their music has had, and this soundtrack feels aligned with that perspective. The main overworld theme you’ll be hearing for a chunk of the game feels like a marriage between the original’s title theme and its first level track “Another Winter,” probably the best move for the song that plays most often through the game. Places that are home to shops or storefronts are much more laid back in tone and then songs ramp up once it’s time to kick ass. There’s also moments where the timbre of the game shifts to suit the more fast and loose style of this game; a boss taking place in an old music hall leaning happily into a big band sound for example. When it comes to something as niche as a video game soundtrack intending to evoke a pre-Y2K soundfont, it’s great to hear Anamanaguchi continue to approach the task with a lot of ingenuity and fun.

As someone who has read the books, watched the movie, reread the books in the color hardcover editions, and watched the anime, this is the perfect amount of more Scott Pilgrim I’d want. It’s also important to go outside and drink a beer (personally) and hang out with friends, as the series has been able to highlight time and time again. Like, I’m almost 30 man; any sort of connection I would have to this bastard kid has long since eroded, but it’s been fun getting to squeeze a quest or two in for a day and then go take care of the rest of my night. At a point where I’m having to schedule my gaming sessions because of how busy life is, Scott Pilgrim EX is one of the few games that recognizes I’m no longer young, unemployed, alone, or a combination of the three and respects the fact I have shit to do. I would love for more games to treat me with this respect, and thankfully there’s some who still do! Also Hazel and Katie from Seconds are here so this is basically the best game on the market. 

The post New Age Retro – Scott Pilgrim EX (PC) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

It seems I’m not the only one who had this experience. I imagine in the months since that demo released some amending needed doing, as there is now a giant “this game is more than just cozy” warning on the Steam page.

To discuss the game properly, talking about the things I found most captivating about it, I am going to delve into extensive spoilers. If that bothers you, I will say in no uncertain terms that this is an excellent story. Even at full price ($12.99 USD in my region), I would highly recommend it.

For everyone else, let’s dig a little deeper into why this game surprised, delighted, hurt, and enthralled me.

Kemono Teatime is a 2025 visual novel by Studio Lalala and, at first glance, absolutely a game I would write off: a vaguely VA-11 Hall-A-type game with the grittier edges of cyberpunk worn off. The game markets itself similarly to many of the dullest cozy games, breaking itself down into three points: Catgirls, Cafes, and ASMR.

“Come now and live your bestest and cutest life,” says the store page, posted sweetly under the game’s two protagonists embracing. Technically speaking, it isn’t a lie.

A Beautiful Lie Served with Tea Biscuits

What first attracted me to Kemono Teatime admittedly was the presentation. Its lush, beautiful, and, yes, cozy spritework captivated me where I would have passed on other, similar, but less attractive games. The beautifully realized characters bounce about the screen in both character art and sprite work, bringing life to the game’s singular location.

While graphics are something like the curb appeal of a game, to me, they are largely secondary to how the game actually feels to experience. I can play games that look like Cruelty Squad; I can play games that look like Caves of Qud. Heck, I indulge in TTRPGs, a type of game with no graphics to speak of—how barbaric!

Yet I can’t pretend that the graphics aren’t a part of what drew me in, especially with their promise of a happy, minimal friction time.

“Everything is fine; everything is safe. Come and have a cup of tea with us.”

I believed that surface level lie, and rather cynically, I believed there would be nothing here worth reporting on. But I think that subversion was the beauty of it. I wouldn’t say Kemono Teatime is entirely subversive—it doesn’t become an RTS halfway through or anything—but it’s been a bit of a trend lately: the mundane work game. You go to a job which like any job has difficulties, trials, and tribulations, but this one has had all its roughness polished away. Stock the grocery store; run the card shop; man the bar; drive the sixteen-wheeler. Working a job that doesn’t have the obligation to feed you is inherently more relaxing than reality.

Similarly to other cozy games, Teatime’s cozyness comes from its removal of these abrasive traits and the habituation to routine. Every morning, main characters Tarte and Macaron commit to the same idealistic maxim: “let’s face every day with a smile!” You pick what dessert you will serve your clientele, who have equally cute, sweets-based names, and offer them tea best suited to their specific needs and problems. Nothing particularly unusual thus far.

The sound design, music, and ASMR further foster this relaxed tone. Each time you make a cup of tea, Tarte whispers spine-tingling ASMR-isms at you before placing yet another beautiful spread of pixel art drinks and sweets in front of you. Snail’s House’s bubbly, bouncing soundtrack carries a similarly optimistic bent.

Each day avails you with interactions with a repeat cast of unique characters, each with their unique roles in the picturesque, idyllic commune of La Bête. The sisters who run the farm, the serious yet romantic journalist, the princess-like woman yearning for her lost love; each one needs the help of the protagonists’ compassionate ear and ailment-curing tea. The cast is diverse and interesting, yet their problem is singular.

Soon, too soon, every single one of them will be dead.

Two Sugars Worth of Self Deception

The reveal of impending death is not actually that much of a spoiler. You know this secret almost immediately. Nearly everyone in Kemono Teatime is a kemomimi—that is to say, basically everyone in the game has cat ears or something equivalent. Rather than taking this concept as simple stylization, it’s the central problem around which the game orbits. A virus has spread the world, and everyone infected grows animal features; while potentially a cute conceit for an anime-adjacent story to have girls with cat ears, in this one it’s deadly serious. The strain of a body gradually evolving into another creature kills the host. There is no hope for a cure.

It sounds absurd, even for me writing it, but it unifies what I see as the dark and light halves of this story. On one side, you have this story about tending a darling tea shop, dealing with problems and enduring social faux pas; on the other, you have a cast coping, in denial, or outright self-destructing in the face of their own inevitable, premature deaths. The majority of the in-game population is already dead, and the main characters have—as a coping measure—had to adopt optimistic apathy. Stress makes the disease accelerate; why make it worse for yourself?

What starts as unsettling subtext—people talking too weightily in proper nouns no one wants to explain—becomes all too textual. A death within the very workplace that has been the game’s sanctuary for the first few hours. Once the nature of the disease is known, it’s hard not to appreciate the gambit the game is making. The story is about the contradiction between choosing to be happy and engaging with the material reality around you.

Every night, the main character, Tarte, stays up late to read the news and listen to the radio. These are mechanically useless but provide background context: who is responsible for the disease? How does the rest of the world feel? What is happening beyond the bounds of La Bête’s idyllic stasis? In its own way, it’s also a characterization of the protagonist. She chooses to make this choice every evening: she stays up to steal time, even if it’s impossible. Her sister will still be dead by the end of the month; then that will be that.

The game’s intentional toxic positivity expresses itself with regularity, yet just as often asks: “what’s the better option?” If you want to maximize your time with a dying loved one, why make things more painful? Why borrow grief from your future if you can make a more beautiful now?

The story is very much about how this ideology succeeds and fails. We see people enter the café knowing full well they’re going to be dead soon; much of how they differentiate themselves is through how they deal with their coming demise. Some seek chemical oblivion, either through alcohol or the cognition-distorting Ramune pills—used when you’re close to death and in mortal agony. Others simply deny the very nature of the world around them.

Through mundanity we see the texture of the story, of people trying to endure the unendurable. Each person is torn apart in different ways. Lovers, sisters, mentor and student; death doesn’t care what relationship it tears apart. When death comes is arbitrary, it just happens when it happens; it’s never convenient. Often the story will promise a character will be there, only to have them gone the next day.

What’s more, the character whose perspective we never leave is even more intimately broken down as the building losses rip them apart. We learn the nature of why she always smiles. Two sisters who promised one another, and themselves, that they would remain happy until the end.

The promise only ever gets more painful. As the days go by, we learn the oppressive grinding motion by which time destroys relationships and promises.  

A Laugh Indistinguishable from a Sob

Even I have my limits. By the midpoint of the story, I said, “I get it.” I was tired of feeling oppressed by the sorrow. This endlessly smiling girl was going to be dead soon; I just wanted the axe to fall already. As I continued to play I realized the intentionality behind that feeling.

Like the characters in the story, knowing death was coming but not its hour is exhausting. There is a perverse, macabre addiction to asking, “will today be the day?” The mundane days are more painful than the eventful ones because they are gone all too soon and your muscles still ache from the tension of bracing. Today was fine, but how many more of those do we have? The middle act ground against me as it slowed down. Everything, and nothing, was fine.

This is, in its own fashion, the most post-COVID game I’ve yet played. It felt a lot like being in the pandemic (sorry, we’re back in 2020 again). I was bombarded with information about how not-okay everything was and yet I was afforded a position of privilege: at least for a little while I had the ability to do a job from home and didn’t expose myself to the worst of it. Not everyone had the same luck. Every day I woke up, did an insipid, valueless, nothing job to help people who didn’t care in the slightest. It wasn’t like shirking those duties was any more fun; every timeline on earth was filled with new and novel ways to make you depressed. So, lots of people receded. You played every game in your Steam library; you learned how to make sourdough in between remote-work phone calls; you binged every video by a YouTuber you like while living and sleeping on your couch.  

The decision many people made to do something even when it was futile felt understandable. It feels understandable here.

But denial only lasts so long, for us, and our protagonist. Eventually, death finds a window even when you close the door. There is no denying it. Our protagonist’s promise to always smile crumbles. One night, she sits on the café’s front step refusing to sleep; sitting out in the winter cold was less painful than sharing space with her dying sister.

Every single step to the end of this story hurt. I’ve never lost anyone I’ve cared about losing but I know what that pain looks like, and, unfortunately, I’m very good at imagining it. In my own personal life, I’ve had to feel many things I would rather go on not feeling. I went many years without feeling anything at all and thinking it was strength. Dealing with new emotions, even positive ones, can hurt when they’re new. I asked my partner how people can stand feeling the fluctuation of emotions.

She said, “I would rather feel everything in the world than nothing at all.”

It was a simple statement, but it was profound to me. Love, for me, and these characters, is something worth feeling even when that love eventually must become pain.

To the Last Drop

The story ends as it was promised. There is no magical third act cure for Tarte’s sister, only the option to spare her pain or keep her mind clear. There isn’t a good choice in the face of something as final as death. You make your choice, then you live with it.

Kemono Teatime nails the mundanity of death and the process of dying. Friends, family, loved ones, they will all die someday; days where death comes are interspersed with many many mundane ones. Somehow, amid them, you must find time to keep living and endure the sharp pain of it. Community can help, it may make it worse, but ultimately the ability to go on living is in your hands alone. Where many cozy games fail is making a story so fundamentally anodyne that the feeling of earning peace means nothing. Certainly, it’s a respite from the average day but, at least for myself, finding peace in a world that wants nothing more than to rob you of it only makes the choice to build peace more valuable.

It’s a thoughtful and emotional story about coping with death that comes too soon. It hit me emotionally not with intentionally manipulative writing but with a human approach. It asks many questions. What do you do when death is coming and you can’t get off the train tracks?  Is happiness a feeling or a choice? Is the mundanity of things truly as safe and comforting as we believe them to be?

Ultimately, I come away with a deeper conviction for something I already believed. The pain of loss is the price for loving at all. There are no shortcuts or easy ways out beyond simply choosing to care for nothing, and that’s a choice I simply refuse to make. I love the ones I love so much; I will bear that burden even when the time comes that I must be strangled with it. It is inevitable but that’s okay. I will not borrow that grief from the future, and I will choose to love, and to care. Everyday until the end.

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