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.

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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.

The post Tea and Tears — Kemono Teatime Review appeared first on Gamesline.

Before I’m a fan of video games, first and foremost I’m a fan of music. I love listening to music, I love the chances I’ve had playing music, and I love experiencing music in levels beyond just the audio experience. One of my first concerts was now over a decade ago; I still remember seeing CHVRCHES months after my first breakup and all of us in attendance getting caught in a downpour as soon as the drop in “Clearest Blue” hit. Between my friendships, my travels, and just the way I view so much of the world now, I owe a lot of my current self to the kid who would sit at the car radio flipping through stations to find sounds that resonated, regardless of their release date or genre.

It’s also the initial love of music that led to my appreciation of TV, film, and eventually video games. Katamari Damacy is one of my favorite games partially due to its eclectic soundtrack, as are a majority of the games I look at in the ever rotating top ten list that I know exists for myself, but have never put to paper. So often for me, a game that can lack in tactile prowess can make up for it by having an effective soundtrack. Conversely, one of the things that’s kept me from going back to Street Fighter 6 for practice in this current season is the fact the core soundtrack disappointingly lacks any sort of punch that Capcom as a gaming music juggernaut is known for. Still fun to watch, but any attempts to lab it will require me adding my own soundtrack so I don’t have to hear “SURVIVALIST. HUNGRY LIKE A TIGER IS” any time I hit character select. 

Rhythm games know all too well about how much the curation of sound is vital to their existence, next to the mechanical feel of “playing” the music chosen. From ParRappa the Rapper to Guitar Hero to Chuunithm, the genre has been able to solidify the key components of success: music that’s worth listening to and a gameplay that intuits the feel of being “part” of the song.

D-Cell’s UNBEATABLE is a rhythm game where music is illegal and you do crime. In this game you play as Beat, a young woman who sings in the band UNBEATABLE alongside the preteen Quaver on guitar, the explosive Clef on drums, and her reserved twin brother Treble on keyboard. The soundtrack is a wholly original collection of rock songs along with inclusions from other artists in the music and games sphere like Jamie Paige and 2mello. The rhythm gameplay itself is pretty simple: enemies, dubbed Silence, will approach Beat on a track from the outside of the screen towards the center. These enemies move in time to the music and are either on a top or bottom lane. Hit your button when the Silence arrives at a designated circle to beat them up and hit as many as possible to get through the song! Some notes require some kind of tap, others will need you to hold the button and release on time to register. Too many missed notes will result in a game over, so feel the beat and keep on trying!

There are options to set your controls to a variety of keystrokes aligned with the various approaches to rhythm gaming through a controller or keyboard; my layout maps the top lane notes to the triggers of my DualSense and the bottom lane notes to the face buttons and d-pad, similar to what I usually use for Taiko no Tatsujin. The higher difficulty beatmaps can be physically exhausting, so it’s nice to have the immediate option to try out layouts that can make subdivided notes a little easier to manage. 

I do want to highlight the team in charge of structuring the various beatmaps for the game: Chi Xu, Cheryl, and TaroNuke show their love of the genre on their sleeves with the layouts of these songs. The only time I’ve ever heard rock in a rhythm game has been either in Guitar Hero or tap rhythm games like Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! and its Western sibling Elite Beat Agents. There’s nothing that outright differentiates the genre from being included in other rhythm games, but there’s a lot of care in place to effectively highlight the feel of each song. “Empty Diary” is one of my favorite tracks and the higher difficulties do a good job of providing challenge without being a grueling test of endurance or fast track to arthritis. There are tracks that definitely lean into that Rhythm Pervert (affectionate?) mentality of playstyle, but it’s not something expected of you in normal gameplay. 

The soundtrack has also been something that’s stuck with me for the better part of the last four years. Peak Divide, the in-studio band made up of composers Clara Maddux and Vasily Nikoleav with vocals from other members including producer Rachel Lake, have cultivated a sound that is so evocative of people getting into a garage and making music as a means of escape and expression. The song I had mentioned before, “Empty Diary,” opens with a strong guitar arpeggio followed by the tapping on a cymbal leading into the rest of the band. It’s the kind of intro I’ve heard at many a bar venue or music hall from a band I hadn’t heard until then and getting to figure out for the first time. The Pillows are an immediate inspiration gleaned from this production, as is apparent in the rest of the game and its ties to FLCL. The rest of the soundtrack continues to deliver hard hitting bangers like “Waiting” and “Sleeping In,” and the game also includes various remixes of these songs or nondiegetic tunes in the Arcade mode like the Tutorial song Proper Rhythm that uses a pretty funky groove with samples from a typing instructional video that also acts as a nod to the keyboard warriors keeping their hands on the home row. 

The audio has been a core feature of what makes UNBEATABLE so charming, but alongside that is the actual visuals which are so essential to the vibe. The game is unabashedly inspired by anime, its primary aesthetics most evocative of current Studio Trigger works to draw an immediate contemporary. Every character stands out in some way, be it Beat’s rough and tumble jumpsuit look with bright pink hair or Quaver’s distinct blue and white palette in both hair and dress. The additional characters come alive with their own visual personalities and are a blast to see sprinkled throughout the environments of the game. Environments are fully realized 3D spaces which creates a Paper Mario-esque storybook feel as you see your characters run around the space. The scenes themselves take heavy Japanese influence, at one point full on recreating a train station in Inaba, and the lighting becomes such a fun thing to notice throughout your time in the Story Mode. There can be a stillness captured in some scenes which is nice to sit in for a while. Unbeatable knows what it wants to sound like and look like, and there’s no hesitation in getting those pieces aligned when put in motion. 

SIDE B – Spoilers for the story mode to UNBEATABLE

When you boot up the game for the first time, there’s a special introduction screen where the game asks about your own familiarity with rhythm games. Do you like them, do you feel skilled at them, and then calibrate the rhythm offset for you along with the flashiness of the on screen effects. The last few words in this opening scene are “THIS IS A STORY ABOUT LOSING YOUR WAY. IT’S NOT A LOVE STORY. NOT LIKE YOU’D THINK ANYWAY […] ALL STORIES ARE KIND OF LOVE STORIES. AT LEAST THE GOOD ONES ARE.” This initial introduction I felt was really well done. I can’t speak on the direct references that this game pulls on in terms of what might be in the team’s specific game bible, but since the first trailer I’ve been aware that UNBEATABLE has shades of FLCL and Scott Pilgrim in its palette. Two series that I had experienced at age twelve, a vulnerable age where the stories someone becomes really fascinated by and even passionate about take deep roots and compel that audience member to ask, “well what else?” A bit of an extrapolation, but that was about the age where I realized liking cartoons and video games wasn’t something I needed to give up at a security checkpoint before passing into adolescence. Suffice to say UNBEATABLE is a game that I felt primed to take in, enjoy, and fully engross myself in. To allow something so joyous about art and its process, warts and all, to move me to tears. That was not the experience I had with the Story Mode by its end. 

UNBEATABLE’s Story Mode starts with Eve, the vocalist for the band One More Final, taking the stage for the last time. We then cut to Beat waking up beside a tree and running up to meet Quaver, unaware of who she or anyone else is. Beat has no recollection of what she was doing and proceeds to accompany Quaver who eventually goes to the abandoned concert hall her mother played her last show at. Performing for Beat, Quaver’s guitar strums bring forth the Silence, beast-like creatures who are drawn to music and are the reason used to outlaw music in its entirety in this world. Beat proceeds to follow Quaver along as they decide to rescue Treble and Clef from prison, and the eventual breakout leads to them forming a band and starting to tour across the local area. Eventually this trips the alert of HARM, the police force cracking down on any and all cases of sound-related crime, who start upping the ante on what it will take to cut UNBEATABLE down.

I need to take a minute to talk about Tenchi Muyo! More specifically, the overall franchise of media that Tenchi Muyo! has become over time. The core frame of the narrative is about a young man named Tenchi who becomes involved in the lives of various outer space women as they bring him along for adventures and shenanigans. This summary is concise not because of a lack of depth around the series, but because the idea is extrapolated on in nearly 30 years’ worth of OVAs, TV anime, drama CDs, and movies. For the Toonami faithful, you were most likely exposed to the original 6 episode OVA also known as Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki, the 26 episode series Tenchi Universe, and other series like Tenchi in Tokyo. All of these are part of the overall franchise, but key differences that can come up mainly lie in the characterization or overall atmosphere of what you’re watching. To what degree is Ryoko Hakubi an all powerful space pirate, is Tenchi himself a hapless hero caught in between the turmoil of the women he’s helping, those kinds of things. As Youtuber Hazel highlights in her video of the series, the level to which everyone is actually related to one another becomes different depending on what you’re watching. End of the day, the series is still capturing the hearts and minds of many fans regardless of what interpretation you manage to catch.

UNBEATABLE, as a narrative, feels caught in an issue of creating multiple interpretations, but all in one package rather than these separate iterations. The demo, UNBEATABLE [white label], came out years ago as the prelude to what this game would eventually be. Many of the songs in the game had these cutscenes introducing and concluding the rhythm sections, detailing parts of Beat’s inspirations for writing. The sparsity in this case was evocative and compelling to the structure. In the main game, it’s never fully explored that Beat writes her own music. Clef in Episode Four comments on her songwriting but at no point is it really brought up prior to that. These songs we hear in the action segments and in bigger setpieces of the game aren’t really brought up as to why they’re here, which isn’t out of the ordinary in most narrative rhythm games. PaRappa never takes a second to say “LeMmE JusT jot THIS doWn” after he raps with Cheap Cheap the Cooking Chicken, nor do most musicals actually title the music in-universe since the expression of emotion through song is understood as this natural occurrence in the laws of that world.

Overall I realized that the feeling of what this story was supposed to be got superseded by other ideas butting in and clogging each other up. This story wants to be about creation, it wants to be about losing yourself, it wants to fight the power. These are things that I love that come up in so much of the art I adore! Here though, I keep finding myself asking “why” or “how come” more often than I’m able to allow myself to run with the narrative. As someone who’s also a big pro wrestling fan, that feeling of being pulled out from the illusion sucks, and that moment hit me hard by the end of Chapter 4. After Chapter 3, we meet our heroes in a larger cityscape. At this point the band has started to gain notoriety and after playing some shows, are in the process of creating an album. Penny, one of the inmates from the prison in Chapter 2 who helps the crew escape, runs into Beat and offers to help with the production of the album. For the next four days, Beat ghosts the band, gets worse in practice, and is consumed at the idea of finishing this record. Clef has a heart to heart with her in the local batting cages using this Rhythm Heaven style minigame to get her point across. 

I thought the idea was cool and I appreciate Clef as a headstrong character also knocking sense into the other headstrong character, but so much of that dialogue was tuned out because I tried to focus on the minigame. There’s parts of the game where if you fail a rhythm section, you will just get sent to the next part of the story with no option to retry the segment you just failed. It sucks! I hate the feeling that I can’t pick myself up after eating shit, something that I loved so dearly in the last game I reviewed where failure was applauded as much as succeeding! So rather than take in the narrative heft of whether the product or the process is the thing that matters most in the act of creation, I tapped circle to make sure I didn’t get a game over and skip that anyway. Then I fought some more cops, and our studio got blown up. Cut to chapter 5.

At its core, UNBEATABLE is proudly anti-authoritarian and anti-fascist. The only real interaction you have with police in this game is through fighting them, and the forces at HARM are also constantly reminded to be the villains without question. Beat, in every single interaction that she was with a member of authority, consistently reminds us that they are pieces of shit and horrible human beings. That part’s all well and fine, shoutout the cop slide. What ends up taking shape is this persecution complex, for a lack of a better word. Everything is against Beat, and since we only have Beat’s interpretation of the world she’s interacting with, then it’s easy to take that hostility at face value. People can be upset by her, but rarely, like in that batting cage segment, do we have anyone really push Beat on how she views the world. Again, this isn’t a plea to have Beat feel bad about The One Good Cop, but more having a curiosity as to why things are the way they are. Beat is thrown into this story with next to no knowledge of what’s going on, much like we are as the player, but then I felt like I had more questions about the world than Beat did and the frustrations came around the “why” of everything. Even if there were no concrete answer, to then at least have the “why” through the distorted lens of authority and scrutinize whether it was an explanation that people did feel complacent to uphold. 

Seven years is a lot of time to work on something. In that time ideas can change, be reworked, be given new life, be dead in the water after an epiphany. This focus and obsession of time passing comes up several times throughout the game. At times it feels a little tongue in cheek, but there’s an earnestness to the fact this team spent so damn long crafting this idea. The fact this game is out at all is a miracle, let it be known. But the flaws I feel I keep running into about how this story is, what the focus is, the overall premise of UNBEATABLE, I hit this point where those frustrations feel less like me wanting to sit in critique and more eager to sit in with the staff  to draw up stories. That I want to make a game that dedicates more time towards providing outlets to those who do harm. A story around a pain felt by everyone but spoken about by no one. o go out and craft something rather than say why this game isn’t evocative of the vision in my head. This isn’t my game though, and the time I sat with Beat and the others really reminded me of that by the end. 

As I work through my feelings about this game, I do feel compelled to think about the students I work with, young people of color who are very well aware of how the world hates them but who have been brought up with just enough acceptance of the status quo that to resist authority requires teaching both the intrinsic moral and the practical application of unplugging, disconnecting, and reconvening. It’s the way that even with my lack of strict cybersecurity routine I’ll shoo away a discord reply asking me to join a test server because that doesn’t sit right. The core message of rebellion and doing what you love is something I want others to take on and love passionately as well. I think this game can be profound if you’re learning what adversity feels like for the first time. If the world looks full of enemies more than it does friends, then I can see someone resonating a lot with Beat. 

I just can’t help but feel like I’m staring at a window, the lights on and the music inside just audible enough from the outside. “They must be having a good time,” I think to myself as I walk to my destination and look up the song playing because it’s by an artist I recognize or a band that I already listen to. I look at the staff, the inspirations, all of these separate pieces of the process to make this game and am so proud of what’s been created at the end in terms of the effort put in to create it. Why then, do I feel like this story lands flat? My initial draft of this review was caustic even, much more an open letter to RJ Lake and Andrew Tsai asking why couldn’t I understand this, even though I can see the blueprints and appreciate them? It sucks to have something that you’ve waited on, even put money into (two dollars, but in 2021 those were two of the maybe ten dollars I had to my name total), and get a product you like most of, but not all of. It’s not to say that RJ and Andrew are untalented either, if anything that’s refuted by the song credits and visual direction and every other piece of the game that they take a stake on. I don’t feel right calling RJ a bad writer for this story, when their expressions of isolation, worry, and perseverance in “Empty Diary” and “Mirror” are still rolling around in my head.

UNBEATABLE is something that reminded me I do like rhythm games. Its sound is one that’s been around with me ever since I listened to The Dream is Over by PUP for the first time back in 2017. It’s been in the periphery of my young adulthood, and its message of losing yourself and finding your voice has been in the back of my head for every job I got fired from, every friend I’ve had to lose, every night where I felt like the person I saw in the mirror was not the person I wanted to wake up the next morning. I think having this game a year before I enter my 30s, well traveled in my career, having an ever-growing group of friends this past year alone and now facing the reality of being a new uncle, feels like getting a gift you had just aged out of but still appreciating the thought that’s there. I’ll most likely be playing Arcade mode still, and as soon as I get that beatmap editor I’ll be making the New York Indie Rock scene every other person’s problem in the leaderboards. One of the final passages in the credits is from lead programmer Reyah Koehler, saying 

thank you so much for seeing this game to the end. we all worked really hard on the game. i hope you loved or hated it, and enough so that something about it sticks with you for a while. Thank you for believing in us and giving us the opportunity to try and make something special for you.

There’s a lot to love about UNBEATABLE, there’s a lot I’ve learned to hate. The game has a beautiful soundtrack, the rhythm sections in story mode will just be skipped over if you fail them. The character designs are fun to see, the other minigames in the narrative are clunky and don’t feel as engaging as the core rhythm game despite the artistic direction. I’ll probably be thinking about this game for a while, and to those of the team who read this I will still probably dap you up when I see you at Magfest and highlight the things I did enjoy. I think that’s what sticks the most at the end. Stories about losing your way feel different once you’ve finally started to get a handle on things, FLCL becoming less this revelation of everything I thought was true and more a fun nostalgic look at when small things mattered so much. They’re precious because of the flaws. For now, I am a little heartbroken as I collect these thoughts that feel so different to the preview I beamed about in 2021. It’ll heal, and luckily I’ve got a great soundtrack for that healing.

The post It’s A Good Sound, Just Not My Sound – UNBEATABLE (PC) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You know bump combat? Yeah I know you Ys-heads know about bump combat—a gameplay system predicated on the simple act of walking into enemies to deal damage to them—but if I asked the average gamer if they could tell me what bump combat is, they’d probably have absolutely zero idea what I’m talking about. 

This is in part because bump combat never really caught on the same way the traditional action RPG format of button based interactions has. It’s probably best known within the Ys series, and RPG progenitors Tower of Druaga and Hydlide. It’s easy to understand why: gaming has sort of inherently leaned towards a more mechanical approach that tries to allow the player as much interactivity as is humanly possible over time. It’s hard to sell a player who’s used to shooting out sword beams whenever they want on the idea of just walking into guys as thrilling gameplay. Compounding matters is the marriage of more intensive action based games into a dilution of the RPG aspect, and a bolstering of more complex player expression. Ys 1 has Dark Fact ping ponging around an arena as Adol flails about trying to just get some hits in, but Ys 8 has ultimate moves, perfect parries, and witch time from Bayonetta, which is, uh, different, to say the least.

Yet there is beauty in the simplicity of bump combat, and Angeline Era is a brave enough game to say “hey, what if things really were as simple as just guiding a guy into different things?”, and I’ve found myself now completely understanding the appeal of the bump.

Angeline Era is a game from Analgesic Productions, developers perhaps best known for their surrealist 3D action series Anodyne, and this is most certainly a work following the same design sensibilities. You play as Tets, a man who has boarded a ship to the mysterious country of Era after being beckoned there by an Angel. Era is filled to the brim not only with various Angels (supposed to have fallen from a biblical heaven), but also all matter of Fae creatures, creating an interesting blend of both Christian and Celtic folklore (with a dash of Buddhism as the game progresses). On arrival, Tets quickly meets an Angel named Arkas, who beseeches him to find a slew of “Bicones”, objects that can be used to reactivate the grand ship that the Angels have fallen to Earth in, and which can supposedly change the world forever. 

For the first 75% of Angeline Era, the format is pretty simple. You travel around a world map, searching for the entrances to various short levels that reward you with items for leveling up, and eventually find your way to more linearly designed areas with a boss and a bicone. You find these entrances through an “investigation” button, which can be used on suspicious sections of the world map (the middle of a crop clearing, the foot of a mountain, etc) to access a short first person minigame where you navigate your way through various hazards to properly enter a level. This is a charmingly novel way to gamify what would otherwise be a pretty cookie cutter experience, and it has just enough variety to avoid staleness.

More interestingly though, you can use the investigation button in the midst of the levels proper, uncovering hidden items in suspect locations, obscured areas, or even cute little asides where the camera switches angles to show Tets just chilling out. The investigation button quickly becomes the tool that defines the depth of Angeline Era’s gameplay. Though it’s required at times for puzzles, you can mostly get by on any level just by bumping your way through various enemies until you get to the end. If you investigate thoroughly, though, you may find not only easier ways of engaging with enemies from different locations, but entirely alternate ways of exploration. It can become tedious trying to search on every single out of place looking tile you see, but being rewarded with cute out of bounds areas or useful consumable items usually makes up for it.

Other than that you’re pretty much doing one thing and one thing only in Angeline Era: Bumping.

You bump into signs to read them, you bump into boxes to break them, you bump into people to talk to them and, of course, you bump into enemies to defeat them. You can get a few different weapons than just Tets’ default sword over the course of the game that change animations slightly, but fundamentally you are just bumping yourself into things until the situation is resolved. There are equipment items like Artifacts that allow for temporary buffs, and a gun that shoots enemies above you, but those are also primarily charged from bumping into things, so you better start liking the bump, buddy.

While normal enemies are fairly simplistic, at their most complex when having a specific directional weak point, timing your movement and positioning to avoid getting hit by rogue elements creates a surprisingly novel form of strategy that I really hadn’t experienced since dipping into those earlier Ys games years ago. Almost all action games require you to learn spacing and positioning, but in Angeline Era, the way you try to figure out exactly how and when to move can feel like playing a shoot ‘em up. You become fixated on your hit box, with dodging and maneuvering becoming your main focus since your damage is basically guaranteed. It makes for an interesting action experience, albeit one that treads into a lopsided difficulty at times.

One of the major contributing elements to this is the very strange health system that Angeline Era utilizes. There is no traditional healing from save points or some sort of consumable potion. On lower difficulties, there’s a chance that the enemies you face will drop healing orbs on death, but the healing from these is pitiful at best, and they don’t really factor in situations like one on one boss fights where you’ll take the most damage. For any difficulty above Normal, there is absolutely no healing outside of an optional purchasable artifact that lets you turn potential damage received into healing for a few seconds. In some ways, the novelty of this approach in the current climate of Dark Souls Estus Flask Forever is really interesting, but in practice, that’s one of your two artifact slots (which provide a bulk of the game’s interaction outside bumping) taken up for what’s usually a core mechanic.

You can supplement your health with the game’s food system, which allows you to go into one of your attempts at a level with a sizable chunk of bonus HP, but I found this system to be oddly tertiary for what feels like a major aspect of gameplay. Food can be bought from shops, and found across levels, but on lower difficulties it’s rare you’ll find it necessary unless you’re up against a particularly tricky boss, and on higher difficulties you can blow through them so fast it feels like there should be an easier way of getting them as to keep your flow going. I think this system would be functionally decent as a supplement, but I found myself a bit frustrated when I realized that your food can expire.

 If you don’t use the food you find over the course of your journey fast enough, it will turn into compost you can use for planting flowers in various places throughout the world. I get the compost angle, it’s interesting to manage an in-game economy in this sort of way. However this meant that oftentimes when I had been holding onto my food not out of a hoarding tendency but as an intentional strategy, I found myself with hardly any to use. Trying to force the player to use their consumables is a challenging task for any RPG design, but this system ends up feeling unnecessary at best, and actively frustrating at its worst. It’s completely out of place in a game where everything else feels so mysterious, so considered.

Especially considered are the aforementioned Bicone sections of the game. While early stages involve a simple narrative conceit to fight a boss, later stages range from exploring mysterious mansions with disturbing diary entries ala survival horror games, or even deceptively elaborate minigames that feel like entirely different works unto themselves. I was especially floored by one Bicone that required me to navigate a puzzle filled mine with its own upgrade system and mechanics. You still bumped, of course, but bumping with a drill and getting locked into place as it does its job created a distinct vibe that helped mix up the format for a couple hours.

I think that’s the strongest point in favor of Angeline Era. Every time you get close to a point of fatigue, or belief that the game has shown its entire hand, it always comes back with a fun idea the developers had, or a novel concept that makes the whole experience feel like a labor of love. Much of Angeline can be seen as a callback to an Era (heyyyyy) of experimentation in games that was once commonplace, and while it doesn’t all hit, neither did those old moments where a JRPG dropped everything to make you do a weird-ass sequence like Chrono Cross’ painted world, or Final Fantasy VIII’s sudden asides to Laguna’s fumbling. In a world with Final Fantasy XVIs that are so afraid of breaking the flow for even a moment, it’s refreshing to play a game where the developers make it clear that this is their vision they’re sharing with you, not something you’re meant to have specific expectations and requirements for.

Though if we’re talking about expectations, the back quarter of Angeline Era most certainly falls in line with what you might have expected from the creators of something like Anodyne. Things get surreal, intriguing, and suddenly much more linear than before. There’s a lot you can glean from the more blatantly obvious metaphors, as well as the deeper subtexts, and it feels like yet another feather in their bonnet for replicating the experience of playing something like Xenogears for the first time (as an aside, I’ve loved how the experience of Xenogears’ incompleteness has become an inspiration for storytellers across the medium; a failure transformed into an artform). 

If I had to critique one thing about this pivot to linearity, it does lead me to believe that I perhaps might’ve enjoyed Angeline Era even more if it had a slightly different structure than as it stands. Exploring a world map and gradually uncovering secrets is really fun, and going through a bunch of levels just bumping about is assuredly engaging, but as the story starts narrowing its focus towards that linear ending it becomes hard to maintain an even flow as you are empowered by a more deliberately designed sequence, only to be dropped back into the free-form format of largely unrelated platforming escapades. Though I readily admit, I struggle to think of an alternative. 

Perhaps putting more of those levels in specifically the post-game, or a more in your face narrative with less downtime that makes it so you’re not going off to god knows where all the time. It’s difficult to try and break up or add expectations onto a work that is so stalwartly itself, but the game does feel a bit lopsided as is, and it’s hard to imagine going through that format on higher difficulties as the game’s several options readily encourage.

Broadly though, Angeline Era is a beautiful work unto itself. It’s filled with enchantingly ephemeral music that really exemplifies that oddness and interrupted tranquility of its world. The towns are filled with the types of NPCs that games like Zelda II are remembered for, but with a further level of depth when needed. I adored how the entire game has the vibe of a 1990’s RPG that doesn’t give a single damn about existing in any sort of established or deliberate world. They’ll casually bring up the United States, or more contemporary concepts, even though you’ve been a little sword guy jumping around fantasy Europe the whole time. It’s like if they made a good version of the diabolically evil Working Designs translations of games like Alundra, where you can also talk to NPCs about Martin Luther.

If you have any interest or fondness for that bygone time where a game felt like it could maybe be something beyond itself, then Angeline Era will definitely be up your alley. It’s not perfect, but the most beautiful things in life rarely are, and it prioritizes blossoming that feeling inside you over making sure that it’s everything you expected it to be.

The post Another Time, Another Place – Angeline Era Review (PC) appeared first on Gamesline.

The lack of that grit makes the recent iterations of the Tony Hawk and Skate series so jarring after all this time. THPS 3 + 4, despite it featuring one of my favorite artists’ songs that sneaks in lyrics like “currently it’s obvious there is no Constitution,” feels confined to PS1 nostalgia even while trying to adapt titles in the series that iterated beyond the initial two installments. skate. is still in development and doing what it can to sand down the original series’ edges. You don’t get body checked by cops anymore, and falling off buildings is fine because you have Not Amazon funded super goo in you now! The games are still there mechanically, but it’s saddening to see these giants miss the initial edge of the medium they’re emulating. For the last decade I would hear the occasional yearning for a new skateboarding game, but it’d feel similar to the way I’d tilt my head to the sky and mutter “yeah that was cool” about the old plaid Enjoi deck with black and white trucks and wheels I owned to timidly cruise around my neighborhood. 

Skate Story is grimy as fuck, and it rules so hard for that. I initially heard about this game about 3 years ago, and immediately fell in love with the presentation. It’s a game I’ve waited for in the corner, knowing it would eventually come, trying not to overhype myself for this thing I knew I wanted to enjoy for myself. In Skate Story you play as a demon in the underworld with a universal desire: to eat the moon. As a demon made of wire it’s an impossible task, but the demon stumbles upon a contract that bestows upon them a body of glass and a skateboard. Made of glass and pain, the demon shreds through the endless night in their quest to eat the moon. Sam Eng’s Faustian love letter to the extreme sport succeeds by making failure so much fucking fun. You will crash in this game. A lot. You get achievements for failing to land tricks after a while, to put it in perspective just how often you’ll be eating shit. 

For those who are coming to this game with experience in the button prompt or flick stick methods of trick delivery, Skate Story’s approach to shredding takes a minute to adjust to. Ollies are done with the Circle/B button and other flip tricks are performed by adding presses of the triggers and bumpers to your held ollie. Right next to your skater you’ll see shapes traced with a dot, portions of these shapes shaded in green to indicate the optimal height for your jump or landing for your trick. The harder the trick the tighter the timing, and other button combinations color in abilities like reverts and spins, while grinds borrow the Skate approach of hitting a rail just right with your ollies. 

Altogether, the glass demon shreds with abandon and every perfectly crafted line is built from a mountain of crashes and tumbles. The act of failing is also done spectacularly: every crash results in the camera dropping to the ground and rolling until it catches the shards of your body against the various nighttime scenes you shred past. At no point did I feel frustrated about falling off my board or having to redo a session. The physics are a little rough, but for a game that’s focused on a deeper descent into the dreamlike, it’s not a dealbreaker. I learned to get comfortable with the weight of the glass skater and use momentum in a way that amplified the desperation felt in getting through each chapter.

The demon traverses several layers of the underworld to complete their late night snack quest. Each moon – surprise, you’re eating more than one moon on this eternal night – casts a heavy shadow on each area you skate past. I can’t emphasize just how beautiful this game looks with its deep shadows lit by fluorescent yellows, blues, and reds. There’s a karaoke bar I go to sometimes, its concrete bar counter along with furniture and trinkets to resemble a goth nightclub, and throughout the space there’s anime memorabilia and rows of manga. It’s eclectic and spacious and with the lights set low and the candles lit, there’s something comforting about the crowds singing top 40 hits throughout the night while I sip on a beer. That’s the kind of atmosphere that Skate Story evokes in its coloring and geometry. The game feels hellishly hostile, but the very act of skating is in defiance of that hostility. Every elevated ledge becomes an opportunity to grind, every jagged bramble and hurdle another chance to bust out a new trick. 

The poorly kept secret here is that the entire game is styled after New York City, and I’m a ride or die for Skate Story as a result. Within minutes of getting your board, you speed down a dreamy version of the Manhattan Bridge bike lanes, you see the backdrop of skyscrapers and scaffolding in the distance whenever you walk through new areas. Sam Eng dedicated time to record sounds of the subway cars screeching to their stops and put that in this game. I freaked the fuck out because it’s a sound I know all too well at this point in my life! To see the Washington Square Park arch modeled in a hellscape amidst skeletons pining over a previous life of regret is cool as fuck, I don’t know what else to tell you. 

Adding to the atmosphere is Skate Story’s soundtrack. Blood Cultures and John Fio went nuts in the studio to create a soundscape that is so addictive to listen to and makes the rush of building your line all the more satisfying and alluring. I’ll be honest, I get really annoyed when people cling to genre norms as a determiner of whether or not something does the genre “correctly.” Easiest nitpick here: your skating game doesn’t have to copy the old THPS soundtrack song per song. Skate Story plays around with atmospheric electronic sounds one level, then in the next level you’re getting hard hitting EDM. You ponder in one scene and then you shake ass in another while you start hitting kickflips and varials. One of the hubs does have a ska inspired track, but we’re talking about 1st wave, fresh off the heels of reggae, where it’s less mozzarella sticks and more hanging out in places where you could get your ass kicked. The boss themes are impeccable as well, each track fully playable within a time limit, so you can juggle your time between full-on listening and getting your combo up. There’s something beautiful about hitting gnarly flip tricks while a song with bright synths and samples of Bernie Wagenblast reading out train numbers plays in full blast. 

Skate Story, by design, is a game about friction. While customizing your board, you have the option to manage the tightness of your trucks. (For people who haven’t fiddled with a board, those are the axles that keep your wheels in place.) Loose trucks make it easier to apply pressure on your board to turn or do tricks, but also feel wobbly at high speeds. Tighter trucks allow for more stability when you really ramp up in speed, which happens a lot in the slalom sections of the game. There’s no right way to set your trucks, but taking the time to figure out what feels good to you goes a long way in making the game a personal experience. 

Skate Story is imperfect and it’s so good for that. I even had moments where the geometry would glitch out and force me out of the bounds of the world in a void of hazy amber light. There are moments where trying for a complicated flip trick doesn’t exactly work, but you still throw something out for the sake of your line and try to keep your momentum. As someone who never once managed a flip trick, the intricacies of how to plant your feet to affect the angle before getting air can get overwhelming. There’s a layer of fumbling intrinsic to the mechanics where mastery is less about never getting off your board and more about how quickly you get back on your board after bailing. I think back on games like Hi-Fi Rush where having zero context of the game and learning on the fly did so much to make that experience special by the end. I won’t speak on the ending not because of spoilers, but because it’s an experience you deserve to have for yourself. It’s the kind of thing where I do wish I could experience it for the first time again. 

It’s been tough to play video games this year, if I have to be honest. I’ve had this block of wanting the right time to indulge in the hobby, and that time rarely comes. If I’m not busy with new anime or shows, then I’m out and about in the real world with friends or going to concerts. Even worse, my lobster is too buttery! But genuinely, playing games as a hobby has been difficult when nothing felt like it landed with me, or would take a while to really sink in for me. After nearly four years of waiting, Skate Story comes through as a solid reminder that I can always be willing to engage in art that’s so proud of being made within constraints. Yeah, this has Devolver’s name on it, but it’s truly something born out of love for skating and love for New York. There’s nights, especially in the winter, where the moon stands out amidst the dead foliage and ice cold buildings, its light reflected off puddles of rain or pitch black windows. Some nights it looks massive, blindingly white against the darkness of night. Skate Story gives an audience a look into how those nights feel, the hours spent going deeper and deeper into the dark with no certainty of when it’ll stop. A city of demons made of glass and pain, our bodies so susceptible to breaking, and yet we keep going.

The post Like Eating Glass – Skate Story (PC) Review appeared first on Gamesline.