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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Digimon needed a high quality, polished, smooth experience the average person could enjoy to break back into the mainstream. Pokémon has started to experiment with the Legends games, but there’s still a concept of “Pokémon” that all other games have been built on. I think Digimon needed something to build off of in the future, and Digimon Story: Time Stranger is that game. It’s an overall good time, but I would describe it with softer adjectives like “solid” and “decent” instead of “exemplary”.

Time Stranger’s combat is by the book at first blush. You go into battle via running into foes on the overworld, and use your team of six Digimon (three active, three in reserve) to do damage and reduce their HP to zero. Each Digimon is one of three types that fit into a sort of Fire Emblem weapon triangle; Virus beats Data, Data beats Vaccine, and Vaccine beats Virus. There are also secondary elemental types such as fire, water, darkness, etc. Being a type of Digimon that is strong against your foe’s type and using an attack that is strong against their type can lead to a huge power increase, and ends up being the primary focus in combat.

Your party levels up with each battle, but you also grow a vast amount of backup Digimon. As you do battle, you can generate your own copies of the foes you defeat over time, adding them  to the reserve. Reserve Digimon gain EXP, but none of the extra stats or effects your party receives. These bonuses are tied to your Digimon’s Personality as well as its Bond and Talent stats. It’s similar to how your Active Pokémon gain EVs from battles but the ones you don’t use do not, but on a wider scale. It feels good to see a ton of Digimon level up at once, and it lets you experiment more as your new monsters catch up to your current team’s levels.

A Digimon’s Bond increases as you use them in combat, and their Talent increases as you Digivolve them. Personalities work similar to natures in Pokémon, where each Personality/Nature gives extra stats to specific aspects over time, such as a Hasty Pokémon gaining more speed and having less defense, and an Adoring Digimon having higher Spirit and Defense. After a few battles, Digimon will want to speak to you, and depending on how you answer the questions they present, their Personality may change. This is cute for the most part, but sometimes a question will only give you two response options: One will shift a Personality towards a certain aspect, the other is rude and doesn’t shift anything. It sucks having to basically tell Greymon to go fuck himself because I don’t want him to start gaining stats in magic because he’s a physical attacker! Give me another option, or at least make the responses less off-putting.

Personalities can also give a passive ability to your Digimon, called a Personality Skill, but each Personality assigns them randomly. If you want a specific skill, you’ll have to shift back and forth between two Personalities until it decides to give you the one you want. As your Digimon battles, it will gain more stats in blue next to their current stats, and a percentage of those stats will be passed on when the Digimon takes a new form. Their Talent stat raises the Digimon’s level cap up to 99, and is raised by Digivolving and De-Digivolving, so jumping around a Digimon’s evolution tree is recommended.

That being said, an issue arises with this system. There are a ton of facets to training, and the bonuses are not something the average player will care much for. Raising your Digimon’s Talent and Bond fully is trivial, and finding a good Personality and Personality Skill is definitely worth the effort; anything beyond that, however, is far too grindy. It’s possible to fully max out your Digimon’s stats if you put the time in, but without using an exploit or buying the grinding DLC, raising one Digimon can take hours or even days. If you are only playing the game a single time on Normal difficulty, don’t worry about anything beyond setting your Digimon up with a good stat spread and a good Personality Skill. Your stats will grow just fine with leveling up. You’ll only need to stress about raising your stats further if you’re planning on doing another run on the hardest Mega+ difficulty. 

The ability to raise your stats so freely is interesting on paper but removes a Digimon’s individuality. Initially, each Digimon has specialties in each stat; a big-ass dragon that does physical fire damage or a plant monster that can heal as well as dole out poison. However, since you can shift where stats are allocated, use items and the DigiFarm to raise stats as much as you want, and can also use the Bond-related extra stats to feed into everything more and more, it takes away a lot of each Digimon’s sense of self. 

Digimon can also have new attacks equipped to them, and there aren’t any restrictions on what moves you can give to any Digimon. This allows for a lot more freedom in builds, but each Digimon’s identity is weakened by this. It doesn’t help things when you factor this in alongside how freely you can raise stats, because now every Digimon has coverage for everything and can be a mixed attacker with physical and magical defense, so each Digimon is only defined by its signature moves in combat. It makes it easier to just use your favorites, but when my Diaboromon is able to use a magical water move, it clashes with the series’ flavor. 

All of these mechanics are similar to Pokémon’s Natures, EVs, and IVs, but in Pokémon there are limits to how high you can raise stats and what moves Pokémon can learn. Making a balanced team is a challenge in Pokémon, but it also allows for a good amount of personal expression. In Time Stranger, there are only a handful of right answers, especially near the end of the game when most enemies are dark element Virus types. 

Another aspect you may upgrade is your Agent Rank, which rises when you complete missions. You gain points you can assign to passive boosts, such as a 1% increase in attack for certain Personality types, higher EXP yields, and lowering requirements for Digivolution. You also unlock special abilities you can use in combat, such as party-wide stat buffs or huge nuke attacks that do massive damage to adversaries. These skills can be used once a meter is filled by your Digimon doing damage and getting hit, so they can be used multiple times over a fight if it goes on long enough.

The Story part of Digimon Story: Time Stranger is simultaneously simple and overly complex. At first blush, it’s a standard good guys vs. bad guys tale about heroic Digimon fending off a group of invaders called the Titans. This conflict takes place in Iliad, one of the three “servers” that make up the Digital World, the realm Digimon come from. Iliad is, as its name would imply, based on Roman mythology, with the leaders of each town on the server being based on a Roman mythological god or figure. The war spills into the real world and causes the end of the world via an event called the Shinjuku Inferno.

The player controls either Dan Yuki or Kanan Yuki depending on your preference, an agent of a group called ADAMAS, who are tasked with taking care of various anomalies around the world. Think the SCP Foundation if their uniforms were designed by Shotaro Ishinomori, specifically Cyborg 009. It’s quickly posited that most famous anomalies such as Bigfoot or UFO sightings are actually Digimon visiting the real world. Your chosen Yuki is sent back in time via mysterious means to potentially stop the events that cause the Inferno from taking place.

Your character is joined by Inori Misono, an ordinary girl who is wrapped up in the events of the game after trying to help an injured Elecmon. Elecmon Digivolves into Aegiomon to protect her, and Inori takes an immediate shine to him since he looks like her younger brother, who died alongside their mother during a previous Digimon incident. Their relationship is both a highlight and a detriment to the game, as it’s endearing to see them grow closer and for Aegiomon’s goals to evolve over time to help Inori, but late game reveals muddy things up and make for a mess of frustrating turns. 

I fully believe the Agent shouldn’t have been the player character, as having Inori and Aegiomon’s relationship front and center without this odd extra player in the mix would’ve made the plot far cleaner. I won’t say what it is exactly, but Aegiomon gains powers related to time as the story progresses, and the “truth” behind how his actions mess with the timeline and how the Agent is involved at all made me groan and roll my eyes. Digimon as a franchise is built on normal humans going on adventures. Why does this game need a special agent to handle things when Aegiomon and Inori learning to help each other is far more interesting?

The opposite Yuki you didn’t pick spends the game as your operator, keeping you updated on the state of the world as you progress. They do this constantly, and it’s one of the worst parts of the game. Once you’re in Iliad, they’re calling you every other minute to remind you how bad the anomalies are getting on Earth. I’m shocked that there doesn’t seem to be a mod to remove them from the game for the PC version as of writing. The player character already feels a bit forced into the story, so having your gender-swapped self barking at you about preventing the Shinjuku Inferno every ten seconds is frustrating to say the least.

The story’s pacing is a mess, and a lot of characters drift in and out of the plot without much fanfare. For example, Inori’s father is initially presented as an important figure when you meet him alongside her at the start of the game. After you go to the Digital World, he’s not mentioned  again until the last bit of the game, and even then he’s spoken of more than actually interacted with. Most of the major events take place in the last fourth of the game, with the beginning doing a lot of setup for events that don’t get paid off in a satisfying way. While it makes sense that you’d be thinking less about the human cast while in the world of Digimon, it makes it far more difficult to give a damn about anyone you’re catching up with once you’re back on Earth. At the very least, most of the incidental dialogue is very funny, as seen in many of the screenshots I used for the review.

When you’re not working on the story, you’re doing a few side quests. Side quests are for the most part pretty generic, but some do feed into overarching plots with the people and Digimon you come to know, and those are the ones that stand out. I especially liked a few quests involving the Bearmon brothers, who are two rascals who get into trouble throughout the story. As time progresses, they attempt to become more involved in the main conflict, and then promise each other that they will continue to grow stronger together via a buried note in a time capsule.

Later, another duo of sibling Digimon called Drimogemon take up their mantle after the Bearmon have grown up and had tragedy change their lives, but these new fighters are inspired by the note and capsule that they find, and promise to fight for good in the future like those before them. The game’s time travel aspects add to the events that transpire between a few of the characters, but otherwise it’s a lot of “uh oh someone died we gotta stop that” a bunch of times in a row. 

Many of the best side missions are not given to you until later in the game, which presents a host of issues in itself. For starters, the game ties Digivolution level to your Agent Rank. You are able to use Champion and Ultimate level Digimon in a timely manner, but Mega and above take until you’re on the path to the final boss to use. Your agent rank, as stated before, rises based on how many missions you complete. So, how do they limit your rank from going too far before it’s appropriate? Around half of the game’s side missions are dumped into your lap right before the final boss. The multiversal threat sits around patiently while you do errands. It’s Mass Effect 3 all over again. 

Of course, you could ignore them and go wrap the game up, but I wanted to use Armageddemon, dammit! Most of the coolest Digimon are Mega and above! I don’t think you should have them for the entire game, but the pacing is off big time. There is also a spoiler-related reason why I dislike this side quest dump, but I’ll leave it at “being told that we should move forward in time and then almost immediately being given the ability to go back and do side missions you missed” is a bit dissonant to say the least.

There’s some supplementary material, but it varies from “acceptable” to outright bad. Near the end of the game you unlock a colosseum of challenge battles, and that’s alright. There’s also a card game, which, unfortunately, is dreadful. You can collect cards by winning games or buying them from vendors, and all it does is add to your pool. You do not craft a deck. When a game starts, you draw five random cards from your entire collection and use those against your foe. You go through five rounds, choosing one card per round to fight. 

Evolution level and the weakness triangle for Data/Virus/Vaccine are supposed to be involved in the match-up, but sometimes the victor will be chosen arbitrarily. I’m not being hyperbolic here, sometimes the game decides a weaker Digimon defeats a stronger one, even if the stronger one has an elemental or type advantage. Sometimes you’ll just randomly miss, sometimes a KO will be reversed. No reasoning! There’s only a single side mission associated with this game, so it’s fully optional, but comparing this to the extensive card battler in Digimon World 3 feels shameful. I’d have to imagine they did this so it wouldn’t eat into the physical TCG or the upcoming online TCG simulator Digimon Alysion, but this is almost worse than nothing, it’s random and boring. I never expected a side mode to be as in-depth as the real card game (which I adore and think more folks should try!), but this has less depth than rock-paper-scissors and sometimes makes you lose for no fault of your own. I know it’s supposed to mirror simplicity the V-Pets’ battles. I don’t care. It sucks.

Iliad is an aesthetically pleasing locale to explore, even if it is a little linear. Each area is a town with a few items to buy and locals to chat with attached to a dungeon or two at either side. The areas are lively, but there’s not a ton to do. You can buy JRPG standard healing items as well as  equipment and new attacks to slot onto your party, but you’re finding just as good if not better equipment while roaming the dungeons. You’ll end up sitting on your funds for the most part unless you need to restock on HP/MP refills. Using items in combat doesn’t eat up your party member’s turn, so spamming healing items early on is not an issue if you’re struggling.

Masafumi Takada is back on the soundtrack for Time Stranger after working on Cyber Sleuth and Hacker’s Memory, and he did a bang-up job here. A few highlights for me are the theme of the In-Between Theater, “Enjoy The Fight” which was used in all of the trailers, and the music that plays when a certain group of legendary Digimon are fought. (That group really didn’t need to appear in this game and have so many of those late side missions tied to them, but their music rocks so I’ll forgive it.) The voice acting is also overall good, but I do think some of the Digimon party members you can get have mismatched voices. My precious Diaboromon line all sound…kinda heroic at times? The beings of pure destruction and malice? It’s fine if they don’t all use the same VAs as the anime, but at least make the voices match their vibe!

Time Stranger is a game that we know was in development for around eight years. With the loss of the game’s producer Habu Kazumasa in 2023, and such a long development time, it’s a safe guess to say things might’ve gotten lost in the shuffle. What was built on such a strong foundation falls apart when put under a microscope, too many plot and character threads that fray and splinter. It’s a bit frustrating that after such a long wait, we’re left with a game that feels like the start of a stronger franchise instead of an incredible experience a long wait could have led to. 

I overall enjoyed Time Stranger, and am looking forward to whatever is next for Digimon video games, but I don’t think this is the perfect game everyone has been pining for. Instead, I think this is just the most balanced experience the series has had yet, by default making it the easiest entry to recommend. Most of this review is criticisms, but I must stress that I like Time Stranger! What I like about it is just held back by such a vast variety of little issues that I’m left with my list of gripes being far longer than my praise. If you’ve been looking for a way to get into Digimon via the video games, this is the entry point you’ve been waiting for. If you want a JRPG that you can customize fully and experience a unique world in, hop on in. Hell, even if you’ve read this and feel like you do want more from a Digimon game, I still think it’s worth a shot. I will be looking forward to the next Digimon game with a lot more excitement, because even with all its flaws, Time Stranger is the foundation the series has needed for quite a while.

The post Champion, Not Ultimate – Digimon Story: Time Stranger (PS5) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

Wander Stars is the second game to come out of Paper Castle Games, and it’s easy to see that this was a passion project. Visually, it’s eye-catching, perhaps influenced by artists like Rumiko Takahashi (of Ranma ½) and the big, explosive aura of Dragon Ball. The post-combat stat screen UI and graphics are very Persona with both a dynamic visual design of big blocky elements and jazzy music, especially when contrasted with the more traditional shonen anime style of the rest of the soundtrack. Everything has that CRT fuzz. Scenes go from vivid and polished to sketchy black-and-white for moments of intensity and drama, effectively so. I really try not to compare proper nouns to other proper nouns, but when the whole thing is sincerely and aggressively anime-inspired (and marketed as such), I’ll give myself a little break. None of this is a weakness, it’s actually what I like most about Wander Stars. Though this laser-focused aesthetic doesn’t carry the whole game into excellence, it’s clearly a love letter to art of an earlier time. 

Wander Stars is a few things in modest doses: deckbuilding, roguelite, dungeon crawler. Ringo is a student of kiai, the martial art of focusing energy and releasing it with an explosive shout, used here quite literally. The combat is turn-based and attacks are composed of words made up of actions (kick, punch, etc.) and modifiers that can increase damage, quicken cooldowns, apply elemental bonuses, widen the area of effect, and compound into some ambitious combos, like Fast Special Wide Poison Strong Punch or Cool Dragon Sharp Super Claw. Each word has a cooldown, whether it’s only one turn or eight, so there is some timing and resource management to consider. Over time your inventory of words grows with both experience and teaming up with characters across the story, and every episode opens by choosing which words you want to proceed with. Though there’s over 200 words to collect and use, on a balanced difficulty you can easily get away with a dedicated set of favorites, with a few specific exceptions where your progress might be impeded only a little bit by choosing nonoptimal words. 

Each turn lasts as long as you’ve got available slots, which allows some breathing room for using items, restoring cooldowns, and putting your guard up. Some battles are especially quick work because of this. There were definitely a couple of bosses where I got into a flow state of attacking with modifiers that reduce cooldowns and return health upon striking a weakness, and enough slots to hit a weakness every time, so every move was a crit and gave me a few bonus slots, which I then used to guard, and those reduced cooldowns meant I could do that successively, ending fights quickly with full health and no sweat. 

Every non-boss fight ends in either a Peace Out or a KO. Both are acceptable, but each enemy has a breaking point at which they will give up, usually a window of 3-5 health points, and you can accept their surrender or knock them out. It’s usually more to your advantage to allow them the graceful loss, but it can also be challenging to gauge how hard to hit to get to that sweet spot. Showing mercy and peacing out will earn you the respect of your opponent, and they’ll offer you a Pep-Up, which is just another modifier for things inside and outside of combat, like restoring health through traveling on the map, exposing enemy weaknesses at the start of a battle, temporarily increasing the amount of words you can carry through an episode, things like that. 

As exhaustive as that whole description felt, all of these elements come together to make a combat system that has the potential to be super customizable, though the wide variety of enemy type coupled with an inconsistent difficulty scaling, rigid weakness system, and hard-to-read mechanics often encouraged me to play more defensively than creatively. 

Each level is styled like an anime episode, with multiple stages laid out like overworld maps. These maps are traveled via nodes, and some nodes have a purpose for items, enemies, mystery encounters, and conversations. The item and enemy nodes are self-explanatory, but the mystery encounters can be anything from learning new words, to getting stuck in quicksand and taking damage, to just having an odd little moment with another character for flavor. Exploration down different branches of each level is typically rewarded, either with extra items or honor points to use at the end of the episode, but you do run the typical risk of frontloading your combat and being weakened for the eventual boss fight. Later episodes remedy the uptick in difficulty by providing little cafes at which to rest and recover, but some stages are rather grueling in terms of enemy repetition. 

Repetition is Wander Stars’ main flaw. As I said earlier, the combat and the enemy design can clash in ways that make clearing an episode feel like a chore the further you get. The weakness system, while it at least remains consistent along the same enemies, will occasionally pull tricks on you such as differentiating between moves of a similar type, so an enemy might be immune to one move, but not the stronger version of it, or vice versa, and if an enemy is immune to any mod, the entire move goes out the window. It’s easy to waste time and cooldowns on mooks that end up being way harder than some of their end-stage bosses. The same frustration that drove me to play defensively coexisted with a lack of unique challenge that gave me little reason to play creatively. 

Beyond that, the UI would kind of implode in on itself occasionally, most notably during the second phase of the final boss, when an explosive move turned into a damage loop with no end until I hard closed the game and had to do that battle over again. In fact, more frequent checkpoints would have been nice, as instead of going back straight to the boss, I had to play the entire final map over again. There were also several instances of elements of the UI not responding to anything, having to click things multiple times to engage anything, and moments where Ringo would clash with moving enemies on a node and instead of initiating battle, they would jiggle around helplessly until I reloaded the game.

The story is a high point, with competent writing (if a bit tropey at times), cute dialogue, and characters whose adventures I care about. It’s a traditional type of narrative that complements all of the other stylistic elements – hyper and intriguing, a strong focus on the strength and trust that builds between friends and loved ones, and the power of believing in oneself. And kicking and punching, and big explosions, and the slow burn from humble journey to cosmic battles. 

First of all, my problem is decidedly not with the queer wolf and his spurned ex-turned-pirate, it’s the fact that their inevitable reunion and rekindling felt like it happened half off-screen. One deep conversation cut short and several inside jokes later, and they’re basically good. It would have been nice to see more of the parts of their dynamic that draw them back together rather than the parts that continue to hurt. The emotional constipation is palpable. Though, it was also nice that a story of reconciliation between those two ran parallel to a budding affection between Canela and Ringo. 

The ending also leaves a little to be desired. After a few twists and turns, the group catches up with Ringo’s brother, Nashi, and the actual, for-real-this-time big bad – their father. This is – generously – hinted at and then swept away with his demise. It would have been interesting to elaborate on some kind of motivation other than he cares little for his kids and loves the pocket dimension (the dreamscape, where dreams are born) in which he has tormented his own son to the point of the two of them being locked in endless animosity. Ringo lives with their grandmother, what would she have to say about it? Upon being introduced to the idea that they could all just Stop This and Go Home, their father says something along the lines of “why would I want to do that? It rules here.” and becomes so powerful the only way to defeat him is to Shooting Star Spirit Dream Beam his ass. It’s a very funny development in the game about love and friendship and mercy, and if absolutely nothing else it’s at least breaking the cycle of tropes. I would have liked to know why he turned out to be such a miserable jerk, but hey, some people are just Like That. And after all of that, Nashi is accidentally left behind during the dramatic exit, having barely said anything this whole time.    

All of this is to say that the story was enjoyable, if lacking some elaboration. If anything, it sets up Wander Stars for a sequel, a second season if you will, pretty obviously. The writing, the jokes, and character work, all solid. The many, many winks to 90s anime, also solid. Given the chance to continue their stories somewhere down the line, I would hope for some tweaks to the combat, but otherwise would put up with that mild struggle to see it through to the end.

The post Nostalgia Ahoy! – Wander Stars Review appeared first on Gamesline.

SLICE hosted a lot of panels and “microtalks” with speakers of various backgrounds, and I tried to cast a wide net and attend as many as I could while covering a spread of different topics. The first block was three smaller panels mostly about storytelling and player motivation.

Cheryl Platz hosted the talk “Modern Motivators of Play,” and discussed why people play games, and the psychological needs that players are seeking to fill. There was a focus here on contrasts, especially between extrinsic versus intrinsic values that players gain from play, and the practical concepts of fun versus mastery or competition, and the intersection of those values. Overall, she introduced the many frameworks that developers can use to examine their relationship to their players and their motivations in a way that was grounded and realistic. 

Sean Vesce hosted the talk “Listening as a Design Superpower,” about the vulnerability of making and sharing art, especially in early stages, which is a common occurrence in game development, especially in terms of getting player feedback. A few specific notes I got from this talk: thinking of receiving feedback as building a muscle, building a community outside your own development team, and listening without the reflex that you’re losing creative control. Much of this talk involved ameliorating the common reactionary feelings that taking criticism often invoke – again a useful tool for any artist really, but especially those who rely on feedback to build a project. He also referenced Never Alone, a game made in collaboration with the Iñupiat people of Alaska, and how that process required listening and sharing, and honoring the world around them. 

Leah Hoyer hosted the talk “Importance of Story to Your Founder’s Journey,” which was about the story not only within a game, but around it. She starts with a question that comes up in articles sometimes: why do games still have narrative? A question with a flawed premise and an obvious answer from my perspective, but not so obvious if it keeps coming up in think pieces. She throws out the fundamental answers: it’s ownable, it differentiates one game from another, it creates conversation, it’s inexpensive, it keeps people coming back, and it provides the why. A story isn’t just in the game, it’s about the game, it’s a story about the studio or developer, the development, and the game itself – why should players or publishers buy it? 

Especially in a volatile market and an industry that’s already hard on developers and studios who have to do their own marketing, accounting, etc., there’s a need to understand what players and investors care about, and how a game lines up with it. I’ve seen the rise in players and fans taking more of an interest in the process and behind the scenes of games and studios, voice actors and artists, so it probably wouldn’t hurt to consider the story around the game as part of a core strategy. She ends on a foretelling note about understanding one’s own motivation: are you starting a studio to make games or are you starting a studio to start a business? 

Here’s where it starts to get interesting: the next panel I chose to attend was about AI. Specifically, it was titled “AI in Game Development: How Are You Using It?” I know, I know. I thought, would I not be doing my due diligence if I heard them out? Let me give the AI guys here a chance to defend themselves. What unfortunately followed would become the throughline of my impression of the day, if not the gaming industry as a whole, at least here in 2025. 

This talk was hosted by Chris Nemcosky, Justin Bailey, Jesse Helton, and moderated by Ric Neil. They represented different companies using AI in different capacities for game development both generative and analytical. I actually won’t go too much into the details of the talk itself – also I left 15 minutes in – but I will tell you much of this defense of AI in game development was introduced as “how to make a AAA game with a team of less than 12 people” and “how to make a character for less than $10k.” Considering those previous panels I attended had, at multiple points, spoken both about the scarcity of the market and the necessity for creative originality and collaboration, this panel felt like it snuck its way into this expo. Again I am reminded: are you starting a game studio to make games, or are you starting a game studio to start a business? 

For each company, there was a function they introduced. One was using original art to generate geometry and other assets with AI. The next was just text generation, for things like manuals and other tasks that would typically fall into the lap of a copywriter. In response to both of these, I would say this does not quite reach the lowest circle of hell, but I still don’t think game development is the place to take artistic AI shortcuts. 

The final example was forecast generation. From what I could gather, this program uses AI to predict how well a game would sell based on similar games. They used PEAK as an example, which didn’t clearly take into account basically everything else about it, what kind of game it is, the marketing behind it, the mechanics within and how that appeals to people, streamers, and other factors that I don’t confidently believe can be regurgitated into tangible results for what is simply Another Game Like It. 

The thought I keep coming back to is the fact that in Seattle alone, we’ve seen massive layoffs at some of our biggest and most profitable tech and gaming companies, game studios closed unceremoniously, upcoming titles cancelled despite the work already put into them, and some of the reasoning behind all this is cost-cutting, restructuring, and the growing budgets for AI. And that’s just in 2025. I can empathize with the desire to be able to make games even if you don’t have a lot of money to invest in it or a lot of people on a team, but finding new and creative ways to deny your work of human touch and a skilled person out of a paycheck isn’t the way to a bright future for the industry, for any industry. 

One of the speakers mentioned in their company’s own independent study of the market, they found that it was best to take a “conservative approach to AI integration” because “Gen Z and Alpha value authenticity” but that only manufactures permission to find the shortest route to the smallest amount of authenticity before AI is permissible to the projected audience. It feels paradoxical to frame that approach to game development in such a way – just enough authenticity to satisfy – and certainly more work than just approaching it fully invested with human labor and legitimacy. Why is the question “are the assets going to be made by humans” still up for debate?  

After looking around and wondering how many of the many, many people in the room were there for the same reason I was, I left to go catch the back half of the other main panel for that block: “Building Passionate Player Communities” – thank goodness. 

Hanna Fogelberg, Anthony Tešija, Gavin Eisenbeisz, and Brandy Camel were speaking, with Leah Hoyer from one of the earlier panels moderating. This talk brought everything back down to Earth, with how to connect with a present and potential audience, different modes of marketing, and what kinds of approaches to take. There was a focus on authenticity, not thinking of marketing a game as some kind of strategy, but rather being comfortable in the tone with which you address your audience naturally. In terms of promotional material, Hanna said “fuck AI slop.” 

This talk was more candid than I expected, but better for it. In particular, when discussing how to recognize one’s audience, they didn’t hold back on the reality of toxic communities. Brandy spoke up on this specifically, having been the person who announced Diablo Immortal at BlizzCon back in 2018, and said that building up rapport with the community helps to mitigate negative backlash and “if there’s anything you can own up to, own up to it.” One of them put it rather succinctly (paraphrased): ‘Shitcans aren’t your audience, so you don’t have to care about them, but dedicated players, modders, etc. are the people who you want to keep.’ 

In this new rise of certain demographics of gamers having rather unhinged reactions to video games with female protagonists, among other non-issues of diversity, there should be a push to deny them the satisfaction of getting their way. I’m sure it’s daunting to new and/or independent developers, but with the support of seasoned game industry people saying hey, don’t even worry about those people, we might just get through this era with our darlings intact. 

I had one more panel to attend before checking out one of the roundtable sessions: “Unity’s Indie Survival in 2025” with Major Nelson moderating the conversation between Tyler Wright, Andrea Roberts, and Nick Kaman.

Nick started this one out with a contemporary bit of advice (paraphrased): ‘There are too many good games. You’re not just competing with those, you’re competing with Fortnite and Netflix and going outside. You’re in the tough position of trying to be chosen for game shows or articles or getting streamed. Get good at the tools available so you’re not at the mercy of the gatekeepers of the industry.’ I can empathize with the constant struggle to be noticed, not to mention the added strain of whatever internal politics dictate the flow of attention.

The subject of AI came up again, as a rapidly-growing key factor of our lives as we know it. There was a little bit of a groan. Tyler started by stating the importance of understanding all the implications of it. Using AI to solve good game design, which hardly works, and not using generative AI but rather maintaining creator authorship and avoiding deliberately taking away opportunities. In other words, ‘finding a way to use AI without putting out questionable practices and output.’

Andrea added onto this, that as indies it’s important to keep an eye on how AI develops, recognize the unknowns. 

Nick called AI “a plague upon this Earth.” He elaborated by describing how it comes with so many problems that the games industry now has to face, like generative AI making art and music, and it sucks. It’s not the experience studios should want players to have. Then he says something that succinctly encompasses the problem I myself have with AI: ‘Games are art and art is made by people and AI has no ability to make art. I play games partially because they’re fun but also because they’re made by humans and I want to see that experience, that’s why I listen to music and go to museums.’ 

In settling the topic of AI, Tyler goes on to say that if you’re going to use AI, to go deep and learn how to use it responsibly, don’t let it replace your craft and make you lazy. This distinction between responsible and irresponsible AI use becomes more deliberate the further that AI technology advances, and has been a prominent sticking point in most of these conversations I’ve been observing. 

The rest of this panel is mostly spent on funding and marketing, the constant struggle within indie development obviously. There’s plenty of advice floating around, but a lot of it has to do with flexibility, networking, luck, sacrifice, and being in the right place at the right time. I think it helps to hear these stories to get that perspective, grow your own perception of what’s possible and probable, and to know you’re not the only one struggling to get funding or support. Some people are willing to go into debt, some people are willing and able to network their ass off, and so on. I feel like it’s about the same kind of sentiment I would hear when I used to ask people how they got into game writing and they would be like, “I saved someone’s life outside of a Panera Bread and it turned out to be the Narrative Director for Naughty Dog” or whatever. 

Toward the end of the day, I went to one of the roundtable sessions and, out of persistent morbid curiosity, I chose the one about AI. Specifically, “The Personal Ethics and Impacts of AI.” The moderator led us in a structured talk about the landscape and present moment of AI in games, and the livelihoods dependent upon and threatened by the expansion of it. 

We started with a series of questions about how we agree on what is and isn’t AI and what is and isn’t permissible from individual perspectives. With the table full of extremely varied backgrounds, including one of the speakers from the earlier panel about AI, there was no notion that AI is a monolith, and the limits of personal taste diverged along many lines. Fundamentally, there’s a gap between generative AI and functional AI, the art-scraping hallucination machines versus things like algorithms, mapping, functionality, etc. Part of the issue presented is looking for the ways that generative AI can be ethical, like having an in-house engine trained on consensually provided art or assets, but the financial and energy burdens still remain. 

Then we went into AI in education. Someone made the point that education is not about getting the right answer, it’s about learning the tools and reasoning to get to the right answer. Students that use ChatGPT to write their essays for them off of basic prompts, for example, lose out on the valuable processes of research, drafting, editing, and developing their own voice. The table discussed that while AI chatbots can sometimes be helpful in expert contexts where informed discernment exists, it’s more widely used at rudimentary levels and harms those early processes. A few unequal arguments were thrown around, at least one about not using electric cars simply because the charging ports aren’t common enough yet, so like many conversations about generative AI it went nowhere productive. 

Overall, the roundtable didn’t really bring up anything surprising, and while a valiant effort at productive conversation was made, opposing viewpoints on the topic of AI will usually refuse to meet in the middle. Especially on the topic of generative AI, there will always be a fundamental difference in perspective and opinion on the efficacy and ethics of it. Personally, I do believe there’s a right and a wrong answer, but that dichotomy will exist for as long as AI does. 

The moderator, at least, did a good job at keeping the conversation on-topic and meaningful, diverting away from arguments that were too personal or combative, and correcting genuine misinformation. He left us with the question: what do we want the future to look like in terms of AI? And my answer to that is: a portal back to the year 2018, but I digress. 

After the panel, the moderator – a local technical designer at Big Company – and a DigiPen student and I sat down to continue the discussion, because we all felt a little unsettled by the roundtable. This conversation was one of the highlights of my day. It was so candid and we all found each other on equal ground despite our backgrounds being rather distinct from one another. I have no quotes or paraphrasing for this, but the topics ranged from AI, generative AI in particular, the culpability (or lack thereof) of AI especially in terms of chatbot psychosis and other formed delusions, and the specific example of therapy professionals using ChatGPT to help them with clients. We went from capitalism to venture capitalism, prisons and housing to mental health and art and socialism. We truly went all over the place, and yet in this conversation was the reality that everything is connected, from generative AI and the billions being poured into it, to your tap water and the price of your rent.  

Not to be outdone by this growing discontent, I made my last stop at the indie game corner and talked to a couple of the developers about the expo itself and the Seattle indie community at large.

First I spoke to Gideon Moes from Ellensburg, developer of Night Spasm, a story-based adventure game that you play through every character in the story, to learn who they are and influence their decisions. The initial impression I got was this interesting blend of deep philosophical topics and unique omniscient gameplay with charming pixel graphics.

So, how was the process of getting into SLICE? 

G: Oh, the process? It was pretty easy. At first there was a little bit of information that I wasn’t sure about, but that was later updated, but signing up for it, getting the tickets, and actually coming here and being able to do everything has been very easy to navigate exactly where I need to go for the events that I want to see, and overall 10/10 experience.  

This is very much about not just Seattle but, you know, this general area of the PNW. What do you think makes games and game developers in this area unique, if anything? 

G: This is kind of my first time interacting with a big group like this, and I’m noticing a lot of patterns. First of all, like most, they’re all very friendly, they’re all very passionate and whatnot. One thing, compared to a lot of the other developers that I’ve met is that they don’t seem too much in your face. Like I feel like so many developers just want to tell you exactly what they want and then they really let you go. But this has been a very flexible experience and I feel like that has to do with the kind of people around you since most of them are local to Seattle and I’d say that’s the unique trait I’ve noticed in this event from all the people gathering around. 

Any other thoughts about SLICE, the area, game dev, anything like that? 

G: Seattle is a much cooler place for this kind of stuff than I thought. I never really took it as kind of a tech or game place but once I heard that slogan of “it’s the Hollywood of game development” I was like ‘oh my gosh, they’re right.” 

I also spoke to the folks – also known as Blue Comet Games – behind Magical Showdown, a team-based brawler full of vibrant magical girls. 

So, tell me about your experience at SLICE!

C: So far it’s been honestly just very nice. This is the biggest showcase we ever have been part of. We are based out of Washington, but mostly have been showcasing this on the eastside at smaller events, but we’ve had a pretty good time here. I’m very happy with the turnout and the response to the game itself. 

C: I will say this: Positives are a lot of nice talks. A couple of negatives, I feel like a couple of them may overlap a little bit, and early on I had some trouble figuring out that there was an upper area and a lower area to go to, and it almost felt a little bit out of the way. But overall, I would say I’ve had a very good time here, 8/10, easily 8.5/10. 

Do any of the talks stand out to you in particular? 

C: A lot of the fundraising and financial talks in general. Very very needed for like indie companies and they realize that when they were planning it. So, I can understand why they loaded up on those. But in general, a lot of these talks are relevant to indies and were very useful. 

And you both are based in this general area?

C: Washington, yes, I’m out in Bellevue.

J: And I’m in Capitol Hill. 

I’ve been hearing a lot about what makes this area special or unique? What do you guys think? 

J: In my opinion, I just think it is both simultaneously big but also very tightly put together. Like in spite of its size, there are a lot of people that you can meet who are just like ‘hey I feel like I’ve known you for several years now.’ I’ve been doing a lot of these Seattle events for a little over 5 years now, and I think of a lot of these guys as my close friends. Doing something like SLICE makes me feel like I’m meeting a whole bunch of new friends. 

A very tight, consistent community. 

C: Yes, like it’s a blessing in that you constantly meet new people but you also meet people that you know. I’ve met at least a dozen people that I’ve known from other events and I’ve been able to come around and say ‘hey, what’s up’ to, it’s very nice. 

J: It’s also a group of people that is always building other people up. 

C: We support each other. 

J: Like game development in general is very communal in that sense, but doing things like this in the Seattle Indies as a whole does nothing but put everybody up, makes everyone better. 

That’s so good to hear, because especially in things like art can be so competitive. I’m in the pro wrestling scene here and it’s a lot of the same sentiment – you see a lot of the same people, build a lot of these deep connections, try to build each other up and have this robust community. It seems like the Seattle Indies group encourages that kind of community and SLICE is a reflection of that. 

J: I just hope that SLICE could be just as big if not bigger than something like GDC, because it is really cool to have something like this so close to home. 

C: This has already been fantastic. I’m hoping it gets bigger and better somehow, but so far SLICE has been great.  

Seattle Indies did a great job in bringing their resources and philosophy to a bigger production like SLICE, even for someone like me who is not at all in the process of making any kind of video game, but likes to write about them from time to time. The span of experience and expertise within these panels and roundtables is welcome in an industry that still has so many unknowns and exceptions to generally well-trodden rules. It was communal too, though Seattle Indies hosts many smaller events, and gave a lot of creators room to share ideas and support. 

Despite my animosity toward generative AI and its encroachment into artistic industries, it can be worthwhile to not hide exactly what we’re dealing with. Without the discussion of AI, especially from companies who are profiting from it, we’re missing a huge amount of context for these spaces. 2025 is clearly the year that this has become a forward topic, and over the course of my 6 or so hours taking in this event, even when I wasn’t seeking it out, AI and the inherently oppositional viewpoints organically came up over and over again. Although I don’t necessarily want the discussion thrown out completely at industry events like this, it’s important to adequately address the effects these technologies have on the very communities that they’re seeking to ingratiate themselves within. Remember the layoffs, remember the real, breathing artists and developers, and remember the reason anyone is doing any of this anyway.

While I was perusing the indie game corner, I overheard a woman talking to a colleague and something she said stuck out at me. “There are visionaries and there are executioners.” I would agree, even though we seem to still be debating about who is who.

The post Impressions of SLICE – the (inaugural!) Seattle Loves Indie Creators Expo appeared first on Gamesline.

What about a run-based hack-and-slash that lags and feels like shit to play? That’s Hotel Barcelona, folks.

Even though this is advertised as a Suda/Swery tag team project, Swery’s White Owls team actually did the deed of creating Hotel Barcelona. Suda apparently helped Swery brainstorm the concepts at play, but once the game went into production, it seems that Swery took the helm and ran with it. White Owls is not known for his action prowess compared to Suda and Grasshopper Manufacture, and boy, does it show here! Something like Deadly Premonition or The Good Life can get away with having gameplay issues as the standout aspects are plot and characters. Hotel Barcelona is built around its gameplay and the roguelike loop, and neither of these are worth digging into.

The game’s baseline sin is its lag. Every action you take in Hotel Barcelona is a solid second after you press the button or move the control stick, except for when you’re in your hotel room ‘base’ by yourself. Even then, when you cross in front of an interactive part of the environment, there’s a momentary hitch. Forget about the combat-focused levels. Each new object on the screen adds just a hint more slowness, making combat feel like you’re trying to take swings at someone under water. Missions that take place during a rain storm are completely unplayable. At best, combat is mashy and unresponsive. At worst, it’s still those things but slower.

Dodging takes a good second to happen, so reacting to your opponent’s attacks is completely impossible. At the start of the game, you have no invincibility after getting hit, so enemies, especially huge bosses, can juggle you and kill you after a single mistake that you could have easily recovered from otherwise. You do get wake-up i-frames later, though! After the third boss. Halfway through the game. Great job.

As you defeat enemies, they drop body parts such as their bones and ears. These items can be used to upgrade your abilities, and there is some improvement to the gameplay once you get the ball rolling on these, but the lag keeps the game from feeling any more responsive! You’ll get more drops and other bonuses by completing challenges that are assigned to you when you enter a room, but that’s only in theory. At one point, I was asked to kill five enemies with ranged weapons. I pressed the button to fire a shot from the requested ranged weapon, and it immediately failed the challenge. 

These upgrades feed into the roguelike loop of Hotel Barcelona, as you travel through a small assortment of stages, slowly powering up and trying to beat the bosses. Each area is just a horror movie rip-off. You fight Jason Vorhees (he’s a baseball pitcher instead of a hockey mask guy, at least! …but still looks exactly the same.) at a summer camp, there’s a Xenomorph pastiche. The titular Hotel Barcelona obviously intends to evoke the hotel from The Shining. It’s not impossible to have fun with on the nose references here and there, but besides a few of the main cast, every aspect of the game’s world design is lifted wholesale from somewhere else.

I like the art, though! The style, anyway. All of the character art/talking heads look gorgeous, and are done by artist Hiroaki Hashimoto, who worked on promotional art for King of Fighters 2000 and beyond. But then the characters start talking, and hoo boy, I have no idea what the fuck SWERY and company were trying to do here. I think they were trying to imitate Suda’s style of writing, but very much are unable to in any way that matters. Pretty much everything about this game is an attempt to imitate Suda’s style that is a failure from top to bottom in that regard, save for good use of a guest artist.

Multiple characters seem to be worried about social norms and “how people are these days” in incredibly baffling ways, too. One of the first cutscenes is an assassin-type snorting cocaine off his girlfriend’s tits, calling the black main character an oddly racially charged nickname, getting annoyed at her GPS, complaining that the term “hitchhiker” is offensive, saying he hates bigots, then shooting the GPS for being bigoted because it annoyed him. Another character, the casino operator that allows you to upgrade your specific weapons randomly, is designed in a gender-nonconforming way, but the first words out of his mouth are “I identify as a man, I am not gay, bi, or trans.” I’m not offended here, just baffled.

Hotel Barcelona drops you into combat as soon as you start the game, and when that first impression had me muttering “oh, this is turds from a donkey’s ass” like James Rolfe within fifteen seconds of starting the game, there’s not much else I need to say. This is a poorly made video game, with nothing beyond its gameplay worth powering through to see. From the marketing I’ve seen, they’re trying to present this game as a challenging “git gud” experience and will probably try to say that game journalists just don’t get it and need to try harder. Gitting Gud at this game would be a waste of time. Don’t stick up for this.

The post Hotel for Dogwater – Hotel Barcelona Review (Xbox Series X) appeared first on Gamesline.

On a larger scale, though, it’s not a game I find myself particularly fond of, for a large variety of reasons. I’m not all that into most of its cast (the game’s minor characters are probably creator Kazutaka Kodaka’s most gimmicky side cast ever, and the major ones alternate between feeling like imitations of Danganronpa characters prior or extremely basic character archetypes), I think the mysteries are often extremely grating in one way or another even though a lot of them show potential (the digital world case spending half an hour on ‘the map loops’ when it’s directly shown extremely clearly on the map burns that trial so bad, man), and the game is immensely prone to going off on tangents that can stop the pacing or intrigue of any given moment in its tracks. I do think Danganronpa V3 has a couple good traits, however. The soundtrack is the series at its best, taking the first game’s grungy and metallic atmosphere and giving it a modernized and sleek refit, fitting V3’s visual style as a sort of neo-Danganronpa, returning to a form 2 left while making everything more flashy, more pop, more bright; and character designs are very stylized and striking despite the actual sprites and CGs leaving… a bit to be desired in the technical department, with an ending that’s easily the best in the series.

Goddamnit, you might say. I got tricked into letting a V3 ending apologist start talking to me, you elaborate.

Though I doubt it, I’m not sure if Danganronpa V3 is ‘bad on purpose’. That’s a defense of its metatextual aspects I hear a lot, and it’s certainly an extremely easy one to come to and understand. When V3’s actual metatextual aspects are ignored, the game acts as a commentary on seasonal rot, the devolution of a story and the detachment from meaning or interest in its concepts that causes it. So many aspects of the game are flanderizations or fakes: the Monokubs, a concept so detached from the identity of Danganronpa, dumb child characters added to bring the ratings back up, but so extreme they did it 5 goddamn times. The murders, so ridiculous and detached from someone bludgeoning a friend to death because of a mental breakdown that we’re now doing them inside of video games and involving ancient revival rituals. We used to murder people over money, now we’re doing it because Monokuma dropped the Necronomicon in our laps. Our tragic backstories used to be losing our brothers and failing to fulfill promises, now they’re our commitment to our secret duties as the teenage prime minister. In the first game, our ultimates were writers, singers, and fighters. Now they’re robots.

This is an easy argument to make, but I’ve always found it disingenuous because it approaches this kind of story from a hostile angle. While Danganronpa V3 is certainly the kind of story that requires hostility to function (no matter how you view it), it is ultimately opposed to its own existence, it is still a story that asks you to look deeply at it and come to understand it and find value from it; just as a negative symbol. Despite this, however, it isn’t particularly far out from how Danganronpa typically functions. The Monokubs are weird additions to keep interest and spice things up, but so was Monomi – a more benevolent bear robot that did the same kinds of weird, extraneous, disconnected gags the Monokubs do. The motives are ridiculous, sure, but just last game we had ‘disease that switches peoples’ personalities around’. Yes, this game has an ultimate robot. The second game had a non-ultimate robot. This isn’t meant to be a gotcha or anything, more so just coming to an understanding that the fundamental ‘bad on purpose’ argument (or any of its typical not-too-far variations) is predicated on one of two things:

• Danganronpa, as a whole, is a series that is the same in execution whether it is ‘trying to be good’ or ‘trying to be bad’ – otherwise, V3’s minor alterations to the majority of the formula would not be enough to count as ‘trying to be bad’
• Danganronpa V3 ‘trying to be bad’ is, in effect, the other games ‘trying to be good’ because of what it is ultimately trying to convey – otherwise, its efforts being similar would lead to it ‘trying to be good’

While a deeper discussion of the theory is not a particularly meaningful exercise to be performing or analyzing, and the argument itself is one I personally find foolish to pursue (even if it were true, the similarities between 2 and V3 make the argument one I feel can only truly be meaningful via hostility towards the latter), it does lead to the reaffirmation of V3’s central goal should you engage with this theory: Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, in continuing the trends the other games kept up, is trying to be bad. These traits are examples of trying to be bad because the game says they are, even though they’re the same traits the rest of the series generally uses. Why would these traits be special, then? Well, that’s easy. Because the game is trying to be bad. What proof do I have of that? Dude, did you see the Monokubs?

It’s a cycle, an ouroboros, an argument that proves its own reasoning with itself. It’s bad because it’s intentionally bad. It’s intentionally bad because, well, I don’t like it and it’s bad. It’s why I can’t subscribe to the theory, it’s a justification predicated on a belief founded regardless of the actual game, but it does illustrate a core concept that V3 – and, by extension, The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- – are dedicated to: We have the power to make a story that lasts forever, a story with infinite potential, a story that is perfect, complete, fully acceptable on its own. These stories can be beautiful, they can be earnest, they can be cruel, they can be everything a story should be identical to how we create stories with meaning. And yet, alone – simply read, seen, and put back on the shelf, the most basic and typical way a story is engaged with – they ring hollow, worth less than the canvas the first drafts were written and then thrown out on. Completely and utterly purposeless.

Why?

One of the reasons I find it so hard to discuss The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- (so hard that I have to open it up with a discussion of Danganronpa V3), is that its scope is simply too huge to open up like I would another game. Were I to review any other game I’ve played recently, I could explain it briefly, go into a few strong or weak points, circle around, and summarize it at the end. You can’t really do that with a 200+ hour game with 100 endings. It’s not gonna work out. This is the third attempt I’ve made at even just opening this thing up. So, why not. This game – at least a little bit – sold itself on the Danganronpa similarities, I think Kodaka would forgive me if I did the same.

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- is, for all honest intents and purposes, styling itself after Danganronpa. A few handfuls of students are trapped inside a school by an adorable little mascot character and are thrust into a life or death situation. It’s a sell you’re used to if you recognize or know anything about the games either of its lead writers have ever made. One of the sell’s special offers is that this time, it’s a tactics RPG; instead of the kids killing each other, the school is under lock and key as part of a defensive measure. Rainbow colored invading monsters want inside, and the main goal of the game is using these teenagers and their wonderfully weird and wild weaponry to keep them out at all and any costs. Said teenagers have their movesets colored by their – to be quite honest – completely deranged personalities. Again, if you know anything about Danganronpa at all, you’ll know exactly what kind of people these kids are. You don’t know how extreme they are this time around – I imagine most of that series’ characters being transplanted into this game would make them look normal people in comparison, a fate only a few of V3’s offerings would escape – but the core idea is the same. 

The Hundred Line‘s most important difference from the games it patterns itself after, however, is its title: the hundred storylines within it. The game has 100 endings, all advertised as their own entire routes worthy of being called the ‘true’ ending. While I must get a bit ahead of myself and confess that I don’t think that’s entirely accurate, the scope and scale is still truly massive. 20+ routes, with all but one or two being dedicated to singular character-driven stories, vast branching trees, or something in the middle. Genres are just as varied, if not more so: comedy, horror, romance, murder mystery, slice-of-life… the list goes on. Horror in particular is probably this game’s favorite honestly, running the gamut of slasher, body horror, denpa, trashy B-movie, etcetera, etcetera.

This variety (or more accurately, this scope) is what lies at the core of The Hundred Line. It is a project driven by ambition, by scale, by an overabundance of stories and meaning, and the writing quality of these routes is – to say the least – just as varied. There are a vast array of phenomenal routes with Kodaka’s best character work yet, gripping stories that use their genre shifts to showcase sides of his characters other games wouldn’t have the opportunity to (a particularly infamous CG that, quite honestly, probably did a fair chunk of the game’s marketing by itself, is the payoff to one that I kinda can’t believe Kodaka threw into the game), and others… are there. There are routes that were written into the game because that route or idea probably had to go somewhere. There are routes that exist because the genre they homage exists.

I do think the wildly varying quality of the game’s stories comes about from its guest writers as opposed to any real notable inconsistencies on its leads – there are writers who consistently make the game’s best routes and there are writers who consistently are crashing and burning – but it does contribute to its ultimate goal in style: the game advertises itself on that massive scale, on the idea that no matter what story or path the player carves for themselves, it will be one they find organic and true. While I find it an idea that The Hundred Line admittedly fails to truly live up to perfectly – roughly a fourth or so of the endings are ‘you picked the wrong side of the coin flip and died’ endings, but even those are consistent marks of specific writers or routes (about a third of those endings are attributable to a single route that acts almost as an adventure game-style story) – the success rate is a lot higher than may initially be expected.

But there runs an inherent risk to such an unwieldy idea: homogeny. A cast with a sub-20 size stuck in a single location is not a premise that inspires hope in being told there are hundreds upon hundreds of hours of stories to tell. Yet The Hundred Line, smartly, I feel, uses its guest writers to dodge that feeling. Some use their space to throw everyone into a zombie apocalypse. Some use it to give them all fish heads. It works out pretty nicely. Even the game’s worst routes add something unique and interesting, and even if I don’t like them (sometimes ‘unique and interesting’ can be a bad thing), I very much appreciate them being there.

The only area I think the game’s variety really fails in is its gameplay. I think the tactics combat is certainly enjoyable, but it’s definitely not the core selling point. It’s got a puzzly flavor to it, less ‘figure out what stats your units specialize in’ and more ‘check AOE combinations against each other’, with a lot of its more RPG-style tools like stat buffs or debuffs saved for bosses. The general focus is on playing fast and loose: mobility is consistently good among the cast, and you’re encouraged to kill units in dying attacks (referred to as Last Resorts) to wipe out chunks of the battlefield in one go and grant passive bonuses to everyone left alive. While it plays nice and fast, and gives the game’s strategy a very unique flavor, it certainly is not difficult: once you have a handful of endings finished, with minimal competence, you’ll realistically have the tools to beat basically any battle the game throws at you, and generally it doesn’t really have ways to spice that challenge up. There are a sizable variety of units, bosses, and mechanics, to be sure, and almost all of them are distinct and provide something interesting and of value, it’s just that the game is so easy there’s little reason to engage with them after a certain point (once you level her up a handful of times, one of the game’s units is capable of one-turning every single battle in the game just by spamming two moves over and over while slightly buffed), and certain routes will even do away with them entirely.

Despite this, I don’t feel the tactical gameplay is The Hundred Line’s priority (it ultimately comprises a relatively small portion of its 200+ hour playtime), and I believe a more useful argument for the game’s success in depth comes from analyzing its cast. The immense scale of The Hundred Line means that it has to have extremely strong character writing from the outset: with so many stories handled by so many writers, having characters that are versatile, engaging, and capable of evolving in so many ways is crucial to creating an experience that is in any way compelling. One of the biggest problems Danganronpa has is that its cast often has little time to spread their wings, and such a limiter can feel like it encourages weaker character writing at times. So many cast members can end up repeatedly falling back onto specific bits, or at best die much too early to even reach that point. While obviously something like Danganronpa is not a series that lives and dies by deep personal character-driven stories and growth arcs – in some cases I do think its tendency to cast aside characters on what feel like whims to be a narrative advantage – something like The Hundred Line has to. It simply can’t afford not to hold an extremely vested interest in its cast.

But the game’s cast is not particularly different from a Danganronpa cast prima facie: a lot of archetypes feel like direct pulls or minor alterations to that series’ personalities. Takemaru Yakushiji, a gruff, uncouth, constantly threatening thug with a heart of gold, Moko Mojiro, the unendingly kind and unendingly passionate wall of muscle, Ima Tsukumo, the little shitface who insists on causing problems for entirely self-centered reasons, and so on it goes. This presents an interesting difference that I think helps break the game apart from the surface-level version of the typical Danganronpa comparison: the game must use the extremely strong and brash personalities it has created and allow them to be what lead the stories. While the game has a ‘format’ a la DR – stay in the school, fight invaders, stay alive – the characters are very often driving the scope of the story as opposed to any higher level factors or some grander scale themes each DR game must focus on. The wider scope of stories and less oppressive format allow them more agency and room for expression, and it allows for some characters who I would never expect to get depth were they put in Danganronpa (partly out of lack of necessity) to get entire dedicated stories for themselves. There are admittedly cases of a character’s necessity getting in the way of their agency – even if I quite like Tsubasa Kawana, the game’s expert engineer, it is a tad annoying she gets so many almost haphazard bursts of focus just by virtue of being the character that makes various mechanical macguffins, and this can be a recurring issue for a few characters with a distinct utility or function.

On the whole though, there are a lot more cases where The Hundred Line feels interested in using a majority of its characters to explore its themes, instead of its characters (barring the immediately relevant main ones) being vessels for the game’s themes to be imposed upon. The immense time and depth increase also means the characters are a lot funnier on average: barring a single character, I don’t think anyone’s running bits are particularly unfunny, and in most cases they’re Kodaka’s best version of them.

I think one of the game’s strongest qualities, however, is ultimately its political bent. It’s a relatively isolated area of the story (with a small set of exceptions, only Kodaka’s routes ever put much focus into it, a decision I imagine was made both for the sake of variety elsewhere and for the consistency of his messaging to come through) but the shadow that it casts over the rest of the game is a viciously harsh one. While I cannot attest to knowing Kodaka’s political views, The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- puts an extremely heavy focus on the evils of colonialism and imperialism, the death and appropriation of culture in service of war, and especially the evils of propaganda and human experimentation. My biggest point of appreciation is its almost comically direct refusal to ‘both-sides’ the conflict: the game very often makes such a form of argument in a brief ‘but what if they’re also the bad guys’, only to immediately shut it down or chastise the audience for engaging or agreeing with it. 

The game’s politics, while obviously based on and pulling from Japanese imperialism (particularly pre-WW2 Shōwa-era conflicts and ideologies, I’d wager), feel extremely applicable to modern-day conflict: the game perfectly manages to capture the vicious callousness and cruelty, saturation of propaganda, denial of guilt on the culprits’ end or humanity on the victims’ end, all the horrors of war that have become much more apparent and transparent with the advancement of modern technology and communications. Kodaka’s irreverent tone, one that so often pops up in Danganronpa, finds itself extremely apt when covering such topics.

Kodaka’s love of writing stories about themselves shines through and elevates The Hundred Line because the game is, ultimately, a piece of propaganda. It is varied propaganda – jumping between pro-war vs. anti-war, the good of the people vs. the good of the self, ethics vs. progress – and in all its variety and meaninglessness, it asks a question: 

What part of this story do you find value in?

When the entire game is shouting at you, espousing hatred and vitriol in the same capacities as love and peace, what do you take out of it? The game’s core messaging – the evils of militarization, colonialism, and nationalism – is extremely obvious; but a story that is so cruel, so loud and vicious and domineering about its ideologies no matter what they may be pretending to be at any given time (even routes about the ways in which peace can be made and reparations can be enacted feel almost intended to be read as over-the-top, cuddly, disingenuous propaganda at times – a critique of the ease with which some believe war can be solved, providing an almost too-easy breezy solution, though not a critique of that desire), is one that forces you to ask yourself: what value do I get from this? 

There’s an obvious answer that stares you down in the face, but that message acts as an affirmation. ‘War is bad’ is not a call for change: it is something you see every time you see the word ‘war’ in a book. The hells of war have been written out in stories, purchased from bookstores, read in full, put back on the shelves, rotted over time, and thrown out over and over throughout history.

What is the point of a story that can be thrown out?

The primary difference in how Danganronpa V3 and The Hundred Line ask this question is that Danganronpa V3 is the kinder of the two. It is a game that preys on those who desperately want a Danganronpa V3, but it wants to show them why they don’t need it. As funny a sentiment it may be to read, the world does not need Danganronpa V3. It arguably did not even need a Danganronpa 2. The world needs stories with love and care put into them. It may be cruel, it may deride the reader for making it there, for themselves needing Danganronpa V3, but its goal is not to make a bad story. It hits every beat it has to hit: wacky characters, fun mysteries, great soundtrack, unique style. It is as earnest as it can be while communicating that there is no reason for it to exist. Stories can only mean something to the reader if they mean something to the creator – if you truly need Danganronpa even after V3, you will find that meaning and you will make it. That is the beauty of fiction. That is the beauty of truth.

The Hundred Line, in turn, is almost a cautionary tale. It is a hollow, vicious, screaming monster of a story that lasts hundreds of hours, uses that time to loudly scream incompatible and incoherent propaganda at you, rushes around to every single genre it can think of, viciously steps over its own toes to make up new bullshit on the fly, throws you into uniquely miserable slogs over and over, smashes you in the face with random bad endings, rips its aesthetic from a series that ended by begging to be ended… all while still being a story that, genuinely, earnestly, wants to mean something. Its characters are well-crafted and deep while still being consistently funny! Its theme is competent and meaningful! Its aesthetic is arguably the best version of itself yet! It has an entire RPG system with an immense variety of bosses and scenarios tied to whatever story it’s pulling out at any time!

But this kind of story, as much as it cares, is – to be quite honest – evil. If Danganronpa V3 was a game that wanted you to move on from it, tell you it shouldn’t exist because it has served its purpose, that it is okay to not need a story, an idea, in perpetuity – a story is valuable because it means something to someone, and stories should exist for that purpose – The Hundred Line preys on those who didn’t listen. It is the exact kind of awful, evil story that will exist in perpetuity if the world clings on to things like Danganronpa V3. It is long and hollow and constantly arguing with itself and it manages to do so while still being uncompromising in its vision and goals – in communicating ideas such as the horrors of war, the evils of denial of accountability with the innately human desire to desperately be seen as a good person, and the way that a blind adherence to and adoration of fiction, of stories, can be turned against us and make us monsters in the most realistic way, makes it impactful in a way no story shorter, no story less uncompromising, ever could. We must actually actively find meaning in fiction, find what it means to us, instead of falling into complacency. While Danganronpa V3‘s goal is to say “the world does not need a Danganronpa V3“, it says so not because it’s also saying “the series sucks and shouldn’t exist anymore”, but because such a story is born out of procedure, out of constantly making more and more without a desire for meaning; The Hundred Line, on some level, feels designed as the natural aftermath of doing so.

The Hundred Line is 100 stories, all of which are written to be as independent and meaningful as the next, each with the potential to be the one that speaks to any one of us, and it’s up to you to find out what the game, what its endless, uncompromising, and at times cruel story, means to you, because if you don’t, then there is nothing it can consistently, truly mean. It’s a confusing game when looked at holistically, trying to judge it on the merits of all of its endings at the same time, but it is an undeniably intentional decision. It is a hallmark of Kodaka’s writing to make stories about themselves and their own messaging; the Danganronpa series can attest to as much. But is it ‘bad on purpose’? Well, is Danganronpa V3 ‘bad on purpose’?

But Kodaka was not the game’s only head writer, after all.

Kotaro Uchikoshi’s contributions to The Hundred Line are vast: he is directly responsible for leading the game’s guest writers, writing multiple routes, and about a third of the game’s routes tie back into the story his own routes tell and the themes his own routes focus on. Unfortunately, I very much do not like these routes.

While I phrase my praise of The Hundred Line’s almost confrontational writing as almost positive failures (“randomly throwing you into bad endings” and “making up things on the fly” are traditionally seen as inherent negatives), I think these are all intentional points. Yes, the game will throw you into bad endings easily, but even when frustrating, it often earns a reason for it. Maybe the route is patterned after adventure games. Maybe the option presented is intentionally horrifically skewed in regards to the game’s or route’s morals. Maybe you just straight up got a choice with an objective answer (a la “who did this crime?”) incorrect. The game will throw you into the most draining parts of itself for functional reasons: there’s nothing saying you have to do the ridiculously long boss gauntlet route in one go, it exists for the gameplay purpose of there being such a gauntlet, and that failure to adapt, in a game so clear on the ability to pick up and put down routes as you please, is a mark I feel is left on the player as opposed to the game. Most of the game’s more confrontational behaviors I have mentioned so far feel designed to be accommodating – cold and hard slaps in the face every so often to mess with you and remind you of its core ideas, but still nothing but a slap.

I don’t think it’s fair to say Uchikoshi didn’t ‘get’ The Hundred Line – he certainly influenced a lot of its storytelling, with any route he had a hand in very obviously being ‘one of his’ – but I do think he was completely disinterested in a lot of its ideas. His stories and contributions are very literal, very direct, very scared of the kind of attitude The Hundred Line’s other routes are dedicated to, and most importantly, very disconnected.

None of the other writers really ever meaningfully engage with Uchikoshi’s concepts unless doing so is the entire point of the route (and sometimes the only point – what I’d argue to be one of the game’s worst routes is the full 100 days long, has almost no progressing storyline throughout, and ends on a 15 minute plot dump in its ‘main’ ending), and in turn, the most Uchikoshi ever pays attention to the political themes or character ideas is writing them out of his stories. He’s one of few writers to split up the Tsukumo siblings in one of his routes, so commonly paired together in almost any activity they do… and almost immediately forces them to sit out of the story because character work isn’t something his routes are interested in outside of ‘propping up the Uchikoshi girl’. He’ll press the reset button on a character’s psyche so their personality is no longer getting in the way of what he wants to do as a writer, a decision constantly presented by other writers within their own stories as a very thematically important moral failing!

Rather, his routes are dedicated to an overarching mystery/romance merge that lacks the political and metafictional intrigue that Kodaka enjoys engaging with and a decent lot of the guest writers enjoy using for a backdrop, one that often gets entrenched in explaining itself and what’s happening. It often feels like he was negotiated with numerically – “I need to reach 100 endings, here’s an empty character slot and a couple open routes, write whatever you want, have a nice day” – and the web he crafts with the space he has feels like it works against The Hundred Line’s goals of versatility and encouraging organic meaning. A core selling point of the 100 endings, one that the game is built off of, is that each ending should be meaningful, should feel legitimate enough to be a ‘true ending’. The game generally makes a valiant effort at it (again, even if I’d say roughly a fourth of the endings fail in that regard, it is still a remarkably high batting average for this large of a game) but Uchikoshi’s stories fail intentionally: his stories have correct golden endings in a game almost completely averse to the idea elsewhere.

I overall do not find myself a fan of Uchikoshi’s works in a serious manner (an opinion I attribute to a personal general disinterest in the style of stories he writes, as opposed to any failings of his as a writer), but even here, it pales in comparison to basically anything else I’ve read or seen of his. I don’t think Uchikoshi is a bad writer, but his contributions to Hundred Line are consistently disinterested, flat, droning, and ultimately encompass the game at its worst. In a game so vast and invested in weird and out-there ideas, his stories look at the surface level concept, look at the base explanation for why and how the game is happening, and say, “that’s what I want to write about above all else”. 

This is of particular difficulty to talk about for me because I feel the immediate response that must be thrown back at me is obvious. “Isn’t that another way of the game expressing and using its variety?”, is a legitimate argument. It is unfair of me to claim the game uses elements typically considered weaknesses as totally intentional efforts to enhance the experience, then turn around and say “but the other guy just writes bad”. You could well make the argument Uchikoshi’s contributions are intentionally counter to the rest of The Hundred Line’s stories – that a story so dedicated to asking a reader to find meaning out of something so unwieldy and cruel would naturally smack itself in the face, dare you to hold onto such a meaning as it cuts the world’s ugliest jig through the world’s ugliest story locks for the game’s most boring, cliche, ‘mystery box show’ storylines – but I don’t imagine it being such a spiteful game.

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- is vast. It is enormous, it it ambitious, it is insightful, it is an honest exploration of ideas that only become more and more important as we find ourselves more and more exposed to the horrors of propaganda and war and the fact that we live in a world where such things are more accessible to see and learn of and understand than ever. It is a game led by the desire to, above all else, desperately demand you find meaning from it. The comparison between it and Danganronpa is one made often, one I think is often made in good faith by those who have actually touched the game, and it feels far more intentional than simply a stylistic pull, or one made because it’s ‘the Danganronpa guy’: The Hundred Line itself is, as cheesy as it may sound, a battle between hope and despair, a story that demands you triumph over it – over its vast, unending, constantly intimidating scale, over all the different themes and messages and stories it can spew out at any given time, over all the deaths and atrocities it and its cast go through or commit – and find hope in it, find some level of meaning that can carry you forward. Maybe that meaning will be found in its themes of sacrifice and saviorism. Maybe that meaning will be found in its romances or friendships. Maybe that meaning will be found in the route where everyone gets phones and you get to see everyone’s typing quirks. Maybe that meaning will be found even when the game spits in the very idea’s face and writes off the very idea of storytelling as a hollow lie.

But you will find that meaning.

And once you find that meaning, find some level of truth and earnest in that fiction after running in circles desperately trying to find one for yourself, then the story has served its purpose. And that fiction, that truth, now one and the same, can lay itself to rest.

The post Round and Round, Like a Carousel – The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- Review appeared first on Gamesline.

I need some kind of simulation of space, and the attenuation of sound across distance. I need some kind of visual ambience to set the mood and spark conversation. I need some kind of passive personal expression that is more robust than a Discord icon. And I need the program that provides this to be free, so I can convince 10-20 people to download it. 

I need VRChat.

I knew very little about VRChat until a few weeks ago, when I started exploring random worlds with my friend Ava to evaluate their suitability for a party and an afterparty that could transcend the limitations of voice chat during a rote multiplayer game. We made playlists, planned activities, and Ava even made a poster.

The event we hosted, A*RAVE, was mostly a success, but we experienced ups and downs that taught us lessons to make the next event better. This review of our own party will serve as a record of the strengths and weaknesses of our plans, so that perhaps you too can learn some tips about planning a virtual summer social.

Secret Spring

Secret Spring is a club-themed world with a dance floor, a large pool area, and a few private rooms. Of all the virtual clubs we evaluated, this one had what seemed like the best balance of high-energy and low-energy space. The dance floor had big screens and speakers with tons of customizable lights synced to the music, and the more secluded pool areas would spatially muffle the music to give people a break when they wanted one.

One thing I discovered while selecting the best club words is that I like listening to music in VRChat way more than listening to music in another desktop window. Even the subtlest spatial audio effects are enough to passively encourage me to maintain a mental model of a fictional space. This makes the music feel like it’s coming from giant speakers in a large room, rather than tiny speakers right next to my ear. Even when I wasn’t really paying attention to the music, its presence and its distortion was a huge buff to my ability to imagine that I was “there.”

I’m glad the music served that background function, because the rave wasn’t really as high-energy as we planned for. 3:00PM was perhaps too early to expect people to loosen up, especially with our entourage of weekend late-risers. People trickled in slowly, and sometimes had to go to a different world to pick out an avatar with dance animations. More importantly, the world was too big to force our group of ~10 people, many of whom have not met before, to stay together. My job as Host was to keep people mingling and entertained, but you can’t stop people from trying to explore the whole world at their own pace. The DJ booth did not have integrated YouTube search or playlist functionality, so Ava took on the heroic task of running back to the DJ booth to copy a YouTube link from our playlist spreadsheet every time the current song was about to end, which limited their ability to corral guests.

“I think the weakness of VRChat is that it is too tempting to make a place ‘too big’ or ‘too cool.’ It makes you appreciate how small most clubs are in real life. We’ve made preparations for future parties, but having to run back through a huge map to update the music after every song quickly lost its novelty. Future attendees should rest assured I have solved this problem in the case of DJing, but even without schlepping for music, seeing people disappear or get lost made it hard to tell when people were having fun, and seemed to frequently lead to people getting distracted from VRChat entirely.” ― Ava

When people did coalesce early in the party, it was in front of mirrors. Everybody liked seeing their own avatars and testing out animations. None of us actually had VR hardware, so our dance moves were restricted to the animations that happened to be programmed into our avatars, plus whatever flourishes we could add through jumping and crouching. For my part, getting a sense of my movement abilities in front of the mirror made me feel more embodied in my avatar throughout the night, because I could build a mental connection between my first-person view and the way that I appear to others.

It’s also just fun, as a game, to study all the “cards in your deck” and build a dance routine out of them. I continued changing avatars throughout the night just to check what their moves were, like I was trying out characters in the fighting game. Once everyone had practiced their moves enough, they did actually get out onto the dance floor. Perhaps the most impressive move of the night was from one user who summoned the Noble Phantasm of Fate’s Nero Claudius to transform the dance floor into an ancient Roman theatre.

It turns out, dancing actually does a lot to break the ice! As the music playlist concluded, the guests remained friendly enough to hunt for the 20 hidden treasures of Secret Spring. Many of them required advanced jumping techniques or enlarging and shrinking avatar size, which injected a surprisingly game-y atmosphere to our final moments there. While I think the gameplay demands of games like Lethal Company or Peak often stifles the possibility for other conversation, this temporary co-op platformer added a welcome social structure to the party.

The Secret Spring phase of the night was a success, but barely. In the future, I would definitely set a later starting time, begin the night in an avatar-select world to make sure everyone has the avatars they want, and choose a club world that is small enough to keep everyone nearby.

Score: ★★★☆☆

Tip Touchers Custom Truth or Dare

Tip Touchers Truth or Dare is gray and empty and ugly. There’s nothing to look at, no ambience to set the mood. Ava and I knew this was a problem, but we proceeded with it anyway because it was the only world we could find with custom-input truth or dare. We wrote some fun ones, but the randomizer algorithm led to frequent repeats. And ultimately, they weren’t fun enough to overcome the depressing atmosphere. Even worse, our too-early start time struck again. People were getting hungry for dinner while we were here, and so our party population dwindled to as low as 5 people.

It wasn’t all bad. The people who remained did share some big laughs to dares such as “What if The Joker could beatbox?”; “Make a villainous speech.”; and “Sing the chorus of Linkin Park’s ‘In The End.’” But this world was definitely the low point of the night, and I wouldn’t go back to it in the future.

Score: ★★☆☆☆

Club Dionysus

Club Dionysus was one of the earliest club worlds that Ava and I explored, and we rejected it both because it was way too big and had no spatial audio muffling. But it did have a first-person platforming course that could potentially reinject some of the energy from Secret Spring; and a preconfigured truth or dare firepit that we could fall back on once the Tip Touchers randomizer started repeating too often.

I was desperate to rescue the party, so I suggested we go here. The platforming course definitely got the blood pumping a bit, but all of our guests were so good at platforming that it only lasted a few minutes. Thankfully, it was enough to warm people up for the truth or dare firepit, which is where the vibe was truly saved.

“I found myself using VRChat’s tools to imitate what I would do at an IRL party: sit on tables or countertops with my legs crossed. It was simply a matter of changing my animation, but I still found it validating to convey my sense of style in a way that was impossible on Discord. I felt cool.” ― Ava

This is where I really internalized the most important lesson of the night: you have to keep people in a small space, and you have to give them some nice scenery. If you do that, people will make the conversation happen without much prodding. Ava and I wrote softball truths and dares because we knew a lot of guests would be strangers to each other, but the Club Dionysus prompts were more personal and raunchy. This world is, after all, a now-defunct 18+ club with lots of framed photos of sexy regulars on the walls. Our guests responded well to the spice, and it ended up sparking long conversational tangents that went way beyond the initial prompt.

Around this time, the sun was actually setting on the east coast. New guests trickled in as they were getting off work, and old guests returned from dinner. Everyone naturally gravitated towards the firepit, and organically integrated themselves into the group conversation. Some people paired off to explore, but they always returned to the firepit. No music was playing, and I barely noticed. After a mixed beginning, A*RAVE seemed to be really taking off.

Score: ★★★★☆

House Party Basement

“I had a lot of fun building up ‘the basement.’ It was one of my earliest favorites since Crystal and I found it and threw Dr. Katz on the TV. But one of its greatest strengths was how its groundedness made it fun to give it mystique, it’s one of the only ways I consistently roleplayed throughout the night. ‘We’ll head to the basement soon.’ ‘My uncle says we can chill in his basement tonight.’ ‘We got markers in the basement.’ By being a believable space, it was fun to assign it emotional characteristics in a way that didn’t feel right with a sexy, future nightclub that couldn’t exist in real life.” ― Ava

House Party Basement was easily the slam dunk of the night.

Learning my lesson from Secret Spring and Tip Touchers, I noticed when people started getting tired of Club Dionysus scenery, and transitioned everyone to mine and Ava’s pre-selected afterparty space. It was the perfect place to continue the casual conversation that had been brewing in Club Dionysus.

This world was also one of the first ones that Ava and I explored, and we always knew it would be good, but I didn’t appreciate just how good it was until we filled it with ~15 people. Every other world we explored would connect every video screen to the same input, but the opposite ends of House Party Basement had two separate video screens with independent inputs and their own spatial audio. The pool table in the middle of the basement acted as a third social locus that could hear muffled audio from both video screens. Then, there was just enough room between these three loci for two or three people to gather.

I couldn’t design a better world for our group size. It’s just small enough that nobody can lose track of each other, and just big enough to allow separate spheres of conversation, and just open-ended enough that people always feel invited to jump into a different sphere. The most active socializing of the night happened in the House Party Basement, and I didn’t have to do any work to keep it going. 

In fact, the vibe was so much like a real house party that I did the same thing I like to do in real life: find my own little spot (on the couch, under the pool table, or on the pool table) and just listen to the pleasant sounds of other peoples’ conversation. Much like playing with my deck of dancing animations in Secret Spring, I became very practiced at the skill of Pretending to Sit Down by carefully hovering my avatar at just the right height in just the right pose. Digital aura farming can be its own game too.

“Easily the highlight of my evening was hiding under that pool table. Me and Crystal were lying prone beneath it and inviting the nearby partygoers to chat with us. It was our impromptu fort. All around us I could hear other people’s conversations, I could hear someone playing the basement’s arcade machine, and chill techno was pulsing the entire time. The space enabled the sensation of not just talking, but being visited. People had to come find us, and find us they did. The added effort of finding the party’s “chill corner” made the socialization happening there feel genuine and intimate.” ― Ava

We were here well past midnight, a fact that caught me by surprise as I had barely noticed the physical effects of playing a video game for 8 hours straight. As guests said their goodbyes, the few people remaining gathered into the cramped, sparsely decorated bathroom of this basement. This is the closest the night came to just being a Discord call. Everyone could hear everyone else, and there was no way to smoothly separate. What remained of VRChat’s social benefits was the expressiveness of our avatars, and the unique bond that lives between the last few lingerers of a long party.

We probably could have gone another hour in that bathroom, but it’s better to end strong than let the vibe awkwardly fizzle. I was and still am very very happy with House Party Basement, and wholeheartedly recommend it to any groups of 10-20 people.

Score: ★★★★★

Total score for A*RAVE? 14/20. That’s a 4/5 if you round up. An acceptable result for Crystal and Ava’s first attempt, especially since it got better as it went on. This party began as a dilettante’s experiment, but now I’m a true believer in the social possibilities of VRChat, and I converted some of my guests as well. I’m not interested in the metaverse as a replacement to the web or a place to conduct business, but the sense of presence and intimacy does make for a surprisingly effective 3D chatroom.

Don’t let me buy a VR headset.

The post A*RAVE: A VRChat Summer Social Review appeared first on Gamesline.

We exist in a weird time and place to talk about Motherhood, considering the personal freedom to be or not to be one is constantly in flux and at risk. Even putting such a focus on that part of Leila denies the conceit of it – she was never supposed to only be a mother, no one is. Though, it’s hard not to centralize it. I grew up knowing that I didn’t want to be one, and that knowing has only ever been reinforced as I’ve grown older. My reasons are mostly practical, and as Leila’s own daughter remarks, with the world as it is, with things like climate change and the ever-growing economic disparity, why would I want to bring a new life into it? I like instead to watch Motherhood from a distance. There’s a thousand good reasons to go either way, and Leila tells a remarkably poignant story of motherhood as both a pitfall of her life as a whole person and her ultimate reassurance that, from the outsider’s perspective, is grounded and relatable. It’s really beautiful.
   
Leila isn’t just a nice story either. One of the most striking things about it is the art style, bright and sketchy at times, very classic point-and-click, becoming slightly more polished and realistic as the situation demands. One of my favorite scenes of the entire game is Leila floating on the water, reminiscing on all of the directions she wanted or thought her life would go, and then sinking beneath the water. Like Ophelia, serene and melancholy. Other scenes are displayed like backdrops of a play, traversing down a path through woods styled like layers of a pop-up book, or the manuscript-style depiction of the Persian story Layla and Majnun. 

The narrative dances around the issues of motherhood to the more granular anxieties most people have: feeling out of time and place, feeling like we won’t grow up ourselves until we have children (or rather, that being the outcome of the expectation that society puts on childless people), wanting to be everything, but being too assumptive we’ll succeed at nothing that we become stagnant. Ouch. 

Nestled between her childhood and adulthood, Leila deals with conventional teenage angst: homework and generational pressure and having a boyfriend who doesn’t care about you as much as you care about him. Trying to find a direction for your identity in books and hobbies and Marcus Aurelius quotes. Learning which masks you’re going to wear – the discarding of which involves ripping her face off entirely and piecing it back together as a small memory puzzle, a notion of sometimes having to remember who the real You is. The sting of shame and rejection manifesting as crawling under her own skin and becoming a seed that blossoms into a laughing flower – the sentiment that we can grow and thrive in spite of (or sometimes thanks) to the trials and traumas of a complicated adolescence.

Most of the puzzles are appropriately related either functionally or thematically to the narrative, all of them at least properly enmeshed in the setting, and all of them relatively easy (the metric I’m using is Me, who puzzles at, generously, about a sixth grade level), though sometimes the pieces of certain puzzles aren’t clearly defined. At times the puzzles feel more like a plain point-and-click, but otherwise they’re a clever device to move the story along. 

For example: one puzzle has the player moving Leila’s joints to contort her body in a box to reach the key to a dollhouse, and what she thinks is the safe, ideal option for life – husband, home, and child. In the desperate journey to rediscover what it means to live for herself, she cheats on her husband and damages the bond between them. But these scenes inside the dollhouse also reflect the effect that the drudgery of her routine – once a source of safety – has had on her. Her dollhouse life is once bright, the tasks quick, then later dark and stormy, with tasks taking longer, if they get done at all. 

The cleaning tasks involved a lot of small, repetitive back-and-forth movements using the mouse, and I genuinely had my hand cramp up during these moments. They would have been more effective if the earlier cleaning bits didn’t also take so long, but at this point in the story my hand was definitely hurting. It’s nothing if not an adequate translation of how hard these things become when you no longer have your heart in anything. If that was the intention, hell yeah, but be warned by this: if you’ve got sensitive hands, be ready to struggle a little. 

There’s another story within Leila – Layla and Majnun, a Persian poem about passionate but forbidden love, with puzzles connected to each arc: love, separation, reunion. It culminates in a scene about her affair – or rather, the consequence of it presented in abstraction – and I’ll admit I struggle to find the throughlines between the themes of the poem and what seemed like a random after-hours quickie with a barista. Perhaps it’s the disjointed presentation – in that you can choose to back away from parts of her life to explore other parts in the meantime – or the constraints of my own perspective. Regardless, this real-life representation of the character’s culture is interesting.    

The story ends with the strengthening of her connection with her daughter, but more importantly her connection with herself. She goes through the daily tasks that bring her peace and comfort, and connects with the world again. She sees her own life reflected in her neighbors, and finds community with the other women of her neighborhood. They sit around the fire and have a little moment of ritualistic whimsy, becoming a little bestial in their freedom, a tableau of unrestricted womanhood traditionally considered taboo. 

Mandy Zines and Ari Trash do a great job voicing adult and young Leila, respectively. Their comforting and organic performances might be too candid for some players, but I like the emotional quality of an imperfect performance, especially for a game that’s so singularly focused on one woman’s life.

Overall, though the narrative could be stronger, it tells the story it wanted to. The dialogue supports it in an unrefined way that reflects how people actually talk about themselves, and it allows Leila to dive deeper into herself and her subconscious. It feels like a long therapy session wherein she comes upon a breakthrough; meandering but not exhaustive. 

I will say, there are fundamental strings of Leila’s life introduced in the beginning that could be explored a little more, a little deeper. Not even in the way I sometimes want simply more of a game – this narrative would benefit specifically from elaborating her childhood. Leila’s main wounds were obvious, but the puzzle attached to that era of her life felt like something cluttered for the sake of being cluttered. As soon as we get a glimpse of her relationship with her father, we’ve moved on to the next phase of her life. Her affair, initially presented as a complicated moment of her life but not quite the central point of this examination ritual, seems much more important by the end, and yet the outcome isn’t clear. As is, Leila still works as a short, evocative, sometimes ambiguous narrative about a woman with a unique yet relatable life story who finds a way to make sense of it all. 

And while I hold that view of the narrative, I also accept the angle that we aren’t always able to dig into the formative events of our lives as deeply as we want to, and instead we have to make sense of the pieces. For how short it is, Leila does well with the pieces, and makes a satisfying enough ending out of them.

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