Recensioni recenti di Whymog

Pushes the medium forward by grappling earnestly, expressively, and eloquently with history, identity, and humanism. Has something to say and what it says resonates deeply, fundamentally. It's an important game.

In my opinion, this is an all-timer. Don't miss it.

Shadow of the Erdtree is dense. There is a lot to process, a lot to tease out, a lot to discover. It's also got some of the best environment, combat, boss, and level design of any FromSoftware game, which is another way of saying it's some of the best I've ever seen in any game.

I'm writing this about an hour after finishing the final boss of the expansion and, man. I loved this experience so much; I got so much value out of it. But the rumors of that final boss being terrible are not necessarily exaggerated. As with any Elden Ring boss fight, people are likely to have wildly different experiences with it; however, I really struggle to see what the intention behind this boss was. It wasn't the hardest boss I've beaten in a FromSoftware game, but it was perhaps the most joyless. Still: it's one boss, Michael. How much could it diminish your score?

As it turns out, not much at all. It's maybe the only misstep in an otherwise phenomenal experience. If you loved Elden Ring, you're almost certainly gonna love this too. For me, this is one of the absolute best gaming experiences I've ever had, and I'll be thinking about it for many years to come.

Snake...do you think managed democracy can bloom, even on a battlefield?

There was a moment in Cyberpunk 2077, probably about 20 hours into my first run through the game, where I thought I was playing a triple-A artifact that had dislodged itself in time and arrived on my doorstep years in advance. You might gather from this feeling that I waited to play the game until it had been out for about a year and thoroughly un-♥♥♥♥♥♥ through countless patches. That waiting wound up being quite prudent; I remembered the game I played being mostly pretty good, frequently quite intelligent; occasionally it even rendered me speechless in realizing the dramatic lengths of its ambition. I would have recommended it back then, but I wasn't recommending much of anything to anyone at the time. (There was this strange thing that was happening — kind of like the opposite of a flash mob — and I stopped talking to friends as much; I'll tell you about it sometime.)

That was in 2021. Now it's 2023, and I've played through almost the entire game again a second time. So? Would I still recommend it?

Cyberpunk 2077 is not the game it launched as. It's been patched so many times now that it's even incremented to a second major version number, complete with an advertising campaign and plenty of incentives designed to woo skeptics and fans back into the fold. All of this was rolled out like a red carpet over a mountain of frayed and wine-stained old rugs just in time for its one expansion, Phantom Liberty, to step out of a Tesla Cybertruck and glitch its merry way down the runway.

The Cyberpunk 2077 of 2023 is basically not broken. It's still got plenty of bizarre glitches (stroke-warning-sign lighting effects, with no tangible connection to the current environment, are constantly popping off), half-measures (character progression is better, but a talent tree feels repressive for a game that's otherwise all about a plug-and-play world), and performance compromises (why do cars almost always only show up on one side of the road? At least they're constantly running me the ♥♥♥♥ over, firmly grounding me in the authentic SoCal setting) that look weird as hell, but you're not likely to notice them if you're new to this game. So: it's not broken, but it's still an open-world, triple-A game. It is a beautiful depiction of a disgusting world, a monumental collaborative work of pop culture that's inexorably and perpetually burning itself to the ground. But you'd have to be pretty jaded to not find joy and wonder in watching a controlled burn.

It is mostly fun to play. Running, driving, dashing, air-dashing, dash-double-jump-air-dashing, and shooting/slicing people are your primary verbs, and they roll off the tongue. There is a story system running under the hood that's always tossing fresh choices your way; you'll quickly realize that most of these are mere window dressing, but every now and then you'll dip your toe into an oil-contaminated puddle and discover it's disguising a seaweed-choked lake of narrative complexity.

Because it's an open-world game with cars and guns, there are hundreds of opportunities to do reckless ♥♥♥♥ with both of them. Most of this stuff is not fun to engage with because, at best, it's meaningless and, at worst, it props a mirror up in front of you and exposes the sheer depravity of your actions as a player. Night City is full of all kinds of characters; many are blank caricatures who bark bizarre, Rockstar-adjacent quips at nobody in particular, and a few are fully-voiced, opinionated, autonomous androids you may even grow quite attached to. But the vast majority of the non-people populating this awful city amount to mere obstacles to avoid, lest you mow somebody down in view of the police, which means you've got to spend the next couple minutes playing hide-and-seek with some truly wretched adversary AI.

But then there are the NPCs with arrows over their heads, and this is where the depraved, grinning rictus of the game's core design reveals itself. Some arrows are blue, and others are yellow. You are encouraged to kill these people because you'll get items and experience points for it. If you kill the blue ones, you get in trouble because they're the cops and, despite being at best a heartless criminal, your character has no motivation — and indeed, the game offers no real reward — for picking a fight with them.

The yellow-arrow folks, however, are fair game, and hunting season never ends. During story missions, you associate yellow-arrow NPCs as enemies to be avoided, quietly dispatched, or brutally killed in a full-on violent assault. But out in the open world, you'll see tons of people with these arrows. Some of them are committing violent crimes when you find them. But the vast majority are not; they're petty thieves, drug users, or just guys being dudes. But the longer you play any game like this, the deeper-entrenched your neural pathways for deriving rewards from a Skinner box becomes. Yellow arrows equate to free guns, free money, and fast XP.

And so you'll likely find yourself, at some point in your playthrough, mindlessly mowing them down, shooting them up, or hacking their brains until they literally catch fire and die in front of you. You won't even think twice about it. They're basically Super Mario coin blocks, requiring just as much mental effort and prompting just as much moral ambiguity in harvesting them. Except they're people; they have conversations with their buddies, they hang out, and — as the game takes great pains at times to reinforce — they're not uniformly "good" or "bad." Because, to its credit, this game is quite certain that nobody can be comprehensively described in binary terms.

They are not real, of course. None of this is. But our lives are, and our time that we spend playing games is real time that can be spent in any number of other ways. At a certain point you may look around your room or see a pet or loved one walk by and realize you're doing something supremely ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up, and you may have a moment of reckoning.

Or maybe not! I dunno.

For every sharp exchange of dialogue, wonderfully nuanced main character, and stunning viewpoint in Cyberpunk 2077 — and the game is truly overflowing with all of the above — there are at least a dozen moments of banal cruelty and mindless indulgence. Of course, the game makes it pretty obvious that its universe is all about banal cruelty and mindless indulgence, so one could argue that this all amounts to intentional meta-commentary. But the longer I play, and the more boxes I check on V's virtually limitless to-do list, the more I feel the weight of the game's overstuffed void of meaningless, cruel ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ diminishing the beauty of this painstakingly broken world. As with most big-budget open-world games, it can't quite decide on the full range of choices it ought to present to the player, and it leans a bit too much on whatever's cheap and easy to scale. Gotta market these games somehow, I know, but I can't ignore how much all this junk food is spoiling what's otherwise an immaculate seven-course meal.

Here's something I've heard a lot that I actually think is true: The opposite of love really isn't hate; it's apathy. Now look at how long this review is.

I love Cyberpunk, which is why I'm so down on it a lot of the time. I love it both in spite of, and maybe even because of, the things I find disappointing, awful, and distressing about it. I recommend it because I think sometimes it's good to let yourself feel like ♥♥♥♥ and to give yourself the opportunity to stop and ask yourself why that is. I think these uncomfortable, squished-in moments are where we learn and where we make decisions for ourselves. And any game that simultaneously inspires me with the heart-swelling richness of collaborative human artistic achievement while force-feeding me depraved and unlovable garbage is, if nothing else, the makings of an utterly fascinating experience.

I fell down a 200-story rabbit hole with System Erasure's newer game, Void Stranger, and that led me (quite directly) back to ZeroRanger, their previous game. It has a lot in common with Void Stranger: beautiful and evocative pixel art, endlessly listenable music, and a million little layers of nuance and craft on top of a strong design foundation.

I don't play a ton of shmups, but I've spent a good chunk of time with at least a dozen of them throughout my life. Speaking not as a die-hard fan of the genre but a frequent appreciator, I've gotta say: ZeroRanger is my favorite one. The balance between difficulty and skill development is just right, to the point where I almost never lost a credit without learning something crucial that would improve my next performance. After just a few hours, I was able to make it to the very end of the game, although I certainly could've done better...

...so I'm gonna go back and play through it again right now.

How does this small, relatively under-the-radar team keep making top-tier games? Don't sleep on System Erasure; they're making some of the best games out there.

I'm recommending this game for two reasons:

1. Because it feels pretty wonderful and inspired to control
2. Because I really want to encourage the developers to keep learning, experimenting, refining, and growing!

To me, that's easily worth the six bucks they're asking for. However, I should also mention that I wasn't really enjoying myself most of the time I played this game for a few crucial reasons:

1. The level design, while clearly well-considered in some general ways (the mixture of open and enclosed spaces, the careful positioning of platforms/walls to enable or prevent traversal as the game progresses, etc.) points to thoughtfulness. However, the game's low-res art style (which I mostly enjoyed aesthetically) comes at the cost of minimal signposting and terribly unforgiving lighting (yes, even after you get the light upgrade on your weapon). I spent much of the second half of my time with this game wandering frustratedly through earlier areas, trying to figure out where the game wanted me to go, and the dearth of clear, identifiable signposts or landmarks left me confused and a bit irritated.

2. The character movement feels elegant, smooth, evocative, and often joyful to perform. However, combat itself is quite clunky-feeling; your hits, and enemies' as well, lack any weight or sense of impact. Ocarina of Time-style lock-on targeting exists, but it has almost no effect and offers no real advantage in practical terms. This all gives the game the impression that perhaps originally it was purely about traversing difficult environments and the enemies were added later or given less attention than they needed (think Mirror's Edge). One small nit: I wish the healing system allowed for very slow movement; I think Tunic did that, didn't it? Maybe I'm misremembering. It'd be nice, though, just to make healing feel a bit less like dead time while still maintaining the risk-reward dynamic.

3. Visibility and perspective could really use some work. At times the camera feels far too zoomed-in on the player character, and — particularly on vertical sequences — the camera requires too much manual work to stay oriented while also climbing upward with the face buttons. A little work on some fixed or dynamic camera behavior in these specific vertical scenes would go a long way toward relieving that frustration.

4. The writing and humor did not work for me. They felt a bit juvenile (and that's okay; I'm getting old, so maybe that's just my axe to grind) but also tonally inconsistent. Speaking to NPCs in general felt rather useless; I question whether this game needs that feature at all.

I spell out all these criticisms in the hopes that they paint a clear picture of where this game may frustrate, disappoint, or fall short of expectations. And, I hope, that this feedback will reach the developers and they can find a little value in it (as a game dev, I find that about 20% of criticism is spot-on, 60% is incorrect but points to a problem worth solving, and 20% makes absolutely no sense, and — as much as I like to think of myself as a good constructive critic — I'm sure my criticism doesn't stray too far from that formula, either).

Pair the movement tech in this game with a strong narrative designer, a more well-developed and beautiful world, and a richer combat system, and you've got something potentially transformative for the character-action genre. But for now, I'd say it's worth six bucks for a glimpse at something really promising. Nice work!

One of the most challenging things about being an arts writer is finding the right balance between informing your readers and proselytizing to them. My desire to share context and shed light on nuance in this space comes from a desire to contribute to a healthy and erudite discourse in a medium I love. That’s a big part of it. But also? I do it because it’s what my ego wants.

I’ve spent a lot of my life working to develop a healthy relationship with my interests, ideals, and passions. Somewhere along the way, things got really mixed up. I came to believe two contradictory ideas at the same time: first, that all the things I love are embarrassing and bad and should never be shared with anyone; and second, that my depth of enthusiasm for the art I enjoy is fundamental to what I like about myself.

Championing Void Stranger publicly has forced me to confront those two disparate beliefs and bring them into reconciliation. I’ve spent more than sixty hours with this game, and while I’ve completed the entirety of its story, I’m still digging; there’s still so much more waiting here for me. But to say it’s a generous game is both an understatement and a bit misleading.

Of all the esoteric and lesser-known games I’ve sought to recognize, Void Stranger is easily the most confounding. I’ve recommended the game to at least a dozen people and even bought a few gift copies, and I only know one person I shared it with who played more than the first few hours. For months, I felt dumbfounded: what was going on? Why weren’t other people connecting with this game?

I thought back to my experience with it. It’s a game I’d never heard of until one of my friends recommended it to me with a “just trust me” kind of attitude. I played for a couple hours, thought it was pretty good, and walked away. It took a couple of gentle nudges from that friend to get me to pick it up again and push on toward the end of what we could call the game’s introduction. I hit a big moment; the big moment hit me. And I was off to the races. But getting to that point was anything but guaranteed.

I’ve run into a similar problem with games like Deltarune. How do I convince someone who loves Japanese-style RPGs to play one of the best ones I’ve ever played that also happens to be, at the moment, totally free? If choosing which games to play was merely an equation of time, money, and effort, a recommendation like this ought to be a slam dunk. Void Stranger costs twelve dollars. So that’s not the issue.

The issue comes down to what’s often called narrowcasting. Since the internet arrived, people have been empowered to self-sort into ever more precisely targeted subcultures and communities. It explains why I watch more YouTube than any other video service: I can find video creators who offer the precise combination of in-depth research and bizarre humor to keep me glued to whatever they produce. And the same is true for games: digital distribution and online word-of-mouth allows all kinds of unusual gems to flourish.

So let me tell you why I love Void Stranger so much. First, it’s exceptionally well-designed as a puzzle game: room to room, sequence to sequence, mechanic to mechanic, it speaks to years of careful consideration from its talented developers. Second, it’s brave enough to tackle aesthetic and thematic elements that are at times discomfiting but prove in time to be wreathed in sincerity. (Mostly. A few parts still leave me feeling a bit leery.) And finally, because it’s a game that communicates so clearly to the player that it holds deep, interwoven mysteries to be discovered, provided you’re willing to observe, think, and keep a notebook handy. (I’ve taken to calling games like this “notebook games.” I find them irresistible, and I think you might, too, if you’re willing to experiment with taking the game off the screen and into your brain.) It all combines into an intricate, abstract, sprawling narrative experience that challenged me in ways that games have rarely, if ever, done.

Unearthing every bit of Void Stranger was satisfying to me in a way that nothing else I’ve played in years has been. I struggle to understand how a two-person studio made such an ambitious thing, nailed it, and are only charging twelve dollars for it. The game strikes me as both incredibly generous and also unflinching in its challenge. But it is a challenge you *will* overcome with time and patience.

So the real question is: how do you feel about challenges?

At this point, I think there are a few things going on. First: we’re swimming in a sea of media. Everyone’s got a million subscriptions vying for their attention. Second: everyone is exhausted all of the time. Points one and two are not wholly unrelated. And third: tired people usually don’t want to spend their leisure time on challenging media. I can relate: Every time I think I’m finally ready to enter my “Tolstoy phase,” I panic and pick up some 260-page pulp-psychology book or light novel instead.

But life is much more meaningful when you choose to do difficult things. I know it’s almost a truism at this point, but I’ve recently become a staunch believer that focusing on life’s journeys and not its destinations is key to — well, you know where this is going.

So here we are, sixteen pages into what might amount to not much more than a screed, and I’ve barely mentioned what Void Stranger actually is. My answer is that it’s a cerebral, experimental, challenging, and profoundly rewarding game. It is my favorite game so far of this decade. It may not be what you wanted — it may not work for you at all — but there’s also a chance you’ve been searching for it for a very long time without even realizing it. I hope you’ll consider taking the leap.

---

Old review, from ~30 hours in:

If you can answer yes to at least *two* of the following…

• You enjoy experiences that evolve the deeper you explore
• You like to think things through, pay attention, and take notes
• You are generally down for sokoban
• You love to be surprised, to come up with your own hypotheses, and to test each outcome
• You know what Solomon’s Key is

…then you may very well be looking at your GOTY right here. It’s sure as heck mine.

If you're on the fence, I'd say take a leap of faith and see where you land. Your mileage may vary, of course. But for me, a person who checks every box on that list, this is a singular experience and an incredible accomplishment, easily among the very best games I've ever played.

absolutely whips ass

This review is not for fans of Dungeons and Dragons, the older Baldur's Gate games, or Larian's other work. If you're in one of those camps, chances are you're gonna absolutely love this game and don't need me to tell you that. Instead, I'm writing for the people out there who, like me, never really vibed with CRPGs before but always hoped to someday. Maybe you, like me, saw its widespread critical acclaim and heard from all your friends how great it was and thought: "Okay, this will finally be the CRPG that clicks for me."

Well, I have good news: It was that game for me! I love Baldur's Gate 3. I just want to caution anyone coming from a similar background that it's got an absolutely hellish learning curve that you're gonna have to be patient and persistent with, but I really do think it's worth the effort.

For the first eight hours or so, I was very turned off by this game. I spent most of that time (no exaggeration) creating characters and feeling overwhelmed by the volume of systems, proper nouns, and seemingly binding decisions I had to make right at the outset of the game. (For context, I have little-to-no D&D experience, and BG3 definitely assumes you're already quite familiar with how D&D operates up-front.)

Once I got into the game itself, I found the interface very opaque and finicky; I nearly died multiple times because I accidentally walked over ground that was on fire, and I didn't understand why enemies would get a free attack on me when I was moving past them, to name a few examples. I also found the early influx of party members frustrating because I had to learn multiple classes at once rather than just focusing on the one I chose for my player character. In hindsight, I realize that the early levels for D&D characters are quite streamlined and simple, but between the complex-to-me UI and the (from my perspective) opaque integration of D&D's underlying systems, I felt overwhelmed and frustrated.

But around hour 10, something started to change. Partly, it was that I had spent enough time immersed in the game's early systems to start to understand what things like armor class and advantage/disadvantage meant, and I no longer struggled to differentiate between a primary and bonus action in combat.

But the biggest thing was — and this is kind of embarrassing — I started to notice the game does have tutorials after all. I just got an ultrawide monitor for the first time and, I dunno if my peripheral vision is bad or what, but I finally noticed the tiny tutorials in the top-left corner on my third character. And they're very helpful! So that's on me. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Once I felt reasonably comfortable with the basic systems, choices no longer felt so threatening. I could level up my characters without feeling like I needed to tab out into some D&D wiki to understand the exact conditions in which a buff gets removed or what the exact difference between a short and long rest is.

Anyway, I'm now plumbing through dungeons and picking up cool gear and trying all kinds of weird ideas out and it's delightful. So there is hope for us non-CRPG types with Baldur's Gate! I just think the game ought to come with an extended, more involved tutorial for D&D newbies to help make sure the onboarding process is much smoother. Still, I'm glad I toughed out the initial period, because I feel like I've mostly overcome the learning curve that turned me away at first.

Man, do I love this game. By stripping the genre down to its fundamentals, Void Sols manages to capture the feeling of a From Software game better than just about anything else I've played. The minimalist aesthetic is really what makes it all work: with no distractions or superfluous/tacked-on systems, we're left with pure exploration, combat, and survival. Don't mistake this prologue's brevity for scarcity; Void Sols already has a ton of depth, and the care and consideration that Finite Reflection put into it is unmistakable.

It's also an absolutely lovely game to look at, too. Its simple geometric shapes call to mind Geometry Wars for me, but the visual effects -- especially the concave perspective/UI and the brilliant lighting and particle effects -- give Void Sols a surprisingly polished feel already. The ambient noise is eerie and effective at setting the mood, and the sound effects are snappy, recognizable, and helpful to the player. In a game where timing is everything and vibe is essential, all of these things come together to make a game that is engrossing and challenging but fair.

It's so rare these days that I play a demo that leaves me yearning for more, and it's even less common that I dip into the optional challenges and try out additional builds. (That's another thing that's great here: the stats system isn't minimal so much as deeply refined. The STR/DEX archetypes are clear and rewarding to build around, but there's plenty of satisfying wiggle room to define your own play style in-between.)

I really hope Void Sols gets the attention it deserves and Finite Reflection has the means to build this game out into something bigger, because what they've got here is the kernel of something really special.