Everyone Wants To Talk About Ripper Because It Has Christopher Walken, But I Want To Talk About Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller Because It Has An Unhinged Dennis Hopper!

Presently, Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. stands as a too-big-to-fail monolith in the video game industry. Not only do they own and operate the Rockstar Games and 2K labels, but they also own an eclectic portfolio of publishing outfits and development studios. With Microsoft's purchase of Activision-Blizzard looming like a proverbial sword of Damocles, Take-Two Interactive is moving to become the second-largest publicly traded independent game studio in the Americas and Europe, behind only their sworn sports rival, Electronics Arts. Now, some of you may wish to dispute that, considering Take-Two's current business model is that of a holding company and doesn't itself engage in internal development, but that's ignoring the fact that when the projects they fund launch, for better or worse, whole subsets of the gaming industry and community come to a standstill.

They are also very good at making money in this industry and getting their name out there, whether you approve of their business tactics or not. Their 50% stake in NBA 2K League and partnership with the NBA has cemented it as one of the more stable fixtures in e-sports, along with the Madden NFL Championship Series and EVO. Rockstar needs no introduction and 2K as well. 2K's many branches and subsidiaries are far more multifarious than its critics sometimes contend and are more than just a bunch of sports game-making factory mills. Firaxis Games is a division of 2K, and the BioShock, Borderlands, and Mafia franchises also fall under their umbrella. Take-Two Interactive is a big deal in this industry, but if we were to go back to when the company was first founded, there weren't telltale signs it would achieve such monumental heights. Sure, the company got started by Ryan Ashley Brant, who was, in turn, the son of a millionaire magazine magnate. However, it is interesting that Ryan could have inherited his father's media empire and instead decided, "Hey, I want to make video games!" His life was ripe for a real-life version of Succession. Instead, at twenty-one, he surprised everyone in his family and those following the print business by saying, "Nah!" after independently raising $1.5 million to form a company named Take-Two. Oh, and before you get too impressed, Ryan's father, Peter Brant, paid his son enough cash to buy 25% of the company to help it get off the runway. Special note, Peter Brant has a cozy relationship with Donald Trump and, in the 90s, was found guilty of tax evasion.

But rather than make this a blog about the necessity of eating the rich, let's return to the topic of Take-Two Interactive's less-than-orthodox introduction to the video game industry. The company started with Star Crusader, a 3D space combat simulation game. Like many in the PC gaming world at the time, the company started things off with a Wing Commander clone but without any of the over-the-top FMV cutscenes! The game was a modest success, but with investors and his father breathing down his neck looking for a juicy payday, owner Ryan Brant observed the PC video game landscape while planning Take-Two's next project. What he landed on was The Daedalus Encounter by developer Mechadeus. The Daedalus Encounter is an interactive movie starring Tia Carrere, and its surprise success inspired Take-Two to fund their own actor-headlining point-and-click adventure game. However, this would have Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones, Stephanie Seymour, and Geoffrey Holder and mix FMV with in-game 3D-rendered character models and environments! That game, Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller, was so successful it convinced Take-Two that the "gravy train" to success in the video game industry was FMV adventure games. That's how you get magnificent projects like Ripper and Black Dahlia, two far better-known games from the early days of Take-Two's history.

I cannot emphasize this point enough, but these FMV adventure games, while lampooned for their poor gameplay and decried for their exorbitant budgets, made a lot of money. Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller sold 300,000 units within six months of its release. Joke all you want about the cheesy acting in Ripper or at the notion that Take-Two spent $625,000 of its $2.5 million budget to hire Christopher Walken, Karen Allen, and Burgess Meredith. Ripper made back its entire budget plus a one million dollar surplus by the eighth-month mark from its release. Ripper was such a financial success that Take-Two reported to its shareholders that it amounted to 28.7% of all company revenue during that fiscal year. Scoff all you want at the FMV CD-ROM era of adventure games, but this was the "golden goose" in the PC game market, with Myst and Riven still setting the entire industry on fire. And as I have said before, contrary to popular belief, Myst outsold Diablo II, Half-Life, Command & Conquer, Doom, Doom II, and Baldur's Gate by a considerable margin and stood as the best-selling PC game of all time until The Sims.

What's notable is how Take-Two used their FMV-derived mother lode: they pivoted as a business and left the market they helped steamroll. Unlike others banking on the continued success of FMV adventure games, Take-Two saw the writing on the wall as 3D technology improved and used its revenue to forge a publishing deal with Acclaim Entertainment to achieve better distribution, especially overseas. They also completed a licensing deal with Sony to bring its games to the PlayStation. Less than three years after Ripper, the company would purchase DMA Design, which would later go on to become Rockstar, and gave a project by Sam and Dan Houser called Grand Theft Auto the greenlight using this treasure trove of adventure game money. And, as we often say in these parts, the rest is history.

What Exactly Is Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller?

Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller is in the weird middle ground between being a multi-media game and an adventure game. Like Myst, your tasks are often basic as they involve navigating between two locations and affixing something you picked up or learned from a prior one to a new one. Unlike Myst, Hell relies heavily on password and cipher-based word problems rather than environmental-based ones. There's one incredibly terrible dexterity puzzle I need to review on its own, but it is the only part of this game that deviates even slightly from the conventions of a SCUMM-based point-and-click adventure game. Everything you do in this game involves going from one environment to the next, hearing someone out, and getting them a random trinket so they hand over an item necessary to progress the story. Sometimes you get a hint about a new location instead of a physical object. It's simply riveting stuff. The one novel idea that this game has is its party management system, and it is one of MANY parts of the game that feel tacked on and partially realized. Throughout the story, you will encounter various possible teammates with the tools and resources to complete puzzles or overcome barriers. The problem is that you have a limited number of party slots, which requires you to dismiss some members to make way for others, and, as we will discuss, if you are not following a guide, you can screw yourself.

The development of Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller is notable and worth reviewing as well. Take-Two was still an upstart label when it was interested in getting in on the PC adventure game boom during the 90s. So, they did what anyone seeking to burn millions of media mogul money: they bought an entire development team from a rival! However, in this case, they purchased the team behind MicroProse Software, Inc.'s 1993 cyberpunk RPG, BloodNet. But Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller isn't an RPG, and as a result, you get a tale as old as time: a development team entirely out of its element because its producers are looking for a specific type of game they are not accustomed to making! Also, the demands of Take-Two to make a game with Hollywood actors limited the story and world the Bloodnet team was capable of producing. As I mentioned, the game stars Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones, Stephanie Seymour, and Geoffrey Holder. Fully rendered 3D characters represent Hopper and Jones, while Seymour and Holder appear in FMV cutscenes. Was this a technical limitation of early CD-ROM technology, or was the Bloodnet team uncomfortable with their mandate? I don't know the answer to that, but the live-action FMV is used sparingly, which makes the game a weird contrast with Take-Two's next two 90s adventure games (i.e., Ripper and Black Dhalia).

And if you are looking for actors going over the top with their line reads, you don't get that in Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller like you do in Ripper and Black Dahlia. Dennis Hopper is in two scenes where you feel like he's in his most potent form, but his scenes amount to about ten to twelve minutes of the game's playtime. Stephanie Seymour plays Cynna Stone, a virtual reality assistant that chimes in whenever she has something to add to what's happening to the story. However, her lines and dialogue must have gotten thrown into a paper shredder because her presence is only felt for about ten to fifteen minutes during the first half of the story. Geoffrey Holder speaks to you in a monotone voice while reading encyclopedia articles. Grace Jones has her moments as the story's primary antagonist, Solene Solux. However, considering she's one of the most vivid and explosive personalities in the entertainment industry, having her be a cackling pro-fascist villain seems like a waste. Instead of striking Hollywood actors chewing through scenery like their lives depend on it, you instead get primarily dry and dull line deliveries by Gideon and Rachel, the game's two playable characters, one of which you select as the primary character, though you often need to switch between the two to complete tasks. And let me tell you, their voice acting IS NOT GOOD!

Production unevenness is a common issue with this game. From the handful of screencaps I posted, you might have noticed that Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller is a hideous-looking game. Running the game on modern technology allows for some shader options, but even they cannot stop the pre-rendered backgrounds from looking like shit and being incredibly dark. You see a lot of random 90s PC game design stand-ins that add to the game's inconsistent tone. For example, there are a TON of giant skeleton statues that resemble the ones from the Halloween-themed fixtures in Rollercoaster Tycoon. This issue leads me to the point that every single environment in this game is garish and over-the-top. The game attempts to convey a cyberpunk dystopian future but does so with levels like a bar that tries so hard to emulate 90s-era grunge sensibilities it's embarrassing. Things get worse when you enter the environments in Hell, which eschew the game's ordinarily mature tone of needing to topple a totalitarian state. For example, at one point, you find yourself in a classroom with a hellish teacher barking quiz questions at you and, on another occasion, a dentist in an operating room that would be fit for a nu-metal music video circa 1999. I almost want to say that it is a case of the development team getting new state-of-the-art design and programming tools and not knowing what to do, but then why does the game's framerate, especially during FMV cutscenes, drop to the single digits? And before you ask, running the game on an emulator or with modern processors doesn't help because they were programmed that way! If you want things to speed up and play at an average framerate, the game directs you to click the left mouse button, and only then will cutscenes play at 30 FPS. WHY WOULD ANYONE DO THAT?!

You Need To Play Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller Using A Guide

Playing Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller sucks. The inventory system is clunky, especially when you need to use one object from a supporting party member with an item in your primary character's inventory. The map you use to navigate the world is endlessly frustrating as it is hard to look at, and various environments have multiple layers or alternate locations in the same spot. To highlight, the Federal Triangle is a location, and there's a part where you need to hop back and forth between the Bureau of Records and Transgressions Entrance. Each time, because the game doesn't connect its environments, you must complete a task, pick the "dcmap" part of the screen to select the Federal Triangle AGAIN and then scroll to the sublocation you require next. That might sound par for the course in an old-school adventure game, but by the mid to late 90s, that was falling out of favor. Likewise, Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller has the added "bonus" of having hundreds of possible ways to get a "game over." Not solving a puzzle within a finite amount of time? Your game is done. Did you pick the wrong location to go to next? You're dead. Did you select the wrong NPC from a party of five in a bar or interact with patrons in a club in the incorrect order? I hope you saved your game recently because you hard-locked yourself to get the bad ending! Most of your interactions in this game involve you thinking about where you need to go and praying that you picked the correct location, and that's not exactly "fun."

These game-overs mask the fact that everything Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller wants you to do is relatively simple. Here's a convenient guide that saved my attempt to play and complete this game. Notice how many steps or puzzles the guide writer summarizes in a sentence or two. Worse, the game has a time limit that it doesn't tell you. Mark my words, if you attempt to explore the ridiculous world in this game and all of its larger-than-life NPCs, you will end up in a fail state where you will not have enough time, or in this case, fast travel warps to complete the game. Again, this is a core mechanic the game outright NEVER TELLS YOU! To compound the punishing time limit, you need to be precise and careful about your mouse clicks, and this being an adventure game in the 90s, many of the objects you need to find are almost impossible to notice without some third-party help. It also doesn't help that the game's production values are everywhere. I can excuse the pre-rendered backgrounds, considering Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller was made in the 90s, and 3D modeling was a daunting enterprise at the time. The FMV cutscenes were an industry norm, and you just had to "be there" to understand why they weren't a big surprise. But for the vast majority of your time, dialogue scenes are presented flatly with close-up shots of characters repeating one of three possible canned animations, with the most common ones being simple hand gestures and head tilts that lead to frowns or scowls. Furthermore, none of these shots or dialogue scenes takes up the entirety of the screen. Outside of the star power, this game feels like a budget title.

More alarming, there are so many concepts and mechanics the game forgets about. Collecting party members is a big deal during the first hour. There's even a bit with that virtual reality FMV companion expressing shock that you can recruit "Scub Stevens" into your ranks, and ultimately, you use his hacking abilities thrice. A telepath also joins your team, and after a cheesy introduction wherein his girlfriend tells him to beat it after he kills her corrupt teacher, you only use him twice. The core problem here is that because the game has a mountain of one-off mechanics, it becomes impossible for you to develop fluency when it expects you to explore new environments or get through roadblocks. You have a hacker AND demolition expert in your team, and the game is incredibly inconsistent about which of those two you need to use to unlock security panels or chained doors. Likewise, the game's combat is nonexistent. What it does is tell you that you need to fight someone at a specific location, and your success depends on if you have all of the required items in your inventory to complete a combat skill check. The issue here is that the game provides no clues as to what any of these items are, and when you do pass them, they are in-game cinematics where you don't have any control over the action. You sit back and watch the goofiest action sequences I have seen in a long while.

All of this grousing suggests you must play this game with a guide. The game engages in virtually zero signposting and piggybacking, which, if you attempt to solve by playing it blind, can result in you falling into traps and red herrings. As I said, you might have insufficient turns to reach the final location if you are not careful. What can also happen is quest critical NPCs can die if you fail to find them quickly enough. In one case, the main characters overhear a gang discussing a plan to murder an older man who happens to be connected to the government conspiracy your characters are trying to unravel. If you hop to even one disconnected environment or level that is NOT this guy's apartment where you warn him about the assassination attempt, he dies. However, if you forget to do this or misclick, the game continues as if you haven't screwed yourself over. It's like when you fail a primary mission objective in Perfect Dark or Goldeneye, and the game continues to let you mess around for a bit. Nevertheless, in this case, you continue exploring plot threads, not knowing an unsolvable roadblock will present itself five to six hours after the fact. Oh, and did I mention that the game has broken puzzles that are impossible to solve because this game wasn't adequately play-tested? Do you want to learn more about that juicy tidbit? Well, I'm more than happy to regale you with tales about why this game is straight-up BUSTED!

There Aren't A Lot Of Puzzles In Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller, But The Ones That Are Here Are AWFUL OR BROKEN!

When the puzzles in Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller work as intended and don't have a horrible bug or design flaw, they are overwhelmingly vanilla-ass password or cipher-based puzzles. Often, an NPC shouts a line or drops a note with clues on how to process computer code or shift alien scripts to translate them into discernable English. For example, when you break into the Federal Triangle, and your characters attempt to piece together why the current dictator decided to burn them, a critical data entry requires the password "Foggy Bottom," and a nearby note on a desk reads "ggyttom." That's fine and dandy, but there are also times when the game relies on esoteric riddles as the crux of its puzzles. On one occasion, you must rescue a freedom fighter from a demon torturing them in a music room. When you talk to them about how to proceed, they say, "Murder the dumb, torture the meek with the scent of death and the gnashing of teeth." That's your cue to have your character click panels on a musical device but only the silent ones. Unfortunately, that hint doesn't tell you the correct order, which is a problem. Also, the five muted keys are found on a 4x4 grid!

There are plenty of other occasions when the game needs to give you more information to reach its intended conclusions, but it doesn't. One that threw me for a loop was its final puzzle, wherein the game presents ten candles, and you need to light them in a specific order. That order is untold, and with ten candles, there are thousands of possible combinations to input. The password-based riddles also suffer from massive inconsistencies, and I must emphasize they are the lion's share of puzzles in the game. When inputting a password, you don't fan through a menu of possible options and instead need to type an answer into the game's parser. Using a parser isn't a weird choice in and of itself, considering Infocom was still making Zork games around the time of Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller. What drove me batty with this game is that sometimes the passwords are case-sensitive, and other times they aren't. And this issue doesn't necessarily stem from whether the password is based on a proper noun, as some passwords need sentence casing, others require proper casing, and some none at all.

When people give me a hard time that my adventure game blogs and videos occasionally use guides, I have to roll my eyes when I get to games like this. Plain and simple, you can only complete this game using a guide because several puzzles are broken. This statement is not hyperbole. The first example of a bug that shouldn't exist occurs shortly after your second visit to Hell. The game wants you to return to Mr. Beautiful's (i.e., Dennis Hopper) office and pick up a random pool cue. Next, you need to talk to a goon named Seceddine Marto, who gives you a hint indicating "R=23." Under normal circumstances, you would use this to apply to a series of phrases you earlier encountered to translate them into "Fruit Death," "Hell Road," and "Oil." This series of terms would, IN NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, inspire you to click on a jukebox and know to locate the albums or music groups named "Orange Martyrdom," "Damnation Avenue," and "Viscous Fluid" and select them in that order. Doing this action would NORMALLY allow you to enter their corresponding codes, E3, E8, and D9, into a computer to unlock the door to a secret room to receive a new device and continue the game. There's one problem. The programmer responsible for this puzzle spelled "Fruit Death" as "Friut Death" and "Oil" as "Oiv." The first of those spelling mistakes is no big deal, but the second one results in a nonsense word, and with hundreds of albums to select from, the puzzle quickly becomes impossible to solve. If your game relies on password-based puzzles, having game-breaking typos is an unconscionable error.

However, the most notorious mistake in this game happens when you reach "Hell's Schoolroom" near the end of the story. While there, a demonic schoolteacher demands that you complete a pop quiz where all of the questions are in a code. The exam topic is state capitols in the United States of America. Translating the questions is easy, but if you input the state capitals for their matching states, you'll STILL fail the puzzle! That's because the answers are programmed to be case-sensitive AND require the name of the city AND the name of the state they are located in. However, the teacher states in-game that they only want the name of the cities and for you to omit the names of their respective states! So, whoever programmed this puzzle did not talk to the person who wrote its directions and script. For example, after you translate the text in the quiz, the first question asks, "What is the capital of Iowa?" the correct answer in-game is "Des Moines Iowa." Still, if you type "Des Moines," which is the answer that follows the in-game directions, that is detected as an incorrect answer! That design flaw should have failed the game during the certification process and sent it back to the development team. However, with Take-Two still getting its feet wet, it's unlikely they had any formalized Q&A process within their ranks. Also, a fun fact for Borgmaster, there are no commas in answers for the MS-DOS version, but they are required with the 3DO port!

I Need To Talk To You About A Single Minigame

Complaining about a single minigame in a video game sounds petty and childish. And you know what? It is petty and childish, but I'm still going to do it! This single arcade game sequence took me damn near two hours to complete, and I'm still fuming about it. Near the middle of the game's second act, you learn about different factions unrelated to the religious dictatorship running the United States. One of these factions is a club of telepaths, another is addicted to neural implants, and another is obsessed with plastic surgery and body modification. You know, the usual stuff you see in a cyberpunk game! One of these factions tasks your intrepid duo with breaking into a morgue they suspect is improperly processing the bodies of recently departed group members. The issue is that the only entrance to this crematorium is guarded by a series of oscillating laser grids that will immediately alert the police. Oh, and the ground is mined, but the mines hop across the playing field you need to navigate while avoiding the laser grids! It's a goddamn NIGHTMARE!

The spawn positions of the mines are randomly generated each time you attempt this puzzle. The fact they move means that when you think you have found a safe place to try and gauge when to time your hops between the lasers, a mine could spawn underneath your character and immediately result in a "Game Over." The default camera angle could be better as it doesn't provide a great vantage point to determine where the laser grids bottom out. The edges between the puzzle's parts are hard to figure out, and the lighting makes seeing the mines a pain. Worse, the laser grid's speed makes it an almost impossible task to complete. And it's not as if they move in an easy-to-notice pattern where you can time yourself or do a countdown to finish it. I do not know how I got past this puzzle, but I did. If you want to see what this minigame looks like in motion, here's a quick ten-minute video clip of me explaining and showing what the game wants you to do.

This Story GOES PLACES!

Why would I play a questionable FMV-based adventure game that is not fun in any way, shape, or form? Well, for the same reasons I played MTV's Club Dead! Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller is a magical snapshot into 90s Americana. When you review it as a time capsule, you realize it is a work of art worthy of inclusion in the National Archives. The characters engage in a tech speak that crosses Star Trek's technobabble with leetspeak and forms a potent 90s-era linguistic baby. As you can already likely tell from my screenshots, this game is an artistic disaster, but it embodies a specific era of the 1990s to a T. And have I mentioned what some of the names are for the characters in this game? I don't think you're ready for this, but here's a list of some of the most notable, and be aware this is not a joke. These are actual names for NPCs in Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller!

• Solene Solux
• Scub Stevens
• Brett Carew
• Thomas Meaculp
• Wicked Stick
• Cyber Schmyber
• Drip (no last name)
• Electric Sex
• Barbara Bacchus
• Dr Clean (no period on the title)
• Aldous Xenon
• Derek Literati
• Senator Erin Burr
• Professor Coronary
• Suzy Toast
• Columbus Spatola
• Steele Jack
• Chastity Bene
• Milwaukee Jack
• Splits Magnola
• Eddy Commerce
• Grinda Dove
• Conklin Danforth
• Phyllis Dancing-till-Daybreak

But what's the story like in Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller? Well, it's a hot mess in the best way possible. The game starts with your two playable characters, Gideon Eshanti and Rachel Braque, being attacked by elite commandos from the current government of the United States of America, even though they are officers in the military in good standing. If you read the manual, you will discover during a previous election cycle, after a portal to Hell appeared and unleashed havoc on the world, American voters elected a far-right religious government that promised to guarantee people's safety. However, this government suspended all future elections and installed Imperator Solene Solux as ruler for life. Yeah, that part of the game hits differently these days. While our protagonists investigate why they have been burned, they encounter an underground resistance front trying to topple the current dictatorship and the forces of Hell. When Gideon and Rachel hack into the Pentagon and uncover files on how the government operates, they toss their lot in with the resistance group.

But what about the demons of Hell? Well, they have a pseudo-peace treaty with the far-right government of the USA. When someone breaks the puritanical rules and laws of the government, police from the dictatorship research the offending person's worst fear and then match them with a demon or devil that tortures them to their heart's delight. You also have monsters like Dennis Hopper's character, Mr. Beautiful, who carve out slices of the United States and act like gangsters protecting their turf. Or that's what we think at the start of the game. As you begin to investigate Hell and the government, your characters sign up to participate in an adult film directed by Asmodeus, who is styled to talk and look like Ron Jeremy. When an undercover marine from the resistance comes to the rescue and shoots Asmodeus, we find out he's an android. You then warp to a secret pocket dimension to talk to a man named "Deep Throat" because even in the 90s, it was cool to reference Watergate. Deep Throat reveals that Hell is a simulation operated by the far-right government to cement its power and justify subverting democracy. This plot twist is completely bananas. The demons scaring people into supporting the evil government, including Satan, are androids. How did the far-right nutjobs make this happen? Well, they blew up a big hole in the ground, claimed it to be Hell, and had all the demon androids ready to scare people into voting for them on standby!

There's a second plot twist almost as crazy as the one about Hell. As Gideon and Rachel try to investigate why the government wants to kill them, they notice that they mutter Latin phrases randomly or in their sleep. They find a leader of one of the factions in the world that can read Latin, leading them to an archive in the Pentagon. In this game, you hack and break into the Pentagon and Federal Triangle about four or five times, and it's no big deal. The future sure seems safer and more secure. Regardless, Gideon and Rachel find a record that explains that everyone on the scrub list, including themselves, were targets of an earlier government operation named "The Night of the Re-entombment." This operation snatched dozens of freedom fighters and then mindwiped them before redesigning their bodies and programming them to think they were law-abiding officers in the government. Despite early successes, the government fell into a Blade Runner issue of some early recipients breaking from their programming and causing chaos, so an order was sent to terminate everyone. I find it hilarious that the game says all this to you and then fobs it off almost immediately. Rachel declares that the report doesn't make sense and, if true, seems like a waste of time compared to simply killing them upon their first capture. Gideon ends up agreeing with her, and they shrug the entire matter off, and nothing more is said about the topic.

Then you fight the forces of Satan. Much like the earlier combat sequences, these boil down to skill checks wherein the game sees if you have all the materials in your inventory to beat a demon. If you do, you watch a cheap in-game action scene where the characters kill the monster, and if you don't, you get a "Game Over." The same thing happens when you fight Satan himself. You need an odd assortment of trinkets to beat him, and there's a fun puzzle where you need to write the words "God is dead" on a wall to summon him. After defeating the forces of Hell, Gideon and Rachel turn their attention to the evil dictatorship and try to hack into the server operating the androids to cause the program to break and reveal the ruse to everyone else. This event is the one time when your choice of who the primary character is plays a role in your playthrough as the volunteer to complete this task is the character you did not select, and after things don't pan out and Solene Solux breaks their mind, they die. With your remaining character, you break into the Pentagon and then fight Solene Solux in a fist fight which is the goofiest-looking thing in the world. Please don't take my word for it; here's an archive of me experiencing the end of this game!

This game is a rollercoaster, and you shouldn't play it. However, with Take-Two Interactive set to become one of the world's biggest independent video game companies, it's fun to look back at their rocky and wild start. It would be a licensing issue to bring these games back to the forefront, considering they all feature the likeness of huge names in the entertainment industry. Still, their trio of FMV adventure games (i.e., Hell, Ripper, and Black Dahlia) set them up for their meteoric rise to prominence, and they deserve more recognition than they presently have. At the very least, Take-Two should openly acknowledge that they would not exist without their early success in making these cheesy-ass adventure games. So, if anyone from Take-Two is reading this blog, I WANT YOU COWARDS TO ADMIT YOUR PAST! ACCEPT YOU MADE THIS GAME BEFORE TRICKING TEENS INTO SPENDING HUNDREDS ON NBA 2K LOOTBOXES! And one more time, here's the game's INCREDIBLE introductory cutscene!

If you enjoy this blog and would like to read my other adventure game retrospectives, here's a list of my previous episodes of this series:

• Episode 1: The Dig
• Episode 2: Atlantis: The Lost Tales
• Episode 3: Loom
• Episode 4: Drowned God
• Episode 5a: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis Part 1 & Episode 5b: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis - Part 2
• Episode 6: The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime
• Episode 7a: The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time (Part 1)& Episode 7b: The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time (Part 2)
• Episode 8a: The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time (Part 1) & Episode 8B: The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time (Part 2)
• Episode 9a: The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One [Part 1] & Episode 9b: The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One [Part 2]
• Episode 10: D (The Game)
• Episode 11a: The Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of Fate [Part 1]& Episode 11b: The Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of Fate [Part 2]
• Episode 12a: The Legend of Kyrandia - Book Three: Malcolm's Revenge [Part 1] & Episode 12b: The Legend of Kyrandia - Book Three: Malcolm's Revenge [Part 2]
• Episode 13: Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb
• Episode 14a: MTV's Club Dead [Part 1] & Episode 14b: MTV's Club Dead [Part 2]
• Episode 15: A.D. 2044

Preamble

I'm going to start things off with a hot take. I've never been the biggest fan of Full Throttle. I respect the game and LucasArts being a preeminent studio willing to think outside the box, but the game is nowhere near my top five or even top ten list of the best adventure games of all time, which is how some rank Full Throttle. Now, I know I have been on record as saying I was in "Team Sierra" when the "Golden Age of Adventure Games" was happening, but that's not to say that I am so oblivious to the gameplay advances and quality writing found from LucasArts during its glory days. Nonetheless, with Full Throttle, a bunch of niggling issues about it have always rubbed me the wrong way. Some appreciate it taking the risk of moving away from LucasArts's SCUMM engine, though Loom beat it by a handful of years. Nonetheless, the skull-based interface is just as obtuse as the SCUMM engine, with its disparate parts fiddly and annoying to click on. I love the game's aesthetics and sense of style. Still, with the scope of the game far more narrow than previous LucasArts titles that preceded it, the game lacks the depth you usually associate with classic adventure games from LucasArts.

However, the most fundamental issue with Full Throttle has always been one that even its more ardent fans have to concede. Just as the game starts to open up and get interesting, it ends. Full Throttle was lambasted even at the time of its release as being short, and while my advancing age has made me more open-minded to quick games, Full Throttle is one that still feels like it demands an extra hour or two. Worse, the entire back half of Full Throttle feels incomplete. The opening chapter at Melonweed bleeds character, but unfortunately, the handful of set pieces that follow it do not continue that tradition. The highway sequence, especially the part where you must collect different weapons, feels like filler. It also remains the worst-looking level with a disorienting parallax effect that remains terrible regardless of which version of the game you play. The arena is a quick, mindless puzzle with a souvenir stall and a terrible demolition derby sequence. The penultimate level at the Corley factory is the most annoying in the game and lacks environmental style and a sense of exploration.

However, to avoid anyone accusing me of dogpiling on Full Throttle, rest assured that I still think people should play it. No game has ever captured the mood and tone of Full Throttle in the nearly thirty years since its release, and while limited, it shares a unique and compelling enough world that is worth exploring if you have never played it. The game's production values and voice acting are still a gold standard for the genre. Likewise, with Full Throttle boiling out the SCUMM engine and featuring a brisk playtime, the barrier to entry is so low it's hard to advise anyone not to seek it out if they haven't done so already. The latter of those positives also make Full Throttle an excellent game to recommend to anyone interested in exploring retro or older point-and-click adventure games. I'd still stick with The Secret of Monkey Island as my top recommendation for adventure game newbies. Still, Full Throttle deserves to be in the conversation if someone you are shepherding looks at the number of verbs they need to process with SCUMM-based or parser-based games and becomes overwhelmed.

So I Played The Remaster, And We Need To Talk About That

Now that I have diffused the handful of you who may have wanted my head after my first hot take, I will kick the hornet's nest again. I'm not too fond of the look of the remastered versions of the classic LucasArts games. They are the definitive versions of their respective games, and a toggle allows you to switch between the original pixel-based graphics and the modern cel-shaded or digital paint-based ones. But HOT DAMN, I think the remastered versions of The Secret of Monkey Island and Full Throttle look like absolute garbage. With Full Throttle, the game's original shading and deep shadows get pulverized in the remaster, which immediately mutes many moody environments at the start and end of the game. Conversely, processing environmental clues and detecting objects and items you must collect on various screens is a thousand times easier in the remaster. However, I think there was a better middle ground that could have been attempted here, given how good modern pixel graphics have gotten in the indie game sphere of today. Call me old-fashioned, but the original graphics just look better than the smoother and brighter pastels in the remaster!

The Intro Cutscene In The Original Version	The Intro Cutscene In The Remaster

Mercifully, the act of playing Full Throttle Remastered is considerably better than it is with The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition. As many of you know, when you play the Special Edition of The Secret of Monkey Island, you must bring up a utility wheel that functions similarly to the SCUMM verb-based engine in the original. While this was done as a necessary compromise to get the game to work on consoles, it is a clunky and unenjoyable way to play the game and, in my case, is the primary reason why I played the game entirely on the retro setting. Because Full Throttle always had a radial UI system that guides your exploration of the world and its many objects, it fares considerably better than The Secret of Monkey Island. Also, Full Throttle Remastered makes a handful of puzzles and sequences markedly easier than they were in the original game. For example, the brick wall puzzle is far more doable as the brick you need to kick with Ben has a noticeable backlight that immediately gives it away. I'll make a special note when we get to other significantly easier puzzles, but rest assured, there aren't that many.

However, there's one last thing I must mention about Full Throttle Remastered that bothered me to no end. A LOT of people enjoy the director's commentary with these remasters, and there's no denying that Tim Schaffer and the cadre of people he recorded with are funny and great storytellers. However, Tim Schafer is full of himself in this specific director's commentary. In particular, there's a point near the end of the game where Schafer says he feels that the story of Full Throttle is "complete" and that a sequel never got traction with the original team. That's outright historical revisionism, as we know that the LucasArts of old put considerable time, money, and staffing into making a 3D sequel to Full Throttle. Full Throttle 2, or Full Throttle: Hell on Wheels, was in development for three years and even had teaser trailers hyping it up at E3. Suggesting that a sequel was never a serious idea is disrespectful to those who worked on that project, even if it got canceled and never saw the light of day. There was even that awkward moment when Duncan Jones tried to get social media to convince Disney to greenlight his idea for a Full Throttle Disney+ T.V. series. Tim Schaffer is wrong, but let's get into puzzles rather than another soapbox of mine.

Puzzle Rankings

Prologue & Melonweed

Getting Out of The Dumpster And Getting Ben's Keys - [Rating: 2/10] - Man, the start of this game sure is fantastic! After a series of cutscenes perfectly set up the story, our protagonist, Ben, ends up in a dumpster and needs to find his way out. You accomplish this by selecting the hatch to kick it open and then moving Ben to the right of the dumpster. When he enters the bar, he'll notice the bartender and need to be aggressive with his dialogue options to get the keys to his motorcycle back. It's a perfect tutorial that decouples you from any parser or SCUMM-based preconceptions you might have going into a classic LucasArts game. The only reason why I'm bumping this up by one extra point is because the dialogue system in Full Throttle can be a pain. If you fail a dialogue check, in some cases, like this one, you have to reselect the person you need to talk to and pick a different option a second or third time before you can continue with the story.

Your First Bike Fight - [Rating 3/10] - I know some people like the motorcycle combat in Full Throttle, but I'm not one of them. Mostly, they are quick and painless, with you always knowing what you need to do to get past these combat sequences. The fights are utterly mindless despite having a basic notion of rock-paper-scissors as you get further into the story. My issue is that it's an awful feeling when we get to that highway level, and you don't have the tools to beat the person you have been matched up against. Also, when it comes to your first fight, I always need to remember that you need to worry about your left and right movements before you start mashing away with your hits. I have consistently maintained that I think Full Throttle should automatically center you with your opponent before the combat begins, and as you take hits, then you worry about your movements. It's not impossible to figure out, but it plays like nothing else you've ever experienced in a LucasArts adventure game, and there are only a limited number of times when you interact with this combat system. It always takes time and practice to get accustomed to, which will likely be the case with most people playing Full Throttle for the first time. However, the game's limited use of this system makes it hard for new players to develop proficiency with its mechanics.

Getting Stuff From Todd's Trailer - [Rating For The Original Puzzle: 6/10; Rating For The Remastered Version: 5/10] - After driving on the highway for a bit, Ben's motorcycle will eventually lose its wheel and result in him getting into an accident. Luckily for Ben, a newspaper reporter named Miranda transports him to a repair shop, and the mechanic, Maureen (i.e., Mo), relays to Ben the tools and parts she needs to fix his bike. While the town of Melonweed presents itself as an open world, there is a correct order in which you explore the city. The first tool you can get, which happens to be a blow torch, comes from a nearby trailer occupied by a grumpy man named Todd. To "borrow" his torch, knock on the door of his trailer, and when he is near the entrance, kick it in to knock Todd out and be able to search his trailer for objects and quest items. From the first floor, you must collect a lockpick from a cabinet and a slab of meat from Todd's refrigerator. You can find a torch on a workbench when you use a lift to navigate to Todd's basement.

The timing for knocking Todd out isn't impossible to figure out, and if you elect to have Todd blow off Ben without kicking the door out, Ben will make a quip about needing to teach him some manners, which is your clue to get physical. I am less enthused about the lockpick and steak in the first level of the trailer. Again, the remaster is slightly more generous about making these objects visible to the player, but knowing you need to open the fridge errs close to hidden object gameplay. In the original game, finding the lockpick is a frustrating pixel hunt. I understand that was a standard gameplay hook in adventure games of this era; trust me, I know that. Nonetheless, for people playing Full Throttle for the first time, I can imagine the sequence of steps at Melonweed tripping them up. Also, making the walk of shame back to the trailer to get the steak or lockpick, if you forget to pick them up the first time, sucks.

Stealing Gas From The Cops [Rating For The Original Puzzle: 5/10; Rating For The Remastered Version: 6/10] - What drives me somewhat crazy is how the game automatically transports you whenever you pick up an item Mo needs. I feel the game should only send you to Mo once you have all three things she requires, but being reminded of what you need to do next after completing one part of this sequence is a gimmie to the player by the designers. A nearby petrol tower has the gas Mo needs to get Ben's bike running again. When Ben approaches the building, there's a gate with a lock he can quickly unlock using the lockpick he found in Todd's trailer. Also, don't forget to pick up that padlock before leaving the tower. Unfortunately, when Ben attempts to climb the tower to "borrow" some gas, it sets off an alarm that sends a police hovercraft his way. You must re-attempt this sequence if you are not quick about moving Ben to a shady spot behind a pillar. While Ben hides in the shadows, the police attempt to find him and leave their hovercraft unattended. This turn of events allows you to open the gas cap on their vehicle, and you can use a hose on the gas cap to funnel gas to the can after using the mouth portion of the skull icon on the hose.

The Gas Tower Hiding Spot In The Original	The Gas Tower Hiding Spot In the Remaster

This puzzle exemplifies how the remaster's art style can make solving puzzles harder. Because the shadows in the remaster are far less pronounced than in the original, it is more challenging to figure out the correct positioning of where Ben needs to be behind the pillar. In the original pixel-based art, the shading pops out far better, and the shadow effect while Ben hides is far more apparent. The part of this sequence involving the gas can is easy to figure out, and in fact, it reminded me of a similar puzzle in Fate of Atlantis, which predates this game by about three years. My only quibble is that this is one of the few times you must use the mouth/taste command to solve a puzzle. Otherwise, that command is reserved for providing flavor text when exploring new environments and is rarely necessary.

Getting The Forks From The Junkyard - [Rating: 3/10] -There's one last environment to explore in Melonweed before beating a hasty retreat: the junkyard. Unfortunately for Ben, the entrance to the junkyard is locked. However, he can get past this problem by using the padlock you remembered to pick up when first entering the gas tower to lock a sliding door, allowing Ben to climb a chain to get into the junkyard. In the center of the junkyard are a car magnet crane, a ton of derelict cars, and a vicious guard dog, which makes exploring the yard all but impossible. To deal with the dog, put the meat from Todd's fridge in a blue car below the magnet crane to trap the dog. Then, move Ben up a ladder to operate the crane to drag its magnet down three times and up three times. This action allows Ben to search a pile of rubble that contains the forks Mo needs to fix Ben's bike. This puzzle is a last "gear check" before you leave Melonweed, and as long as you have the tools necessary for success, I think it is a clever and fun sequence. My only complaint stems from the perspective the game forces you into when you operate the crane. It's a terrible angle that makes knowing where to move the magnet harder than it needs to be.

Getting Past The Police Blockade - [Rating: 2/10] - After Mo repairs Ben's bike, the game transitions to a cutscene that shows that a police blockade exists on the only exit out of Melonweed. To break this police entourage, return to the gas tower and have Ben touch the same ladder that triggered the alarm the last time he visited there. The police will then leave their blockade, and Ben automatically leaves town without additional input. There's a quick transitional sequence in which Ben returns to Mo's repair shop to find it abandoned. While there, he needs to check a pile of junk to figure out he needs to go to the long derelict Mink Ranch. I'm bumping this entire sequence up one extra point because backtracking to the tower is a weird design choice. Again, Full Throttle is guilty of a lot of copy-paste gameplay that its fans sometimes overlook, and this set piece is an early example.

Mink Ranch, The Highway, & Mine Road

This part of the game is STILL UGLY!

Investigating Mink Ranch - [Rating: 1/10] - Before Ben goes to Mink Ranch, he first needs to return to the Kickstand Bar to find Miranda, the reporter from earlier, to get a summary of what has happened to Ben's biker gang. The Polecats, Ben's pose, are being framed for the murder of Malcolm Corley by Adrian Ripburger as part of Ripburger's ploy to gain control of the legendary Corley Motors, the last domestic motorcycle manufacturer. Believing Ben when he says he's being set up, Miranda gives Ben a fake ID he needs to show a truck driver in the bar to get past another police blockade. Also, while in the bar, we watch a news report that relays the status of Ben's biker gang. When you arrive at the ranch, enter a cabin and locate some pictures to find clues about Mo's past. Next, move some pillows to find a tire iron that you then use to open a trunk underneath a bed. Everything here is straight and to the point. I'd hazard to call this more of an extended cutscene than anything else, but it fills in some gaps about the worldbuilding and main story and does so with the same spectacular voice acting that graced the start of the game. I have no complaints.

Dealing With Nestor and Bolus On The Highway - [Rating: 5/10] - Well, it's time for the worst part of Full Throttle: the highway. The highway is not the most challenging part of the game. Instead, I find it the most tedious and monotonous part, with you needing to repeatedly loop around the same dull highway sections before you find the area you want to explore. When you first drive through the highway, Ben stands next to a crashed semi-truck full of fertilizer. It would be best if you had Ben use the tire iron on a wheel on the semi-truck, which causes it to move slightly. Grab some of the green fertilizer, and upon using Ben's bike, you should trigger a short chase sequence with Nestor and Bolus, two of Ripburger's goons. The solution is to dart back to the overturned semi-truck, and if you remembered to use the tire iron on the truck, they crash their car. When you investigate the crash site, use the tire iron on the fender of the wrecked vehicle, and lift a hover unit.

This part is far from the worst segment of the highway section of the game. Nonetheless, the sequencing can get tricky, especially if you forget to turnabout to the semi-truck when Nestor and Bolus chase after Ben. There's no "fail state" to worry about in this game, but re-engaging with this puzzle is annoying because every part and level in the highway is miles away from the other parts. The entire road is stretched to a painful degree, and with it being the worst-looking part of the game, regardless of which version you decide to play, it's not exactly the most exciting level to deal with. If you miss one exit, looping around to get back to it results in aimless backtracking sessions that feel like a waste of time.

Getting The Necessary Weapons On The Highway - [Rating: 7/10] - This part of the game sucks. I was not too fond of it in the 90s and still hate it today. I'm sorry if you like the style and presentation of the motorcycle fights, but praying to the RNG goddess to be nice to you as you play one of the worst versions of rock-paper-scissors wasn't fun when this game first hit the shelves, and it still sucks today. When you explore one of the ends of the highway, you find out that the bridge to the Corley Motors factory is in ruins. When you explore one of the highway exits, Ben should come across the former leader of The Polecats, Father Torque, who gives you the rundown on what you need to do to get over the bridge. Ben will need a hover unit, booster pack, and ramp. Unfortunately, the ramp is currently in the secret lair of the Cavefish gang, and locating this lair requires a set of goggles from one of their gang members. However, Ben can't simply go up to a Cavefish gang member and hope to nab their goggles. Instead, he needs one of two possible weapons to position himself correctly to attack any given Cavefish gang member. With Full Throttle being an adventure game from the 90s, all this is easier said than done.

To get to the goggles, you need to find bikers with a mace, chain, booster pack, chainsaw, and board, hopefully in that order. As I suggested earlier, there's a light element of rock-paper-scissors with only the biker with the mace beatable with Ben's fists or starting tire iron, with the other bikers remaining unbeatable until you get additional weapons. The issue with this puzzle is immediate. The game randomly spawns the bikers Ben confronts, and it's very likely at the start of this sequence, he ends up in a fight he cannot win. The game also does not eliminate bikers you have already beaten from its rotation, and the jerk with the chain can steal weapons you try to use on him and are not careful. Of the many ways the remastered version of the game has been designed to make playing Full Throttle easier and more enjoyable, the fact it still fails to de-dupe the instancing of the bikers on the highway is aggravating. During this playthrough, I got the mace and chain without much difficulty, but the game spawned an unbeatable confrontation with a Cavefish biker three times in a row. On top of that, the timing and positioning with some of the biker fights, the Cavefish one being the most evident example, is far tighter than it needs to be, with you often needing to re-attempt the same battles more than once before you figure things out. There's the female biker with the chainsaw, whom you can only beat if you use the fertilizer on her, but you must be close enough to use this item. Overall, I'm not too fond of this part of the game. It's an incredibly tedious affair that overstays its welcome and becomes tiresome.

Finding And Robbing The Cavefish Lair - [Rating: 5/10] - When you finally manage to grab a pair of goggles, use them in Ben's inventory, and when an icon pops up on the screen, click it to enter the Cavefish lair. While in the cave, move right to find the ramp Father Torque mentioned. Have Ben hop off his bike and then have him hook the ramp to the back of his motorcycle by clicking on it. Move to the left once, but before attempting to exit the cave, have Ben leave his bike to unhook the ramp to block a set of reflectors which causes chasing Cavefish gang members to veer off course and crash into a cave wall. If you forget to do this step, Ben ends up out of the cave without the ramp and needs to find the lair using the goggles again. Even after all these years, the extra step with the reflectors always gets me. The point of the Cavefish using special visors to know which direction to turn is one Father Torque makes when you talk to him. Still, it is not a hint that immediately helps you figure out why Ben can't steal the ramp without redirecting the reflectors. Besides that point, this puzzle is relatively short and painless.

Jumping Over The Gorge - [Rating: 1/10] - When Ben leaves the cave, he automatically sets up the ramp to the correct position. However, Ben needs to learn how fast or what angle he needs to be at to make the jump successfully. To help him, find a plaque to review the items required to make the jump and when to time the booster pack. As long as you have the needed motorcycle upgrades, the game triggers the cutscene wherein Ben makes the jump without breaking a sweat. This puzzle is another gear check puzzle wherein the only thing preventing you from solving it is if you are missing something. If you examine the plaque and neglect a trinket, Ben will chime in what he needs and even posits where to find it. For that helpful game design, I'm giving this my lowest mark.

The Stadium & Corley Motors

Stealing Your First Bunny Toy And Getting Its Battery - [Rating: 3/10] - After Ben pilots his motorcycle over the gorge, he ends up in an arena nearby a canyon that he believes leads to the headquarters of Mo's biker gang. Unfortunately for Ben, the entrance to this lair appears to be mined. When you enter the stadium, you find an older man named Horace running a souvenir store. After some introductions, Horace welcomes Ben to try out one of his best-selling toys, a remote-controlled race car. When Ben uses this device, the batteries run out, and Horace turns to try and get his toy working. With his back turned, observe the stand and then have Ben steal one of the yellow rabbit toys for sale. Have Ben return to the canyon and use the toy rabbit on the ground, which causes it to trigger one of the land mines. Luckily for Ben, a battery survives the explosion, and he can pick that up and add it to his inventory. The signposting that the yellow rabbits are vital has always been poor, and the communication of the game's expectations for using them is even worse. Nonetheless, with this act limiting you to just a few explorable locations, it's pretty easy to put two and two together here.

Stealing A Box Of Bunny Toys And Using Them To Get Past The Minefield - [Rating: 5/10] - Return to the souvenir stand and use the battery on the spent toy car. Have Ben use the toy car to make it veer through the turnstile leading to the arena, which Horace notices and becomes upset about. When Horace runs after the toy car, have Ben steal a box of toy rabbits. Return to the canyon entrance again and use the box of toys on the minefield, but be very careful to pick the rabbits up before they trigger any of the landmines. The trick with this puzzle is to use the toy rabbits one at a time until they trip a landmine. After starting an explosion, move Ben to the location of the blast, and then use another toy until it triggers another landmine, and repeat this process until Ben ends up at the Vulture's hideout. Using too many of the toys inefficiently will result in you needing to steal an additional box. When I first played the game, I thought you just used the box, and if you got lucky, you would only need to use two or three of them before Ben got to the next cutscene. The fact you can do that feels like a red herring the programming team should have designed out of the game. That and frantically collecting the toy rabbits after using the box on the minefield doesn't feel good. Correspondingly, tone-wise, this puzzle feels entirely out of place.

The Demolition Derby Puzzle - [Rating: 5/10] - First, when Ben ends up in the Vulture's headquarters, have him call Mo "Diapered Dynamo" to prove he didn't kill Malcolm Corley. After an extended mission brief, I can only imagine was purposefully directed and written to resemble the Death Star mission brief during the climax of Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, Ben ends up in a demolition derby. As Mo's assistant explained earlier, Ben needs to use a ramp to bounce on top of an orange car to cause it to stall. Then he needs to push it to the right and over the ramp. The position of the orange vehicle causes Ben's car to land on top of a blue one, which results in a massive explosion. While Ben is enflamed, have him run to the box seats in the arena to cause the whole stadium to catch fire. To deal with Nestor and Bolus, hop on the orange car and when the blue car rams it, jump on it. When the blue car is positioned next to a fire pit, run into it to cause the two goons to drive into the fire. The game automatically triggers a new cutscene once the demolition derby is complete.

This statement will be another occasion where I diverge from the consensus on Full Throttle, but I HATE THIS SEQUENCE! It's so incredibly fiddly, as positioning the orange car is a complete pain in the ass. Bumping it to the bottom right corner of the arena and then through the ramp never feels good. There's also a slight timing element to when you should use the ramp, and missing your cue or window is endlessly frustrating. Worse, the game constantly interjects with cutaways taunting you to work quicker, despite there being no actual timer. Waiting for the various cars to get in the correct position during the second half of the puzzle is zero fun, though with this being more of a waiting game, it's far from being an unattainable chore.

The Brick Wall Puzzle In The Original	The Brick Wall Puzzle In The Remaster

The Brick Wall Puzzle [Rating For The Original Puzzle: 10/10; Rating For The Remastered Version: 5/10] - This is the "big one." When Full Throttle was first released, this one puzzle resulted in more people calling into the LucasArts hotline than any other part and was one of the most common calls made to the service short of The Dig and the stump disc swapping joke in The Secret of Monkey Island. It's also something the remaster deliberately makes considerably easier. Before we get to that, after the demolition derby, it is CRUCIAL you examine the floor of Mo's hideout to notice a six-digit code. Afterward, when Ben exits the hideout, he must find a secret entrance to the Corley Motors factory. To locate this tunnel, Ben must kick a brick wall in the right place AND at the right time. The rock he needs to kick is slightly above the left-most post where you start. To time things correctly, wait until all of the meters on the screen are no longer moving or shaking and kick the rock. Sounds easy, right? Well, it sure is in the remaster, but this task was downright impossible in the original game!

As I said earlier, the remaster has the common courtesy of having a backlight to the rock you need to kick. That alone cuts the difficulty of this puzzle in half. Finding the stone in the original game was nearly impossible because it perfectly blended into the brown wall texture. The other problem with this puzzle was that finding the correct position to kick the rock could take you so long that you could forget about the timing aspect of the puzzle. Mo's assistant makes one quip about needing to time Ben's kick to the rock, but that's far from enough piggybacking the game should have done before throwing this puzzle at you. Likewise, the remaster is far more generous about where you need to click because I remember feeling like the clickable area for the rock in the original game was five to ten pixels big. If ANY of you remember how bad this puzzle was in the original game, please, drop a comment so I don't feel like I am going senile.

Unlocking The Floor Safe [Rating: 4/10] - Remember that six-digit code I mentioned earlier? When Ben finally enters the Corley factory through the secret entrance, he'll quickly find a safe in a nearby desk. The combination to this safe is 154492, and after you input this code, Ben picks up a film reel and pass card. Normally, I have erred towards the generous side when it comes to password-based puzzles. Most of these are simple fetch quests as long as no dexterity-based minigames are involved. The issue with this puzzle is that there are a variety of six-digit codes in Mo's hideout, and none of them are especially well-labeled to suggest which one applies to the safe. It's also a slight leap of logic to return to the hideout to find this passcode, as your first reaction is to search the factory and desk for clues on how to open the safe. Nonetheless, opening the safe is straightforward once you figure things out.

Ruining Ripburger's Presentation - [Rating: 2/10] - After Ben nabs the film reel and keycard, he must find a hallway to the right of the desk. To enter, he needs to use the card on a card reader and then find a room with a projection system, and you can witness Ripburger droning about his vision for Corley Motors. While in this room, pull the motor lever and then the lamp lever twice to break the projector. If you are not quick enough, security will cause Ben to leave the room and result in you needing to try again. After Ripburger's speech comes to a standstill, exit the projector room and find a middle space that allows Ben to use photos that prove Ripburger murdered Malcolm Corley. Doing this causes a new cutscene to trigger, which transitions the game to a chase sequence on the highway. The timing element of using the lever on the lamp for the projector is a bit quirky, but for the most part, this is an easy task to pull off and is meant to transition the player to the game's climax. It's a fun and cinematic moment that quickly juxtaposes to the highlight of the whole game: the final chase sequence.

The Grand Finale

Getting Into The Airplane While Ripburger Pilots His Semi-Truck - [Rating: 3/10] - This is the best part of the game! While the game meanders a bit in the middle, its conclusion is fantastic, and the final battle against Ripburger has an almost Mad Max 2 vibe. When Ben ends up on Ripburger's semi-truck, click on a panel below a window and snatch Ripburger's cane the moment he sticks it out. Open a different panel below the window and use this cane on a fan; eventually, Ben will end up in an engine compartment. Use Ben's tire iron on a fuel line to cause Ripburger's truck to stop moving and end up inside Mo's airplane. Again, everything you need to do here is simple and more about providing a visual spectacle. You needing to mess around with the two panels, and the game calling back to the tire iron after an extended hiatus is slightly contrived. Nonetheless, with the final result as cinematic as it is, it's hard to complain.

Inputting The Correct Commands On The Airplane Monitor - [Rating: 2/10] - While inside the airplane, Ripburger turns on the defensive batteries on his truck to try and kill Ben and Mo. Deciding to boot Ripburger from the plane, one of Mo's gang members directs Ben to use the plane's control panel to push him out. You can accomplish this by climbing a ladder and then selecting the "Take-off," "Post Take-off," "Gear," and "Raise Gear" commands, and in that order. These commands cause Ripburger to jolt out of his truck and become stuck on one of its gun batteries. Getting to the panel is easy enough, and with only four possible commands on the monitor and their order being reasonably easy to figure out, it's hard to find too much fault in this puzzle.

Dropping Ripburger To His Death - [Rating: 3/10] - It's time to get Ripburger his just deserts! With him hanging onto a lone gun turret, enter the cockpit of his truck and then use a monitor there. After selecting the monitor, click "Main Menu," "Defense Menu," "Machine Guns," "Control," and finally, "System Off." With that, you drop Ripburger to his death, but if you want to see a slightly humorous optional scene consider selecting "Fire" before you drop Ripburger. Nevertheless, having one monitor-based puzzle was fine, but having two in a row feels like the design team ran out of ideas. I will also boost this score by one point compared to the previous one because there are more inputs to select, and their order isn't as apparent as in the last puzzle. But a minor complaint if I do say so myself.

Correctly Leaving The Airplane So Ben Doesn't Die - [Rating: 4/10] - Hey, will you look at that? You can die in this game! Most people I know screw this sequence up on their first try, and I'm one of them. When you reach the final puzzle in the game, Ben finds himself inside the airplane moments before it falls into a gorge. However, if you try to run out of the airplane, he'll shift the plane's balance resulting in his death. Instead, the game wants you to have Ben use his motorcycle to quickly drive out of the teetering plane before it falls over and explodes. This scene is excellent, but not having the bike visible enough on this final screen was the wrong call. Ben ducks away to the left as if he's Bugs Bunny putting on a new outfit to out-wit Elmer Fudd. I also feel like the point of Ben's bike being in the plane is not clear enough in general. As I said, this puzzle is designed in a way that guarantees you mess up at least once when playing the game your first time, and that doesn't sit well with me.

Should You Play Full Throttle? (Answer: Sure, Go For It!)

All my grousing aside, I still think people should give this game a shot if they haven't checked it out already. No other game looks and feels like Full Throttle and the creativity that guides its world design and setting is undeniable. And while the game has its share of gameplay-based hiccups here and there, the absence of the SCUMM system and its short playtime make this game an incredibly welcoming experience for adventure game newcomers. For those of you who played Full Throttle years ago and want to test your nostalgia, there's something to gain from buying the remaster. I strongly recommend you play the game with the original pixel-based art, but hearing Tim Schaffer chat with others who worked on the game is a delight, even if you must take his word with a grain of salt. Also, the skull-based interface holds up remarkably well, and the same applies to the game's voice acting.

I caution that you go into Full Throttle with realistic expectations. Its brief story has some lulls that cause it to feel like a partially completed idea. Some levels feel like "filler," and the game sports some downright infuriating puzzles. While I respect the people who present this game as an all-time highlight of LucasArts's "Golden Age," I cannot support that mindset. LucasArts had other titles that are more fully realized and played better than Full Throttle years before its release, and that's not up for dispute. When you compare this game to the peaks of Monkey Island, Fate of Atlantis, or even the Sam & Max series, Full Throttle feels like a fun but aberrant experiment one or two steps above Loom. I give it all the credit it deserves for doing something different and weaning LucasArts away from the SCUMM Engine, but that's where I stand when it comes to deliberating its historical legacy. It's a great game that gave Tim Schaffer the commercial industry clout he needed to go out and make bigger and better games.

Also, here's an archive of me playing Full Throttle live on Twitch!

A Brief Primer On Pendulo

Pendulo is a studio I never thought I would cover with my "Quest for the Worst Adventure Game" series on Giant Bomb, and there's no specific malice behind my reasoning. As I will discuss shortly, their games today have strayed away from traditional adventure game conventions to resemble more the dialogue-based action-adventure-oriented aspects of L.A. Noire or the latter titles from Telltale Games. Even if I was to go back to their earlier titles like the Runaway series, The Next Big Thing, or Yesterday, Pendulo's point-and-click interface always felt rudimentary, with their item combination puzzles rarely amounting to anything that required deep thought or constant head bashing. That said, The Next Big Thing and Yesterday continue to be two works of theirs that I will defend as worthwhile experiences, even if the latter can't quite stick its landing.

Suppose you haven't heard of Pendulo at all. In that case, you either have missed their games constantly being on sale for a buck whenever a Steam or GOG sale rolls around, though they are not nearly as egregious about that as Daedelic's Deponia games. Alternatively, like most, you might have stayed away from the turn-of-the-century European PC adventure games that were keeping the genre "alive" in the early 2000s. When people ask me what I mean by "modern European PC adventure game," I either point them at the Deponia series, The Runaway games, possibly Deck13's Jack Keane or Ankh series, or Frogwares' Sherlock Holmes games, and by then, they get the milieux. I'm talking about that weird gap when North American studios turned their back on the genre, but right before TellTale took the world by storm with The Walking Dead or Kickstarter made retro-styled point-and-click games cool again. It was a weird time, but what sometimes gets lost is how many of those interstitial games came from studios with storied histories and decades of experience.

Pendulo stands as "Spain's longest-running active game development company," and within the borders of its homeland, it has become a point of national pride. Nonetheless, the studio has weathered multiple cases of nearly filing for bankruptcy, even after putting out quality games and titles. For those unaware, while the original Runaway proved to be a monumental critical and financial success, after the game completed development, its producers had to pink slip virtually everyone, including themselves, after it finished production. Not only had the game's initial distributor filed for bankruptcy right as it was ready for an English release, but they had also struggled to transition from 2D pixel-based art to fully rendered 3D models without professional training. Pendulo started as a group of college friends who decided to make video games after graduating. Their team started with just a handful of personnel before expanding to the mid-thirties. The whole fiasco of how the first Runaway saved the studio has an essay on Wikipedia I strongly recommend you check out if you want to do a deep dive into the studio.

Pendulo has also made its fair share of mistakes, the clearest example being when it took five years to make Runaway 2. After having a bite at the critical success apple, they made the same mistake we have seen all too many times with smaller outfits. They tried to put too many recent gaming trends in their sequel in hopes of broadening their potential audience. It is a tale as old as time. Following the Runaway sequels, Pendulo hit it out of the park with The Next Big Thing. Still, the issue was that they misjudged the market and didn't realize that the demand for a comedic point-and-click adventure game with B-tier stylings and production values wasn't what it once was, and the game was a financial disaster. This was even after Pendulo cut its staff to fifteen people and limited the game's development time to 18 months. That means they learned from the experience and observed recent developments in the genre to plan their next title, right? Well, no. With Yesterday, Pendulo viewed the financial struggles of The Next Big Thing as an indictment against comedic point-and-click games and decided the solution was to make something gritty but keep the same game engine and core gameplay intact. Unsurprisingly, Yesterday also was a flop, and with two titles that did not perform, the studio was on the brink of failure before they decided to throw in the towel and leave the genre they had rested their laurels on for over twenty years.

But Wait, What About The Puzzles?

After Yesterday commercially failed, Pendulo went through a two-year period where they resorted to keeping the lights on by porting all of their games to mobile instead of spearheading new game projects. The strategy is incredibly similar to the "lost years" of Revolution Software, which courted a burgeoning network of fans through its Remastered Broken Sword titles and mobile ports. With Revolution, their new fanbase allowed them to fund new game ideas like Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse and Beyond a Steel Sky. Pendulo's mobile years were less successful, but they kept the studio alive during its darkest period. Still, they eventually came into contact with Microids, a French publisher with a penchant for buying the IP rights to classic PC adventure games from defunct European developers. They are also behind the modern Syberia games. The deal with Microids was simple, Pendulo didn't have to worry about its finances as long as Microids picked what games and IPs they worked on, and their first task was a video game adaptation of the European comic series, Blacksad.

Comic books are a black void in my nerd knowledge. As a result, I can't tell you if Blacksad: Under the Skin is an authentic representation of the source material. I thought the game's attempt to convey a noir-heavy story with dialogue choices and open-world exploration was incredibly awkward at times. Pendulo, by hook or by crook, made a narrative game driven by quick time events and BioWare-inspired dialogue choices. It's not a complete failure, but Pendulo was slightly out of their element as the stitching between major scenes and set pieces is virtually nonexistent. For example, after pursuing a lead for the story's core murder investigation, there was a moment when I was left with Blackksad and didn't know that to trigger the next cutscene, I needed to use a telephone. Instead, I spent about twenty minutes scouring for clues and talking to NPCs until I had exhausted their dialogue options. The game's piggybacking and signposting are nonexistent; in an open-world adventure game, that's a problem. There are also some highly awkward and out-of-place minigame and platforming sequences, but that's a problem with virtually every modern adventure game these days. Nonetheless, there are plenty of times when Pendulo works through its issues and struggles to convey some genuinely riveting scenes. For example, there's a scene at a high-stakes poker table where Blacksad needs to maintain his cover, and upon realizing a nearby opponent is cheating, the cheater gets called out and promptly popped in the gut with a sawed-off shotgun. It's a fantastic scene, and there are plenty of others like it sprinkled throughout the game!

Either by the cache of the IP in Europe or people looking to try something different, Blacksad did well enough for Microids to continue its strategic partnership with Pendulo. However, Microids' next task for Pendulo would be far more bizarre. Microids bought the rights to use director Alfred Hitchcock's "name and likeness" in 2018 for reasons no one fully understands. The studio tasked with utilizing this newly acquired IP was none other than Pendulo. Like Blacksad, Vertigo would sidestep familiar point-and-click gameplay in favor of simple object interactions and dialogue choices. And with this, we can now jump into our featured event. Nonetheless, there is something that I need you to understand before we jump into the insanity that is Alfred Hitchcock – Vertigo. As the previous two sections of this blog hopefully lay out, Pendulo was, and to a certain degree today, a studio in crisis. They relinquished their creative freedom for financial stability after the market rejected multiple projects they had spent years toiling away at. If you're still looking at this blog perplexed that there's a video game adaptation of Vertigo that came out in 2021, of all things, you need to understand that was likely not their call.

We Need To Talk About The Story In Alfred Hitchcock – Vertigo

First and foremost, this game is not a faithful reinterpretation of the film. It takes some of the film's key ideas and plot elements and then adds a few modern twists here and there. The game starts with a bang where the main character, author Ed Miller, emerges from the wreck of a car accident and then sees what he thinks to be his father about to leap to his death from the ledge of a nearby bridge. As he clambers to what he believes to be his father, he watches in horror as they jump to their death. During this sequence, you run into the awkward QTEs that litter the entire game and the shortcoming of its dialogue-based choices not feeling valuable. For example, you can choose to either sneak up on Miller's father or run after him, but both options do not impact the overall content of the scene. After the game cuts to black, we juxtapose to the second protagonist in the game, Dr. Lomas, who has been tasked by a friend of Miller to try and help him with his vertigo and psychological trauma. Miller claims the car accident killed his wife and child, but no records exist of these two individuals.

Dr. Lomas is the single most frustrating part of this game. She's an incredibly well-written character with impeccable voice acting, especially in the English translation. She's a strong, older African-American character that has the option of using their job as a clinical psychologist to make people stand down from their positions to listen to her, and I loved those options. Unfortunately, Pendulo's notions of modern cognitive behavior therapy include thinking that hypnosis is the most common form of treatment of PTSD, and Dr. Lomas delves into the tenuous world of dream analysis. Every possible trope you can think about a Hollywood-written psychologist or therapist is here. However, considering a core aspect of the game involves Dr. Lomas forcing Miller to relive suppressed memories, I don't know what more to expect. What I think is less forgivable is how the game has Dr. Lomas oscillate between providing therapy and collecting evidence to exonerate Miller from the current criminal investigation targeting him. In the first meeting between the two, Dr. Lomas asks Miller about the day of the accident instead of treating his vertigo, which was the whole point of her being assigned to Miller in the first place. Then, when you control Lomas, you fan through notes to create a Phoenix Wright-like dossier as if she is leading his defense case.

It is time to discuss flashbacks as a core storytelling device because that's 70% of this game! When Dr. Lomas turns on a panel to induce hypnosis in Miller, he recalls his first meeting with his presumed former wife, Faye. As he recalls, Miller was attempting to make headway with his latest novel when an injured hiker knocked on his door asking for help. She conveniently tells him that she doesn't want him to call for an ambulance because she doesn't have health insurance. She also immediately comes onto Miller, which doesn't render a red flag to him, and they have a one-night stand before he awakens to discover she's no longer beside him in bed post-coitus. I want to say the scene with the two coming closer to intimacy is creepy and incredibly awkward, and I don't ever want Pendulo to do another sex scene ever again. When the original recollection is over, we experience the main gameplay gimmick of Vertigo, reliving memories to remove Miller's gaslighting. Dr. Lomas directs Miller to return to memories, which involves you taking control of Miller and then exploring specific moments in the previous set piece to show the "true scene." In this case, we get early signs that Faye isn't the plucky kind-hearted youngster we thought she was.

After a quick scene wherein you review notes from the first session with Dr. Lomas, we transition to the game's THIRD PROTAGONIST! THIS GAME HAS THREE DRIVING CHARACTER STORIES, which it introduces within the first hour! Our third character is Sheriff Reyes, who enters what appears to be a long-derelict farm with a poorly attended horse and moldy food festering on a dining table. Reyes knew the house's owners personally, as they are the aunt and uncle of his partner, and is investigating the premises after getting a tip of possible foul play. As he enters the building's basement, he discovers the corpse of an older white male with a gunshot wound to the head. We then jump cut to Dr. Lomas as she starts her second session with Miller, and this time, we get a flashback to his childhood. I have no idea who voiced the kid in this game, but they did a great job. The conceit with the flashbacks to Miller's childhood is that he enjoys living in fantasies, with pirates being his childhood fixation. There's a fun bit wherein he hops in and out of frame to pretend to be his imaginary friend, and the way the game animates and transitions to make way for his imaginary playground is the single strongest part of the game, narratively speaking.

I also found the subplot involving Miller's traumatic childhood to be evocative. As you might expect, our initial memories about Miller's childhood are largely rosy and paint a positive light on Miller's father. When we relive those memories, we discover that Miller's father was an alcoholic, and his mother was planning to leave him after she conceived a second child. The issue is that it was a revelatory moment the first time, but the game makes you do this same song and dance three more times, wherein you get a fun little scene with Miller being a kid and going on adventures, and we need to bring Miller back to Earth that he was a victim of child abuse. For example, there's a scene wherein his father drunkenly calls him worthless and doomed to be a failure. And these scenes aren't exactly quick. The first takes about thirty minutes, the second twenty, and the final two about ten to twelve, respectively. Pendulo had an exciting premise and ran it directly into the ground with repetition and what I can only call "padding." It's wild to think, but this game is about twenty hours long, and it would have been far better if it was half that amount.

We Need To Talk About The Plot Twist

After another quick interstitial moment wherein Dr. Lomas reviews her notes from her session with Miller, we transition back to Sherrif Reyes. Reyes finds incriminating evidence, such as a handgun and bottle of whiskey, in the glove box of Miller's recently crashed car. The game then jumps back to Lomas about to start another session with Miller, and this time she asks him to recall the car accident that killed his mother and younger sibling. The original memory involves Miller's father attempting to save him after his car's tire pops, and it teeters on the edge of a cliff before falling, taking Miller's mother and baby sister. The real dream reveals that Miller's father deliberately crashed the car and pushed it over the ridge to prevent his mother from leaving him with the kids.

After achieving this revelation, the sheriff bursts into the scene and claims Miller is the lead suspect in the murder of Samuel Franklin, the dead farmer in the basement. The sheriff attempts to interrogate Miller but makes little headway and storms out shortly after. When Dr. Lomas returns to her hotel room, the sheriff appears at her door, and it is here that we get another sub-plot. Sheriff Reyes likes strong-willed women and is falling in love with Dr. Lomas. Yup, that's something that happens in this game. Suppose you think it represents a massive conflict of interest on Dr. Lomas' part to date the person seeking to throw her patient into jail. In that case, you have to understand that while her professional life is in order, her personal life is a mess, and she's 100% down to date an older man that understands her for who she is and respects her opinion. That may make sense to you on paper, but it's a mess mechanically and narratively. The two are in the middle of a murder investigation, and part of what you do with them is go on dates. You do this two more times!

Oh, and Reyes is the person that was having an extramarital affair with Miller's mother and was the father of Miller's younger sister before her death. There's even a scene where Reyes reveals the scars on his face come from a botched suicide attempt, and instead of viewing all of this as problematic, Lomas canonically agrees to a second date. But that's not the plot twist I'm hinting at here. After Reyes and Lomas engage in their little social, the game transitions to a short gameplay session where we control Faye, Miller's presumed missing wife. During this sequence, we discover that she deliberately injured her ankle to get into Miller's house and had a complex scheme to get into his pants, including lacing a glass of wine with boner pills. In the next scene, she comes up to Miller's door with a baby, and Miller accepts them into his life without asking a question! I have no idea why Pendulo thought it was a good idea to reveal to the player that Faye is a femme fatale and an unreliable character less than halfway into the story. I understand that the movie reveals that Judy Barton/Madeleine Elster is not the character we thought she was, but that reveal happens in the film's climax. In this case, it is PAINFUL needing to go through long investigation scenes with Reyes and Lomas when you already know the answer and are simply waiting for them to connect the dots.

While Faye lived in a guest room with Miller's child, we discover that she was drugging Miller to induce vertigo and sleepless nights so she could dress up as Miller's mother and attempt to haunt him in his sleep. For what we presume to be months, she's been lording over him, telling him to kill himself and asking him, "Why did you do it? Why did you kill your wife and child?" Now, you might be wondering why she's doing this. Well, it turns out that when Miller first got into writing, his manager was Faye's adoptive father. Being mentally unstable, Faye perceived Miller as taking her father's attention away from her. So, many years ago, she tried to frame Miller for pedophilia by uploading compromising pictures of herself on his phone while dressed as a schoolgirl. She gained access to his cellphone after drugging him, but the subsequent police investigation uncovered the truth and found Faye to be the one that staged the entire thing. In response, Faye's adoptive father decided to have her committed to a psychiatric ward. So, yeah, a core part of the story involves a false rape accusation. OH, BUT IT GETS WORSE!

Dr. Lomas suspects there's something more to the bridge and decides to hire a drone pilot to investigate parts that the police investigation may have missed. By the way, this scene is after the nephew of the murdered farmer stormed Miller's house on the verge of murdering him. While using the drone, she finds a backpack, costumes, and a bungee cord, which proves that the scene Miller saw on the bridge at the time of his accident was staged by Faye. On top of that, they even find her body when they notice a cropping of damaged and bent trees in the distance. After Reyes and Lomas review clues and evidence, they learn about a trucker who assisted Faye in setting up Miller's car accident and get to see the entire scene as it happened. Faye dressed up as Miller's father and jumped off the same bridge that took the life of his mother and little sister in hopes of inducing Miller into killing himself. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! Well, you see, Faye isn't Faye.

Faye is Veronica Carrigan. You may recall that point when I said that her adoptive father was Miller's former publicist and manager, and he had her committed when she falsely tried to accuse Miller of sexual exploitation. So, how did she get out? Well, first, Veronica made friends with her roommate at the psychiatric hospital, knowing her "friend," Lisa, was only a few days removed from being released. After gaining Lisa's trust, she manipulates her into celebrating her upcoming release on the hospital rooftop over a bottle of vodka. They also decide to swap clothes as a sign of their friendship. After getting Lisa incredibly drunk, Veronica/Faye has Lisa walk on the edge of the roof. Then she pushes her over so that she can assume her identity to secure her release from the hospital, somehow guaranteeing the body on the ground would be identified as Veronica. Apparently, this occurs in a world where DNA evidence doesn't exist, and performing autopsies is unheard of. Nonetheless, Veronica's scheme somehow works, and she assumes the identity of Lisa for the rest of her life until dying at the bridge. Dr. Lomas correctly identifies the dead body below the bridge as Veronica because it has a scar on her bottom. We learn that this scar originates from when Veronica deliberately sat on broken glass to get her babysitter fired so she could spend more time with her adoptive father. Likewise, Faye/Veronica/Lisa seemingly spent ten-plus years planning her scheme to get revenge on Miller while being raised by a family that never noticed she wasn't their daughter.

Oh My God, We Need To Talk About The Endings

So, the game's over, right? We know why Faye/Veronica/Lisa wanted to ruin Miller's life and how the car accident was a setup. Well, there's just one problem, the game also decides to resolve all of its sub-plots AFTER it gives you the conclusion to its main story! That's right; the game persists for five hours after settling its core story! The first issue is the location of the dead farmer's wife and Miller's daughter. But before we can solve that mystery, Miller decides to conquer his vertigo by defeating a mental representation of his drunk father, which you beat by clicking the correct dialogue choices when they appear. After vanquishing this specter, Miller confronts his aunt, whom we discover is responsible for gaslighting him into thinking he had a good childhood. She proceeds to disappear for the rest of the game after she admits her brother was a bastard.

After that scene, Miller recalls an earlier conversation with Samuel Franklin, the man that got shot, about how he has a bomb shelter hidden underneath his farm. This clue inspires Miller to head for the farm. Unfortunately, as he attempts to find the bunker, Adam Franklin, Reyes' partner and the nephew of the murdered farmer, attacks him and is convinced that Miller is the man who murdered his uncle, even though all of the evidence we have collected proves it was Faye/Veronica/Lisa. Miller convinces Adam that he can prove his aunt is still alive by locating a bunker on the farm. After finding the bunker, Reyes arrives to help the two, but instead of finding a happy Aunt Esther, they see her brandishing a knife and covered in blood. Delirious, she attempts to kill everyone around her before running to the roof of the barn, which I think is one of the few visual callbacks to the movie. When Miller attempts to comfort Esther on the rooftop, there's a moment when his legs give out, and it mimics one of the most iconic scenes in the film. Nonetheless, after you click the correct options to break Aunt Esther from her stupor, she returns to her senses and surrenders the baby to Miller.

Aunt Esther recalls what happened when Faye/Veronica/Lisa stormed her home and held her and her husband at gunpoint before murdering her husband. With that plot point resolved, the game transitions to Miller busy typing away on his computer, with his vertigo and writer's block entirely beneath him, while his publicist, who is now his father-in-law, is caring for his child in the background and calling for him to take some time from his work to play with his child. The last these two met in person, the other charged the other with rape, but now the two get along perfectly and have joint custody of the baby that only exists because someone wanted to drive Miller to suicide. Likewise, despite discovering that his happy childhood was the byproduct of decades of gaslighting, Miller has no signs of PTSD or long-term psychological trauma.

Oh, and Reyes and Lomas decide to become a couple if you allow them to. They fell in love during a murder investigation where Dr. Lomas decided to make a world record of how many doctor-patient confidentiality rules a single person could break in a week. Still, before the two can officially tie the knot, Lomas drops the whopper that Faye/Veronica/Lisa was sexually molested by her biological father before being put into foster care. This plot development is a one-off line that Lomas makes before kissing Reyes. It's a line the game fobs off minutes after it shares it. I have no words.

Finally, as one last Parthian Shot, the game gives you an idea of what happened to Faye/Veronica/Lisa on the bridge. After pulling off the initial jump from the bridge, she attempted to climb down the bridge safely. However, as she was packing her things, Miller's pet cat, a recipient of Veronica's torture throughout the game, jumps on her back before leaping off her and back on the bridge. The act causes Veronica to become confused and results in her falling to her death, and there's even a moment where you can pick a dialogue option for Veronica to compliment the cat for its scheme. It's the best scene in the entire game, and it's not even a contest.

Regrettably, the game ends with an audio-only flashback to Faye recalling when she got sexually molested by her biological father. This game makes you listen to simulated child abuse. I'm not lying. That's a thing Pendulo put in this game, and you have to let it happen. You can't skip it.

Don't play this game.

Author's Note: SPOILER WARNING! This is a two-part series looking at Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin. While this episode primarily discusses mechanics and gameplay, it is not entirely free from story spoilers. You have been warned.

Also, if you enjoyed this episode, here's a directory to the first episodes of every Final Fantasy game I have covered on this site thus far:

• Part 1 of Final Fantasy I series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy II series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy V series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy VI series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy VII series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy VIII series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy IX series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy X series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy X-2 series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy XI series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy XII series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy XIII series
• Part 1 of Final Fantasy XIII-2 series
• Part 1 of Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII series

Preamble: I Hate Souls Games! There, I Said It!

Stop the press, people are talking about Final Fantasy games, and it's not entirely negative! Many of you are playing and enjoying Final Fantasy XVI and waiting in anticipation for more details about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Oh, and Final Fantasy XIV continues to deliver life-long experiences every day! Undoubtedly, it's an excellent time to be a fan of the series, as the present and future sure seems bright. However, instead of tapping into the games leading the zeitgeist surrounding the newfound enthusiasm for the series, I am flipping things back to something from last year: Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin! It's a game I mentioned in passing during my 2022 GOTY blog as being the "Most 'Mid' Thing I Enjoyed" last year. As I said then, the game feels like a platypus. It simply should not exist, and yet it does. It has one of the most rewarding job systems to grace the Souls-like genre while having the worst inventory and smithy mechanics I have ever seen. It's an oddball, but that makes it endearing.

Unfortunately, some people took that to mean that I was not too fond of the game or even hated it when I thought I made it clear that was not the case. Stranger of Paradise is an incredibly messy and inconsistent game that works despite its problems. However, when you compare its highest of highs to its technical rough edges, bizarre presentation, and mid-game slog, I think it all averages out to a game that is perfectly serviceable to die-hard fans of Final Fantasy looking for a goofy Tetsuya Nomura side hustle and nothing more. Souls-like purists will likely get annoyed by its lack of depth or thematic inconsistency unless they turn their brains off to accept its schlock. While it gets close to being one of the better "baby's first Souls-like," several design quibbles prevent it from fully earning that title. The game came out the same year as Elden Ring, and while I will never call it a better game in a million years, I ended up having more fun with Stranger of Paradise than Elden Ring. Undoubtedly, it made me smile and laugh more, and considering I went into it thinking I would hate it, there's no denying my final assessment is anything but negative.

Yet, I should come clean about my feelings regarding Souls games: I don't like them. My dislike of From's Souls series is one of four video game "hot takes" that I know immediately disqualifies me from ever having a job covering video games professionally. The other three are:

1. I'm not fond of Castlevania or Metroid games because I have a personal aversion to backtracking as a core mechanic.
2. Final Fantasy Tactics is a mediocre tactic and strategy game carried by an excellent story.
3. Fire Emblem got ruined during the handheld era when it prioritized the visual novel aspects over tactical strategy, and even Three Houses only partially eliminated the waifu garbage that makes Fates completely intolerable.

When it comes to From and their current approach to game design. It's okay if everything I am about to say doesn't matter or detract from your ability to enjoy their works, especially Bloodborne or Elden Ring. You do you. Nonetheless, I'm not waiting for them to give a shit about basic quality-of-life designs in their games. It's obnoxious that, to this day, From's narrative storytelling and worldbuilding rely on you reading in-game tomes and descriptions for weapons. I'm done with the clipping issues in their games, especially when a gigantic golem boss swings a massive axe, and it clips through my cover and kills me. They have had over a decade to fix their collision detection issues and make weapons or actions not cut through parts of the environment. Their platforming has always been awful, yet they continue to put in the most frustrating and harebrained platforming sequences into their games. Those leaps of fate you need to take where you don't know if you are jumping into immediate death or entering a new location weren't even cute the first time, and they have aged as finely as a carton of milk. Finally, am I the asshole for wanting them to make a camera that can snap into place correctly whenever I fight a large-scale boss? Why the HELL do From cameras still struggle to show you more than 50% of the gigantic boss character models? That shit was a problem in Kings Field, and it still drives me up the wall in Elden Ring!

It's perfectly okay if none of that matters to you. You'll never see me, with my biases, come out and pen massive essays on why people are wrong to name Elden Ring their Game of the Year or why From is "ruining video games!" I have reached that stage in my life where I know what I like and can understand that not everyone will agree with me, and that's why the video game industry we live in today is so interesting. With the barriers to entry at an all-time low, there's something on Steam, Humble Bundle, the Xbox Series S/X, the PS5, the Switch, or itch for everyone! Oh, wait, what am I talking about? Did I lose my train of thought while grousing about From Software? Damn, I'm sorry about that. This blog is supposed to be about Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin. Without further ado, let's jump into it.

Part 1: Man, The Start Of This Game Sure Is Something!

The staff working on Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin deserve massive commendations for making a game that knows what it is and what it wants to do. That much is certain when you start its opening salvo of cinematics and set pieces. Never before have I seen a Final Fantasy title so perfectly communicate its tone and mood, since maybe Final Fantasy IX, as succinctly as Stranger of Paradise. The minute you boot up a new game, you watch a roughly two-minute cutscene in which Garland rips through the halls of the royal palace of Corneria as they snatch a princess. The viscera and frightened looks of the soldiers attempting to block his progress perfectly relay what Nomura meant when he said he wanted to make a game about an angry man. And then the game drops you into a boss battle against Tiamat, with two supporting companions, with zero context on what's happening or who any of the characters are that you are controlling. It's utterly strange, but given the game promises to provide a "strange" journey, it is a fitting introduction.

Unfortunately, that tutorial battle with Tiamat does not teach you the core mechanics well. I know Team Ninja has done the "drop the player into the middle of a boss battle to learn the ropes" trope before, but it doesn't work here for various reasons. First, with the appeal of Stranger of Paradise being your investment in a wide breadth of jobs and their respective tech trees, you are in no position to figure out which playstyles work best for you. Likewise, with the starting tutorial involving a boss, you suddenly have to worry about high-stakes, game-over-inducing attacks, which you are equally unprepared for at this stage. Yes, the context and animation cues on when to pull off the special moves to end this battle are not impossible to figure out, but there's enough nuance to the combat of Stranger of Paradise that this does a horrible disservice to the game. The tutorial environment in which you fight an endless stream of goblins as you perform a series of class-specific moves works far better than this sudden confrontation. And before you counter that this is a ridiculous suggestion, that field tutorial level, with a series of combat trials for the Warrior class, is the next goddamn scene, so I think I'm not off base in saying the order of levels here is weird.

Speaking of sudden and disorienting juxtapositions, after you whittle away at Tiamat's health bar until it reaches the halfway point, the game smash cuts to black and then transitions to Jack in an empty field, and it is here we get the legendary scene where he listens to Frank Sinatra's "My Way." We still need to find out who Jack is, but instead, we have a contextless cutscene in which he's faffing around in a field with none of the other characters we saw in the two last scenes. One quick problem, if you played the demo when this game was officially announced, you know this scene uses the closest thing there is to a "Fair Use" sampling of Frank Sinatra. For reasons unknown to man, Square and Team Ninja only sample approximately twenty-ish seconds of the song and don't even get to its refrain, "I did it my way!" That was the case in the demo, and it's still the case in the game's full release, and as a result, the scene feels broken. On top of that, after completing the combat trials in the field, the game abruptly jumps to a new environment in which the party, all together now, talks about needing to help the King of Corneria before you seek audience with him. However, instead of that task being the next time you give the combat a whirl, the game cuts to the characters on a boat having completed whatever they set out to do. You see them beaten up and bruised and never learn what they did or fought.

Upon their return, they meet with the King of Corneria and get a basic explanation about Garland and the forces of Chaos running amock in the wildlands surrounding the kingdom. In a brief scene after that, you get a hint of a relationship between the princess and Jack. Why does the princess like Jack? I don't know, and the entire prologue feels like a fever dream. Maybe if the game had stayed with Jack in the field for a bit longer with the full version of "My Way," or there was an interstitial combat sequence wherein you fight a goblin king after boarding the boat the first time, this would all work better. However, that's not the case, and what you have is a game that reeks of "Peak Nomura" in that it is far more interested in giving you fanciful epic set pieces with exquisitely dressed characters than carefully stitched introductory characterization sequences. Admittedly, this game shows you its cards within the first hour, whereas other Nomura-led projects, especially the Kingdom Hearts games, take whole acts and upwards of tens of hours to relay even a smidge of what you should expect. Stranger of Paradise is a mess before you start your first "real" mission, and that's an accomplishment if I do say so myself.

This game has three listed directors, none of which are Nomura, but you wouldn't know it while playing it. The story's complete lack of a filter, reliance on inopportune lore dumps, and lack of context-building lead me to believe that the lead writer isn't the only carryover from the Kingdom Hearts team. However, all of the checks and balances that were in place to prevent this game from being a nightmare either did not function or were so preoccupied with other obligations that they couldn't stop the Kingdom Hearts schlock from bleeding into this project, and I think we are all the better for it. Again, the only time things break for me is the utter lack of stitching between the many disparate set pieces you interact with and the long pauses between any progress with the main plot or Jack's backstory. If ever there was a game that warranted the "Start-Stop Storytelling" label, it's this one. And yet, when you get to those punctuated story moments, they are incredible, and the odd and unevenness of its structure end up making it more unique. Can you think of any modern video game that burns through four CG cinematics, a licensed song from Frank Sinatra, and a boss battle that is a baptism by fire in a single hour? I think not!

Part 2: You Sure Can Tell This Was Never A Top Priority!

Discussing some of the context surrounding Stranger of Paradise's creation seems appropriate. The game stands as a reimagining of the first Final Fantasy game. It is a collaboration between Square-Enix, particularly Tetsuya Nomura, and Team Ninja, a division of Koei Tecmo. This project is neither the first nor the last collaboration between the two, as Team Ninja also led the development of Dissidia Final Fantasy NT and Dissidia: Final Fantasy Opera Omnia. While Team Ninja took the lion's share of the programming and design of the game, the direction was a collaborative effort with Square-Enix's Daisuke Inoue, the lead battle design planner of the Final Fantasy XIII series, working alongside Team Ninja's Hiroya Usuda and Nobumichi Kumabe. Kazushige Nojima, the lead behind Advent Children, Crisis Core, Final Fantasy X, and the Kingdom Hearts franchise, assumes most of the writing duties, but more on him in the next episode. The game was a passion project of Tetsuya Nomura, and he, predictably, became the game's lead character designer and creative producer after it finally got the green light. If that sounds like too many names to process, consider the game sports three composers, directors, and producers. This game should suffer from having too many cooks in the kitchen, and while it does, it's not to the extent I would have predicted.

When Nomura first conceived the game following the release of Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy, Team Ninja was in a sizable transitional period. They were less than five years removed from founder Tomonobu Itagaki getting kicked out of Koei Tecmo following sexual assault allegations. Also happening was Dead or Alive 5's cratering with the fighting game community as well as the problematic development cycles and releases of Ninja Gaiden 3 and Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z. To call Nioh a "course correction" for the studio is an understatement. Before Nioh, it was shedding talent following every game release and had a revolving door of leaders. This fact is incredible when you consider Nioh fell into considerable development hell after being one of the earliest games demoed for the PS3 in 2004. The eventual leader that strongarmed the studio and Nioh to the finish line was Yosuke Hayashi, who would eventually get a promotion to Executive Producer following Nioh 2. Nonetheless, before Nioh came out, to support its development and completion, Hayashi changed the core business strategy of Team Ninja to pivot away from its portfolio of original IPs to contract work and collaborations.

This strategy is far from alien, even in Japan, with PlatinumGames being one of the clearest examples of it put to good use. However, there's no denying that Team Ninja is guilty of one of Platinum's common pitfalls with this project direction style. The goal is always to have a big project funded by all your contract-based projects, and the arrangements come in as quickly and plentiful as possible. For Platinum, it is the Bayonetta franchise, whereas, for Team Ninja, it is Nioh and Wo Long. Nevertheless, none of this mercenary work is ever allowed to rise above a certain level of quality, and there's no denying that you can tell which contracts were better funded than others. For every gem like Astral Chain or Fire Emblem Warriors, you get something like The Legend of Korra or Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order. In the case of Stranger of Paradise, the project is caught somewhere in the middle of Team Ninja's quality assurance. The input from Square-Enix assisted them in devising a wholly novel and pleasurable job system. Still, there's no denying that it never got the funding or time to transform into something that felt like a proper spin-off in the Final Fantasy series. Say what you will about Dirge or Crisis Core, but you can tell those games were valued by more than a small slice of Square-Enix internal.

While I can't deny being impressed by some of Stranger of Paradise's levels or re-imaginings of legacy backdrops, the game is sometimes downright ugly. While Jack's grimace certainly seems well-animated, all of the NPCs come across as auto-generated models you'd get from a default license with Unreal Engine. The jobs are fun, but you quickly notice how most are permutations of a core set of five, and as such, end up seeing the same finishing moves and animations more than you'd like. Compounding that problem is the lack of enemy variety, another arrant reflection of the game's lack of budget and development time. Every new environment introduces one to two enemy types after the first two levels. However, you still see enemies from the game's first act throughout your adventure with Jack, even into the game's penultimate level. The side quest system feels like a complete afterthought, and the same sentiment applies to the UI/UX of the menu-based overworld. The option to interact with NPCs to learn about their daily goings-on is one of the most bizarre inclusions in the game. Then there are the technical issues! Despite not being a beauty, the game struggles when you get into some more complex and particle-based attacks or finishers. Also, some of the more enormous bosses not only have derpy animations and AI but cause the game to dip well below 30 FPS.

All of this is not entirely Team Ninja's fault. As you play Stranger of Paradise, you understand that the game was a fun side-project, not a priority, even for Square-Enix. Nomura loved the damn thing, but even his clout only gave the game a mid-tier budget and about two years to bake in the oven. Somewhat hilariously, while some like to call the game "Nomura's baby," with the "story of an angry man" quote as evidence, all signs point to him having an incredibly tight leash. When Square-Enix first announced the game, Jack being Garland was a closely guarded secret, but when everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, called it, Nomura's higher-up convinced him to rewrite that plot element. When the game's first playable demo launched and people got their asses handed to themselves, we didn't see the typical heel digging we generally see from him. Instead, they rebalanced abilities, classes, and companion commands to make everything more manageable. The big shots at Square-Enix wanted this game's development to cycle quickly before it bled money. Stranger of Paradise was undoubtedly a "team effort," but one no one working on it wanted to last more than a few years.

Tangent: THE PC PORT OF THIS GAME IS STILL ATROCIOUS!

Okay, let's say you read this mini-series for Stranger of Paradise and come away confident you want to try it. My advice is to avoid the game's PC version like the plague. While I know the console versions have their share of issues and lack mod support, the PC port is so compromised I have difficulty recommending it under any circumstances. For those who have played the game, be mindful that whatever framerate issues you encountered on PS5 or Xbox Series X are significantly worse on PC. There's constant hitching with every finisher, and some environments are so poorly optimized the game can never go above thirty frames per second. Sure, the godawful menu for the inventory system, which we will discuss shortly, is slightly better on PC. Still, the menu generally reeks of something designed for a console set-up and a living room television, as the real estate on a computer monitor feels incredibly cramped and busy, and I played it on a 27-inch monitor.

The reason for these technical issues is comical. With the PC version, sleuthing players discovered that the game has a multitude of unoptimized shaders and textures, which lead to some characters, NPCs, and enemies having approximately or more than 30 MB of geometry. In the non-patched version, you could be dealing with a single enemy with 300,000 unoptimized polygons, with a party of three having twice as much each. The game's console versions received immediate patches to address this problem, whereas the PC port had to wait months before seeing any improvements. To add insult to injury, some patches and updates for the PC version are less comprehensive than the console versions. The bitrate on the pre-rendered cutscenes was partially fixed on PS5 and Xbox shortly after its release, while that remains a problem on PC. One of the most common workarounds, I shit you not, is downloading a mod that makes all the characters bald. I gave this a whirl and was shocked to discover it worked. Things may have improved in the half year since its release, but judging from the user reviews for the Steam release, which came out in April of 2023 after its timed exclusivity contract with Epic expired, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Part 3: GOD DAMN, Is The Inventory System THE WORST! THE. WORST.

Nioh and Nioh 2 went on to influence a lot of the design in Stranger of Paradise. Most of these influences are positive, like the job system and the varying playstyles you can explore therein. Unfortunately, not all design carryovers work. The most problematic one involves inventory management. In the Nioh games, you have a proper Souls-like smithy and armor and weapon creation suite, which allows you to improve your character by giving them new tools and garb. I'll admit the blacksmith mechanic in Nioh is by far one of the most intimidating mechanics in the entire game, but Team Ninja mercifully improved it in Nioh 2. Nonetheless, your progression in both games is tied to managing scarce resources that can lead you to pivot how you play and approach upcoming combat scenarios. With Stranger of Paradise, Team Ninja decided to open the floodgates and give you almost everything worth using whenever moving from Point A to Point B in each environment, and that seems like a far worse alternative to every possible struggle you'd have trying to parse out the blacksmith in Nioh.

The issue here is simple. Stranger in Paradise gives you way too much shit whenever you traverse through and complete a level. The number of times I needed to spend upwards of ten minutes between main story missions junking redundant or useless armor sets or weapons upon finishing a quest was ridiculous. Worse, because the game constantly inundates you with random tat, you often find yourself never becoming attached to articles you affix to your characters for too long. Anything you gain at the end of one level will be replaced by something you pick up in the next. Even if you find a fun or creative outfit, there's a high likelihood you'll need to junk it after one level. That's not entirely antithetical to the core design of Nioh or Souls-likes. Still, the immediacy of Stranger of Paradise's planned obsolescence rubs me the wrong way. In Nioh or Elden Ring, a massive climactic boss might force you to switch things up and try a different build. With Stranger in Paradise, because almost every job class is viable, but the game is still programmed to bestow trinkets for every one of its core class types, you feel overwhelmed with your upgrades within hours of playing it.

Even worse is the interface and menu you must interact with when you play around with the cosmetic and combat upgrades. Someone at Square-Enix told Team Ninja that menu-based inventory and combat systems were a must in this game, and it sucks. There are so many menus and sub-menus. Worse, the game's "Auto" button is not nearly as helpful as it should be. That button does not consider the job affinity mechanic, wherein if you equip characters with clothing attached to a job, they will gain new abilities and buffs. Additionally, clicking the "Auto" choice on the equipment screen applies a pure DPS build to ALL OF YOUR CHARACTERS and not simply the one on the screen when you select that option. I found that last part out the hard way after spending about ten or so minutes trying to find the best pieces of equipment for a magic build for Jack and then a tank build for Ash, and by the time I got to Jed, I was tired enough that I thought about letting the computer do its wonders with him. To my horror, all of my work on Jack and Ash went down the drain after I clicked the auto-equip button, and I found them dressed in pop-punk garb as if they had walked through a Hot Topic circa 2005.

The point here is the one way the game tries to make your interactions with the fiddly inventory and equipment systems more efficient does more damage than good. Yes, there's a menu where you can select an assortment of modifiers to cull your loot trash, but it is thoroughly buried in the Overworld, and the game makes one marginal passing remark about its existence. Even then, the game gives you six hundred slots, and they fill up fast when random mooks pop out two to three trinkets by default. While there is overlap with the different "flavors" of jobs, the weapons and equipment are each classified to individual jobs, meaning the game is likely programmed to provide an even distribution of everything rather than for the jobs you commonly use. There are a few positives about that, though. Because you always have so many tools in your toolbox, trying out a class for the first time at level one is easier than you'd expect. Also, the variety of the weapons and the wildly different ways they control do wonders to communicate the nuances between every job. However, those are small hollow victories compared to the systematized drudgery in Stranger of Paradise.

Tied to the fiddly menu system is the smithy, which might as well not exist at all. Refining useless inventory items into raw materials and then using those raw materials to improve pieces of equipment is not only time-consuming and frustrating but also pointless. Because the game keeps you littered with leveled equipment, the incremental improvements you get by interacting with the blacksmith almost always become fruitless exercises. All of the issues with the inventory system lead to the single worst problem with Stranger of Paradise: downtime. Even if you opt out of one or two of the systems or menus I described, you'll likely spend ten to twelve minutes on the overworld fanning through trinkets and figuring out your builds for upcoming environments. This rigmarole is neither fun nor rewarding because every screen is so dense with information and stats, and you do it constantly. Even if you enjoy one or two jobs, opting out of experience points or class progress while trucking through bosses with maxed-out jobs removes you from the gameplay feedback loops that feel rewarding. Likewise, if you have any issues with analysis paralysis, you should stay as far away from this game as possible. Because comparing the stats between two articles isn't the most user-friendly experience, you often need to squint for minutes upon end at random decimal places to determine which sword or battleaxe is the best.

Part 4: But Hey, The Job System Is AMAZING!

No, seriously, the job system in this game is amazing! If there is one thing worth mentioning, it is that Team Ninja designed Stranger of Paradise not to be wholly representative of the Souls-like genre. Sure, when you go to a save point, stuff respawns, and if you die before reaching a save point, you lose out on class progress. The roll has I-frames, and you need to pay attention to enemy animation cues during boss confrontations, but that's where the similarities end. One of the most significant differentiators between Stranger of Paradise and the Dark Souls series comes with its job system. While most traditional Souls-likes lock you into a job selection from the start, Stranger of Paradise actively encourages you to swap Jack and his compatriots' classes however you see fit before starting a mission. And there isn't even the slightest penalty for retooling your characters! If you want to give a job a whirl for the first time, have at it, and if you end up hating it, the experience you put into that job is NOT wasted time. Part of that stems from the tech trees assigned to every possible job assignment. If you want to unlock every tool or combat resource, especially the advanced and expert ones, you must find branches and nodes in every job. To highlight, the starting mage will unlock the white and black mage jobs, which lead to the Sage.

These tech trees might seem like the most lizard-brain, B.F. Skinner-approved things imaginable when you first look at them, and that's undoubtedly true. There are too many options to process, and some unlockables, like new moves, are too obtuse or esoteric for their own good. Nonetheless, the game synthesizing the myriad of raw materials and pool of resources indicative of the Souls genre into one collection of experience points lessens the blow. It's also one of the most compelling gameplay feedback loops I have ever experienced. The minute you unlock your first new ability or advanced class, you start to pan over all of the game's options and engage with a slightly heady calculus on what to sport for your next mission so you get more fun goodies and job assignments. This design, in turn, forces you to engage with playstyles and mechanics you usually wouldn't, and as I suggested earlier, a lot of effort was put into the game to ensure virtually every job is viable. What's more, even if you encounter a job type you dislike, Stranger of Paradise has the decency to provide spendable resources that allow you to level up unused jobs immediately so you can continue exploring its options.

Even if you have your steady preferences, Jack can have up to two classes, which means you can still assign him a maxed-out job that you love, along with a new one you want to try for the first time. Moreover, the game's passive buffs ensure you don't immediately discard even its starting classes. Every passive buff stacks, and even if you feel hesitant about reusing an older job, if you unlock the affinity spheres on its tech trees or use affinity-raising weapons or equipment, you can send a nominal amount of experience points to that job. In my case, while playing the fourth level while controlling a Lancer, which was getting 100% of my experience points, my Duelist was getting about fifteen percent of my experience points. By the time the mission was over, I had a few pips to spend even though it hadn't been in my rotation for hours. Nothing associated with the game's job system ever feels entirely out of the loop, and that's doubly the case with the affinity system I just mentioned. Investing in a single job's weapon and equipment type will unlock passive and active buffs Jack can use on tap. What's fun is you can have one active job and spec Jack's equipment to open a different job's affinity bonuses.

One thing related to the Job System is the game's parry mechanic. This mechanic is a universal system wherein Jack can trigger a parry while an enemy attacks. If you time it right before the attack lands, you interrupt the enemy and immediately initiate a new combination of attacks against that target. I loved this mechanic for three reasons. First, it is snappy and incredibly responsive, with the windows for the parry being more and less generous depending on your enemy. For example, parrying a bat is far easier than a dragon. When you pull off a full parry, the immediacy of the transition into your combo is an absolute delight and can be all the difference between victory and defeat in the more pivotal battles. Second, there's a slight risk-reward mechanic as you cannot infinitely be in parry mode, or else enemies will simply doge Jack or attack him differently. Jack's Soul Shield ability has a tighter window to pull off, but it allows him to absorb enemy attacks and either bank them or immediately throw them back. Banking spells and enemy specials are a fun way to circumnavigate the magic limitations of some of the non-Mage classes. Finally, the parry system is variable across certain classes and weapon types. For example, the Swordfighter can initiate a full parry without worrying about timing, but at the cost of magic points, and Maces and Katanas have even trickier parry windows but deal massive damage when you pull them off.

Nonetheless, nothing in the world of video games is perfect. I've already said my piece about the equipment and inventory system, but the game's unintelligible iconography bears repeating. There's a use of overlapping colors to indicate when jobs are connected, but the icons start to blur when you get closer to the end. Costume sets and what they lock away aren't clearly signposted. Playing around with Jack's jobs is entertaining, but fiddling with his co-conspirators is far less rewarding. It also does not help that the commands you give them are so basic it's easy to forget they're even there. Correspondingly, the limited nature of your commands for your party members further compounds the feigning sense of investment you have with them. More problematic is the menu for editing your finishers and command abilities. I tried to edit my finishers and combos whenever I unlocked new job abilities on the tech trees, but bopping out of the tech tree to the move list is a challenging process, and the menu for editing those combos is unintuitive. The Command Ability system is even more tucked away and annoying. When you level up a job enough, you'll get its unique command ability, and Jack can have up to four of these. However, some of these abilities are incompatible with specific jobs or weapon types. For example, the Swordfighter's Shield Bash requires a shield on hand. And again, retooling your character, needing to go back and review your command abilities, and identifying incompatibilities add to the game's issues with downtime.

Tangent: I Need To Talk About The Lowest Difficulty Setting

There is another way that the previous works of Team Ninja went on to inform the development and design of Stranger of Paradise. One odd way is how the mindless musou sensibilities of Hyrule and Fire Emblem Warriors helped Team Ninja devise ways to opt non-Souls fans into Stranger of Paradise. When you first start the game, you are presented with three playable difficulty options: Story, Action, and Hard. The fourth, "Chaos" difficulty, is unlocked after beating the game, and there are newer and more difficult settings for the DLC. Unlike other Square-Enix products or Souls-likes, you can switch these settings whenever you like; you just have to remember to do it in the overworld before starting a mission. That alone is a godsend to anyone unfamiliar with the genre or isn't sold on it, like me. I played the game almost entirely on the default Action setting before trying the Hard and Story ones. Predictably, the harder setting results in enemies doing more damage and taking longer to beat, and it makes the game's parry mechanic all but a necessity. However, the "easy" Story setting does a few things I thought were incredibly interesting.

For one thing, the Story setting makes all the player's guards and blocks unbreakable. That means there are no ultimate attacks from bosses to worry about dodging or parrying. Even when Chaos belts out bolts of plasma or is rearing to kick you in the face, you can block everything by simply putting up Jack's dukes. Likewise, enemies don't have invincibility frames. There are no terrifying moments when you see a giant baddie powering up their next big AOE spell, and you can't wail away on them. Combining these two things gives you a significantly different experience in Stranger of Paradise that mimes a Musou more than a Souls-like. The lowest difficulty setting might as well be called "Warriors Mode" because Team Ninja designed it to play and feel like Hyrule and Fire Emblem Warriors. This modification is something only some Souls-like developers should consider, and, obviously, not all of them. Still, I commend the developers at Team Ninja for opting more people into their game and its systems by recognizing that some people going into Stranger of Paradise want to see its silly nonsense and don't have time to bother with its core mechanics. You still get more out of the game by opting into its standard and higher-difficulty settings, which better tie into the game's job system. However, there's no denying that the Musou-lite Story Mode fits the game's storytelling aspirations better. So, if you liked Fire Emblem Warriors, this game might be for you!

Part 5: I Wish The Storytelling Were More Consistent

Investing in the job system and finding new playstyles or build paths was my primary motivator to finish Stranger of Paradise. After showing so much promise from the onset, the story halts to a standstill until you initiate its final act. You have stilted exposition with the king and princess and some of the most worthless NPC interactions in Final Fantasy history to hold you over. What's bizarre is how the game tries to sell you on the idea of Jack being a person of mystery. Not revealing all the answers to that quandary is all you get to keep you narratively invested in seeing Jack's adventure continue. Jack's stern attitude certainly is meme-worthy, but it also stunts his and his companions' character growth and development. In one such case, Jed attempts to recollect a dream he's been having, and rather than let him finish, Jack replies, "No one cares about your dreams!" Banter is almost entirely superficial and generally connected with the most surface-level observations about your surroundings. Instead of discovering why everyone likes Jack organically, you listen to the most barebones joshing between your companions during long contextless combat sessions. Sure, the first few times when Jed and Ash announced the presence of cubes to indicate an upcoming save point was adorable, but that keeps happening.

Yet, when the story does kick in and doles out the schlock, I'm back in it. After accepting the king's mission to save the Kingdom of Corneria from the looming threat of Chaos, you can talk to the princess and other NPCs about life in the kingdom and their initial impressions of Jack. These NPC interactions are surrealist art. All the faces that are not the player characters err toward the uncanny valley. The environments that own their source material certainly pop, but this game is generally hard to look at when you are not in motion. The settings are linear, with vanilla-ass switch puzzles that become tiresome after the third level, and the ones that take place inside building interiors don't stand out all that well. Whenever the game tries to engage in essential worldbuilding, you can tell that's not where the money went. Even worse is how core points of worldbuilding are contained in tooltips and load screens at the start and end of levels. When you first load up the pirate bay with Bikke, the load screen mentions it comes from "Dimension XIV," which is your hint it's a recreation of a level from the massively popular and critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV. That's crappy storytelling! If you don't read those tooltips, then the plot twist near the end of the game hits you like a sack of bricks!

The recreations of Final Fantasy levels certainly help, and I will not sit here and lie to you that I didn't smile when I went through the Mount Gagazet or Pandemonium Castle levels and didn't nostalgically think about my previous encounters with those backdrops. However, even the best environments feel incredibly limited in their scope because of their stark linearity, and what few bespoke corners there are always lead to treasure chests or, worst, data logs that fill in critical gaps in the narrative. It's a storytelling crutch as old as time but with the base game only partially interested in giving you broad vinegar strokes on who the characters of the game are and why they're doing what they're doing, relying on data logs and journals that need to be collected seems like malfeasance. Understanding Astos and how he figures into Jack's journey is almost exclusively conveyed through these collectibles, and it sucks. Also, the team that made this game made the wrong choice for some of the levels they picked to express their respective games. The Fire Cavern is one of the most generic levels they could have tapped to represent Final Fantasy VIII, and the endless office spaces of Insomnia are the last thing I would have picked for Final Fantasy XV.

Nonetheless, your first mission to beat Garland goes smoothly until you find a silver-haired young woman in a Japanese schoolgirl sailor outfit inside Garland's armor. The task after that is when the game finally breaks from its formula of adapting the first Final Fantasy game shot for shot. The mission after Garland involves fighting a pirate king named Bikke. Here, we discover that the crystals our four heroes are collecting are jet black instead of colorful representations of the four core elements. Likewise, when Neon tries to talk to make a point to Jack, he responds by saying, "Bullshit!" and then plugs in earbuds connected to a music player and starts listening to Limp Bizkit. This scene is what I mean by Stranger of Paradise doesn't understand how to pace itself. It drops that whopper with Jack's MP3 player and then doesn't follow it up with any subsequent weirdness until you watch a short cutscene after beating Bikke. The fight against Bikke points the party to Astos, who, after getting a thrashing, promptly gives Jack his mission objective for most of the game: kill the Four Fiends. After this, the game follows the same template of you accepting a mission in a new environment, 90% of that environment being slogs through mooks and random enemies, and the finale of the environment being a boss encounter that introduces a new puzzle piece to the story. It sounds normal, but I must stress that over ninety percent of your experience with any given level does jack to progress the story and characters, and that's why I refer to the middle of Stranger of Paradise as a "slog." It also does not help that it is here when you notice the repeating finishing animations or the game's scant ten different enemy types.

But again, right when I want to dismiss this game, it makes me laugh. There's a moment when your characters are ascending the highest peak of Mount Gagazet, and Jack's peers ask him why anyone would go on such a pilgrimage, and his exact words are, "Who fucking cares? We have a mission!" When you get to the Final Fantasy IV level, where everyone is in space, there is a moment when Neon says, "Wow! We're really high up!" and Jack's immediate response is, "Don't worry about it!" It's pure camp, and I love it! Watching multiple characters treat what they were experiencing with deft seriousness only to be greeted by Jack saying "whatever" is endearing. Nonetheless, when you meet Astos, it is around that point when you realize things are "weird" in the Kingdom of Corneria. Starting with our friendly dark elf, and during every lead-up to a Fiend, we see flashbacks to Jack and company's previous attempts to beat the Four Fiends, all of which failed. These flashbacks are a mess as they don't happen with enough frequency or coincide with character progress to make them significant until the climax, and when they do, they're so short it's hard even to understand what you've seen. Luckily, the game is so heavy-handed with its message that it's impossible not to know there's a time loop happening, and your friends know more about it than they're letting on to Jack. Again, it's immensely stupid, but I wish the game were dumber. I think it would be better if Stranger of Paradise fully reveled in its schlock from start to finish. Yet, the fact it doesn't makes it a more uneven experience, and that unevenness is part of the reason why I enjoy watching it. So, what do you think? Would this game be more satisfactory if it were better, or is it best when it doesn't know what it is doing? The next time you see me writing about Stranger of Paradise, we will discuss its ending and a Final Fantasy-based conspiracy theory I have.

Hey, Steam Got A New Update That Makes Playing Games On Steam Better!

Recently, Steam hosted another edition of its Next Fest event. During this promotion, developers, primarily smaller indie outfits, paraded various demos and prototypes for projects they have been toiling away on for years. Outside of Steam's seasonal sale events, Next Fest is one of the most valuable and beloved promotions Steam hosts, short of the handful of lotteries they run where you have the off-chance to nab a Steam Deck or free games. And why wouldn't you like Next Fest? It's one of the best opportunities to explore new games and interact with developers as they probe you and others for input on how to go about the development process with their passion projects. The motive is to place you in a positive feedback loop on a marketplace that sends you deluges of notifications and updates about sales and games you might have on your wishlist, and if something during Next Fest catches your attention, then you're going to add into that feedback loop.

However, before we get into the existential, let's also commend Valve for not only hosting an event to ring up some much-needed positivity in this industry but also for introducing a new and appreciated update to their marketplace. Whether or not they timed this update to coincide closely with Next Fest or the Summer Sale is a matter of pure speculation. Still, considering how several of these new features, like user notes and reliability improvements to Big Picture Mode, have been asked for, for quite some time, I don't think it's a matter of pure coincidence. Nonetheless, this update proves that everything I will complain about shortly is fixable. Unifying the code to the desktop client, Big Picture Mode, and Steam Deck? That's no easy task, yet the minds at Valve did it on top of introducing other UI/UX improvements that make searching for and finding new and upcoming games far easier. They are also showing signs of listening to the input of their audience as they have mercifully finally addressed the issue all of us once had with Steam Notifications popping off every goddamn minute. Now the default is for these notifications to trigger if something about a game is genuinely new. Likewise, the notification feed is vastly improved and far easier to process than it once was.

Nonetheless, the most significant additions to Steam, beyond the front page just being far easier on the eyes, involve the introduction of user-made notes for all games. By allowing users to create custom notes or pinned windows, you can navigate games and the Steam marketplace client without fear of losing your train of thought. With notes, imagine, if you will, a life or work obligation breaking up your recent game session with a two- to three-day break. With this feature, you can write a quick note pinned to the corner of your game about what you were doing at the time and where you need to go next; it's a game changer if I say so myself. There's also no denying that the new custom features related to font size, window opacity, and color will make the readability of Steam better for those with vision issues or other general disabilities.

Unfortunately, while all of this is positive in terms of the direction of Steam, there's been an annoying precedent Valve has set regarding their Next Fest event. Every year, Valve introduces new search parameters, modifiers, and demo aggregation tools that only appear when there's a Next Fest event for reasons still unknown to anyone following the industry. This quandary is far from breaking news and even something I have written about before on the site. Next Fest started after Valve decided to rebrand their Steam Game Festival after their brief partnership with Geoff Keighley ended in 2019. It remains an excellent idea, but it also annoyingly continues to be the only time when you can use the desktop client to show you the most played demos on Steam or provide you with handy easy-to-click green buttons to download free playable builds of games. I'm not joking here. Being able to search for new or the most popular demos? That's gone now that Next Fest is over, and so are hundreds of helpful sub-genre filters that make filtering out exploitative trash on Steam all the easier. Likewise, with Steam placing a greater emphasis on user streams by the minute, pinning or notifying users when developers are hosting streams or providing handy VODs on any game's page after those streams end remains an endlessly frustrating issue. But again, this is all familiar territory, so let's jump into it.

Seriously Valve, All Of These Handy Search Tools And Modifiers Would Be Great On The Main Storefront!

Let's slay the giant dragon right from the get-go. If someone from Valve reads my weird opinion editorials, which is highly unlikely, and they want me to stop complaining about their post-Next Fest decision-making, make following and tracking new and popular demos on the desktop client a permanent feature. I'm not asking for anything unreasonable here, as dozens of other dropdown menus and lists already exist. What will one more of those titled "Most Popular Demos" or "New Demos" do? You may be worried that having that one extra tab will cause the processor on the Steam Deck to short-circuit. Okay, but HOT DAMN, every time a Next Fest rolls around, simply modifying the genre settings and search parameters for what I am looking for and then seeing which top demos fit has led me to discover new and exciting games more often than using the Discovery Queue. You may appreciate the Discovery Queue, and my blog last year saw a non-zero number of you chiming in that you enjoy using it. Still, there's no denying that it requires a much higher time investment than simply clicking a genre tab and then seeing what the most played demos for that selection might be.

And I know that some of you are wondering why it's such a sore point to me when I can do that on the current page with new and recent releases and even recently discounted games. My counter-argument to that is two-fold. First, Next Fest sees countless "exclusive" sub-genre search modifiers that never get added to the main store's search engine. As a result, if you find a winning combination of search modifiers that consistently draw in big and small games that tickle your fancy, there's a chance you can't repeat that formula the minute Next Fest is over. To highlight how annoying that can be, let me give you a common situation when Next Fest ends. Let's say you find a demo, something outside your wheelhouse, or even a genre you don't usually play. If you make this discovery during Next Fest, Steam shows you the more specific sub-genre modifiers you can use to find similar titles, and its custom search engine will even allow you to search by tone, mood, and game length on top of all pre-existing ones. Many of those usability features disappear when Next Fest ends, and it's baffling.

Yes, this loss is not the end of the world, as the current search tools get the job done, and there are other ways to find new and emerging game projects on Steam beyond Next Fest. Nevertheless, what harm is there in merely adding the ability to search for demos? Steam Next Fest is the only time that ability exists, and the only workaround when the event is over is to search for new games or ones listed as "Upcoming" and pray they have free playable builds on their store page. However, that becomes problematic because it inevitably leads to you finding an endless list of "Early Access" games that may or may not have game demos. This point opens up my other grievance about Steam automatically deleting the demos you downloaded during Next Fest. I understand that the developers often ask that the demos they design for Next Fest not stay up in perpetuity. However, the consequence is that if you read about games during the event after the fact, there's a chance that you are shit out of luck when it comes to giving that title a whirl. It also would help if I could search for demos using the general Steam search engine. There are enough modifiers that I can often cobble together a template that provides the same rewarding discoveries I experience during Next Fest. Still, until Steam allows me to add a "Demo" tag, I always end up with games with no free playable content to test before making a purchase or have paywalled Early Access pages with no demo available. Even if you consider some of my requests unreasonable, we can all agree having a list of popular demos or allowing people to search for them doesn't present Valve with a massive engineering task.

The Helpful UI/UX Features Steam Next Fest Gets STILL Have No Reason To Disappear When The Event Is Over

At the time of the initial publishing of this blog, we are amid another yearly Summer Steam Sale. Like last year's summer sale, I wonder how better navigating the Steam storefront would be if some of the features or standards showcased during Next Fest were permanent. For example, a few games caught my attention when the sale started, and after clicking their pages, I had to re-remind myself where to find developer-led livestreams that showcase how to utilize game-specific mechanics. A similar but distinct issue involves the inordinate number of games that I discovered while fanning through the "On Sale" portal but found out that the only playable build the developer had available was gated through Early Access. In those cases, there often wasn't a freely accessible demo. Steam has to allow for some of these scenarios, as each developer's situation will differ. Still, my issue is that I can't filter these games out of my queue or feeds because there are NO demo-related search modifiers.

And I must return to how arbitrarily hidden demos are on Steam's currently formatted game pages. Why Steam doesn't let you toggle Next Fest's helpful green "Download Demo" button the minute you pan to a game portrait shown on the front page is a mystery. Again, I understand that not all developers should be expected to take the time to develop or edit a game build to fit the desired format of a standard game demo. However, for the many developers that put in the time and effort to do that, they should be allowed to have an option that seamlessly helps interested consumers to download and interact with a free game build if one exists. Part of the reason why so few people download demos on Steam is that they either don't know where to find them, don't know how to determine if one exists in the first place, or there is so little buy-in by the developers of their genres of preference to create demos in the first place. My proposals don't remedy the last of those, but they would make the first two immediately less of an annoyance.

As endlessly silly sorting games by mood may have felt during Next Fest, the reactive nature of that search experience is still immensely better than scrolling through pillars of games highlighted through the default "On Sale" or "Upcoming" dropdown lists. While the revision made carousels snappier, the fact that you still need to hope and pray that Steam surfaces valuable items into those carousels inevitably leads to disappointment. I get that using the Discovery Queue can help fill those carousels and change which ones you see, but do you know what would be faster? Me being able to customize which ones are there in the first place. On top of that, while the dropdown lists are likely one of the most common ways the average Steam user discovers new games and titles on sale outside of Wishlist notifications, they are getting increasingly clunkier and less valuable as Steam becomes inundated with games. Again, overall, I like the new Steam revision and especially the direction Valve is taking with unified OS updates, but putting a shiny coat of paint on the storefront will only work for so long. At some point, there needs to be a fundamental re-assessment of how to best surface recommendations and new and emerging titles.

Steam's Growing (And Sometimes Annoying) Emphasis On Livestreaming

Let's not beat around the bush. During Next Fest, the number of streams Valve put on the welcome screen to the event caused it to chug to a crawl at times. The current Summer Sale also has its share of performance issues, but that's likely not something that can be squarely pegged on streaming. In fact, the number of streamers seen playing around with massively discounted games or much-ballyhooed releases is significantly less than what we experienced during Next Fest. Nonetheless, both events had the same two fundamental problems when it came to surfacing streamers: 1) the notifications/reminders for developer streams are awful, and the visibility of their VODs is even worse, and 2) unless you are part of the streaming zeitgeist from morning to night for every possible genre, you have no idea who to trust or why the people streaming on Valve's platform are people you should care about. The first has the most straightforward solution: developer stream archives should be pinned in either a "Streams" tab on a game's store page or in the image and trailer carousel.

Compared to others, I am okay with the pre-recorded stream videos at the top of many store pages. While I agree it is annoying that they auto-play by default, those videos do an admirable job of showing you what a game looks like when it's in motion. They need to be better integrated on their associated pages, and with developers sometimes streaming upwards of ten to twenty snapshots of their game's core mechanics and gimmicks, the default carousel is starting to feel clunky, and accessing that information after the fact needs to be more intuitive. Some developers break from the standard format of having one auto-playing video and then an assortment of contextless screenshots on a game's top carousel, but that is far from the norm. If developer-led videos and streams had their own visibly marked tab or portal, Valve wouldn't have to rely so heavily on Next Fest to opt them into their burgeoning streaming ecosystem. The game store pages' default video and image carousel also show their age. They consistently chug whenever you attempt to display higher-resolution media or play HD videos, and this issue is not new.

However, the situation with developer videos and streams seems secondary to the growing initiative from Valve to push user streams on game pages and their desktop client. During Next Fest, and this problem exists even today on the main storefront, you must scroll through five or six user streams to explore game-specific community hubs or pages. The first issue is that Valve and Steam do nothing to filter these streams, making it difficult to figure out who to trust or which streamers even fit your style. Say what you will about Twitch and YouTube, but their bank of search modifiers and tags makes locating streamers that aren't yelling at you from beginning to end, if that's not your thing, a possible task, but that's far from the case on Steam. Likewise, the streamer biography pages are so rudimentary on Steam you usually end up making more leaps of faith than on any other modern streaming platform.

Then, there are the technical issues that crop up whenever Steam tries to show you more than five streams on the same page. Twitch is currently in its weakest state regarding its community's confidence in its leadership. Even then, we have seen this before where Valve tries to opt big names into streaming directly on Steam, but those efforts prove fleeting. With Next Fest and the current Summer Sale, you get the sense that Valve wants Steam to be more integrated with a streaming future, but if that's the case, the architecture currently isn't there for that to happen. And if Valve goes that route, how much of a distraction would that pose to the expected functions of Steam being a place to buy games? It does seem likely that we will all be migrating to watch streamers there from time to time because it seems inevitable that there will be a big name there who is handing away free game codes after securing a contract with Valve. Nonetheless, I've been wrong about this stuff before, so what do you think?

If you enjoy this blog and would like to read my other adventure game retrospectives, here's a list of my previous episodes of this series:

• Episode 1: The Dig
• Episode 2: Atlantis: The Lost Tales
• Episode 3: Loom
• Episode 4: Drowned God
• Episode 5a: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis Part 1 & Episode 5b: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis - Part 2
• Episode 6: The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime
• Episode 7a: The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time (Part 1)& Episode 7b: The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time (Part 2)
• Episode 8a: The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time (Part 1) & Episode 8B: The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time (Part 2)
• Episode 9a: The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One [Part 1] & Episode 9b: The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One [Part 2]
• Episode 10: D (The Game)
• Episode 11a: The Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of Fate [Part 1]& Episode 11b: The Legend of Kyrandia: Hand of Fate [Part 2]
• Episode 12a: The Legend of Kyrandia - Book Three: Malcolm's Revenge [Part 1] & Episode 12b: The Legend of Kyrandia - Book Three: Malcolm's Revenge [Part 2]
• Episode 13: Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb
• Episode 14a: The Quest For The Worst Adventure Game Puzzles - MTV's Club Dead [Part 1] & Episode 14b: The Quest For The Worst Adventure Game Puzzles - MTV's Club Dead [Part 2]

Preamble

No one was asking me to play this game. I'd be surprised if this nigh 7,000-word write-up got even a single comment. Unsurprisingly, there's no groundswell for coverage of A.D. 2044 here or on any video game website. Playing this pile of crap falls entirely on me. While site-friend Relkin spitballed this game to me months ago, I already had a copy due to my morbid curiosity about experiencing one of the lowest-reviewed games on GOG. And with the game having virtually no coverage in the English-speaking gaming community, I was signing up for an authentic blind playthrough. Pre-2000s European adventure games have always been a giant void in my knowledge of the genre, especially regarding the Eastern Bloc of adventure games following the fall of the Soviet Union. For example, I understand Metropolis Software exists and completed Teenagent, but that's where I tap out.

This week I was in the mood to broaden my horizons, and BOY did A.D. 2044 lead me down a wild rabbit hole! I mentioned this when doing a grab-bag special on the free games available on GOG. I talked about Teenagent there and how the adventure game genre, even when LucasArts and Sierra tapped out, was incredibly active in Europe. While Myst deserves a ton of credit for keeping the genre going, Infogrames, Revolution Software, Cryo Interactive, Psygnosis, and Gremlin Interactive were churning out widely-praised works that were also financially successful. With the fall of the Society Union, many up-and-coming game developers from Eastern Europe only had adventure games as their point of reference for what a video game could be or play like.

When you play something like A.D. 2044 and consider that it was its developer's first go at making a Windows NT-based game, you have to play a fun game of figuring out its point of reference. After thinking about it, Myst might have been in the programmer's wheelhouse, but A.D. 2044 certainly feels like a Cryo Interactive clone. The shiny, fully rendered 3D models in 2044 and its heavy reliance on hidden objects reek of Cryo's Atlantis franchise. It's also a screen-based graphic adventure game like Myst in that you navigate using arrow-based directional inputs, and there's no camera movement once you enter a new screen. However, this game being a cheap Myst clone, only explains part of a big question I had when I first encountered it.

Why Is This One Of The Lowest Reviewed Games On GOG?

Before I answer that question, I must concede that we can go "darker" on GOG. There are worse games and even worse adventure games on the digital marketplace. There's the fraudulent Simon the Sorcerer anniversary game that promised fans a proper remaster and did not deliver on that even the slightest bit. The 3D-era Leisure Suit Larry games are on GOG, and the equally tacky Les Manley franchise accompanies them in the "adult-themed adventure game" arena. There are bad FMV games, poorly curated indie titles, and that dog-dick ugly LotR Gollum game. Yet, even with all of that competition, A.D. 2044 feels like a "contender" for the worst game on GOG's marketplace. Before we explore why, I need to provide some context on why this game exists. First, the game on GOG is a remaster of an Atari 8-bit computer game that was adapting a Polish cult film titled "Sexmission" or "Seksmisja." Poland was still a part of the Soviet Union when the film and original Atari 8-bit computer game were made, whereas the Windows remaster came out in 1996. However, that source material is vital because it gets to the heart of what makes A.D. 2044 a purely putrid experience.

Seksmisja is a 1984 science-fiction film that depicts an alternate future wherein women rule the world and a lone male that volunteered to be cryogenically frozen before a nuclear apocalypse discovers the female-led New World Order has installed an all-encompassing totalitarian state on the planet in the aftermath. Post-apocalyptic androcide-focused science fiction is a well-known sub-genre, with Y: The Last Man as the gold standard. Some in Poland praise Seksmisja for being a satire of life under the Soviet Union, but it also has highly problematic depictions of women and is incredibly anti-feminist. As you might expect, the film and its game adaptations make the false assumption that a world run by women would immediately become totalitarian. The movie also depicts gender reassignment as a punishment for anyone with male physical characteristics, views feminism as deeply connected with Puritanism, and that feminism's ultimate goals are to develop a sexless society that admonishes masculinity. It's pretty horrid shit if I do say so myself.

Yet, this game isn't well-loved by the anti-woke grifters on GOG or the internet! The reasons for that are self-explanatory. As you probably can tell from the handful of screen captures I have shared up to this point, the game is butt ugly. Sure, you must commend the developers for having a decent stab at 3D models and environments, with not the best technology at their disposal. Even then, understanding what you're looking at is a chore, and character models are bizarre without feeling charming or in the spirit of the game's themes. Related to the game's often indecipherable environments and textures is its bunk-ass game design. A LOT of the puzzles, as you will see shortly, boil down to you needing to find and track down one-off items that are hidden under random pieces of furniture or locked away in secret desk compartments. The pacing is also atrocious. There are three acts to the game. The second, which involves you needing to operate an elevator to explore different rooms you cannot enter any other way, is one of the worst things I have played this year. There are many occasions wherein you need to navigate labyrinths, and the repeating wall textures make tracking your direction impossible. The item combinations you must complete make no sense, and the game has far too many cipher or password-based puzzles. Do you get the feeling I don't like this game yet? Well, buckle up because it's time for me to review some puzzles! But be warned; this game is a doozy!

Let's Rank Some AWFUL Puzzles!

The Starting Building

Getting Everything You Need From The Starting Chamber Room/Prison - [Rating: 5/10] - I mentioned already that this game often plays like a hidden object game, and that's very much the case when you boot it up and gain control the first time. Your character finds themselves in a two-story apartment complex, and any attempt they make to leave results in them getting the shit kicked out of them. Also, all you have on your person is an electronic device the game's translation calls an "electronic goaler." While in this environment, there are a few screens and objects you can interact with that are entirely optional but provide a fleeting sense of worldbuilding. You need to mosey down to a cryogenic tube and click a button that opens the encasing around a bed and pick up a pack of cigarettes. Across from here is a scanner that refuses to let you use a nearby room because your stomach is empty. However, if you examine a table with a plate of apples, while the apples are fake, there's a breakfast pellet your character can eat and a box of matches, an essential item for several future puzzles. Under this table is a spoon, a critical quest item you use to eat a bowl of soup. When you approach the scanner, it opens the previously locked door, revealing a toilet. Surprise, the culmination of this puzzle is you taking a shit. I wish I were joking.

I don't hate this game's starting level. It's small, and because it is a self-contained circular environment without any dead-ends, it's a decent enough start to get your feet wet. Likewise, the number of collectible items and necessary actions aren't out of the realm of possibility because there aren't many. And yet, it's still an incredibly frustrating affair. That spoon took me forever to find because there's no sign that you need to look underneath the table in the first place. Much like Myst and the works of Cryo Interactive, you use the arrow keys to move in predetermined directions. However, the same pitfall with the games of Cyan and Cryo presents itself in A.D. 2044. There are times when you might know where you need to go, but you need to find the one screen that leads to that location, and being next to or near a piece of furniture only sometimes leads you to it. For example, after eating the soup, to unlock the gate to the stairs, you can't simply move to the right of the table, even though it's right next to the stairs. Instead, you need to back away from the table, approach the cryogenic tube, move right to face a pillar, and click a button to unlock the stairs.

The Puzzle In The Bathroom - [Rating: 4/10] - Upon entering the bathroom, it's time for a collect-a-thon! Behind a pair of boots is a button with the letter "A." Under the toilet is a newspaper, which is HILARIOUSLY dated to 1984. Do you get it? It's a reference! Above the sink is a mirror, which is the only tricky part of this sequence. The mirror looks like a fixture of the environment, not an object you can pick up and tuck away in your inventory slots. The good news is that the puzzle that requires its use is right around the corner, and that puzzle does piggyback the solution requiring a mirror. As such, I can't get that angry about this level, especially with it being so small and brief.

Exiting The Starting Room - [Rating: 6/10] - It's time to deal with the guard that will not allow your character to leave their apartment, and it is here that the game and its creators show their true colors. A fire alarm is above the door to a corridor out of the room. To trigger it, click the cigarette box to get a single cigarette and light it by connecting it to the matches. It's now time to review how the use of items works in A.D. 2044. When you wish to use anything from your inventory, place it in a slot above an eyeball. However, to use or combine items, you must click that eye to zoom in on them. In this case, you need to place the carton in the slot, examine it, click on the box to get a single cigarette, place the cigarette in an inventory slot, back out of the zoomed-in screen, swap the box with the individual cigarette, zoom in on the cigarette, and use the box of matches to light the cigarette. Does that sound fun and intuitive to you? Oh, you have no clue what's in store for us next!

When you apply the smoking cigar to the alarm, it starts blaring, and the guard, wearing a thong leotard police outfit you'd expect out of a strip club's Halloween night party, will run into the room. You need to then move your mouse cursor over their mouth until it turns into a pair of lips and kiss her directly on her mouth to cause her to fall back, land spread-eagle, and blow up into millions of pieces. As disgusting and absurd as that might sound, it's a time sequence and a frustrating one at that. If you aren't quick enough to figure out what to do with the guard, she beats you up and resets the puzzle. There's also nothing in the game to suggest kissing her is the solution. That and the awful inventory system leads me to bump up the score of this puzzle by a few extra points.

Entering And Exiting The First Corridor - [Rating: 4/10] - The room immediately following the bedroom is a corridor that parts at the end to the left and right. With the left turn, a laser grid prevents you from moving further. To deal with the laser grid, find the mirror, click it, and then drag it directly onto any part of the laser. This action causes it to short circuit and allows you to collect a gas mask and first aid kit. Past the gas mask and kit, you must move left again to enter a waste disposal area. As I said when discussing the mirror, this puzzle is a simple "gear check." Either you have the item the puzzle asks for, or you don't. Because I have experienced my fair share of laser grid puzzles before, I didn't find this an outrageous ask. Also, I was delighted you didn't have to position the mirror in a specific place or direction to destroy the grid.

Exploring The Waste Disposal Room - [Rating: 7/10] - This waste disposal area is the first environment where you can get lost or fall into annoying loops without knowing it. Worse, you have to come back to this area more than once. The gimmick with your first exploration effort in the waste disposal area is that you must find a secret exit out of it, but only after collecting a single story-required item. When I first played this game, I forgot to pick this up, and it took me a while to figure out how to return to the disposal area because everything during the back half of the first act takes place in a series of interlocking corridors. Nonetheless, all you need to do right now is open a box labeled "Litter" to pick up a spool of thread; that's it. It's a single marked container in a room with at least twenty, and the only way to know that is to brute force this whole level and click on everything. If you interact with the containers in this room long enough, you should find one covered in graffiti, and upon opening it, discover the secret exit. However, it would help if you remembered to wear the mask before using it or risk dying. This sequence is a needle in a haystack puzzle, and it's not even a good one.

Moving The Mine Cart In The Incinerator - [Rating: 5/10] - The next area is an incinerator room. The incinerator is filling the room with smoke, but the compartment fueling it is too hot to touch. To the left of the incinerator is a mine cart, and if you look inside it, you'll find a poker you can collect. If you move to the back of the cart, you'll also note that it can shift before it returns to its normal position. The game needs you to swing to the front of the cart, flick a switch to adjust its brake, and push it again to move it to the end of the track. However, the real key to this puzzle is a unique-looking rock under the cart, which provides you with a tiny mouse upon clicking it. Again, the game relies on a hidden object gameplay hook for the culmination of a level, and it's easy to miss as the rock is the same color as the background and foreground. Even then, this level is short, and knowing you need to move the mine cart isn't too much of a leap of logic.

Exploring The Workshop - [Rating: 6/10] - Mercifully, while the levels with the first act aren't exactly the most visually pleasing in the world, at the very least, they are quick and to the point. After exiting the incinerator room, you find yourself in a workshop. Annoyingly, the door you entered becomes locked, so if you need to return to something you missed, you must complete the rest of this loop before being able to backtrack. The workshop has a bench with tools, but you can only use a drill for now. Find the button with the letter "A" and use the tool to puncture a hole. Here's the kicker: you must put the button into the slot above the eye and apply the green thread. Again, the spool is a missable item from a previous screen, and if you don't have it, it's a royal pain in the ass to track down.

Likewise, there are TWO easy-to-miss items here! A drawer is under the bench, and you must click it to open it to find a hammer that you must put into an inventory slot. From here, you need to pivot or turn at a 180-degree angle to locate a bucket. The screen looking at the drawer is the only one that leads to this bucket. When you find the bucket, you must look into it to find a metal rod. After collecting this, you can ascend a set of stairs. The game has two items you can miss, AND it locks the door behind you, forcing you into repeat loops to try and find random crap! As a wise man once said, "It stinks!"

Opening The Gate At The Top Floor To Get Back To The Incinerator Room - [Rating: 5/10] - Once you reach the top of the stairs, the game immediately greets you with a steel gate blocking the next entryway. This gate, if opened, provides a quick access point to the waste disposal room. Luckily, to the left of the entrance is a cupboard that initiates a new round of item collection. The lowest rung of the closet has a protective glove that you can pick up and eventually use on the latch to the furnace from earlier. The only game design dick move here comes from the next item you must pick up: a key below the cupboard. You can only pick this key up if you go to the final level of the cupboard and click to move down. I missed this in my first playthrough and ran around in circles for about fifteen minutes. The key promptly unlocks the gate near the stairs when you apply it. As much as I want to get angry about that key, I can't. It's one item, and with the insane dexterity and luck puzzles coming up, I would feel bad if I ranked this part of the game too high because I got stuck for a bit.

Gaining Access To The Interrogation Room - [Rating: 3/10] - Once you open the gate, it's time to do your second official circuit in the hallway. Your first objective is to return to the incinerator and use the glove to open the latch to the fire powering the waste disposal room. You can throw your electronic goaler into the flames. That's all you need to do before exiting and returning to the corridor in front of the apartment room. This time, turn right and find a wall that leads to a police station. When you try to enter, another scantily clad officer blocks your progress. To remove her, use the mouse from the mine cart on a crack under the door to the station to scare the officer away. You know, because women don't like "icky" animals. Get it? This sequence is about as easy as they get in A.D. 2044. There's not much to say other than missing the mouse is a bit of a doozy.

Opening The Safe In The Interrogation Room - [Rating: 3/10] - While you explore the police station, you'll eventually find an interrogation room. From the entrance, find a desk and observe files labeled "Top Secret" and the female names in the dossier. When you move down the desk, you'll move to the drawers, but only one, the leftmost, will open. This drawer provides a key that unlocks a nearby prison cell. When you look inside the cell, you should see a stray piece of paper you can pick up using the poker. The note says, "She pressed 3871," which happens to be the combination to a safe to the left of the desk. When you locate this safe and the control pad for inputting these numbers, the safe opens to reveal two control bars. When you pull both bars up, they unlock the door to the elevator and the game's second act. Maybe I have been irony poisoned, but I enjoyed this almost escape-the-room-like level. Again, the best parts of this game, which are fleeting, involve small explorable environments with minimal backtracking and require you to pick up on subtle, but not impossible, environmental context clues. That's the case here, so nothing in the interrogation room feels outright impossible. Let's remember that while we transition into the worst part of the game!

The Elevator Lobby

Repairing The Elevator - [Rating: 5/10] - Unfortunately, the elevator is broken, and you must fix it. Find a control panel to the left of the elevator door and use the button attached to the thread to insert it into a coin slot without losing anything. When you press the unmarked button on the panel, one at a time, you discover they correspond to the letters "O," "D," "A," and "N." If you recall the list of names from the police station, you should remember one of the names on the list was "Dona," which is the solution. When you gain access to the elevator, there's a screwdriver hidden on a panel you can only pick up if you move forward and then forward again. When examining the numerical board inside the elevator, there are four floors in the next act, but it would be best if you tackled them in an unspoken order the game doesn't tell you, and you would only know if you were consulting a guide. This second act is BY FAR the worst level in this game, but this part is by no means a terrible puzzle or sequence. The panel to turn on the elevator is right there, and it is relatively easy to figure out what you need to do. The only tricky parts involve having the button on the string as the drill is at least three screens removed from this location and remembering the screwdriver in the elevator.

Teleportation Chamber Room - [Rating: 4/10] - The first floor is a teleportation chamber. Despite the promise of sci-fi action, this level boils down to hidden object collection and gear checks. To access the teleportation chamber, fiddle with a control box by clicking every button. There's no correct order; you click the buttons until the door opens. When you enter the chamber, you only need to pick up a rope and turn left to find another control box. You must use the screwdriver on this box to nab another button with a letter. If you continue exploring this level, which is not necessary, you should be able to find another guard that asks for a pass and cannot be defeated by kissing her. Yup, this entire second act boils down to you making a passport. Similar to the previous puzzle, getting upset here is hard because the level itself is compact, and there are only a few possibilities of getting lost. At least here, the item you need to pick up, the rope, isn't tucked away on an impossible-to-find screen.

Unlocking The Department of Archeology - [Rating: 7/10] - It's time to return to the elevator to explore the third floor of this building. The second level returns you to the police station, by the way. The third floor involves a "Department of Archeology" and various museum exhibits and doors along a corridor. Only a few of these open, and if you try to move forward, a female homage to ED-209 knocks you on your ass. You defeat this robot by connecting the green thread to two columns and then goading it to chase after you. Defeating a clunky and unwieldy robot by tying a rope to two columns? Tell me where you've heard that idea before! With that out of the way, you move forward to a door in the hallway. Unfortunately, this door has a lock, and how you solve this problem is downright stupid. There's a chair next to the door that, upon standing on it, leads you to its key. However, you can only stand on this chair if you apply the newspaper on it. I still don't understand why you need to do this. Not a single clue in the game hints that the chair is only usable if there's a newspaper on the seat. But the real problem is that you need to pick the newspaper back up or risk screwing yourself over in a puzzle during the game's final act. That's not hyperbole; that's something that can happen.

Collecting A Bunch Of Crap In The Archeological Institute - [Rating: 5/10] - It's time for ANOTHER hidden object sequence. When you enter the lab, you find various relics being prepared for future exhibits. Some are "funny" window-dressing, while others are critical to completing the game. A mini-temple has a chisel, a nearby mechanical stamping device is needed for the passport, and on a wall is a safe with a unique detector. When you go to the desk with the stamping device and move down to look at its drawers, you must use the chisel to open the first drawer to collect a blank copy of a membership card. The second drawer holds a blank, unstamped passport, and you can resolve that by applying it to the nearby stamping machine. You also need a second stamp by finding a manual press on the desk and using it on the passport. Oh, and the third drawer has a paper clip! It's time to return to the elevator and use it so you can present this to the guard on the first floor. Mercifully, the lab in the institute is short and straightforward, with only a few hidden objects. Also, the two stamps for the passport are next to each other, and by this point, you know to check the drawers in any desks in this game. This game might be gaslighting me into thinking it's not bad. Oh, wait, the following four sections are abject dog shit!

Entering And Exploring The Storeroom - [Rating: 5/10] - When you walk past the guard, you eventually find yourself in a storeroom. You can open a few containers with the poker; one should have a blue glove. Across from the containers are space suits, and one has a pocket to use the blue glove to nab a remote control. You can't use your non-gloved hands because the outfits have radiation or some shit. To the left of these suits is a metal door, and YET AGAIN, you open these doors by fiddling around with control boxes. But the gimmick here is that this control box puzzle has TWO parts! First, you need to use the remote on the left chest to open it, and once it is opened, grab two switches and place them in the unlocked rightmost box. The second part of this puzzle involves pressing buttons in ascending order based on how many sides are on the shapes below the buttons. The pocket on that spacesuit is a real middle finger to the player. There is more than one spacesuit, and the left pocket is hard to peg down from the rest of the screen. Knowing basic geometry isn't that hard of an ask, but I have to say putting shapes in order of how many sides they have is the laziest shit you can put in an adventure game.

Fixing And Using The Cage Lift - [Rating: 9/10] - The next room involves a cage lift, which is the worst part of the game. The cage lift lacks power, and the power box is locked. When you approach the power box, move down to pick up a rock and socket wrench. Return to the power box and open it using the wrench, and you can turn it on when you apply the blue glove to its two buttons. Now, you need to return to the cage lift and discover it's meant to be a two-person operation, as the cage lift is to the left of the station with the button to move it upwards. As a result, you must throw the rock from the cage to hit the controls to move it. Unfortunately, you need to be pixel-perfect with your aim, and if you miss, you need to walk back and pick up the rock, return to the cage, and throw it again! Getting this down took me about ten or twelve tries! At the top of the building is a maintenance hole you can pry open using the metal rod you picked up ages ago. Figuring out this item combination is no easy task, as there's nothing to guide your efforts, but the real annoyance here is the part involving the lever and rock! What if I told you you must do this at least once more?

The Painting Room Puzzle - [Rating: 9/10] - Past the maintenance hole, you enter a pitch-black room that you can illuminate by lighting a match. And guess what? Yet again, you must find ANOTHER control box to push a button to start a puzzle! This time a green button on a control panel permanently turns on the lights in the room. In the middle of this room is a mechanical device that has a camera on top of it. On the back of this machine is ANOTHER panel you need to pry open to solve a mini-puzzle. There are two vials, one with radioactive waste and another with white phosphorous. You must use the blue glove to knock over the radioactive water and pick up the white phosphorous. But here's the most significant dick move in the game short of the rock-throwing minigame. In this room is a random prop rock. You must crush this rock using your hammer to pick up a cockroach. This rock is in a room filled with similar-looking objects! What you have here is another mean-spirited needle-in-a-haystack pixel hunt! It's a wholly screwed-up affair with you wailing away on random rocks until you find the correct one. If we are being generous, the stone you need to find is slightly larger than the rest, but that's pushing it. It's a monstrous ask of the player if they are not using a guide, as it could take twenty to thirty minutes to go through every rock without help.

Exiting The Elevator Complex - [Rating: 7/10] - Now that you have the cockroach, you must drag your ass back to the police officer you used the mouse on! That's right, we have FORCED BACKTRACKING! The "best" part is that many of the puzzles I already explained, such as throwing a rock, must be completed again when you need to return to the painting room to finish the second act! But I'm getting ahead of myself! First, you must return to the elevator and revisit the second floor to scare the police officer using the cockroach. In her room is a desk with an unlocked drawer with a knife. Return to the elevator and explore the archaeology institute on the first floor. Go back to the lab and find a painting with a safe. Use the phosphorous to open the safe, and then grab a lighter. Finally, return to the third floor, do that rock-throwing shit again, and return to the painting room. In this room is a single screen wherein you can use the knife to cut a hole to exit the entire starting complex. Finding this screen is a complete pain in the ass, and it's not like there is an imperfection or clue on where to use the knife. It's another case of you needing to have an item active and clicking randomly on everything until something happens; my least favorite design quirk of early adventure games.

The Outside Level & Final Mansion

Getting Past The Gate And Entering The Mansion - [Rating: 7/10] - Finally, a change of scenery! When you first exit the starting building, you butt up against an electrified fence. To the left of the electrified gate entrance is a set of spikes on top of a cement wall. Depending on your monitor's aspect ratio, these are incredibly hard to see. Throw the rope you picked up from the teleportation chamber at the spikes and summit the wall. On the other side should be a gazebo. Push a sundial to climb to the top of the pavilion and pick up a new spool of rope. Now, there's something in the villa's front yard that you need to pick up, and it might be the most fiddly individual part of the game. Like many Myst clones, the pathways to mission-critical screens with essential items start five to six screens prior. In this case, you need to find a bench, move to the left of it and then move forward to get near a moat and then turn around to look at the mansion. Next, you must walk under a bridge to swim through a creek to face a green fern-like plant. From the fern, back up, do not move forward, to find an alcove to pick up some twigs and fire kindling. There is no other way to reach these twigs, even if they are plopped next to the mansion's door. I am, by all definitions, a Myst apologist, but even I hate it when adventure games have obtuse and hard-to-parse-out pathways you could only ever know if you were the designer or were using a guide.

Picking Up Crap In The Mansion Foyer - [Rating: 6/10] - It is now safe to enter the mansion. The entrance has a fountain full of radioactive waste you must deal with sooner rather than later. When approaching the fountain, pick away at a metal nut to drain the fountain. When examining the trough of the fountain, pick up a shotgun shell. In the villa's foyer and surrounding rooms, it's time for another collect-a-thon! Approach a set of shields hanging on a wall and then move left to pick up a flashlight. The rightmost shield reveals a fuse box; you can nab a burnt fuse from there. In the study, to the left should be a piece of moldy bread on a footstool, and if you stand on the footstool, you can pick up a shotgun. The mansion requires you to explore rooms and interact with almost every piece of furniture until you find the correct screen to pick something up. Luckily the left double doors are locked, so the number of areas you need to search is minimal. Nonetheless, at least the previous two environments had marked control boxes to fiddle with, whereas this one requires you to fan through paintings and chairs until you find a secret compartment or hidden screen. The issue is that the control boxes were a repeating motif, whereas the furniture in this environment is an endless stream of one-offs. The game's third act is its finale, but when A.D. 2044 most feels like a hidden object game.

Turning On The Fireplace And Drying The Shotgun Shells - [Rating: 8/10] - To the right of the building entrance is a fireplace, and this fixture is critical to the next puzzle. First, hopefully, you remembered to pick up the newspaper from the chair when you first needed to enter the archaeology institute because it's an essential item for starting the fire. If you forgot it, as I did, you are in for an incredibly long backtracking session. Place it and the twigs in the fireplace and then apply a match to the kindling to start a fire. Now, the game is incredibly picky about the order of your steps for the next part of this puzzle. First, you need to note that the shotgun shell from earlier is wet and useless as a result. To dry it, you need to back away from the fireplace, move forward to the mantle above it, place the shotgun shell behind a picture frame, back away from the mantle, wait for a short audio cue, and then move forward to the mantle to pick up a "dry shotgun shell." After that Byzantine process, you can load the shell into the shotgun.

Theoretically, the game wants you to complete a few other puzzles after placing the shotgun shell on the mantle, but the timing for that audio cue seems immediate. Nonetheless, the granularity of what you need to do here rarely happens in the rest of this game. The shotgun shell will stay wet if you deviate even one step from my description. In that case, you need to pick it up while it is still wet and try again. For reasons I don't entirely understand, the design for the mission complete on this puzzle doesn't just include the final position of the shotgun shell but also a specific series of steps leading up to its placement on the mantle. That right there is terrible game design.

The Hidden Bookshelf Puzzle In The Study - [Rating: 9/10] - The game does not indicate what it wants you to do next. In theory, it wants you to continue exploring new sets of wall fixtures and pieces of furniture until you encounter a clock with what appears to be a dial. However, nothing about the clock seems too out of the ordinary, and how you solve this puzzle is downright insane. First, around where you dry the shotgun shell is a sofa, and near it is a wire that allows you to repair the blown fuse from the shield. When you place the repaired fuse back into the box it came from, the mansion should suddenly regain its power. This allows you to use the double doors to the study, which has several bookcases filled with novels and encyclopedias. One of these shelves has a book titled "Orbium Solestium," which has a loose page you can remove and place in your inventory. Taking the book reveals the dial, and the page appears empty, but obviously, it has invisible ink that requires heat. Here's my issue, you need to be near, but not directly in front of, the fireplace to make the ink appear. There's precisely one screen where you can place the page in your examination slot to read the instructions "five right, seven left, and three right." Unfortunately, the correct position to read these instructions is a chore to find, and the fireplace is viewable from several logical places that seem like they should accomplish this task. Worse, you need to reset the dial to the noon position because it doesn't start there! In fact, the secret hint doesn't even tell you the starting position for inputting the code in the first place! WHY WOULD ANYONE DO THAT IN THEIR ADVENTURE GAME?!

Entering The Genetics Laboratory - [Rating: 4/10] - The bookshelf reveals a false wall when you input the code into the dial. Before you enter, go to a bar and find a button that you can only see if you use the flashlight under the bar. The switch turns off a security gate that allows you to pick up another spool of rope. When you finally enter the secret entrance and hitch a ride on a lift, you meet a final security guard that you need to blow away into bits using the loaded shotgun. The hidden button is a slight annoyance, but nothing you haven't already experienced in this game. The animation for murdering the security guard, on the other hand, is otherworldly and worth seeking out if you want to have your mind blown.

Restoring "MANkind" - [Rating: 6/10] - Past the guard is a wall that can only be opened if you depress two switches simultaneously. You accomplish this by using the two ropes you should already have in your inventory. Gear checks in adventure games; I love them! Inside a lab, you'll find a birthing machine that needs new settings to give birth to males and females, not exclusively females. The X/Y Chromosomes gauge needs to be at 50%, Garbage Control to 100%, and a third gauge I couldn't read to 0%. With that, you now get to watch the ending cinematic of this "wonderful" video game. It's logical to assume you need to set the gauge involving X/Y Chromosomes to halfway, but the other two are wild guesses or involve pure luck. Ending your bullshit adventure game with a brute force puzzle so I can watch a cutscene furthering your anti-feminist propaganda? That's what I call poetry!

Should You Play This Game? (Answer: No.)

It would be best if you did not play this game. I ended up paying five whole dollars to play A.D. 2044, and that was ten dollars too much. In writing this blog, I hope my scathing review generates some SEO to where it's a top result for A.D. 2044, and it helps dissuade people from buying it even when it is on sale. If you are one such hapless consumer and bought this thinking you were getting a wacky multimedia adventure game from the 1990s, request a refund. This game is neither worth the patience nor effort to get what little modicum of joy derives from it. That someone took the time to modernize this remaster of a bad Atari 8-Bit computer game for modern systems is immensely depressing. A handful of classic and obscure adventure games and Myst clones warranted the care and attention A.D. 2044 got with its current GOG release. There may be someone from Poland reading this right now that can demystify what the appeal is here or why this mini-franchise speaks to the most basic anti-woke grifter sensibilities. Otherwise, please send it back from whence it came and pretend it never existed. Only some things from over twenty years ago need or deserve a modern platform. A.D. 2044 is not one of them.

Preamble

Before we get into the premise and inspiration of this blog, let me say I think Tears of the Kingdom is a masterpiece. It's a technical marvel, and I have enjoyed almost all I have played of it. Its seamless transitions from the underworld and sky environments provide one of the most satisfying gameplay loops I have experienced in a modern game. Accidentally stumbling upon new mechanical creations or unorthodox solutions to missions or puzzles has been endlessly gratifying. And at the end of the day, exploring its rendition of Hyrule is profoundly moving and awe-inspiring at times, which is no easy task considering it is a sequel and parts of what you seek out are retreads of environments and themes from Breath of the Wild. Tears of the Kingdom provides you with a sandbox where you honestly feel that no single playthrough will ever be the same as your mindset when approaching its tools and situations is always bound to be unique. By all means, it is a work of art and a testament to the creative prowess of those working in Nintendo's internal studios.

Nonetheless, I want to posit a slightly negative takeaway that has been abscessing inside me since I reach the game's midpoint. Again, I want to relay a slight disclaimer that I don't want what I am about to postulate to take away from whatever joy you or others have derived from Tears of the Kingdom. However, while I relish the game, it represents, to me, the best possible endnote one could make for the Nintendo Switch as a console. And before anyone thinks this is going to be a long scree about the game's lack of graphical progress compared to Breath of the Wild or a series of grousings about the usual open-world bugs or framerate issues, rest assured, I am an invidious individual, but I respect your time. While some of that factors into my belief that Nintendo shouldn't dedicate further resources to development affixed to the platform's original SKU, something beyond that has been bugging me. For example, I would like to know how this hardware and controller allow Nintendo to continue to innovate and refine its core portfolio. Nintendo can only make a word larger or denser than in Tears of the Kingdom if they have new hardware that allows them that privilege. That is unless they want that game to be a flaming dumpster fire.

You Get The Sense The Switch Is Buckling At This Point

Most Switch devices in households are the original SKU dating to 2017. The critical issue is that the Switch's system-on-chip (i.e., SoC) is a first-generation Nvidia Tegra X1, with the OLED model sporting a modified update. I'm not DigitalFoundry, but we are now five generations removed from the Tegra X1 based on Nvidia's mobile SoC development timeline. Furthermore, everything you play on your Switch uses a CPU operating below 2 GHz, runs on 4 GB of RAM, and utilizes MultiMediaCard memory. I speak for everyone that it is a technical miracle that Tears of the Kingdom looks and runs as well as it does, considering it runs on six-year-old hardware. The game's issues with maintaining a stable framerate whenever there is a lot of water or significant fire effects on the screen become more understandable when you recognize it's using the guts of old mobile phone or tablet technology. The other issue with the Switch stems from its baseline memory. The original Switch still only sports 32 GB of SD Card-based memory with a slight bump to 64 GB if you have the OLED model. Yes, affordable memory cards are out there. Nevertheless, that doesn't change the fact that Nintendo and ANYONE developing a title for the Switch by decree must assume that whoever is purchasing their titles has 32 to 64 GB at their disposal. With Tears of the Kingdom crossing the halfway mark regarding memory requirements, the idea that Nintendo can continue to avoid memory inflation is utterly ridiculous.

More importantly, there's no denying that, as beautiful as Tears of the Kingdom is at times, the Switch shows its age. Everyone I have talked to who has played the game has at least one story of a vehicle or gadget they created phasing out of existence, without warning, before their eyes. Some might dismiss this as a graphical glitch, but after it happened to me a second time, I feel it is more a sign the game and its hardware cannot process past a certain number of objects or actions before you start seeing the game experience brain farts. And there's no denying that there are performance impacts to Tears of the Kingdom having a larger world with more complicated tools at the disposal of its players. More elaborate fights consistently dip below twenty frames per second. Nintendo had those same performance issues with Breath of the Wild, but they continued to trudge on with their enormous sandboxes with lush forests and intricate seas and lakes. Their creative aspirations are not in line with the hardware they were working with, but this is not a new phenomenon. Virtually every prior Nintendo or third-party title on the Switch has similar issues at times. If the Zelda team couldn't find an outright solution to these issues with a game sequel that got six years to bake, then no one is finding these solutions.

And yet, series director Eiji Aonuma has reiterated that Tears of the Kingdom's format will likely be the blueprint for the series' future. Let's be honest for a minute. A new Zelda doesn't come out before we see a hardware revision or successor to the Switch. Nintendo knows that; I know that; you know that. Flat out, the worlds the Zelda team wants to create cannot get bigger or denser with this technology. It will be challenging for its design leads or directors to explore alternate art styles or aesthetics if Nintendo continues to drag its feet regarding hardware. Furthermore, the buzz in the industry is that other divisions and branches in Nintendo are privy to many of the ideas and successes that Nintendo EPD and Aonuma's team experienced with Tears of the Kingdom. However, I have a hard time imagining other development teams, Nintendo or otherwise, being able to replicate the dark magic Nintendo EPD did in getting the world of Hyrule we see in Tears of the Kingdom to work on the Switch. How many other third-party studios have six years to spare and the collective brainpower Nintendo has? As I will discuss in another point, most development studios love the Switch's massive user base, but there are signs that many more are tired of working around the Switch's limitations. So, the likelihood of anything coming close to topping Tears of the Kingdom is slim.

The Esoteric Design Of Tears of The Kingdom Highlights A Need For A New Controller

I must be careful how I word this because my previous attempts at expressing my feelings about Tears of the Kingdom's control scheme were met with instant hostility elsewhere. Certainly, Tears of the Kingdom is a fun game, and I'm not disputing that. Nonetheless, I do feel like its esoteric design and open-ended gameplay butt up against the Switch's default controller. First and foremost, there are plenty of examples in Tears of the Kingdom where there are not enough buttons on the controller when you dock the console. The "wiggle the right stick to un-fuse something" is the first example that jumps to mind regarding something the game asks you to do repeatedly that I desperately wish you could do by pressing a button. However, when I look at what every single input on that controller already does, I have no idea how you would map that without jeopardizing the player experience with another similarly necessary and repetitious action. Then there are the critical player actions that must be mapped to alternate positions because of gameplay triage. I cannot begin to list the number of times I kept hitting L to try and switch to a different weapon when I needed to use the D-Pad instead, but it drove me crazy even though I understood why that was made the way it was.

Yet, there are other times when the game's controls are broken apart with granularity when they probably shouldn't. I am still trying to understand why the default control scheme has Link's sprinting and horse sprinting on different buttons, but that was the wrong call. Similarly, it annoyed me to no end when I would be holding an item in the menu, and while navigating my fingers, I accidentally tapped B, which exited me from the menu and caused me to redo everything I was doing. To the design and programming team's defense, there were few viable answers or solutions to avoid this problem. When the Switch first launched, it was focused on micro-games and titles that still valued Nintendo's love for waggling shit. Also, at that time, we all thought it was incredibly "cute" to break apart the default controller and have friends play with you using just a Joy-Con, but that got old real quick, and now more ambitious titles like Tears of the Kingdom are paying the price. Even then, the controller still feels unwieldy at times, with you needing to reconcile that sometimes, you're just bound to hit the wrong thing while your hands navigate the big hunk of plastic that is the Switch.

No matter, there are other more pressing occasions when the controls feel unwieldy, and the Switch's controller is the prime culprit. Sure, there are times when the game's clunkiness can be squarely pegged on Nintendo being Nintendo. The best example of that has to be Nintendo continuing to be the last stalwart of the right-face button being "accept." However, there are plenty of times when the game needs you to go to the menu to follow Byzantine steps to complete straightforward actions that feel like they should be simple button presses. To highlight, throwing weapons sucks. There are only a few times when you are outright forced to do this, but I need to look up the proper steps every time. The fact it is NOT just Select Menu -> Select the item you want to throw-> Hold the item -> Use R drives me crazy. Instead, as most of you know, you need to have the article you want to throw at the ready, hold the throw button, hold UP to select the item you want to throw, and finally wait for Link to switch to that item so you can throw it. Bopping in and out of menus needs to be done in this game because there are few alternatives. Every button on the Switch Controller already has a purpose, and if you want to fix one command, it must come at the cost of another.

Nintendo Needs To Figure Things Out When It Comes To Its Relationship With Touchscreens

This section will be the briefest of this blog because I'm confident I can get my point across in record time. For those of you who are younger, I want to take you back to when Nintendo made video game devices with good touchscreens. I know it sounds unbelievable, but hear me out on this one. The year is 2012, and Nintendo releases the Wii U, a pretty mediocre platform. It's not terrible, and it even had some memorable gems. Still, it was poorly marketed, and Nintendo's communication on what it was and how it was an upgrade from its predecessor was awful. It also never had good third-party support. But, it had an incredibly high-quality touchscreen that made menu-based games a seamless affair (e.g., Mario Maker). Nintendo also had the 3DS in its portfolio, which had an even better, more importantly, responsive touchscreen. Flashforward to today, and Nintendo, and everyone for that matter, has completely stopped giving a shit about using the touchscreen on the Switch. The reason for that is simple. The touchscreen on the Switch is dog shit, and playing docked is preferred for more substantial titles like Tears of the Kingdom.

These points are not a secret, hence, why so few developers use the touchscreen in any capacity. I have had resistive touch screens on PDAs that felt more responsive and intuitive to use than the Switch's touchscreen. The consequence is that there are a LOT of fiddly menus and inventory management that honestly would have been a lot better and more intuitive to butt up against if I could tap on the screen and get things done. When I think of things I wish I could tap on a screen to complete, the radial menus for picking whichever tool you want to use come to mind. It's wild to believe this is an issue because Breath of the Wild was a Wii U title that did not have this problem. Nevertheless, I know 90% of the people reading this are bound to chime in that they only ever play this game docked. Fine, but that's ignoring the reckoning Nintendo needs to face about which direction they wish to go in the future with their Switch successor. Will they try to split the difference and make another portable console hybrid? Probably. But then you have to consider how that impacts your development ambitions in the future. Likewise, an entire SKU (i.e., the Switch Lite) is all handheld. Are only one out of five Switch users going to play Tears of the Kingdom undocked? Sure, but that's still 20 to 30 million people, and leaving them behind is shitty.

There Will Be TotK Imitators, But Developers, Especially Small Indie Outfits, Are Already Skipping Switch Ports

For my final point, I want to emphasize how Nintendo cannot plan a better console swan song than Tears of the Kingdom. With this game having thoroughly pushed the hardware to its limits, I desperately hope the company has made a selection for its next generation of hardware. If any of its core development studios are busy working on four to five-year projects on the Switch hardware, then that's all but a waste of their time. Furthermore, what more is there to do with the console at this point regarding innovation? Ring Fit Adventure rejuvenated the world of fitness games; Splatoon 2 and 3 rocked the multiplayer front; Fire Emblem: Three Houses spearheaded innovations in the tactics genre where even Firaxis is taking notes from it; Animal Crossing: New Horizons was the greatest Pandemic pick-me-up; Super Mario Odyssey was a masterclass in modern 3D platforming while finding innovative ways to honor its progeny; Super Smash Bros. Ultimate continues to dominate the genre its franchise pioneered and spawned countless cheap imitators; Breath of the Wild practically redefined modern open-world game design. When you also consider the console has ELEVEN Pokemon games, including spin-offs, what more is there to do or prove? In that regard, Tears of the Kingdom feels like a victory lap more than anything else.

And other development outfits are aware of that last note. Review the number of canceled Switch games on Wikipedia; you might be shocked at how few titles are on the list. Nonetheless, there are some notable games on Wikipedia's state-sanctioned list, like Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Final Fantasy XV, and Marvel's Midnight Suns. Looking at that list, you'll notice some commonalities with each canceled title. For one thing, you'll see a growing number of developers that are actively following tech, software, and hardware improvements in the world of video game development. The Switch's comparatively ancient architecture often makes adapting products from developers following recent tech and software innovations daunting, especially for smaller indie outfits. You might look at some of the games I listed and chime in, "But ZombiePie! Most of those games are PC games!" First, everything I listed, besides Final Fantasy XV, has an Xbox or PlayStation port that is very much comparable to the PC version. Second, let's also not forget that several upcoming titles are simply skipping having Switch releases even if the console has a massive customer base. Our very own Jeff Grubb has said that the rumored Final Fantasy IX Remaster will not have a Switch release due to its development team not believing there's a viable way to make their game work on the platform. The Switch deserves credit for fostering greater indie game representation than its predecessors. With the console, Nintendo dramatically lowered the barrier to entry for its digital storefront, but these technical limitations are courting a very particular style and type of indie game.

It's not just prominent studios with big AAA titles that aren't excited to grease their gears to work on Nintendo's highly successful but aging console. As odd as it might sound, the most requested Switch release continues to be Genshin Impact, and if it doesn't happen in 2023, it's not happening. And think about that one. If Epic can find a way to make Fortnite work on the Switch, what's miHoYo's excuse? Part of it is a reluctance to work with the Switch hardware knowing there's likely something new coming around the corner, and a belief that the compromises made to get something to work on the Switch aren't easy. Vampire Survivors was the most heralded indie game of 2022, and there's no sign it will ever come to the Switch. While the game employs a simple 2D art style, I think we all understand it's a resource-intensive game that would take considerable work to run satisfactorily on 4 GBs of RAM. I get that Nintendo EPD got a game far more complex and ambitious to run on the Switch, but again, not everyone making games has the time and brainpower Nintendo is willing to burn. And even if they have people still excited to work with the console, I don't know that I want them to. I'd rather their big pie-in-the-sky ideas go unimpeded without butting against as many technical limitations as they are running into right now. So, let Tears of the Kingdom be how we say goodbye to the Switch. The present and future are bright; here's to more cool things like it!

Preamble

My, how time flies. As Wario64's Tweet reminds us, it's been over ten years since Don Mattrick took the stage and presented the Xbox One, an all-encompassing multimedia-minded console priced at $499.99/£429.99. The platform proved to be a significant turning point for the company's console manufacturing fortunes after doing more than admirable work with the Xbox 360, hardware issues and all. Mattrick left Microsoft on July 1, 2013, and his position remained vacant until Phil Spencer officially became Head of Xbox in 2014. It's wild to think, but Mattrick announced the Xbox One, and when things went south, he only stayed around for less than a year before hitching his reputation and future on Zynga. So, while many gamers, especially those invested in the Xbox ecosystem, look at the anniversary of the Xbox One as a significant page in the "What Could Have Been" tome of video game history, most seem to have forgotten that we are also nearing the tenth anniversary of Phil Spencer's tenure as the head of the Xbox brand.

Phil Spencer is one of the more interesting figures in the video game landscape. The man first joined Microsoft in 1988 as an intern, with one of the highlights of his internship involving him becoming the development lead for Microsoft Encarta. He was twenty-five years old when he led that project. He was eventually attached to Microsoft's Xbox division almost immediately upon its launch. He made the rounds in Lionhead Studios and Rare until he became the general manager and studio vice president of Microsoft Studios, now known as Xbox Game Studios. When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella promoted Spencer to the company's Senior Leadership Team, which means he now only reports to Nadella, few opposed the move. The Xbox brand was still on shakey grounds, but Spencer had done a decent enough job of righting the ship in a limited amount of time. Now with Nadella being reported as signing blank checks to fund the defense team responsible for protecting its proposed buyout of Activision-Blizzard, it doesn't seem like Microsoft has any plans of giving up on video games, though its vision of what it will contribute to the industry and what shapes its consoles will take remains undecided.

And yet, how much progress have we seen the Xbox division make since Spencer took the reins? Most estimates say the PS5 continues to outsell the Xbox Series S/X two-to-one, and the Switch continues to inhabit its own arena where it is on track to become the second best-selling game console/device of all time. The highly problematic launch of Redfall resulted in Spencer making the rounds in various media circles, wherein he publicly apologized for the game's state and took some responsibility. The reports of management dysfunction in Microsoft's internal studios, especially those they bought during Spencer's tenure, continue to grow. This year, the company has a lot riding on Starfield, and if the game's technical issues exceed what many of us would judge as the normal jank associated with Bethesda's style of open-world game design, that would be another black mark on his record. Game Pass remains his most significant achievement, even if it has done little to motivate people to join the Xbox ecosystem. So, does Spencer have enough to show for his nigh ten-year reign, and if not, at what point do you start judging his management and amiable direction differently? Before we get into that, I want to clarify that I am not advocating for the firing or removal of Spencer and his associates. Nor do I think Spencer is a friend, consumer advocate, or someone to defend like he's the second coming of Christ. He's a multi-million dollar earning corporate manager who will likely make more than I will ever make in my lifetime in one month.

The History Of Broken Promises

Let's start with an effortless statement: Phil Spencer legitimately loves this industry. He loves it so much that he has attended every one of Microsoft's E3 press conferences and has been on the brand's public stage in some capacity since 2010. The issue with Spencer's enthusiasm is that he has the "Peter Molyneux Syndrome." He overpromises on the company's portfolio of projects and habitually underdelivers. Likewise, his love for big stages and fancy press conferences has the habit of forcing some studios to slap together teaser trailers and game announcements far earlier than they should. Redfall is a recent example, and Jason Schreier's profile on the game confirms this in brutal detail, wherein Arkane developers knew the game was in a problematic and buggy state but were forced to demo it at press events, which seems downright cruel. Additionally, let's remember that 343 did a massive rework to Halo Infinite after a universally negative response to a press conference trailer. Likewise, when was the last time we heard anything about The Initiative's Perfect Dark reboot game or Playground Games' Fable title after both were tapped to be "World Premier" teaser trailers Spencer giddily announced on a public stage? Spencer and Microsoft are far from the only guilty culprits of this practice. Still, he sometimes exhibits an element of "announcement envy" when he tries to out-compete Sony and Nintendo on big stages, and it's had some embarrassing results.

Now, what are Spencer's responsibilities in this matter? At the most basic level, he reviews items before they get on the final draft of his conferences, and there's a high likelihood he puts out company-wide memos asking for interested parties. Again, I'm not an expert on the corporate structure at Microsoft, but there are two points worth echoing on this matter. First, Spencer's experience working in software, which dates back to 1988, should mean he has a good compass on software titles being in a good or bad state. Unlike other console gaming head honchos, Spencer knows how the sausage is made. Second, how many years in a row can you look directly at the camera, promise people this will be the best year for your console yet, see things not pan out, and still not realize you need to be more careful about your language and messaging? People might like Spencer's more amiable personality, but who trusts him when he excitedly says he has a game announcement that will catch your attention?

Most Agree Spencer's Statements About Big Games Not Moving The Needle Is Wrong

We now transition into the most divisive part of Spencer's Kinda Funny interview. At one point, he outright states that Microsoft likely will not be able to catch up to Sony or Nintendo this generation or possibly ever in terms of hardware sales, and also that even if the Xbox had a bevy of big, eye-catching titles or exclusives, people are unlikely to leave the current Sony and Nintendo console ecosystems in favor of Xbox's. There is some truth to what Spencer is saying, and I agree that the Mattrick era lost one of the worst possible generations one could lose in this industry. However, I don't entirely buy Spencer's argument that losing the Xbox One generation is the primary reason Xbox still needs to play "catch up." People forget that the PS3 eventually caught up to and exceeded the 360 thanks to Microsoft's complete and utter complacency after they caught Sony in its weakest state. After approaching an entire generation with a sense of pompous elitism, Sony engaged in a level of good faith building Spencer's management has repeatedly been gun-shy about in favor of continually attempting to shift their narrative to pretend like the Xbox One never happened. I honestly think if Spencer and others stopped saying some permutation of how the Series S/X was a "new era of Xbox" and instead publicly reflected on why consumers and developers turned on the Xbox One, it would result in some buy-in from significant stakeholders.

Furthermore, Nintendo had an even worse time with the WiiU. While Nintendo has almost 40+ years of video game IPs at their disposal, a fact I do not want to downplay, the core argument that big and exciting exclusive titles will not change your fortunes doesn't hold up in my mind. While Spencer's Kinda Funny interview was admirably frank, it critically oversimplified most video game consumers. Most people with disposable income and in the games hobby are open to owning more than one console. The messaging shouldn't be about "switching" people that own a Switch or PS5 to replace what they already own, but instead to motivate and communicate why owning an Xbox console alongside the ones they already own is a worthwhile investment. And yet, continually, Microsoft has failed to do that. Part of it stems from Microsoft releasing almost everything that launches on the Xbox on PC. Whether that is a good business decision is beside the point that people who do not already own an Xbox Series S or X don't feel like there is a reason to own one, and the brand isn't exactly saying why one should change that mindset.

The Reports Of Management Dysfunction In Their Purchased Studios Grows

This next point is not exactly a shocker to anyone casually following recent video game news. Still, Redfall is far from the only evidence of Microsoft showing clear signs of not knowing what it wants from the many internal studios it paid millions of dollars to own. Microsoft first announced the Perfect Dark reboot in 2020. After prolonged radio silence, Microsoft only recently revealed that they needed to reboot the endeavor, and many of the figures billed as spearheading the project had left. And speaking of Xbox struggling to communicate the state of its tentpole titles in its portfolio, it's WILD that we will likely get to the fifth anniversary of Gears 5 with no semblance of an idea of what is going on with Gears 6 or what Microsoft has done with The Coalition after Rod Fergusson left to work on Diablo IV. It's also not like Microsoft denies its struggles managing in-house studios. In a documentary titled Power On: The Story of Xbox, Spencer admitted that his and his predecessor's handling of Lionhead Studios was "a mistake" and how forcing them to make a Kinect title, everyone knew would never make its money back, was a terrible decision. Spencer also admits that he knew Fable Legends was not a good fit for the studio but didn't do anything to encourage the studio to pivot into something that better fit their strengths and instead let everyone involved wallow until the plug was finally pulled.

For an example of how the Spencer era has not been a universally smooth transition, look no further than the ebbs and flows of 343 Industries. It is essential to note that it's impossible to criticize any studio or console manufacturer with staff turnover unless you have evidence of gross or criminal negligence or abuse. There are even cases of Microsoft presiding over graceful torch-passing moments in its outfits, like when Shinji Mikami announced he was bowing out of Tango Studios after HiFi Rush. Likewise, The Coalition deserves much credit for using Gears 5 as a slight course correction of the series. Nonetheless, the struggles of 343 might stand as one of the most prominent black marks on Spencer's tenure as an actual manager of a brand. 343's near-constant soft-rebooting of the narrative they are trying to tell in each game is a sign there's an evident lack of direction that otherwise did exist during the Bungie era of Halo games. Infinite's inability to deliver on a regular schedule of updates and features that were once assumptions in the past, without any clear replacements or alternatives, further suggests 343 is either rudderless or in dire need of a director that can act as a point man willing to follow an open five-year plan. And the announcement the studio would be heavily affected by layoffs and was in the process of restructuring does not paint a pretty picture that Spencer or his staff know what to do with the post-Bungie Halo IP, even though they have had almost ten years to figure things out. Has the FPS genre passed Halo by? Possibly, but you can't look at 343's inability to deliver on split-screen co-op in Infinite or promised season pass features as anything other than a studio in crisis!

He Sure Likes To Put All Of His Eggs In One Basket

I hinted earlier that the Activision-Blizzard purchase would not be a focal point of this write-up. Nonetheless, there's no denying that we need to talk about it. To put a slightly positive spin on this topic, it is worth noting that the enormous blank check Satya Nadella gave Spencer to purchase the studios he did on top of Activision-Blizzard came after Spencer had to virtually argue in favor of Microsoft not selling the Xbox division to another company or spinning it off entirely. His directive of going "all-in" on gaming hasn't been without a handful of successes and, as we will eventually talk about with Game Pass, does deserve massive credit for changing how we consume video games in the first place. More fundamentally, if Spencer's personal goal was to keep the Xbox dream "alive" and within the walls of Microsoft, there's no denying he accomplished that. Nonetheless, they sure have a lot riding on their Activision purchase. Microsoft has the reputation of thinking it can purchase its way to market-share parity, and there's no denying you get that sense with Spencer's reign.

It also does not help that much of Spencer's current drive to move units and bring people into the Xbox ecosystem relies on people viewing Game Pass as "enough" to sell them on new console hardware or encourage them to use the Xbox or Game Pass PC apps. Speaking of which, how is it in the year of our Lord, 2023, that Microsoft's communication about the differences between Game Pass on Xbox and Game Pass on PC STILL is utter dogshit? I'm not even talking about the performance issues with the Xbox App on PC or Game Pass on PC; I want a list of the games that exist on one or the other and the ability to sort them. This quibble is one example of how Microsoft needs to be more thoughtful about educating general audiences about Game Pass, which is all the more difficult when you have two different permutations of that service. And on top of that, what the fuck is the point of the Xbox app on Windows? I'm sick and tired of needing to put it to sleep whenever Windows updates and turns it back on, and it sucks up my processing power, OR it hits me over the head with ads for games I'd much rather buy on Steam, Epic, or GOG.

The other dangerous line of thinking that Spencer is occasionally guilty of is viewing one game or project as being "enough" to salvage or justify problematic development cycles. The worst thing that could happen this year is if Starfield comes out and it has considerably more "Bethesda jank" than we have ever experienced in their previous titles. Open-world games are complex endeavors; there's no denying that. Nonetheless, a lot is riding on Starfield this year to show the power of the Xbox's architecture and that the Microsoft acquisition of Bethesda and ZeniMax Media was mutually beneficial. If the game comes out and it's noticeably better or has a smoother launch than what we have seen in previous Bethesda titles, they can, at least, claim they are learning from their failures. Still, another problematic outcome that could arise after Starfield's release is one I'm apprehensive about but assured will happen. I think there's a genuine risk that Starfield makes a ton of money, and Microsoft slaps water on their face and says, "Whelp! We are out of the growing phase! Nothing to see here! Business as usual!" Redfall is one of many examples that Microsoft needs to have a cause célèbre moment wherein they reflect on why their attempts to create the in-depth AAA internal game titles that Sony and Nintendo have has been messy at times and which of their policies or personnel continue to lead to these dusty development cycles.

To Spencer's Defense, He Inherited A Disaster

Let's now transition to why we should still view Spencer's tenure as a net positive rather than a net negative. The biggest one is a reason I have already hinted at earlier. The fact remains that the launch of the Xbox One was an unmitigated tire fire. While the console was not a complete commercial failure and even had pockets of success worldwide, Spencer inherited a public relations disaster. The end of the Don Mattrick era burned large swaths of the goodwill people had from the 360 and pissed away decades of progress Microsoft made with developers to treat their consoles as being on par with Sony and Nintendo. The last ten years have made some, but not complete, progress in rectifying the deficit Mattrick wracked up in the failed plan to make the Xbox One an all-encompassing multimedia device. Are there examples of developers like Square-Enix that prove some do not view the Series S/X as worth their time or that Microsoft still does not present them with a deal worth taking? Sure, but considering that the alternative was Nadella pulling the plug, Spencer preserving much-needed competition in the industry remains a massive accomplishment. And, yes, a single mind or person rarely spearheads business decisions. Spencer has a team of industry professionals that work with him. Regardless, part of his agenda of keeping the brand alive has also involved him and his team developing a path or direction we don't see from Nintendo or Sony. There's no denying that games are coming out that take advantage of Game Pass and would likely not exist on consoles if it did not exist.

Spencer's work to better align the Xbox division with Satya Nadella's mandate of moving from Microsft's software-based portfolio with services and cloud databases was no small task. Yet, he managed that reasonably well, and this has been to the benefit of consumers like you and me. It's wild to think, but Microsoft has the most consumer-friendly backward compatibility program AND maintains legacy software leaps and bounds better than its competitors. As an exercise, think of any game you bought digitally on XBLA during the heyday of the 360. Unless it is a movie tie-in or a licensed property, it's likely still available to purchase, thanks to Spencer and his team publicly advocating for these storefronts to stay up and available. The last time Microsoft sunset any services on Xbox was when they terminated Xbox Live support for the original Xbox to allow people to have more extensive friend lists and adopt a wider breadth of newer Wi-Fi generations. Yes, Games for Windows Live is another black mark on the company's record, but that wasn't Spencer's call, and it still ranks below Nintendo making whole generations of consoles virtually unusable like what they recently did with the Wii U or Sony revoking your ability to buy exclusive titles on the PS Vita.

Microsoft Has Been In The Industry For Far Less Time Than Its Competition

I want to return to Kinda Funny's interview of Spencer, wherein he accepted responsibility for Redfall's state and signaled that he did not see a path for Xbox to match the PS5's sales lead. Something must be said about him coming out and accepting responsibility for a mishap. When I indicated as such on various other channels, many people were apt to point out that Iwata did so when Nintendo's fortunes took a downward turn. Now consider this, by the time Iwata took up the head role in Nintendo, Nintendo had its skin in the video game industry for about the same amount of time Microsoft has been making and publishing console video games in totality. That's an advantage few have mentioned when raising concerns about Spencer's tenure leading Xbox, but one we need to be mindful of before calling for his ousting. Sega, Nintendo, and Sony have all committed more prominent follies that have lost their respective console brands even more money and reputation than the Xbox One. The Xbox One was Microsoft's de Havilland Comet. It was riddled with mistakes, but mistakes that virtually any company that has entered the console manufacturing market has made. Sure, Nintendo and Sony have pivoted within a single console generation after stumbling, but that's after both had decades of experience managing console hardware for nigh thirty years. Expecting a single person or team to un-fuck a thoroughly screwed situation is not just an unrealistic expectation; it also masks how Microsoft's failures have been echoed and repeated by its peers.

There's no way for me to put this without sounding like a monster; the studio dysfunction many have cited as a possible weakness of Spencer's management isn't endemic to Microsoft. Going dark on a hotly anticipated video game title? How about the Nintendo Defense Force update me about Metroid Prime 4 and Nintendo's haphazard direction for Retro Studios? And if you want a historical example of Nintendo being as meddlesome in the development and leadership of a video game as Microsoft was on Fable Legends, look up the development history of Body Harvest and learn how it might stand as one of the most tortured developments in industry history. Do you think Microsoft is alone in announcing a new internal studio prematurely? Remember when Sony paraded Treyarch veterans associated with the Call of Duty franchise with the announcement of Deviation Games? Remember when Sony announced that Deviation Games laid off 90 staff members this year, and all of those big names have since left the label for "undisclosed reasons?" And you also have Sony subsuming Japan Studio and stripping it of its identity after belting out Astro's Playroom.

Reading over Jason Schreier's most recent report on what went wrong in Arkane during Redfall shows some weaknesses of Spencer's management style. It sounds like he elected to give the newly acquired studios and their pre-existing management free reign to operate as they did before purchasing them. In a lot of ways, this article isn't surprising. Though, it's not a massive indictment against Spencer or Microsoft. Redfall sounds like an example of a studio operating out of its comfort zone, and with Arkane already three years deep, axing the game was a tough call. Additionally, the mismanagement seems primarily from Arkane's managers rather than Spencer's. You could argue that he should have pulled the trigger, but it's still a brutal decision. His only genuine mistake in my book was presenting the game as a big release when all the signs were there that it was not that. Additionally, Bethesda asked for Spencer's hands-off management style in the first place. Todd Howard has been on record saying he likes Microsoft letting them cook, and that was part of their initial agreement when ZeniMax agreed to its sale to Microsoft. I don't say any of this to apologize for poor management that has gone unchecked or possible toxic work practices. Nevertheless, let's not look at Redfall or other game projects from Microsoft's command center as these self-contained experiences. If Sony was so much better at this, what the FUCK was the deal with that TLOU PC port?

Game Pass Has Always Been A Long-Term Investment & It's A Massive Triumph Regardless Of Its Current Issues

If you press even the most ardent critics of the current state of Microsoft or Spencer to highlight successes, most tend to default to Game Pass. These claims are then followed by a bevy of issues with Game Pass, like the fleeting nature of more prominent games on the service or perceptions of its unreliability. Correspondingly, many people have claimed that Game Pass is a single success story associated with a brand in dire straights and that one W cannot possibly outweigh a long list of Ls. As if fundamentally changing how we consume and play games is a simple accomplishment that should weigh as much as a game launching hot or without promised features. Sure, the communication of what value Game Pass poses needs to improve, and the service is still struggling with some basic UI quibbles that have persisted well beyond their introduction. Still, Game Pass remains one of the best deals in the hobby, and it's not like Spencer unthinkingly followed a template another company pioneered. Laying the groundwork for Game Pass necessitated massive engineering and novel out-of-the-box thinking. There have been subscription gaming services in the past, but none have achieved the ubiquity or general acceptance Game Pass has achieved.

Likewise, Game Pass is not a singular service or product. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and the goods tied to Xbox Cloud Gaming present entirely different benefits to people who opt into them. With Xbox Cloud Gaming, the team at Microsoft has assuaged previous critics at Microsoft internally that their division fell out of line with the company's growing emphasis on cloud services and its "software as a service" model. Maybe you hate this direction, but when you weigh the need for self-preservation, it's hard not to see the need for it. Cloud gaming is far from something that Microsoft or Phil Spencer invented, but when you look at previous stabs at creating a long-term cloud-based gaming service, efforts like OnLive didn't "stick" the way Xbox Cloud Gaming or Game Pass has. Correspondingly, other competitors like GeForce Now or Amazon's Luna have had far more tumultuous relationships with publishers leaving their respective platforms or services without warning. Let's not forget about GeForce Now changing its licensing agreements and, at one point, losing Bethesda, 2K, and Activision in a few weeks. Game Pass also has injected a much-needed sense of direction into the Xbox brand, and Spencer has consistently executed on funding games that benefit the most from the service, whether it be games big or small. Xbox under Spencer has what feels like an incredibly tangible sense of commitment to a long-term viewpoint on how to change their fortunes, and in the realm of business, that's not something you punish.

People Like Him

It seems incredibly odd to end this write-up with something so subjective, but pointing out Spencer's amiability seemed the best way to end it. And it is true, while the console wars still fail to die, most people view Spencer in a far kinder and brighter light than most of his competitors. Obviously, Nintendo is the gold standard, but let's remember how many of you would opine about always looking forward to Jeff Gerstamnn interviewing Spencer during E3 and feeling like there was something different about him. Yes, Spencer is still a corporate suit who speaks about wanting to take responsibility for the launch of Redfall with little sign of him following through in any meaningful way. Nonetheless, the man is a storyteller, and unlike Jim Ryan, he has more personality than a wet cardboard box. Even if all Spencer was expected to do was take center stage during conferences and get people excited about things they likely will not touch for at least five to six years, you still benefit from him sticking around. The thing is, Spencer knows his shit and does a lot more than drum up fanboy support. Thanks to his connection to software and game development, he understands the industry, and I don't know how many others tick the additional intangibles boxes he does.

And you know what? Having the humility to say outright that something is your fault and you accept responsibility, especially in an era when we seem to get the most robotic and soulless apologies from video game companies, is refreshing. Spencer's subsequent interviews about Redfall show he understands the game's issues are more significant than simply polish. What are the actual consequences of taking responsibility? I hope it translates to permitting Arkane to cook and providing the people who worked on Redfall the opportunity to share what they think could have been done better and him acting upon that input. Contrast Spencer with Jim Ryan, who often issues public statements that make perfect business sense but get your blood boiling. The main contrast is that the games company Ryan is in charge of has been doing exceptionally well. And that's just that. Even if we like Spencer because he knows how to talk like a human being, the point still stands: when is it time to reassess his tenure?

Author's Note: This the second part to a two-part series. Here's a link to the first episode in case you missed it:

• The Quest For The Worst Adventure Game Puzzles - MTV's Club Dead [Part 1] (At Least Scroll To The End For A Twist)

CONTENT WARNING! There's A Gross Transphobic Scene In This Game!

During my first blog post about Club Dead, I made a few passing references to how parts of this game reminded me of the first Ace Ventura movie. In particular, the way its larger-than-life characters gesticulated and talked felt like weird facsimiles of Jim Carrey's performance. I wrote that post before finishing the game, and now I stand here to report regretfully that Club Dead shares another highly deplorable similarity to Ace Ventura. One of the game's villains turns out to be Lana Powers, BUT Lana Powers is ALSO the oddball doctor performing the autopsies for the hotel's investigation. When you discover this, the doctor permanently switches to the voice used for Lana Powers, suggesting the character is meant to be trans or, at the very least, gender fluid. I should note the game does not outright have the doctor come out and say they are a trans person, and instead, has a morphing effect wherein the villain switches between their two "personalities." Nonetheless, the male actor makes a high concerted effort to sound effeminate once you experience this plot twist, and their mannerisms moving forward repeat a LOT of the familiar tropes film and media associate with gay men. For example, there's a point when they do a Z-Snap. Finally, though the doctor is henceforth referred to as "she" by everyone who is not the protagonist, the protagonist appears to misgender them deliberately as a taunt.

Now, a handful of you might read that last paragraph and think, "Well, what if the character is trans and they also happen to be evil?" As someone who played the game, I can tell you definitively that's not the case, and the doctor character, much like their Ace Ventura counterpart, is very much established as switching their gender to employ an evil plot. This trope trivializes the soul-wrangling those in the trans and gender-fluid communities go through and depicts gender reassignment as a simple flick of the switch. Yes, this game takes place in the future, but that doesn't change the fact that it repeats other harmful stereotypes in films and games regarding trans people. What makes this even more distressing is that the doctor is revealed to be mentally ill and that their "confusion" about their gender, the game's words, and not mine, are connected to that. It's utterly disgusting and a MASSIVE black mark on the game, even if you enjoy its wacky story and bizarre supporting visuals. And in the off-chance, you're still unconvinced any of what I described is not okay, one, know I don't want to be friends with you, and two, consider watching Disclosure on Netflix.

October 31st

Puzzles From 9:00 am to 11:25 am - [Rating: 6.5/10] - I needed to break my "retrospective" on Club Dead into two parts because October 31st is a BIG CHUNK of the game! Worse, the first two hours of this day are an absolute SLOG! After Nick Offerman helps you nab a bunch of aliens doing their best Roman senator cosplay, you enter your apartment only to experience a HILARIOUS cutscene in which your character's estranged girlfriend catches them hanging out with Lana Powers, but more on that in a little bit. As was the case before, your primary gameplay interactions involve:

• Fussing about with the in-game PDA.
• Checking messages/emails to gain new items.
• Moving random tat into and out of your character's hands.

The kicker here is that there are THREE long-winded emails to mull over instead of the usual one or two. Likewise, it's not immediately apparent which of these has your next storyline-required item, as each is relatively thorough. Finally, the item in question is a pallet swap of a previous one; in this case, the "ticking goggles" look very similar to the ones you've already used. To add insult to injury, you must discard the ticking goggles almost immediately after you enter the hotel lobby. The goggles don't even appear in a cutscene and exist as an entirely artificial barrier to your progress.

After watching another video, Sam, your character, needs to review a new bevy of PDA files before moving a "personal access badge" into his hands. Apparently, after arresting the evil space Romans, the hotel's security team felt the need to deputize you, despite you still being the primary suspect in a murder. With the badge, migrate to Lana Power's room. After a quick back-and-forth with her, review new documents and emails before hitching a ride on an elevator to floor ten and, after seeing a cinematic there, make it a priority to go to the Medical Room on floor fourteen. While there, Sam needs to perform an autopsy on the Space Roman Nick Offerman killed so he can yank a CD from his gullet. However, it is worth noting that this action will only trigger if you remember to read the relevant email that details that the doctor that performed a preliminary autopsy found the CD in the first place. If you elect to blow off the emails, this entire sequence will not pop off, and you'll be unable to complete the game. It would also be best if you moved the disc into your main inventory so you can download and review a new PDA file which will allow you to trigger a new cutscene upon entering Sam's hotel room.

Weirdest Video: It's a tie between your girlfriend catching you mucking around with Lana Powers and your character going elbow-deep into the throat of a corpse. The walk-in scene has the expected punchline of Sam's girlfriend making a pretty honest appeal for him to open up to her about his current issues, but the endnote wherein Lana walks into the frame without warning and turns directly to the camera to blow a kiss while saying "I can't endure interruptions. Night, baby!" is the sort of fourth-wall-breaking nonsense I can get behind. The scene that ties this one involves Sam realizing there's more evidence to collect from the long-dead obese Space Roman. He then shoves his whole arm into its corpse, THROUGH ITS MOUTH, so he can grab a CD-ROM that got there for unknown reasons. And to cap it all off, after pocketing the CD, the ghost of the dead Space Roman shouts at him to return the CD where he got it.

Puzzles From 12:00 pm to 3:25 pm - [Rating: 5/10] - Things indeed start on a "bang" with you needing to mess around with the Chipman Interace again! In case you have forgotten, the game makes you click on attachments in emails to complete puzzles; it also has an in-game permutation of unzipping files in the form of the Chip System, which oddly mimics 7-Zip in terms of the steps you need to follow. After watching a new video, download a few files before going to the Fantasy Room. Upon entering the room, you'll see a montage of the dreams and aspirations of each person murdered at the hotel up to this point. Scudder wanted to play with puppies, and Richie 7 wanted to start a rock band. After copying these dreams onto a disc, you can head to the Surveillance Room. But before we do that, I must note that using the disc during this bit is incredibly fiddly. After leaving the elevator, and not a second later, you must put the disc in your hands until you find a reasonably obtuse door at the end of a hallway. After the cutscene with the dreams is done, you need to place the disc in your main inventory, and if you leave it in your hands, the cutscene in the Surveillance Room will not trigger. Once that task is done, it's time to download and review more PDA files and emails before walking to the Body Station.

While the Body Station is typically a fun location, it's, unfortunately, time to repeat the game's routine involving PDA articles and emails before moving to your next location, Central Control, on the first floor. However, it would be best to move the disc from your inventory to your character's hands again. The good news is that you burn this disc after interacting with Logan and don't have to worry about it again. The bad news is that Sam needs to book an appointment for Spenser in the Pod Room, where he experienced the demonic Teletubbies. You find Spenser designing a new holographic virtual reality program, which involves him shouting orders to designers and engineers while he inhabits a video game world because that's how video game development will work in the future. Because this is a cyberpunk hellscape of a video game, Spenser attempts to call security, with Dali-inspired melted clocks interjecting in between every other word he says, only for Sam to declare that Scudder is dead. Spenser continues to ignore your character as he dematerializes you from his program.

Weirdest Video: Did I remember to mention that Nick Offerman's character dies? He's the best character in the entire game, and they kill him at the halfway mark. At least the game knows to send him off in a fitting fashion. As the doctor examines his corpse, he notices a white ice-like substance covering his body and takes his fingers, uses them to caress Offerman's mustache, and then begins to smell and eat whatever killed him. This action allows him to determine his time of death to the hour. Logan, also your estranged girlfriend, is promptly named the head of security at the hotel. She's shockingly competent at her job and the game's "straight man/woman" in many regards. Nonetheless, the hotel doctor being a weird pervert that can only make diagnoses if they can lick their patients, was a choice.

Puzzles From 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm - [Rating: 4/10] - It could be Stockholm Syndrome, but it was around this point when the game's annoying interface became less of an impediment and everything it needed me to do felt increasingly automatic. I knew there would be files for me to peruse, and considering there had not been a new item when I started the next level, I knew there was nothing in my hands I needed to consider putting there. In this case, it is time to return to the Medical Lab before returning to the Pod Room. If there is one quibble for me to relay, it's the game's on-again/off-again relationship with the personal access badge. There are a handful of new environments that are only accessible if you have the badge in hand, and it needs to be active regardless of however many times you've been there previously. There are also some new environments where you only need to have it in hand the first time you enter. Finally, some locations during the game's second half don't need it at all.

Alas, if only that were my only issue with this segment! Before attending to things in the Pod Room, place the personal access badge in your character's hand and enter. It's time for you to have a WONDERFUL cutscene involving Spenser in his virtual reality world AGAIN! After watching a video, remove the badge and head for the lobby. Watch another cutscene, review new emails, and consult files in your PDA. Finally, head for the Body Station on floor fifteen, but mercifully, this situation does not require you to have a specific item. And if you are keeping record, the game has now repeated the same formula at least six times!

Weirdest Video: The part with Spenser in the virtual reality program is undoubtedly the most memorable part. It has the most 90s-era appropriate flashing geometric patterns while Spenser repeats familiar fashion guru tropes in a faux-gay accent. Sam acts surprised when Spenser blows him off, but considering he just met him and decides to call him "Spense" to his face, who can blame him? But the weird ways the game attempts to remind you that it takes place in the far-flung future slay me. When Spenser attempts to use a digital device to call for security, it's a giant green bong-like speakerphone because when this game was made, cell phones were not the cutting-edge technology they are today. The protagonist even references wanting to vent their frustrations on Spenser using "instant messenger." And the background art during this dialogue must be seen to be believed.

Puzzles From 6:05 pm to 7:55 pm - [Rating: 8/10] - During this segment, it is CRITICAL that you be careful when checking your messages. These messages are tucked away in a separate Inbox panel and entirely different from your PDA files the game already expects you to review as part of your daily goings-on. Nonetheless, move a "Digitizer" from your main inventory to your character's hands and use the elevator to move to the Surveillance Room on floor sixteen. This action nets you a digital drug-sniffing dog called a "Video Bloodhound." After you watch a weird cutscene in the Surveillance Room, you need to find a new file attachment and note it shows an image displaying the letters "AC." Replace the Digitizer with the Video Bloodhound in your character's hands and use the Chipman Interface to listen to an audio recording. After you listen to the chip, head for the hotel lobby and use the Tele-FX, which nets another cache of documents you need to read and review. I will warn you, the final hour of this game makes you interact with a TON of fiddly menu systems, and it drove me up the wall.

After you review those documents, head for your character's hotel room to watch an incredibly in-depth cutscene to learn about the hotel's sub-basement. Unfortunately, when you attempt to use the elevator to get there, you'll likely take note of a locked door that blocks your progress. Remember when I said reading the documents during this level was important? Do you also remember when I told you one of those emails had an attachment with the letters "AC?" Yup, the password to this door is in an incredibly easy-to-miss file attachment and impossible to figure out anywhere else. Also, there's an additional log-in you need to input, "LUMIEL," that you only get in an email AFTER you first enter the sub-basement! You'll never forget any of this information during additional playthroughs, but it is goddamn infuriating to butt up against the first time!

Weirdest Video: When you enter the sub-basement, you discover it is a furnace, and a British sci-fi coal miner is one of the few people that work there. Despite that, he's wearing a German World War I Stormtrooper uniform. Also, he speaks in sentence fragments and riddles like he's a Skaven from Warhammer Fantasy. However, the best part is when he introduces himself as Lumiel and says, "Lumiel is always here to give you a hand," upon which he gives you a SEVERED HUMAN ARM and then runs away. IT'S NOT A PROSTHETIC; IT'S AN ACTUAL HUMAN BODY PART! Apparently, our friend Lumiel has been toiling around in the hotel's furnace and encounters random human appendages all the time, and like a cat that has recently slayed a mouse, he wants to show that he likes you by giving you viscera. Oh, and you don't need to chase after him and give him his goddamn arm back. If you do, he welcomes you to use it as he thinks you need it more than him! As a result, you now have a human arm on top of your usual inventory clutter.

Puzzles From 9:00 pm to 10:15 pm - [Rating: 6/10] - As you might expect, you need to move the human arm into your hand and then go to the Hotel Lobby and make a beeline for the Tele-FX. After you finish your business with the Tele-FX, move the arm back into your main inventory and head for the Pod Room. A weird and scary video depicts Lana Powers' death, and your character decides to book it for her room on floor five. Upon entering, you find the room empty, and nothing happens. That's because this is one of the few times the game is time-sensitive! The following cutscene, which happens to be the transition between this day and the next, will only deploy when the clock hits 11:00 pm, even if you have all the required items to trigger it! Luckily, there is a button that moves you forward in time, but I have been avoiding it to give you a better sense of what it is like to experience the entire game. This scenario is one of the few times when the game requires you to be aware of the in-game clock, and it's easy to see this example being a frustrating roadblock. The dongle that speeds things up is easy to miss, and the previous time you needed to check the clock to progress the story was ages ago, and the game incentivizes you to take your time and not bother with it!

Weirdest Video: Despite my disclaimer at the start, I simply MUST talk about the reveal involving Lana Powers. When it seems like the doctor is about to perform a lobotomy on your character, Lumiel pops out of nowhere and comes to your rescue. You met him exactly once prior to this scene, and he declares you one of his best friends, so he attempts to rescue you. He also uses a comically oversized pair of garden sheers to cut you loose. He hisses and squeals like a rat, but he's your buddy for the rest of the game! There is an earlier scene wherein you watch Lana Powers get murdered, which is incredibly creepy. The dream sequences and murder scenes all feel like they owe a debt of gratitude to David Lynch, and that scene, in particular, is no different. But something about a character you meet in a game's final act being the crux of the entire story tickles me pink.

November 1st

Puzzles From 12:00 pm to 2:20 pm - [Rating: 8/10] - Alright, it's the final day of Club Dead, and now we need to talk about a new mechanic on top of all its annoying menu-based nonsense! This new mechanic involves you needing to save people on specific floors before exceeding a time limit. If you fail, you get a "Game Over." It is worth noting how playing certain parts of this game out of order or attempting to interact with other characters or environments without the necessary equipment will end your adventure prematurely. For your first rescue mission, you must find Logan Kane in Central Control on the first floor before the clock exceeds 12:20 pm. When Lumiel rescues you from the evil doctor, the game starts at 12:00 pm. With such a narrow window to complete this task, is the game cognizant of this fact and stop with the file downloading and email reading bullshit? NOPE! You still have to interact with the rigamarole you always do when starting a new level or sequence in this game. Plus, when you save Logan Kane, you need to use a syringe when entering Lana Power's room which ducktails into you needing to head to the Surveillance Room on the sixteenth floor. It's around here when the game shows that it has run out of ideas of how to string together sequences, as the gameplay amounts to visiting every location at least once to see if someone needs saving from the evil doctor. After the Surveillance Room, you head for the Pod Room, followed by the Sub-Basement. Because the murderer is loose, if you visit things out of order, YOU DIE! That last part is infuriating because there are so many levels to choose from, and while the previous three days allowed for some open-ended exploration, this final one does not.

Weirdest Video: When you enter the Surveillance Room, you find the doctor attempting to inject your girlfriend with a large syringe. Moments before they can kill her, your character comes to the rescue. However, after wrestling the needle from the doctor, our good friend Sam decides to rekindle his relationship with his estranged girlfriend instead of CHASING AFTER THE MURDEROUS DOCTOR! Sure, sticking around reveals some critical information about the doctor and how they attempted to shut down everyone's access codes, but did our good friend Sam need to have a tender heart-to-heart on top of his lore dump? However, the scene that takes the cake has to be the one you see when you break into Lana Powers' room. After snatching some incriminating evidence, a bizarre blue hologram taunts Sam. I do not know what this hologram is meant to depict, so I'll post an image and hope one of you knows what it might be. I think it might be a Smurf put through a Vitamix.

Puzzles From 3:25 pm to 4:55 pm - [Rating: 5/10] - After the cutscene in the Sub-Basement, you need to examine a new PDA file to acquire an item for a future sequence. That item is a wedding ring, but it is crucial that you not put it into your character's hands until after you do a few things. First, head to Sam's apartment to trigger a new message and then leave to use the elevator to return to the lobby. A new PDA file should pop up, and this one will net you a printout that needs to be placed in your character's hands so you can use it on the Tele-FX. Once done, remove it from your character's hands and read over a new batch of PDA files before heading to the Medical Lab. After that, you should eventually get a PDA file that bestows a picture of a clock and place this in your character's hands like the previous picture and then move to the Body Station. When you finish the cinematics there, replace the photo with the syringe and then go to the seventeenth floor, which normally houses the bar, but this time use a wooden door that you have never used before. As you might have guessed, the pictures are all one-off items and are a nuisance. Knowing when to use them and when to tuck them away is never particularly clear, and that's an endless source of irritation.

Weirdest Video: This part of the story makes no sense to me. Your character collects tapes from Lana's room and then has the security guard play them, and it is discovered they are the tape recordings of everyone the doctor has killed. They show perfect evidence of the characters killing themselves, and the security guard even acts nonplussed that they exist in the first place and even quips that they came from the cameras already installed in everyone's hotel room by default. So, if the hotel knows there are suspicious activities and a possible serial killer, why didn't they notice that their security camera footage was missing in the first place? Regardless, the security footage is a riot, with the highlight being the discovery that Nick Offerman's character called his taser "Sparky" in memory of his dead childhood dog.

Puzzles From 5:20 pm to 7:20 pm - [Rating: 3/10] - When you enter the Tiki Bar with the syringe, you should be able to save someone named "Red Moses." You must do this before the clock passes the 5:20 pm mark. After reading over some new PDA files, move the syringe and then go to the hotel's tenth floor. After helping the people there, read a message that gets you some cash, and then head to the Pod Room again. Move the money to your hands, enter the room, and net a new object called a "V Timer." Move that object into your character's hands before moving to the Fantasy Room, and after you are done there, move it back to your main inventory. With all that out of the way, head for the Surveillance Room. This chunk of the game was BY FAR the tamest of all its sequences during the final day. You don't have to do anything new, and it is easy to figure out where you need to go, given only a few rooms are left. Moving crap around is still more complicated than it needs to be, but that's about it.

Weirdest Video: When you enter the Surveillance Room at the end of this sequence, Sam's girlfriend asks why they don't just leave the hotel. Despite being the sanest proposal we have heard in the entire game, Sam dismisses it, saying they still need to definitively point the murders on the doctor, as if we haven't already done that. After that quip, the doctor attempts to communicate with the two by billowing, "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears," and then lays out their entire evil scheme for all to hear. Their transmission looks like something ripped directly from Max Headroom, with static, 90's stylings, and other random icons like flaming skulls and casino slot machine cherries also gracing the screen. And guess which floor their secret lair is! Yup, it's on the thirteenth one!

Puzzles From 7:55 pm to 10:30 pm - [Rating: 6/10] - It's time for the BIG FINALE! Your character hints that "only one person knows how to get to the thirteenth floor," and that's our buddy in the Sub-Basement. Check your inboxes and PDA before and after entering the basement. After an extensive cutscene, check for messages and new PDA files and acquire an elevator access button. Return to the Pod Room and place the bidirectional transductor back into your hands before entering the door to the main room. I must note this is an item you have used precisely ONCE PRIOR, and it was during the first day! That is what I call a "dick move." Once you are done with the Pod Room, move the elevator access badge into your hands, and when you use the elevator, you should be able to access the thirteenth floor. After a cutscene, place the wedding ring in your character's hands, and it is critically important to check for and read new PDA files before AND after entering the elevator. To save time, you don't even need to use the elevator, but for whatever reason, the game only triggers the email containing the solution on how to beat the doctor if you enter the elevator. However, you die if you mess around for too long in the hotel. The best course of action is to download the files after the first cutscene on the thirteenth floor ends, enter the elevator, and review the new files that pop up. The final "skill check" regarding if you beat the final boss is if you read the required files and have the wedding ring in Sam's hand. That's it, but trust me, it's a bastard.

Weirdest Video: The ending to Club Dead is a work of art. I don't think any of you will be shocked to learn that Club Dead has a fever dream of a finish. When you first enter the thirteenth floor, you find a giant container with the brains of the doctor's former murder victims. Nearby you find their corpse hooked up to a machine that can send people's consciousness through the internet. After Sam uses the contraption for a hot ten seconds, his girlfriend yanks him out moments before he fries his brain. After the two discuss what happened, a new antagonist reveals themselves. It turns out the doctor was trying to use the brains as a sacrifice for an evil spirit that lived in the hotel and wanted to be freed by using the internet. The woman is Alexandria Romanov, a long-forgotten descendant of the Romanov family and wife of Lumiel. She reveals that the owner of the hotel took her brain and fused it with the computer, and now that she is free, she's going to get her revenge by killing everyone in the hotel and then downloading her consciousness into the internet to send a message that will melt everyone's brains.

I know this isn't how the internet works, and this sounds a LOT like The Ring, but it was the 90s; what more can I say? The evil internet witch begs Sam to hand over his brain, and she attacks your girlfriend by shooting out internet BASIC from her hands. Sam pulls out the wedding ring, which is the witch's Kryptonite, and Sam shouts for his girlfriend to stop the upload of the brain-eating super virus. When she fails, the creepy girl that constantly hung out in Sam's hotel room pops into the scene, calls the evil internet witch "mommy," and then breaks the machine that was about to send her brain-melting internet message. I cannot emphasize enough that none of this is foreshadowed even the slightest bit. The brain witch is defeated, and the remaining survivors of the hotel book a flight on a spaceship before it explodes. Sam and his girlfriend decide to adopt the girl that helped them defeat the brain witch, and everyone lives happily ever after.

NOT! The game implies that Lana Powers uploaded her consciousness into Sam's girlfriend's brain while she was knocked out during the fight against the brain witch, essentially killing her, and the ship's pilots are those demonic Teletubbies from earlier.

Should You Play MTV: Club Dead? (Answer: Probably Not)

In the first episode, Sparky_Buzzsaw made the cogent point of saying to most people amused by the concept of Club Dead that their best option was to find a YouTube video with all of the cutscenes spliced together into a single fifty-minute video. At the time of my first blog, I had not fully finished the game and was aghast at the suggestion. I was entertained enough by the game's harebrained moments that the work I put into it still felt worth the effort. Then the repetition of the gameplay kicked in, and I reached the more involved segments and found myself defaulting to Sparky's judgment. It does not help, as I indicated at the start, that there's an incredibly off-putting plot twist involving a trans-person, and their gender feels less like a point of empowerment and more like a cheap shock-jock comedy bit. As a result, I burned out on Club Dead far quicker than I had envisioned. It's a bummer but par for the course in multi-media video games. Rarely, if ever, do non-Myst, non-Tex Murphy, non-Journeyman Project, or non-The Beast Within FMV adventure games know how to maintain their momentum.

Despite those issues, this game is an incredible time capsule. Never before have I seen a single video game encapsulate the social fabric and aesthetical milieu of the 90s quite like Club Dead. Every creative, narrative, and aesthetical choice that needed to be made in the game defaulted to the most potent and quintessential notions and hopes of the 1990s. The idea of instant messengers and PDAs dominating the technological landscape in the future? That's here. The concept of the internet being a portal to Hell and the afterlife? Yup, Club Dead has that! Are you nostalgic for the Jazz Solo Cup design? Well, you are in luck because it's in this game! Do you want a game that reminds you of your sticker-filled elementary school Trapper Keeper? This game might be for you, but be warned, it is not for the faint of heart. The game takes a note from Myst and puts next to no emphasis on solving puzzles, but unlike Myst, it relies on inventory management and object "skill checks" to gate away its nonsensical cutscenes. It's a complete bore to play, and as I said at the start of this series, I don't know a single gaming-based demographic where that feels worth the barrier to entry. But maybe you are up for the challenge because FMV games of this ilk give you a rush. Maybe you exist, and in that case, give it a shot.

Pokémon Was/Is Kind Of A Big Deal To Me

I'm not exactly prompt with this blog, but after getting past a bunch of work-related stress and Giant Bomb-related obligations, I was able to do something I have been meaning to do for about a month: sit down and watch the Pokémon anime. It might not seem like something an average thirty-something should have on their to-do list. Still, as someone who grew up in the nineties and with Pokémon a part of my daily video game and media diet, I felt like recent events and news warranted me coming out of my Pocket Monster multimedia retirement. While I habitually adopt every other game in the mainline series into my library, the animes and movies slid out of my prevue around the time I entered middle school. You know, that awkward period when it was okay to like things that were "nerdy" in private, but the minute people found out about it publicly, all Hell broke loose, and your social life was over. None of this preamble is to suggest Pokémon media was NOT an essential part of my upbringing. I spent an ungodly amount of time and money in the trading card game, waited with bated breath when new TV series episodes aired, and even stayed in line during a chilly morning when the first movie was released.

Nonetheless, "lapse" is the best way to describe my relationship with anything marginally connected to the non-video game Pokémon empire Nintendo built once I erred towards my latter tween years. Even though I still managed to qualify as an alternate for my region's TCG junior tournament, around 12, I finally decided to "grow up" and move away from the show, card collecting, and games. I think everyone has that moment at least once, but with different media. It's that awkward moment when you need to walk away from something before you want to because you think you'll get in trouble for liking something you worry others perceive as being beneath you or your age. For me, it was Pokémon, but maybe for you, it was Barbie, The Muppets, He-Man, G.I. Joe, Transformers, The Smurfs, Sesame Street, etc. I have no idea if this phenomenon has a name, but I doubt regardless of gender, race, religion, or creed, you'll meet a single person that hasn't walked away from something significant to their childhood when they didn't want to. Part of the reason for that stems from most children's media rarely making any platitudes or recognition that adults can like their content or, as is the case of Pokémon, that people who were there when the franchise started are now adults.

Now, yes, Pokémon has eschewed things slightly in that regard. Nintendo knows people like you and I play the games. Hence, the DLC and content patches for any modern title bearing the namesake consider our input. But the shows and films have always been an on-ramp into the games and other merchandise and rarely if ever, made motions of wanting to be cognizant of time. Sure, some characters came and went, and even Ash fell to the wayside occasionally to make way for other characters that could better represent new and emerging worlds, locations, and upcoming games. Still, there was a core that persisted for nigh thirty years, and before this year, all signs pointed to the television show trudging on no differently than The Simpsons, South Park, or SpongeBob. And yet, 2023 proved otherwise. Admittedly, it was announced in 2022, one month after Ash became "World Champion," that the final episode of Pokémon Ultimate Journeys: The Series would mark the last time Ash would be the protagonist of an episode of the anime. All future series would feature new characters at the helm, new locals, and accompanying monsters. The final episode of this season, in which the series and audiences bid Ash farewell, is a beautiful send-off. As the title of this blog might suggest, I even got a slight bit emotional when things finally came to an end. If you wish to avoid spoilers, I'll segregate an episode summary in the next section of this blog, allowing you to skip ahead.

The Final Episode Is Beautiful

Before we get into what happened in the episode, let's make one important note. Ash did not retire and is still a figurehead, though in a reduced capacity in future seasons of all non-game Pokémon media. He sets off on a new adventure, and it's all but assured he'll continue to pop up from time to time when duty calls. This fact has led some to say that the announcement that the show is moving on from him was simply a marketing gimmick similar to when Transformers: The Movie (1986) killed off a whole slate of beloved characters only to replace them with new ones so kids would buy new toys. While my heart tells me to put up a vehement defense of the new direction in the final episode, there's no denying the corporate underpinning that has defined Pokémon since its inception. Putting a new set of fresh faces at the front of posters and media is meant to onboard new prospective consumers into the Pokémon media empire. If we continue to ride this train, that's just cake for the people in charge of the future of the television series.

However, the real point I want to make about Ash not fully retiring is that his final episode was refreshingly "understated." He and Pikachu end up where they started and start the proverbial process of reuniting with every character that defined their journey from beginning to end. Whether it be Gary, Misty, Professor Oak, or Ash's Mother and her Mr. Mime, everyone is there and has something to say to him to make him think about his present standing in the world. The first part of this process that honestly "got me" is when he definitively says goodbye to Brock and Misty. There's no rigmarole of getting the team back together and going on one more great adventure. In a moment of stunning clarity, Ash recognizes that his former companions have settled down, and while he feels restless, he doesn't want to upend the lives of others for the sake of his well-being. He promises to revisit the two when possible, but as he continues to march forward, it's in the hope of meeting new people while not forgetting about others he has met in the past. Again, it's an utterly understated moment, and one only older Pokémon fans will notice, which is a defining feature of the entire episode. While I think some younger or more recent fans might find parts of it lacking the up-tempo pacing that practically defines the series, the episode's slower and more reflective pace seems tailored to those that may remember slogging down Gogurt or Lunchables while glued to a Zenith television. Ash realizes he's old and things are different. It only took him twenty-five years to admit it, but we finally see it happen.

To further the theme of identity wrangling, Ash talks to Professor Oak, where he re-encounters some of his older Pokémon and even Gary. The reflective exercise here involves whether or not being a World Champion makes Ash the "Pokémon Master" he dreamed about when we first met him. The conceit is one I think we can all relate to, at least conceptually. Sometimes the little victories that keep us going are fleeting, but not the successes we set out for our initial career aspirations. And how do we define "success?" Is it by a metric set by you or someone else? Is it the eye of the beholder, and whose eye is it? As an individual who has sometimes considered the directions I could have gone with my education and career, it's a familiar feeling. I know I'm good at my job and making some difference in the world here and there, but is it enough, and am I truly happy? The story juxtaposes one of its possible answers to that when it reveals that Team Rocket has reunited after a controversial breakup a few months prior. Despite an endless stream of failures, the three are as happy as can be and don't give a rat's ass that they have almost nothing to show for the twenty-five years they have been at it trying to steal Ash's shit. By most metrics, their team is an utter failure, but they don't care, and that's the point.

The final reflection in the episode is the most cathartic for those who remember the Pokémon phenomenon's origins. Near the end of the episode, Ash re-encounters the Pidgeot he released and promised to reconnect with from the original series. Before this encounter, Ash tries to settle down but fails because something doesn't feel right about stopping his march around the world, even though he's hoisted up a big fancy trophy. When he meets a bespoke forgotten friend, he realizes that even if you walk the same path a thousand times, you'll always have a new story to tell and people to meet. The difference this time is that Ash, like you and me, has experience and age on his side. And in a concession to those that might pine for the past, he declares that even with age, there are still adventures and journies for him to look forward to. It's a conclusion I honestly saw coming a mile away, but one I did not mind for a second. I think we, and even those growing up with Pokémon right now, as you and I did decades ago, benefit from being reminded that there's nothing wrong in retreading things from your past. You can still have adventures as you age, say goodbye to old friends, make new friends, and learn about new places and people, whether you are a kid or a senior citizen. No one other than you can tell you when to stop.

Why I Think This Is A Special Moment

The obvious point is that seeing everyone come together at least one last time with practically the same voices and faces when things started was comfort food. The endnote with Pidgeot has been an unresolved plot thread for nearly twenty-four years, and while some might consider it a cheap bit of fanservice, it serves an important message. Pokémon understands that the kids that first grew up with it exist. There's little doubt in my mind that the future of the television series will not be as forthcoming about wanting to pay tribute to the past. Still, this solitary concession made me recollect years of watching silly cartoons about kids bonding with monsters. That, at least to me, was worth the price of entry. We are getting older. While the show isn't always the best place to relive memories and croon about the past, it will continue to provide the same opportunities to learn about growth and friendship for new kids that some of us benefited from. Hell, some of you might be sitting down with your own children watching rehashes of stuff you remember falling in love with decades ago!

More suitable writers and intellectuals in the world of literature are better equipped to opine about the best conclusions in the realm of literature. I had a professor in college spend an entire three-hour symposium where all he did was try to convince every student in his American Lit. 202 class that it was Moby Dick. While he made a more than decent argument, I'm rather squeamish about delving into the muddy waters of histrionics. Nonetheless, two conclusions still stick out to me as my favorites. The first, The Great Gatsby, requires no introductions. Still, I hazard to say that it might be too "safe" and is possibly one that would net me more eye-rolls than nods of agreement. Some use the novel's status as required reading as a case study on everything wrong with secondary English literature education. My second pick, and the dark horse, is The Phantom Tollbooth. While a work of children's literature, the novel's final page perfectly captures that singular moment of transitioning from childhood isolation to teenage destination and experimentation—the evolution from being abstract to seeking experiential life lessons. Just as in Ash's final episode as the titular adventurer, Milo in The Phantom Tollbooth is forced to seek a new adventure with memories of the past and the ability to look at things through a new lens as his advantage. For those who might not know what I am talking about, I'll reference an excerpt from the book.

Milo walked sadly to the window and squeezed himself into one corner of the large armchair. He felt very lonely and desolate as his thoughts turned far away—to the foolish, lovable bug; to the comforting assurance of Tock, standing next to him; to the erratic, excitable DYNNE; to little Alec, who, he hoped, would someday reach the ground; to Rhyme and Reason, without whom Wisdom withered; and to the many, many others he would remember always.

And yet, even as he thought of all these things, he noticed somehow that the sky was a lovely shade of blue and that one cloud had the shape of a sailing ship. The tips of the trees held pale, young buds and the leaves were a rich deep green. Outside the window, there was so much to see, and hear, and touch—walks to take, hills to climb, caterpillars to watch as they strolled through the garden. There were voices to hear and conversations to listen to in wonder, and the special smell of each day.

And, in the very room in which he sat, there were books that could take you anywhere, and things to invent, and make, and build, and break, and all the puzzle and excitement of everything he didn't know—music to play, songs to sing, and worlds to imagine and then someday make real. His thoughts darted eagerly about as everything looked new—and worth trying. "Well, I would like to make another trip," he said, jumping to his feet; "but I really don't know when I'll have the time. There's just so much to do right here."

It's odd, but rarely do we see media establishments as codified as Pokémon make even the slightest effort to age with their audiences. To even marginally thank the people there when things first took off was comforting but also purgative. I will likely not touch another episode of the television show unless something demands it. I harbor no ill will or judgment to those that wish to continue with the series, and it would be hypocritical if I did, considering I continue to trudge along here when things are clearly changing, and many people I remember talking to daily find new mediums and chapters to their video game enthusiasm elsewhere. But that's the beauty of The Phantom Tollbooth and Ash's farewell. Both end with the same message. Where you end up in your next journey, whether it be somewhere new or familiar, if it's your path, that's all that matters. There will be some people who join you and others that will not. The point is to thank everyone that helped you along the way but keep persisting. Go out there and find new experiences where you least expect them. You're not bound to have the same friends or sensations as your first adventure, but that's precisely why you should do it.