The Tower of Dubious Horror Games 2023

Welcome back to the realm of Dubious Horror. I’ll be honest: I have a shortlist for The Wheel of Dubious RPGs III: The Absolute Dregs with more than 40 games, as well as a smaller list of dubious character action stuff I'd really like to show off. Both of these will likely come to fruition next year, but I think it’s time to return to Dubious Video Games with a seasonally appropriate slate of prime quality dubious horror. I’ve been berated by my “friends” for playing too much good stuff in the last few months, so it’s important that I stress: there’s gonna be some real garbage in this one. I’m very excited to showcase some of the stuff on my list and I hope you come along either during my streams or with these write-ups.

What makes a game “Dubious” you may ask? This is a question people have posed to me multiple times and I figure it’s worth laying out here. My extremely serious and not-at-all loose criteria for such is threefold: Weird, Questionable, and Obscure. Chances are, if a game fits one or more of these extremely specific and not at all subjective adjectives it qualifies for this feature. For example: only the most asinine of contrarians will stake Resident Evil 4 as being “dubious,” but there are numerous main-series and side games in that franchise that I think would undoubtedly qualify. I played two out of the four Gun Survivor games, and I can say with some assurance that Resident Evil Dead Aim is a weird fucked up thing and Resident Evil Survivor is hot trash. Similarly, a game might not have a bad reputation, but if it’s weird enough or no one has heard of it, that’s worthy of my notice as well. Finally, I want to stress that “dubiosity” is an indicator entirely separate from quality or how much I enjoyed any given game. Blue Stinger might not play especially well, but hot damn is it one of the most memorable things I played last year.

Daymare 1994: Sandcastle

Category: Indie Dubious Horror Around the World (Europe)

Developer: Invader Studios

Release Date: August 29, 2023

Time Played: a little over 7 hours

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Would I play again? No.

As the inaugural game of Dubious Horror 2023, the hottest release of this year, and the prequel to “one of the worst games I’ve played on stream” I had high hopes for Daymare 1994. Unfortunately for all my Going There/Being There enthusiasts, I have terrible news: Daymare 1994 is a far more competent game than its predecessor. The small Italian development team at Invader Studios got the memo, took a look at Daymare 1998, and then proceeded to “make a better video game.” Oh, it’s still terrible, mind you, but instead of being terrible in a way that was a highlight of last year’s feature, this one is just kind of a boring linear action shooty shoot thing.

I had plenty of words to say about the previous game, but it’s the kind of thing that makes sense when you think about its roots as a fan remake of RE2. It’s a game with more enthusiasm than sense or budget or really anything resembling cohesion. Between the bits of Resident Evil fan fiction with the serial numbers filed off there were numerous attempts at making a weird busted pastiche of other, better survival horror games. To reiterate, it’s one of the worst things I played last year (a year where I also tricked three other adult men into playing Aliens Colonial Marines with me for the children) but it feels like a bad Resident Evil fan project that wished upon a star and became a $30 published video game. If you'd like a reminder of how that went, my write up from last year is here.

Perhaps wisely, Daymare 1994 understands its limitations better, and instead tries to focus on action above all else. You’re only controlling one character, from one perspective, and a set inventory of tools and abilities. There aren’t even that many puzzles or anything resembling inventory management this time around. It’s just your not-Umbrella agent lady with a MP5k, a shotgun, and a cryo gauntlet. In this video game, you mostly just do a light jog through well-rendered but overly large environments, occasionally interrupted with fights against exactly three regular enemy types, all of whom are weak to “getting shot in the head” or “getting sprayed with cryo gas.” There is barely anything resembling variance to these encounters, it just eventually ends. You can upgrade said cryo gauntlet with more abilities, but otherwise you get no new weapons or tools or really anything that helps differentiate hour one from hour seven.

The storytelling is still bizarre and incoherent, to the point where it’s genuinely impossible to understand the main drive of the plot and I'm not going to even try. That’s fine. It’s honestly a plus, given that every cutscene has an essential “what the fuck is going on” quality to it. It also, weirdly enough, doesn’t actually tie into Daymare 1998 all that much outside of a limp post-credits stinger. If there were more cutscenes with that sort of deranged, incoherent quality instead of endless hallways, I’d probably have more positive words to say about this one. Instead I’m left adrift. I do think if Invader refocuses themselves a bit, they can probably find a happy medium between "One of the worst things I've played on stream" and "God this is just a really slight third person shooter with a lot of running" I know in my heart they'll find a way. Should you play it? No, oh god no. Please don't. There are plenty of genuinely good smaller indie games trying to do the resident evil throwback thing which are far more worth your time. Have you played Signalis yet? you should play Signalis!

Song of Horror

Category: Indie Dubious Horror Around the World (Europe)

Developer: Protocol Games

Release Date: October 31, 2019

Time Played: 7 hours

Dubiosity: 2 out of 5

Would I play again? The perma-death mechanic really took the wind out of my sails here, so I’m leaning towards no even if I think the game itself is mostly decent.

Previous company excluded, one of the more exciting things I’ve wanted to delve into with this incarnation of Dubious Horror is the indie scene. Not full-on steam trash or streamer bait, but well-intentioned horror games of varying kinds on modest budgets with modestly-sized teams. Sometimes you get a Daymare 1998, but other times you get a Tormented Souls. It’s a surprisingly vibrant scene, all things told, and even if not all of it is great there’s at least a chance it’ll be interesting. The games on my shortlist for these categories are ambitious enough or at the very least noteworthy enough that I feel like I can talk about them and their dubious qualities without feeling like I’m punching down on “like five dudes.”

With all that said, Song of Horror might be closer to the “not actually dubious” end of the scale, inasmuch as I could see a human being who isn’t weird and irony poisoned having a good time. An episodic, smaller-scale survival horror game with multiple playable characters, a weirdly punishing perma-death mechanic (more on that later) and some really impressive environments is frankly better than what I want or expect from the same feature that led me to play Countdown Vampires. I can respect a smaller game that knows its limitations and scope just as much as I can enjoy one that wildly overreaches, but the latter is usually better for #content.

To be clear, the basic game part of Song of Horror involves you selecting one of a handful of characters with slightly different properties, wandering around mundane spooky environments with fixed camera angles solving various Adventure Game and/or Resident Evil puzzles. The first episode takes place in a spooky house, the second a spooky antique store (and its adjoining apartment complex) and the third a university archive. There’s some sort of overarching story about a cursed music box, an unkillable eldritch presence, and a guy who really could use a nap, but since I didn’t finish the game I can’t really say if it managed to nail whatever landing it was going for. I’ll just say that by the levels of competence I expect from this genre, for this feature, it seemed a resounding fine/10

While I wouldn’t call the game all that scary (insomuch as I am resistant to a lot of that stuff these days) there’s a good level of detail and spooky atmosphere I think they manage to nail. The actual puzzle design for a lot of the puzzles I would put on the obtuse side of acceptable. A lot of these games tend to have puzzles that are a little more involved than the survival horror games which inspired them, and this one is no different. I, at one point, had to take notes. Gross. What is this, some sort of myst clone? Disgusting.

Instead of combat, however, there’s an AI-driven presence who will show up to ruin your day. This feels as much like an intentional experiment as it does a self-imposed limitation to not have to design combat mechanics. Avoiding the smoky, tentacle shadow thing entails listening to doors, not poking your head in obvious deathtraps, and…participating in QTE minigames. So here’s the thing. Shooting a zombie in the head or running past it is the kind of small, tense interaction that adds friction to what would otherwise be walking between points of interest. Trying to recreate that tension via “occasionally finding a hiding place and doing a breathing minigame with the triggers” is a bit less engaging once you’ve done it the third or fourth time, especially since the consequences of failing are instant death.

I’ve been dancing around it, but I think the instant death stuff is actually what killed my desire to see this one to the finish line. You have, in essence, a fixed number of “lives” (random people who live in suburban UK) to do an entire episode with or restart it from the beginning. When and where “the presence” will attack is governed by an AI director, so what I think the game is trying to do is encourage cautious play. What it actually does tends to be a bit less fair, I think. There are usually clues hinting at various actions which will lead to death, but some of them are obtuse or punish curiosity. Basically, what I’m saying is that Song of Horror intentionally or unintentionally evokes a Sierra adventure game more than a Resident Evil. I feel like being friends with ZombiePie for over a decade has ruined me and this haunting is the result of that.

I don’t think the component parts necessarily add up to something amazing, but I do think if this mechanic was a bit less punishing (or if I wasn’t the kind of person who enjoyed poking at things that would obviously kill me) it probably would’ve been the difference between finishing the game and deciding to move on. While it certainly displays signs of indie-budget jank, my overall feeling is that it’s probably a bit too competent to fully earn the dubious pedestal. Thankfully, the next couple games I’m covering have no such problem.

Help, Armored Core has consumed my life

Oh hi, it’s been a bit, hasn’t it? What if I got back into the habit of playing video games and writing about them, hm? Too much has happened to me in the last few months but I’m back and ready to throw down thousands of words for a scant few readers in my lonely little corner. It’s fine. With the slow erosion of the games press from every conceivable angle, and especially the devaluation of written content thanks to SEO guide hell and AI bullshit, I’d just like to say that I was ahead of the pack by never ever actually making a cent off of this shit despite doing it on and off for the last fourteen years. This is just therapy at this point. I don’t even *care* if you nerds read it. Okay I do. A little. If you’d like to support me in my stupid bullshit either give my twitchy twitch a look and watch me stream, or you can support Deep Listens’ patreon. I’m on their podcast sometimes! We talked about Dragon Age II! You should listen to it!

2023 has already been a banger year for video games. Like, shockingly so, in both the “garbage made specifically for me”, and “Popular things which are good” categories. You’d better believe I have strong opinions about Baldur’s Gate 3 and other, far more obscure or weird bits and bobs. I also played through pretty much all of The Legacy of Kain series and might eventually have some things to say about that! Heck man, I might even get back into the garbage streams again. There’s a non-zero chance more horror write-ups are coming later this year, because I’ve found some stuff I need you to see. I have a lot I want to talk about, basically, and I might as well start with the thing that’s devoured my attention this summer.

To summarize, Armored Core is a franchise where you kitbash various parts of robots together in order to do bite-sized ill deeds (and the occasional war-crime) for megacorporations, often using controls not meant for human hands, with a level of accessibility and difficulty one would expect out of 2000s From Software. It’s my jam. I’ll admit this was not entirely my own idea. You can blame VaatiVidya’s coverage of the Armored Core series for being the catalyst to this. In retrospect, it’s frankly absurd I wasn’t an Armored Core person *before* this. I’ve already expressed a willingness to delve into From Software’s pre-Souls back catalog, I love stupid granular video game mechanics, and I think giant robots are mostly cool and rad. OF COURSE I would be into this.

It’s also no surprise that none of these games reviewed especially well. It’s hard to imagine now, in a post-Elden Ring world, but this series was pretty consistently poo-poo’d by various western games press outlets. This was the case for a lot of overly-esoteric or overly-Japanese series in the 2000s, but pre-2009 From Software was uniquely qualified for the ire of mainstream outlets. To quote G4’s review of Last Raven: “The presentation is weak, the gameplay flawed, and the reliance on insanely in-depth customization will likely end up annoying most gamers.” I will never not take an opportunity to swipe at “Old Games Media” and this is another case, like the early Yakuza games, where motherfuckers just didn’t get it. That’s their loss and my gain, as I’m here to recount (almost) every Armored Core game and its status in the overall energy of the cosmos. This is my service to you, and also my way of forcing myself to write things again.

Armored Core, Project Phantasma, Master of Arena (1997-99)

There are many series that don’t find their footing until the second or third installment, but to Armored Core’s credit, they kinda figured it out from the get go. If you like customizing robots, ice cold corporate wetwork, and the kind of UI design only a company who started out making bizdev software could do, they did it in one. Oh, to be clear, you also have to live in a world where using R1 and L1 to strafe and R2 and L2 to look up and down becomes a reasonable way to live your life, but it’s fiiiiine. I did it! Me, the person who regularly plays weird old games with nonstandard control schemes, says the old video game with a nonstandard control scheme plays just fine. Which means you can believe me. Part of why this is tolerable has to do with the very generous soft targeting system AC has going on. As long as you can keep the enemy inside the targeting box, you’re locked on. The size and shape of the box is determined by the weapon you’re using and the FCS you have installed. The real problem is dealing with vertical enemies, of which there are… some.

I will not pretend that a From Software game released before the year 2015 has any real desire to be played by human beings. I will say, however, that the general mission structure of these games is bite sized in a way that makes them less daunting than otherwise apparent. The average mission in most of these Armored Core games is less than five minutes. If they’re particularly spicy, they might be closer to ten. This is even more apparent in this first PSX generation, where draw distance is at a premium and corridor crawls are frequent. Most missions involve you needing to blow something up, prevent something from being blown up, or going from point A to B. The exceptions to this structure tend to be big late game set pieces. The last mission of Armored Core the First is notoriously one of them, featuring a platforming sequence I might generously call “pretty awful.” It’s the most egregious bit of the game and I have no regrets about abusing the hell out of save states to get through it. Later games definitely have their share of bad mission design, but none of them will ever be as bad as “destroy floating mines.”

I don’t have a ton to say about the other first gen expansions. Project Phantasma adds the arena, which is a key component of the series going forward, and Master of Arena (unsurprisingly) focuses on arena fights and integrates them with the main story. I didn’t play too much of the latter, likely because I was already getting a little tired of the technical limitations and notable jank of the PSX generation, but if you get anything out of this know that these games are all shockingly playable in spite of their age.

Armored Core 2 and Another Age (2000-2001)

Armored Core 2 is one of THREE Fromsoft games to make the PS2’s North America launch , which is probably as good an indication of any as to how much they used to just throw stuff out into the ether. It’s easily a better game than both Evergrace and Eternal Ring (both of which have a… dubious quality to them, one might say) and I dunno I might go as far as calling it the best PS2 launch game. What’s gonna compete, hm? Fantavision? Madden? Tekken Tag? Those aren’t real games. Those are the games your normie cousin bought alongside a DVD copy of The Matrix.

To be frank, Armored Core 2 does not fuck around. None of these games do, but the second generation of Armored Core sticks out as having some of the more consistent examples of “From Software difficulty” in regards to mission design. They’re not more complex than the first game, at least most of the time, but they are often more demanding. Heat is now a concern, and I would recommend getting a better radiator as one of your first purchases so that errant enemy rifle fire doesn’t lead to considerable damage over time. I’d also say this is really where I actively needed to change up my AC on a regular basis to meet the needs of the mission, rather than relying on a single build to do most of the heavy lifting. While a lot of problems can and will be solved by building the biggest tank with the heaviest weapons, there are cases where that should not be the immediate go-to. For one, sometimes you need to be able to stay in the air for more than like ten seconds. Or go up a large vertical shaft.

AC2 Another Age is noteworthy mostly because of how much it’s just an unapologetic “mission pack” of an expansion. It has 100 missions, and to see credits you have to do all 100. I ended up skipping it for that reason, but now that I’m coming back around to write all of this, there’s a good chance I’ll revisit it. I mean, if VaatiVidya can play all of them, that clearly means I should as well. (I don’t think I will play all of them) (I might play all of them)

Armored Core 3 and Silent Line (2002-03)

The third generation of Armored Core was the first to dare asking “what if you could hold something other than an energy sword or shield in that left hand?” This opens up a lot of very stupid build variety options, as my various hijinks involving “What if Two Machine Guns” is any indication. It’s also the first game in the series to let you just dump a weapon to lower your weight and energy drain. Is it the first that lets you move the camera and aim with the analog sticks? No, of course not. Why would you think that? These games came out on the PSP for god’s sake. To be fair, AC3’s controls are absolutely smoother and more responsive than the prior generations, but you’re still strafing with the shoulder buttons. These ended up being some of my favorites of the bunch, and I think if you’re gonna check out one of “the older games” these might be the two I’d recommend.

My self-imposed challenge for Armored Core 3 was to avoid going as heavy as possible from the outset, which helped me improve . In both AC 1 and 2 I’d very quickly opted for a heavy quadruped build, whose combination of ground mobility, armor, and the ability to fire heavy weapons while moving was key to my early success in these games before I really “got gud” at using the series mobility tools. Legs determine your weight capacity, your mobility on the ground and in the air, and even the size of your AC’s hitbox. They’re easily the most important part of your robot, in the same way that they’re the most important part of Atelier Ryza’s character design. Besides bipedal legs, which come in all weight classes and varieties, there are reverse joint chicken legs (which tend to have excellent jumping ability), the aforementioned quad legs, full on tank treads (which unsurprisingly can support a lot of weight, have a lot of armor, and basically can’t move very quickly at all) and the awkward stepchildren of the bunch: hover legs (good for water missions and staying in the air, if nothing else)

Silent Line is probably the high point for me, as it’s where I finally “figured out” a lot of Armored Core mechanics and had more fun just goofing around and experimenting with builds. You may ask “Arby’s Waterman, how come you didn’t get sick of these games even tho you play so many???” and I think a lot of that has to do with both the bite-sized nature of missions *and* the stupid granular nature of customization. Once you understand the rules, the various bits and bobs, it’s easy to make something that works, even if that something is very stupid. What if you had ALL MISSILES? What if you had missiles for your missiles? What if you relied on the good grace of god and just shot a bunch of dumbfire rockets everywhere? What if *two* energy swords? You can make it work. You can, if you believe in yourself and think very long and hard about weight limits. And energy limits. You want both of those things.

Armored Core Nexus, Nine Breaker, Last Raven (2004-2006)

Often referred to as “Generation 3.5” by fans, the last trio of PS2 Armored Core games finally introduce modern controls that control like normal video games. Imagine, being able to aim with the right analog stick! It’s unironically the biggest deal. All three of these games are also quite different from one another, at least as different as three games running on the same engine tech with the same core gameplay can be. One gets the sense that it’s where a lot of experimentation was happening, given that at this point they’d managed to churn out like ten Armored Core games in nine years. Truly the Madden of robot customization games, or something. Except instead of a truck stick or QB vision cones or whatever they made it so now your booster generates heat and also overheating drains your energy bar super quickly instead of being a simple damage over time effect. Needless to say, cooling moves from being “nice to have” to “a fairly crucial part of one’s build” in case you didn’t need more plates to spin when designing a robot. I like that. You can also now store backup weapons when your primaries run out, in case you were to say, have two pistols and replace those pistols with two more pistols. Highly recommend that.

Armored Core Nexus is more-or-less an indirect follow-up to Silent Line, featuring the same corporations, many of the same basic parts, and seemingly a lot of the same game assets. However, between the aforementioned control changes, gameplay tweaks, and a bonus disk containing remade versions of classic Armored Core, Project Phantasma, and Master of Arena missions, it’s definitely worthy of being more than just “an expansion.” Nexus is probably my second favorite in the series behind the 3 games, and a lot of that has to do with the game being far, far more generous with money than any of the prior titles. This makes things a bit easier, but it also adds more opportunities for customization and different situational mechs depending on the situation at hand. This is where I made a build with floating legs and machine gun arms and managed to make it work.

Nine Breaker is an Armored Core game with no story missions and no shop, instead tying advancement to arena fights and bespoke training missions. If you import your save from Nexus, you also don’t get access to the parts the game would otherwise give you for free on a new game, which is a problem given the variety of tasks laid out in front of you. So, fair to say, I skipped Nine Breaker. This one feels like it’s the most “people should throw money at me if they want to see me suffer through it” of the bunch, and while I cannot explicitly link you to places to give me money on here, just know you can do that and you *can* let me know if you’d like me to play Nine Breaker.

Last Raven, on the other hand, might as well be called “Armored Core for Super Players.” I would like to consider myself pretty good at video games. I have completed most of FromSoft’s post-Demon’s Souls output. Armored Core: Last Raven might be the single hardest video game to come from this developer. I do not mean that as hyperbole, I don’t mean this as a “wow Elden Ring EZ” sort of brag. It’s just pure sicko mode shit made specifically for a hyper-niche audience of lunatics in mind, as you’d expect from a late model PS2 game from a long running niche series. Many of the builds which made easy headway in Nexus were powerless against the enemy AC pilots of Last Raven, all of whom are more maneuverable and aggressive than anything prior. If you like the AI flying over you and stunlocking you to death with perfect precision, I have great news. I don’t even know if this game is hard in a “fair” way so much as it’s just oppressive. A real fucker, you might say.

It’s maybe the hardest “git gud” wall I’ve encountered in some time, but to my credit I managed to get it done. Sure, I might’ve picked one of the easier routes (Last Raven only requires you to play roughly a dozen missions before seeing credits, as opposed to most other games hovering around 30) but I’m just proud I saw credits at all. A few days (and a few more AC games) removed, I'm almost dumb enough to want to see the game’s other routes, now that I’ve managed to get my expert bunnyhopping technique down. I don’t know if this is stockholm syndrome or a reflection on how much easier future AC games ended up being, but yeah I’d consider doing that mission where you fight another AC in an open field that is continually being bombarded by suicide drones again. I’d do that. For money.

Conclusion:

Armored Core is good and these older titles are still worth going back to. Unfortunately, none of them are digitally available on modern consoles, which just leaves a scant handful of PSP and PS3 offerings if you're willing to go through the hassle of ancient desiccated storefronts. I did that, and as a result, I have access to a for real digital copy of Verdict Day. Given the current state of retro game inflation, further exacerbated by the announcement of AC 6, physical secondhand copies of these games have never been more expensive. I'm not going to explicitly endorse piracy on this here video game webzone, but I will say "get it where you can."

So, for both word count reasons and logistical ones (namely, the Armored Core V games don’t emulate well at all and I currently don’t have access to my PS3 to play Verdict Day at the moment) I’m gonna take a hard stop at the end of the PS2 generation. However, depending on how people respond to this as well as my own play habits, you can likely expect a follow-up covering the fourth, fifth, and possibly sixth(???) generations of Armored Core, as well as the ones I skipped (in case you really want my hot takes on Formula Front.) Spoilers: Armored Core 4 is lukewarm and mediocre, Armored Core For Answer is fucking rad. That's it. I'm done. Maybe I'll do my big Baldur's Gate 3 spoiler writeman. Let me know if that's something you'd be interested in.

It’s time to finish my plate. I figured before I started my next dubious streaming project*, I might as well clean up The Tower of Dubious Horror Games. So here it is, a testament to my 14 years of writing dumb things on this silly webzone. Should only need one more part after this. If you'd like to find stream VODs of all of my playthroughs of these games, consider checking out my youtubes

Countdown Vampires

Category: Actual Garbage

Developer: Bandai

Release Date: August 21, 2000

Time Played: Around six hours

Dubiosity: 5 out of 5

Would I play again? I won’t pretend I wouldn’t.

Countdown Vampires has occupied an outsized place in my brain for the last few months, even among the weird shit I’ve played for this feature. To call it a “bad Resident Evil clone” is like calling the Louvre a “building with some art in it.” It transcends mere badness and becomes high art, worthy of being put in the Louvre. Or at least the MOMA. Few other games aspire to this level of exalted ineptitude, perfectly balanced between being “sort of playable” and “deeply incompetent.” It’s cargo cult game design at its finest and easily sits in the Dubious Hall of Fame. No I’m serious. It’s been like six months since I streamed this game and I still think about it.

To explain *why* Countdown Vampires is The Birdemic of Video Games, it’s worth considering what games like Resident Evil do correctly. Take the Spencer Mansion of the first game, or the RPD of the second as examples of tight puzzle box environment design. Those games start with an environment that you slowly unwind and learn over the course of a handful of hours, with enemies acting as the obstacles. Even in games with a more linear structure, the idea of resource expenditure and exploration plays a key part in Survival Horror as a “genre.” If you remove that, it’s basically an adventure game. If you give the player too many resources, it becomes something closer to an action game. It’s a tricky needle to thread, but the actual nuances of that design aren’t the topic for today.

My point is more that Countdown Vampires doesn’t understand any of this. It doesn’t understand how to create an interesting environment, or the basic fundamentals of video game puzzle design, or why you’d want to run past an enemy instead of unloading on them. It’s performing a bizarre pantomime of a Resident Evil game where it understands the controls, the UI, the way a pre-rendered background is supposed to look, but exhibits no meaning behind them. It’s a game whose one unique idea is to give you a tranquilizer gun to knock out vampires (you can then sprinkle them with holy water to “cure” them) but said tranquilizer lasts like 10 seconds at most. Oh by the way you need to save at least 30 people this way to get the good ending. No, this isn’t indicated anywhere. There’s no real “flow” state to environments, nor is the game shy about just spawning new enemies by the time you return to those areas. MULTIPLE puzzles will have the item needed to solve them in the adjacent room. It’s deeply incompetent on such a fundamental level that it doesn’t surprise me to learn this was this team’s first game, or that none of the lead developers had much experience with the genre beforehand.

None of this would be possible if the overall presentation wasn’t also deeply nonsensical and silly. Keep in mind this thing came out four years after the original Resident Evil and somehow matches it in terms of hilariously bad line reads. How did they get away with the audio popping and crackling the way it does? Why does it take a full second to open up the inventory menu? Why is the protagonist a shirtless goober? Why do I have to gamble at a casino to afford health items? Wait, I have to play the entire game again to see the true ending? What?

Without exaggeration, Countdown Vampires is the perfect example of why I do this nonsense in the first place. It’s a laser-targeted piece of garbage aimed directly at me and my stupid preferences. I have no idea if you, the reader at home, will get anything out of it, but as someone who loves him some classical survival horror-ing, inventory managing, tank controlled nonsense it’s that premium quality junk.

Now time for a lightning round, because "I don't want to write a minimum of 2-3 paragraphs for some of these games and also it's been long enough that I don't remember everything"

The Evil Within 2:

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

A revisit probably best left in the past; I think The Evil Within 2 is fundamentally a more coherent game than the first one, but it’s also less interesting as a result. As these replays have cemented for me, both Evil Within games aren’t great. They have interesting ideas. They might even have good sequences. But for the most part, they’re games I define by their failures more than their successes. Especially in a post-RE7, post-RE2 Remake world, I just straight up think they’re not worth my time. Probably aren’t worth your time either.

Dementium: The Ward and Dementium 2

Dubiosity: N/A

Technically ambitious, pushing the DS hardware in a really fascinating way. Are they remotely fun and/or scary? No. No they aren’t. Had my fill after about an hour.

Resident Evil Gaiden

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Resident Evil Gaiden continues the longstanding Resident Evil spinoff trend of being kinda shit, which should surprise absolutely no one. As the unlikely, non-canonical duo of Barry Burton and Leon S. Kennedy, you get to investigate a boat, awkwardly navigate environments, and engage in a combat system I’d describe as “being pretty bad.” It’s definitely pushing the limits of what the hardware is capable of, but there isn’t a whole lot to it beyond “they kind of tried to cram a Resident Evil game onto a game boy”

No, seriously, it was probably a mistake to have a dedicated portable category. By their very nature, a lot of portable games from this era were simple and straightforward and there's not a whole lot I can say about this that wouldn't be made readily obvious watching 10 minutes of gameplay.

Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare (GBC)

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

You know how Capcom started making and then canceled a version of Resident Evil for the Game Boy Color? Leaked prototypes are out there, you can see what they were going for. It’s an impressive little thing, but you can also see why it was canceled. The GBC is an interesting platform for a lot of reasons, but Resident Evil Gaiden was probably a better fit for the platform than trying to cram the original in there.

So anyway, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, recently released onto Nintendo Switch Online, is the actualization of what that RE 1 port was trying to do. It’s a game attempting to cram an abridged version of its console counterpart onto a 4MB cartridge, complete with pre-rendered backgrounds compressed to the point of abstraction. Is it good? No. Is it interesting? Absolutely.

Fobia: St. Difnia Hotel

Dubiosity: honestly too good for this feature.

Made by a small Brazilian team, Fobia is a reminder that, in fact, there are indie developers out there who are genuinely capable of making a decent survival horror in this day and age. Fobia is a notch or two below Tormented Souls in my “how good of a fake Resident Evil is this Fake Resident Evil” ranking list, but as a neat $20 take on RE7? Not bad!

Corpse Party

Category: Visual Novels can be Scary As Well

Developer: Team GrisGris

Release Date: April 22, 1996 (original release)

Time Played: Around 12 hours

Dubiosity: 5 out of 5

Would I play again? No please no oh god no

If you are of a certain age, or perhaps of a certain weebish disposition you’re likely familiar with the likes of Corpse Party. The original 1996 version of the game, a doujin PC-98 game made with the original version of RPGmaker, influenced an entire swath of Japanese horror stuff in video games and beyond. You wouldn’t get the likes of Yume Nikki, Ib, or Ao Oni without it, or even the likes of Undertale. I’m not even fucking joking when I say that Corpse Party is the most influential game I’ve played for this feature. So much J-horror stuff, RPGmaker stuff, and indie doujin stuff in general can directly or indirectly trace its roots back to this one thing. Unfortunately, it’s also terrible.

When I say Corpse Party is Triumph of the Will or maybe Birth of a Nation, but for doujin horror games, I’m not joking. I’ve played some pretty unfortunate visual novels in recent months, but Corpse Party has the distinction of being one of the worst things I’ve played on stream for any of these features, up there with Duke Nukem Forever and Daymare 1998 in 2022’s Hall of Infamy. It’s genuinely miserable edgelord trash, and I wish I had never played it. But I did so I’m going to justify myself by doing this write-up. I spent $15 american dollars on this video game, I hated pretty much all of it

Worth mentioning, the version of Corpse Party I played is actually the 2011 remake (which itself was a remake of a 2008 mobile/PC version, and then was subsequently re-re-remade for PC with higher resolution art in 2021), which came out over here on PSP courtesy of XSEED. That release in and of itself is actually pretty important, as it’s around the time visual novels started to gain real traction in the west, both officially and via fan translations. And in that sense, this game makes sense. If the year is 2011, you're like... I dunno, 16, and you've never seen an edgy anime before, I can see how it might resonate with you. Am I saying that Corpse Party is responsible for the endless garbage torrent of RPGmaker hentai games clogging up Steam’s new release calendar? I’m not *not* saying that.

To experience Corpse Party now is to have a rosetta stone for the previous two decades of edgelord J-horror tropes. If there's a shitty horror anime from the past 20 years, it probably owes something to Corpse Party. If you enjoy a nigh-endless amount of shock horror, where bad things happen to anime kids and they poop and piss and wander around getting scared, do I have a VN for you! If you enjoy wandering around the same handful of environments for 10 hours looking for the next story trigger, only to get a bad ending because you missed a thing an hour ago. There aren’t themes, the characters are mostly tropes, and the entire thing is genuinely just mean-spirited to the point of absurdity. The worst part is I can see where other, better things took Corpse Party's ideas and made them their own. Higurashi and Umineko probably owe some amount of debt to this game, but those games have likeable characters, themes, genuine dread, good writing, etc etc.

So yeah please don't play this one. You have so much to live for.

anyway there's one more of these on the way, in case you want my months-late thoughts on video games I streamed last year. Also should have another tactics thing out before the end of the month. The best way to start 2023 is to finish my stuff from 2022, apparently.

PLAYER PHASE

Much to my chagrin, I am not a being with infinite time and infinite patience. Playing enough of a tactics game to feel comfortable writing 3-5 paragraphs about it is a surprisingly time-consuming process, especially since I’ve already written about the games I liked enough to play to completion or near-completion. Writing things in general can be hard, especially when the site you’re putting them on feels precarious. This is a personal outlet; having an audience is just a favorable side-effect. I’m not expecting a huge audience to mourn should my 14 years of internet blog just vanish into the ether one day. HOWEVER, just know that I have plans to continue writing things regardless of the state of *this webzone* and if you’d like to follow along (should the inevitable happen) it might not be a terrible idea to keep your eyes on the Deep Listens podcast feed or maybe my Twitch. That’s all I’ma say about that.

With the release of Fire Emblem Engage last week, I thought it pertinent to finish this installment of “Here are all the video games I played with tiles in them which came out in 2022.” Once again, if you’d told me in the year of our lord 2013 they’d be making numerous games like Fire Emblem Awakening, I would’ve been stoked beyond my capacity. Now, to some extent, it turns out I *can* have enough Fire Emblem. I don’t know if playing through all three of Fates’ campaigns back-to-back-to-back broke me, but I’ve found my general threshold for anime tile-em-ups to be less than it used to be. With that said, I present a handful of games clearly inspired by Intelligent Systems’ flagship series. That means tile-based, turn-based, games with bespoke units, often with fixed or suggested classes, and probably some level of character bonding.

Also, in case you’re wondering, I think Engage is a fucking banger if you have any interest in the tactical side of Fire Emblem and aren’t just there for mediocre anime ships. Just thought I’d throw that out there immediately.

Lost Eidolons

Lost Eidolons is the freshman effort from Ocean Drive Studios, a Seoul and Los Angeles-based joint made up of MMO and mobile game veterans. I say this as nicely as possible, because it feels like a passion project, a game that has a lot of moxie, but Lost Eidolons is on the endearing side of “mid.” It’s maybe not something I’d recommend at full price, but in my roughly eight hours with the game thus far it’s grown on me to the point where I think I’m gonna finish it, which I wasn’t initially going to do. Sure, the man who just spent the last week replaying Ninja Gaiden 3 is maybe not the greatest barometer for how you should spend your time, but just know that for the most part this game carries my tentative endorsement.

Its baseline mechanics are different enough to be more than Fire Emblem with the serial numbers filed off, but there’s no denying what it’s trying to imitate. The presence of an optional perma-death toggle should be indicative enough, and like the absolute predictable buffoon I am, I picked the hardest difficulty with that feature enabled. Thus far, I haven’t been incredibly taxed by Lost Eidolon’s map design, but credit where credit is due, I’ve also had to take advantage of the rewind feature numerous times. There are some interesting ideas, especially when it comes to the game’s magic system (i.e. cast a water spell to drench an enemy, then follow up with lightning to do extra damage or ice to stun them for a turn.) and I wouldn’t be surprised if later chapters have even more unique ideas.

To keep the Fire Emblem comparisons going, it’s incredibly evident the devs were inspired by Three Houses when it comes to structure. Which is to say that between maps you can wander around camp, talk to your followers, and engage in obnoxious busywork to earn doodads and beebobs and so on to min-max your squad in various different classes. Moreso than even Three Houses’ monastery, the camp area has a lot of chaff, definitely where you feel that Korean MMO and mobile game DNA seep in a little bit. A lot of it feels like it could be relegated to a menu, or otherwise cut down, but maybe some people are into spending 30 minutes fiddling with gear, wandering around, and engaging in awkward conversation with your friend “Robert.” I, alas, am not one of them.

If there’s a trend you should take away from “ArbitraryWaterman Spending Too Much Time Telling You About Turn-Based Bullshit You Have or Haven’t Heard Of 2022”, it’s that all of these fucking video games need to stop pretending their vanilla-ass fantasy story is worth an hour of introductory exposition. I can’t believe I’ve gotten to this point. ME! The CRPG man! The doofus who read like eight Shannara books in middle school! This was a problem with Midnight Suns, it’s a problem here, and it’s going to be a problem when I get to Triangle Strategy. The tale of a band of small-time mercenaries rising to lead a rebellion isn’t even egregiously bad or anything, and in my time with the game I’ve seen enough to think they’re at least nailing the (trope-y) beats they’re going for. It’s just in need of an editor. And maybe a different art style, if I’m gonna be honest. Something about these very realistic character models stiffly emoting like PS3 JRPG characters feels a bit off-putting.

Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga

Symphony of War is a surprising combination of Fire Emblem and Ogre Battle, made even more surprising by the fact that developer Dancing Dragon Games has managed to cram it all in the confines of RPGmaker. This is a game clearly straining against the limitations of what that software is capable of, and for that reason alone I think it’s noteworthy. For a $20 indie tactical RPG I picked up on a whim? Also noteworthy! It’s a neat little thing! Have I finished it? No. Shit’s long my dudes, and there are at least four more games from 2022 I’d like to cover before it stops being okay to talk about games from 2022. Wait fuck, it’s almost February?

So, as mentioned, Symphony of War has you moving bespoke units of troops around the map instead of individual characters in a very Ogre Battle (not Tactics Ogre) sort of way. Thankfully for all involved (me), it’s not doing the faux-RTS thing but is instead about that tile bullshit. There’s no weapon triangle or anything, but there sure are obvious rock-paper-scissors interactions between different types of units (hey guess what, spearmen are good against cavalry) complicated and made more fun by the way you set your troops up. Unlike an Ogre Battle, you can very much get away with something like a unit of nothing but archers or mages, assuming you ensure they don’t get attacked directly or anything. There’s even artillery n’ shit if you really want to hammer enemies from range.

If there’s a problem I have with it, it’s that the game sometimes falls into the weeds of its own UI a bit. Part of this, I imagine, is due to the limitations of RPGmaker, but like my time with Ogre Battle 64 last year you can just get overwhelmed with the amount of information at your disposal and the ways to access any of it. It can also be difficult to gauge how any given combat encounter might go at a glance, which is something other games of this type have gotten better at. I’ve also heard from people who’ve played more than me that the gameplay never really meaningfully evolves past the first few hours, but I’d have to look for myself to know for sure. And to do that, I’d have to stop playing Fire Emblem Engage, which I’m sorely against doing.

If you haven’t noticed I haven’t talked about the story and that’s because it’s some vanilla-ass JRPG “we played a Fire Emblem and an Ogre Battle and sort of tried to do both of those” storytelling. It’s not really all that remarkable and should probably be shuffled alongside the likes of… Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark, or something in terms of indie JRPG generica. Still, the game as a whole is cool and novel enough that I will not hesitate to recommend it.

Bonus: Dark Deity

Technically a 2021 release, but with Dark Deity being included as a freebie for the EGS, ported to Switch, and in at least one humble bundle this last year, I figured it worth my time to also talk about it. Mostly to warn you away from it. See, while I’d give the two previous games a tentative thumbs up despite some weird gameplay limitations and oatmeal storytelling, Dark Deity doesn’t get more than a “well, you tried” award. Like the prior two games, it’s a Fire Emblem-esque indie title, but unlike the prior two games it does not have nearly enough “moxie” to overcome some really truly baffling design decisions. I’m always hesitant to dunk on small indie games like this, especially from what appears to be a relatively inexperienced team, but this one might just be too rough to escape judgment.

You know the weapon triangle? A pretty simple rock paper scissors deal? Cool stuff, yeah? What if there were FOUR different armor types with varying levels of resistance to NINE different damage types? What if, instead of equipping your characters with different weapons, you just kinda had four different classes of weapon you upgraded individually? See, if there’s one thing I appreciate about “A Fire Emblem” it’s that the math is relatively straightforward. Muddying it with percentile damage variations and fiddly damage/accuracy calculations makes things harder. As always, map design is another concern, though I’ve only played through chapter 8 and don’t feel especially pressed to see if it improves.

It’s a shame, because there’s absolutely some production work done here. The character art is nice and colorful, and the sprite work intentionally evokes the GBA Fire Emblems. Sure the story is, once again, the tale of a group of plucky young upstarts evil empire cult blah blah blah blah but it’s at least not taking itself especially seriously. The best I can say about Dark Deity is that it feels like a particularly ambitious Fire Emblem ROM hack. It doesn’t really nail what it’s going for, but it has the enthusiasm and ambition to try and tinker around with fundamental bits to see what does and doesn’t work. With a bit of refinement, I think my feelings would probably shift. For now? I’d pass.

Bonus ++: Project Ember

Oh, so anyway, Project Ember is a particularly ambitious Fire Emblem ROM hack for Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade (AKA the one with Roy, AKA The First GBA one, AKA The one people in the early-mid 2000s were asking Nintendo to localize). The most recent version came out last year and does seem to nail what it’s going for, with the enthusiasm and ambition to try and tinker with fundamentals to see what does and doesn’t work. I’m of the opinion that FE6 is one of the lesser games in the series. It’s definitely harder than the other two GBA entries, but rarely for reasons that feel fair, and rarely for reasons that I find fun. Hit rates are low, enemies are tanky, and maps tend to be overly-large, all of which contribute to the whole thing feeling like a slog. Combine that with some surprisingly stingy promotion item distribution and it’s not one I really want to replay all that much. Until… now?

While I’ve only gotten through the first six or so chapters, Project Ember feels like it addresses pretty much all of my issues with the game. As the person who recommended it to me said “It’s FE6 for people who don’t like FE6.” Admittedly going down a laundry list of *why* this fan made ROM hack for a 21-year-old GBA game that never came out in the United States and 95% of my audience hasn’t played is probably a losing battle, but to sum it up: everyone hits harder, characters are more viable, and you aren’t stuck using the same handful of units every single playthrough. It’s closer to something like New Mystery of the Emblem (wait, fuck, that’s *another* Fire Emblem game that never came out over here) in terms of being more about the player phase. Your characters tend to hit very hard, and so do the enemies, leading to less “Park one overpowered unit in the range of all the enemies to kill them during enemy phase.” It's also, um, harder, if the video below is any indication. I'd call myself pretty good at Fire Emblem, but this one definitely has pushed me harder than some more recent titles.

Uh, but yeah. For the five of you who know what this means and have feelings on Blades-a-Binding, maybe give this one a look? The new and reworked sprite animations in this thing are fantastic, and probably worth the price of admission alone. I’ve already accepted that trying to get people to play the Japan-only Fire Emblem games for more than five minutes is a little like herding toddlers or convincing someone to watch all of Legend of the Galactic Heroes. It’s not impossible, but at some point they’re going to want to do it themselves without any prodding from you.

And that’s it for Tactics Emblems! Well, sort of. There’s one more game in this list that I’d consider Fire Emblem-adjacent, but it’s interesting enough on its own merits to not be lumped in here. That, and I’ve already written about four things here.

ENEMY PHASE

Oh Hi, it's me again. Did you miss me? No? Well, too bad. When I'm not playing terrible fucking Sonic games on stream or entertaining a particularly anxious 4-year-old Goldendoodle while his owners are visiting the in-laws, I like to tactics. Here are two more high quality (this isn't me doing a sarcastic bit, I think both of these games are fantastic) video games worth your time if you like hexes and/or squares and enjoy doing murders in a turn-based fashion.

PLAYER PHASE

Expeditions Rome

Expeditions Rome is the third game in Logic Artists’ Expeditions series of historical tourism tile-em-ups; one of those series you’re vaguely aware of but probably aren’t thinking of very often. You may recall the Denmark-based studio was working on the canceled Divinity tactics spin-off, or that they announced they were pivoting to NFT games right after Rome’s release. I’m here to tell you that it's not only unfortunate timing, but also an absolute shame. Expeditions Rome is one of my favorite games of the year, and in a lot of ways checks the boxes I want from both a CRPG and a tacticstravaganza.

To give an indication of exactly when this game grabbed me, it was one or two hours in. At the start of the game, your character (a noble son or daughter of Rome on the run from troubles at home) becomes acquainted with a young Gaius Julius Caesar. He’s friendly, if a bit shady and perhaps a little too ambitious for his own good, but you think “oh, I see, I’m going to watch Ceasar’s rise to power from the sidelines.” An hour later, he gets merc’d right in front of you and you take control of a Roman legion. This happens at the beginning of the game. My friends, Expeditions Rome is a tactical RPG about your created character doing a Julius Caesar. Or not. This is not a game concerned with minuscule historical accuracy about legionary tactics, it’s not coming in with a weird nationalist agenda about “accurate historical depictions of Medieval Bohemia.” This is the funhouse TV show version of Roman history, hovering somewhere between a classic sword and sandals film and a premium cable series like HBO’s Rome or Showtime’s Spartacus, with just a sprinkling of classic BioWare in there for good measure.

Like prior Expeditions titles, this is a hybrid between a couple different kinds of game. The tactical battles, featuring hexes, bespoke objectives, and different classes, are the main appeal. Most of the encounters in the game have a bespoke, hand-crafted affinity to them, which makes each fight feel more meaningful than some of the other tactics games of 2022. For the most part, you’re going to be doing *something* else besides just taking your Roman guys and gals, slashing and bashing every enemy you run into. You can tell they learned some stuff from that canned Divinity game, because the amount of environmental interaction is noteworthy. Highly recommend throwing oil pots when you aren’t just throwing a shield guy to shield your guys while your shield guy does shielding.

There’s also the army management angle, which… to be perfectly, completely, totally honest I don’t think is all that exciting or good? There's cards? And numbers? And it's never really well explained if what you're doing is meaningful. It feels a little too limited to be a truly great strategic layer, and for the most part I found it to be on the forgettable side of pointless. Thankfully, it's not a huge part of the game. Still probably better than the naval combat in Pillars of Eternity 2 though.

The actual thing which surprised me was the quality of the CRPG-ish walk-and-talk sequences. The writing and voice acting in Expeditions Rome is… good? As mentioned, it’s a game that aims for being fun and having verisimilitude over being hampered by real historical minutiae. This extends to your supporting cast, who are probably more fun and diverse than actual Roman legionaries would’ve been. Since there are only 5, and you’re more-or-less rolling with the full crew as soon as you get all of them, that also means they’re more than willing to react to your decisions and give you shit or question your choices. It’s all fully voiced, and for the most part I will continue to say putting full voice acting in your dense RPG (and having said voice acting be good) adds a lot to the experience for me.

This is one I need to get back to, if only to see the inevitable part where you can choose to cross the literal Rubicon or not with your legions. Still, unless the game collapses in its last third I think it's fair to say I recommend it unambiguously.

King Arthur: Knight’s Tale

We’ve finally reached the first honest-to-goodness Eurojank contender for this year. Neocore Games, based in Budapest, is one of those developers who’ve been silently cranking out decently successful video games for the last decade. You know, The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing? Warhammer 40K Inquisitor Martyr? More importantly, like a decade ago they made an RTS/RPG hybrid called “King Arthur: The Role-Playing Wargame.” While I’ve never played it myself (despite owning it on steam for something like a decade?), it was apparently successful enough to warrant a sequel, and here we have what appears to be a successor to that. Kinda? Maybe? Apparently King Arthur II: The Roleplaying Wargame is “not very good” if steam reviews are to be believed. Anyway, we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about the one which came out this year. It’s an Arthurian tactical RPG with a copious amount of edge. It’s very good!

Arthurian myth has been reinterpreted and re-framed by different authors with different ideas for literally more than a thousand years. It’s a malleable story, so Knight’s Tale featuring a revived Mordred recreating his own Camelot and Round Table to fight against an undead Arthur doesn’t feel particularly out of the realm of possibility. There’s a respectable amount of intent in trying to create a vaguely grimdark, decidedly grungy take on those stories; they clearly did their homework. What seems less intentional is how sometimes the game’s dark fantasy aesthetics and writing lean into accidental camp. Lines that would otherwise seem grim, weighty, or potentially badass are instead enhanced by “high quality” voice acting to become something a little sillier. I don’t think it’s quite “Full 40K” as far as being in on the joke, but in some ways that also makes it more pure with the stupid metal album energy going on. I mean, heck, Knight’s Tale even has its own moral compass based on the decisions you make along the way. Forget Lawful Evil, my boy Mordred is Tyrant/Old Faith.

As far as tactical turn-based combat goes, it’s not doing anything especially unique, but what it is doing is executed well. I’ve been playing on Hard, and the name of the game there is “damage mitigation.” Sure, you might say that’s the name of the game for ALL of these, but no, let me be clear. Your characters have two layers of health. The first layer (HP) can be replenished during missions and acts as a buffer for your vitality (which, once it hits 0, your character gets perma-death’d.) Furthermore, taking damage into vitality has a chance of giving your character debuffs in the form of injuries. Both injuries and vitality need to be restored at Camelot between levels, which requires time and/or money. While that might seem overly punitive, it highly encourages the player to think about each encounter from a very defensive perspective. Enemies will almost always outnumber you and some of them are quite tanky, so you can’t crowd control or out-damage your way through everything. Everyone can overwatch for a reason. This is maybe the first tactics video game, perhaps in the history of me playing tactics video games, where I’ve found traps to be astoundingly useful instead of a pointless boondoggle.

The other thing this injury system encourages is having a deep bench of knights to go upon knightly quests (i.e. murdering a bunch of undead, picts, bandits, human soldiers, or fae.) There are about thirty recruitable characters in all, but your round table can only hold a dozen once fully upgraded, including Mordred. That can lead to some fun, tough choices in regards to who you bring along through the game and who you kick to the curb, especially once loyalty bonuses and penalties from alignment start factoring more heavily. There are six classes, and each character tends to have a few unique abilities or passives to make them stand out. There’s a lot of wiggle room to build characters in specific ways, and thankfully this is one of those games where each spent skill point actually feels meaningful instead of incremental.

Honestly, the fact that I’m as impressed as I am with the character building aspects of this Grimdark-ass eurojank King Arthur RPG should be proof of my enthusiasm towards it. It can be a tad slow and isn’t as flashy as some of the other stuff on this Tactical Travelogue, but it’s got moxie and sheer “meat and potatoes” competence. Honestly, if not for the fact I’ve already declared like five other games to be the sleeper hit of 2022, this would probably be the sleeper hit of 2022. The developers have been pretty consistent about adding new updates, and there’s even some sort of competitive multiplayer skirmish thing? Sure? Looking forward to seeing what else comes out of Neocore in the future.

ENEMY PHASE

If you had told me around a decade ago that XCOM Enemy Unknown and Fire Emblem Awakening would help usher in a new wave of turn-based tactics games, I would’ve been irrationally stoked. Too much, honestly. After spending multiple years of my life griping that they weren’t making the video games like the video games I liked, there is suddenly an abundance. A surplus of games what with square and/or hexagonal grids, probably turn-based, and undoubtedly full of numbers. And to be clear, this list is just games I’d explicitly consider “tactics” first and foremost. They might have other elements, but the primary form of interaction is moving goofuses around in a turn-based fashion. If we wanted to expand the definition to strategy games, or RPGs with tactical elements, there’d be even more.

Point is, there are a lot of these things. And if you’re not sick like me, you might want some actual recommendations instead of just playing all of them. That’s fair. That’s what I’m here for. So assemble your troops on a square or hexagonal grid, stare blankly at your slate of abilities, and figure out how many action points you want to spend because… I dunno where this metaphor is going. Turn-Based. We’re talking about turn-based video games. That’s the joke. I'm going to write more of these.

Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters

When trying to explain the torrential flood of games with the Warhammer license in its fantasy, sci-fi, and higher fantasy permutations to a normal person, I often have to take a step back. How is a layman supposed to distinguish a Dakka Squadron from a Darktide? A Dawn of War from a Battlesector? A Chaosbane from an Inquisitor Martyr? What about that one Age of Sigmar tactics game that came out last year and nobody played? I guess I can see how that might be confusing to someone who can’t tell one division of the techno-fascist Imperium of Man from another, but that’s why I’m here to help. Just remember this handy dandy device to determine which games with the Warhammer license are good, and which are bad: The ones I say are good are the ones you should play. Okay cool. You’re welcome. I guess you could also try asking Henry Cavill, given he seems to have some free time right now.

Chaos Gate Daemonhunters is the ostensible revival (sequel?) to 1998’s Chaos Gate, a game I’d call a “pretty good X-COM style tactics game.” It’s something I might eventually dig into more, but for now I want to talk about this new one, which is a “very good XCOM style tactics game.” In fact, I think it’s one of the best games of this year, if my top 10 wasn’t indicative enough. You’re Space Marines, you’re the super duper secret psychic daemonhunting chapter, you’re a squad of four heavily armored trucks wrecking shit and eradicating heretical snot cultists wherever you find them. Along the way you’ll get to be yelled at by your disappointed father of a Chapter Master, condescended to by the sassy lady Inquisitor who does your research, and probably face the most dreadful minions of the plague lord. You know, regular 40K stuff.

For as much as I kind of despise the way “XCOM” has turned into mainstream parlance for any game with turn based combat, a grid, and half-cover shield icons, this game is undoubtedly “An XCOM.” Most of the baseline design decisions in Chaos Gate feel like they came from people who played a lot of Firaxis’ take on XCOM and took notes on what did and didn’t work. Damage is fixed and based on range and cover. There are no percentile to-hit rolls. Armor acts as a buffer to HP. Your squad of four Spayce Muhreens recovers all of their AP the first time you encounter an enemy pod, letting you take position even if caught by surprise. Instead of XCOM 2’s hard turn limits (which are good) there’s a soft timer in the form of the warp surge meter, which constantly debuffs your squad, buffs your enemies, and even occasionally sends in reinforcements. It also goes up incrementally whenever your characters use psychic abilities, creating tension without forcing you to rush.

It’s some good shit, and even with occasional bits of jank, though I admit some parts can be frustrating. There are some boss fights which definitely lean a little too hard on gimmick mechanics, you can get screwed over on post-mission loot drops, and the (thankfully) light strategic layer can be annoying to deal with early on. It’s also kind of a fucker? The recently released Duty Eternal DLC, which adds some extra mission types, Techmarines, and even the occasional Dreadnought, also made the game notably harder (though like half of that was certain overpowered abilities and exploits getting balanced.) I’m saying my attempt at an Ironman run has gone very poorly multiple times and I should stop trying to beat the game that way.

But yeah, if there’s one game from this list I would recommend to anyone who needs their fix five years since War of the Chosen, it’s this one. In a lot of ways, it feels like the game Gears Tactics should’ve been; similarly focused on getting close up and aggressive but with a stronger sense of identity. It even has the same execution mechanic, granting your entire squad extra AP if you manage to kill a stunned enemy. That’s always fun! Anyway there's a near-full playthrough of the game I did on stream with @relkin so maybe you could check that out if you want an example of video games.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns

Speaking of Actual Firaxis, let’s talk about the actual game from the Actual XCOM people. I know people break out in hives when the topic of Marvel comes up, or when the topic of “there are cards” comes up, or when the concept of “doing a S.Link” comes up. I know this because, at various points and to varying degrees of severity, I find myself some level of done with all three. BUT EVEN SO, I think Midnight Suns is a pretty fuckin’ good tactics game. I was a doubter, I was a naysayer, and look at me here now. Writing a thing. On the internet. Please tell Jake Solomon I'm sorry.

To get it out of the way immediately, I think the writing and socializing elements of this game are *fine.* They’re not great, and they feel like someone in the dev team played Fire Emblem Three Houses and tried to put that game’s bad hub area in there verbatim. Your mileage with these things will likely be based entirely around how much you’re willing to buy into Marvel Bullshit at this point in the Year of Our Lord 2022, a year which brought us like five Disney Plus TV series and like three or four theatrical films. I refuse to look up how many there actually are because fuck man, there are too many. They don’t repeat the same mistake as Crystal Dynamics’ Avengers game – the more notable characters aren’t just carbon copies of their MCU counterparts – but your actual mileage may vary on how much you want your dweebus OC to become platonic besties with Blade.

For my part I’ll just say that I liked some characters a decent amount, liked some of the club interactions a lot (book club good) but didn’t hang out with Iron Man at all (he sucks.) I basically did none of the exploration puzzle shit on the abbey grounds after a while either, and straight up think the game would be better if all of that stuff was consigned to a menu. Perhaps more damning, I definitely started buttoning through dialogue instead of letting the voice acting play out. There’s a lot of talking, especially early on, and by the end I had my fill of it. Call me when the Morbius DLC comes out. I want to hang out with Michael Morbius. (Morbius is one of the DLC characters in the season pass I am not doing a goof)

The chaff between missions was probably my biggest point of contention during my playthrough. Once you get into the actual missions though, it’s that primo quality shit. That tactical cocaine. You’ve got three card plays, two redraws, and one move. It’s your job to maximize that as much as possible, alongside a pool of Heroism and a bunch of environmental interactions. It’s puzzle-esque without feeling as stifling as something like Into the Breach, and there’s a lot of customization and expression in the way you can load out your characters and synergize as a squad. The difficulty also is granular in a way that lets you play exactly up to your comfort zone. It’s really inspired in that way, which is why the parts of the game which are less confident and less polished really stick out.

If I was going to get super specific and dig through every character’s deck, there are probably some things I’d harp on, but for the most part I think they do a great job of making each character feel unique and capture the stupid dumb power fantasy one wants from a video game what with super heroes. Spider-Man sticks out as being a tad weaker than the rest of the cast, especially before you get some of his better cards. Otherwise, very few notes. I maybe wouldn’t recommend this at full price if you aren’t enthused about doing a Diet Fire Emblem with Wolverine, but that’s about it. Now please make XCOM 3.

YOU THINK IT'S OVER? THIS IS JUST THE FIRST TURN. also there are a lot of games on this list. Like, a lot. Like, at least two more write ups worth.

ENEMY PHASE

Hello bombardinos. Bombfriends? Bombos? What do we call each other anymore? Fandom wiki editors? It's been a bit, and I'd like to apologize. I'd also like to apologize because this absolutely isn't a dubious horror blog. Haven't had the time to give Countdown Vampires the write up it deserves, but now that I'm currently "done" with the Tower of Dubious Horror games (at least, I'm taking a break) you at least can rest assured that the backlog of things I need to write about isn't getting any larger. So instead I decided to write about something while it was still hot, namely my participation in various charity streams.

For the past three years I've been participating in Extra Life as part of the Giant Bomb discord's larger effort. It's been a lot of fun doing the relay thing with some other cool members of the community to help raise money for children's hospitals. In order to further justify these choices, I've decided to do a write-up.

Extra Life 2020: Mass Effect Andromeda

I’ve already written my thoughts on Mass Effect Andromeda, and for the most part I think I stand with what I wrote five(????) years ago. It’s a messy first draft of a BioWare game which feels like it treads the same ground as its forebears, but worse. My stream, a six hour zip through the game’s opening hours as Heathclif Ryder (followed by me playing Grimrock II to wrap things up) was a breezy, fun affair sitting in public voice chat with folks from the GB discord. For whatever it’s worth, the act of playing Andromeda is the least arduous part of the experience. The shooting is snappy and mobile enough to at least make the parts where everyone talks more tolerable. I don’t feel like I need to say much more than that.

It was probably the most straightforward of my charity streams, back when I just had a laptop, a capture card, and a series of bad ideas. As will become abundantly clear, my desire to one-up myself year-to-year has led to increasingly bad decisions.

Extra Life 2021: Hunted The Demon’s Forge

You cannot accuse me of failing to go the extra mile for my dumb stunts. Hunted: The Demon’s Forge used Gamespy for its online services; a service which has long since been discontinued. In order to play this very co-op focused video game, cooperatively, one needs to set up a fake LAN using a service like Hamachi. This is probably more work than such a thing deserves. But it was also probably an ideal game to pick with my friend Joeku, whom I’ve played many a terrible or mediocre co-op game with over the last couple years. We already played Resident Evil 6 and FEAR 3; we had to go more obscure. So why not play a forgotten 7th generation co-op shooter trying to be Fantasy Gears of War?

That might sound like a reductionist statement, but it’s 100% on the mark. Hunted feels like the median Xbox 360 game, coming out in the peak Xbox 360 year of 2011. It’s an aggressively desaturated brown and grey third person shooter with too much light bloom, waist high cover, and two grungy, moderately edgy protagonists. One of them is a bald man in heavy armor, the other is a bikini elf wearing barely anything. They quip, they gripe, and they shoot not-orcs (Norcs?) in the head and sometimes do bad melee (if you’re not playing as the elf you’re doing it wrong). If you wanted to hear Laura Bailey doing the posh accent she’d later put on display in the first season of Critical Role, there’s plenty of that. The one celebrity voice of note is Lucy Lawless as the villain, earning a paycheck. She deserves better. Pretty much everyone who worked on this game did. I've talked at length about my feelings on InXile as a developer (Wasteland 3? Pretty good! Tides of Numenera? Not good!) but this being the straw that led to the Wasteland 2 kickstarter makes a lot of sense. It's just abundantly clear this isn't the game the devs wanted to make.

The thing I’ll say about Hunted is that it’s too competent to be a complete disaster. That's not entirely praiseworthy, since it doesn't have enough budget or flair to have many memorable set pieces or combat encounters either. A year removed from its completion, I could not tell you many specific moments or set piece from its surprisingly lengthy runtime, because they all bleed together. The one thing which sticks out from the morass of dead simple traversal and repetitive combat arenas is the presence of optional puzzle tombs. One gets the impression that someone at InXile wanted to make something closer to a traditional dungeon crawler at some point, and this was the only thing which remained from that original idea. Not that the extra skill points and loot feel especially worthwhile, but it’s at least something better than the mid-budget, mid-execution Generic Dark Fantasy Gears the rest of the game is playing at. I’m glad we’re out of that console generation, but at least it provides an inexhaustible source of charitable chaff.

So hey unfortunately I didn't record this stream locally, so there's no archive of the original eight hours. That said... we did do another stream later to finish the game. And that's archived. It took us another three hours.

Extra Life 2022: Aliens Colonial Marines

In what may be one of my prouder achievements from this year, I tricked three other adult men into playing the entirety of Aliens Colonial Marines with me, cooperatively, for the childrens. ON MY BIRTHDAY. I need not overstate it too much, but ACM is one of those special bad games which truly lives up to its questionable reputation. There’s plenty which could be said about its long development; the number of developers who at one point or another tried to make a game called “Aliens Colonial Marines,” the legal drama surrounding Gearbox’s alleged embezzlement, etc etc. It’s fair to say the game’s development was a mess, and it shows. The AI? It bad. The guns? They bad! The storytelling? Especially bad! Even the DLC, which initially seems to Have Ideas, is very quickly revealed to be Quite Bad.

As a cooperative experience, however, ACM deserves special attention for *very clearly not being designed for co-op.* You know how the general map design of Halo and Gears became wider after they shifted from two to four players? There’s none of that here. Aliens: Colonial Marines is a game designed with one player in mind, which makes playing it with four a hilarious clusterfuck. The number of times we got stuck in door frames and in corridors deserves special mention, and will likely be a pretty big part of the “best of '' supercut I’m planning on making. But it’s also impressive how little of it works. Because of the highly scripted, setpiece-driven nature of the campaign, anyone lagging behind will get teleported with the rest of the crew immediately. This sometimes (frequently) happens even if you are only a few steps behind. Or ahead. It doesn’t really have any rhyme or reason. Oh, also being teleported revives you, if you’ve been downed.

The end result of this was a lot of running past as many stupid xenomorphs as possible, hip-firing the SMG (somehow the most consistent and accurate weapon in the game) and essentially trying to get to the next checkpoint as quickly as possible. It turned into a feat of impromptu speedrunning; a competition to break the scripting as quickly as possible so we could get it over with. The stealth mission where you have to escape the exploding xenomorphs was far less difficult once we realized one player could just kite all of them leaving the rest to sprint towards the next checkpoint. It’s deeply, deeply stupid, but at least it made for a fun cooperative experience when we weren’t getting angry at each other over things just breaking.

Do I recommend this experience? No, absolutely not. Was it the worst game I played this year? In a year where Duke Nukem Forever and Corpse Party shall haunt me, ACM was both thankfully brief and decidedly successful as a charity event. Should you play it? Fuck no. Absolutely not. Do something better with your time. We intentionally avoided using the fan mod which supposedly “fixes” some of the more egregious issues, but even with better AI and more impactful weapons I think the overall quality of the set piece design is poor. Unlike some other choice pieces of garbage I dunno if this one can be salvaged.

Too long? Probably gonna make a shorter highlight vid as a way of goofing around with some stuff. Consider following my youtubes and twitch for more.

Illbleed

Category: Sega NightmareCast

Developer: Climax Graphics

Release Date: April 25,2001

Time Played: Around 11 hours

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Quality of 20-year-old GameFAQs walkthroughs: terrible and amazing

Would I play again? Could be convinced to do a true ending run if I were to ever make something resembling money doing these silly streams.

“I can’t believe this is a real video game which was released on store shelves and sold for money” is a phrase I uttered multiple times during my playthrough of Illbleed. As the follow-up to Blue Stinger, it’s an ideal companion piece. The former was released at the start of the Dreamcast’s short lifespan, while the latter heralded its demise. It’s also with great fanfare and appreciation I announce it’s somehow weirder and more deranged than even Blue Stinger. It’s games like Illbleed which make features like this worth doing. Is it a good video game? No, probably not. But is it a great video game you should see with your two own damn eyes? Yes.

The game part of Illbleed follows the trend of its predecessor by being “weird” and “maybe not especially good” but it deserves points for originality if nothing else. It’s a level-based structure where each mission is a take on a different kind of B-horror movie. Most of them involve detecting traps moreso than solving puzzles or managing inventory. Instead, most of the challenge in Illbleed surrounds not wasting your limited pool of adrenaline on things which aren’t traps using a series of unhelpful UI bars at the top of the screen. Oh and there’s also combat, which is generally terrible and maybe not great, but at least deserves kudo points(?) for trying something different.

The real prize aside from novelty, however, is just how fucking weird Illbleed is. It’s worth noting that multiple lead developers from Climax Graphics left the industry after the Dreamcast went under. If they had stayed, would we know their names in the same way we know the Suda 51s or (god forbid) SWERYs of the world? Its tone is inexplicable. If I had doubts about how self-aware Blue Stinger was, then Illbleed made it abundantly clear that the people making it and localizing it knew exactly what they were doing. Probably. Why is there an extended, deeply deranged Toy Story parody which feels like a presage for half of Adult Swim’s programming in the early 2000s? Why does the devil look like Sonic the Hedgehog? Why does the true ending involve the main character sacrificing all her friends? It’s a lot to unpack and I can’t say enough about it. You should play Illbleed. Or maybe just… watch someone else play it.

Doctor Hauzer

Category: Respect the Classics (or else!)

Developer: Riverhill Soft

Release Date: April 29, 1994

Time Played: An hour and 15 minutes

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

“CD ROM ENERGY”: Immaculate

Would I play again? No, but now I have working 3DO emulation so that’ll probably result in something stupid. Well, more stupid than when I played it for charity.

While the Dreamcast will continue to be this feature’s unofficial mascot, I must give the 3DO endless credit as the most “dubious” of video game consoles. Unlike the other failures of the early 90s (Jaguar, 32X) it actually has some redeeming features among the truly baffling multimedia nightmare trash it tried to champion. In addition to a certain level of misguided first-party support from the 3DO company, it has some solid console ports of contemporary PC games and perhaps more surprisingly, a lot of support from Japanese devs. Now, admittedly, a lot of the system’s popularity in Japan had to do with the number of porn games ported over from the PC-98, but even then you have weird experimental shit like D, or the best home port of Super Street Fighter II Turbo. It’s a weird piece of hardware, and you can likely expect me to delve more into it at some point in the future. Who could’ve imagined that a *true pioneer* of the survival horror genre was a Japan-exclusive 3DO title? Me. That’s who. Me.

As one of the earliest games of its type, Doctor Hauzer is absolutely trying to break new ground. Unlike those namby pamby wimps over at Infogrames giving the original Alone in the Dark trilogy “pre-rendered 2D backgrounds,” Doctor Hauzer dared to push the hardware with fully polygonal, textured environments. Sure, that means it runs at an especially chunky sub-10 FPS at pretty much all times, but was this quality which truly activated the “what the fuck am I looking at, how is this a real video game” part of my brain. Besides, if you run the emulator at approximately four times the clock speed of an actual physical 3DO console, the game runs totally fine. It’s fine.

What you’re left with then, is an experimental attempt at a horror adventure game with full 3D movement and the crustiest of tank controls. There are no enemies to threaten you, no ammo to manage, just a spooky mansion full of traps, items, and the same 30 second horror stinger playing on loop*. It turns out Doctor Hauzer is a remarkably short, straightforward game when you’re following a guide, as its main venue for challenge is just putting a bunch of death traps everywhere. It controls like butt, moves like molasses, and As my time played will indicate, I beat the game in a little over an hour and found it a slight, if interesting, piece of history. I have higher hopes for Riverhill Soft’s later games, including the infamous Overblood and the “so good it never got released in the US” Overblood 2, so look forward to those at some point.

*so, a weird anecdote: my twitch archive for this game got flagged for copyright violation. The claimant was some weird horror atmosphere CD, which used the exact same music. The weird kicker is, the track in question is from a CD which came out in 1998, four years AFTER Doctor Hauzer. Did both things borrow from the same sample library? Did this random CD you put on in the background of your middle school halloween party steal music from Doctor Hauzer? The mysteries are unknowable!

Clock Tower The First Fear

Category: Clonk Tower, Respect the Classics

Developer: Human

Release Date: September 14, 1995

Time Played: Around five hours

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Despite having its own self-contained category, I was surprised to find out how straightforward the original Clock Tower was. To be clear, this is the original Super Famicom game, not its PSX sequel which came out in the west as “Clock Tower.” That’ll probably happen at some point, but not today. This is the one with the girl who is clearly just Jennifer Connelly running away from the scissor man. As opposed to the one with the girl who is clearly just Jennifer Connelly running away from the scissor man in THREE DIMENSIONS. It’s also definitely not any number of Clock Tower imitators, 90% of which also involve a young girl or woman running and hiding from weird monsters wielding comically oversized sharp objects. There’s a type to this category, is what I’m saying.

Before your Amnesias and your Outlasts and your Bloober Team Steam Trashstravaganzas, Clock Tower was the series of horror games where you couldn’t fight back and had to run or hide. It’s not a subset of horror games I’m particularly fond of, as any tension that might come from being chased is quickly doused by the frustrating trial-and-error nature behind it. There’s a reason why most of the games I’ve covered for this feature are closer to the Resident Evil side of things, and it’s partially because I find the push-and-pull resource management angle to survival horror a lot more interesting than figuring out what the game wants me to do to avoid getting stabbed.

No amount of predetermined scissor man hide-and-seek can really change the fact that Clock Tower is more-or-less a traditional-ass point and click adventure game, albeit a very slight one. There are multiple endings based on fairly obtuse criteria, some of the room layouts are randomized, but for most of my time with the game I very slowly wandered between rooms wondering what the hell I was supposed to do while occasionally avoiding the scissorman via trial and error. It’s a game whose strength comes from vibes, and whose weakness comes from… literally anything else. It’s a little too easy for me to peek behind the curtain and see the mechanics at play and conclude they aren’t particularly good mechanics. So I guess I’m saying it’s really good there are at least three more Clock Tower games and numerous homages. Look forward to those.

X-Files: Resist or Serve

Category: Licenses of Death

Developer: Black Ops Entertainment

Release Date: March 16, 2004

Time Played: About six hours

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Duchovnyosity: He still doesn’t give even the remotest of shits

Would I play again? Probably not!

I don’t have a ton to say about The X-Files: Resist or Serve. In a lot of ways, it’s self-explanatory. It’s a licensed game from the mid-2000s based on one of the most popular television shows of the 1990s for the Playstation 2. You can probably fill in a lot of the blanks right there, especially when I tell you it’s “heavily inspired” by Resident Evil. Well, Resident Evil but you can play as dubious favorite David Duchovny or actual favorite Gillian Anderson sleep talking their way through what feels like a particularly dire multi-part episode of the series.

I haven’t seen a ton of The X-Files, but I certainly hope this isn’t what fans are talking about when they talk up the quality of the television show. I was under the impression it wasn’t a series where our protagonists shoot a bunch of zombies, alien hybrid monsters, and weird psychic clones every week, but I don’t know for sure. At least they got the obnoxious 90s nerd characters a fairly significant supporting role. They got their own spinoff? Really?

For what it’s worth, it’s not the worst game I’ve played for this feature. It’s pretty bad sometimes, but more often than not just comfortably mediocre. Given it was published by the shambling corpse of Sierra mid-death throes and developed same studio responsible for 2003’s Fugitive Hunter: War on Terror (which is most notable for being the game where you fistfight Osama bin Laden) it could’ve been far worse! In a nod to Resident Evil 2, Mulder and Scully have two separate but interconnected stories, with different puzzles, weapons, and playable sequences. How much of that is padding, asset reuse, and a way of extending the length of a $50 video game I cannot say firsthand, but I bet it’s a lot!

Hello and welcome back to another SURVEY OF TERROR. That’s right. The Tower of Dubious Horror Games is back, with another handful of interactive entertainment vaguely relating to the act of getting scared and/or conserving ammunition. I apologize for this one taking a bit, but in my defense life is hard, writing is hard, school is hard and sometimes I just want to play Total War Warhammer III’s Immortal Empires for *too many* hours a day. With that said, let’s talk about video games vaguely representing the horror genre of a questionable quality. The next write up should probably take less than two and a half months. Potentially.

The Ring: Terror’s Realm

Category: Licenses of Death and Sega NightmareCast (also, as I was to discover: Actual Garbage)

Developer: Asmik Ace

Release Date: February 24, 2000

Time Played: A little over four hours

Dubiosity: 5 out of 5

Musical Numbers (from me): Multiple

Will I finish it? If you throw enough money at me, absolutely.

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears. I think we’ve come across a genuine bonafide Kusoge here. Not only is this the only game of note to be directly based on Ringu (well, outside of some mobile stuff, pachislot machines, and Sadako being in Dead by Daylight now) it also came out in the United States years prior to the film’s American remake. It’s a deeply baffling, lethargically paced, technically incompetent attempt to recreate a Resident Evil, and it’s fucking terrible in a standout way. Is it the overly loud, extremely CASIO keyboard plink-plonk soundtrack? Is it the way the already stiff tank controls have what seems like an entire half second of input lag? Or is it the deeply scuffed translation underlying what appears to be some very dubious writing?

It’s all of those things. No longer confined to a mere videotape or 8mm filmstrip, the curse of Sadako has infected a video game within the video game you are playing. In the real world you play as a CDC Researcherwoman, who spends her time wandering between a series of identical-looking rooms having weird conversations with people to progress the plot. In the virtual program only known as [RING] you wander through a series of identical-looking rooms to do bad Resident Evil things and shoot goofy looking monsters. Neither endeavor feels like it was made by people who had ever made a video game before. I have played $4 indie horror games made in Unity by one person in their spare time which feel more coherent and cohesive than this.

It’s an interminable mess and was the first game I had to tap out of for this feature. So, kudos for that. I really do feel like I’ve accidentally stumbled onto something that would be featured in a Thor High Heels video about “Mysterious Dreamcast Games,” assuming he hasn’t already talked about it. It’s a product comprised of incompetence and jank and a very specific brand of late 90s, early 2000s Japanese skung for good measure. I would not recommend it.

Blue Stinger

Category: Sega NightmareCast

Developer: Climax Graphics

Release Date: August 31, 1999

Time Played: Around ten hours

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Am I glad I played it? Absolutely

Will I ever play it again? Probably not

I say without hyperbole that Blue Stinger is one of the more psychotic games I’ve played for any of my streaming features. This is a compliment, as it’s also one of my favorite things I’ve streamed this year. It’s the sort of deeply Japanese, tonally bizarre, ambitiously jank game which could’ve only come out during the lifespan of the Sega Dreamcast. I mean, shit, the cast of Sonic Adventure are right there voicing the main characters. It’s got Dogs Bower! How many other video games have Dogs Bower? That’s right. Only one other one. And that one is, uh, coming in the next blog.

Blue Stinger is weird. To say that Blue Stinger is weird does not fully encompass how batshit is is in every facet of its execution. It’s a survival horror game, kinda. Enemies drop coins, which you can use to buy ammo, healing items, and weapons from the vending machines scattered around Dinosaur Island (there are no dinosaurs in this game.) There are melee weapons, there are shooty weapons, there is some amount of solving puzzles. One of those melee weapons is a shirt for Dogs Bower which just says "Karate Man." It inspires him to do Karate, which is very good. It’s a weirdly ambitious combination of all of these elements in a decidedly clunky package. Grinding for healing items and ammo is basically required unless you’re good (I’m certainly not) and some level of clunky maneuvering is needed whenever camera angles and monsters are concerned. This goes doubly so for the boss fights, which aren’t great.

However odd it plays, the real draw of Blue Stinger is “literally any time there’s a cutscene.” I can’t stop emphasizing the point: this game is accidentally or intentionally an absurdist masterpiece, and I have no fucking clue how deliberately its scenes come together. Elliot and Dogs are two dudes far more indifferent to the alien virus, horrible monsters, and strange floating fairy creature than they are to christmas shopping prospects, baths, and the affection of the one other character in the game. The voice actors seem well aware of exactly what they’re dealing with, but I don’t know if the script writers or localization team did. The end result is a strange, magical adventure which could not have come out of anywhere other than a mid-budget Japanese game in the late 90s. It’s one of my favorite games I’ve played for this feature, and if not for the next game from this studio, it might be *the* favorite.

BONUS GAME: Daymare 1998

Category: I played it for a charity stream

Developer: Invader Studios

Release Date: September 19, 2019

Time Played: 8.5 hours according to Steam

Dubiosity: 5 out of 5

Will I play it again? Please no

In 2015 a proof-of-concept video showing off a fan remake of Resident Evil 2 in Unreal Engine 4 hit the youtubes. Like a lot of proof-of-concept videos showing off fan remakes in the Unreal Engine, it gives off a lot of earnest-but-rough “Nintendo, hire this man” vibes. It was 2015 however, so the video elicited a decent amount of buzz from long-suffering Resident Evil fans. Unsurprisingly, it also elicited a friendly tap on the shoulder from Capcom. Like, genuinely, as far as Cease and Desists go it was maybe the friendliest C&D you could possibly have. Members of Invader Studios were flown out to Capcom HQ, where they chatted with some developers, got some tips, and generally had a positive experience. Emboldened, they announced publicly they were moving the project in another direction, with their own original IP. A few years, one failed kickstarter, and some publishing deals (with the people who made Hatred!) later, Daymare 1998 came out. And then a few years after that, I played it for a charity stream.

To use a Caravella-ism, “Video Games are hard to make,” and that is even more true when it’s a small independent team working with a limited budget. It's with that nicety that I say Daymare 1998 might be one of the more miserable experiences I’ve had this year; short of Duke Nukem Forever. On paper, it’s a third person survival horror-ish shooty shoot with similar ideas to Capcom’s own modernized take on Resident Evil. Ok, so it’s a little more than that. It’s an awkward pastiche of other, better survival horror games and never aspires to be more. What’s the line between bad imitation and loving homage? To be glib, the answer is “one of them is good.” Nothing about Daymare 1998 feels good, but if it had any original ideas, I’d be willing to champion them in the name of eurojank. Instead, the one unique thing it has going for it is… realistic magazine management? If what you thought survival horror needed more of was manually putting bullets into a limited number of handgun magazines between every shootout, it has that. Does it have interesting puzzle design? Or interesting environments? Or a sense of pacing? N-no?

What it does have is maybe the strongest “fan fiction with the serial numbers filed off” energy possible. I’m talking Fifty Shades of Grey level of “they hit Control-F and changed the names” with some truly baffling storytelling told as confusingly as possible from three different perspectives. The specifics don’t matter, because there’s barely a plot until there’s too much of a plot, but one gets the impression someone in the development team was very proud of their lore bible. That’s nuts, because it’s literally just bootleg Biohazard in every aspect of its evil biotech corporations, wife guys, and special forces wearing gas masks. The non-native English voice actors awkwardly delivering dialogue written by non-native English speakers is a nice bonus, honestly. Rest assured that they got Leon S. Kennedy’s original RE 2 voice actor (Paul Haddad) for a bit of stunt casting right before he passed away, and his lines are just as awkward as everyone else's. At least this game delivered one of the single funniest flubbed lines I've seen this year.

If I haven’t made this abundantly clear, I don’t like this game at all. Even with the veritable mountain of caveats I’m willing to make for smaller games with their heart in the right place, this one is a real clunker. In a world where the modern Resident Evil games didn’t exist, I’d be willing to give it more of a pass, but not only is there a fantastic Resident Evil 2 remake (and a still pretty good RE3 remake), there are also multiple other examples of small indie teams making better survival horror games without just an endless string of references. I’m sorry, but when the $3, two hour indie game made by one dude in unity is the better modern survival horror, maybe there are other options. So basically, please look forward to my inevitable playthrough of Daymare 1994: Sandcastle whenever it comes out.

This should start at the correct portion of the stream, but if it doesn't it's at around 3:15:00

Next write up should come sooner.

Welcome to the new age of dubious. The new age of terror. The new age of streaming gimmick formats because I was tired of being subject to a randomizer wheel and wanted to mix things up. It’s time for THE TOWER OF DUBIOUS HORROR GAMES. More structure, less chaos! More democracy, less transparency! More full playthroughs, less two hour introductions to RPGs! That’s right, it’s up to me to climb, traverse, or otherwise navigate this categorical calamity using my wits, cunning, and audience voting. The current categories (which may or may not be switched out upon my leisure) are:

• Horror(bitrary)Water: A surprising number of horror games feature aquatic themes! If it’s on a boat, if there’s a significant amount of wet, or if fish are involved, it probably goes here?
• The Real Terror Was Dubious All Along: What defines a horror game? What makes something “scary?” If you said “actually a video game of dubious quality is scary in and of itself” then this category is a catch-all for that, I guess! Sometimes I want variety.
• Actual Good Video Games: Because not all horror games are dubious, I swear.
• The Curse of Beloved Franchises: There are several video game franchises that spring to mind when one envisions “horror.” Not all of the games released under those names are great.
• Visual Novels Can Be Scary Too: Read along with your friend ArbitraryWater as you learn just exactly how many visual novels and spooky RPGmaker VNs one can go through before pants are shat (in fear. Not for other reasons)
• Licenses… of DEATH: sometimes horror games are based on horror films. A novel concept!
• Sega NightmareCast: The scariest console of them all, the Sega Dreamcast. A surprising number of weird-ass horror games only exist on this console! YOU BET I'M GONNA LOOK AT EM ALL, JESSIFER.
• Clonk Tower: an entire category devoted to justifying the $50 I spent on a secondhand CIB copy of Clock Tower 3. Anyway, um, I guess you hide from a scissor man or something.
• Respect the Classics… or else!: Only the creakiest, oldest, most crustiest of spooky video games in here! Haunted House for the Atari 2600, is that you? (probably not)
• Actual Garbage: Fox Only, Final Destination, No Items. Just dubious.

Watching my streams LIVE gives you the opportunity to determine the course of my horror streams. When I finish (or tap out of) a game, you will determine my route through this terrifying tower of torment! Depending on how hard I wanna go down the hustle hole (ew), there might also be follower and/or subscriber incentives. Should be fun, yeah?

Cold Fear

Category: Horror(bitrary)Water

Developer: Darkworks

Release Date: March 15, 2005

Time Played: Somewhere under five hours

Troubleshooting: Fan Widescreen Fix. I had to disable my second monitor so the ad-hoc controller setup I made worked.

Dubiosity: 2 out of 5

Number of times I sang the Lonely Island song “I’m on a boat” on stream: Twice

Would I play again? naw

I don’t have a ton to say about Cold Fear. It’s maybe the most “We have a Resident Evil 4 at home” game imaginable, given its release proximity in early 2005 and presence on Xbox, PS2, and PC. See, this game is from the same team responsible for Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare a game I played to completion last year and would just like to briefly touch on since it's basically half the inspiration for this feature existing at all. AITD: The New Nightmare is a weird, recursive mess of a video game. In the same way Wasteland 2 and 3 are inspired by Fallout 1 and 2, which were inspired by the original Wasteland, so too is The New Nightmare a weird riff on Resident Evil, which itself was inspired by... the original Alone in the Dark trilogy. Shit's weird. It's also an attempt to launch the series into franchise potential, with a bunch of ominous, poorly-delivered plot threads which are vaguely followed up in the 2008 Alone in the Dark revival (which, don't worry, we'll get to.) The most notable thing about it might just be the part where I literally had to do no troubleshooting whatsoever to get the GOG version to play nicely with OBS, but otherwise it's a mediocre trifle best avoided.

As Darkworks' follow-up game, Cold Fear dares to ask “What if Resident Evil had boat physics?” and goes from there. It's also a significantly better game than New Nightmare. As AmericanMcCoastGuard it’s your job to run back and forth between a handful of rooms on a spooky Russian oil tanker in an entirely linear fashion. In a feature I HAVE to imagine was riffed from pre-release versions of Resident Evil 4, it’s got mostly fixed camera angles but switches to over-the-shoulder when you’re aiming, but the actual layout and progression never becomes trickier than running around, grabbing one key item, and then going back to another room to use said key item. It doesn’t even have save rooms, it just has set places in the story where it asks if you’d like to save.

It’s a surprisingly playable, competent affair, which is more than I can say for a lot of other stuff I’ve touched. Don't confuse that for something you should run out and play, but as an introductory experience to this feature I'm happy it started basic. It’s also a game with exactly two ideas, both of which it uses throughout the entirety of its run. The first is aforementioned boat physics, and the fact that to kill the not-plagas infecting the crew, you need to go for the head. Always. The lack of a map is probably the game’s way of trying to feel longer than it is, but it also means at no point did it ever overstay its welcome. That's probably also why the whole thing fails to stick out in my brain, being DEEPLY UNMEMORABLE, but it's some extreme B-tier, 6/10 energy exuding from this entire product.

A bunch of random licensed games my roommate had in a binder

Category: The Real Terror Was Dubious All Along

Developer: Various

Release Date: Somewhere between 2003 and 2007

Time Played: anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour for each of them

Dubiosity: Golden Compass: 4, Eragon: 4, Revenge of the Sith: 3, Return of the King: 2

DMCA claims to date: none, surprisingly

Would I play more? Maybe one day we’ll give Return of the King another look. Otherwise, nah.

Licensed movie tie-in video games! They used to exist, now they don’t, at least not in the same way! This is not a tragedy. This is not something we need to mourn or be nostalgic about. If my podcast episode on Lord of the Rings: The Third Age wasn’t proof enough, there’s no better example of this than the quick survey of four movie tie-in games I borrowed from my roommate. In this accursed CD Binder, I found video games based on two commercially unsuccessful, critically panned fantasy book adaptations and two of the highest grossing films of the 2000s? Sure, that’s a decent mix. At least, a decent enough mix for me to get threeish hours of quality entertainment out of the lot.

The thing that struck out to me is how much these game tie-ins all have in common. There’s the scuffed realistic art direction which just looks like mud, the soundalike voice actors (except Return of the King, which managed to get most of the cast in a recording booth for a day or two), the pained attempts to turn 5 minute movie scenes and set-pieces into 30 minute video game levels. Somehow, all four of these games are just brawlers. Pre-God of War character action titles, I guess I’d say. Complexity, mobility, or really any sort of combo potential are far beyond their reach, but by golly can you press a short string of face buttons together and stuff will happen. Sure, there are force powers and brisingrs and maybe a jump, but for the most part you’re doing the prehistoric equivalent of a square square triangle, but without the part where you can hold the triangle to do a launcher afterward.

Even The Golden Compass, the odd one out in this quartet, still opens with the most awkwardly animated armored polar bear fighting you’ve ever seen in your damn life. I don’t remember a thing about those books other than vaguely thinking they were the YA novel equivalent to r/atheism, but I’m going to guess they didn’t involve quite as many polar bear fights. Thankfully, after the action packed introduction, including fighting some sort of Inuit-looking shaman and his ghost wolves(?) the bad platforming and stealth elements became more apparent when you *aren’t* playing as the polar bear. Which is about where I tapped out.

I don’t really have much to say about the other three games, other than thinking Return of the King probably seems like the most playable of them. Alas, going back to it now, it’s not quite the banger I remember from 2003. Don’t get me wrong, It’s resoundingly good compared to the other three games I played for this feature, but between the surprisingly difficult insta-kill segments, groups of enemies swarming the player from off-camera, and less-than-generous checkpointing, it’s also “of its era” in a way I’m increasingly lukewarm of. At least it has FMV interviews with the cast, in case you’d like to know that Sean Astin is apparently the worst at video games. Please enjoy me narrating the cutscenes to avoid showing movie footage on screen when I get to that part of the stream

This is also the stealth launch of my sunday show, currently called “Sunday Scan Converter Supertime” which is my ill-intended method of justifying owning this RetroTink 5x Pro. I have a bunch of Gamecube, PS2, and Wii games here, ready to go and show themselves in beautiful (?) 1080p dark magic upscale. Wait, if I plug the PS3 in and use it to play PS1 and PS2 games does this also count? I guess we’ll see.

Resident Evil Dead Aim (AKA Gun Survivor 4: Biohazard - Heroes Never Die)

Category: Horror(bitrary)Water and Curse of Beloved Franchises

Developer: Cavia

Release Date: June 17, 2003 (happy 19th anniversary, bad video game!)

Time Played: Around three hours

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

Light Gun? No

Would I play again? Lolno. I’ll likely end up playing Resident Evil Survivor at some point but fuck if I'm gonna play the Dino Crisis or Code Veronica ones.

The light gun game is one of those lost relics of the arcade age, something that never really translated when home consoles became the dominant form of interactive entertainment. Outside of a brief resurgence of Wii originals and the current proliferation of VR shooting galleries, it’s one of those dead end genres that loses relevancy the second you aren’t pumping quarters in constantly. I guess there’s that House of the Dead remake on switch? That’s weird, right?

This is why I find Capcom’s weird dalliances with trying to translate the light gun experience to home consoles so… interesting? They made four of these. Resident Evil Dead Aim is the LAST one, and the year prior there was a Dino Crisis themed one? Sure. The general idea behind this series was to combine the sensibilities of a light gun shooter with a traditional Resident Evil game, complete with the GunCON light gun controller. That last part is important, actually, because I don’t know if these games work removed from the context of a bespoke light gun doohickey. Of course, given that I don’t have a CRT television readily on hand, I also wouldn’t be able to play these games as intended even if I did have one.

With a regular-ass DualShock 2 (and definitely not a DualShock 4 hooked up to a computer, officer) what I’m left with is maybe the most bland simulacrum of a Resident Evil game awkwardly foisted upon a fake light gun shooter imaginable. Someone in my chat put it best when they said “This looks more like a Resident Evil knockoff than the actual knockoff [Cold Fear]” The ongoing trend of Biohazard spinoffs being almost universally terrible starts from the beginning, and Dead Aim is a perfect example of that. As action man Bruce McIrvin, it’s your job to shoot zombies in the head with guns and clonkily navigate through the blandest boat ever made. Sometimes discount Ada Wong is there. A plot is vaguely gestured towards, but the most memorable thing the game has going for it is some truly, truly, astoundingly bad voice acting made extra good because the VA doesn’t match the subtitles. Oh also the main villain turns himself into a sexy lady version of the usual Resident Evil Tyrant monster, complete with boobs and organic stripper heels, so clearly someone in the art department had some preferences they needed to get out. Don’t worry, like all final bosses in Resident Evil, it eventually mutates into an amorphous blob with tentacles and weird orifices that look like buttholes, so they got that part right.

Removed from the novelty of a light gun controller, it’s just a really fucking boring, sedate simulacrum of a Resident Evil game without any of the puzzles, environmental navigation, or resource scarcity which makes the series good. Inventory management is reduced to only being able to carry eight stacks of ammo, which is still PLENTY of ammo (there is a never-ending supply of handgun bullets in save rooms, which means you’ll never be dry) However, the dark and horrible secret about this game is… you can kinda just run past a lot of the zombies. Likely due to the game’s nature as a light gun thing, the environments themselves all tend to be quite wide, which also means the classic art of juking zombos is surprisingly easy. It’s not much harder once you get to dealing with faster enemies either. I can easily see speedruns of this game lasting less than an hour.

But yeah, I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised a forgotten installment of a forgotten sub-series made by the people who would go on to make Bullet Witch is kinda fucking terrible. What surprised me was finding out some elements of this game actually made their way into future Resident Evil light gun spinoffs, Umbrella Chronicles and Darkside Chronicles (uncoincidentally also made by Cavia, uncoincidentally also not great.) Oh well. At least the save room theme will continue to be part of my regular pre-stream music rotation.

I've made sure to keep a running youtube playlist of all my stream archives, in case you'd like to follow along at home. I'll try and keep up on the blogs from here.