When it comes to game releases every year has its big headliners and hidden gems, but none were more packed than 2017. As my backlog-related project for this year I'm looking to build a list of a hundred great games that debuted at some point in 2017, making sure to hit all the important stops along the way. For more information and statistics on this project, be sure to check out this Intro blog.

With this entry of the Dredge of Seventeen I came through on a threat I made last month. October was going to be a last stand of sorts for this feature (excepting for a moment that we still have two more entries to follow): one big push to get me over the 100-item goal with wriggle room to spare in case I wanted to bump off some of the lesser Dredge entries from the finalized list. With six new games added to the 2017 GOTY rankings we've done just that: the grand total now sits at a very handsome 104 games going into November. That said, I sadly didn't quite get to all the horror-themed 2017 games I had prepared, but I think writing about six games in one entry is probably overkill already and what's more Halloween-themed than a surplus of killing?

It's also been a very dense month for adventure games. With the exception of the Zelda-like Hob from Runic Games, each of the following items were of the adventure genre, albeit often very different interpretations: Another Lost Phone, the follow-up to previous Dredge candidate A Normal Lost Phone, uses the uncommon (for games, at least) interface of a smartphone for its epistolary clue-gathering puzzles; Eponymous is an ominous walking simulator in a Minecraft-inspired blocky video game world stuck in a beta phase; The Letter is a dyed-in-the-wool horror visual novel (and moonlighting as this month's VN-ese Waltz entry); Detention is a 2D survival horror game that eventually drops the spook-evading aspect; and A Mortician's Tale is a macabre but heartfelt puzzle game somewhat inspired by those Trauma Center games from Atlus.

An eclectic mix to be sure, and another indication if more are needed that the year still has plenty of surprises left in store.

Another Lost Phone: Laura's Story

I have a small stockpile of 2017 games that, for whatever reason, released the same year as their predecessors, so my strategy was to play one early in the year and the other late to give them some breathing room. Another Lost Phone is one such same-year sequel for A Normal Lost Phone, which I played back in February. The quirk of these games, one shared by similar series Simulacra, is that the entire "world" is seen through the screen of a single smartphone: the apps are your levels, the passwords your broken bridges, and the treasures are the nuggets of personal data you're trying to mine to understand who the phone's owner might be and how you might get in touch with them to return their device. There's obviously a voyeuristic aspect too, and the game plays a little with that by how willing you are to interfere with the owner's life: there's a button right on the phone's home screen to summon the owner's partner to come pick it up if it's ever misplaced (though there's a few hoops you need to go through to get it working, such as activating the GPS), and it sits there tempting you to take the quick and less invasive option rather than go digging yourself for the info you need.

Both Another Lost Phone and A Normal Lost Phone are built on twists and secrets: the key to their mysteries can be found by unlocking the path to the owner's most secret sanctuaries and learning the truth behind their current predicament and why they may have abandoned their phone in a hurry. That also means that a review like this has to tiptoe around those revelations, focusing on the means in which it delivers that story without being overly descriptive. The surface-level correspondence paints a picture of a young female professional who has been estranged from her closest friends with the exception of her current squeeze, the picture of a supportive and caring boyfriend. Of course, there's a few hints that he might not be as he seems, and the more emotionally intelligent players (or those with similar experiences) can probably pick up what's going on relatively quickly before the game makes it explicit.

Another Lost Phone first has you looking for a public wi-fi password in the images and conversations saved to the device, moving onto social media websites and email once an internet connection has been made, and finally a private messaging app with several layers of secrecy obfuscating its presence. Each lock requires careful examination of the information presented in the apps currently available: a saved image providing a street address, for example, or an email correspondence that reveals a relationship between two contacts that isn't made explicit elsewhere for the sake of answering a security question. It's clever stuff, requiring some logical deduction, reading comprehension, and observational skills: aspects of a player's potential perspicacity that adventure and puzzle games don't commonly invoke. The interface is pleasant too: while revolving around a piece of modern technology, the art style has more of a hand-drawn feeling with softer edges to the displays and more calligraphic fonts in lieu of whatever cold and mechanical defaults are the norm with phone manufacturers. This softness also helps alleviate the pervasive wrongness that is present whenever a game tasks you with delving into a stranger's personal business: while your avatar has no bearing on the story and thus has no evident intent or interiority to define them, the game's stated goal is to help Laura in whatever way you can, and that means learning as much as possible about any predicament she might be in before deciding on a course of action.

Like A Normal Lost Phone, I found Another Lost Phone a compelling mystery framed in a fairly uncomfortable delivery method. Uncomfortable both for my aversion to smartphones and to privacy invasion alike. That doesn't necessarily serve as a knock against the game - art is often about taking you out of your comfort zone, after all - but I feel this game might be better appreciated by those who live in their smartphones and are more familiar with the territory. And, to be fair, that's like 95% of people my age or younger, so I can definitely see this adventure game format continuing to propagate as a means to tell chilling, personal stories about potentially imperilled individuals: it's like the opposite side of the coin to how horror stories have to either write around the fact that everyone can call for help on their phones at any moment, or else have to make them '80s period pieces where we're too harangued by knife-wielding stalkers to spin a rotary phone the necessary number of revolutions.

Ranking: C. (It wouldn't feel right to put this too far away from where A Normal Lost Phone will end up on the list, given all their strengths and weaknesses are identical and the dawning realization of their twists are delivered in a similarly effective slow-burn fashion. If anything, they function as a double helping of the same meal.)

Eponymous

I added Eponymous to my reading (?) list after playing a different game from this studio for an Indie Game of the Week (Minor Key Games and Super Win the Game, respectively) and wondering what kind of range this developer had, given the IGotW in question was a Zelda II-inspired explormer. Eponymous is... well, hard to define, but it's a walking simulator combined with explormer type advancements - say, acquiring a crouch or double-jump move in order to explore more of the world - set in an ominous and surreal world made of Minecraft-style lo-fi blocks with a meta twist in that the game's programmer is frequently talking to you, guiding you through what game there is like they might a QA tester during an alpha phase of development.

Eponymous, or "Eponymous: In Which a Work Is Known by Its Reading" to give it its full title, feels like an experimental palate-cleanser between projects: a notion that the developer had and turned into a short piece on a whim. Excepting any amount of time spent wandering around lost, the game takes about thirty minutes for a blind run at most. It's not wholly a walking simulator, despite what I said in the lede: there's some platforming involved, though it's relatively minor and unintrusive if you're not adept at those games (or their 3D incarnations, as is the case here), and the game mostly serves as an unsettling tone piece. As you play, you catch glimpses and sound glitches of a potentially malignant entity: one that goes unacknowledged by your voiceover guide. This being manifests in the game as a shape with a heavy pixel-mosaic that causes visual and audio distortion just by looking at it, similar to the titular antagonist of the Slender games, though is otherwise a passive observer of your actions that cannot be interacted with. This entity will speak to you also, often providing conflicting information to the developer voiceover, and as the game gets more bizarre with its environments it becomes a little bit of a psychological horror game where you're left considering who to trust, especially as the stranger of the two voices is frequently warning you of danger you cannot yet see.

While the game isn't terribly involved or compelling, with its levels of abstraction often working against it as much as for it, if you chance upon it for free like I did (its normal asking price is around the $2-3 range though, so you're not breaking the bank either way) it might be worth seeing it through to its twisty and enigmatic conclusion. I might argue that the game is meretricious by design: the horror, the platforming, and the narrative are all paper-thin, but the actual aesthetic of an empty and half-complete video game world with a potential ghost in the machine makes for a quite striking setting to just wander around in, offering strange little passages to read for those who explore all its nooks and crannies. It did make me wonder if the developer intends to do something much bigger with the concept one day, and is simply testing the uncanny valley's waters here.

Ranking: E. (An intriguing interactive short with some novel ideas but not much in the way of mechanical depth. It won't threaten any of the more elaborate games on my list, but there's enough substance to its ominous oddness that I can't dismiss it entirely either. It can sit in the "I'm not sure what this is" zone, otherwise known as 81-100.)

Detention

So I didn't know this until planning this month's 2017 itinerary but Detention had a live-action movie adaptation? The movie originally came out in 2019 but Netflix started promoting the localized version over the past month. Hearing about it made me more determined than ever to get into this Taiwanese horror adventure before the end of spooky season, on top of it being a well-acclaimed slice of psychological (and political) horror.

Set in the politically tense environment of 1960s Taiwan, a dozing highschool student named Wei wakes up in the late afternoon to find his school abandoned due to a typhoon warning. Wandering around he meets a senior, Ray, unconscious in the school's auditorium. Realizing that neither can leave because the bridge has been washed away, the two buckle down for the night until help can arrive the following morning. However, something in the school suddenly shifts, leaving Wei mysteriously dead and Ray the only survivor, prompting her to start looking around the school for answers. Early on, Ray must evade the notice of malicious spirits roaming the school by following the instructions left behind in notes, but as the mystery behind her predicament deepens the game's direction shifts in turn.

Many horror games from countries less represented in the gaming industry will often draw upon their folklore and culture as a means to distinguish themselves from the crowd, summoning any number of local creatures and spirits as the antagonists, but Detention goes a step further by setting the game in Taiwan's White Terror period in the 1960s, roughly analogous to the McCarthy communism witchhunts but with a much more aggressive government mandate behind it, and couching the game's supernatural evil in an all-too-quotidian malevolence. Anti-communist sentiment was strong enough to get you killed if you were found to be in possession of banned texts or espousing certain values, and the literati of the era found themselves stifled creatively and intellectually by these oppressive laws: it works effectively as the backdrop to the game because of how it factors into the more personal story of its protagonist, Ray. The particulars of this tale are doled out very gradually and often through subtext rather than directly: the Ray the player controls has a selective memory loss of the events surrounding the time when she meets Wei during the typhoon alert, but eventually starts to remember as the player explores the school and beyond its walls.

Its structure is similar to Silent Hill 2, in that the titular foggy town is less of a real-life entity and more of a metaphysical construct of the protagonist's tortured mind, with nonsensical geography that works mostly to funnel the player from one moment in Ray's life to the next. The game has its monsters, all of which must be evaded somehow, but these too aren't entirely real: in fact, they simply stop appearing after the halfway point of the game, relegated to an afterthought once the true nature of this illusory world becomes evident. I suppose it's a bit of a spoiler to give away this progression, but it's not exactly some late-game exclusive happenstance: the game's shift in purpose and design happens gradually throughout its early, middle, and final chapters, and is key to its appeal as a contemplative horror game that's not so much swimming in supernatural chills than it is about exploring its protagonist's interiority.

As far as the gameplay goes, though, I was consistently impressed with the type of puzzles Detention had to offer. They start as relatively benign key puzzles common to the survival horror genre - explore from one end of the available areas until you find an item, go back to where it's needed, try to survive the spooky scenario that arbitrarily triggered as a result of your actions - but start getting weird, befitting the dream logic rules of this abstract world. One such instance includes turning a radio dial to different stations, each time causing the world to shift: one has you exploring Ray's home as it once appeared to her, while the next moves all the furniture to the ceiling and walls and generates new areas to explore. A mirror puzzle a little later on has you changing the lighting to suit the reflection's behavior. Despite the increasingly surreal and obtuse situations behind these puzzles, they remain approachably intuitive to solve throughout. The ghost encounters too are fairly novel in their mechanics: the first type simply requires you to hold your breath (toggled by hitting the right mouse button) and pass quickly by before you run out of air, while the next requires you hold your breath, stand perfectly still, and not make eye contact by looking in the opposite direction as it walks past. They vanish after that point though, so I'm slightly curious how much more elaborate the evasion strategies might've become if they had stuck with it.

Detention's strengths are in its slow reveal of what Ray did to lead her down this disturbing trajectory and its use of mature themes of (minor spoilers) abandonment, loneliness, political upheaval, sexual awakening, seeking redemption, and ugly emotions spurring uglier acts of defiance and suffering as the background to the game's central intrigue. However, mechanically as a survival horror game and a standard adventure game alike the game is surprisingly strong as well with multiple inventive puzzles and a ghost evasion tactic more nuanced than "run the other way;" certainly more impressive than most 2D Indie Silent Hill ersatzes I've played in the past. That a genre such as this, which nominally exists to give YouTubers a histrionic fright or two to the amusement of their audiences, can produce a game with such solid mechanical and emotional cores alike is a rare and wonderful thing. I'm clearly going to have to try their follow-up, Devotion, before too long. (I just hope it finds its way back on Steam or GOG eventually once they grow a spine, though there's always the developer's own site if all else fails.)

Ranking: B. (I'm not a particular fan of survival horror games because they tend to be one-trick-pony jumpscare delivery systems, even the more interesting ones like Siren or Fatal Frame, but Detention works in that space better than most in part because it has a grown-up tale to tell about living in the wrong country at the wrong time in its history. To witness the abuse this developer has gone through, Detention's bogeyman of oppressive regimes censoring anything even mildly critical is as potent as ever.)

Hob

Probably the game with the highest profile of this month's batch, Hob was an attempt by Runic Games to branch out after the second of their Torchlight loot RPGs. Sadly, the studio closed down months after Hob's arrival, though I suppose we should be grateful they managed to get the game out before that happened. Hob has some obvious parallels to the Legend of Zelda franchise, adapting a similar angled top-down perspective and exploration occasionally gated until the player had solved a puzzle or found an upgrade.

However, perhaps unconsciously channelling the recently released Breath of the Wild, Hob offers very little in terms of dialogue or lore or direction: rather, what it does offer is subtext and hints to the current state of its mechanical world. One glance of the setting of Hob would suggest an untamed, arboreal world with alien flora and fauna, but some rudimentary exploration is enough to prove otherwise: much of the planet, beneath a veneer of grass and nature, is entirely mechanical. Switches raise and lower artificial landmasses covered with intricate, arcane designs, and almost every NPC you meet occupies a robotic frame. It's also covered with a sinister corruption of extraterrestrial origin, which glows with a bright blue and purple sheen which creates a stark contrast against the natural greenery of the less effected environment. The protagonist, a hooded figure, is one of many of its kind: all the rest of whom appeared to have been taken over or destroyed by the malevolent corruption and its approximation of a hive intelligence.

Hob has something of a dichotomy behind its world design and progression. While it does little to hold the player's hand beyond offering a point on the map to head towards, there's not much in the way of open-world exploration. You can wander off the beaten path only to find obstacles every where you turn until the current objective has been met, which'll often reshape the world in unpredictable ways to make more of itself accessible. One example is fixing a water plant and opening a series of pipes, which fills empty reservoirs with lakes and rivers, allowing your protagonist to cross to the opposite banks and continue exploring. There's plenty of collectibles and upgrades to find off the beaten path, mostly involving the game's skill system: any new skill requires both the blueprint to add it to the store and the currency needed to then buy it, the latter also dropping from larger enemies. In addition are the requisite health and stamina upgrades, the former needing two and the latter needing five to upgrade the respective gauges. There are also butterflies, which are the more elusive types and serve to unlock some of the double-edged alternative costumes, each of which improves either stamina, attack, speed, or health at the cost of another. Finally, there are the vista points: places to stand that causes the camera to zoom in on the more scenic regions of the game, adding to the game's pool of concept art. These vista points can be hard to spot, however, due to their small size. Most collectibles will appear on the map as icons if you were unable to collect them the first time (vistas are the exception, which conversely only appear on the map after you've accessed them): most of the time, they're not so much locked away by a missing upgrade but simply because the player needs to find another route to reach them, possibly one that has yet to be opened. Since subterranean areas are smaller they lack maps, but in its place you have a set of icons that correspond to all the collectibles in that area for the sake of completionists.

The world design, though attractive, can often obfuscate finer details that deserve to be a little more apparent. While the game does give important interactive objects a slight sheen to help distinguish them from the background, the world can often be an awkward place to navigate. Pathways route circuitously over and under the landscape in ways that aren't always obvious, especially with the fixed perspective. The game puts this to effective use when hiding its valuables from all but the most observant and thorough explorers, but it's less welcome when the path to the current objective is the one being obscured. Other irritants include the way the map zooms in when fast-travelling to make it harder to understand where fast-travel stations are in relation to each other; you can then manually zoom back out, but it's an odd choice for the default option. There's also the inconsistent respawn rules: most of the time, if you tumble down a pit you'll respawn right next to it or at the entrance to the current room as in Zelda, with only full HP loss requiring you to return to the previous checkpoint. However, the game is annoyingly inconsistent about this rule, dumping you some ways back if you're trying to hop over to an out-of-reach collectible or some other daredevil platforming challenge.

One of the game's shining virtues is its combat, which is layered in a way most Indie Zelda clones don't bother with. Combining aspects of the top-down 2D Zeldas with the later 3D ones, you have a standard sword swing, dodge roll, and enemy lock-on initially but are continually adding new moves and abilities to your repertoire as you find and purchase their blueprints. This might be a simple extension to your regular combo, a stronger stabbing move that is performed while sprinting, or something based on new abilities: using the grapple hook to pull off armor plates, for example. Through this system of incremental advancements, the combat remains compelling throughout if never super involved in terms of unique enemies and boss fights. The puzzles are inventive too, and there are many dungeon-like structures and other set-pieces that involve multi-stage puzzle-solving, like restoring the aforementioned water system or climbing up a massive tower of gears. Reviewed on their own, these aspects sound like they make for a strong game, though the relatively minor irritations combined serve to detract from the moment-to-moment experience of actually playing it. It certainly doesn't seem like the game was rushed at any stage given the intricacy and relatively large size of its world; it simply doesn't coalesce in the way it probably should, considering all its parts on an individual basis. Its wordless presentation also serves to work against it more often than not, creating a layer of narrative obfuscation - where the player simply goes from place to place completing objectives for reasons unknown until later - in a world more deserving of some detailed backstory. The hands-off approach is a bold choice though, and a relatively unusual one, so I can't fault that particular aspect too much: I'm the kind of dumbass who reads all the books in Elder Scrolls games and item descriptions in Souls, so maybe the issue here is more internal.

Ranking: C. (I enjoy most "Zelda-likes" and I think Hob is a spirited attempt to make a moderate-budget one of those with an impressive length, art direction, combat systems, and puzzle design: all the ingredients a game of that genre needs. It just felt a little soulless and rudderless to play for reasons I can't wholly put into words, pushing me through the motions of completing the game's railroaded objectives while never being quite so burned out by the process that I didn't pause to take the time to poke around every currently accessible area looking for secret caches and other surprises. Like a fulfilling meal rather than a delicious one, perhaps is one way to put it. It's going to end up square in the middle of my overall rankings once I'm through, I suspect.)

The Letter

(I reviewed The Letter in more detail in this blog. This entry is a continuation of that review, discussing the multiple routes and endings with as few spoilers as possible. Best to consult that one first if you want a more general rundown of the game, but here's a brief synopsis for the sake of clarity: as one of seven people cursed by an old chain letter found in a haunted mansion, the player must try to survive ghost attacks while working out how to free themselves from the curse. These seven characters include Isabella Santos, one of the estate agents looking to sell the mansion; Hannah and Luke Wright, the affluent couple that buy the place; Marianne McCollough, the interior decorator hired by the Wrights; Ashton Frey, a police detective friend of Isabella's; Rebecca Gales, a schoolteacher friend of Isabella's; and Zachary Steele, a photographer and filmmaker friend of Isabella's.)

I've now completed The Letter three times, seeking out its elusive "true ending" and discovering more about how the game is structured. Similar to Raging Loop (covered here), there's merit to seeking out endings where characters die: every chapter, each of which has a different viewpoint character, can either end with that character's death to or narrow escape from the Ringu-esque spectral antagonist (who, is turns out, actually was a Japanese woman. So I guess it isn't appropriation after all?). These fatal endings unlock "memory fragments," that are accessed by the final viewpoint character, the caddish Luke Wright, due to some genetic memory tying him to the cursed mansion. By playing through routes that leave characters deceased, the player can witness Luke's recalling of the memory fragments attached to those characters' fates and learn more of the backstory of the game. Once enough information is gleaned, you should theoretically realize the "correct" combination of characters to kill off for the game's true, if not best, ending. Alternatively, you can seek out the game's many epilogues, each of which based on the following variables: each character's relationship status with the other characters, and whether or not that character perished. There are, for instance, ten different versions of a "romantic" epilogue which rely on those two characters maxing their affinity with one another, though only for certain combinations of characters (for instance, there is only one same-sex coupling in the game).

To emphasize just how many variables the game is juggling, the Steam version of the game has 172 achievements. I initially wondered if it was one of those games that gave out achievements every ten seconds as incentive to keep playing or whatever that scam is about, but each achievement is actually connected to a specific CG or event that you can only trigger by choosing specific decisions during the story, plus a few more general ones like completing every ending for one character's chapter or nailing the QTE ghost attack mini-games. After three playthroughs I've achieved barely over half that number: some are going to rely on some very specific routing, which helped me realize just how complex the game's branching system is. Even if you're not a fan of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" format most visual novels seem to follow, it's both admirable and a little bewildering just how intense the branching is in The Letter. Luke Wright's chapter, which is also the last, is relatively short: the game's denouement begins just as the previous character's chapter ends, and after some backstory to establish Luke's role in the story you see the game out from his perspective. However, for as relatively short as it is to read, the flowchart for Luke's chapter is easily ten times longer than Isabella's, the first. It has to be, to account for every variable: who died, who is closer or more distant to whom, whether you decided to talk to this NPC or that NPC, etc..

All that said, I think there are some plotting issues with the game and some very strange character choices that probably needed rethinking. For instance, as if to establish that Luke Wright isn't a particularly nice person, he's the only character in the game that freely drops racial slurs around the game's minority characters Zach, Isabella, and Ashton. In some ways this makes sense: Luke's a ruthless businessman raised by a heartless tycoon and has killed (or had killed on his behalf) several people that threatened to derail his financial empire, though the player can choose to help him realize his more empathetic side through his interactions with his wife Hannah, but slurs feel like something that a medium shouldn't need to utilize to make the point that a character is a villain. The fact that he gleefully murders Hannah on one of his routes should be enough to establish his villainous bona fides. To the game's credit, whichever characters he's with immediately call him out on this behavior, including - perhaps incongruously - the corrupt Chief Inspector of the city police. Some character deaths are the result of boneheaded decisions, making them obvious death flags for anyone who's seen a horror movie, though others are a bit trickier: Hannah, for instance, will be possessed by the antagonist if she's too forgiving of Luke's actions and will be murdered by him if she's too hostile - the only way she survives to the end-game is by being somewhere in the middle, acknowledging that their marriage is on the rocks and could use either a trial separation or couples therapy to resolve.

Now that a single playthrough will take in the region of an hour or two given most of the dialogue can be skipped - excepting route variances I've not seen yet, since the fast-forward feature won't skip past any new text - I might find myself jumping back in to check out what happens if certain characters don't make it to the end. I've yet to try a run where everyone dies, for instance, or one where everyone lives for that matter (my first and third attempts had one casualty each). I'm not sure I have it in me to play through the game the 30 or more times it'll take to see every variance, but it does turn the game into a little collectathon of sorts: how do I access that one branch of unseen events? What kind of far-reaching consequences does this choice have? How many character pairings can I find? I might bounce back in occasionally to try a new route if the inclination strikes... though it's more likely I'll get distracted by something else this November, including the next visual novel.

Ranking: C. (A dense structure doesn't necessarily make up for a clichéd ghost story, even if the characters are mostly well-realized by their individual chapters and the script relatively engrossing in its delivery. The art and animations are generally decent, the latter more so due to how effectively it's utilized for the jumpscares, and I'll admit that there's some part of my lizard gamer brain that is compelled to hunt down all those different route variables and CGs and achievements, and the game sure has a lot of all three if I wanted to talk up its longevity potential. The Letter couldn't quite evoke the same emotional response that something like The House in Fata Morgana did - which has many plot similarities, not least of which being the central haunted mansion and a raven-haired maid spirit - but I'm positive enough towards it that I'm sure it'll find a firm placing in the middle tiers somewhere.)

A Mortician's Tale

Our final October entry is a game that isn't strictly Halloween or horror-themed, and in fact calling it such might be a disservice to its death-positive message of empathy and unity in the face of loss. A Mortician's Tale has you, as funeral director Charlie, preparing bodies for burial or cremation for bereaved families, working with them to provide the type of service that'll best help them with their grief. It's a sweet-natured narrative adventure game that handles its subject matter with the sensitivity it deserves, delving into a part of life - the last part, specifically - that most media is hesitant to touch.

Each of the game's small "chapters" begins with Charlie checking her emails, which along with the new assignment also includes correspondence with Charlie's university friend Jen, now working as a forensic scientist in a museum, as well as with the other employees at her funeral home. These little asides both work as a means to provide little side-stories for you to follow over time, as each "chapter" is separated by several weeks and months, as well as explain more of what a funeral director's work entails and the decorum and conventions related to funeral services and interring the deceased. The educational aspect comes from Charlie's subscription to the "Funerals Monthly" newsletter email, which also discusses what to say and not say to mourners, alternative means of laying a person to rest including eco-friendly "green" funerals involving biodegradable chemicals, and how different cultures handle death including the colors worn at funerals.

Following the acceptance of the new assignment, the player must then prepare the body. This plays out a little like the operations in the Trauma Center series, following a standard series of processes using a sidebar of tools. If the body is to be preserved for an open-casket funeral, for instance, you need to carefully clean and massage the body to preserve the skin, drain the blood, and inject it with formaldehyde to ensure it's presentable for the service. Fortunately, there's no part where you need to do reconstructive surgery on someone who walked into helicopter blades or something equally unpleasant - no having to work on a "Timmy Headloaf" - but there are a few complications that arise with some cases. For one, you have to surgically remove a pacemaker before cremation to ensure it doesn't explode mid-incineration, while other items like jewelry need to be removed from the cremation process and added to the urn afterwards. Each of these body preparation mini-games have full step-by-step on-screen guides so there's no point where you need to memorize the process: these mini-games aren't really about challenging the player with increasingly difficult scenarios, only serving to demonstrate the type of process bodies go under in preparation for their funerals in a hands-on fashion. Finally, there's the funeral itself: you are free to talk to mourners to gauge the type of person the deceased was, or simply pay your respects at the coffin/urn and return to the lab area for the next chapter of the game.

The game's relatively brief - about ninety minutes total if I had to guess - but there's a few asides like a death-themed minesweeper clone that your friend sends you. One case gives you to option to skip if you feel uncomfortable with it: a suicide victim, whose final wish to be quietly cremated is superseded by the family who prefer an open-casket funeral instead. You're given an alternative case to handle instead if you choose to pass on it. The developers' intent is quickly obvious when playing: not only to remove the stigma surrounding death and celebrate those whose job it is to see us out with dignity and respect, but to detail the day-to-day processes and the challenges that funeral directors and technicians face. The game's overarching plot, which eventually sees Charlie's "mom and pop" funeral home change hands to corporate ownership and adopt a clinical and profit-focused approach to services, is handled well and highlights the importance of empathy to those grieving. Its wholesome aesthetic does much to soften the morbidity of the subject matter - the deceased look a lot like Animal Crossing villagers when they're on the slab, come to think of it - and I'm a mark for any game that opts for an isometric perspective, just out of nostalgia if nothing else. It's the type of game I could see being played as part of a school assignment: a straightforward and educational look at a career many would be too squeamish to acknowledge or examine too closely. I can't say I handle death particularly well either, but a game like this does much to alleviate the fear and trepidation of knowing me and my loved ones will only exist on this planet for an extremely limited amount of time. Certainly puts playing six 2017 games in one month into stark perspective.

Ranking: C. (While it handles the same subject matter as Rakuen, it's not quite as emotionally resonant nor as involved gameplay-wise so I'm thinking of dropping it a few places underneath. Games like A Mortician's Tale are certainly important to the medium though: offering a necessary perspective on the death industry that's both informative and emotionally intelligent, highlighting challenges that arise from preparing the bodies to doing right by the deceased and their family.)

I've been knee-deep in horror games from 2017 for this month's Dredge of Seventeen entry, but one more couldn't hurt (my cardiologist might have a different take though). Creepy Tale reminds me of the Frog Detective games: not in the sense that they share an aesthetic or a sense of humor, but in how they seem to be propagating fairly quickly by being relatively brisk in size and reusing some of same tech from game to game: exonerable in this case because the core of both series can be found in its puzzles and stories, rather than complex new mechanics or anything else that might require an expensive and time-consuming engine do-over. Inspired by the works of the Brothers Grimm - the studio is even called Creepy Brothers - Creepy Tale is a vaguely Teutonic tale about a pair of brothers picking mushrooms in a forest, when one is captured by a shaggy creature after chasing a golden butterfly. The other, more timid brother is then tasked with rescuing him.

Creepy Tale has some Limbo/Inside vibes, largely owing to it being a 2D platformer-adventure game with a young male lead, but it's far more puzzle-focused and not nearly as unsettling (for better and worse). There's only three buttons to worry about beyond movement: jump, pick up item, or use item. Items are automatically selected from your inventory when used, so there's no trace of a point-and-click interface: it's streamlined this way on purpose, as a few of the puzzles are very timing-sensitive. An example of that would be one of the first puzzles in the game: you need to chase a guard out of the same hut your brother was abducted in, first by setting a mushroom on a nearby stump, knocking on the door, moving out of sight, and sneaking in when the occupant goes after the mushroom. Once inside, you have a few seconds to get into a nearby chest and shut the lid: both steps are manual, so it's easy to forget the second and be very visible once the monstrous sentry walks back in (you even get an achievement for getting caught out by it, perhaps as a consolation prize). There's a few of these instances where you need to avoid enemies on patrol as you solve puzzles around them, and it's not too dissimilar to the structure of the Little Nightmares series if not quite as involved with the platforming aspect.

Aesthetically, it has that slightly cheap paper-doll animation style shared by a great many Indie games but otherwise the art direction is pretty strong and reminiscent of a creepy Gorey-esque storybook style, or something riffing on the same vibe like Don't Starve or the Samorost games. It eschews spoken dialogue or text of any kind to dodge localization expenses, relying instead of ideograms: this includes the protagonist's thought bubbles, which are sometimes expressed if the player is spending too long on a particular puzzle and might need a hint. While not particularly scary it does have villains that chase you down, grisly (but not overly so) death states, and appropriately tense musical stings whenever the protagonist is spooked by something, so thematically it hits all the right notes. The puzzles, too, are easily the match of the game's sense of style: there's some clever escalation in mechanics, like a trap that probably caught you the first time that you then use to catch an enemy instead, and there's a handful of cases that require observation and patience to solve. One scenario has you trying to defeat a witch whom carries the key to the only exit, and if you accidentally leave a cupboard open while rummaging through her possessions she instantly becomes agitated, eventually sussing out your hiding place in case you thought you got away scot-free: the goal next time is to make sure you close that cupboard once you've taken the necessary item out. I was impressed with little touches like these that gift the game's antagonists with an extra layer of cunning, even if they often served to trip me up and necessitate a checkpoint reset.

Creepy Tale is a bite-sized affair but generally gets everything right in terms of tone and in building a spooky adventure game over a handful of smart puzzle ideas and Germanic arboreal monster designs. Like Oknytt, it's steeped in local mythology in a way that makes its world a little more surreal and alien even before you add the horror factor. If I had a gripe, it's in how every interactive object has to exist on the same plane which leads to areas where it feels like they overlap in a messy way: accidentally activating the neighboring hotspot by being just a few pixels off, say, which becomes a significant problem during those time-sensitive puzzles where something's chasing you or you're trying to corral a NPC to a specific spot. A bell puzzle in the third chapter, necessary for dragging a patrolling enemy down a few floors in a tower so you can explore the above stories, is one that runs afoul of this hotspot-congestion problem. Otherwise, the game is a small-scale spooky delight and a far less terrifying alternative to all the Phasmophobias, Devours, and Outlasts out there if you want to get into the Halloween spirit this weekend without the concomitant pants-wettery.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Decided to spend the second half of 2021 checking out some renowned visual novels. Sometimes my ideas aren't any more elaborate than that. I've tried to discuss the following games in as spoiler-free a manner as possible, with a very spoilerish section at the end for my final thoughts on where the story goes.

Well, it's Halloween-adjacent, so I figured I should play the spookiest visual novel I happened to have on me. The Letter bucks a trend I established early on with this series: my intent was to get a working knowledge of traditional Japanese VNs before I could appreciate what the western takes were doing to subvert the formula (say, with Doki Doki Literature Club's senpai slaughterfest) but the ones I've chosen so far are already fairly distinctive in their approaches. Raging Loop, another VN I could've played around this frighteningly festive time, repurposed an elaborate variant of the social deduction game Werewolf as its narrative basis and layered on a time-looping story, neither of which seem particularly common to the VN genre. What sets The Letter apart, however, is its country of origin: the not-so-adjacent nation of The Philippines, which brought to the world such wonders as the yo-yo, adobo, and Mr. Jan Ochoa.

That said, there isn't a huge amount of Filipino culture on display in The Letter: rather, the developers sought to create a more traditional western horror story by setting the game in a haunted mansion in the UK, albeit with a diverse cast: there's a Filipina protagonist, or at least the first of many protagonists, as well as an African-American and a Japanese-American along with the more expected Irish, Scottish, and English nationals. (The ghost, meanwhile, is not Japanese but sure does look like the type of yurei so beloved of J-Horror movies like The Ring or Ju-On: The Grudge.) The story is broken up in such a way that seven major characters each have their own routes, with each following one after the other in a particular order to reveal pertinent information at the right intervals. Chronologically, a character's story will often start earlier than when the previous viewpoint character's arc ended, if only to establish some necessary backstory or motivations. This also means that many scenes that involve multiple viewpoint characters are skipped on subsequent routes, though you'll occasionally see one play out with the other character's internal thoughts instead - possibly providing a quite different context to their words compared to how the original viewpoint character perceived them. A cute little feature of this viewpoint switching is how character names will change to reflect relationships: someone who is currently a stranger might be referred to as "tall man," while the socialite and second viewpoint character Hannah Wright has a bad habit of getting peoples' names slightly wrong. You'll also get a minor info dump about each cast member in the game's "profiles" tab, but only once they've become a viewpoint character: the game uses this to its advantage, giving the most suspicious or mysterious members of the cast (though not necessarily the antagonists) the privilege of being the final viewpoint characters to maintain that mystique for as long as possible.

The structure of the game is impressive, in the sense that there are a lot of decisions you can make that have far-reaching effects, even if it's as minor as how you chose to react to another character's witticism or whether or not you told them something potentially unhelpful. This might slightly alter the dialogue in a later exchange, or completely change the arc of a different character's route. This system is both extremely extensive in its branching and a little intimidating if you're the type, like I am, to play visual novels with the goal of seeing every route play out. It's far more elaborate than, say, the aforementioned Raging Loop where every decision had an immediate effect to the story and the branches were relatively minor, or even a game like Our World is Ended, where making decisions that increased affinity towards specific characters (a system The Letter also shares) affected the ending you would get. In The Letter, there's an alternative reaction for almost every decision you might make, in addition to relationship-specific endings. You can even have characters killed off during their arcs to see what might occur in someone else's that follows (as opposed to the non-canon failstate deaths, which requires you reset to just before the game over - a similar structure to Telltale's games where deaths are either treated as plot-crucial or are quickly reversed due to being the result of player error). Pivotal moments like these have to happen late in the game's overall timeline for obvious reasons - no having a character killed only for them to show up later - but I have been morbidly curious to leave characters to their grisly fates to see how the rest of the cast would react.

Speaking of, I should probably talk about the plot of this game. The Letter begins with rookie estate agent Isabella Santos finding the titular document while checking over a cursed mansion her realtor is desperate to sell. An ominous chain letter written in blood, it inadvertently falls into the hands of six other people: Hannah and Luke Wright, the wealthy couple looking to buy the mansion; Marianne McCollough, the professional interior decorator the Wrights hired in haste to begin planning out their new home; and Isabella's three closest friends Rebecca Gales (a schoolteacher), Zachary Steele (a freelance photographer and film director), and Ashton Frey (a detective inspector). The game then follows each of the seven of them on the days before and after they read the letter, as each begins to be stalked by a malign spirit along with everyone else attached to the mansion's recent renovation and sale. It is a fairly typical ghost story told in a mostly atypical way, offering multiple viewpoints with differing amounts of information on the mansion, its new occupants, and the other accursed letter readers, along with their own inner demons and past tragedies that only make themselves known when you assume that character and have access to their interior monologues. The cool and stylish Marianne, for instance, is a picture of professionalism to every prior viewpoint character as that is the way she chooses to present herself around others; it's only when you reach her chapter you realize that she's a bit more of a disaster (and is a closet geek to boot). The ghost curse narrative and the slow "trail of breadcrumbs" method it reaches its climax is less essential to the game's flow than the player jumping from character to character, understanding how each one sees the world and how their hitherto perceived role in the story is much removed from the actual truth, and observing how the domino effect of their earlier decisions causes such massive branching later on leaving them to wonder what might have happened differently, and how those different outcomes might be triggered. It's going to be a real mess to navigate all those flowcharts later, if I ever get around to it (fortunately, like most visual novels, you have the option to skip previously read dialogue on repeat playthroughs).

I'm enjoying this game quite a bit, even if I see a headache on the horizon to get the most out of all those branches, and it's surprising that it's the studio's first project. It's much more elaborate and confident than many of the full-price VNs I've played so far, if not quite as engrossing or original. However, what strengths it has extend beyond simple storytelling and complex flowchart structures: the game's art style is exceptional if a bit Disney-esque, as well as the completely different art style it uses for its journal entries which look more like traditional manga, but more striking than those is how smooth and expressive the animations can be, normally utilized whenever a character is talking or gesturing or shrugging or sighing. There's sometimes a bit of a delay as the arms vanish and reappear in new positions that can be a little off-putting to watch, but the animation is best employed when the game is trying to spook you with a sudden ghost attack: I didn't think you could really do jumpscares in a visual novel where you have to click each time to reach the next dialogue box, but the game pulls off some pretty effective ones. In terms of typos, there's quite a few but at a rate of around 1 per every 100 words, which ratio-wise is probably close enough to my own output that I can't really grumble (and I'm ostensibly a native English speaker). Some mistakes are evidently the result of not quite understanding certain English idioms and expressions rather than simple careless spelling errors: it makes me think that the localization was probably handled in-house. Either way, the script is overall decent even if not all of its interludes and asides feel all that impactful. The voice acting isn't bad either: some of the British accents are a bit more of a stretch than others, but I respect the attempt. Last, there are these QTEs whenever the ghostly antagonist decides to get all grabby that don't really add too much but can be mitigated by playing on the easier difficulty setting or skipped altogether. The violence and gore can be... moderate, though rarely overwhelming. The grislier stuff it tends to leave to your imagination, though suffice it to say the content warnings are there for a reason.

At this point I usually follow these VN reviews with a spoiler-blocked breakdown of the story and where it ends up for the sake of fully comprehensive coverage... but I'll be skipping that step this time because I haven't actually finished the game yet: the later chapters are considerably longer than the previous ones, as all the pieces you set up earlier fall into place and you settle in for the conclusion your actions have earned you. Instead, I'll provide that breakdown when I cover the game again for this month's Dredge of Seventeen entry: turns out The Letter is a 2017 game as well, so I'm conveniently double-dipping with my features this time. (I'll link to it here when I've published it, hopefully sometime next week.)

Looking back over 2021's many Indie Game of the Week entries I realize I've developed a bit of an explormer addiction over these months in quarantine, so what better way to rehabilitate myself than by playing eighteen of them at once, smoking the entire carton as it were? That's the insane deal you'll receive when you purchase Robot Wants It All, a compilation of all the Flash/browser-based explormers created by Hamumu Software over the years in which a mechanical being invariably demands a thing and platforms around precarious mazes until they reach it.

Reading the game's description I figured Robot Wants It All would simply present all six of its "Robot Wants" entries - including one built specially for this bundle, Robot Wants Justice - as a simple list, but the truth is far more involved. Initially, only the first game in the series (Robot Wants Kitty) is unlocked: the rest need to be purchased with currency you either earn while playing the games or are rewarded afterwards as a completion bonus. This bonus can increase or decrease depending on various factors such as your completion time, weapon accuracy, total number of deaths, and special conditions like avoiding killing enemies as much as possible (or killing all of them) or finding all the collectibles, if applicable. Each game first presents to you its "Easy" mode, in which you get a smaller map and a slightly truncated version of the progression chain, with the option to unlock the "Classic" map (a recreation of the original version) and a "Remix" version (a much harder and larger map). Added to this are mutators like those found in Supergiant's games: optional settings to make the game harder that also increase the payouts in turn.

While I was a little skeptical of this progression system initially, as it seems to favor a speedrunner approach as opposed to the languidly-paced exploration I'm more into, the post-game rewards have been significant enough that I've usually been able to unlock a new map to play immediately after the conclusion of the previous. Excess funds, if any, have been going towards optional content like little history blurbs for each game, new alternative skins for the titular robot protagonist which can sometimes offer gameplay tweaks, and new mutators to tinker around with. Individual maps range from being a mere five minutes long if you're speedy to almost an hour for the larger Remix ones, and with the cash incentives to play quickly and accurately it has more of an arcade sensibility than most games in this sub-genre. Controls-wise the platforming and combat are usually fairly concise though I've had trouble registering hitboxes at times, even if that's something that isn't usually a problem in pixel games. Dying and respawning happens so fast that you'll regularly fail to register what just killed you, which is probably more of a positive on the whole but does allow doubt to fester in your mind as to whether or not everything's on the up and up.

Each game has different traversal upgrades, some of which don't even let you start with a jump until you find the right power-up, and will often have their own rules to follow. Each one also tweaks the ratio of platforming:combat:puzzles to create more distinct playthroughs, with the Easy, Classic, and Remix versions of a given game offering the same mechanics but with different map layouts. Hence why I would argue that, even though the game presents itself as six games in one, it's actually eighteen in one (albeit, eighteen bite-sized maps that you could bash through in a handful of sessions, in case it sounds overwhelming). The mutators and having different award targets to chase bolsters that longevity further, making Robot Wants It All similar to another platformer I played recently - Love 2: Kuso by Fred Wood - in that the game recognizes its shortcomings (specifically its literal shortness) and builds a meta game model around it that turns that brevity into a strength. Even if it takes you a mere ten minutes to clear a map, you have the option to jump back in to complete it even faster for greater rewards that can go towards many unlockable features, or play in pursuit of a particular objective if you're trying to unlock the game's enigmatic achievements, or simply move onto one of the other seventeen maps available. I've already cycled through the Easy intro-level maps for each of the six games to get a feel for them all and am now working through the bigger Classic maps, and it's been satisfying coming back to the in-game store between games to unlock a new mode or buy some extra features which in turn unlocks even more to browse in the shop's skilltree-like structure.

As for the differences between each game, that's where this package starts to feel a bit repetitive. It's not quite Kirby Super Star, for as similar as it is in the sense it unlocks harder games as rewards for completing the easier ones, as the Robot Wants games use a very similar engine (due to them all being remastered with the same tech) with the same fundamental mechanics for the most part. Robot Wants Kitty, the first of the six, is the archetypal mini-explormer: there's an even balance of combat and platforming and a non-linear map that starts you right next to your feline target, except with a barrier in the way that you can only overcome by finding all the traversal upgrades in order. Robot Wants Puppy, the follow-up, is different in that it uses the kitty found in the previous game as your partner: combat involves launching the kitty at enemies to claw apart and then remembering to pick the little guy up afterwards, at least until you get the upgrade that recalls the fuzzy wonder instanter. Other upgrades also involve the kitty in some way: using the tail as a helicopter to glide over wide gaps or the cat's sharp claws to walk across ceilings, for examples. Robot Wants Fishy has larger, more challenging subterranean maps that are separated by a central teleportation system, thereby splitting progression across four distinct paths. Upon acquiring a new upgrade, the trick to completing the map quickly is remembering which of the four routes had a roadblock you can now overcome. It also makes use of floaty underwater physics, which is one of the game's clear weaknesses (that is, unless either of the two larger Robot Wants Fishy maps include a better swimming upgrade to mitigate it; I've not tried them yet).

The fourth game, Robot Wants Ice Cream, is much more combat-focused. There are fewer upgrade types but each are heavily iterative - four or five power-ups apiece - and can be found all over the place: some might increase your firepower damage, some might increase the bullet spread, others give you a means to use a smart bomb with further upgrades that allow you to use it more often and increases the rate at which it regenerates. It also has a pathetic double-jump that you have to keep upgrading until the second hop finally matches the first in distance travelled. It's also one of the more linear games in this series. The fifth, Robot Wants the Letter Y, is a bit more cerebral in that it tasks you with completing environmental puzzles to reach new upgrades: this might include using a reflective laser to hit buttons at angles, switching platforms between active and inactive states, or dropping EMP mines to temporarily disable barriers. The final game, Robot Wants Justice, includes an optional goal to save all the alien "Derpoids" by touching them and letting your puppy partner teleport them to safety but is otherwise a linear affair with a unique offensive rocket punch upgrade that also acts as a mid-air dash. It does have a curious final boss however: a cloning machine that spits out one-eyed purple leapers that you can defeat in a pacifist run by letting the clones leap towards you only to fall into the lava underneath, rather than pushing them in yourself.

While I don't think any of the individual games are all that much to write home about, or write on a website about in my case, the sheer quantity of game modes offered here and the meta gaming manner in which they're incrementally doled out does add a great deal to this package. I suppose another close equivalent, in addition to those mentioned above, would be Digital Eclipse's various Mega Man Legacy Collections: each included game comes packed with so many extras to peruse that the front-end trappings surrounding the compilation could be said to be as much of a value add as the individual games themselves. In Robot Wants It All's case, it's also a smart way to adjust for the simple fact that these games, as deliberately breezy browser-based games meant to be conquered over a lunch break, are best served by this gaggle of highscore-chasing incentives and longevity-boosters rather than the no-frills list of six pretty similar, rudimentary explormers the developer could've easily presented them as. If you've ever spotted or engaged with one of these "Robot Wants" games in the wild, this set seems like the ideal way to consume the whole franchise.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

It's Halloween month, which means it's time to revisit the moody puzzle-adventure series Forever Lost for one last spin around the perplexing, multi-symbolled block. I first tried this series back in August of last year with IGotW #183 after picking up the whole trilogy of episodes in that big Summer Itch.io charity bundle, moving onto the second episode in that same year's Halloween-themed feature The Itchy, Tasty Spooktathlon, and my impressions of Forever Lost as a whole haven't really shifted since then with the conclusion of Forever Lost: Episode 3, its third and final episode. Forever Lost presents an amnesiac hero wandering the halls of a disused mental health facility, and later the surrounding buildings, as they desperately try to figure out who they are and whom trapped them there by completing one hindersome puzzle after another. It's very much of the Myst lineage if in spirit alone, or perhaps the many Escape Room sims available on mobile devices, with tidbits of lore scattered around the more puzzle-centric clues and hints adorning the game's many walls and notepads.

Forever Lost: Episode 2 ended by deepening the central enigma behind the protagonist's identity and the reason they're trapped here, suggesting that the tragic end to a marriage is key to the mystery, and the third episode works to wrap everything up to conclude the story as a trilogy. I was only half paying attention to the story in previous instalments and have mostly forgotten most of it a year later, but even as a standalone Episode 3 does a fine job quickly getting you back up to speed as to who all these important people might be and lays all its cards out on the table, figuratively and literally in one puzzle's case. Determining the protagonist's identity from all the various proper nouns being bandied around wasn't the most challenging riddle to solve, but the game did end in an intriguing enough way to justify any investment in its thin plot.

As ever, the traits that held the greatest significance to me were the nature of the puzzles and the convenience of the game's user interface and quality of life features. In one specific way the game felt a like a step back from the second game: the conspicuous absence being the second chapter's elaborate hint system that was written in a loose Q&A format to minimize the risk of seeing solutions you weren't looking to have spoiled. It must've been a tricky method to deliver the very specific advice players needed if the developer dropped it for what is probably the most challenging of the three games. Episode 3 does, however, retain the ingenious camera/photo album information-gathering feature from previous games and has expanded its utility by including a "picture-in-picture" feature that allows you to refer back to saved images and scribbled overlying notes while simultaneously looking at the specific puzzle to which they pertain. I could, for instance, see a pattern of colors on a wall, snap a quick photo, then bring that image up when I find a similar interface awaiting a specific sequence and imitate the pattern without relying on my terrible memory. The format of the game's puzzles and how their hints could be many screens away from where they can be solved encourages the player to take photos of anything odd in case it relates to a future puzzle (as well as the puzzles themselves - for instance a peculiarly-shaped indent waiting for an item you may have just picked up). The album can then be pruned once you've solved puzzles related to those images for the sake of keeping things tidy, essentially working like a second inventory.

The third episode's difficulty largely relates to how expansive its map becomes after you've been playing a while. Chapter breaks usually arrive once you've opened a door to another large zone, or group of screens to visit, but these new areas are often meant to be compounded with all those you've found so far; to explain what I mean, you'll open up a new region only to find key items and hints relating to puzzles you abandoned unsolved half the game ago. Though the game is only about four or five hours long, it's easy to forget what was left behind in earlier sections unless you're impulsively taking photo evidence and the game even tricks you a few times by letting you think a puzzle is over when in fact it still has some part to play. An example of this, spoiler-blocked if you want to go into this game completely fresh, involves the following:

The game still has some issues regarding the convenience of getting around. The game world is quite large and many screens are arranged in a linear order, so without a fast travel system or a map it can take a while to return to some specific spots at the end of long chains of rooms or remember which domicile has the particular kitchen area you need to find for a puzzle. Another issue that extends to the whole series is a lack of any sort of compass navigation, that is to say letting you know which directions on any given screen are connected to other screens. A compass or a mini-map or even opaque arrows that highlight nearby exits is a feature that has existed in this genre since the MacVenture series of the late '80s, so its absence in modern point-and-click adventure games like this seems conspicuous and unfortunate. Unless you make sure to tap every doorway, hallway, and edge of the screen in case it takes you to a new area it can be easy to miss whole zones with vital hints and items.

Overall I think I enjoyed the puzzles a bit more in this third chapter, including some that recontextualized some of the wall messages I'd seen so far from useless graffiti to something of actual importance; realizations that only come late in the game, after you've passed by most of the related messages. It also has something that those HOPAs or something like The Room series has where you can start a chain reaction of puzzle solutions by finding one vital item as a reward after the next, which can be very satisfying if you've been staring at those puzzles for a while. I wish the developer could've implemented more ways to make the game easier or at least more transparent in terms of navigating its world, and it feels like the same bugs continue to appear from episode to episode (it has a real bee in its bonnet about accidentally registering double-clicks, frequently skipping screens in the process), but if you liked the first two episodes the third works as a steady progression in difficulty and gives you all the plot-related answers you were looking for so I'd say it succeeds in that goal at least.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

So... I've been watching a lot of Hololive (a VTuber talent agency of sorts) clips of late and recently they've all been playing a lot of Minecraft after the servers for the Japanese and English-speaking members were combined. It's been cute seeing both sides struggle with the language barrier when encountering each other, but more than that I've been impressed by all the elaborate construction projects everyone's been showing off to their newly connected neighbors. It gave me the itch to get back into a construction sim in a big way too, and therefore it seemed the perfect excuse to dust off this copy of Dragon Quest Builders 2 I picked up last year to see how Square Enix and Omega Force have improved upon Dragon Quest Builders 1.

For a while, the gameplay experience felt very similar. The progression of the first island, for instance, teaches you all about the sequel's new farming mechanics but couches it narratively in a familiar riff on the first game's poison country and how all its quests revolved around purifying enough of the terrain to make a sanctuary for travellers. Despite these story similarities though, the game is filled with major, sweeping changes to the core mechanics and is much more confident and expansive in its approach; I get the sense that it acquired a more concrete idea of what an audience wants from a Minecraft clone, which is to say A) a greater sense of freedom unfettered by too much linear quest progression of the type that usually defines a regular entry in the Dragon Quest series, and B) the opportunity to keep expanding a permanent location instead of continually starting over with new parameters and goals.

As such, while this series continues to walk a delicate line between giving players not enough direction and too much, DQB2 finds a better balance than its predecessor while also addressing the issue of the first game's non-permanent locales: while you still have similar "scenario" towns to build from scratch each time, the central location of the Isle of Awakening is a persistent and enormous landmass that awaits continual development. In-between your time on these story-based islands, you can spend hours just renovating and constructing the Isle of Awakening's Minecraft-ian blank canvas world: the chief motivation to complete these story islands then becomes unlocking many more crafting recipes, room plans, building blueprints, and other unlocked mechanics and tools to improve your "home base." It's an intelligent compromise between the original game's goal of turning Minecraft into something more directed and quest-focused, completing objectives in a manner akin to constructing LEGO kits from a set of instructions, and the appealing open-ended creativity of same.

Moreover, there's so many welcome changes to the extant DQB formula that I've found myself enjoying this sequel far more than the original game and, for my sake as much as anyone else's, I'd like to go through an itemized list of these superior additions to understand why this outing is that much more compelling. I should clarify that I'm only a couple islands into the game so far - the agricultural Furrowfield and the mining town of Khrumbul-Dun - but I'm thoroughly hooked in a way that I haven't been with a construction sim since Terraria all those many moons ago.

Tabula Raiser

On the Isle of Awakening, you're left to your own devices for the most part but the game still wants to give you some boundaries if only for the sake of not being totally overwhelmed by indecision. For instance, when you get back from the first island - which is all about creating arable land and partitioning and preparing parcels of tilled earth for growing specific types of crops - you're given some directions to make a similar farm back on the Isle of Awakening albeit with a much more generous land size.

One of my favorite RPGs, Dark Cloud 2, also has its own building mode that operates mostly on vague objectives rather than the rigidity of Dragon Quest Builders's blueprints. Requisites like having a river of a certain length or building enough fencing to encircle a farm, but the shape of either is left to the player's discretion. On the Isle of Awakening, you're given a few direct goals and then a whole mess of optional ones to pursue and yet none of them are so specific as to restrict the player's creativity or agency when crafting their own settlement. If the goal is to make a restaurant, it's down to the player how large they decide to make their eatery and the themes and menus it might have. As you play more of the game and unlock more block types and furniture from geographically and culturally diverse islands there's a wide number of interpretations for those simple suggestions. I always work best with a goal in mind but I also enjoy the freedom in being able to build anything I want as long as it suits a required purpose.

Explorer Shores

In addition to the story islands and the Isle of Awakening discussed above, you can visit these proc-gen islands for some resource gathering. There's something like a No Man's Sky scavenger hunt for item types while there - which works simultaneously as a list of possible things to find if you're on the hunt for specific components - and scouting them all means unlocking an infinite amount of one resource in the rest of the game. Having infinite wood, for example, isn't just a medical condition any more: it's also a means to build as many wooden structures, or useful items like chest containers and platforms, as you'd like in either the Isle of Awakening or in the next chapter of the story.

What I like most about explorer shores is that it offers a slightly different variation on the gameplay, in particular when contrasted with the Isle of Awakening. The Isle of Awakening is almost all building-related while Explorer Shores has no building at all, at least if you're doing it right, but is instead all resource-gathering and exploration. Its rewards are tangible and its scavenger hunt is something that can be made easier with certain upgrades during the story progression (I'm not far enough in to acquire it yet, but a certain tool will help you find missing resource types while jogging around). They're optional and mostly filler given their randomized nature, but those infinite resources are too tempting to pass up. I'm hoping for infinite stone and common metals next, since I've a hankering to build myself my own metal city like Vector from Final Fantasy VI.

Civil Engineering

One of my favorite little mechanics that makes itself known towards the end of each island is how you're tasked with creating a huge building with multiple floors, but suddenly everyone in town is inspired by all the building you've done and decides to pitch in. After a certain amount of solo input to get the ball rolling, the NPCs will not only gather the resources needed to complete this megalithic structure but will put down all the requisite pieces in addition. If you really want to build the entire edifice yourself, the blueprints for the floors stay with you so you can recreate them on the Isle of Awakening (though it will take much longer without all that extra help; fortunately, having infinite supplies of certain materials helps a great deal).

It feels like NPCs are just more useful in general in DQB2. While they still mostly stand around and occasionally give you requests for certain buildings with specific conditions, many of them will join you in fighting off the occasional attacking horde of monsters and most pull their weight in other, career-oriented methods. The farmers plant and harvest a lot of crops, the miners fetch up large supplies of metal ores each day/night cycle, and so on. Everyone also drops gratitude points: the game's chief currency, one used to expand the size of the towns during the story mode and spent on acquiring new item crafting recipes on the Isle of Awakening. As long as you've built a town that attends to their various needs, they will if nothing else be a constant supply of happiness cash.

Dragon Quality of Life: Fast Travel, No-Loss Respawns, Endless Inventory, and Gliding

As well as the more overt mechanical additions, it feels like DQB2 is just more hospitable in general. There's a fast travel system that makes getting around convenient and doesn't require farming Chimaera Wings from specific mobs (usually only found in high-up places), you acquire a means of gliding over long horizontal stretches before the end of the first island, and any death just spawns you back in the nearest settlement during the daytime with no loss of items. Best of all, the game quickly eliminates inventory limits by introducing a bag that has near-infinite carrying capacity: you are limited to what you can hold in your "active bar" but anything else can be dumped in a sack for future access and will also be available while crafting.

Death is often inevitable in these crafting sims, especially as your attention is frequently divided enough that it's easy for some beastie to get the drop on you, so ensuring that there's no repercussions for letting your concentration slip (or your entire body in the case of navigating a precarious walkway several tiles above ground) minimizes the amount of frustration involved if you're eager to get back to your construction task. Any given Dragon Quest is still going to throw its menagerie of cute, pun-named monsters at you regardless of whatever genre it happens to be appropriating that day but they're far less of a threat in this game: many types aren't even hostile, letting you initiate the encounter if they have drops you might need. Likewise, while the game still has the requisite boss battles where your entire settlement is at risk if you're unable to prevent the boss's attacks in time, the inspired populace will instantly rebuild everything as it was before the boss fight was initiated - no running around post-battle refilling blocks of dislodged earth for the sake of your perfectionism.

There's many other little helpful features, but with many of them I can't recall if they were in the original game too. Like how setting down a blueprint in the world means every component you need to finish it is highlighted in your inventory or in the crafting menu: there's never any ambiguity as to what you still need to complete the plan, and thus no need to keep checking over and over or writing down what's left to acquire.

Online Envy

I don't recall if it was in there or just not as prominent, but DQB2 frequently introduces impressive constructs from the online community via a notice board feature or the Explorer Shores. In the latter's case, you'll occasionally come across curated content just sitting in the wild - sadly, you can't take any of its components with you for fear of jumping ahead in the progression - and can explore it and study it in detail in case you want to recreate it. I don't think there's a way to download custom blueprints so you can build other projects yourself (unless I've not been looking hard enough or it's a post-game privilege). They also stick community creations in the loading screens, which is a novel place to put anything of value that isn't a tooltip (it has those too).

It feels like a no-brainer for a game based on creativity like this to implement a means to show off your big imagination to inspire others, but I don't recall the first game doing a whole lot with the conceit. Having them actually appear in the procgen Explorer Shores mode is a genius move, since it lets you poke around them like interactive dioramas, but I'm guessing the developers just have a selected handful that might appear.

Sometimes you see free games while browsing Steam or GOG and your curiosity is every bit as piqued as your sense of parsimony. Symphonia, especially, intrigued me by its screenshots: this was an Indie platformer with a strikingly vivid artstyle of flowing contours and detailed backdrops, with an elaborate orchestral score; visually and aurally it's easily the match of a professional video game like Rayman Origins or Hollow Knight. Not only was it relatively new, but it was free on GOG (and Itch, I'd later discover) and would apparently stay that way in perpetuity. Was it a game that ran into music licensing issues and could only be given away? Was it so abjectly terrible despite appearances that the developers didn't feel right asking for money? Was it some kind of charity affair where the developers were instead asking for voluntary donations to save some opera house from closure? Is it mafia-related? (I've seen The Godfather, I'm sure there was classical music in there somewhere.) Or maybe it was an unusually high-quality student project that's less than an hour long and given away gratis as a means to generate interest in more substantial projects (including perhaps a fully-featured version of Symphonia) from the same studio in the future? If the latter sounds the most correct, it's probably because it is in fact the most correct.

Symphonia presents a land of music and clockwork machinery, the latter of which has ceased to function causing the many music-making devices around the place to go silent. Philemon, a concert violinist and dextrous hero, determines the problem to lie somewhere in the core of Symphonia's mechanical world and singlehandedly travels there to restart its engines. He then returns the same way he entered - though with more hazards to overcome with the machines now functional - to finish the concerto he originally set out to perform. The entire exercise takes about thirty minutes, give or take a roadblock, and the player is able to resume the game at any of three checkpoints when starting anew. While music plays a significant role in the world design there aren't too many mechanics tied to it, excepting certain moments where Philemon has to power machines with his violin music to put them in motion including moving platforms and gates. Fortunately, there's no accompanying game of Simon or anything, though I could see a rhythm mini-game being implemented in the "final" product.

From what I can tell Sunny Peak, the student studio that launched Symphonia, based much of the game's movement and mechanics on a few major Indie platformers known for their fluidity: the two chief mechanics involving the violin saw that Philemon carries with him, along with his violin. Using this flexible bendy saw he can pogo himself over longer gaps (though spikes are always fatal) and make higher jumps, and can also use it on cushioned surfaces to launch himself in the opposing direction held. The game doesn't quite last long enough to use these two mechanics in tandem for more elaborate platforming sequences - the pogoing and fluidity reminded me of Shovel Knight, and in particular its expansion Specter of Torment - but it's certainly something a larger version of the game could explore. The game does still have some challenging sequences towards the end, and there's a game-wide collectible hunt that gives you a post-game rank based on how many you found if you feel like taking on every challenge the game has to offer.

To some extent, Symphonia in its current student project form resembles more of a demo of what a final game might resemble, even if it presently has a beginning, a middle, and an ending in its short, dialogue-free narrative. There's little Sunny Peak could do to improve the core of what's already here, besides perhaps add a few more mechanics and tweak those already there to improve the game's flow even further, and this point it just needs severalfold more levels and concepts for set-pieces to get to where it needs to be. Notably, regarding the protagonist's similar sinuous appearance and movement animations, Symphonia might be the closest we're going to get to Hollow Knight: Silksong until the real thing finally shows up. I'll admit to being a little apprehensive about reviewing a game that took less than a hour to complete but I figured enough people were as intrigued by this freebie as I was to warrant a full investigation; turns out it was worth slaking that curiosity because for as short as it happened to be, Symphonia has an abundance of confidence in its presentation and gameplay. It really only needs a bit more substance to cross the threshold into being commercially viable.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

When it comes to game releases every year has its big headliners and hidden gems, but none were more packed than 2017. As my backlog-related project for this year I'm looking to build a list of a hundred great games that debuted at some point in 2017, making sure to hit all the important stops along the way. For more information and statistics on this project, be sure to check out this Intro blog.

As I mentioned last time, the intent for September was to dedicate myself to the single most pressing game in my 2017 homework pile: Nihon Falcom's The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd. The game originally debuted way back in 2007, but it took ten years for the localization to happen - A) because the game's script is enormous, and B) because so were the scripts of the prior two games and they kinda needed doing first - so it appeared much later as a 2017 release in the west, already a few years after the Trails of Cold Steel localizations began popping up. It's a bit of a weird series, but one that has rewarded the patience of those diehard fans who have to play them in order: the next two games after Sky, Trails from Zero and Trails to Azure, are confirmed to be on their way and will take less time due to having competent fan translations to build upon. (Incidentally, I bought the first Trails of Cold Steel for PS3 almost five years ago but have been putting it off until I'm all caught up. Just two more intervening games to go!)

Anyway, I'll get more into Trails - significantly more, since I've little else to talk about this month - just below, but suffice it to say it's been a lean month with regards to this project specifically. There's a bonus short Indie I managed to squeeze in during the final hours of September, but I think I'm going to spend October making a big push towards completing as many of the remaining smaller Indies on my to-do list as I can. I'm also going to focus on the more horror-themed 2017 games I have sitting around, like the acclaimed Detention and the visual novel The Letter (which will be doubling-up as this month's VN-ese Waltz entry also, since I'm very economical with my laziness). I'm hoping to make one last push to get over that 100 list entries milestone by Halloween and dedicate most of November and December to playing newer games for the sake of GOTY season... with perhaps a few 2017 stragglers here and there too, of course.

For now though it's time to hit the Trails, pardn'r.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd

[The prior Trails in the Sky the 3rd review can be read in last month's entry of Dredge of Seventeen. This is meant as a continuation, after completing the game.]

When I started Trails in the Sky the 3rd, or expressed my intent to start playing it, one of my Twitter mutuals told me that she was glad that I was giving it a shot because there's a fan sentiment - particularly from those hurrying to catch up to where the series is currently, some eight games later - that Sky the 3rd is considered "inessential." She also asserted how bizarre she found that belief, given the quality of Sky the 3rd and how right it does by fans of the first two games and that of Trails as a whole. After completing the game, I feel I have to concur with her while also understanding where that sentiment originated: Trails in the Sky the 3rd is easily the match of Trails in the Sky Second Chapter and well worth the investment in its slightly unusual format, though with the caveat that it exists mostly as an epilogue or an interstitial entry - something that wraps up the previous story arc set in this universe while sowing the seeds for those yet to come.

In fact, I have a tremendous amount of respect for how it sets up the next two sequel series - Azure/Zero and Cold Steel - by discussing the regions of Crossbell and Erebonia respectively, establishing the current precarious political climates in both nations that their related games will go on to develop further and make central to their overarching narratives. I'm not sure how solid Falcom's sequel plans were at that stage, but putting into motion that early for what would eventually become six games' worth of plotting is some pretty confident worldbuilding. Of course, I'd expect nothing less from the team that developed Trails in the Sky and the level of detail involved in creating Liberl and its vast number of named ancillary characters. It feels very "Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase 2": reaching that point where a franchise has already spun enough gold that everyone's fully on board with seeing how far they can take it. Given Japan just saw the release of the eleventh game to carry the Trails name, Kuro no Kiseki, it sounds like an investment well made.

The best way I can describe Trails in the Sky the 3rd is by going back a few decades to a time in my life when I was buying up cheap DVDs en masse. In this analogy, the first two games are like a fantastic movie and its equally good sequel and the third constitutes all the featurettes, deleted scenes, documentaries, commentaries, and other short-form bonus goodies you received by buying the special edition DVD boxset. The 3rd's story and structure barely hold themselves together under closer scrutiny barring the moments when it focuses on protagonists Kevin Graham and Ries Argent and their strained relationship, but for proponents of the first two games it's all the fanservice and extra lore you could want. Each Sun, Star, and Moon Door is a portal to a post-script (or prequel) short story based on all the characters that filtered in and out of your party across the first two games. The main progression also gives you the opportunity to recruit a couple of reformed villain types who turn out to be way more fun when they're on your side.

However, the game is also as much of a mechanical evolution as the second game was to the first. Not only did Second Chapter start you off at a higher level, but from the outset it granted you all the mechanics that were slowly introduced across Trails in the Sky First Chapter - like the powerful "S-Crafts" - and continues to add to that complexity, side-stepping the usual "slow start" issue that plagues most RPGs of a certain length. Second Chapter's combat system starts off fully formed and only continues to develop from there, and the 3rd provides a similar set-up though with perhaps slightly less development involved. Instead, most of the 3rd's mechanical development comes from outside development: the unusual rules and systems of the spectral world of Phantasma where the game is set, where each dungeon might warp around and drop you somewhere unexpected with new rules that you're required to follow to make progress. The 3rd's boss fights are also some of the toughest in the whole series: the game fully expects you to know how everything works by this point, including an ideal orbment set-up and using certain time-manipulation mechanics to their utmost (especially the AT-Delay and Impede functions) and throws every challenge it can at you.

The new format - everyone's trapped in a dungeon apparently powered by thought and illusion - means there's some ideas they can implement that wouldn't really work in the more realistic version of Liberl and the Zemurian continent the franchise calls home. A minor but amusing narrative touch is having everyone comment on the new enemies based on undead monsters and demons: neither exist, or can exist, in the game's "real world" and serves as an early indication that this is an illusory world, whereas in most other fantasy RPG universes the characters just kind of accept that hellspawn are walking the Earth. It also allows the character designers some fun coming up with models for what are mythical beings in the religion of the game's world, thematically fitting with Kevin's and Ries's roles as "Gralsritter": powerful enforcer knights of the Catholic-esque Church of Aidios. After all, with all the strong monsters you've taken down throughout the first two games, the only place left to go is legendary demons (something I believe was the case for the later Baldur's Gate expansions too).

Even stronger than those demons, though, are certain characters known in the overarching narrative for their sheer overwhelming strength that you also must fight: the most notorious of which being Cassius Bright, former S-rank Bracer and current Brigadier-General of the Liberl Army (and Estelle and Joshua's father). Much like Loewe the Bladelord during the late-game of Second Chapter, this is a wake-up call boss battle that will absolutely ruin you on the first attempt and any attempts thereafter until you intuit the very specific tactics required to defeat them (which for me involved a lot of turtling with the overpowered Earth Wall spell and hitting them with any stat-down debuffs I had available). It's an exciting if frustrating battle against the person who is regularly touted as the series' most powerful warrior - one that, in their prime, was utterly unstoppable.

On the hero side of things, Trails in the Sky the 3rd is the first game to allow you to play as former antagonists Alan Richard and Renne, a.k.a. the Angel of Slaughter. Richard is an absurdly useful ally due to his sheer speed and the minimal delay after using his katana crafts: you can buff this advantage even further with the right speed-up and auto-CP gear to ensure total dominance of the battlefield, denying opponents an opportunity to act for as long as possible. Renne's another character like Joshua in that she's a potent balance of strength, speed, and magical ability: she comes with a unique quartz orbment that allows her to insta-kill foes 20% of the time (provided they have no immunity) and some powerful S-Crafts. I don't believe Richard will appear again in the Trails series in any significant role but Renne will several more times, so I look forward to seeing how her complex characterization develops. (I do think they may have gone a little too dark with some Renne-specific backstory stuff in this game - she's always been a bit too edgy as a construct, but one that's easy to root for all the same.) For the record, my preferred party was Richard, Joshua, Kloe, and Kevin, though I felt a little bad leaving Estelle behind - she apparently has unique dialogue for many of the bosses.

Not to speak too much on the final dungeon (beyond that its BGM is fantastic) except to say that it forces you to use all sixteen playable characters in your assemblage, which meant some grinding towards the end to catch everyone up. It became clear in retrospect that the game wanted you to spend enough time with everyone so you're not caught with your pants down during the finale, but the final castle itself has plenty of resources to help you if you survive long enough to reach them. Given every one of the four parties has to face a boss fight at the end of their leg of the journey, you can't really run past everything and hope for the best either. It made me wish that inactive characters still earned XP - a modern convenience that came into common practice some time after Trails in the Sky's era back in the '00s - but at least the game has Suikoden's weighted XP system where those flagging behind in levels earn considerably more XP to help them catch up fast, and it only takes a few battles against the strong foes in that last gauntlet before everyone's in fighting shape for the final battles. I would've liked to have seen more "trial fights" behind character-gated Sun/Star/Moon Doors to help introduce or re-introduce these characters and their particular strengths - for example, I barely used the female knight Julia Schwarz when she became playable for the first time towards the very end of Second Chapter, but she's a quick swordswoman and an excellent support character that you spend some time with early in Trails in the Sky the 3rd due to being one of the few characters available at that point and I'm glad to have been given an excuse to use her beyond curiosity. Ditto for the Erebonian knight Mueller Vander, who like Agate Crosner is a powerhouse tank and useful in a party of ranged attackers like Olivier or support characters like Kloe. Given the level difference and the expenditure in getting the best equipment and quartz for everyone, there's little incentive to switch around too often during the main game but at the same time tinkering with party dynamics is much more at the forefront of Trails in the Sky the 3rd due to its structure and those moments where everyone in the group is called to action. (Another cute touch about the final dungeon is that all the chest messages - usually sarcastic jabs at your kleptomania or silly jokes - are sweet and encouraging, pushing you towards the finish line.)

Last thing I wanted to point, even if it's a little redundant since this is a Falcom joint, is the game's exceptional soundtrack. Not only are there a selection of great tracks unique to this entry - including at least eight different battle and boss themes - but the format that bounces chronologically through various characters' pasts means ample excuse to bring back the music from the previous two games, so you get what is in essence a "best of" of all the Trails in the Sky games in one package. The music files are actually included with the Steam version of the game in a BGM folder: there's something like 144 Ogg Vorbis tracks in there, so you can definitely get your fill of Falcom Sound Team jams. Of the new tracks, I particularly liked the final dungeon theme (linked to above) as well as the music that plays in the chill hub area of the Hermit's Garden both in its normal form during the game and a special version during the end-game where it's pouring on the suspense. Then there's boss tracks like the standard (and jazzy) battle theme Determination of Fight, the special boss track Overdosing on Heavenly Bliss, and the cathartic final boss track Dreamy and Boisterous Holy Land (gotta love JRPG BGM names). There's a few new arrangements of older tracks too, so it's almost like a Smash Bros. OST.

Ranking: S. (That's right, that means it's going into my top ten for 2017. I've yet to decide quite where to put it, but its inclusion will be enough to knock fellow Falcom game Tokyo Xanadu+ down to eleventh place. I suppose it's only fitting that a Falcom game dethrones another (and there's a third in the top ten as well - Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana - so I'd say the developer is well represented regardless). Between the confident worldbuilding and deeply clever and tactical combat, I am a devoted fan of the Trails franchise from this point onwards I think it's safe to say.)

Love 2: Kuso

My other 2017 game this month is Fred Wood's Love 2: Kuso, a modest sequel to an already modest 8-bit retro platformer that nonetheless has its charms and deeper aspects. With a mostly monochrome aesthetic torn from the same Sinclair ZX/Commodore 64 era that VVVVVV was inspired by, the player's goal is to make it through a series of tough platforming challenges with some basic jumping. Nothing as elaborate as a double-jump or a wall-jump or anything like that: the game is deliberately simple and straightforward, giving every stage a single color tone and indicating anything that might potentially kill you with a stark white sheen for visibility's sake. The levels are tough and uncompromising, requiring close timing and precision platforming, but with the requisite Super Meat Boy-style rapid respawn.

However, the game - like its predecessor Love - also allows the player to make their own checkpoints as well as providing infinite lives in the standard "Unlimited" mode. This allows the player to make the game as challenging as they like as they make their way through all its levels, and offers an additional menu of various assist features to ameliorate the difficulty even further. Love and Kuso alike are less determined to have you pulling out your hair but to become better at the game at your own pace: it's going to be tough going for a while, but since you can set a checkpoint almost anywhere (though it's a good idea to put it on a safe platform, since your checkpoints can "die" and vanish if they get hit by a projectile or something) anything it throws at you is eventually surmountable at any skill level. From there, you can retry challenging the game with fewer checkpoints and lives lost, and eventually become confident enough to attempt its "Arcade", "Hard", "Speedrun" and "YOLO" modes, where the lives are strictly limited, or pursue any of its tougher achievements. Given a full playthrough is only about an hour or so the first time through, what it lacks in content it makes up for in ways to approach the game from a more seasoned perspective. As was the case with Celeste, it's a game that wants to challenge you until your thumbs have worn down to nubs, but also doesn't want to lose you from the get go with its absurd difficulty. I was content with a single playthrough, since I'm not really the score-chasing or speedrunning type, but I admire the amount of staying power it packs in there.

I also appreciated its chill EDM soundtrack - germane to the type of gaming experience it offers - and how all the Love levels are included for free, much like how the Rayman Origins levels are available to play in its sequel Rayman Legends for those who were late to the party. The game offers a mode that lets you play all of Kuso and Love's levels mixed in together, which might be the ideal if you've yet to play either: this way you get a steady increase in difficulty, rather than having to start over with Kuso's easier, early levels after cutting your teeth on Love's hardest, final ones (either that or they randomized the level order and I never noticed). Since it regularly dips to around a dollar or so in Steam sales and Switch sales alike (I played it on the latter) it's definitely worth the small time and money investment, even if you're not some obsessive platforming savant who intends to conquer every challenge it throws your way.

Ranking: C. (At this point even the C-rank, which is mid-tier, is no slouch. While the game is extremely basic by design there's a lot of thoughtful ideas going on behind the scenes working to draw players into the game from any skill level. It's very accommodating to anyone willing to take a chance on it, and offers many reasons to stick around.)

Seeing the discourse around the recently released Axiom Verge 2 - surprise, surprise, I'm fascinated by yet another Indie explormer - reminded me of a Quick Look for a different Indie game with an interesting approach to subtly changing the game world by essentially hacking into its base code, from changing an enemy's health value to its core abilities and behavior. The Magic Circle, released by Question back in 2015, is a game about game development. In particular, it's about a studio that has let perfect become the enemy of progress: this studio eventually scrapped their '90s space-faring FPS for the sake of a fantasy adventure-RPG, but is no closer to finishing that project either after almost two decades of development. The staff is in something of a chaotic state - the director hems and haws over every decision, the head level designer is trying to get herself fired since she's unable to quit for contractual reasons, and a new recruit with an obsessive love for the developers' prior games is planning a Machiavellian gambit to bequeath these never-to-be-finished projects to the fanbase to complete. However, the player character is none of these people. In fact, it's a big question who the player actually is: they're treated as a nameless playtester, but it's evident they have more control over this incomplete world than they should.

The game's title has a double meaning: the fantasy game-within-a-game (and the sci-fi non-entity that preceded it) is named The Magic Circle for lore-related reasons, but the Magic Circle is also a real-life association of stage magicians whose first and only rule is to never reveal what's going on behind the curtain or under the hat. You, however, will see every line of code and every asset, active or temporarily deleted, as you explore the Magic Circle's fragmentary and (mostly) monochrome setting. After a brief intro, you're dropped into an open-world to explore methods to get the game closer to a complete state, but first you need to work your way through and over a number of obstacles and broken bridges (literally, in one case). Given a set of developer tools, you do this by changing the behavior of wandering monsters and other objects. A rock, for example, comes with the fireproof behavior: you can pull this behavior from it and make something else fireproof instead, ideal for crossing the river of lava blocking the volcano. Monsters can have their allegiances changed in order to target whichever foe is in your path (or just stop them attacking you) and you can even choose to upgrade a companion creature by powering up their stats or changing their attack patterns to something more powerful: a meagre cyber-rat becomes a little more formidable when given a Securitron's railgun or the fire breath of a flame elemental.

In the midst of all this code tinkering, you're picking up bits of lore not from the game world, which seems to be barely formed even after 20 years, but rather that of the studio behind it and its unfortunate past. The studio founder Ishmael Gilder - voiced to sardonic and delusional perfection by James Urbaniak, formerly of The Venture Bros. - created a compelling world way back in the text adventure days but seemingly has no idea how to translate his ideas and stories to a modern 3D action game and has long since lost his verve for this line of work and the fair-weather fans that seek to demolish any carefully-built world for their own amusement, and while the eager new recruit Coda appears on the surface to be a breath of fresh air for this struggling studio she plans to sabotage the game and depose its director for the sake of some misplaced fan entitlement. Maze, the lead level designer, is more savvy about Coda's schemes but has her hands tied after years of answering back to the boss due to him dragging his heels about implementing a multiplayer mode, and at this point no longer cares either way and is looking for an exit. All this dev drama is made apparent as the player digs into audio logs and visual files, many of which are purposefully hidden in glitchy assets, giving the player reasons to explore every nook and cranny beyond picking up new behavior protocols to exploit - these logs more or less explain why the Magic Circle is stuck in the state it's in and comprise the meat of the game's storytelling.

My first concern with any game involving programming (or in this case scripting, and yes there is a difference) is whether or not they make it simple enough for the player to understand. I've done my fair share of scripting in the past and the parser used in the game is considerably easier to use than the real thing - it's intuitive too, which is more than can be said for most programming tools - and there's often multiple solutions to problems in case your brain happens to work differently. For instance, there are these enemies called "flamers" that need to be removed because they're guarding bridges, though you can't edit their behavior directly because their flame attacks tend to demolish your avatar before you get close enough to use the tools on them. Instead, you can either program an ally to have a powerful ranged attack to eliminate them all from a safe distance, or you can give that same ally the fireproof status from those rocks I mentioned to let it safely melee them all to death as they try in vain to roast it. When you finally find a monster capable of flight, you can then use a combination of a flat creature (the rocks will do - they're much more versatile in this game than in others) and the waypoint tool to ride them around as your personal hoverboard and overcome a lot of hazards that way. The game's not particularly long and doesn't have too many of these puzzles to solve, but it fills what geography it has with enough incidental storytelling and surprises to make it feel much more expansive. The endgame too goes in a completely different direction, albeit in a fashion germane to the themes of the game.

The Magic Circle is an unconventional game that can be a little too meta for its own good on occasion, though like similar games about game development - The Beginner's Guide and There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension, both of which I've yet to try, and to some extent Baba is You - there's a subversive and almost self-defeating streak about trying to convey the countless difficulties inherent to creating a piece of interactive media that would resonate with a wide enough audience to justify the cost of making it. Its message is less some "woe is me" artist kvetching or about how toxic entitled fans are ruining the joy of making games (there's a few jokes about both however) than it is shining a spotlight on the unique challenges faced by those in game development that mostly go unknown by those embracing the final finished product. The Magic Circle heightens the drama and comedy alike of this process by envisioning a studio truly stuck in developmental hell: its visionary leader stymied by indecision and embitterment while his many subordinates fret about the future of the game and their careers both. While the real thing is rarely as tragic, there's a sense that any project might stretch on for eternity given the right (or wrong) set of circumstances and it takes almost a literal deus ex machina by way of the player's unpredicted interference to finally push the project over the finish line. While its true appeal is in that comedic exaggeration of how the game industry can be a merciless taskmaster to amuse those who closely follow in-progress game development and regularly partake in betas and fan mods, there's enough clever puzzle design and dark workplace comedy to enjoy for those less invested in that world.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Decided to spend the second half of 2021 checking out some renowned visual novels. Sometimes my ideas aren't any more elaborate than that. I've tried to discuss the following games in as spoiler-free a manner as possible, with a very spoilerish section at the end for my final thoughts on where the story goes.

In retrospect, I've been pretty lucky with all the visual novels I've played so far, both for this VN-ese Waltz feature and overall. VNs have many negative connotations from both those seasoned with the format and those too dubious of the genre to give them a fair shake, and I've known that - in order for those stereotypes to exist - I would inevitably encounter a game where I'd frequently feel embarrassed for playing it. One steeped in harem anime clichés, awkward sexy fanservice, and a branching structure that is too cumbersome to effectively navigate. Our World is Ended is that fearsome epitome of VN tropes made manifest. That isn't to say it's a complete write-off, though. Its thirstiness is usually played off as a joke - though even the implications raised are troubling - and there's no actual ecchi content to be found beyond anime ladies in swimsuits. It's pretty earnest about its feelings, and does eventually flesh out its one-note characters as they all go on their individual arcs. But, boy, it's a journey all right.

So, to set the stage: Our World is Ended follows one of Japan's worst video game developer companies, Judgement 7. Comprised of seven employees, it's a company teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and obscurity after a string of maligned failures. The "company culture" is best described as a chaotic quagmire of competing egos. Its lead programmer and founder is a raging lech, its scenario planner and its graphic designer are both hopeless chuunibyous (i.e. delusional nerds hiding behind personas), its chief musician is a tone-deaf walking disaster of a woman who is more or less Britta from Community and treated with a similar level of disdain and pity, its other programmer is a child prodigy who splits her time hyped up on sugar and fast asleep after crashing and thus needs constant attention, and the only two normal employees are the part-timers given all the thankless tasks to do. You naturally play one of these part-timers - an "Assisting Director" rather than an Assistant Director - whose job it is to corral this messed up bunch into a semi-productive unit. Add to that dynamic a very Steins;Gate conspiracy involving virtual worlds, a shadowy evil cabal planning to rule the globe through AR technology, and the digital specter of the prior, much-beloved director of Judgement 7, and it's a recipe for an episodic anime about deeply flawed people learning to face their fears and overcome their worst impulses by drawing strength from their makeshift dysfunctional family.

To circle back around to Steins;Gate, even in my limited experience with VNs and anime in general it feels like that game - and the series it belongs to - is the most significant source of inspiration for Our World is Ended. The group dynamic and setting is similar (Tokyo's Asakusa district is substituted in for Akihabara) and the story structure is especially similar in the odd way it thematically veers from slice-of-life dating sim lightness to sci-fi outlandishness to suspenseful thriller. The only significant difference is that it took a while to warm up to Steins;Gate's protagonist Rintaro Okabe because of his obnoxious flaws, ones that eventually softened and disappeared with time: while that's the case with almost every character in Our World is Ended, unlike Rintaro these flaws are treated as endearing quirks and left intact throughout. Characters do grow over the narrative so it's not like they're all paper-thin caricatures, but you'll probably find yourself regularly skipping over the voiced dialogue for certain characters (especially the rotund scenario planner Iruka #2, who tends to scream every other line of dialogue). There's a significant amount of sexually-charged humor including some jokes about minors so... well, excessive would be one word for it. Problematic might be another, more accurate one. Basically, if you have a low tolerance for the prurient aspects of low-brow comedic anime this game will test it like an overcaffeinated QA intern.

Then we come to the more mechanical aspects of Our World is Ended, in particular how it deals with branching paths. Mostly, it doesn't: what happens is that you can make decisions, usually responses to lines of dialogue, that brings you closer to one member of Judgement 7 in particular. It's similar to, say, how Final Fantasy VII decides who Cloud goes on a date with at the Golden Saucer: there's a semi-invisible tracker that remembers how many times you jumped to the defense of one character over another, or prioritized them in some other way, and in the pause screen you see the top three matches based on the points you've accrued with them at any given moment. This won't effect the first playthrough: besides a few scenes that change depending on who you're with, the story progresses right up to the "normal" ending regardless. It's in subsequent playthroughs, where you're deliberately picking options to build affinity with a specific character, that you can unlock specific routes that end the story in different ways depending on who you've built the best rapport with. The first playthrough gives you glimpses of what each pairing is like, letting you get an idea not only of what that route might entail (helping the shy artist become more confident in herself, for example) but which choices are more likely to appeal to which characters.

Complicating this is how most of the game's decisions use the "SOS" or "Selection Of Soul" system: those times when the protagonist Reiji is put on the spot and has to quickly think of a response. These responses fly across the screen at different speeds and sizes, making it hard to get a sense of the full spread of options available until some of them have already disappeared. Some responses will earn you points with specific characters so they are integral if you're hunting for the character-specific endings, but it's not always apparent which is the best one and you may take a neutral option without noticing that a far more ideal option has yet to appear or may have already scrolled by in a smaller font. Silence is the result of any SOS decision where you're unable to choose something in time, which usually doesn't affect the subsequent dialogue too much but does make your character come off as a little aloof. It's a bit of an irksome mess, but sticking the other endings behind subsequent playthroughs does make it easier to use that first run as preparation for what's to come. The Skip Text function, vital for replays, will also pause on the line of dialogue immediately preceding one of these SOS decisions thereby giving you time to make a quick save before you jump in and carefully consider all the options available, so the game does at least offer a few QoL boons.

Our World is Ended is easily the worst of the VN games I've played recently, though since that's a short list of Steins;Gate, Raging Loop, and The House in Fata Morgana it's not quite the admonition it sounds like. For all its lasciviousness and awkwardness it does create a compelling story with some decent character and background art, and even if it's incidental you get a pretty decent tour of the sights of Asakusa such as its famous Shion-ji temple and the nearby Tokyo Skytree. Its scenarios - seemingly disconnected misadventures into the virtual landscape of "New World" and its limitless possibilities - have some imaginative if silly ideas involved. (One such instance is when a trickster character forces the group to play the "normie game": they have to spend their time doing normal people (as in, not nerdy shut-in) activities like going on dates and will accrue or lose points each day based on their actions, with the goal to hit at least 100 points by the end of the week. Naturally they all have some trouble with this.) There's a lot of requisite hacking talk which is never so advanced to lose the less tech savvy members of the audience and exploring the characters in more detail helps get past any lingering distaste with their archetypal roles: similar to how the casts of walking clichés in the Tales and Persona franchises are allowed to blossom into something approaching real people with how much of their games' lengthy runtimes are alloted to their development. Our World is Ended does have an issue with typos in that they are plentiful, though fortunately not in the sense that the entire English script felt machine-translated; more that the localizers were seemingly only afforded so much time/resources for proofing the script before the final release deadline, which I imagine must be common enough to games in genres like VNs with all that text to translate. The intent is always clear, at least, and stuff like Japanese puns are properly localized into applicable English versions rather than dousing the screen with Translator's Notes about shiritori and dajare.

I feel like if this review keeps going it'll eventually take on the cadence of someone at an expo trying to convince someone else to check out an anime despite a "rough" first few episodes: make no mistake, this game is sometimes an ordeal to suffer through and sometimes it makes you want to check your door's closed and the curtains are drawn, but overall it isn't a catastrophe and many of its jokes will land in a way that won't have you reaching for the Jim Beam or a 12-gauge. If you like (or can tolerate) media where the hero is continually getting into compromising situations and yelled at by anime girls for being a "hentai" then knock yourself out. Caveat emptor to the rest of you.

I guess I finished the previous rundowns with some spoilery story analysis, so here:

Turns out that I have one more horror-themed VN in my stash and next month is the ideal time to play it. I'll see you all then, page-turning pals.