A review of Balatro

Another unnecessary post, considering how many people started playing this thing when it came out.

This game has gotten big press and 250K+ sales since last week when I read about it. After watching ten minutes of a streamer play it (GEEGA if you’re curious, she’s yet another cool VTuber over on Twitch) I knew it was for me, even though I’d never played another roguelike aside from the Shotgun King demo last year, and it’s been interesting to try to understand why.

Frostilyte’s review of Balatro is a good place to explore that point further — his is a view of the game from an expert roguelike player’s perspective, and he breaks down a lot of the mechanics that make it fresh and exciting. My view of Balatro is from a novice’s perspective, for whatever that’s worth if anything at all, but I’ll give my thoughts anyway.

Balatro is a card-building game based around poker in which the player must beat successively larger opponents with a limited number of draws and plays. Hands are scored according to card point value in blue and the hand multiplier in red. However, you won’t get far without Jokers — 150 of them. These cards can be bought in the shops between rounds and have a wide variety of effects, some of which can work together to massively stack up your point value and multiplier. Together with the tarot, planet, and spectral bonus/hand-building cards, these are what you’ll need to beat a full game of 8 antes (24 rounds if you don’t skip any) and each ante’s boss.

So Balatro operates with five full sets of cards: the regular French playing card deck we all know, the major arcana tarot (I’m also still playing Persona 3 Reload — very relevant!), and the game’s custom Joker, spectral, and planet sets (Pluto included as a dwarf planet, along with one surprise and two others I haven’t unlocked yet.) I would have thought all these decks might make the game too convoluted or complicated for an impatient asshole like me to bother with, but just the opposite somehow — it’s easy to get the hang of Balatro, since all the above decks serve purposes that make sense and are easy to get down.

Not sure why planets, but I appreciate the space theme

But then, what’s the appeal of this game? Why has it sold hundreds of thousands of copies, why so much play among streamers? I think Frostilyte covered that very well in his post, but from my own beginner’s perspective, I think the main hook to Balatro is its combination of chance and the wide variety of effects you can mix to get those high scores. Chance is a major part of the game — my last run just ended in the most frustrating way possible, and I’m not the most patient player on Earth when it comes to that kind of frustration. I can play through a 100+ hour JRPG, but that’s a different kind of patience — this is the kind that makes me crack a little when I’ve only spent 20 or 30 minutes building up what I thought was a really great deck, then falling just about 250 points short of a win.

This made me want to break something

Being pretty new to the genre, I found the whole “start from the beginning” aspect of it off-putting at first, but it certainly helps that a typical game only runs about 20-30 minutes if you get near the end of its eight antes. What stung me more was losing my deck and the Jokers complementing it, along with all the hand upgrades I’d received. It does sting in the moment, but it’s really not so bad wiping the board clean and starting over.

The lack of a save function may even add to the game by making each choice over what to buy and how much, what hands to play, and how to balance money with upgrades far more meaningful and demanding of close attention, since you can’t just savescum it as the kids say. I like that I can start a new game with a certain strategy — say, adding and converting cards to a particular suit and going for all flushes, or piling money into building up an easy hand like pairs — and that strategy can become more or less effective based on the hands I get and the Jokers and planet cards I end up with. Even if you think you have a good deck with plenty of upgrades, you can end up losing to an unlucky round or a difficult boss, and at the same time it’s possible to turn around a mediocre setup with a few lucky hands and draws in the store.

You might think your deck and Jokers are unbeatable, but while this is an easy end boss, a few of them feel like the game just telling me I don’t get to win this time (the fucking massive blind, I hate that one.)

If that kind of challenge appeals to you, I’d check out Balatro. Even if you’re not very into card games, the visuals are trippy in a good way and the single theme with variations that plays throughout is so good that it doesn’t get old, joining HoloCure in that category. The Balatro BGM has a similar lasting power, though it reminds me more of a few contemplative tracks from other games — see “Dead Angle” from Umineko and “Digital Root” from 999 for two other examples.

Even the sound design itself drew me in. I am not a sound engineer or sound guy or anything, but I know when something sounds good to me, and it’s all very engaging in Balatro, especially when you have a set of Jokers that add multipliers to each card and bounce off of each other like a pinball.

Just get some multiplier on this fucked deck and you’ll be hearing that, one of those flush decks I put together.

Even though I still get a little pissed over my really bad RNG runs, I’ll keep playing Balatro off and on. It’s a good time, and if you’re afraid of compulsively playing this game as a lot of other people are, at least it’s not compulsive gambling — you only have to pay for this once, and the price was worth it.

Next post, I’ll probably take on another anime series. I’ve really fallen off from the anime this year, but at least I will definitely be watching Yuru Camp season 3, which you probably could have guessed anyway with all the praise I’ve constantly showered on it. Work has been a lot more stressful and hectic lately, making it harder to find time to write, but after ten years writing here is almost a religious habit now. I might compensate by writing some audiobook reviews, since I’ve been listening to a lot of those in the car while stuck in rush hour interstate traffic. I’m in the middle of The Power Broker so far, a biography of a power-crazy New York city and state park department head, and while that might sound like a dry read, just the opposite — the writing is engaging and the subject is fascinating, though I sure as hell wouldn’t want to have worked for him. Until next time.

Sky diary #3: Welcome home

It’s No Man’s Sky time again, oh yeah. I hope you wanted more of it. Finally I can make it to a new system that hopefully won’t suck so bad.

I exited warp speed into a star system infused with orange juice. That might be a good start — all I need now is a vodka nebula or something to make 10 to the 30 cubic meters of cosmic screwdriver.

But I was distracted from my alcoholic thoughts by some pirates or something who attacked my ship as I was approaching a space station near my entry point. Killing them was pretty easy once I recovered my senses — more or less point and click and the rest was automated. I don’t know if combat will continue being this easy, but I won’t assume so.

Once those assholes were dead, I proceeded to the station, where I met a lot of guys wearing Daft Punk helmets and learned bits of a different new language from them. This seems to be the standard experience at these stations.

Taking a break. It’s nice to be able to sit in chairs, even if it doesn’t have any practical use. I can’t escape my pressure suit, but at least I don’t have to stand all the time, though a fucking cappuccino or something would be nice. Why no coffee shop? And now that I’m sitting here, I realize I look like Daft Punk too.

Before I leave the station, I’m tempted to jump down this hole into whatever this is. Looks like a frame from a late 90s-early 00s movie theater pre-film animation. I know that’s bizarrely specific, but look it up on YouTube.

The first planet I chose to land on doesn’t look very promising. Looks like a Tim Burton movie world, and I don’t need to live on one of those. The surface is home to various dinosaurs with more randomized names, some okay-sounding and some stupid. This was about the point I realized far too late that I could make money by scanning new animals and plants like this “Honeymafoe”, which is a pretty good name.

Ultimately, this planet is another bust, at least for now. It’s got 1.3 rads in its atmosphere, which is 1.3 rads more than I’m comfortable with, and even if it didn’t, I just don’t like the look of this place.

But all’s not lost. After leaving this nightmare world, I flew to a far larger planet nearby, maybe the planet to this moon. Upon landing, I found a temperate climate, grass, and even more toxin-spewing plants that I assume exist in some form on every planet in this fucking game. There’s even a rainbow to welcome me. This must be my new home.

70 degrees? Perfect weather too. There’s nobody around aside from the usual plant and animal life that pretend I’m not even here, but that’s fine with me. Even better — I didn’t come here to make friends, aside from the friends I’m making on those space stations. No, I can be happy in total solitude here, even if it does have these weird red lakes that I’m afraid to swim in.

This being by far the best planet I’ve landed on since starting my journey, I immediately decided to plant my flag here. To set up a base, you need to build a few tools including a computer that require you to gather even more materials, so after the usual scraping around I was ready to begin. But first, a name better than the “Adfornj Base” the game thought up. Sorry if your name is Adfornj, but it’s not the name for my base.

This time, instead of using a meme joke from a 20 year-old anime, I decided to pick a name by searching for a random city on Earth. Not having a globe handy to do that “spin the globe and go where your finger lands” game, I went to some “random city generator” site and got this:

Drammen is a city just southwest of Oslo. I’ve never been to Norway, so I don’t know whether this Drammen resembles the Earth one, but any Norwegians reading, please let me know.

Pretty sure Norway doesn’t have dinosaurs either, but this planet does. They ignore me like everything else, though I still take care not to get trampled by them when they run around.

Another one of my neighbors is this Shrek slug guy. It’s cheerful, which is a nice attribute for a giant creature that could probably easily crush me if it felt like it.

After getting my bearings, I finally build a proper house in a place that’s not depressingly awful.

It’s still more of a pathetic shack than a house, but at least less pathetic than my last shack. And this time my surroundings are pleasant and temperate, so maybe I can do some work outside expanding this doublewide into a mansion. Does anyone remember those doublewide homes? Was that just an American thing?

A shorter post, but that’s it for now. I hope this new post format isn’t too annoying if you’re not into it. This isn’t taking away from anything else I’m working on, anyway. So until next time, avoid those toxic plants.

Demo mode: Tevi

It’s Next Fest time again at Steam. Nuts to Valve, as usual, but where else are indie devs going to post their games for sale? I love itch.io, but it’s like a flea market where you can find 2% gems among 98% garbage — maybe not the best place to sell if you can help it.

So I played a demo. Just one, because my other concerns aren’t giving me any extra time these days. I hate it, but what can you do.

Tevi

What a surprise, AK picks the game crammed full of kemonomimi girls to play. But it was a good bet, because the Tevi demo was enjoyable enough for me to put the game on my wishlist. Tevi is a Metroidvania that looks like it will be in the vein of Rabi-Ribi, which I think was made by the same guys. I played some of that game, and this has a similar feel: rabbit girl runs around dangerous wilderness fighting monsters and asshole catgirls who throw bombs at her for no reason. Main character Tevi has to take on plenty of enemies, including her friend/rival Vena, who draws her into a bullet hell boss battle to test her fighting skills.

Nice background, though I generally avoid places where I might have to fight rattlesnakes

Tevi features a nice set of difficulty levels, which is great for me, since I both like these Metroidvania-style games and am also fairly bad at them. At the same time, I feel bad playing on easy mode, like I’m missing out on a nice challenge. That’s especially true for these bullet hell games. Both Rabi-Ribi and Tevi have a similar feel to the Touhou series in that way even though that’s a shooter and these are platformers — attribute that both to the bullet hell, the bosses who refuse to die, and all the animal-eared girls. The latter games’ skimpy outfits don’t hurt either, though Rabi-Ribi really cranked that aspect up. The protagonist bunny girl isn’t quite in a bunny girl outfit this time, anyway. Or maybe it’s a steampunkish version of a bunny girl outfit.

You do get a well-endowed angel lady too, no problem with that

I like what I’ve seen of Tevi so far, and I might get the full version upon release. I don’t mind a challenge, and I also appreciate that one of the goals in the demo is to make sure the Waffle House is still open. Because when the Waffle Houses are closed, that’s when the world is truly ending. If you’ve ever lived in the American South, you know. (That’s not even a joke — see the Waffle House Index.)

Technically not actually a Waffle House, but the name is close enough. The inside of this place looks a lot nicer, though.

A very short post today, but that’s all I have time for right now. See you next time, when I’ll hopefully have a little more peace.

A few not quite free games from itch.io

Man, I have a huge pile of games on itch.io I haven’t played. That pile might stand as tall as a modest house if they were all in physical form. I love those big donation packages they’ve put together, but it does feel like a waste sometimes to leave 99% of that crap untouched.

So let’s touch some games. Unlike most of the itch.io games I look at in my free game posts, these aren’t free, though they also tend to be pretty cheap. No theming this time either, because I can’t be bothered, but I can tell you one of them is extremely 18+. See if you can guess which one from the title!

Tic Tac Crow

Man, tic tac toe is a bad game. If you play it properly, it ends in a draw every time — the game is just too simple to be interesting. That said, it’s probably a decent start for kids just learning the concept of a game with rules, and it also seems like a game some birds could find interesting. So I appreciate that Tic Tac Crow is a tic tac toe game with only birds. You play as a bird and fly to a flat green field every day to play tic tac toe on tree stumps with sparrows, crows, and various other friends.

Some of the birds seem to be stronger opponents than others. I’ve heard crows are unusually smart and can solve complex puzzles, so maybe it’s natural that a crow would pick up a game like this. I didn’t play long enough to notice any definite patterns because tic tac toe is boring as hell, but I did enjoy watching two birds squabble over a stump as they pecked and scratched Xs and Os. Nice bird sounds and animations too.

I get the feeling that’s the real point of Tic Tac Crow anyway — not to play tic tac toe, but rather to relax and watch some birds do slightly more human-like things than usual. There’s even a nice end-of-day list of events when you leave the field, including some ominous entries like “Oliver stared at you intensely” or something like that, and I’m wondering now if there’s some kind of murder plot or the creation of a portal into Hell if you play long enough.

Sander, you’re creeping me out. Don’t look at me like that.

Coco Nutshake (link NSFW)

Well shit, I just gave it away, didn’t I. Too bad, since that was a puzzle. Coco Nutshake is a rhythm game (requiring only the use of the mouse hand) in which you visit a beachside coconut milk stand. Only the milk doesn’t come from the coconut: it comes from the proprietor in the most literal sense. The game features three stages: in the first you smack her coconut bikini top off for some reason, in the second you dispense the product with your own hands, and in the third and most annoying, you shake your drink until it’s ready, and all are scored by how close you kept to the rhythm the game demands.

I know this game is very lewd and objectifying and so on, but what the hell. I swore to promote the lewd arts, or at least the quality ones, and this is a quality one as far as small indie games go. The pixel artstyle is nice and unique, the animation is fluid (most obvious in the second stage), the BGM is a lot better than you’d expect out of a vertical semi-h-game, and the censor bar over the lady’s eyes somehow makes it all the more appealing. Don’t ask me why, because I couldn’t tell you. Though I still don’t think I’d drink a breast milk cocktail, even ignoring the obvious public health concerns.

She needs to do her best to hide her self-serve milking operation from the state health department.

I still won’t post semi-h stuff here, though I will gladly write about it. But if you want the whole game or at least a nice animated gif of the action, visit the maker’s itch.io page. Coco Nutshake is truly high-quality smut, the best kind. It’s just a trifle, sure, but some of those trifles can provide a satisfying experience in a very short time (placeholder joke here that I’m not good enough to actually replace with anything.)

Melissa ♥

Yeah, the heart is part of the title. And this is an actually free game, but I had Melissa ♥ just sitting around waiting for a post that never came, so I put it here.

Oh no, she’s cute and she’s just like me! These dating-sim-writing bastards really know how to pull you in.

Melissa ♥ takes place in my own childhood of the early 90s, only instead of playing Oregon Trail on those Apple IIes, the kids were playing short romance visual novels. I know they existed at the time, but not in the West and sure as hell not at any of my schools. But lucky you, you get to play Date Night in the school’s computer lab, with the promise of a date and possibly a smooch, and I guess who doesn’t want that from a person they’re attracted to. Even if it’s a fake person on the other side of a computer screen.

Sadly for you, Melissa is aware of the truth and of her status as a game character inside a game. After a date in which you can either totally agree with all her tastes and be a fellow artist who loves cats or whatever, or be a sports-loving meathead on the other end of the spectrum, Melissa tells you she knows she’s just a character but is sick of meeting players, then getting abandoned by them after delivering the promised after-date kiss. She’s also taken control of the computer’s immediate surroundings somehow, and that doesn’t end very well for the player character.

Usually this refers to more than just a kiss, but this game is PG aside from the especially bloody bad endings.

Melissa ♥ echoes another, much longer and more involved dating sim VN that you probably know already. But it’s a nice ten minutes, and the maker is planning on creating a trilogy of these games and putting them up on Steam, so this version of the game might turn out to be more of a demo. If you’re into horror and old computer graphics, check it out anyway.

That’s all I’ve got for now from itch.io, but maybe I’ll dig through it again sometime soon. Until then.

Summer game haul (or, games I might never finish)

Since I have less and less free time. And yet the sales don’t end, and what am I supposed to do? As much as I hate Valve and want to avoid Steam (and I do whenever there’s another option, often itch.io for the indie games even when it means having to spend a few more dollars) sometimes it is the only option. But still, fuck Valve.

So here’s some sadly low-effort work this month, when a lot of other people are writing daily posts for the Blaugust posting challenge/festival. Go check it out — I took part last year and it was enjoyable, but work and life are so thoroughly draining/killing me now that I just can’t do it this time. Instead, here’s my first post of the month, a look at several games I recently bought and had the chance to play at least slightly.

Disco Elysium

Given that I’ve always heard good things about this game, I was looking forward to finally trying it out. I didn’t know much of anything about Disco Elysium going in, which seems like exactly the kind of game you wouldn’t want spoilers in (at least my impression from what I have heard.) And just a couple of hours in right now, all I can say is that it’s strange and intriguing.

After establishing my character’s strengths and weaknesses, I woke up in a dirty hotel room, hungover and in my underwear. This start to the protagonist’s day brought back so many unpleasant memories that I had to go through my own brain loading process for a minute before realizing that Disco Elysium is a classic point-and-click adventure game, only with a lot of tweaks that make it interesting, most of which I’m sure I haven’t seen yet.

I went with Sensitive because it sounded the most fun to me, but I wonder if I basically picked hard mode. But then every version of this game seems like it will probably be hard mode.

My version of the protagonist being charismatic but constantly on the verge of a mental breakdown only seemed to increase the game’s unpredictability, as I talked to either a voice in my head or a demon while looking in the bathroom mirror before gathering what clothes I could find (missing one shoe and my tie, but good enough) and leaving to do some detective work. Sure, I couldn’t remember my name, my profession, or why I was here, but I was at least able to pretend enough to my partner that he only thinks I’m an idiot, which I can probably deal with.

An idiot, but not a racist at least. Though it’s interesting that you can apparently make your character into a total asshole as well.

No big surprise, maybe, but I like Disco Elysium so far. Normally the protagonist’s hopeless situation might be a little stressful to cope with, but the guy is so completely far gone that that situation becomes absurd and fun to play along with. Even if most of my dice rolls to determine the outcomes of my actions so far have been miserable failures. This game doesn’t mess around. I’m fully prepared to die in some profoundly stupid way and will probably test out every possible way I can put the protagonist in unnecessary danger just to see what happens.

Hypnospace Outlaw

Another acclaimed unusual indie game, Hypnospace Outlaw entirely takes place in Hypnospace, a late 90s internet service that you jack into while you’re sleeping. Because fuck getting any rest at all: you need to be productive even during REM. Even more shockingly, my character apparently signed up as a volunteer mod to help flag violations of Hypnospace law on other users’ homepages (no abusive language/harassment, no use of copyrighted characters, etc.) So instead of actually sleeping, you get to spend your time digging around this primitive internet-style platform and reading about how some kid broke up with his girlfriend because he has his eye on a different girl in his band club.

For the kids who weren’t around then: yes, we had these bullshit shock ads back in the 90s too. Some things never change.

I’ve gotten through what I think is the first chapter of the game, and it is certainly something. Hypnospace Outlaw really does get the look and feel of the very early consumer internet down, when people started flooding it in the mid-90s with Geocities and Angelfire pages about their dogs and hobbies, and even with the dancing hamster gifs and embedded music files that were so common back then.

Vintage internet. For the real experience, go to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and find some late 90s versions of existing websites — even the corporate sites back then looked like shit.

However, I have a problem with this game. Though it’s not a problem with the game itself, to be fair, but with me: it feels like work. The player character is quite literally working for the Hypnospace admins, and not even for real money but rather for Disney fun buck-style platform-only currency. I already can’t relate — I would never volunteer to be a moderator, and for as much time as I spend online, I certainly wouldn’t implant a chip into my head to navigate a separate internet that you can only access while asleep. I know this may come as a shock, but I need my four or five hours of sleep so I can at least pretend to be a functional adult, and I feel using this sleep internet thing would be a detriment to me even aside from the potential for brain damage.

Imagine working as an internet copyright snitch and not even getting paid. If you’re going to be a corporate bootlicker, at least have the dignity to demand real money for it.

All that said, the premise of Hypnospace Outlaw is interesting, and there seems to be a lot more under the surface that I haven’t found yet, so I will probably keep playing to see what else I can find. It is at least funny to visit users’ pages after you’ve issued citations against them and read their complaints. Power is addictive, isn’t it?

Idol Manager

And speaking of games that feel like work, here’s Idol Manager, an idol management simulation just as the title states. After being given a brand new idol company to build from the ground up by a shady businessman with possibly questionable ethics, I got to hiring three idols and put them on a regimen of training and performing that is sure to wear them out to the point they all have mental breakdowns.

I’m kidding; of course I’ll do my best to avoid that. Can’t squeeze money out of these girls if they’re burned out, after all! And Natsuki here is a real catch despite her low stamina.

Idol Manager seems to be a pretty comprehensive simulation, coming from my clueless perspective as someone who’s barely familiar with idol stuff outside of the more idol-ish aspects of the VTuber world. Most of the game takes place on a SimTower-style 2D building screen, where you’re able to place offices and specialized facilities staffed by voice and dance coaches and staffers who work to get your idols promotional opportunities like photoshoots and variety show guest spots.

But of course the hole goes deeper than that. There looks to be a lot of opportunity for scandal in Idol Manager, with its social sim element that let you take the idols out for coffee, gossip with them, and even make advances on them. This last option seems both wildly unethical and extremely unwise, but I can’t promise my curiosity won’t get the better of me at some point.

I got Sunshower from a Taeko Ohnuki album I like, thought it would make for an even better idol group name than an album title. They only have about 60 fans as of this writing, but with Kira’s attitude, Sunshower is definitely on its way to the Budokan or wherever it is the big idol groups perform.

But once again, hell if Idol Manager doesn’t feel like work. At least I can’t complain too much about that this time, since I couldn’t have expected much else from a game titled Idol Manager, but unwinding with a game like this after my actual work can feel a little strange for that reason. Then again, I’ve always enjoyed sim games that involve at least moderate micromanagement — as long as the payoff makes the more tedious aspects of the game worth playing. I’m still not sure whether that will be true of Idol Manager, but the promise of a massive scandal is admittedly enticing.

Points for those who can correctly guess where I got our first song’s title from (hint, not the Bananarama song that comes up first in the Google search, though that song might be the ultimate origin of the title.)

Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus & Butterfly

And finally, a game that I’m already pretty comfortable with since I’ve played the first in the series. Coffee Talk was a nice drink-brewing social sim/VN in the vein of VA-11 Hall-A, and while I preferred the latter’s futuristic dingy dive bar and its bitter, jaded protagonist Jill Stingray (speaking of a character I could relate to, sadly) I enjoyed Coffee Talk almost as much. And much to their credit, unlike Sukeban, Coffee Talk developer Toge Productions actually put out a sequel instead of maintaining a “coming soon” page for it for four years straight or however long it’s been.

Rejoining old patrons and meeting new ones at your nighttime hours-only Seattle coffee shop.

If you want more background on Coffee Talk, you can find it in my review above. Aside from the addition of a couple of new ingredients and an item safekeeping/delivery mechanic that will certainly see some use in the course of the story, Hibiscus & Butterfly feels very much like the first game, which is good, because I liked the first game. Not sure if I’ll even have much more to say about this second episode that I didn’t say about the first, but if I do, you can be sure I’ll make a post.

I’m usually just a black coffee type, but I can appreciate the artistry.

That’s all for now. I have quite a few more games in the backlog, including a couple that I should really finally finish, but I’ll just keep playing whatever happens to grab me. Until next time, happy Sunday — I’ll do my best to enjoy the rest of my meager free time until tomorrow.

Demo mode: A few demos for Next Fest

It’s yet another big event on Steam. Thanks to Valve for bringing us demos of a wide variety of indie games set to be released in the next several months (and also fuck you to Valve for different and unrelated reasons, but I’ve complained about those before.)

Today, we’re having a look at just a few of these new demos, and you’ll soon notice a pattern in the games I chose to try out. In no particular order:

Viewfinder

You’ve entered some kind of virtual space where users can alter their surroundings by superimposing photos or other pictures onto the landscape, creating new spaces to walk around in. Your only obvious goal is to reach the teleporter at the end of each area — easier said than done, since most of the teleporters are either out of reach or need batteries you’ll have to find by scouring the level.

As for the story, it looks like Viewfinder has one, though at this early stage it’s understandably thin on the details. The demo skips around other parts of the game not yet available, but we already have a few characters established — not actually around, since your character seems to be completely by herself in this environment, but we have recordings and notes left behind to read from artists and programmers working on and using these spaces. Maybe living in them too?

Not sure what kind of promise they’re hoping for, but these virtual floating sky houses do look and feel idyllic. Just as long as you don’t get trapped in there like the holodeck in Star Trek used to do sometimes.

The puzzles themselves are both novel and challenging. It was awkward at first to pick up this bizarre “paste images into real 3D space” mechanic, but it gets easier as you realize how creative you have to get to make it around. The game’s puzzle aspect was enough to keep me engaged, even if I’m not the biggest fan of the old “walk through an abandoned landscape/town and examine what’s left behind” approach. It’s hard to get very entangled in a plot that’s already occurred to people you don’t know, but this being a virtual space, maybe there’s more to it in Viewfinder.

If there is, I might pick this one up. From what I played, it reminded me of Superliminal, which I liked aside from the ending (which I could go on about, but it gave us Pekora speaking English so I can forgive.) While I normally don’t like this kind of walking around an environment “post-mortem” gameplay — again, if that’s actually what it is, which I’m not sure of — if it’s essentially a puzzle game, I can enjoy it if it’s done well.

Pygmalion

Join a poor grad student as he’s chained to a wall to work in this lady’s laboratory. His work involves him solving at first simple but increasingly complex match the color block puzzles. However, these puzzles are all timed by move, and if you fail the whole thing explodes and kills you (or you just reset the puzzle.)

Match color to color. Pretty simple stuff, at least at first.

Soon enough, the grad student wanders into an off-limits room where he finds a robot girl. As his supervisor tells him, their lab is developing androids built to bring happiness to everyone. Don’t mind the fact that this robot girl relentlessly insults him every minute. Don’t ask questions. Just keep working by solving more colored block puzzles.

Her regular uniform is a maid costume, of course

Pygmalion is an interesting one. I didn’t even realize it was a puzzle game before starting the demo — Pygmalion sound to me more like a visual novel about a tragic romance (wasn’t it actually a novel or a play?) I didn’t expect much from the first few puzzles either, but the mechanic can make for some challenges. I also appreciate the nice art and the color-coding of the characters. Not much more to say about Pygmalion except that I might also revisit it when it releases.

Word Factori

This was before I discovered dark mode

Thanks to Frostilyte for suggesting this one (and follow his site if you aren’t.) Word Factori is still another puzzle game, but this time it’s language-themed, dealing with the creation of new letters and words by literally manufacturing units of letters, rotating and flipping them, bending them, and joining them together into new shapes. At first, my dumb ass could only make I, but I quickly learned from the tutorial that I could alter and merge these I units to create other letters like C, V, and L.

Once again, the complexity quickly steps up. Upon being prompted to ship OX, I had to puzzle out how to make an X — four Is? A V and an upside-down V? (or a Greek lambda, Λ, but that doesn’t count as a letter in Word Factori, nor does the Greek gamma Γ.) And the T in CAT, god damn was that frustrating to figure out.

That’s to say, you can make the shapes, but they don’t represent those letters or fit into any words on their own — they’re only component parts of Latin letters.

But that’s just the point — you just have to try all those out for yourself. There are plenty of letters I haven’t worked out yet, presumably with a lot more to come in the full game. The novelty worked well for me, and while I’m not sure whether I’d feel like doing 100 of these in a row, I enjoyed what I played of it. Especially if I can make a Ж, a ع, or a ゐ. Maybe we’ll get foreign language DLC?

Pâquerette Down the Bunburrows

Is it time for a different genre? No, fuck that: more puzzle games. Nothing but puzzles. This is Pâquerette Down the Bunburrows, the story of the title character who keeps and cares for rabbits. At the start of the game, Pâquerette spots another bunny out in the field and chases after it down into a hole (Alice reference?)

Down the rabbit hole for real

The puzzles are nice and intuitive. The bunnies you corner in each level move according to specific patterns around their environment, so Pâquerette becomes a moving block game with a different goal and style. And the visual style — I get a real Gameboy feel from this with the chunky text and limited-color graphics, a plus for me now as an officially old man (at least according to Gen Z, which seems to have set that cutoff point around age 27. You kids, just wait until you get older.)

This map kind of looks like a rabbit too, but only if you think about it hard enough

Pâquerette is both very cute and a nice diversion, so if you like cute things like rabbits or fun things like chasing rabbits around a labyrinth, you might also consider trying this game out.

That’s all for now. I know I’m not getting into some of the flashier non-Gameboy-looking stuff like Lies of P (though I love the title) but I like puzzle games with unique styles, so why not give them a look. Until next time.

A review of Endless Monday: Dreams and Deadlines

Corporate life is hell. For a long time, the only comic depiction of that hell that many people knew about was the strip Dilbert, drawn and written by what turned out to be a jerkoff (and a litigation-threatening one too who doesn’t seem to appreciate parody, which we knew about long before Twitter existed.)

Tiger-chan is legitimately a far better strip anyway, newspaper comics need to get with the times

Well, fuck the Dilbert guy, because we have something far better in Endless Monday, a concept created by the artist hcnone, who specializes in cute office ladies complaining about work, celebrating the weekends, and wishing they could be doing something else other than toiling at a faceless corporation. So of course I’ve been following that account for a long time since that’s very much my thing, and when they put out a short visual novel project early this month, I decided to buy it. Not that I have much money to be spending on new games right now, but I’m far happier for my ten dollars to go to an independent artist than EA or Ubisoft or similar corporate shitheads (and man, I will be complaining more than usual this post, won’t I. Though not about the game.)

Time to finally work

Endless Monday: Dreams and Deadlines stars Penny, an artist in the creative section of a company that builds robots with strangely specific and seemingly useless functions. At the start of the game, Penny is sitting at her desk on Saturday night, just starting work on an ad project for the mysterious ZINEBOT 6000. Penny has no idea what ZINEBOT 6000 is or does, her only clue being a vague email describing the project’s goals and a series of blueprints of a rickety-looking robot.

Penny has had several weeks to complete this project before its deadline of Monday morning, but of course she used all that time not to work but rather to play mobile games and draw comics featuring her original character Tiger-chan seen above. However, she’s now under extreme pressure to come up with six ad illustrations and slogans within about 36 hours. Penny’s heart might not be in this work, but she has to pay rent, and she doesn’t want to let down her former college senior and supervisor Miss Whiskey.

The very first decision I made was to join her at the club, and I didn’t regret it. They don’t call her Miss Whiskey for nothing.

Penny is scrambling for ideas at this point. Thankfully, she has current and former colleagues she can call for help or possibly to get scolded depending (or to get pressured to get a higher-paying job in the case of her mom, which felt like an extremely real conversation in a way I didn’t like.) Penny can also roam the empty office to hunt for more ideas, which looks disturbingly like my own office with its open floor plan and chest-high partitions that you wonder why they even bothered with if we’re not even allowed to have real cubicles.

But at least there’s an also very real-looking dumpy office breakroom, complete with a pot of very old cold coffee that may or may not be dangerous to drink from. In this desperate hour, anything might give Penny some inspiration, even the odd hallucination or space abduction.

I can’t say I’ve hallucinated one of my characters yet from pushing myself too much at work, but that might just be because they still only exist in text form and I only have a general image of them. I’d make character sheets if I had an ounce of illustrating skill.

I didn’t have much idea of what to expect going into Endless Monday, since I’d only really seen hcnone’s work on Twitter, usually a panel or two of office lady eating a burger or crying over a deadline like Penny here or maybe in cosplay getup on occasion. A visual novel is quite a bit more involved than that of course, and I didn’t know exactly how all the corporate worker depression would translate into a story.

Compliments to hcnone then, who both created some great character portraits and illustrations and wrote a short story that was fun all the way through. Endless Monday is kind of a surreal comedy despite its very mundane setting — truly anything can happen when Penny drinks that stale as hell coffee and her sight gets blurry. I’ve recently gone on about how I don’t care that much for mundane settings, but one of the exceptions I’ll make is for stories that mix some bizarre and unexpected elements in, like a talking tiger woman magically climbing out of your dreams and into reality. Reminded me of Shirobako a bit, especially with their common theme of work-related stress and deadline pressure.

And difficult conversations like this one in a possibly moldy coffee-induced flashback. Whiskey is pretty damn cool, but she’s also down to business when necessary.

Despite those surreal elements, Endless Monday is one of the most hard-hitting stories I’ve read recently while also being consistently funny. The comedy here feels like hcnone’s regular work translated into a story, so if you follow them anyway you’ll probably be happy with it as well. And I say “hard-hitting” in the sense that it hit me hard specifically. Though I’m sure millions of others can also relate — with the stress, sure, but also the feeling that your soul is being drained of even its last few drops of hope, hope that one day you’ll be able to quit and live on your passion instead. All the better when you learn how scummy your employer really is and you lose any faith you might have had left in it.

Friend and former colleague Skye, whose passion isn’t quite working out for her as a living.

So while Endless Monday is really an absurd comedy, it does have some nice real moments like that. I might not be a corporate artist, but having worked in offices for years now, this all felt like a very relatable satire.

And all the better, one with several colorful and memorable characters, with a couple that I recognized right out of the gate in art that I probably liked when I was simultaneously “doomscrolling” as the kids say and looking at the half of my feed that’s anime girl pinup art. I’m a big fan of good pixel art and of hcnone’s expressive style and character models, and they work beautifully here, contributing to the nice hand-drawn look of the game.

Aside from the purposely old RPG look of this place. Nice reference too. The kids won’t get this one, but Clippy was a real bastard back in the old days of Windows 98 and XP.

On top of all that, Endless Monday has a very fine set of BGM (my favorite: Tiger-chan’s island theme with the cheesy midi roar effect in the middle.) I always appreciate a game with music better than “it’s there” but this is still another one that well exceeds expectations.

Really, all that might improve the experience is voice-acting, which Endless Monday doesn’t have. Yet, at least. Maybe we’ll get a patch later on, though voice-acting might be too much to ask from every indie game. If that bothers you anyway, just imagine you’re back 15 years in the past, when barely any visual novels had voice-acting. And maybe the creator had different reasons for leaving it unvoiced. Either way, it doesn’t bother me, but it’s just something to know.

They did include a game-within-the-game though, and points for that. This lumber girl game could easily be a real one on the app store, maybe even a hit.

Not much more to say than that. I completely enjoyed Endless Monday, and if you like some absurd yet maybe relatable humor, I think you will too. I also appreciate a good short VN, since so many of the interesting ones look long as all hell; I got through the game in only three hours but found that short time to be well worth the cost (and again, the money feels a lot better going to an indie artist, who have over the last several years collectively beat the asses of the AAA guys in terms of innovation, storytelling, and presentation.)

So here’s hoping we see more of this kind of work out of hcnone — I’ll be following. Happy Monday as of this writing, and until next time.

Games for broke people: Unlikely/impractical weapon edition

Despite being an American, I’m no expert on real-life weapons. However, like many others of my generation, I have used all sorts of weapons in games. And so why not play a few games that are centered around the unique attributes of specific weapons? And since I don’t feel like spending more money at the moment, free ones. Yes, this is yet another one of these posts where I try to cram at least two free games I found into a single stupid theme. Starting with:

Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate (demo)

This entry is a cheat on my part, I admit: it’s a demo version of a game that costs money. But considering the fact that I’ve gotten quite a bit of play out of this free demo, I’d say it counts, or close enough, at least. I learned about Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate from the excellent blog Professional Moron — compliments to Mr. Wapojif for his insightful posts. Shotgun King is a chess-based game just as the title suggests, but it’s also a rogue-like/lite. I don’t really play rogue-likes, but I do play chess on occasion, and I’m not extremely bad at it.

Shotgun King does operate on standard chess rules to some extent. All the pieces move as they normally would, at least at the outset. The setup is non-standard, however: you play as Black with a single king, while White starts with four pawns, a knight, a bishop, a rook, and a king. Not exactly fair, but you do have an advantage: your king has a god damn shotgun. As the opening sequence tells us, he was such a lousy king that his entire army left him, even his queen, and so now he’s out for revenge. This translates into a game in which you progress through floors consisting of chessboards and enemy pieces that you can blow away.

Taking aim at a few poor pawns, who didn’t ask for this

Your shotgun doesn’t have much of an effective range at first, but it can be improved by applying bonuses you can choose from between floors (though each bonus comes with a paired bonus for the enemy that you’re forced to choose as well.) And remember, as in regular chess, the object is to kill the enemy king: it doesn’t matter how many pieces White has once you have the white king in your sights and down to one HP; once you’ve got him, you win and get to advance to the next board.

That’s all well and good, but the trouble I’ve been having with Shotgun King is that the RNG has really been screwing me, with some games ending after a horrifically unbalanced floor because White ends up with twelve pawns that can attack sideways and three rooks. It is possible to build an extremely powerful king to fight your opponent with, but the odds aren’t that great from what I can tell. Since I’m not a rogue-like guy, I don’t know if this is standard practice, but it is frustrating to get cornered and have to start over. The example below is a pretty decent outcome, at least: it’s satisfying to get right in the enemy king’s face and gun the dude down when most of his army including his queen are still standing.

The white king eats lead

So if you’re better at chess than I am and don’t mind some unforgiving RNG, try this game out. I imagine the full version of Shotgun King has a lot more to offer, anyway — remember that this is just the demo I’m covering here because I’m a cheap asshole. I probably won’t buy the full version either unless it goes on extreme sale, but if you’re a bigger fan of this genre than I am, it may be something to check out.

Deepest Sword

A dragon threatens the land and has taken your dog hostage, and it’s your job as the local brave knight (or the only local in armor at least) to slay it, using a sword specially crafted for the purpose. However, the blacksmith is only able to start you out with a short sword that’s not quite enough to get the job done. The trouble is that defeating the dragon requires you to pierce its heart, which is located at its center at the bottom of a conveniently placed hole. But unfortunately, on your first run at the beast, your sword is far too short to reach the dragon’s heart. Strangely enough, far from being relieved, the dragon seems annoyed at your sad attempt to pierce its heart before it immolates you with its fire breath and forces you to start over.

That’s rough.

Lucky for you, the old blacksmith at the start of the game crafts a slightly longer sword each time you successfully make it to the dragon and fail to slay it. How many times will you have to penetrate the dragon’s sword entry point before it’s finally vanquished, and how much longer and more complicated will the cavern path to the dragon get before you finally succeed?

Now I’ll say what you already know: Deepest Sword is just one very long dick joke. But not just a dick joke: one with a purposely irritating movement mechanic. The hero’s sword is controlled by one set of buttons and the hero by another, but at times it feels like the sword is really controlling the hero, being far too large for the guy. It can be swung over the head, but it’s difficult to keep raised and will likely fall back to the ground.

However, the real obstacle of Deepest Sword is the maze you have to make it through each run, a puzzle that forces you to use the game’s physics and your sword to squeeze and pole-vault your way through. Aside from being an analog for part of the male anatomy, your sword really is like part of your body in this game, since you can’t drop it or put it away. On the positive side, as annoying as it can be to deal with, your sword is a requirement for vaulting above otherwise unscaleable heights on the way to the dragon, who kindly waits for you to make your thrust before burning you alive again.

Living in a fantasy world where blade-lengthening services actually work

So while calling a game like this “fun” is a bit much considering how much pain it put me through, a challenge like this isn’t so bad to take on sometimes. Especially when it’s free, and also really just an excuse for an elaborate sex joke while remaining completely safe for work in the technical sense.

I’m sure there are many more games out there based solely around unusual weapons, some of which might also be penis metaphors, but that’s all I have for now. I might just continue this old post series if I can dig up more interesting stuff, but that probably won’t be a for while, so until next time when I’ll be returning to my current coping mechanism of watching and then writing way too much about decade-plus old anime.

SimTower revisited

My working days are full of stress, and those are almost all my days. So what to do? I’ve come to appreciate a certain kind of game — I’m not sure if it falls into a single genre, but it’s the kind that I can play and just relax to. Often they don’t even gave a story to follow, but if they do, it’s a light one. The island exploration game A Short Hike falls into this category, and so does the landscape creation puzzle game Dorfromantik. And though this may be surprising, so does SimTower, the original building construction and management simulator.

I wrote a retrospective review of this entry in the Sim series way back in 2014, not long after I started this site. Back then, I was also under a lot of stress as a student. It was a different kind of stress than I have now, but playing SimTower helped me relieve a little of it. And while part of its appeal to my adult self may have been the nostalgia it inspired in me — I first played SimTower soon after its release in 1994 as a kid on the one family computer — it wouldn’t hold up at all if nostalgia was all it had going for it. So after nine years away, I decided to return to my old Windows 95 virtual machine and my tower construction duties to see just how well this game would stand the test of time.

The humble beginning of my new grand tower, just a dumpy building in a dying office park off the highway. Since we can’t afford another elevator car just yet, my tenants’ employees will have to stand in line since they’re too god damn lazy to use the stairs. This will become a theme.

I went over the basics of the game in my old post, but to recap, SimTower was created by Japanese game developer Yoot Saito and his team. According to an interview I read in the “official guide” to the game (and actually a very good one) Yoot got the initial idea for the game while waiting for an elevator in an office building and wondering why he had to wait for the furthest elevator from him to stop at his floor, a story which if you’ve played SimTower for even ten minutes you can immediately believe. Yoot expanded this elevator-based concept into a building simulator, as far as I know the first of its kind, and at some point he met Maxis head Will Wright and sold him on the idea as a natural addition to his SimCity line. Therefore, while it was released as simply The Tower in Japan, Yoot’s game got the Sim branding in North America.

I felt I got more out of this third playthrough of SimTower, or if not more, then something different than before. In the foreword to the same guide I looked through, Yoot himself says that in SimTower he wanted to create a hakoniwa, or a kind of miniature garden. I don’t know much about the concept, but I think I basically understand what he was going for, and if my idea is right, I think he succeeded. Though there’s a ton of complexity in certain aspects of the game — the traffic flows most of all — the greatest appeal to me of SimTower now is being able to just let time run and watch the residents of and visitors to my tower live their lives, doing my best to accommodate their needs and wants but otherwise letting it flow.

Here’s a typical day in your mid-sized tower: office workers show up every workday morning, take the elevators to their offices, and work through the day with a break for lunch in one of the building’s fast food places. Most offices close at five, with some working longer hours (more realistically in my experience) starting the rush home, the white-collar workers passing the arriving hotel guests on the elevators, which are always too slow and backed up. The hotel guests will go straight to their rooms and stay up for a while doing whatever they’re doing (no overly personal details shown, but maybe implied) before sleeping, unless you’ve provided proper restaurants for them to have dinner at in which case they’ll give you even more business. And repeat the next day, excepting weekends when the offices are closed but your commercial spaces see more business from outside to compensate.

The tower grows, slowly becoming worthy of its name. It’s especially important to plan ahead in your elevator placement, which I didn’t do here — I ended up deleting the shaft on the left and building a new one on the far left to make room for needed improvements.

All this is very satisfying to watch run when it’s going well, meaning your elevator placement isn’t fucked and your zoning is reasonably sensible. You have relative freedom over the placement of your units, the greatest restriction being that you can’t place certain units like hotel rooms and offices underground. So while you can put a fast food place next to an office, the office drones won’t be very happy about the noise and the smell of frying oil next door unless you lower their rent. Not that the hired help would probably care much about the office’s overhead, but maybe the offices’ evaluation bars only care about the owners’ and operators’ opinions. Temps and grunts like me can fuck off as usual.

Not that that’s a point against this game. It’s probably obvious at this point, but there’s a lot of abstraction to SimTower. Most of it necessary — imagine having to balance elevator and stair traffic concerns in a 60-story mixed-use tower with the details of electricity and cable hookups, maintenance, and waste disposal. Even the calendar is extremely simplified, with a game year broken into four quarters, each quarter consisting of just one week of three days each, two working days and one weekend day for a 12-day year. Admittedly a strange calendar, but you’ll be grateful for it considering that your office tenants pay their rent on a quarterly basis.

And don’t worry about attracting tenants or guests to give you money: SimTower takes place in a city with seemingly unlimited demand for office space and hotel rooms, as they’re all rented out on the very same day you build them with a few special exceptions. There’s even a condo option available, though it’s a shitty one that I never take seeing as how condo owners are assholes who only pay you once and then spend the rest of their residence in your tower complaining about noise and traffic. Fuck condos: don’t build them.

So none of that’s very complicated. No, the most complex aspect of SimTower by far is traffic management, and the greatest focus otherwise is simply on building. That relative simplicity works for me — it would probably be impossible to get that miniature garden sort of feel Yoot wrote about if the player were having to stress more than necessary.

I especially get this feel where the commercial, office, and hotel sections meet. Express elevators are a godsend at this point, allowing hotel guests and theater patrons to bypass all that shitty standard elevator traffic and go straight to my deluxe sky mall without any unnecessary stops.

But then again, there’s one form of abstraction to SimTower that some people may find especially strange. It’s perhaps the most obvious one, and one shared by the sequel Yoot Tower: the total lack of a third dimension. Your SimTower is entirely 2D, with just one view available of the front of the building. Or maybe the side, since the lobby entrances are on either side, presumably opening to the streets than you can’t see. It doesn’t matter, though, since you can only place units on a flat plane in this view. I guess the depth is implied, but it does still strike me as weird being stuck in this 2D cross-section view when I think too much about it.

There were obvious technical limitations on SimTower, released nearly 30 years ago now, that would have made it difficult if not impossible to expand into a third dimension. Back when I first wrote about it, the only such games I knew of aside from SimTower was its 1998 sequel, which faced similar limitations and had a similar fully 2D style. But now, looking back, I think there was more to this decision than just technical considerations. Expanding a hypothetical new SimTower-style game into three dimensions, with individual units and rooms, might be so incredibly complex as to be fundamentally unplayable by a single person. At that point you’re basically just building an actual building, which takes massive crews of engineers, planners, and other specialists. Naturally none of it would be real, but even so, combining that complexity with the kind of management you’d expect from a SimTower sequel anyway might be too much for anyone possibly aside from hardcore Victoria series players.

And even if that were feasible, I think you’d end up losing a lot of that hakoniwa feel Yoot wrote about and that’s such a part of the appeal of these games for me. Back when I wrote about SimTower, I speculated about another sequel to this series, which we’d get two years later with Project Highrise, and though I haven’t played it myself, it looks from the gameplay footage I’ve watched that it also uses a 2D cross-section format. Maybe there’s a good reason for that.

There’s something peaceful about a scene like this one, your hotel guests headed to their rooms. If I were one of them, I’d take the elevator up to floor 16 and get a coffee before the café closes.

Given how good this game was and how relatively well it must have done, considering that it’s one of the better-remembered old Sim games, it’s a little surprising that we went through an 18-year gap between Yoot Tower and Project Highrise for proper building simulators. My best guess is that the scope of the building simulator has something to do with that. The Sim series has thoroughly covered life on a large city-wide scale with SimCity (though with the failure of the last entry in that series, the city-building torch has completely passed to Paradox and their Cities: Skylines series) and even far more thoroughly on a small scale with the wildly popular The Sims. SimTower and Yoot Tower are somewhere in between those two, and maybe they’re a little mundane for that reason. SimCity features natural disasters and even alien attacks; The Sims features extreme interpersonal drama. The only disasters in SimTower are the occasional fire and terrorist bomb threat. Which are admittedly pretty dramatic, but even those can be dealt with through money if you have enough and don’t trust your security team enough to leave it to them.

But I don’t mind if SimTower is a little more mundane than its city simulator counterparts. Again, I think that contributes to its appeal.

Maybe what SimTower truly needs is a series where you fall into the Backrooms but it’s all the building’s parking lot that warps into endless creepy empty hotel corridors at night. That kind of dumb bullshit spinoff might get the kids interested in this old rusty game. (Though I do like Kane Pixels’ video series, obligatory mention there. Check it out; it’s good.)

As for BIGPPTWR, as it’s officially known because of the eight-character name limit, it currently stands at 37 floors, topped by a row of fancy hotel suites that nobody has yet stayed in. I’m not sure whether I’ll bother building any higher than that — if I really cared about reaching four stars, which requires a population of 5,000, I’d build wider than I am, but I decided to restrict myself to nine office lengths for aesthetic reasons. If you want to play properly (as far as there even is a way to play a Sim game properly, which I guess there isn’t) you can really just fill the entire screen with building, including the underground section as long as you remember to leave the bottom three levels for that metro station.

For my part, I’m just happy to let my modest tower run. Maybe 37 floors is tall enough. Or maybe I’ll get the urge to keep obsessively building higher. Either way, I’m happy to say that SimTower does hold up. If you want to try it for yourself, I’d encourage you to download a copy of the game’s iso image from the archive.org library: since SimTower seems not to be sold anywhere at all, not even on GOG, this seems like a reasonable option. And in case you’re wondering, I wanted to check out Yoot Tower again and tried to do so, but I couldn’t get the damn thing to work on my virtual machine, even though it’s supposed to run on Windows 95, and I don’t have a copy of Windows 98 to try it out on. Despite my issues with 95, though, it’s still far more user-friendly than this Windows 10 shitpile.

Currently playing (Neon White, my entire Steam backlog)

It’s been a while since I wrote about any games here, but I haven’t been idle on that front. There’s one game I’m nearly done with and will be writing about in a full review at some point this month — I don’t want to be too ambitious with my schedule considering how much work I’m taking on this month, but that much seems feasible. However, I’ve also been playing a new game and returning to some I’ve had on Steam for years (and maybe itch.io too?) Blowing the dust off of those, just because they’re there, and I don’t feel like spending any more money since I wake up in a cold sweat sometimes thinking about my debt. But then that’s a lot of us, sadly. It’s the reason I have the job I have to begin with. I sure as hell don’t do it for fun.

So let’s talk about something actually fun. Neon White was released in June last year on PC and Switch, but since my PC is garbage, I had to wait until the PS4 release in December to play it. I’m not much for action games as you’ll see if you look through the Games index page on this site, but there are two reasons I picked up this one, starting with the recommendation of fellow blogger Frostilyte. Our tastes in games don’t totally overlap, but his analysis is always a great time to read, and his looks at Neon White got me interested in checking it out for myself. And secondly — I won’t even make a show of downplaying this because I’ve already written about VTubers a few times on the site, but there’s a certain laughing dragon girl who played through the game, and her streams are always entertaining, but before watching any of it I don’t want to spoil anything for myself, least of all the solutions to the stages. That’s as good a reason as any, isn’t it?

Speaking of, Neon White isn’t a standard FPS as the guns might suggest. While there is plenty of shooting in the game, it’s far better described as an action platformer with puzzle elements. Each stage in the game up to the point I’ve played takes place in Heaven, where the characters including the protagonist codenamed Neon White have to clear out a demon invasion. The game’s primary mechanic is a card system: each card represents a gun (a pistol, rifle, shotgun, etc.) with a set amount of ammunition, but the card can also be used up and discarded to perform an extra function like a double-jump or a boost.

I’ll get into the system in greater depth when I’m done with the game, but it’s surprisingly intuitive and easy to get hooked on. There’s a strong speedrunning aspect to Neon White, but you don’t have to be a Hardcore Gamer™ to get into it. I’m certainly not. Another nice aspect of this game is that it’s pretty forgiving about jumps, allowing you to do demon-slaying parkour without worrying about pixel-perfect landings. However, the challenge is still there, especially for those who want to earn the top “ace” medal times in each stage for bragging rights (or the really extreme red medal times, of which I’ve only gotten two. Good thing these really are meant just for bragging rights.)

As for the story and the characters, you may have heard from Frostilyte or elsewhere that they are over-the-top ridiculous, and that’s totally true. Neon White does have a plot, but it feels like something a 13 year-old boy might write with plenty of edge and hot girls with guns etc. etc. The protagonist even has amnesia. What more can you ask for? It’s pretty much a bad anime plot. I’m not sure just how self-aware the developers were, but it feels like they just decided to go all out here, which I respect: commit totally to the over-the-top feel or don’t bother at all.

There’s not much more I can say so far — this isn’t a review since I haven’t finished the game, but I will be taking Neon White on in full at some point. Very fun so far, though.

And then there’s my backlog of old games. I have no hope of clearing this out, not unless I find a rich patron to fund me quitting my job and locking myself in my living space and living off of deliveries which I’d love to do if I could. But I can make a dent in the backlog, at least. Looking through my list of games on Steam, I have several visual novels, a few action platformers, and an assortment of stuff that I can’t easily categorize. I remember HuniePop 2 irritating me for some reason, but it is in there and I do want to return to it — it’s been long enough that I don’t remember what it was that annoyed me about that one. Maybe I was just in a lousy mood at the time. I also have Momodora III and IV, which I’ve meant to play forever now.

Momodora III by indie developer rdein, which I played ten minutes of before getting thoroughly beaten by the first boss. Those demons just won’t let up. But I will be back — the challenge to games like this is in getting the patterns down.

I’d like to get through a few of these sometime soon, but the VNs might take precedence. Not sure how I’ll approach my backlog, but I will at least put a few chips in it, if not even a dent. And HoloCure is coming out with an update this or next week, so I’ll be wasting at least a few hours there when that happens.

I hope the brief update was interesting, anyway. This week is going to be hell for me, so I don’t expect to be able to post anything else until this coming weekend. Hope you all have a better week than I do!