Izzy's 2024 gaming year in review.

[isthatallyougot]

It's cool that you will fire up something like that and give it a chance. Sounds semi-interesting, but I know I would have bailed when it came to exploring in a too-dark world. Cannot stand that.

Yeah, I like games with dark setting, both practically and conceptually, but there needs to be a good contrast and sufficient lighting (or at least convenient personalization options), otherwise it's just a chore, for sure.

#47 Ominous! (PC - ?) 2/5 (1 and 1/2 hours.)



I picked up a small RPG called Ominous! from my itch.io library out of curiosity this year. You find yourself in some apparent RPG "otherworld" at the start, as there are clear references to the normal world with which we are all familiar. This set of circumstances and their cause is unknown and distressing to the main character, Murphy. It seems your job is to find out the reasons behind this strange development and sort everything out. You are free to explore a very small 8/16-bit world and interact with characters in order to resolve things. It's not long before you find yourself in the game's only dungeon and have to fight your way out, turn-based style. There are items and skills to purchase and acquire via combat and various other methods. There are many moments where bad things happen to Murphy where he exclaims, “That's not right,” or something of that nature, as if he is trying to remember and assimilate everything that is happening or has happened. Upon defeating a boss in the main dungeon, you are sent back to the beginning having received an ending along with a series of “doom tokens” that refer to ways in which Murphy has met his demise on your adventures. Apparently you are to collect all of these tokens along with playing through multiple times in order to solve this mystery and get the true ending. It's kind of a rogue-ish game in this way, and I thought the concept was decent enough. I played through a couple of times and got a couple of endings. There's even an in-game "guide" item you get after a couple of trips where it explains how to get all the doom tokens and find all the routes through everything. And the characters are fully voiced. There's some potential here, for sure.

However, the game goes for a humorous angle that makes fun of RPG conventions and different elements common to gaming. Humor can be a tough thing to get right, and of course, what is perceived as funny will resonate differently with everyone. For me, I rarely found much amusing here, despite its obvious attempts at comedy. To make things worse, the voice acting is very amateurish. I understand that this is a small indie game, so I'm not trying to be too critical. But I still like what I like, no matter the budget and resources available to a creator. It's surely not all bad here, and I appreciate the effort, but after an hour and a half and a few trips through the short loop, I had seen all I was interested in seeing. Again, there are surely worse games out there, but the combination of humor that didn't land for me, the whiny and annoying voice work, and the short Groundhog Day repetition that made things feel lacking in content resulted in me having had my fill before uncovering all the secrets of whatever happened to poor Murphy. I will say that I think this creator has potential, and I saw enough good here that I think they ought to keep at it. But, for me, Ominous! is ultimately a 2/5.

Edit / side note: This game is so small and obscure that I couldn't even find a release date.

[canedaddy]

However, the game goes for a humorous angle that makes fun of RPG conventions and different elements common to gaming. Humor can be a tough thing to get right, and of course, what is perceived as funny will resonate differently with everyone. For me, I rarely found much amusing here, despite its obvious attempts at comedy.

That second screen shot about the highly educated fish is pretty funny to me.

[isthatallyougot]

That second screen shot about the highly educated fish is pretty funny to me.

The whole game was just:



That pic may have seriously been the funniest part though, ha!

[isthatallyougot]

#46 Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase (PS1 - 2001) 2/5 (2 and 1/2 hours played.)



For some reason, I found myself firing up an old PS1 game - Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase. I suppose I was remembering how much I loved the cartoon as a kid. I remember getting up early every Saturday morning to watch a variety of cartoons…and probably eat some diabetes in a box, but Scooby-Doo was always my favorite. When I booted up this game, the title screen blew me away with an unexpected wave of nostalgia as the full original cartoon theme song played. I don't know how long it had been since I heard it, but it transported me in the way that only the stickiest forms of nostalgia can. I just felt this warm sense of a forgotten familiarity and had a big grin on my face as I lost my sense of time and place for a few moments.

After that initial flush subsided, I was also pleased to find that the voice actors were mostly, if not all, original, or at the very least, very good sound-alikes. Casey Kasem must have surely reprised his role as Shaggy, or maybe they even pulled old clips; I don't really know. But the sense of authenticity in terms of voice was mostly very nice. The practical structure of the game is that of a collectathon platformer. There are seven regions, each represented by a screen (you see this is a "Cyber" game. ) in the hub world. And you must tackle these in order with no allowance for exploration outside the linear path. Each region has two main levels and a third boss level. In some levels you are Scooby and in others you are Shaggy, but the rest of the crew is relegated to radio communication on this caper.

As much as I love the genre and the property (at least in my memories), the actual platforming is very loose and slippery here, though. Throughout levels, you must collect and hurl pies at enemies to dispatch them as well as accumulate one-up tokens and Scooby snacks that also give you an extra life when the tally reaches 100. It's very formulaic and just lacking any inspiration to set it apart. It's just a paint-by-numbers genre-template affair, sloppily done with a beloved license as a wrapper, and the lack of both passion and skill is very evident. It's too bad that this franchise wasn't given more love here. It's on the low end of adequate in terms of execution, just barely registering as having the most modest degree of competence. It's ok, though; I got my nostalgia bomb, and the whole thing was only around two and a half hours. I really hoped for better, but maybe some other Scooby games from the past fare better. Only my affection for the hungry stoner and his hound, along with my love and forgiving attitude for the genre at large, propelled me forward. 2/5.

[isthatallyougot]

#45 Ghost House (Sega Master System - 1986) 2/5 (About 2 hours)



Looking to continue to satisfy my curiosity about consoles and eras that were largely absent from my personal gaming history, I had an interest in firing up the Sega Master System. I had a Genesis but was always interested in those cool-looking graph paper boxes from the prior gen. There was always something so striking in that imagery that conveyed the idea of digital art so well for me. I don't *think* I ever played a game from it. I didn't have one, and I don't remember any other friends that did back then. So I think this was my first foray into that system's library. Anyway, I found that the cover and some screenshots for a game called Ghost House drew my attention, and I gave it a go.

It's got a fun premise. You're to inherit the family jewels - no not *those* ones - but they're hidden inside Dracula's mansion. But of course they are. There are “5 precious stones," each of which are obtained after defeating a version of Dracula, the first four of which are “dummies” according to the game manual, clones, I guess. You must kill enemies in this multi-level abode to avoid damage and find the key that one of them is toting around. (It appears very quickly after defeating an enemy early on in each level.) You have a limited amount of power that is whittled away via damage from the game's various enemies until you die and drop the key to Drac's coffin. There are flying bats that approach in various vertical oscillations and at various speeds. There is “Death,” which is a pear-shaped blue thing - never, I repeat… NEVER go pear-shaped. Fire blowers that look like a bloated tomato with a big mouth that will severely damage you if you let it blow flames on you. You can dismiss enemies by jumping on them, punching them, or using a sword. And speaking of swords, they (and arrows) occasionally shoot in across the screen, and if you jump on them, you get points, and in the case of the sword, you pick that up and are more powerful in attack. The unfortunate thing is that it only has about 5 slashes until it vanishes from your character, and you'd have to acquire another. Most enemies can simply be punched into oblivion with a single blow, but that's not very practical in terms of Dracula or his “dummies,” who really need more oomph to dispatch. But overall, it was a fun premise with peppy, albeit uncomplicated and short looping music that controlled well and was fun and engaging on a moment-to-moment basis. It's also cool that it has a scoring system along with a primary end goal so you can sort of challenge yourself in both ways.

I wish I could limit my review to those positives, but this old-school game is really challenging and not in a fun way in terms of the primary mission. Oh, Dracula! You fiend! When he arises out of his now-unlocked coffin...because you know, you're the fool who found the key and didn't have enough sense to let him lie...you're in for some real trouble. In the first place, he has two forms, a flying bat and the human-like, traditionally imagined Dracula form. It's only really feasible to damage him in the human-looking form. But here's the problem. He rarely changes into this form, and while a bat, he is flying around frantically, usually bumping you (and damaging you) before you can do much about it. To be fair, you can follow his pattern to a degree, but you're also contending with the regular bats, the incoming arrows and swords, and whatever else may be around. It's really a bit overwhelming, but it's primarily Dracula's bat-form speed and irregular movements that cause the most problems. And even if you're lucky enough to currently be in possession of a fragile sword, Dracula has a nasty habit of appearing in his human (and defeatable) form on levels that are above you and/or far away from where you are standing. That wouldn't be such a big problem, but he rarely remains in the human-like form for long at all, sometimes only for a flash, and then it's back to the manic flying bat. This was REALLY frustrating and overly difficult, at least relative to the crucial overall fun-to-frustration ratio. To make things worse, if you're near a ladder to a lower level, you'll often get bumped down, falling out of the fight, only to have to reopen his coffin and begin again. You end up just losing too much power/health too quickly in these "boss" encounters and feeling pretty helpless overall. There are items you can collect that can restore a bit of your power, but they're limited, and even if you make your way to another, you're likely to lose as much health as you'd restore just on the way there. There is one Hail Mary or saving grace. If you jump up and “hit” a light sconce (not a candelabra) with your head, you can freeze time for several precious seconds. So, in theory, you can obtain a sword, try to dodge or jump on other enemies so you don't use it up, unlock his casket, wait for a brief moment when he is still in his Count form, hit the sconce, and dispatch him so you can move along. Now, I will say that I did this a couple of times, but the issue is that there are only 5 uses of this ability throughout any game. (This whole ability and its limitations are NOT explained in the manual, by the way. I found out looking around online.) Unfortunately, in the normal course of running and jumping, and trying to survive, you're going to end up accidentally hitting the light sconce when you DON'T need the power, making future confrontations nearly impossible. I understand that this is an old-school game, and often these affairs look to extend the playtime of an otherwise simple premise by ratcheting up the challenge (read: nonsense in this and many other cases), but this was just too punishing. I'm sure if I were a kid who had little else to play, I'd milk it and likely even master it. But that's not the case for me, and I thankfully don't have to tolerate such abuses. It's too bad because the fundamentals were fine, and the presentation and idea were engaging, but it was, difficulty aside, overly repetitive without enough variation to the overall experience. Long story short, Ghost House was rather fun but unbalanced in terms of difficulty, which resulted in some significant frustration. Had the Drac fights been better designed, I would have surely bumped this up a notch since the core gameplay and game feel were fun enough. 2/5, however I'm at least happy to have popped my Master System cherry. I'll probably give some other system entries a shot later because there was nothing wrong with the system's technical capabilities, especially for a lover of the old-school, and I could surely see it delivering a fun game.

[isthatallyougot]

#44 The Red Strings Club (PC - 2018) 2/5 (3.6 hours played)



The cyberpunk setting and theme are well represented in popular culture, games and otherwise. I think it taps into our uncertainty, fears, and sometimes excitement over the possible paths for the future of humanity and its definitions. We've got this rapidly increasing technological set of tools that seems to be growing in a scarily exponential fashion, and there can be a sensation of simply “holding on” as the winds of change blow with such force, raising questions about what is to come. I think it's a rich setting with tons of room to play and explore, and I enjoy returning to the examinations of these questions and potential answers from time to time.

With that interest, I fired up a game called The Red Strings Club, an indie game by Deconstructeam, developer of 2014's Gods Will Be Watching, which I really enjoyed. In Strings, we're greeted by a dramatic opening. Hard to beat the drama of a man contemplating how he got where he is as he plummets from a high rise to his impending death against the neon backdrop of reflected lights on the building facade as he descends. From there we flash back to the same man playing the piano in the titular bar and conversing with the bartender, a man named Donovan. Soon we are immersed in a world of themes common to the genre - the idea of what it means to be human in a world of (apparently) sentient machines, along with augmentations that can alter who people are at a fundamental level. There's also the dystopian element of the endgame of capitalism, where corporations have amassed way too much power and ultimately seek total control while having little in the way of resistance due to their overwhelmingly disproportionate resources. Specifically here, a massive entity known as Supercontinent Ltd. is in the game of mind control via a tool called Social Psyche Welfare, which is going to be implemented on an involuntary basis, taking away negative emotions and putting a permanent psychotic happy smile on everyone's face. What could be more useful than a populace of content and smiling workers and consumers?!?

You, as Donovan, step into this drama as a bartender who self-identifies as an information broker. You've got a special set of skills that allows you to mix and serve just the right drink to customers to, ironically, also manipulate their state in harmony with the emotions and mental vibe you'd like to elicit. With this natural skill, you play the central role in collecting and distributing information among the city's powerful movers and shakers, players who must be drawn to the small club due to Donovan's skills and charms.

All of this plays out via a mini-game where you must mix cocktails to suss out the secrets of the city. As you blend various liquors, a circle moves and shrinks or expands. This circle needs to align with on-screen circles that represent potential moods of the client you are serving. When you've lined up two circles, an option to have a conversation is activated. To be clear, the bulk of The Red Strings Club is centered on dialogue. And I enjoyed the general writing and concepts presented. I found them interesting in the ways mentioned above. But if you're not looking for a game that is mostly exposition, this would be a game to avoid. But, in premise, I was very into everything.

Unfortunately, there are some real missteps that drained the fun for me here. The most problematic was the fact that the mini games were not only not enjoyable; they were actively tedious and annoying for the most part. In addition to the drink mixing game, there is a small portion where you (as an android servant) are constructing implants/augmentations for humans that are customers looking for a change in their life. You place this biomass on a lathe and spin it while paring away excess material until the shape conforms to the blueprint of the desired augment. This one was a little finicky, but it worked ok. The drink mixing game was also not too bad initially, even if clunky. But there is a point later in the game where you've got to not only align an on-screen circle, but must also orient an arrow on the circle in the proper direction. If the mechanics were smoother, I wouldn't have minded the repeated attempts at pouring and mixing to get things right. But the mouse selection and movement were just cumbersome and unwieldy as you selected, deselected, poured, shook the mixer, and so on. It was actively annoying and just sapped my energy and enjoyment of the rest of the good bits. Additionally, there are only a handful of environments to enjoy, and while the narrative carried the mood and detail, it was surely frustrating to be so limited visually in a video game. I think I played almost to the end, judging by a red line indicating choices made, but I still dropped it close to the conclusion because it was mechanically off-putting, and the themes, while interesting, have been explored endlessly throughout media. It's a shame that this didn't live up to the developer's prior work for me. To be clear, there are aspects I enjoyed here, but the frustration and tedium of the primary form of mechanical interaction sapped my enthusiasm to the point that I wouldn't recommend this title. 2/5.

[canedaddy]

Man, you are the king of deep deep DEEP cuts. That one doesn't sound like it would be my cup of tea even if the minigames were all fun.

[isthatallyougot]

Man, you are the king of deep deep DEEP cuts. That one doesn't sound like it would be my cup of tea even if the minigames were all fun.

Ha, yeah. The longer I game, the more exploratory my urges. It's not that I don't like mainstream stuff, and there'll be some of that on this list, but more and more I feel like you kind of know what to expect in that "category", as broad as it still can be in some regards. And I just have an insatiable curiosity in general towards most of my interests in life, so I wander.

#43 Mizzurna Falls (PS1 - 1998) 2/5 (5 and 1/2 hours played)



I don't even remember how I became aware of the game Mizzurna Falls, but it was years ago. It's a 1998 Japanese adventure game by Human Entertainment. Anyway, it got a translation in 2021, and I had always been interested in giving it a try based on what I had seen, so I finally got around to it in 2024.

I have to say that it's very impressive in some ways, certainly in terms of what it attempted to accomplish. It's an open-world mystery in a Twin Peaks-like setting and town. The adventure takes place over the course of 7 days, each of which you play, from December 25, 1998, through New Year's Eve. There's a prologue that introduces the setting and some characters before you're given free rein to explore. In this introduction we learn that a local girl, Kathy Flannery, has been attacked by something that has left her body slashed and cut, but she's in stable condition in the hospital as things begin. Coinciding with this believed-to-be bear attack, another high schooler, Emma Roland, has disappeared, and the two events are believed to be related due to the relationship of the characters and some details about what they may have been experiencing and doing. You play as Matthew Williams, an 18-year-old senior, and due to your social proximity to these characters and their friends, you feel an obligation to help solve these mysteries, and you seek to aid the local police and others in the investigation, hoping to bring clarity and justice as well as holding on to the idea that maybe Emma can still be found and saved.

The game world, as mentioned, is open-ended, and you are utterly free to roam and explore as you wish. You can travel on foot or drive your VW Bug around the small-ish open world - the town and some of the surrounding areas. How cool is that?!? The world itself and its movements exist entirely independent of you, the player. Things are going to unfold, and events will happen even if you do nothing at all but drive around and sightsee. Granted, if you do this, you're going to have no chance of getting the good ending. (You'll likely have no chance anyway, but more on that later.) Every day you can go wherever you wish, whenever you like. You'll find out via conversation with others of some events that you'll most certainly want to attend. And as you explore, you'll discover other events, locations, and people in the world, many of which will open up further routes of exploration and discovery. But you're not guided with a firm hand in this adventure, not in the least, in fact. It's entirely up to you to uncover this world, and your own actions are what will reveal things more than any in-game direction. (more on this later) I have to say that this was very compelling in concept to me. Not only do I love the vibes of Twin Peaks, which are abundant here, but the idea of helping solve this adventure as things unfold in real-time day to day had a strong pull for me. And to be clear, the game does some amazing things, especially given the era. There is a colorful cast of locals who you'll gradually come to know, a charming, wintry small-town vibe to enjoy, a very interesting and dark narrative that points to esoteric knowledge and rituals, an intimate but dense open world that is a treat to discover, and much more. You even have a phone that allows you to call characters using the 4 PlayStation “sacred symbols” as phone numbers. Man, was I really* into things. Maybe you can feel this coming...BUUUUUT…

Unfortunately, the game has *major* problems that just drain the love. They are twofold from a bird's-eye view. There are technical issues as well as design issues, and I'll get to both. First the latter. Mizzurna Falls is absolutely RIGID in execution. I'll explain what I mean. In order to progress the story and your investigation, you must participate in **many* events as the days unfold. You've got to be in the right place and at the right time, or you'll find yourself having failed - whether you know it or not at the time. Unfortunately, the game gives little to no guidance on the “when and where” these crucial interactions take place, unless you have played and explored all locations at all times, which demands replaying things until you know everything inside and out. After having had my fill (for other reasons, which I'll get to), I looked at a thorough guide, and let me tell you, THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO WAY ANYONE COULD FINISH THIS GAME WITH THE GOOD ENDING WITHOUT A GUIDE! It is simply not possible that you could or would know where to be for each of the myriad points on the timeline with which you must engage. It's not a question of “figuring things out” with your personal wit and determination. There is simply no way it could be done. There is not enough in-game guidance or information for this to be a possibility. Having said that, if you were to play dozens and dozens (and dozens) of times, keep copious notes on everything, and then keep exploring this world over and over again, MAYBE you'd eventually come up with a complete list of potential interactions along with their time, place, and day to where you could formulate a “best course” of action. I cannot imagine the number of hours this would take, but I said it was impossible, so I want to offer this slim counter-argument, however remote for anyone who is on the right side of the spectrum of sanity. To be fair to the developers, I read that they wanted to include a journal or log that would track and show you all of the events that you had uncovered so that, when retracing your steps in additional playthroughs, you would at least have that information as a guide, and you could decide which of the events were worth repeating and where and when you might search for other events and interactions. But they ran out of time, apparently, and the game was released as-is. This aspect alone makes the game incredibly daunting for anyone who wants to *play* rather than be given all the answers. I don't like playing games with a guide at all. If I'm going to do that, I may as well just watch a YouTube video. But unfortunately this aspect of the game's troubles wasn't even the worst problem.

I've played through games with technical issues in my life and managed to muddle through if I enjoyed the game enough otherwise. I'll bear with some less-than-optimal elements if the overall package warrants it. Well, here that is simply not possible. The most egregious problem is the fact that I encountered numerous occasions where the world simply would stop loading. I'd be driving along in my VW Beetle, and the road gave way to an endless flat gray void before me. (pic included) In a sort of cruel meta synchronicity that occurred in-game, I was investigating the possible causes of Emma's disappearance by finding a library book she had been reading from a pointer received via conversation with another character. And this dark philosophy book quoted an idea that there is really nothing at all, that the ground of all things is, in fact, nothing...a void. Meta indeed, of the most unintended variety, ha. (I actually agree with this, but that's a conversation for another venue.) I got around this by reloading old saves a few times, but it kept recurring. If you cannot navigate the world, if the world vanishes before your feet/wheels, well, you surely cannot play the game, lol. I also encountered problems where I couldn't sleep at night. You have the option to go to bed and sleep for either 1 or 5 hours for the passage of time, but the game simply froze whenever I tried to execute this option. But even that didn't dissuade me. I decided to explore the world with my compulsory insomnia, and even at night, I discovered some interesting things that kept me engaged. I was willing to overlook this issue as well because I was so interested in the overall content. But then I started having issues where I couldn't even open up my inventory. My car would not respond when I got in. It was just a technical disaster on a variety of levels. I read a variety of sources about this game, and apparently Mizzurna Falls is just known to be incredibly buggy. And that's the case whether emulating or playing on native hardware. I tried everything I could, including different BIOSes and different emulation settings, and I even considered throwing it onto my actual PS2, but after reading that the best way to play was emulation due to the use of save states to mitigate some of these potential problems, I realized that it just wasn't going to happen for me. I'm a patient gamer, but I have my limits, and this just pushed them too far.

It's a real shame because the concept, setting, narrative, and overall charm were right up my alley. I desperately wanted to love Mizzurna Falls because I could see so clearly what it aspired to be. I could FEEL it, and I was in love with its essence. Sadly, its vision was not matched by its execution and not even close enough to warrant prolonged investment. Had I been able to complete this game, there are *many* more positives and enjoyable eccentricities I would have expressed in this review, but given the problems, I'm not motivated to cover this wonderful mess in full. I'm *truly* crushed. I played it for half a dozen hours, even with these glaring issues, because of its positives, but I literally could not continue because of technical problems. And the idea of starting over, knowing I'd surely encounter them again, not to mention the fact that if I wanted any hope of a good ending/outcome, I'd be bound to a guide, well, I just couldn't do it. I won't and *cannot* be so cruel as to score this ambitious disaster a 1/5. Its vision alone is worth more than that, and the content itself is incredibly interesting. I just wish I could enjoy it. I'd overlook the design issues if the technical issues weren't preventing me from playing, and I would have finished the game, even knowing I'd only get a bad ending. And I may have even replayed it. Man, I SO wanted to love this game. I am happy to meet a game on its own terms if the package warrants my investment, but I wasn't even afforded that opportunity here. I was even making my own physical notes about characters and events outside the game, so invested was I. I was planning on keeping my own diary of events and characters in order to do for myself what the developers didn't have time for - to fully plumb the depths of this world through my own documentation and investigation. Man, oh man! I'm truly disappointed that it was not to be. There are no words to express the devastation I feel. 2/5 that deserved to be at least a 4 or maybe even 5/5, given proper execution. The gap between what is and what should have been is just a proper gut punch for me. Ah well, such is life sometimes.

****************************************************

Well guys, that's the end of the "2's".



That means that everything from here on out is at least something I'd recommend (with varying degrees of enthusiasm)if the game sounds interesting to you. 42 games that I felt were worth playing in 2024...not too shabby. Let's let go of the past. Those games are done and dusted. Let's look forward to a brighter future!

[isthatallyougot]

# 42 Milk Inside a Bag of Milk Inside a Bag of Milk...(PC-2020) 3/5 (25 minutes playtime)



You know, I love experimenting with indie games and even very small projects. There's something pure in works that aren't created first and foremost as products of commerce. In these experimental and unique offerings, I find myself connecting with that early era of gaming when things were more a labor of love and passion, when tools and resources limited the canvas of creation to a more narrow scope, nurturing creative solutions and approaches. While many of these little projects don't end up on my own “gaming greats” list, there's just a fascination in creations that are born from a very small team or, even better, a single individual. These are “art projects” often as much as (or more than) they are games, and they're often very personal and just fascinating on their own merits.

I had heard of the game Milk Inside a Bag of Milk Inside a Bag of Milk... quite a while back, but knowing how short it was (it takes about 20 minutes), I was reluctant to even pay the 49 cents you can often find it for. It's nothing personal against the developer's work, but I have a hard time justifying paying for such brevity, for better or worse. But it was offered for free on itch.io early in 2024, and I wanted to experience it finally, so I downloaded it and gave it a go. The visuals are nothing special, even if they fit the overall tone. Things are blocky and two-toned shades of purple and red, where you have to do a bit of interpretation and imagination for the static scenes on display. But this is a tale of an individual who is clearly suffering from *intense* PTSD, and the visuals were befitting the distorted and traumatized perspective of the broken main character. The essence of the story is a simple act of going to the store to, like the title indicates, buy some milk. But the burdens this character carries from a very dark event that occurred in their life have predominantly rendered them in the freeze state of the fight/flight/freeze spectrum of response to trauma. So even the simplest of tasks are herculean in nature to a mind that has fractured in some fundamental ways, and even the application of prescription medications has done little to alleviate their suffering. Along the way, you're able to offer responses as you accompany this character on their task, and these replies can take the form of helpful or insensitive in nature. These actions affect the outcome and primary character's dialogue and reaction to the world. The soundtrack was also phenomenal and really added to the flavor of darkness that permeated this brief tale. It was moody, spooky, and disorienting in flavor and really enhanced the dialogue that occurred throughout. By the end of things, I really felt genuine compassion for this character and can only hope that this is not a reflection of the creator's actual internal world.

I won't say this game is a “must play” necessarily, but I really appreciated what felt like a very personal form of communication that came through in a very vivid and moving way in the end. Hopefully, if this is a reflection of the suffering of the creator, sharing this work has contributed to the easing of their pain because this picture of that state was wonderfully, if tragically, conveyed with a minimum of waste and a maximum of impact. 3/5

[crimson_tide]

Deep cut izzy strikes again !