The Backbloggery

[archived from a cohost post, originally made on january 30, 2024] hot on the heels of outer wilds, another game where I really just didn't vibe with basically the entire creative product, unfortunately despite owing melos han-tani a sizable karmic debt 1 , I haven't really clicked well with any of analgesic's games so far. I got through even the ocean in one sitting because the mechanics gave me enough joy to zoom through all the levels even while I wasn't really getting a whole lot out of the game's smaller emotional beats. I bounced off anodyne 1 because of my disinterest in both the mechanics and the writing, and while this was slightly alleviated with anodyne 2, I still didn't really gel with the tone of... just about everything. world, plot, incidental dialogue... just a whole lot of words that I ended up glossing over hard. mechanically the game was unobtrusive and unremarkable for the first half, and then the back half dropped two pseudo-op...

[archived from a cohost post, originally made on january 29, 2024] it's always a bit unfortunate to feel like you're not in tune with people. sometimes the universe hums a melody at you and everyone else seems to join in instinctively but you just feel like you missed the memo and end up left out. for me, outer wilds never really clicked . it took me three... four? attempts to play the game for the motivation to actually kick in and get me to a point where learning about the world would eventually lead to the game's ending, instead of simply flickering out. there's a level of intrinsic interest that entirely escaped me, and I couldn't tell you what was causing that disconnect. it brought me moments of joy, but where others got hit like a truck by the music, it didn't do much for me. sans spoilers, while the ending was good, it didn't radically alter my opinion of the game, that being "some part of my taste just doesn't work here. I und...

[archived from a cohost post, originally made on january 16, 2024] did this game need to exist? probably not. do I want it to exist? also probably not. in the words of my partner, doll, i feel like we need to have a moratorium on hamfisted retreads of an occurrence at owl creek bridge this game is an awkward narrative platformer. it begins with the conceit that you start on a camping trip, a pair of girls spending time together, before suddenly, one of them goes missing. the other, j.j., stands up, confused and afraid, and begins searching for her. before long, she is struck by lightning, killed instantly, and then given the power to revive by the (ostensible) doctor depicted in the above graffiti. from this point on, j.j. can't die via obvious means, only being truly vulnerable after having all of her limbs removed. instead, the pain inflicted on her simply reduces the number of limbs she has to use, or affects her in other ways (eg. when she's lit on fire, she...

  [archived from a cohost post, originally made on january 10, 2024] when I saw the trailer for this game, I wondered if it would be more of a parody than I would be able to put up with, but I was nonetheless intrigued by its pitch. what if a short rpg was a scattered bundle of memories you had to sort through, in the middle of a final battle you couldn't remember the motivations for fighting in? to make an effective homage to something requires a fairly deep love for it, so you may trim where needed to make your point, and dwell on the parts that need the time. this isn't a love I assume many have when it comes to rpgs. in fact, it's something I have to fight to make space to instill in people a lot of the time. here, however, the playful nature of the cuts between story beats trims the majority of the mechanical downtime and replaces, for example, the restful breathing of walking back to town to report on a job well done with the differently stressful develo...

[archived from a cohost post, originally made on january 10, 2024] when all you have is a wrench, everything starts to look like a bolt. which, if you live in the setting of iconoclasts, is sensible, apart from the bit where having a wrench without a license makes you a criminal. I've been craving a decent metroidvania and this has been sitting in my backlog for, oh, [checks calendar] nearly five years now so I figured I'd get around to it as part of BBB... and yeah! it's a good game! really good spritework, pretty solid mechanically, though I'm more of a momentum-based platformer fan so the lack of real momentum tech made me feel like I was always moving slightly slower than I wanted... when I wasn't riding a juiced up wrench across a zipline, which always felt too fast for me to reasonably react to. the tools were fun, and figuring out how to deal with enemies was mostly fun (aside from a couple I just learned to run past lol) it didn't outstay...

[archived from a cohost post, originally made on january 10, 2024] we're going to be talking about this game on the podcast I do (live genre chronicles woooo) but I feel like I need to talk about this before we get to that on sunday. it's, frankly, fucking miraculous that this game is as good, as considered, as deliberate as it feels. where the first game was callous and flippant, trudging along with awful people in a battle system that amounted to just about nothing, the sequel has managed to make me cry multiple times, to build a set of challenges I felt satisfaction in overcoming, and to fill a world with NPCs with coherent, if ridiculous, motivations. the sidequests in this game, even at their worst, have more character to them than the entire party from the original caligula effect, which I've already written about . the writing, I can explain easily. tadashi satomi was the scenario writer on the original game, but couldn't return for the sequel due t...