Aya's Reviews

(Chapters 1-5)

Genre: whatever Toby Fox wants it to be

Hometown, USA has been imperiled by the reemergence of the Dark World, a living psychosis where ordinarily inanimate objects manifest personalities and lovable speech quirks in a shadowy pocket dimension. Kris* and the Fun Gang go on a series of whimsical* adventures* through oneiric dungeons to distract themselves from the real world.

Bullet-hell type gameplay returns from Undertale, but as the chapters progress and Toby and co.'s coding skills mature, you can never truly predict what kind of gameplay twist will happen next. Some battles are challenging, but the overall difficulty is quite low.

Nuzzle noses with a cute goat boy on a pedalo cruise over a lake of battery acid. Cut your palms on prophecy and smirk the pain away. Follow the northern lights until the channel changes. Make your friend stronger, then drive the wedge deeper, deeper, yet deeper, til she feels at home at the bottom of a lake. Hold an "egg" in your hands until they disappear.

The world is meta and self-referential. Your player character cooperates with you begrudgingly, even though a monochrome copy awaits your commands... somewhere. Operate under so many layers of abstraction that objective truth is obscured by overactive pattern recognition. Tricky Tony sure knows how to write a mystery.

(withholding score until all chapters are finished)

Genre: dungeon crawler

This game manifested itself onto my PC. It's clear that I've been chosen to wander the mechanized limbo of Naraka. Who am I to shirk such a holy command?

Golem, a rapidly decaying flesh automaton, is tasked with recovering fragments of memories to construct a giant tower in the purgatorial Naraka, thus interrupting the cycle of reincarnation. The cast of characters is truly lovely, and it features some of the most inspired designs of all time. Gomi's design, for example, perfectly communicates that she (1) deserves to have rocks thrown at her and (2) desperately wants to have rocks thrown at her. I want to be friends with Meri.

The pre-rendered 3D cutscenes are masterfully presented, and they possess such an endearingly sinister vibe that I find myself replaying the game just to witness them again. The crusty, enigmatic atmosphere is the main draw of the game: footsteps echo down dank and softly pulsating hallways, pale blue lights beckon you towards the watery recesses of the internet, rusted supplicants breathe smoke into dismal instruments to serenade the impaled angel they worship. Meanwhile, Gomi watches porn in her cardboard box.

The gameplay is doodoo feces. Wandering the Naraka is mind-numbing, and the enemies serve zero purpose other than to delay your progress. You stumble across the large cast of characters (mostly) randomly, so if there's someone you really want to see, you'll be searching for a while.

The gameplay is actual dogshit (please, for your sanity, play on Pacifist mode), but the poetry on display is priceless.

Genre: FPS

The siren song allure of capital gains has loosed a man from his stature in life, forcing him to aerate the skulls of corporate drones to feed his family cannibalistic appetite for economic prestige. Become a high net worth individual by assassinating sallow-faced executives, the quicker the better, then dump your paltry paycheck into the exotic fish commodity exchange.

It's not exactly eye candy, but I was Stockholm-syndromed into appreciating the aggressively garish art direction by the end of my lucrative career. The world is Pollockian and vague, granting your ugly corporate soul scant yet precious autonomy to explore. You have sold the corners of your vision for adspace, and several key stakeholders own shares of your body, altering it to best achieve business ventures. Shoot biomass out of the crusty, gaping holes on your ankles to double jump. Repurpose your vestigial organs into something more profitable, like a grappling hook made from your appendix.

Your weapon arsenal is sociopathic, and the bad guys come in many exciting flavors of rainbow vomit. The story is surprisingly poetic. I cried when I returned Home, even though I've never been to a place like it before. All physical phenomena have been hijacked to better facilitate the transfer of economic value, which is inherent and real. Invest in yourself and you're soon to become the perfect gun. Just remember, if you fail to deliver profit, we'll detonate the bomb in your gullet. There's no sense in keeping around a depreciating asset.

The invisible hands of the market found your trachea. They jam their thumbs into your natural kill switch, and you feel ecstatic.

Genre: TPS

Sci-fi space opera. Pilot ascetic robot monks and crack open heavily armored space demons like walnuts. Features the most hypnotic movement I've yet experienced in the genre. I'd willingly submit myself to the Helminth if it meant I could bullet jump in real life.

A Tenno's life is never dull. There are upgrade materials hidden inside the chest cavities of your enemies, just begging to be released. Wrench open their ribcages with several exciting modes of combat, including jetpack, Soulslike, and Railjack missions that make me want to die. You can also forgo your awesome living metal death machine to play as your wimpy operator if you're bored of having fun.

The community is incredible. A demigod swooped down from heaven to award me with a full Prime blueprint for helping them farm Oxium. Unlike many other free-to-play games, it is rather easy to come about the premium currency here, so long as you know about basic supply and demand. Either way, Tenno can surmount any challenge by lifting each other up.

Having finished the story in its entirety, I can safely say that nothing of consequence will be lost if you skip the whole thing. The dialogue relies too heavily on smarmy, cocked-eyebrow webcomic humor for my tastes. Sorry, they can't all be winners. Luckily, the core gameplay is more than enough to make this game worthwhile.

Genre: Management sim

Artful. Feed little guys* to the beasts* to generate energy*. Live out a single day a dozen times so that your favorite worker survives unscathed. Your patience is tested, and suddenly the piles of viscera with anime eyes don't mean as much to you anymore.

Distinct from that other, more recognizable monster lab by its sheer avarice and its reliance on poetry for worldbuilding. Diverse bestiary, always a novel way to see a life reduced to biofuel. Turn calcified trauma into swanky new clothes. Drive invaders back using abstract notions, quantified and color-coded for your convenience. When (not if) all else fails, mash the retry button.

Your old coworkers are mad at you for putting them into the torment nexus. Tug at the exposed nerve endings of your living facility and hear a wide-winged angel scream in the deep. Fight bosses that directly attack your framerate. Everyone here is unraveling, so crush their spirit until you figure out how to be a good person.

Extremely jank. Vertical difficulty curve. The art and writing and OST more than make up for it.

9/10

Genre: FPS (movement)

Nine guys shoot each other in a desert. Gravel, gunpowder, grave dust. Red sprite in the upper atmosphere, the howling of machinery. A handshake of potassium chloride, grinning like only an Atomic Age propaganda soldier could.

Useless buildings turned to mass graves. Shoot the floor and the Earth lets go of you. Feed the newbie into the iron jaws of meshed gears via banana peel. Snap your own neck to finish a punchline. Find an unloaded gun on the spawning room floor and turn into a statue. When you drink the 2Fort sewer water, everything begins to make more sense.

The badlands cannot contain you. Slide down the slanted pillars suspended in space. Grief your teammates while the unlucky hordes approach. Visit Mario Kart and cry.

Delicately coded with a tire iron. Cracked and misshapen in all the right places. Your friends will pump you full of intoxicating lightning. Make a name for yourself and your gimmick gun. Study the ancient texts and find the coded secret to happiness: X+2, E, Schadenfreude, killbind.