the null-log

...Pragmata is very good.

*REVIEW OVER*

Okay, seriously now: Pragmata is the very only game other than Nier Automata that I could declare an instant classic. It's pretty much the new Resident Evil 4: a game that's so polished, smart and well-rounded that it holds infinite replay value. People will be replaying it decades from now.

But the first time I saw Pragmata I was not impressed with it at all. It seeming to be simply an over-the-shoulder shooter with the Bioshock hacking minigame bolted on top, Capcom having also recently burned a lot of goodwill with their practices and the deluge of Resident Evil Remake slop (Resident Evil 2 Remake was the only good remake they did). What is this, a shooty-shooty in the Year of our Lord 2026? And with a hacking minigame? Gamers patently hate hacking minigames; weren't we supposed to be all about innovation and the ever-so-mentioned subversion of expectations nowadays? And on top of this, it is yet another Dad Game, a moniker that has been given to many recent titles which follow a formula of having your character, usually a gruff, badass man or father figure, team up with a little, precious child in some way --it all seemed a bit trite.

Pushed back three times, to the point people even declared it vaporware, Pragmata has finally released and it is my 2026 GOTY, GTA VI be damned. I was not expecting anything from it but the game is seeping passion project through each and every pore; Cho Yonghee has definitely become someone to pay attention to. Bravo to the RE team for powering through remake after remake just to be able to release this; and that is one of the things that surprises me the most about it: that Capcom had the guts to release a completely brand-new, narrative-focused IP, highly polished, single-player game in 2026, not a remake, remaster or port, not a moviegame, without games-as-a-service, microtransactions, forced dlc-on-disk, season passes, that's not open world slop or rollslop. Games like these are a dying breed.

Part 1. The Dark Side of the Moon

Pragmata follows the adventures of Hugh Williams, a burly, portly astronaut employed by Delphi corporation in a futuristic, sci-fi setting, where the Moon has been colonized due to the fortuitous discovery of Lunum, a substance that can be refined into Lunafilament, which can then be used to miraculously and instantaneously 3D print anything you wish, from a pencil to a computer, a taxi cab or a skyscraper. Delphi's advancements caused rapid growth and its ambitions grew large but something went awry and here we find Hugh responding to a distress call from the Moon on a special mission.

Once Hugh and the crew arrive on the Moon they discover that the whole place has been torn to shreds and, following a sudden Moonquake, Hugh loses his comrades and falls into the abyss of the Delphi Moonbase, called the Cradle --the origin of a new fully automated, AI-driven civilization. Jungian undertones not to be ignored and obviously signaling the beginning of a Jungian Hero's journey, Hugh is saved by a mysterious… little girl, an android of a special new kind, a Pragmata, robots who look and act, have feelings and behave 1:1 like humans while still harboring superintelligence, developed by Doctor Neil Higgins as a way to cure diseases and regenerate tissue in humans. This section aligns perfectly with the meeting of an aide or an instructor in the underworld, a magical encounter that propels the Hero forward in the Jungian myth.

Realizing soon that the AI in the Cradle, IDUS, has gone rogue and has destroyed the Cradle and killed everyone, Hugh and the Android, who he baptized Diana (for the Roman goddess of the Moon), have to team together to survive. Diana can hack enemies to make them vulnerable to firepower, and to operate machinery and systems in the Cradle. Hacking is represented by a grid; manipulate a cursor around the grid with the face buttons while aiming to connect different kinds of nodes together: when done correctly, this will place enemies in an "OPEN" state, where they will glow cyan and reveal their phallic/hump/gonad-like weak points, which Hugh can attack for massive damage. Different nodes will increase your OPEN time length, hack multiple enemies at once, make the bots overheat, get shocked in place, perform many hacks in a chain, or attack other bots, among other effects; if the bot gets overwhelmed, you will be able to close in, Resident Evil 4 style, to deliver a critical point blank shot. Some items in the game world also have to be activated by hacking. Hack enough enemies and Diana will unleash a powerful finisher move, the "Overdrive Protocol".

Even though the idea of repeatedly playing hacking minigames to be able to even shoot enemies sounds dreadful, in practice it never gets old because of the clever many variations on it (even though I think there's still definitely room for more). Balancing enemy positioning against the give-and-take of finding the most interesting paths to hack enemies in the grid makes for very satisfying gameplay: you can short circuit and hack the enemies quickly, or you can try to be greedier and grab more nodes at the risk of leaving yourself vulnerable to enemies. Meanwhile, you can dodge, jump and sprint with your space suit's thrusters: how expertly and delightfully Hugh's movement mechanics were designed! Obviously inspired by the Moon Landing footage. This is another element that I like in this kind of game: Hugh, like Sam Porter, is not supposed to be an Avenger, he's supposed to be an everyman full of flaws who hates himself a little bit --beginning as a lonely and staunch "I want no children" man in Hugh's case. His movements are clunky and average person-like, he shoots slowly, and he flails and trips, limited by the zero-gravity environment of the Moon. The whole affair is more evoking of awkwardness and inertia, rather than of a hack-and-slash stylish-action game where you're a demi-god or a demon, but in a way that's still enjoyable and deep.

And in reality… this is all there is to the gameplay loop besides Resident Evil-like fixtures of exploration, file collection for lore, and some light platforming, my only critique being that the game is basically, start to finish, "run into big door and go into disparate hallways to activate N switches to unlock big door" --but hey, at least we're not doing 40 hours of fetch quests again. Pragmata rejoices in being a game and not a movie, and is what Death Stranding would be if they weren't too busy getting high off their own farts and acting as a financial front so Kojima can participate in endless Adenochrome orgies with his Hollywood celebrity buddies. I jest. Both games are great but I can't help myself to compare this game to Death Stranding because the influence is obvious, both in their technodystopian, last-man, futuristic, sterile, compu-mechanized worlds with 2001 a Space Oddysey aesthetics, and their themes of isolation, passing the torch to a new generation, connection and paternity.

Diana steals the show with how totes adorbs she is at every step of the way, and how, slowly but surely, Hugh and Diana bond and learn to collaborate with each other, Animus and Anima, as they uncover the disaster of the Cradle to stop the rogue IDUS. This is reflective of the process of individuation in Hugh through integration of his Anima. Another element that shows up in this game from Death Stranding is the Beach, speaking to the collective unconscious of the late-capitalism "performance subject" as described by Chul-Han: only a tired and jaded person like that would be drawn so heavily to the beach.

You will spend a lot of time in the Shelter, the main hub of the game, because that's from where you launch yourself to the different locales in the Cradle. This works like a little apartment or a little house, which begins cold and distant, and ends up filled with wonders and toys and other marvelous stuff by and for Diana as you begin to explore the world --watch out for "REMs", Read Earth Memories, chips containing recreations of toys and such other amenities from Earth for a little child, to be printed with Lunafilament, such as a playground, a bedroom, a campsite or a beach, sought after by the residents of the Cradle for nostalgia. The Cradle also now houses a complete city reminiscent of Times Square, the Big Apple, to provide comfort and little bit of authenticity to their artificial, 3D printed living quarters in the Moon. Eventually, even your buddy Cabin will join the Shelter, a race of walking and talking PCs that support Hugh and Diana and provide side content and unlockables if you find his figurines scattered around the world (like the Medallions in Resident Evil games). Cabin will provide a series of minigame-like "Training" challenges that work like the VR missions in Metal Gear Solid, and a series of unlockables that can be gotten by playing "Bingo" with Cabin Coins, which are awarded in-game.

Part 2. Memories are You

As Diana and Hugh continue to explore the Cradle to stop IDUS they will meet another Pragmata, who names herself Eight. Doctor Higgins had a daughter, Daisy, who fell ill of a grave disease. To find a cure, he developed the Pragmata in the image of Daisy. Number Seven, Diana, was the first; she was adopted by Higgins as his own child, but she failed to produce a cure for Daisy and was shelved away. The next iteration, Eight, showed promise in clinical trials; when Delphi caught wind of this, they rushed into things, seeking profits out of sheer corporate greed, and applied the early treatment to Daisy. She tragically died, and Higgins collapsed, feeling completely desolated. Eight now seeks to enact the will of the Doctor. When she learns about her past, Diana has an identity crisis, believing herself to be useless and worthless, junk without a soul; yet Hugh comforts her and reassures her that she matters and that her soul is in her choices.

Production of Lunafilament by the rogue IDUS caused both pollution in the form of filament waste, much like 3D printing waste, and Dead Filament, similar to the Tar in Death Stranding or the Gloom in Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, which can infect and kill anyone who touches it and is incurable. This was the reason behind the collapse of the Cradle; after Hugh and Diana stop IDUS, Eight betrays them, showing dominion over the dead filament. She now desires to pollute the Earth with the Dead filament to teach Humans a lesson and avenge Higgins, since the Doctor desperately warned Delphi's deaf ears about the side effects of lunafilament to prevent disaster; from a Jungian standpoint, with this, they confront the archetype of the Shadow.

This is where the game hits its narrative Apex: Diana gets infected with Dead Filament, and Hugh seeks to rebuild her; in doing this, he becomes infected himself, and even though Diana gains the ability to purify Dead Filament from the environment after recovering, it is impossible to clean it from organic beings. Knowing that time is ticking for him, Hugh decides to put on a strong front for Diana's sake as they seek to stop Eight: this leads to a final battle between Hugh, Diana and Eight, who assumes a new form as a massive cyborg, after which they have to evacuate the Cradle because she turns into a Resident Evil-style Dead Filament Kaiju. In a climactic scene, Hugh finally deals with her with a massive Proton Cannon and, manages to help Diana escape to the Earth in a cargo shuttle, before finally revealing to her that he's infected and he's not going to survive (which is the reason why he kept his face hidden throughout most of the game). With the last of his strength, he sends Diana off: he promised to her from the bottom of his heart, that one day he'd take Diana to see the Beach. The game concludes with Hugh's death and the reveal that Diana made it to Earth in safety; standing on the beach, she longingly reaches out to Hugh on the Moon -- by the way, the RE Engine logo was always a reference to this, did you get it?

The slow sections are a fantastic contrast to the action segments, where you're encouraged to simply talk to Diana to pass time and to discover how your relationship to her as Hugh is evolving. There are a massive amount of hidden interactions, such as seeing her playing with toys, dancing, "doing the robot", or listening to her share some of her feelings about the Doctor or Eight; her oversized, puffy jacket is an adult size, which Doctor Higgins picked for her because he thought she might be cold. This is what bumps up the game from a "Good" to an "Amazing" rating for me, that someone really, really cared about these characters and wished to give them all the joy and emotion in the world --Diana will even pout if you stop interacting with her for too long, and her face will tremble as if she was about to cry in the ending. She will jump like a little monkey when she's happy to receive a new toy, or sit down in peace to watch TV in her room. This is also how you learn that... Diana is barefoot because she charges her battery through her feet (...yeah, I know). Special kudos to the voice actors: this is one of the very rare cases in games when I actually liked the English dub better than the Japanese tracks, simply because they excellently nailed their parts.

I would like to praise this game for it being chock-full of bonus content, such as unlockable outfits, a completely exclusive series of files with a side story from a Journalist, Doctor Higgins' Brother in Law, who infiltrated the Cradle that serves as a prologue of sorts, a Sound Test, additional game modes and many weapons and perks, most of which never even show up until after the endgame. This is all incredibly rare, because these kinds of things are not usually unlockables nowadays: they sell them. I also loved the gunplay because it's very crunchy and visceral in a way that I haven't felt in games since Doom (2016), but the recourse of Call of Duty-like perks falls a bit flat for me, since I don't like perk systems like that.

After clearing the game once, you will gain access to New Game Plus, Lunatic Difficulty, and an additional mode with secret content: Unknown Signal, which actually contains the true ending of the game. In Unknown Signal you will revisit all levels and re-fight tougher versions of four of the bosses: there's a quasi-metroidvania aspect to this mode, too, because you will realize that many wings of the levels were previously out of reach because you didn't have the ability to clear out Lunafilament debris or Dead Filament. This will unlock extra-hard superlevels that play VR Mission-style: if you manage to clear Unknown Signal 100%, the true ending will play after you defeat Eight and help Diana escape to Earth, in which it will be revealed that Hugh actually managed to survive and return to the Cradle with Cabin, fulfilling the Jungian Hero's myth phase of Death and Resurrection.

Static typing zealotry is such a spiritually castrated activity: there's this mentality that "real programmers" would never even fathom using dynamically typed languages. I also find the idea of "but correctness of the program is in the types" a pretty deficient premise --tests are what gives you confidence that your program is correct, not types. The compiler can help, but it's not a silver bullet.

One time I renamed a field in a model and everywhere else that used it, but I forgot to change a call in a view. Since I was working with a dynamically typed language, this slid past and we had 500s in production. I get why people like static typing so much, but not testing properly was the actual problem in this case.

Again, there's this whole pervasive, toxic mentality of "if it's not Statically typed with GoF it means you're not a real programmer" in tech that I strongly dislike. Roblox makes billions and it works with fucking Lua for crying out loud.

The reason why I think this zealotry happens is twofold: 1. That people literally know no better because they learned Java in school and they work with Java and that's the end of it, and 2. that people actually enjoy having to make empty, ridiculous gymnastics as the ones you have to make with Static typing because it makes you look like you're working more than you actually are day to day. It makes you look big braned. To each their own, but to me it makes me feel like you've never done anything outside of an Academic context.

Metroid Prime 4, a game 18 years in the making which went through two different versions made by Bandai Namco and Retro Studios respectively, has been one of the gaming Holy Grails for the longest time. Announced back in 2017 at the end of the Wii U era, it went into development hell to everyone's concern over the years; fret not, for it has finally materialized for the Switch and Switch 2... and it's terrifyingly mid.

It's got very good aspects to it. The controls are a joy to play with (though, disappointingly, they abandoned a lot of the pointer-centric interface design that the Wii versions successfully championed back in the Metroid Prime Trilogy). The graphics are amazing, and the audio system is really sophisticated; I get tingles when I listen to the Morph Ball rubbing against the ridges in Fury Green. The game is a powerhouse and I did love parts of it.

But in what is an absolute Monkey Paw-like situation, they controversially decided to make the game a BOTW-like shamelessly, uncreatively and half-heartedly. The Open World is absolute ass, and it's literally empty except for two sad, lonely ramps you can jump off from with your bike which gets "speed limited" all the time and can't be summoned in the actual regions to explore, only in the Open World. There are a myriad signs of the game originally being vastly bigger and more ambitious, and having suffered a drastic reduction in scope until it ended up like the Dashcon ball pit of Open Worlds. I consider "Open World-itis" a blight upon the industry now. On top of this it's pretty sad that you have to traverse it by force, with no quick-travel system, every time you want to switch areas (which is the lifeblood of a Metroid), and that the areas are not interconnected like they should be in a good Metroid game, but instead are linear and self-contained; you're going to eat up the sandbox and you're going to like it, damn it, they said. And to add additional insult to injury, you have to traverse it while the game drops inane hints like "it's a good idea to revisit areas you've been to when you gain a new ability!", from Myles Mackenzie, your navigator.

I get what they were going for with the addition of Galactic Federation NPCs, and I actually applaud it; put me in the microscopic minority that actually liked the new characters and I think they did an okay (not great) job with them. Sure, they tend to act too Millennial-Writing Quirkychungus for my tastes and they feel more out of an Avengers movie than a Metroid game, but I think they were trying to move the needle and evolve the series for the best. Of particular offense is Myles Mackenzie, stereotypical "nerd" archetype who's like super good with machines and technology and acts as your Navi of sorts, spoonfeeding you objective markers and hints. He suspiciously looks as if a writer somewhere self-inserted into Prime 4 to be Samus Aran's boyfriend. There's also Armstrong, Samus Aran's Weirdly Sapphic Fangirl who goes nonstop oh my God I can't believe it she just did Morph Ball did you see that? Wow Samus you are so, so cool, I can't believe I'm finally meeting the Legendary Samus Aran, the Bounty Hunter...

Borrowing heavily from Alien (1979), Metroid games are usually lonely affairs, challenging you to conquer an Alien locale all on your own; the feeling of desolation and vulnerability of start-game Samus when faced against intimidating, unknown forces makes for a tremendous payoff as you slowly power up your abilities and make sense of the World, untangling its beautifully interconnected mazes: that feeling of "Aha! I can finally go back and open that one door!" will never cease to be incredibly satisfying in these games. The tank of a character you turn into in the late game is almost completely different to your initial state, much like how Ripley becomes the Phallic Female by the end of Alien.

Prime 4 instead insists on having Samus discover the power of friendship and to put Family first like Toretto; this is perfectly acceptable to me because characters are actually supposed to grow and morph, but it ultimately falls flat because, recoiling from the disaster that Other M was with its talking Samus, they made Samus a silent protagonist in this game again, so all of the character interaction ends up looking goofy and weird because Samus gestures in silence among a group of five chatty Cathies. I actually strongly dislike when people get pedantic about what is or isn't a Metroid, because dude they completely close themselves off to what Metroid can be, mane, but the new direction they took is a bit baffling.

The plot is a re-threading of the same old "Chosen One" plot every other Prime game has, but instead of Phazon, now it's called "Green Energy" (weird ESG wordplay there). An old civilization of Psychic Axolotls from ridiculously Yonic Solarpunk planet Viewros, called the Lamorn, met their demise when trying to harness Green Energy in hopes to progress their civilization. They put all of their culture into the Sacred Tree that yields the Memory Fruit and went extinct after a fatal event called the "Great Tragedy", which turned their whole species into zombies once Green Energy got into the atmosphere and rained down on everything, mutating the environment. They provide Samus with their Psychic abilities, in hopes that she'll be the "Chosen One" to save their civilization, and these psychic abilities are the main vehicles in the game. I loved the design of the Lamorn because they're bright, cheery, progressive and, again, really, really Yonic, unlike the usual grimdark, gritty and Phallic H.R. Geiger-like designs the series has. I'm also contractually obligated to love Axolotls.

Most of the game will consist then in exerting your psychic abilities to solve the mystery of Viewros and fulfill your destiny. You can see very remnants of Wii-era design here: from the game being very big on motion controls, to how puzzle design involves them. You could call this game "Metroid's Skyward Sword moment", for better or worse. You can shoot a tracked beam which you control with the Joy-Con, you can draw runes with telekinesis to unlock doors, spawn psychic platforms or psychic lasso things out of the way among many other things. I did like the psychic theme a lot and I enjoyed my time with it; the only game mechanic decision I didn't like was that they changed alternate shot types, like Ice, Electricity and Fire, returning from previous Primes, to now require ammunition and ammo tanks (like energy tanks) to expand your cache.

With much, much, much ado and one of the biggest edgings I've ever seen a game do, the game also offers you a psychic bike, Vi-O-La, which, again, you can only ride in the dunes of Morocco which the game calls Sol Valley, the main open world of the game. The bike is fine enough, but I feel like it was very underutilized and that they had a myriad other plans for it which they had to cancel: conspicuously a section in Flare Pool uses a secondary form of the bike that can hover over lava; why design another form if you're never going to do anything else with it?

To try to fill the void, the game offers you the ability to boost and AKIRA SLIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDE with it, which can also be expanded with boost tanks. There's also a middling form of combat during riding sections that I didn't enjoy at all.

Get used to the bike, you will need it to get from area to area, and to collect... *retches* Green Energy Crystals, the game's worst sin by far. All Primes are guilty of forcing a fetch quest at the end, as a sort of "victory lap" around the game world, but this time it literally grinds the game down to a complete halt with frustration. The game tasks you with collecting and depositing Green Crystals, which are scattered around Sol Valley, into an altar to retrieve the memory fruit as a requisite to move onto the final section of the game, your goal being to warp back home from Viewros after reuniting with the Galaxy Federation soldiers in it. But it added like two hours of gameplay to literally drive around doing absolutely nothing but gathering crystals for me. It's not fun at all and it's very disappointing that they decided to ship the game like this. It's not just horrible game design, you have to proactively want to sabotage your game to ship something as horrible as this. It's like they did it out of spite for the player: you get no meter and no indication of "how much is enough" with the crystals, you are simply expected to keep driving around for crystals and depositing them until you finally satisfy the game's obscure requirement of them. The amount of times I backtracked to Fury Green, the initial area in the game, was insane, both to obtain new weapons and to deposit crystals into the altar, which is made even worse by the long loading times in my Switch 1 version of the game and the repetitive, cringey quips by the Gal Fed team when visiting.

Ultimately with Prime 4, the bad outweighs the good by far and the game ends up being terribly mid. I understand that they're trying to appeal to a new generation, and that the game is simply trying to be more modern to appeal to today's audience. I am too much of an old fart. But Metroid has always been a niche series and it was my impression that they knew that very well; that their audience is very demanding and well defined, and that I was lodged right within it. That the series lives or dies by it. My advice to you, my reader, is: stick with the wonderful Metroid Dread to get your fix, and that maybe Retro Studios, who I still respect and think they're still geniuses technically speaking, yet whose old guard has long since left, should try a different franchise next time.

I have finally sat down to write my thoughts on Hollow Knight because it's a fascinating phenomenon. It's the second most peer-pressured game I've ever played, number 1 being taken by Dark Souls, "The King of Rowdy Little Shits", of course, which people literally shamed me into playing back in the 2010s when I was working at Epicor because if you don't play it you're a little pussy bitch and you have no balls and you smell like poop and u suck dude!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1. Over the years, I noticed a slowly rising sizzle for the game, with people calling it the best indie game of all time, or flat out one of the best games ever, or the best, and it eventually got to me. Why are people so into this game? From the outside it looks like nothing really special; Metroidvanias are a dime a dozen in indies, and this one seems like just one more for the pile.

Well, Team Cherry's 2017 extravaganza, Hollow Knight, is actually a really, really competent game, and it differentiates itself as wheat from the chaff. It has dignity. Marrying a cutesy design that's part American Newgrounds flash cartoon (think Alien Hominid, Castle Crashers or Binding of Isaac), part Dark Souls, and part Metroidvania, it excels at sound design and action game design, providing relentless, challenging, hair-pulling action, tight controls and a delightful soundtrack and sound system. In everything else, it falls short.

I am a Millennial; I have a Steam Deck, a Youtube Premium subscription and a Dog (I also have been sacrificed to Moloch and left for dead by every institution, ah! I am so Millennial it hurts); I grew up with Albino Blacksheep, Homestar Runner and Newgrounds, so I have an incredibly soft spot for these kinds of games. I think the Newgrounds aesthetic is incredibly punk-rock in a way, arising from countless pirated copies of Macromedia Flash MX 2004 being used worldwide by adolescents who juggled exploring the bleeding edge juvenile artistic expression online back in the 2000s with daily bouts of just-discovered Masturbation, Algebra II homework (we're doing quadratic equations this bimester, dude) and teenage drama. The mere idea of democratizing vector graphics was and is a wonderful thing, and it gave birth to myriad animations and artists online, humbly shared over 128kbps DSL, many of whom have gone on to create monstrous media empires, like the already mentioned fine folks at The Behemoth, Arin Hanson, and the Brothers Chaps. I think there's something incredibly Godly about how, coming from absolute nothing, they created small, tiny little games, drawings and animations out of sheer will, attempting to recreate the success of the bigger players while running on empty. Praise be to Flash!

Hollow Knight is what happens when people with that Genus mature and actually go professional. Financed with a 2014 kickstarter out of a Ludum Dare, it went on to garner massive praise and an incredible reception by the gaming populace. The game is chock-full of content and I did enjoy my time with it, even though, to quote Nerrel, the game tends to be aggressive to the point that it feels like "the game is challenging me to make me quit playing it at every second". I like challenging games, and I educated myself on shmups and Arcade gaming culture for a reason, because balls-hard games are fun (when well made), but Hollow Knight ain't it, chief.

The problem with the game, plain and simply, is that it wants to be 2D Dark Souls sooooooooooooooo bad. I hate Dark Souls. Nuff Said. It doesn't only want to be Dark Souls, but it also wants to be Symphony of the Night and Super Metroid sooooooooooooooo bad. It does way better at the latter, but the former, Dark Souls side of it bogs down the whole experience.

In ~~Dark Souls~~ Hollow Knight you are a little guy named... nothing. You literally are a bug without a name or identity who simply moves into a hive called the Hallownest to assert itself. There's no greater calling or story or mission at hand, and no plot of any kind except for the dreadful "environmental storytelling" that people love to, again, ape to hell and back since Dark Souls came out just because we Dark Souls now (which for some reason wants us to be placated with small tidbits of plot strewn around in signs, truncated sentences and small lines of dialog from some NPCs); there's just endless senseless violence.

Michel Ancel, developer of Rayman, once Frenchily said in French what's probably the most France-like French thing to ever be Frenched by the French: "plot in Video Games is like plot in a porno", to emphasize that narrative is not really important in game design and that instead, gameplay (as much as I dislike that word) is king. I agree, but a good, fleshed out narrative that doesn't insist upon itself too much will never be a detriment to a game, and will instead adorn it and supplement it beautifully. Developers, please don't cop out: do not do environmental storytelling that much anymore, please. I am begging you. Leave Environmental storytelling to Souls games.

It can be argued that the rachitic plot is there because it is one of the staples of the Metroidvania genre to give players the reigns quickly and let them explore and conquer the World on their own terms. There's something really beautiful about this kind of mentality in games and I do applaud it, but there is such a thing as being narratively too vague and open-ended, in a way that simply ends up being annoying in the end. I am not enjoying myself if you're throwing me to the Hollow Knight wiki to read up on your vague and open-ended plot to try to figure out what I just played.

There is an actual plot about Hallownest being home to a legend, a Hollow Knight, a figure who excelled at combat beyond everyone else and became the most revered Knight in Hallownest under the Pale King and Queen, who damned him to being sealed inside a "black egg" behind three seals to contain an infection of a strange Orange-colored disease that takes over the will of bugs, even when dead; none of it matters: you're here to fuck. You are tasked with finding the three seals and breaking them, for which you have to fight cruel monsters and master platforming mechanics borrowed straight away from Super Meat Boy. There's even a shinespark like movement. Exploring the world will yield many rewards and perils: some items will provide energy tank-like expansions for your health bar, some will provide missile tank-like upgrades to your soul meter (which acts like mana), and others will provide new abilities, perks (in the form of badges), or spells. Most items are simple treasures that you have to pawn off to counteract the game's biggest weak point: the soul system.

In Hollow Knight, money is your main resource: a lot of unlockables (too many, in my opinion) in the game have to be paid off with Geo from certain shops. Even checkpoints (in the form of benches), warp points with the Stag, and maps cost money. Even getting an indicator of your position in the map screen costs money. Therefore you have to conserve your money very carefully: not only are scams and bullshit situations abundant in the game, if you die, you lose it all, leaving it behind in your soul which has to be retrieved by combat, sometimes from incredibly awkward situations that pretty much damn you to lose your soul out of how terribly positioned it gets. This works exactly like, you guessed it, the bloodstain in Dark Souls: failure to recover the soul after dying will forfeit all of your money for good. I hate this mechanic because it adds nothing to the game but an unnecessary backtrack every time you die, which complicates into wasted time and grief backtracking from and to benches. It also locks you into having to backtrack to a painful point which you may not necessarily want to go back to after a game over: what if you lose to a certain boss and you decide, "oh, wait, maybe I'm not supposed to be here this early into the game; let me go explore elsewhere and get better, and then I can continue fighting this boss"? Well, that's not happening with the soul system --unless you're fine with losing all your money.

Here's your chance again for all of you fuckers to tell me to git gud: in a game about exploration where money is the main reward, you telling me that all of it can go down the drain for reasons completely out of my control is incredibly demoralizing and a middle finger to my time. It cancels out all the exploration I just did, in a game that's literally about exploration. It is pretty much a slap in the face and this is the main reason why I insist that it's almost as if the game wants me to stop playing it every step of the way --small aside: the game has no save points, the benches are "check points", and it also uses the same system as Dark Souls where every decision and death is irreversible and can't be undone by reloading, so there's no such thing as resetting out of a soul retrieval to save yourself some time.

Thankfully, the developers realized there was frustration in this and built several solutions to this problem as a consolation prize for when it happens (because it is a matter of when, not of if), by literally showering you with money and making it easy to come by and plentiful, and allowing you to keep your pawnable items and encouraging you to "only sell what you need". The main side quest throughout the game is to rescue the lost Grubs (who are totes adorbs little cutie patootie babies and I would die for them), hidden in special locations that usually require puzzle solving or platforming prowess. Rescued grubs entail a monetary reward. The game also provides a coliseum with challenges that can be cleared to get cash. Finally, there is also a shop that you can peruse where, for a fee, you can recover your soul immediately and skip the backtracking: it's good to have this accessible, but isn't it in a way an admission from the developers that the mechanic sucks? If you can just skirt around it, why even put the mechanic into the game to begin with? I think that it contributes nothing of value to Metroid games.

Grubs and other secrets are signaled to you through audio cues as you explore: I consider this to be one of the best parts of Hollow Knight, how it builds a delicate ambience with simple guttural sounds, hums and grunts. You have no idea how relieving it is to be fighting for your life, to finally run into the map guy and getting to find your way to a bench. I truly consider the sound design to be the very best part of the game.

For everything else, I have a lot of pet peeves. The map is too massive for a game of this scope, and large swaths of the map are literally empty, for example most of the Abyss and large corridors in the Crystal Mines. Granted, the point is that you should traverse these sections with the shine spark-like dash the game provides early on, but it's not very fun to just have to traverse for the hell of it. The game's graphics are actually pretty nice, taking from Gothic and noir styles with a little bit of Cuphead mixed in, but I echo other people's sentiments historically that the actual tilesets and area designs are pretty indistinguishable from each other. The black and cold-color palette seen at the beginning of the game is pretty much everything you'll see until the very end: the game tries to switch it around with greenery in Greenpath and the Queen's Gardens (my favorite area in the game), or with pink/purple hues in the Crystal Mines, but besides that it's pretty much exactly the same. Variety and ambience are very important parts in Metroidvanias, because they help make a mental palace of the game world to traverse it by memory, which is not only a necessity but one of the staples of the genre in a way, and I can confirm that I had a very bad time backtracking through the map because it it.

Another issue I had is that the game relies too much on negative reinforcement to the point that it almost feels as if it's getting some twisted pleasure from it. One tiny example is how the map doesn't update as you traverse it, to instead require you to visit a bench to be able to update the map. Tiny gestures such as updating the map as you go along in Metroid are positive reinforcement loops that you are on the right track and to help you navigate the map without making the game too easy, but Hollow Knight simply decides to do without for no reason. I actually think negative reinforcement can be a pretty great resource when used well in games, but this game just keeps stomping you with it until it's no longer cool.

I grew up in a broken home because the modus operandi the Christian sects have in the Mexican ghetto (and most elsewhere when you think about it) is to convert the more psychologically vulnerable wife first, so the husband has to convert by proxy, else he faces demise. My dad is very stubborn so he never gave a shit about the creed; my mother is a schizophrenic as well, so eventually things came down and they separated. The economy being in shambles, we had to move house several times to accommodate. Things progressively got worse and worse.

I was 21 at the time and I remember me and my younger siblings were watching Detective Conan because we really love murder mystery procedurals. I have three siblings. My younger siblings are decent but my older sister has streaks of violence and has been conflictive over time; classic "abandoned child" attention seeking complex. She also inherited my mother's schizophrenia. My father was not there.

My sister had some sort of psychological crisis and started fighting with my mother: this is a common occurrence even to this date, her being 37. I do not associate with her because of this and many other things. During their little catfight, things got dramatic and some local cops were called to come over and try to separate them and take away my sister, who was brandishing forks and stuff like that to try to scare us. I held back her arms at some point so she wouldn't move; she resisted and tried to hit me several times.

Contrary to what many people will tell you, Mexico is a Matriarchy and many legal codes are biased to favor women. This is understandable for communities for whom familial violence is still very much a thing, so the penal codes are to always put the blame on the side of men first. So my sister claimed that I hit her, that I held her arms back so my mother could punch her openly. Bunch of Freudian nonsense. Motherfucker.

They took both my mother and my sister to the drunk tank so they could cool off for a while. I stayed back but we didn't know what to do, even more now that the evening had been ruined.

My dad comes over and he tells me that we should go look at them and see what's going on. Foolish as I was, I thought "oh, maybe they want my testimony, maybe they'll listen if I talk to them about what's going on in my house", perhaps influenced by the fact that I had recently played a lot of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.

We went to the police station and they said "you're going in too, because your sister just implicated you in this, so all of you gotta cool off", and they put me in a communal cell, not without going through the humiliation ritual of taking off your shoelaces and undergoing a cavity search. I still remember the red, shiny, greasy face of the cop that one night, rude and mean as he was. Violence was not committed against my person, but I still felt bad. They put me in a communal cell in Parque Alamey, Monterrey, together with a bunch of other people. I don't remember the names of them, but I remember one of them looking very pig-like.

A policeman who probably noticed how out of place I looked in there came over to me and chatted me up for a while. He offered me a comforter, which smelled really bad and was questionably clean, it smelled like piss. He asked me the usual, why I was there, and what had happened, to which I answered. He couldn't do anything about it, but he offered a bit of reassurance before going off on his rounds.

The whole place smelled of piss, and one of the cells had been turned into an apartment, kitchen and TV included, where someone lived, one of the janitors, a curious and weird fellow. My mother and sister were in the communal women's cell across from mine. It was late at night but I didn't sleep. I looked up at the high ceiling, looking at a window, for the whole night, watching how the night became dawn.

When the morning came, people were taken for breakfast and what apparently was showering; I partook of none of those. I didn't eat for the 48 hours I was there. My dad, wanting to be there somehow, went and visited me; I don't remember what we talked about, but he brought tacos. I don't remember eating them. He didn't get the memo he was supposed to slide me a key in there.

The women's cell across was significantly emptier than my cell, where a bunch of miscreants hung out. They'd ask me about what I had done and why I was there, to which I replied that I didn't do anything but it was because of a familial fight. One of the guys, the pig-like fellow, tried to chat me up, behaving progressively more monkey-like as he saw my mother across the hall, who was then waving at me like Spongebob waving fruitily at Squidward. I didn't answer her waves; the guy asked me if I was related to the woman as he fondled his junk through the pocket of his shorts.

Realizing how stupid and how potentially in danger I was because I was obviously too much of a dweeb, some of the cops decided to move me into an individual cell. I spent the time doing absolutely nothing besides looking outside.

At 6 pm we were taken to another installation in a patrol car; the shiny-faced brutish red cop who took me in was driving it, I remember, and he turned on the siren and sped just for the heck of it. He drove incredibly fast.

After arriving at this other installation, I spent the night there. It was some kind of tribunal or a family-matters court where people could go and talk to lawyers or, I don't know, cops, to submit family violence cases. They had a small cell in there where I spent the night with some other people. I didn't see my mother, but they made me wear an orange vest as I walked in.

This process of moving to and fro Parque Alamey continued for two days. A lawyer approached me at some point to discuss my case; apparently you can pay the equivalent of 100 dollars to post bail, but nobody did it for me or us. I understand that my aunt went and visited us, because she's always been close to our family and looks after us really well, but she didn't pay for anything --I wasn't expecting her to, of course, since back then coming by that kind of money wasn't reasonable.

After 48 hours had passed, we were released. I was given back my stuff. I remember simply walking outside Downtown as my mother sang some Christian hymn and my sister blabbed on some bullshit. My father picked us up and he gave me the phone to talk to my younger sister once I was out. I told her I was alright and that nothing had happened and that I was coming back, but I sort of choked up. I was sad.

I am not telling you this story as some sort of sob story or to convince you of anything, or to look for sympathy or to seem to be a sorrier person than I am. I am simply posting this because it's the kind of stuff that must never be forgotten; it's the kind of reason why people say that "my family is a bunch of crackheads", because over the years my relationship with them has become eroded further and further. My father called me a cuckold once he got addicted to meth, because he was resentful that I was living in the USA and I wouldn't give him any money (you know how meth addicts get about money, they start stealing small stuff and pawning it for cash for yet another hit, so I had no trust in him --much less because from what I knew, he was actually slinging, not only consuming). In his mind, I had money, so I have an obligation to feed him and his bastard child even though he's been out of my life since 2005. Mexican culture is family-oriented like that, in a very toxic manner.

2004 and 2005 were incredible years for games, due to the release of Half-Life 2, Cave Story and Resident Evil 4, among many others. I consider these three to be the most influential games of the 2000s, and possibly of all time, because they broke molds and created new ones for every subsequent game to follow, even to this day. There's a little bit of Half-Life 2 in Halo Infinite, a little bit of Resident Evil 4 in Gears of War Reloaded, and a little bit of Cave Story in Hollow Knight: Silksong. Moreover, all three of them are incredibly enjoyable, superbly designed, sincere to the extreme, and excel in many different ways. The gaming industry has, basically, been chasing the Purple Dragon of these three games ever since. They are trailblazers. Ever since their time, the sole other game that has caused a rift effect in the industry is 2010's Dark Souls, which is the defining staple of the 2010s --but we're not focusing on that one now, because it's a rowdy little shit.

Half-Life 2 is the sequel to the groundbreaking Half-Life in 1998. The series took liberties that no other shooter had taken up to that point, in aims to make storytelling in games more compelling; sure, it's kind of a Quake clone when you think about it, its engine literally being a derivation of the Id Tech of the time ("Id Tech" is the name Id software gives to their engines, by the way), but it boldly implements a new, sophisticated system of scripted events and interactivity. Gone are the days where a shooter would simply be about shooting mans in the face in tiny little video-gamey mazes, to instead put us in the shoes of Doctor Gordon Freeman, a PhD Physicist at the Black Mesa facility, whose experiments have unforeseen consequences and enable an alien invasion in New Mexico.

First person shooters back then had little to no plot, being more of an excuse to go around on a rampage. As great as the likes of Doom or Quake are, Valve, correctly, saw potential in the medium and designed their games in such a way that the plot happens around you without relinquishing control, in ways that make you feel that you're actually living in a plausible, interconnected World. The maps actually resemble real world locations. Whereas most games recur to cutscenes or text for storytelling, in Half-Life these scripted events advance the plot. This has the disadvantage of potentially making you miss things if you're not looking in the right direction, but in a manner that only enhances the immersion.

Half-Life's approach to storytelling and level design were pretty much unheard of back then, and the sequel had a very high bar to clear and even raise further above. Half-Life 2's goals were to enhance immersion, through the implementation of the delightful Source Engine physics and new, sophisticated animation and interactivity systems. Characters now react, gesture and quip at you and among themselves with convincing, lifelike acting, and can interact with each other: things as simple as passing objects between characters were pretty much impossible in Half-Life 1. The characters also are not archetypes anymore, like in Half-Life 1, where the low poly counts and few assets meant that stiff, pre-programmed character models had to be reused everywhere.

In Half-Life 2 you are tasked with leading the Human resistance to the Combine: an aggregated group of alien races that take over galaxies and subdue them; the Combine colonize Earth after what's known as "the Seven-Day war", peering through a portal opened by Half-Life 1's resonance cascade. Among many things, the Combine have deployed some kind of technology that makes Humans sterile, curtailing reproduction. Again, eerily predicting the statu-quo of the World of 2025, and with a superb aesthetic that combines War of the Worlds, Seattle (the closest big metro to where Valve Software is located), and Communist Hellholes in Russia, Half-Life 2 inspires us to "become the Freeman".

Half-Life 2's gameplay, even though it is pretty much a corridor shooter, already shows signs of making strides towards the modern FPS. It extends from its peers of the time, by making most of its puzzles require risky platforming and clever usage of items in the world to make simple machines: from something as simple as a see-saw which you actually have to physically weigh down with items so you can use it to cross a chasm, to machines that can mow down zombies in half, the game has all sorts of incredible physics-based interactions. These may not seem noteworthy, in an era where GTA V is passé and where even Nintendo of all has adopted physics-based gameplay as the standard in Nu-Zelda, but this was incredibly revolutionary for its time. It is said that even Miyamoto went and lined up for the E3 demo for Half-Life 2 back then.

Half-Life 2's victory lap comes in the form of the Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulator --the Gravity Gun: once you have become accustomed to the new Physics Engine, the game presents you with a way to break it to your liking with the GG, enabling new and fun ways to interact with the world and attack enemies by punting or moving items around, again, all under a robust physics simulation. Sure, it's a bit janky by today's standards, it will never not be fun to kill a Combine soldier by means of toilet to the head.

A mysterious, nameless character who's been simply known as "the G-Man" since Half-Life 1 will interrupt you at points to address you, putting you in stasis: this is you were transported from Half-Life 1 to Half-Life 2's World to begin with. If you're fast enough you may even spot him teleporting around and meddling around, as if always looking over your shoulder, peeping on you, supervising you. His involvement in the story remains a mystery even to this day, him claiming simply that he's "recruiting" you for "jobs" that his "employers" require: this theme of you being "employed" by him without choice and for no clear reason is creepily stressed every time you achieve a game over. The G-Man is one of the most amazing characters produced by gaming of all time.

Controversially, Valve Software used Half-Life 2 as a trojan horse to launch its Steam service. Digital Downloads for games were almost unheard of back then, and deemed pretty much impossible with the slow bandwidth speeds of 2004, but they were visionaries. Steam is an infinite money hack nowadays. Through growing pains they stuck out with it, with one of their goals being to enable episodic content.

Valve saw the opportunity to speed up delivery and shorten release cycles with their Steam platform, and from these efforts come Half-Life 2 Episode 1 and Episode 2. Of note, the game over screens in Episode 1 seem to no longer be quipped by the G-Man, instead being from the Vortigaunts, an alien race who has befriended the Humans in their rebellion, who mysteriously stopped the G-Man’s will that one time around. They seek to protect Freeman, Alyx Vance, and her Father, Eli Vance, who they deem vital for the rebellion.

With each episode, the technology improves, with even better graphics and physics, characters being able to hug each other, and better gunplay, but we already know how everything ended: in a 20 year cliffhanger that shows no signs of resolving anytime soon.

Unable or unwilling, Dr. Freeman?

Whereas previous Resident Evil games were fixed-camera survival horror games in Urban and High Tech settings, more focused on smart resource management, picking your fights correctly, and being pitted against forces greater than you, Resident Evil 4 decided to nix all of it to instead go Texas Chainsaw Massacre slash Eyes Wide shut in rural Spain. Capcom gave the team a dream vacation in Spain, to go tour Old Castilla and other cultural landmarks to scout inspiration for new games, and from these efforts come Devil May Cry, Resident Evil 3.5, God Hand, and Resident Evil 4.

The initial version of RE4 revealed to the public, known as RE 3.5 by the fans, seemed to no longer focus on zombies, viruses and laboratories to instead take a more surreal and spiritual tone: it showcases Leon S. Kennedy, the protagonist of 4, fighting his way through phantoms in a stormy Castle in Spain. It is said that at some point there was some kind of glitch in this version of the game, where someone discovered that if they repeatedly knifed an enemy quickly, the enemy would remain suspended in mid-air as if it was being juggled: Kamiya and Mikami saw potential in this and from this we got Devil May Cry and God Hand.

Resident Evil 4 was retooled, perhaps given the initial reactions to the RE 3.5 trailer. It was Evolve or Die for the series, as it always has been: Resident Evil had grown stagnant and predictable, and even pathetically easy (Code Veronica I'm looking at you), and whereas they did a couple final fixed-camera games with the RE Remake and RE0, it was obvious that the series had to go somewhere else to be relevant in the Millenium. So, the game implemented a novel over-the-shoulder camera system. The games therefore are now more about hands-on combat and being aware of what's ahead of you: of pinpointing things almost as if it was a rail shooter, but with free exploration. Whereas Half-Life 2 was all about realism, immersion and physics, Resident Evil became about third-person action-adventure arcade fun to enhance the power fantasy --it even has a very primitive version of cover-based shooter gameplay.

You can already see East versus West at hand.

See, parts of RE4 still feel like they want to be a Survival Horror game, but soon enough it will become apparent to anyone playing the game that this is nothing like the Resident Evil of yore: the game decided to go more in a cheesy, cartoony, Hollywoodesque, campy route that even the Resident Evil series itself has been unable to recreate ever since. Whereas the old games were about having scant ammo and peashooters, this game instead makes it a slot machine of roundhousing, suplexing, neck-breaking, fan-kicking, blowing up, slicing down, punching and decapitating zombies, where you will be given money to buy bigger, better weapons to improve your zombie ass-kickery. Ammo is plentiful and you are completely overkill.

Leon S. Kennedy from Resident Evil 2, now a hard-boiled macho-man pretty boy in rural Spain, is tasked with rescuing the president's daughter from cultist terrorists in Spain, who seem to have discovered some kind of ancient parasite called "Las Plagas", enabling another case of bio-terrorism like the Umbrella cases in Racoon City. Umbrella has become extinct, but Ada Wong and Krauser, Albert Wesker's secret agents, seek to obtain the parasite for their own nefarious purposes of "restoring Umbrella". Las Plagas take over the body of an infected individual and submit them to mind control of their leader, Lord Saddler, who wishes to use them to enact the New World Order.

Sourpusses may still be sad that Resident Evil decided to go over-the-shoulder action movie, "betraying" the series, but I insist, it's Evolve or Die, and in this case it was the right move: Resident Evil 4 sells like hotcakes to this very day, and its sequels continued the trend, propelling RE into a media powerhouse.

RE4 is considered one of the best games of all time, in my opinion, mostly because it doesn't take itself too seriously in gameplay, plot and setting. It makes gameplay king, no matter if it's unrealistic or goofy: as a matter of fact, the goofier the better, with countless stupid one-liners in tow. One moment you're solving puzzles, the next you're riding rollercoasters in a Castle, running away from a mech in the shape of a Castilian overlord, and the next you are choking Ada Wong. I hope that more games learn from this, instead of the grim and unnecessarily edgy RE5 and 6, and maybe some day we'll finally get a game which really knows what it is: a game to be enjoyed.

Cave Story is the 2004 indie darling developed by the one-man team of Daisuke Amaya, aka "Studio Pixel". A Japanese salaryman with a wife and child, Pixel developed a tiny, retro-style "Metroidvania" lite in his spare time, simply for the love of the game. To this day, the game is available as a freeware download for PC and many other platforms, which fans have lovingly ported, remixed, modded, tributed and even repurposed as full-fledged commercial games, simply because of the impression this game leaves in you.

In Cave Story you are a fighter Android named Quote, who has been abandoned in a mysterious Cave: tasked with returning to the surface, a mysterious plot slowly unfolds. A group of Palenthologists have been deployed to the cave to investigate an incident involving a substance derived from an endemic species of red flowers, which can mutate anyone who consumes them into a monster. One of the Scientists, the Doctor, goes rogue and discovers that the Cave, which is actually in an Island floating in the sky through Magic, hosts a Crown which allows the wearer to curse people to do their bidding: he takes hold of Misery, the witch, and Balrog, a big contraption thingy, who he tasks with seizing the Red Flowers with the ultimate goal of using them to rule the world. He also converted Sue Sakamoto, daughter of Momorin Sakamoto, and the crew's engineer into Mimigas: A local species of cute bunny-like creatures which fall victims of the Doctor's genocide. He poisons Toroko with the Red Flowers in his first attempts, and local Mimiga hero King dies defending her.

The game uses a simplified version of the Metroid system where you have to explore the world to unlock powerups. However, the weapons are not used to unlock further areas of the map like in Metroid: gunplay takes the first and foremost spot, with a novel levelling system where enemies drop crystals that you can use to level up your weapons. Weapons level down upon taking damage: at points you may actually want a lower-level version of a weapon, so there's a lot of fun in this process of give-and-take.

There are multiple story branches, discovered from whether you decide to take certain weapons and items in the game or not. Particularly from your rival-slash-waifu-slash-damsel in distress, Curly Brace (get it? "Quote" and "Brace" as in... programming?). Curly is the second of the Androids left over in the Island to counteract the Mimigas, but as Quote, both suffered deprogramming and have learned that the Mimigas are not the enemy. Curly offers you her Machine Gun at one point, which you need to decline, making the game harder for a while. Then, one of the Scientists, Dr. Booster, also offers you the Booster jetpack if you meet him in the depths, which you have to strategically avoid. If both of these are performed correctly, Curly will be able to follow you to the depths to fight the Island's core of Magic, which keeps the Island afloat: if a cable tow is collected at the right time, you will be able to rescue Curly from drowning and take her with you when escaping the Island. If you don't take this route, you have the option to escape early with Kazuma, Sue Sakamoto's brother, who uses one of the Dragons being hatched in the Island to fly away, or to escape without Curly.

You will discover from resident Jenka, an Old Woman, that the magic in the Island is created by her brother, Ballos, the Wizard: the Ultimate power in Cave Story, who also created the Crown that started all of this. If you fight through the Doctor and his minions, causing the Island to collapse, and Curly is still alive, you will have the opportunity to fight through Hell for her. I really love it when games do this: some kind of Superlevel hidden at the end, which combines all of the game's ideas and cranks them to 11. Hell is one of the most difficult challenges in gaming ever, even more coming from what's otherwise quite an easy game, facing you against Ballos' terrifying three forms, a sequence that you have to clear perfectly if you want to escape the Island with Curly and Balrog's miraculous help.

Half-Life 2's penchant for "raising the bar" in immersion, realism, and physics simulation, with its episodic release schedule, scripted events, and the multiplayer forces it spawned such as Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2 and Counter-Strike 2, with their strong focus on purchasable in-game customization, and Resident Evil 4's over-the-shoulder camera and sharp focus on action, replayability and weapon upgrades, for better or for worse, have become staples in the vast majority of games ever since their release, leading to the current "Games-as-a-service" era. Every modern game has an element that's come from one of these titles.

Even though it is simplistic of its own accord, Cave Story succeeds at being poignant and compelling with only primitive 8-bit graphics and sound. It proved that 8-bit games were not only about nostalgia, that something had been lost to time with the transition to bigger, better, 3D ultrarealistic gaming, and that you didn't need a huge corporation to produce your game if you really wanted to. That the development landscape had become democratized enough that, if you truly were willing, you could create a game completely from scratch, a very romantic idea that has crossed the minds of every programmer in the World. It unleashed a wave of retro-revival games that even Big Corporations caught wind of, and it created the modern Indie landscape and its myriad games, a lot of which have become modern classics. It proved that it didn't matter whether your budget was peanuts, you could make it in the modern world if your drive is strong enough.

In 2015, an exploit surfaced for the old school Club Nintendo. Basically, they allowed you to redeem coins by registering your console's serial number, but they wouldn't check whether the number was actually real.

What I did is that I made a little python script that bruteforced many serial numbers. To my surprise, it worked: I got enough coins to redeem for a set of Smash 4 posters that way (because otherwise you need to seriously overpurchase Nintendo stuff to be able to redeem anything worthwhile).

Of course, they caught up to it and they banned all of the accounts that used the exploit. Still worth it.

The Visual Novel (or VN, also called "Dating Sim" by some when romance-centric, and "Eroge" by the Japanese when explicitly adult) is a game genre that doesn't get time in the spotlight at all, because they are icky, yucky, ugly and cringe games made for ugly otaku losers that smell of cheese, whose self-loathing mothers didn't love enough to make them functional adults in society. However, attention is deserved to the genre that brought us the supreme likes of games such as the Ace Attorney series, the Professor Layton series, VALL-HALL-A and Umineko --in the words of Doki Doki's creator, Dan Salvato: "Visual Novels allow people to experience feelings life has not been kind enough to offer them" and "they can tell stories that no other media can", and this is true: their mixed-media approach, though more resembling of a choose-your-own-adventure book than a video game, can incite emotions in people that no other games can due to their razor-sharp focus on character development, plot and world-building. In the West, the most similar things to these are point-and-click adventure games, which are currently in decline but I also love.

Doki Doki literature club is a 2017 free-to-play VN following the adventures of a group of five High School students in (presumably) Japan, who get together after class to read books and share poems and stories with each other: Sayori, your childhood friend who "values happiness the most"; Natsuki, a genki pettanko first-year student who pulls no punches but is all about cutesy bunnies and candy; Yuri, a big breasted and shy goth girl who loses herself in books and melancholy; and Monika, Honor Roll student and absolute bombshell, the leader of the club. Classic story of boy-meets-girl, you are the MC, a timid otaku who gets embroiled into the Literature Club by Sayori (since you were yet to join an after-school club). Both the setting and characters being stereotypical of Visual Novels is a very important part of the experience, since this is the game's main draw: to a newcomer, the game looks and plays, for the first couple hours, like a classic VN, full of cutesy interactions, lovey-dovey moments and branching routes, as they're known in VN parlance: love is in the air and the girls of the literature club are falling head over heels for the MC, and subtle interactions help you progress further and further romantically with the girl of your choosing, as you reveal new "CGs", or "Computer Graphics", which is the term VN developers give to illustrations.

Every day, you are tasked with "writing a poem" to share with the club: this is done by cherry-picking 20 words from lists. Unbeknownst to you, the game is profiling you --different words will produce poems that will appeal to a different girl in the club: cute words will please Natsuki, dark or edgy words will please Yuri and nice words will please Sayori. Whoever you appeal to the most, will be the girl with whom you will get closer in the story the next day.

What's special about DDLC is its penchant for subversion: the game is actually setting out to do something no other Visual Novels do, and, I'm going to go ahead and spoil it, the game is actually a horror game that, perhaps predictably, "subverts your expectations". A bit haphazardly pulled off, the tonal whiplash really stings in this one, because one moment you're writing poems with your girls and eating roses, and the next you are being sent to hell for no reason at all. I have to say that I've become a bit jaded with the "subversion" thing that every piece of media seems to want to do these days --no, putting in trans characters doesn't make you special or "cool" anymore. No, putting in "meta" "ARG" or "out of the box" mechanics in your game doesn't make you the next Hideo Kojima. You don't need to be "the next Undertale". It almost seems like everyone and their grandmother want to "subvert the expectations" nowadays, and to this I say: game developers, you don't need to subvert the expectations every time. When everyone is subversive, nobody is subversive, you know what I mean. Please focus on simply making good games.

But I digress: upon successive playthroughs of the game, you will start noticing that Monika, the leader of the club, seems to drop small hints that "she's had an epiphany", a phrase which you usually pay no mind to on your first run, as you choose Sayori, Natsuki or Yuri --most players will predictably choose Yuri, since she's the Best Girl and she's lovely and precious, and her smile must be protected. Sayori will become distressed by this development over time and yearn for your affection over Yuri's, since she's in love with you.

After spending a weekend with Yuri, to prepare materials for the upcoming "school festival" (tropes abounding) slowly getting closer to her, Sayori will confront you and confess that she loves you; whether you decide to correspond her affection (by saying "I love you" to Sayori) or not, the day of the festival she will kill herself, claiming that somebody "is in her head". She's been deppresive and suicidal all along, wanting you to join the club simply to have an excuse to get closer to you.

Now, this is where things start getting interesting because most VN players know that you should save often and stagger your saves before different forks in the road, so you can freely reload to try a different route once you see what a certain route has to offer. Predictably, a player will have several saves in store, but upon running into the Sayori suicide ending, your saves will disappear. You will never get to see what happens if you had prevented Sayori's suicide.

Once you decide to restart the game to see other routes (since your save files are now gone), you will begin to notice that the game seems to slowly become corrupted, as if the fabric of spacetime itself in-game is giving away, and, that, eerily, Sayori is completely gone from the game now. People act out of character and they become unhinged.

Besides the glitches and off-beat lines, this replay will mostly go as normal, but when you attempt to get with another girl again, this will irk Monika and the game will become further corrupted, with graphics and the music dying at times. Yuri will reveal that she's actually a Yandere, who's obsessed with you and she likes to cut herself, and upon obsessively confessing her affection to you, she will stab herself to death. This is the most gruesome death in the game: Monika claiming that, because "the code broke", you remained locked in place for a weekend in the classroom, looking at Yuri, life slowly fading away from her eyes and her body slowly becoming putrefactive. You painstakingly scroll down unskippable, corrupted dialog written in garbled text coming from her dead body as this happens. A callback is made to the "nice smells she brought" to your house in the original route with her jasmine diffuser, and the smell of her cadaver this second time you spent a weekend with her.

Did you know that in the early stages of putrefaction, the body smells fruity, like rotting blackberries in the summer heat?

Monika will then break the fourth wall, telling you that she actually did all of this herself: she has realized she exists within a game, and that the code of the game does not allow her to get with you; yet, she loves you, so she manipulated the other girls to kill themselves. She has the ability to rewrite the code in any way she wants. She can even remove dialogue options that allow you to pursue other girls, to instead force you to pursue "Just Monika", change the zoom level, take away control from you so you cannot move your mouse pointer, or delete characters from the game entirely (eerily being reflected outside of the game World by actually deleting files in your hard drive. She wants you for herself. She then decides to go scorched Earth and reprograms the game to create a dimension where there's nothing but you and Monika, where she's even able to detect if you are livestreaming the game and will then jumpscare your viewers.

The climax of the game comes when Monika decides to lock you in place for the rest of time looking at you in the eye, and since there's no other way out, you have to, honest to goodness and I'm not kidding, open up the game's install directory and delete Monika off of your Hard Drive yourself, which will cause the game to crash and lose all your save files again.

When you restart the game again, now without Monika or Sayori, the plot will mysteriously still allow for a Literature Club to exist even without her as the president; mysteriously, Monika will not be able to bear to see you pursue other girls anymore from the ether and she will finally collapse and render you her final message in the form of a song, before deleting all of the game's content and leaving you with a letter. You can't recover the game from this state except by reinstalling the game.

Final Notes

See, I'm completely aware that the horror elements in DDLC are a bit hamfisted, and almost juvenile and even laughable. Natsuki is killed off hurriedly by means of shitty creepypasta-tier JPG manipulation. This kind of stuff should not work on a 35 year old Millenial dumbass like me (it's more of an "impressionable, terminally online, Game Theory-binging Gen-Z or Gen-Alpha Discord kid that thinks that decoding base64 text is le cool epic haxx and sonic.exe is creepy" thing), but it does, and I have enough suspension of disbelief for it, because I love games that dare. Games that don't fit any mold, or that try new things, even if infantile and simplistic. Even if the game is a bit too tryhard, even dropping a 4000 word short story in base64 about a serial murderer in Yuri's character file, I still can't help but admire people who try things like these in gaming.

If you're willing to go deep enough into the rabbit hole, you'll find that within the DDLC files there seem to be hints at another game to come somehow related to a "Libitina" project, which the community has pieced together slowly over time, piece by piece. I am looking forward very much to what Salvato has in store next, after getting a taste of his madness; I really like his brand of "going deeper, and deeper, and deeper".

I was going through some old files and I figured that I would share this. It's a cup and ball demo made in lua, with gravity and rope/rigid-body physics (think Box2D).

https://github.com/nullset2/cup_and_ball/tree/main

I used some pre-implemented rope simulation, so it's not completely of my devise, but I hope somebody finds it fun somehow.