everygame

[everygame]

DAIVA Story 6: Imperial of Nirsartia (T&E Soft, 1986)

Developed/Published by: T&E Soft / Toshiba EMI Released: 11/1986 Completed: 08/04/2025 Completion: Liberated all 14 planets, but didn’t discover the enemy homeworld of Nirsartia.

There are a few Famicom-only games that Nintendo have released in the West on their Switch Online service–and far more that they haven’t. Which makes it so absolutely bizarre that in 2022 they released this, DAIVA Story 6: Imperial of Nirsartia, an action/strategy hybrid that’s almost completely forgotten, on the service.

You could assume it’s that they were looking to fatten up the service with something where the rights were easy, but this was released before things like Golf and Mach Rider! And it’s not like it’s been released by a company who has put a lot up on Switch Online–as far as I can see, the current rights holder D4 haven’t released any other games via Switch Online before or since!

But let’s get into what DAIVA Story 6 is, because it’s… complicated. You see, in 1986, T&E Soft, largely still fresh off the success of Hydlide, wanted to make a new game, but couldn’t align on if they were going to make a strategy game or an action game. So they just… slammed them together. And then they had to face the question of what system to make the primary platform. Realising that if they made one game and then ported it to other systems they wouldn’t be using those systems to the best of their abilities, they decided on a completely bonkers plan: to make seven different games all of which use the same game design, but which make the most of each system and which feature a deep, interconnected narrative based on Indian mythology (but in space.)

According to information sourced from The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 2, this undertaking would turn out to be so insane that the lead developer, Yasuo Yoshikawa, would go blind.

(Temporarily, but still.)

Strangely, despite being the sixth game in the series, as the simplest game, Daiva Story 6 was released first, with the rest of the games following shortly after (apart from the seventh and final which unifies the stories of the previous six–due to the aforementioned blindness, it would be released somewhat later and be somewhat different, being entirely a grand strategy game with no action aspect.)

To be honest–none of this particularly matters if you’re only going to be playing Daiva Story 6, because it’s got barely any narrative apparent in it. In Daiva Story 6, you cycle between three modes:

An overhead section where you control a space ship flying between different planets. Planets start the action levels, but there are also enemy ships in space that begin in ship-to-ship battles, and you can return to your home planet to increase your squadron of ships for said battles.

The ship-to-ship tactical battles, where you position your ships each turn and then watch them fire missiles and lasers back and forth with enemies.

The action levels: a side-scrolling shooter where you control a mech that can jump and fire. Before each level you get to place three power ups during the level–a smart bomb, some missiles, and a health refill.

Daiva Story 6 is… not good. If it was just the action levels, it would be a forgettably janky Famicom game–not quite Mystery of Convoy, but close enough. Really the main reason to know the lineage is it explains the why of why you’re doing these three disparate, undercooked modes: they feel like the kind of thing you’d play on a Japanese PC of the era and they are!

But they are so undercooked in an attempt to make them accessible. The overhead section is ultimately just a menu. The only thing that really stands out about it is that the enemy ships sometimes attack planets you’ve liberated, which is a lot less than the other games, which have you actively assigning defenses to planets, making manufacturing orders and so on. 

The ship-to-ship battles seem to have almost no tactics at all, just being a war of attrition outside of some tricks like lasers but not missiles firing through asteroids. And I can’t tell if this was intentional or not, but you never have to do them. You can just let planets get captured and then redo the action level again, which is probably quicker.

The action levels, which should be the highlight are, uh… not. I love that you can place the power-ups, which is apparently a more detailed system in the PC versions (you can earn more power ups, etc.) but the power-ups outside of the health refill (aka “just place it before the boss”) need perfect foresight to place anywhere even mildly useful. 

They also made the really strange decision to make you just… not collide with any of the level. The levels auto-scroll, which makes me think they just didn’t have a solution for what would happen if the character got stuck on the level. What this means is that while you can jump around, you are generally best just trying to keep your mech at the lowest part of the level.

Proper collisions have to be something they gave up on because, like, the levels have sequences that read like you were meant to hop across lava via platforms and stuff. Instead you just… stand still and scroll through it.

It feels insanely janky and unfinished, and as a result the game veers between “completely trivial” on anything but the hardest difficulty, and “complete fucking bullet hell” on the hardest–one of which is boring, and the other which is, well, unfair, because the controls are so crappy and floaty (every level has a differing amount of gravity, which could be sort of interesting, but it adds little.)

Unfortunately, the game requires you beat it on the hardest difficulty to unlock the “true” ending that ties into all the other games (which also, seemingly, had insane requirements to get their true endings.) I was not going to bother with this because… it’s boring! Even if the game didn’t feel crappy to play, it’s extremely samey–every action level feels the same, and because there’s no point to the ship battles, I didn’t do them. 

Basically: not worth going blind over.

Will I ever play it again? I really do think it’s quite interesting that they made seven of these in a year. And listen, I did watch (skip around) some Youtube playthroughs of the different PC versions to compare and contrast. But I’ll never play any of them.

Final Thought: If your imagination was captured by this mania, the good news is that you actually could play (almost) all of them thanks to D4’s hilariously expansive Project EGG emulation service. 

It seems that all of the games apart from the second, “Memory in Durga” for the FM-77AV are available on the platform, though it requires a monthly fee–and no, none of the games have shown up on Project Egg’s “EGGCONSOLE” releases for Nintendo Switch. 

Although this has all reminded me of the existence of EGGCONSOLE, I wonder what’s there that I might like to play? Gotta be better than this, surely?

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[everygame]

INSERT/DATE/HERE (Luth Haroon, 2025)

Play INSERT/DATE/HERE and then come back, ok?

How do you feel? Did you keep clicking? Did you stop? Did you just close the window after it said game over, or did you continue? How long did you click?

…

When INSERT/DATE/HERE was shared by friend-of-the-zine Mare Sheppard, it was made clear what it was about–and I don’t think when you start playing, that you can really have any doubt what you’re doing from the first click anyway. It made me think of the “Death From Above” sequence from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which (in a reading which absolutely requires the author be stone-dead in your mind) I always read as a meaningful juxtaposition of how some people kill by pushing a button vs. the gritty reality of on-the-ground warfare. A touch of nuance with your exciting Hollywood-style story where any action is justified by the fact you’re fighting “real” baddies.

But the reality of this kind of warfare is the person pushing the button doesn’t even really think about if they’re fighting baddies. They aren’t thinking about them as people at all. And if they did, they wouldn’t care. 

In INSERT/DATE/HERE we face a genocide that has been streamlined into a series of clicks, likely performed by a drone operator, miles away, sitting in a chair in front of a computer just as you are. What they are doing has been so disconnected that it is as if they are poor, special Enders, allowed to do what they’re doing without ever really having to understand it. So disconnected that the clicks you just performed could very well have been as real. The perfection of dehumanisation. 

I clicked. I clicked until I hit my quota and then I watched what that actually meant. And then I clicked, over four hundred times, to symbolically bury every single person I killed–until it was clear that not every one could be found. Because of course, many of the murdered will never be found, or counted, or their existence will simply be disputed, whether we have seen it with our own eyes or not. As I write the window remains open, knowing that there will be no closure, there is nothing I can do, and that tomorrow the same thing will happen again.

Free Palestine. Donate: gazadirect.com (verified direct aid campaigns) / UNRWA / PCRF / MSF

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[everygame]

Wheels of Aurelia (Santa Ragione, 2016)

Developed/Published by: Santa Ragione Released: 20/09/2016 Completed: 16/07/25 Completion: Completed seven endings and unlocked every checkpoint.

Wheels of Aurelia is being delisted from the App Store on July 25th because of Apple’s anti-art App Store requirements, and as it’s been made free by the developer in response, I thought I should pick it up and play it through. While Wheels of Aurelia will be available on other platforms–and if you’re reading this after it’s been delisted, you can pick it up there–it’s not exactly a preservation issue, it really does speak to the complete devaluation of creative work in our tech industry-led culture. Companies like Apple expect apps to be updated regularly, but of course, a game can just be… what it is (never mind the fact that a lot of apps don’t really need to be updated or changed much, if at all, either.) And let’s not forget the cultural vandalism of binning off everything from the old 32-bit App Store rather than working to keep them accessible.

Apple are cunts, basically. And I think this matters in the case of Wheels of Aurelia for the same reason I wrote about Despelote in the context of our AI slopscape: Wheels of Aurelia is a genuine attempt to make a human work, but one that is still, specifically, a video game.

Set in Italy in the 1970s, the player is cast as Lella, a woman taking a road trip to France for mysterious reasons, accompanied by Olga, who she met only the night before and has her own reasons for taking the trip. In some respects, the game could be described as a visual novel, but I think that’s a little reductive–I’d call it a “car conversation simulator”, because it captures the feel of something any driver will know well–when you’re engaged in a conversation while driving and are able to split your attention seamlessly between the conversation and the road.

Here it’s cleverly provided by making the driving as simple as possible. You head forward automatically and can switch lanes to overtake and speed up (a bit) by swiping but that’s really it. While you’re driving, the conversation flows, and you can choose between a few different responses each time you’re prompted. So as you drive, you’re mostly listening, or thinking about what you’re going to say next, only occasionally making a point of taking active control of the car.

I really have to emphasise that this is the ideal video game interpretation of the car conversation. If the driving was literally any more complicated, I’d have to think about it, and when I’m driving, I don’t think about it. I’m just… driving!

Something else I appreciate about this is that it doesn’t tell one long narrative. It actually does the one thing I always want games to do–make it impossible to see it all in one playthrough, make each playthrough short, but make each playthrough tell a whole story. Wheels of Aurelia, if you play it once, is very short–less than twenty minutes. But as you play, you can pick up hitchhikers. You can change your travelling companion. You can choose which town to head to next. And you can always choose to say something different.

I thought I’d be done with one playthrough, honestly, but through the dialogue the game doesn’t just progress a narrative, but paints a portrait of Italy in the late 70s. Like Ecuador in the early 2000s, it’s nowhere I know anything in particular about, and the game (cleverly, I think) gives you encyclopedia entries (sourced from Wikipedia–now that’s some savvy effort-saving) to fill out anything in detail that you like–though I was happy to let it just flow, to feel immersed in my lack of perfect context.

The thing I would say surprised me most is that I actually wished it was a little longer per playthrough! I appreciate that the game doesn't shy away from serious, adult topics, but the endings feel a little sudden, like you haven’t spent quite enough time with the characters to get totally comfortable with them. While you draw more of them out each playthrough, it feels like you’re just capturing a snapshot of someone’s life–and the endings imply a little too much by comparison. It can feel unearned. And if you’re a completionist, I suspect that trying to see every ending here will get pretty repetitive–better to just play it until you’ve had your fill and leave some things unknown.

Sometimes there are just games that just… do what they’re trying to do. Wheels of Aurelia is one of them. There’s no “update” that they could make that would be worth it to make Apple happy: it deserves to exist, and be played, as it is.

Will I ever play it again? There are many endings I haven’t seen. Ironically, this is kind of a perfect iOS game–I can imagine picking it up and giving it a run through to get an ending I hadn’t seen at some point in the future while I’m in a waiting room or something.

Final Thought: I was interested to read that one major inspiration for this was the Italian film Il Sorpasso, as the movie it immediately put me in mind of was the Italian film Rabid Dogs. Though that is tonally incredibly different…

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[everygame]

Cyrano (Popcannibal, 2025)

Developed/Published by: Popcannibal Released: 07/03/25 Completed: 10/07/25 Completion: Completed it.

I was looking for something quick to play through and I saw that I’d noted that this recently (re-)released adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac was under an hour, so I decided to give it a run through.

The most interesting way to think about Cyrano is that it feels like one of those “abridged” books for children–it’s a gentle, extremely pleasant introduction to one of the classics. The likelihood is that while you’re familiar with the concept (poetic man with large nose helps attractive thicko woo the woman he secretly loves) and you probably know one famous scene from many, many parodies (the one where Cyrano feeds Christian lines to charm Roxanne) you probably don’t know anything else about the story or setting–and Cyrano provides the broad strokes in charming fashion.

While you get to enjoy the story, the majority of your interaction comes from JRPG-style battles and “letter writing” and the way these two sections connect is really fun and interesting, even if they’re individually a touch simplistic. The JRPG battles are so simple, in fact, they tend towards unbalanced. You can’t choose which enemy to hit and healing is weak, meaning it’s more luck than tactics. But each enemy defeated gives you a playing card, and each playing card has (most of) a line of poetry on it, so when time comes for Cyrano to write Roxanne a letter, you make the best poker hand you can from the cards you have managed to collect, and then those cards form the basis of the letter, upon which you can type your own flourishes for fun.

Something also worth mentioning about the letter writing: Cyrano was originally released in 2021 as part of a pack to support LudoNarraCon, and this new version’s main addition is to add controller support–allowing this to, for example, be played on Steam Deck. But because the game features you adding your own text to letters, you need to at least be using a soft keyboard, which as we all know, sucks. You can just skip this aspect completely as it has no mechanical effect, but it does mean you’re not taking part in a fun aspect of the game that personalises it for you (at the end it shows you all the letters you wrote) so that’s kind of a bummer. It would have been nice if there was a “I don’t want to type” version that just filled out the whole sentences on the cards for you–even if it would be less funny.

I’m quibbling, however. Cyrano is a good example of how much work a strong narrative and a breezy runtime can do for a game–especially when paired with lovely, appropriate art. You do feel like you’re enjoying a play, and at the end I found myself rather moved–Cyrano is a classic for a reason.

Will I ever play it again? It’s not going to play out any differently. But it does make me fancy watching another adaptation. Maybe that Steve Martin one???

Final Thought: The most surprising thing about Cyrano is that it doesn’t feature the most famous scene! I thought it might feature it still using the poker-hand letter writing mechanic, but it’s excised. In fact, the version of the story here shuffles about and changes things more than I expected–all the more reason to revisit the story elsewhere.

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[everygame]

Pro Wrestling (TRY, 1986)

Developed/Published by: TRY / Nintendo Released: 21/10/1986 Completed: 05/04/2025 Completion: Defeated The Great Puma!

Nintendo’s output on the fledgling Famicom/NES is… patchy. And nowhere is it more patchy than when it came to video game representations of sport, where they can somehow manage to literally solve golf game design and then months later be willing to put their name on things like Soccer and Volleyball, which are, frankly, absolutely horrendous. Even with Nintendo warming up by late 1986–they’ve just put out Metroid, for example–you can’t help but expect Pro Wrestling to be a bit of a dog, considering the sport (or at least, sport-adjacent entertainment) has a lot of terrible, lazy video games to its name, and this specific release is most famous in gaming circles for having a win screen that declares “A winner is you!” which probably was funny once.

Well, it isn’t a dog! A bit like how Nintendo lucked into working with Satoru Iwata on Golf, with Pro Wrestling they also managed to hire someone who knew exactly what the fuck they were doing: Masato Masuda.

Masato Masuda–who passed away in 2014 at the untimely age of 48, sadly–is best known by the wrestling hardcore as the creator of Fire Pro Wrestling, generally considered the greatest and most important wrestling video game franchise (even by people who love AKI’s wrestling games like me) and according to an interview in CONTINUE Pro Wrestling was made “mostly by [himself]” with “someone else who did the graphics.”

Although not a sport that would see as many games released as, say, golf, wrestling was reaching its zenith in popularity worldwide, so before Pro Wrestling there were several high profile releases from Sega and Technos that I’m sure Masuda will have tried, and two wrestling games would appear before this on Famicom:  Tag Team Match: M.U.S.C.L.E. and Tag Team Wrestling (both of which would appear on the NES before Pro Wrestling, too.)

So–not having played any of those–I can’t make any educated claims that Masuda was “solving” anything about wrestling games with Pro Wrestling. But whatever prior art existed for him to pull from, Masuda understood a few things:

Pro wrestling is about unique characters.

Pro wrestling is about grappling–and the wide range of moves that result.

Pro wrestling isn’t about winning or losing–it’s about ebb and flow.

Now, I won’t pretend that Pro Wrestling clicked for me immediately. It has the immediate problem of any 2D games where you can move in and out of the screen–not being exactly sure where you need to be to connect with attacks–and the systems by design are a little obscure. Succeeding in pulling off moves from grapples can feel a bit random, too. Does initiating the grapple confer advantage? Does it even track who initiates? Actually, how do you initiate a grapple? Is it timing? I’m button bashing, but sometimes I don’t go as hard and still win?

As far as I can tell–from nosing around a bit–the game relies on a stamina system with regeneration, with lots of “triggers” based on stamina levels. So you’re basically trying to wear down your opponent’s stamina enough that they don’t get up long enough so you can pin them, but if you’re slow–or they start beating you up, their stamina recovers.

(This matters because as you play through the game, enemies seem to gain stamina and regenerate faster.)

The genius of this system is that it ties into the ebb and flow of a “real” wresting match perfectly. You have to wear down your opponent to pull off bigger moves, but they can also suddenly go on a tear by kicking you in the face before you manage the grapple you’ve been building towards. You can misjudge when to pin, get a kick out, and have the entire match turn on its head. And vice versa! If a match isn’t going well, it’s can sometimes only take a single correct move to swing the momentum back.

Pro Wrestling also features, well, all the actual features of a wrestling match. Not only is the referee who has to run into position, you can jump of the turnbuckle, throw your opponent out of the ring and then leap onto them, get ring outs, and so on. The building blocks are all there for every match to tell a story.

This is aided, of course, by the game’s memorable characters such as Star Man and The Amazon (famously inspiring Blanka.) Each character has individual special moves–the Amazon’s all illegal moves that can end with him begging innocence to the referee, amusingly–and are inspired by real wrestlers. Fighter Hayabusa is transparently based on Antonio Inoki for example, though Giant Panther will always be debated–I suspect he’s actually based on Fritz Von Erich, the patriarch of the Von Erich family due to the use of the Iron Claw, that he famously feuded with Inoki and that it doesn’t look like any of his sons–but that’s pure conjecture.

But the point is that with whichever character you choose, there’s something special to work for, and it adds to the narrative you create through play–you survive the Amazon cheating like crazy, pull off the iron claw and pin! The crowd goes wild!

I won’t lie–often when I’m playing these older games, I’m sort of just… working through them like a job. But Pro Wrestling? I just played it! Once I was comfortable with how it played, I settled on King Slender (the Ric Flair analogue) because he had an easy move to pull off (the backbreaker–he’s the only character with a move you can pull off by pressing A only from a grapple) and had fun until I hit a genuine brick wall.

Pro Wrestling isn’t a long game–it’s built around winning five matches to become the VWA champion, then ten title defenses until you take on “Great Puma” to become VWA/VWF champion–three loops of the roster. But by the third loop your opponents are unstoppable–they regenerate stamina quickly, pull of grapples faster. I couldn’t go any further.

And really, that’s ultimately Pro Wrestling’s weakness–it all works up to a point, and then as a player you have to go “ok, how can I cheese this.”

For me, that was starting again with Fighter Hayabusa, abusing his “Back Brain Kick” and ring-outs. While it’s not a guarantee, if you can get your opponent on the mat and then position yourself right (Hayabusa’s midriff around where your opponent’s body is lying) you should be able to kick them in the head as soon as they stand up, and spamming this at the start will alow you to either start pulling off grapples or let you throw them out of the ring and then just run them into the barriers till they can’t get up quickly enough.

It would be some demoralising, terrible wrestling for the audience, but at least for me it’s what I had to resort to for the last chunk of matches.

However–that’s if you’re determined to beat this (maybe you have a blog or something where you’ve tied yourself to doing that.) I assume most players who played this either just had fun playing a wrestling career–it does track wins and losses, and you can just play it–or took part in two-player matches, where all the obscurites of stamina and grappling probably lead to absolutely epic battles. I certainly haven’t played a better two-player game on NES or Famicom by this point in 1986–and I may not for a while!

Will I ever play it again? Unlikely, but not impossible!

Final Thought: A funny and strange fact about “A Winner Is You” is that it isn’t even the original win quote. Seems that in the original release of this it just said “Winner Is You” and in a later revision they “fixed” the English by just sticking an A at the beginning.

Which is a really strange fix! You’d assume someone who actually spoke English might have pointed out that’s not better–and it’s not like “You Win!” has a character limit or something.

The fix also seems to have changed a “bug”–that if you play King Slender it takes longer to get to the first championship. This was something I didn’t mind and originally assumed was “balance” because King Slender’s back breaker seems so powerful–though when I got later in the game and realised I could basically never pull it off, my opinion on that changed somewhat…

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[everygame]

Despelote (Cordero/Valbuena, 2025)

Developed/Published by: Julián Cordero, Sebastián Valbuena / Panic Released: 01/05/25 Completed: 18/06/25 Completion: Completed it.

Despelote is boring.

But maybe that’s what’s important about it.

—

We live in an age of AI encroaching on everything we do. An age in which in particular it is going to have a noticeable effect on creativity, as the big guys look to it as a solution to that pesky problem of “having all the value being created by workers” and (some) small guys look to it, perhaps naively, perhaps without diligence, as a way to create work that competes.

And indeed, this has already happened to Panic, the publisher of Despelote, who found their second season of releases for the Playdate handheld infected–and I will use that pejorative–by generative AI, by a developer looking for shortcuts (as covered in a recent article.)

This kind of use is likely to become endemic in the games industry–for another example, 11 Bit Studios’ The Alters has also been discovered to have used ChatGPT for “placeholder” text.

The question I have however, is if these developers understand that generative AI is a flattening force. It is a product created by feeding it everything we’ve ever created, built only to mulch it up and spit it back out as slurry. Now, the big guys don’t care. What they want is a fat pipe of chemical lowest common denominator. 

But how are you going to stand out if you fertilise your fields with that? Little knowing that it eats the fields it lies upon?

Maybe those who are using it to “compete” don’t care either. Maybe you just have to get what you can and get out before it’s all over. Maybe you can fool yourself there’ll be a Mars here too, once the earth is salted.

— 

But instead of that… why not embrace your humanity? Why not spend all your effort on making something that reflects… you? Instead of creating what is common, what everyone recognises, why not create work that not everyone recognises, but in which they can find commonalities? Why not make something like Despelote?

An AI could not make Despelote. Only a human can, because only we are able to make the non-obvious connections in the story of our lives. 

Here, designer Julián Cordero recreates the experience of being a child in Ecuador, but specifically during the Ecuadorian national football team’s historic qualifying campaign for the 2002 World Cup.

This is probably not the most obvious setting you can imagine when you are creating a game about the world of children and how it interacts with the world of adults. Similarly non-obvious are the decisions made in which to represent this, which it does in a form that I feel only video games could manage–while also introducing (in my opinion) a new kind of cinematic flair. One that does not look to mainstream cinema’s style but the art house.

It opens with you playing what appears to be a retro game: Tino Tini’s Soccer 99. Despite this being a reference to Dino Dini, and Kick Off 2 and the like being fucking rubbish (sorry, this is a Sensible Soccer house) this is actually a brilliant wee overhead-view football game that could be released on its own terms, with a simple and rewarding “flick-to-kick” control scheme. But as you play, you start to overhear your parents talking, and then, cinematically, quite unlike any other game I’ve played, the camera slowly pulls away from the television, until finally, your dad turns off the telly. 

In Despelote, as it would have been for any of us, such is your lot as a child. You find yourself pulled around by your parents, told what to do–and given limited amounts of free time. And what matters is in that free time you don’t really have anything to do. You can run around, maybe you’ll find a ball to kick (beautifully, controlled just as in Tino Tini’s Soccer) but there’s nothing to hunt out, nothing to unlock, no rules for playing with the ball. It’s just you, some other kids who might want to aimlessly kick a ball about, and a world of strangers, almost all of whom are captivated by the ongoing football matches on the telly (unfortunately the game doesn’t really allow you to just stand and watch too–though you’re likely to run and check on the score when you pass a TV.)

I’m not going to lie–after the shine of kicking a ball wears off (which really does feel fucking great) and you realise what’s happening, Despelote is properly boring, and if you’re a progression-focused twat like me, you’ll probably really struggle with it. While it’s not exactly Jeanne Dielman (and you can play through Despelote in nearly half the time it would take you to get through that) it’s working in that kind of perhaps punishing milieu. It wants you to feel the boredom and frustration of the limits of childhood–and to strain against them as a child does.

Throughout, you get flashes of how Julián will grow up, how his love affair with football will evolve as he does; fragments of memory that ask you to remember that these childhood afternoons that maybe felt so boring were actually fleeting, and you can never have them back. It’s not as much about being Julián as it is about you–what these moments make you think about, how you remember your childhood. I remember my own childhood. Scotland in Italia 90. Then a flash of sitting in a car on a rainy day. Now I’m at an uncle’s, watching the penalties that ended the 1994 World Cup. Now I’m drunk for the first time, years later…

I remember.

I suppose there’s some concern about American exceptionalism here–after all, the Yanks don’t really like “Soccer”. Maybe it’s unfair to imagine the American “gamer”, unable to take the steps from soccer to their own sports obsessions. After all, their “world” championships only include their teams [“And Canada’s!”–Canadiana Ed.] so that sense of a national collective that crosses political and societal boundaries may be a step too far. Maybe to many, Despelote is just foreign, and boring.

But that, to me, represents the state of the art. The boredom of Despelote is not what has stuck with me–what has stuck with me is the themes, the ideas. Someone is saying something–something about themselves, and hoping that it makes a connection with you, your experience.

It’s not perfect, but it’s human. These days, what more can I ask?

Will I ever play it again? It says all it needs to, once.

Final Thought: One of the more interesting background facts about Despelote is, of course, that Julián Cordero’s father directed Ratas, ratones, rateros, the “first Ecuadorian film with international-standard production values” which gives reason to why this game features (in my opinion) a different sort of cinematic influence. But I think this influence has also leads to one of the most amazing cameos I’ve ever seen in a video game: a DVD of Fishing With John!!!

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[everygame]

Dino Sort (Adam Atomic, 2025)

I wrote about getting into PICO-8 games recently by way of Adam Atomic’s Prince of Prussia and owning a Chinese emulation handheld (a subscriber exclusive) and Adam recently dropped Dino Sort which I don’t think I can justify an entire post on expzine.com for, so isn’t it brilliant I have a newsletter now?

Anyway, Dino Sort is a brilliant wee game where you shuffle around dinosaurs to get them into the right positions based on their personal requirements (e.g. “don’t put me next to a predator”) very much in the style of Rush Hour. There are 26 designed puzzles which will probably take you, I don’t know, forty-five minutes to polish off or something, and though it will require some logic and lateral thinking, it’s good because at least I never ended up in one of those situations where untangling all my dinosaurs was going to be annoying or impossible the way it would be in a Sokoban game or something (god I hate Sokoban.)

Also as someone who actually hates when a puzzle game has a billion puzzles–the “infinite pizza” problem, you eventually get sick of even pizza–I loved that this was something I could pick up, play and put down, but if you really wanted to keep playing this, you can because it generates a daily puzzle every day. They’re of varying quality, but just think, you could play it every day instead of doing a Wordle, because The New York Times can fuck off.

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[everygame]

Super Xevious: GAMP No Nazo (Namco, 1986)

Developed/Published by: Namco, Tose / Namco Released: 19/09/1986 Completed: 28/04/2025 Completion: Completed it–but with a complete collapse in dignity, having to abuse save states starting around area 14.

Well, it’s been a while since the Xevious klaxon has gone off here in exp. towers–I think the last time we mentioned it was actually Tower of Babel–but here it goes off because we’re only bloody playing the first “real” sequel to Xevious! And it’s yet another Famicom game with Nazo, aka “Mystery” in the title. They were mystery mad in Japan in the mid-80s!!!

If three years feels like quite a gap for a game as successful and influential as Xevious to get a sequel, it’s worth mentioning that this is actually the fourth game in the franchise. Xevious in the arcades got an update in the form of Super Xevious (to which this has no relation) and then–and this is true–Xevious creator Masanobu Endo made a game starring an enemy tank from Xevious, Grobda, because he thought it’d be funny.

Grobda seems pretty forgotten now–and I don’t think “the top-grossing arcade game in Japan for December 1984” is quite enough to believe it was that much of a success. But of course, we know that Xevious itself was a huge success on Famicom–so it only makes sense for Namco to bang out a sequel. In this case, Endo probably didn’t think it was funny–he was on record as believing that a direct sequel to Xevious was unnecessary, and he’d left the company a year earlier. 

With Endo’s guiding hand missing, Namco–with the aid of Tose–did something that I think on paper makes sense. They looked at the huge success of Xevious, an Endo joint. They looked at the huge success of The Tower of Druaga (oh dear, set that klaxon off as well) also an Endo joint. They looked at how Tower of Druaga’s mystery design had been implemented into basically every other game coming out at this point, and thought: well, it’s chocolate and peanut butter, innit? Smash ‘em!!!

So with Xevious: GAMP No Nazo, you play Xevious levels where you have to do a particular action to progress–this is actually a bit less punitive than the original Tower of Druaga, where you can keep playing through the game with no way to win because you missed something. This can be as simple as defeating a boss (hardly a secret) or as annoying as finding hidden things in the level or interacting counter-intuitively with enemies. 

To put none too fine a point on it, this doesn’t work. At all. It’s obvious that at least Japanese players had become comfortable working through obscure fucking nonsense without the cameraderie of the arcade, but a vertically scrolling shooter puts pressure on you in a way that Tower of Druaga’s mazes didn’t–you can’t navigate back to something you’ve missed, and having to do an extra loop in GAMP No Nazo to get back there is brutally punitive.

Because GAMP No Nazo is miserably hard. There’s no sense here of the push-and-pull “intelligence” of the enemies of the original, just walls of bullets and, frankly, unfair bullshit from the very start. The first level sets the tone by featuring clouds that obscure enemies and bullets meaning you can be killed by something you can’t even see.

Trying to find what’s required to get to the next level just isn’t fun because of the high tension and sense of a “wasted run” when you get to a point and progress. The things you’re asked to do aren’t very interesting, either–while I’m hardly going to ask for the misery of The Tower of Druaga and having to, like, kill enemies in order, or something, the game only thinks to do something obvious like offer you different routes in levels like… twice.

You can choose to play this like Xevious: to see how far you get, how high your score goes by just memorising all the requirements, which isn’t actually so bad. And the game… sort of works. But it’s not as fun as the original, feeling more predictable and rote before getting ever more absurdly difficult, and I certainly wasn’t sure why I was bothering at a point–each time I’d think “maybe this is ok, actually” I’d start a new run to try and get further and get killed by enemies hidden by clouds immediately, sapping any urge to continue.

Namco might have been able to get away with this bar for the fact that it’s mid-late 1986 and the Famicom has already seen the likes of Gradius and Metroid, and Castlevania is out in a week. They went big with this one–no more numbered boxes, a special golden cartridge–which raises the question if they knew they had a pig on hand that they hoped more lustrous lips might help. Because it feels like Namco is getting left behind in both tech and design on the Famicom: GAMP No Nazo doesn’t look or play any better than the original, and that came out in 1984! At this point, the Famicom is Konami’s to lose…

Will I ever play it again? It isn’t worth it.

Final Thought: Namco, obviously, will be ok. But the sad thing, really, is that Xevious won’t be. The series that really started it all will limp on with a few sequels, but won’t ever be an important factor in the shooter genre ever again. 

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[everygame]

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive, 2025)

Developed/Published by: Sandfall Interactive / Kepler Interactive Released: 24/04/25 Completed: 27/05/25 Completion: Completed it, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves with too many details yet.

Alright, so in order for me to critique Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, I’m going to have to go into far too much detail on why video games are hard to critique, a problem that left me as the only video game critic in the world (as far as I know.) 

[If you really don’t want to read the next thousand-odd words at any point you can skip ahead. But don’t come crying to me if you don’t understand where I’m coming from.]

Video games are hard to critique because video games aren’t really just “one thing.” They don’t neatly fit into a single form where the audience can make an assumption that they know what the (ahem) experience of “experiencing” it is (is there a better way to say that?) While there are exceptions, of course, you can generally expect when you sit down to watch a film, you’re going to sit down and watch it. When you sit down to listen to an album, er, you sit down and listen to it.

(Other experiences are available.)

Now, absolutely, that’s the broadest expression of what you’re doing–consider it the first layer of experience. The hope, of course, is that in experiencing the work, you are absorbed to the point where you forget anything about your existence as a “person on a surface in a location” and instead exist in the world that is being presented–consider that the second layer of experience.

Now, that second layer does not remain static in the face of genre or stylistic choices. To take film as an example, editing, soundtrack, many “artificial” things happen that do not line up with our linear, continuous experience in the first layer. In some respects, these artificialites are not simply absorbed, we recognise them, we work with them. There can be some level of interactivity (if not affect upon) the works–we knit together a non-linear narrative as it goes. Our eyes scan the screen in a movie, our focus dances from instrument to voice at the insistence of the songwriting on an album.

Games, however, have a less “clean” line between the two layers of experience. “Play” is a different experience than “watch” in that first layer, and both change the type of absorption you experience in the second layer: you may be embodying a character rather than empathising. You may be in competition rather than conversation. And then within that genre and stylistic choices make different demands: maybe you are in “play” mode a lot. Maybe you are in “watch mode” a lot. Maybe the type of play changes.

As I’ve played a lot of old games by now, I’ve become interested in, and written about, the “transition points” of video games where technology has allowed newer forms to emerge. Don’t consider this definitive of the state of the art, but for the sake of my hypothesis, a summary:

Games begin as competition: think Pong or Breakout. There’s no narrative. You are, essentially, playing a game as people know it either against another or “the computer”. A sport. You may be able to win, but you may just be seeking a high score. Play, not watch. 

Games evolve to have a narrative “reason” for the experience: think Space Invaders. There’s a framing, if not a narrative. If you can win, it’s not the “goal” as much as it is an end-point for “besting” the machine. Play, not watch, but with narrative context.

Games make the narrative a distinct part of the experience: think even as simple as Super Mario Bros. Suddenly the game becomes about the story. You’re “rescuing a princess”. Narrative is doled out like “reward” for your success in the game. When you finish the game, it’s like finishing a book. You can put it down. Play and watch!

It’s here that the concepts of “diegetic” and “non-diegetic” story come into play. The diegeticnarrative in Super Mario Bros. is that you’re rescuing a princess. The non-diegetic story is that you’ve run forward and jumped over a block and then you ran into a koopa and you died and then you came back to life and you ran forward…

In some respects, this non-diegetic story is part of the magic of video games, in that it affects both layers of experience at the same time. On the first layer, you’re not sitting and watching: you’re pushing left, then A. But it seamlessly translates on the second layer to running left, and then jumping. But it doesn’t represent narrative.

So then you get games that try and make the narrative a “part” of the play, at various levels of success. Maybe you’re finding the narrative in the world via logs (not great). Maybe you’re pushing buttons during the cut-scenes (eurgh.) Maybe your character’s death and rebirth is explained via narrative, or you get to make choices that change the narrative–at some level of manageable granularity. Maybe they simply try and make what you’re doing in the game make such rock-solid sense diegetically that it all works seamlessly. Maybe they do that by forcing the player to do things whether they want to or not (and then smugly admonish them for it later).

It’s not, exactly, a solved problem. Nor is it, essentially, actually a problem. It simply reflects the nature of video games as an experience. Sometimes you are playing them. Sometimes you are watching them. Sometimes the mechanics are thematic with narrative, sometimes they aren’t. The first layer you inhabit changes (“I’m watching. I’m playing”) though this may not affect the second layer (“I’m rescuing a princess.”)

I don’t think there’s a kind of game that represents this split better than the JRPG.

Now, again, I don’t want to imply that I think there’s anything wrong with the way JRPGs use narrative and play. But they have, to me, always represented a particularly aggressive split between watching and playing (though don’t let me stop you yelling “but what about Hideo Kojima” or something.) JRPG battles, something you do famously a lot, almost exclusively happen in an “alternate reality” from the rest of the game right down to how you interface with them. Not even play maintains a consistency of experience.

[cough]

So that’s why when I wrote about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, it feels ridiculous to try and write about it as a complete work. Because my remembered experience of it does not reflect something I can critique as a whole. The game merges exploration and a battle system to a narrative which, to be completely honest, never engage in a way where one was in my mind during the other. It’s entirely possible that it’s different for you–I’d be interested to know what you felt the game might be doing to make that possible for you–but ultimately what it means this is a tale of two parts. A game and a narrative.

Er, though we need more preamble…

Continue reading on expzine.com.

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[everygame]

Sky Kid [NES] (Namco, 1986)

Developed/Published by: Namco Released: 22/08/1986 Completed: 15/04/2025 Completion: Got the “Happy Ending” by shooting down the Air Successor in Mission 26. Version Played: Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1

Sky Kid is, with some reservations, a wee hidden gem of an arcade game. I described it as a “strange little dead-end in the side-scrolling shooter universe” when I wrote about it, and while I stand by that, I wonder now if my framing is a little wrong because of the post-Xevious, post-Gradius context. Playing Sky Kid again in its NES port, I was struck by the thought that it might be as much inspired by something like Choplifter. While it doesn’t match in terms of design really at all, there’s a spiritual lineage: one is a “simulation” of being a helicopter pilot, and the other is a “simulation” of being a biplane pilot. The concerns in either are not that of Xevious/Gradius, where you move a frictionless collision box around, but one where you have to use your helicopter/plane using its actual characteristics to survive and succeed.

I do think taken in that framing I like Sky Kid even more. Revisiting the arcade version before giving this version a run through I was struck by how bright and attractive it is, the pleasure of doing loops, and how unbelievably rewarding it was to nail an enemy base with a bomb dead on.

Sky Kid on NES is an excellent recreation of that in terms of play, but unfortunately, it just doesn’t look anywhere near as good due to the NES’s more muted colors. At this point in the NES (or rather, Famicom) lifecycle, it’s a bit of a disappointment, with for example Ghosts ‘n Goblins doing a much better job of capturing the character of the original game despite having the NES palette to work with. It’s not as bad as Pac-Land, but it doesn’t look much better. Someone over at Namco was letting them down.

There is some effort made here to make this a different(-ish) experience from the arcade–there are more levels, a few of them are shooting galleries, you get some wee interstitial animations–but we’re still not at the point where NES games are diverging from their arcade counterparts to be particularly deeper or richer, and Sky Kid gets every bit as frustrating as it was in the arcade as you work your way towards the end of this. In fact, maybe more frustrating. As in the original, the design doesn’t support bullet hell, but bullet hell is what it gives you.

As with the original, this plays better as a score attack, but I think when you have the chance to come home with a copy of The Legend of Zelda or Metroid by this point… well, it’s not even been a year since Sky Kid came out in arcades and it already feels out of date. A biplane in a world of jet fighters: charming, but you ain’t picking it.

Will I ever play it again? I like the arcade version. I have the arcade version. This one isn’t necessary.

Final Thought: What I don’t have is Sky Kid Deluxe, the arcade update which has a range of minor differences. It was released by Arcade Archives for Switch and PS4, which I definitely support in theory, but absolutely cannot justify purchasing because… well, I’ve played Sky Kid twice now. That’ll do. Maybe I’ll see it in an arcade one day, I’d like to.

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[everygame]

JaJaMaru No Daibouken (Jaelco, 1986)

Developed/Published by: Jaelco Released: 22/08/1986 Completed: 13/04/2025 Completion: Completed all 20 different levels (it loops.)

Well, more fool me. When I wrote about Ninja Jajamaru-kun, the game that precedes this in the series, I wrote that it “[didn’t do] enough to make me put up with ININ’s bullshit to get the sequels.”

Unfortunately, having a bunch of Nintendo gold coins to use up before they expired and seeing the Ninja JaJaMaru: Retro Collection going for $2.99 made me go “well, it’s basically free, why not.”

I’ll tell you why not: because… do ININ even like retro games? Are they just an avenue to prey on a group of willing suckers–i.e. retro game collectors? Because not only is the Ninja JaJaMaru: Retro Collection bare bones, it doesn’t even work correctly.

Now, feel free to consider this anecdotal because I’ve only tested this on my Nintendo Switch Lite–and no youtubers or the like have really covered this release in depth (I imagine it’s niche enough to not have done that well.) But if you try and play JaJaMaru no Daibouken with the included CRT shader on it creates so much slowdown that you actually can’t play the game. It completely tanks.

It runs fine if you don’t have the CRT shader on, but, frankly, I’m a CRT boy. I don’t care if it’s even that good a shader or filter (notable exception: the excretable one on the Astro City Mini) just as long as it does something to muddy up the graphics. The games were literally designed to be seen on a tiny crappy telly via a noisy RF cable, so it just feels wrong to me to see them all crispy and HD.

So that was $2.99 down the fucking drain–but at least I haven’t dropped money on the Turrican Anthology or something [“yet”–Ed.] But let it not be said I’m one for giving up. Thanks to my trusty Trimui Brick I could quickly and easily get set up to play this through with an acceptable CRT filter, and I suppose that’s the way I’ll play the rest of this collection (god knows I’m not picking up a Switch 2 to try and see if it improves the performance of a CRT shader…)

But, uh, let’s actually talk about JaJaMaru no Daibouken, eh?

It’s rubbish.

Will I ever play it again? No!

Final Thought: Oh, alright, I should probably say more than that. So… I suppose the interesting thing is that JaJaMaru no Daibouken came out just under a year after Super Mario Bros. (Ninja JaJaMaru-kun was released after Super Mario Bros. too, actually) and it’s the first obvious Super Mario Bros. clone I’ve played chronologically.  Sure, it’s possible Pac-Land for Famicom was rushed out after matter of weeks in development (though unlikely) but that was based on a pre-existing design, and Wonder Boy doesn’t feel that much like Super Mario Bros. when we’re being completely honest.

But JaJaMaru no Daibouken feels like exactly what you get if you ask someone to take the art and engine from Ninja JaJaMaru-kun and turn it into Super Mario Bros.: it’s got side-scrolling levels, blocks JaJaMaru has to hit with his head to get coins and power-ups out of, and… well, I mean, that’s enough. It’s not exactly the Great Giana Sisters, but the “hit blocks with your head” thing is enough. Case closed!

I’ve previously mentioned that the original Super Mario Bros. doesn’t actually feel that good to play–we’ve just all misremembered that, because the later ones do–so I can’t really beat up on JaJaMaru no Daibouken for not controlling that well (floaty jumps and that.) What I can beat it up for is just being so bloody half-arsed. Levels look like they just threw down blocks in any old combination, and although the game features 20 levels, but half of those are boss battles that you don’t even have to complete–if you die, you just go to the next level and don’t even lose a life. And the game doesn’t have an ending or anything, it just loops. Which actually leads to the ridiculous situation that you can reach the “final” boss, fail to rescue Princess Sakura, and then… just go to the second loop. Deeply uninspiring.

JaJaMaru no Daibouken keeps a lot of the flavour of the (by this point) established JaJaMaru franchise, though, which doesn’t as much feel like something they did to differentiate as much as it’s just what they had lying around. The power-ups act like they do in the previous game and JaJaMaru’s uncontrollable frog pal Gamapakkun shows up too, albeit rarely. Though weirdly, the most interesting mechanic from JaJaMaru-kun, that you have to jump on enemies heads so you can shoot them, doesn’t show up here! (Maybe they thought it was getting too close to Giana Sisters-esque “let’s get sued” territory.) There’s an annoying learning curve in that you’ll never know which enemies kill you on touch and which don’t until, well, you’ve been killed by them, and weirdly one enemy that shows up right at the end, the Tanuki, can’t be killed but you can jump on their head to stun them. So… half of a mechanic from JaJaMaru-kun, for one enemy, just to confuse us, as a treat.

It’s all very inconsistent, but because of the terrible level design, you quickly work out that you’re just supposed to run through the levels ignoring all the enemies as much as possible. While it’s true this is optimum for Super Mario Bros. too, the level design there ensures you engage with enemies in interesting ways. Here your engagement is generally things like “oh an enemy spawned directly in front of me and killed me with a projectile before I could react.” or… actually it’s usually that one.

JaJaMaru no Daibouken is over very quickly, so it’s a very minor waste of life. But it is a waste, I won’t lie.

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[everygame]

Developed/Published by: Infocom Released: 22/08/1986 Completed: 18/04/2025 Completion: Completed it. 304/304 points (though points are random and I believe you get them all just in the process of beating the game.)

Phworr, eh lads? Etc.

Right, that’s me got all the 90’s video game magazine parlance out of the way [“you forgot ‘or something’ and to do a made-up Ed’s note”–made-up Ed.] so I can put my “pretending to be a serious games historian” hat on for the first Infocom game I’ve played since Trinity–surprisingly, all the way back in 2023. If you’ve been following along, you’ll be aware I’ve been picking and choosing Infocom games to play through, leaning towards the work of Steven Meretzky, and I’ve been looking forward to playing this for a while, his “return” to a more normal sort of adventure game after the big swing (and commercial miss) of A Mind Forever Voyaging.

Based on a joke title Meretzky posted on a whiteboard featuring upcoming releases for Infocom, Leather Goddesses of Phobos is a strange release, I think. Infocom had always made games for adults, but never “adult” games, and there hadn’t really been any commercial “adult” games for years at this point. Softporn Adventure came out in 1981, and unless you’re Portuguese and have fond memories of Paradise Cafe for ZX Spectrum that was about your lot. So it seems like quite a gamble for Infocom to release something that appears so risque–but then Leather Goddesses of Phobos isn’t really an adult game at all. In fact, it’s barely smutty at its most extreme, and Meretzky, wanting to drum up a bit of controversy after the failure of an anti-Reaganite art game, decided “sex sells” and Infocom as a group went for it: digging through Meretzky’s papers, he sent a sheet of possible game ideas to the other imps (this may have been the standard procedure at Infocom?) for his next game, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos won out, where its sexual content was expressed as “very soft-core; see Barbarella as an example.” (it doesn’t even go that far, to my eyes.)

(The sheet is quite illuminating in general, a kind of ideation that I recognise as a game developer. We have another attempt, I think, to court a bit of controversy with “The Interactive Bible”, an interesting if not-yet-fully-baked design idea “Blazing Parsers” and then something that’s optimistically trying to make making a game quicker, “The Viable Idea.” Personally, I’m sad we never saw an Infocom spaghetti western.)

Unlike some other Infocom releases, I don’t really have any personal history with Leather Goddesses of Phobos outside of memories of the (very) mildly titillating screenshots of its sequel, Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X! In fact, the main thing I have to say is that I only realised this wasn’t called “Leather Goddess of Phobos” after playing it for a bit, which won’t make me cry “Mandela Effect” as much as “Goddesses is such an inelegant word, it’s bizarre it isn’t just Leather Goddess. My brain was correct, reality wasn’t.”

 But anyway, what is it actually like to play Leather Goddess(es) of Phobos?

I’ve been a bit up and down on the Infocom games I’ve played–some might say unnecessarily hard on them, judging them by the coddled standards of 2025. But Leather Goddesses of Phobos gets off to a good start. Unlike Trinity, where you essentially never know what you’re actually trying to do overall, Leather Goddesses of Phobos more or less immediately has a character hand you a laundry list of items to collect, and then you go “oh, I guess I just have to collect these, then.”

As good as that is, it’s also a little… underwhelming. Having picked and chosen, I’m aware that I’ve not seen everything that Infocom has to offer, but I’m still surprised that I haven’t played an Infocom game since Deadline (their third game) that gave me any sense of anything except a static world. Leather Goddesses of Phobos gives you a Floyd-like companion (Trent, or Tiffany) but they barely seem to exist, and even when you meet characters in the world they feel so… un-interactive. Maybe, at best, they take part in a little vignette.

I suppose with Leather Goddesses of Phobos I’m really realising–and perhaps chafing against–the limitations of the text adventure at least in the mid-1980s. In some respects, you want a text adventure to have the feeling of a book; limitless, enveloping imagination. But in other respects, you want to play it like a game. You want to be reacted to. It’s probably, why, to be honest, characters have been so sparse in these games–because when you try and interact with a character, and they don’t do anything, or it feels wrong, the illusion of being on an adventure is broken. You’re not reading a book, you’re on a dark ride and suddenly the lights slam on and you’re aware you’re looking at a mannequin, not the king of Mars.

Somehow, the fact that characters in Deadline might like… walk into another room just abated that, and I’m not asking for characters to roam across the planet here, but maybe if they piped up a bit more. Felt a bit more worth talking to. The issue with making a “funny” game is that so much of comedy is character work, and here, really, the only character is the parser.

But I’m being a bit harsh, because Leather Goddesses of Phobos is otherwise an extremely solid classic rooms and items, bread and butter text adventure. The best I’ve played since Meretsky’s own Planetfall, and arguably the best I’ve played full stop. It’s understandable, accessible, and I never had to use an Invisiclue to the point where it just told me what to do–well, except in one particular case.

That one I’m just going to spoil, actually. One of the things that makes Leather Goddesses of Phobos work so well is how well integrated the feelies are. Sure, I don’t have the box to hand, but there’s a comic which includes a couple of direct hints for some puzzles, a map which is unbelievably necessary and helpful, and a scratch and sniff card, which I’m sure nearly 40 years later is completely useless even if you opened a brand new box, but which is a really cute and silly B movie-adjacent idea that’s perfectly fitting. One of the things it does is prompt you to “smell” things in the game to work out what they are (which it thankfully tells you in text–scratch and sniff cards have always barely worked). Early in the game (for me–the game is fairly open ended) you sniff and discover some chocolate, which, of course, you’ll hang on to. Later, for reasons, your mind will be transferred into a gorilla. But you’re not strong enough to break out of the cage. I assume you can see where this is going: you need to eat the chocolate to get strong enough to break out of the cage.

You know, that famous thing about gorillas. That chocolate makes them strong.

This is, obviously, nonsense. The only animal-related fact I know about chocolate is that it kills dogs and I certainly wasn’t hanging onto it in the game expecting I’d use it to kill a poodle or something [“you said ‘or something’ after all”–90s Ed.] Considering that banana is one of the most recognisable smells you could possibly use on a scratch-and-sniff card, I had to assume that Meretsky simply thought that giving you a banana would be too obvious a solution so went with the impossible to work out chocolate, but I couldn’t find anything in his notes to reflect that. According to the ever reliable Digital Antiquarian, Meretsky tested the scratch and sniff scents on the other imps to select the most recognisable scents to then use in the game, and I do think it adds insult to injury that one of those chosen scents actually was banana! But it’s used elsewhere!!!

I even found a playtester who complained about this exact puzzle:

“It is reasonable to not eat the chocolate and even suspect the sugar rush, but why oh why would you put the chocolate in the cage?”

I suppose he’s more complaining that this game features more than one puzzle which requires hindsight, and to be honest, they should have fixed those too. But in general, Leather Goddess of Phobos is logical and fair, while still managing to make puzzles funny and clever–the best of The Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy without the worst of it. There’s a puzzle about kissing a frog that will immediately put you in mind of the famous babel fish (and which made me laugh out loud) and a puzzle involving a mysterious machine and wordplay that is so perfect and silly that it’s maybe one of my favourite things in an adventure game ever–possibly worth the price of admission alone.

The game does still undercut itself though–for seemingly no reason. There are definitely ways to manufacture yourself a no-win, dead man-walking situation, for example, all of which I miraculously managed to dodge due to the order I did things in, and I definitely had a few puzzles where by all rights I was just lucky to not have to resort to clues. One object on your list you need to specifically look somewhere you might not look to find, and then you need to be really specific with the parser to do what you need to do to get it. Another requires a vignette that you need to be in time for (though that one I immediately sussed what was up–the “dead end” was just so suspicious to me. But I reached it almost at the end of the game–if I’d got there early, I could have had to replay nearly the entire game.)

The game’s maze–which people find famously annoying–is a perfect example of how the game undercuts itself. You have the map in hand. You have the required clue. If you’re patient, it’s actually really satisfying to navigate it, and I did so… and then the torch I was using burned out, and I had to do the whole thing again much more efficiently. Close to hundreds of turns. It was so unnecessary! I was having fun!!! Why punish me for not being perfect!!!

These moments, however, are far rarer than you’d expect. I noted above that the game is fairly open ended, and I’m not sure if there’s a “preferred” way to work through the game, but as I said above in my playthrough I never entered a vignette where I didn’t have something to hand I needed (though it’s possible, I’m sure) and if I got stuck somewhere there was always somewhere else to go for me to solve something else. I never put this down annoyed–well, apart from the fucking maze. Well, not the fucking maze–the fucking torch (I honestly did think the maze was clever.)

I think the thing about Leather Goddesses of Phobos is… it’s probably as good as one of these things is going to get without a much more modern design philosophy. You know what you need to do and every time you sit down and play it you get a little closer to doing it–and it’s charming while you do it. But it’s never sexy. I did play it on the “LEWD” setting and took every opportunity for a bonk, because I’m still thirteen at heart, but my dander remained unfrothed; it doesn’t even reach the heights of Alter Ego! I guess I’ll see how I get on with [checks to-play list] Leisure Suit Larry??? Eugh!

Will I ever play it again? You know, it’s possible. It’s not likely, but it’s possible. And I will play Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X!, which I don’t believe anyone likes. Because why not.

Final Thought: In some respects, Leather Goddesses of Phobos suffers for not being something special like A Mind Forever Voyaging, but it also sort of is, as the last true success Infocom would release before the company began an unstoppable slide into oblivion, and for that alone it should be celebrated. At the very least, if you like text adventures, though, you know how to play them, and you can live with the idea you might have to reload a save on occasion, this is a solid couple of tevenings. Oh sorry, I mistyped… tevenings. There must be a mysterious machine around here somewhere for that…

Enjoyed this post? It was originally published at exp. Magazine, a user-supported website. Support us by subscribing at Patreon, buying us a coffee via Ko-fi, or just subscribing to our newsletter.

[everygame]

Transistor

Developed/Published by: Supergiant Games Released: 20/05/2014 Completed: 10/04/2025 Completion: Finished it.

It’s been a couple of years since I went through Bastion(!) so I thought I’d boot up another Supergiant game, and decided to just move forward chronologically when I checked and saw Transistor was pretty short–I just keep putting off anything that seems like it’s going to take ages to complete these days. Plus it’s always nice to see how a studio evolves.

Not knowing anything about it, I assumed–what with the isometric graphics, and the lady with the big sword–that Transistor was “more Bastion” in terms of being an action title with light RPG elements, but it’s actually something much weirder–an awkward meld between Bastion-style real-time mechanics with a turn-based battle system that’s similar to something X-COM, or more specifically like Valkyria Chronicles, with free movement and action-point system.

I'm so sincerely not a fan when promo screenshots hide all the UI–in Transistor's case, they go as far as completely hiding the entire battle system (which looks like this.)

There’s also a bit of the deckbuilder to it. While the game doesn’t have a huge or ever-changing range of abilities, each time you level up you select new abilities and each is able to work as an action on its own, an upgrade to another action, or a passive ability, leading to a pretty wild amount of combinations which are meant to emphasise your chosen playstyle. So you can double and triple down on your favourite ability by adding upgrades and passives that support it, or you can try and make a “hand” of abilities that work in conjunction–maybe you want to tank damage; maybe you want to be a glass cannon, maybe you want to spawn helpers or play stealth. It’s all some amount of possible.

It sounds really good, and interesting, but I’m sad to say it doesn’t work, because the combination of real-time and turn-based combat is never comfortable. It’s not so much like eating a chocolate and peanut butter cup as trying to eat spoonfuls of peanut butter while chocolate pours from a faucet that you can’t turn off. The game seems to be balanced around using your turns in a tactical manner, but you have to wait for your action points to regenerate in real time. You are defenceless during that period (unless you upgrade one of your abilities to be used during recovery) so you’re stuck running around being attacked until you can get back into a turn.

This isn’t fun at all! The enemies are fast and the action frantic, so any time you’re not in a turn you feel like you’re barely keeping your head above water, soaking up damage. I’m sure there are mitigations, and it’s entirely possible if you’ve played this you created a hand of abilities that made the experience smooth, but Transistor really fails at explaining anything about how to play it.

It’s probably part of the game’s storytelling–it starts in media res and slowly reveals what’s going on–but it feels like there’s no help in getting comfortable with the mechanics. There’s a “backdoor” area that appears periodically where you can take part in “tests” that throw you in at the deep end so you can learn by trial and error what different abilities do and how to combine them, but I’ve finished this and I’ll say that I’m actively unsure if I ever played this game correctly. I ended with a build focused on long turns to allow me to debuff and do massive melee damage, which sounds really rewarding, but I still spent most of the time taking damage and running away, even with one attack set for use during recovery. If that’s intentional, I just don’t get it.

The upgrade system really probably does have too many options and is fussy to interact with. 

It really feels like one of those designs that someone came up with because it sounded good, and then you get to this point in development where you have it all built but you can’t find a solution to a problem like “what do people actually do while waiting for turns to recover” because the core of the design, ultimately, just doesn’t meld.  It seems likely they found people being able to use all their abilities in recovery (for example) made the turns either unimportant or overpowered and then couldn’t solve it so just powered ahead because it roughly works. I’ve watched a few playthroughs of Transistor and everyone else seems to have played it similarly to me–different abilities, but same tactics. It doesn’t really look any more satisfying a play experience than the one I had, which is a bit of a shame for a game that puts such effort into having an insanely modifiable range of abilities. You just never feel like you’re excelling, just surviving.

To speak positively, Transistor’s arms-length narrative did grow on me. I think largely down to the performance of Logan Cunningham as The Transistor; he sells the game’s noir-like setting while expressing deep pathos; he’s talking to someone he loves, and you can always hear it in his voice. You could argue it overpowers everything else in the game; the enemies have no character and the main antagonists are barely there. The central characters are the only ones you’ll care about–thankfully, they’re sensitive to that, and when the game ends, at least that feels satisfying.

Transistor really isn’t a game I could recommend, though, even as short as it is. It just doesn’t come together.

Will I ever play it again? I’m generally glad when a game includes a new game plus, and while I could unlock more abilities and so on, this is one of those stories that feels like such a nice closed loop, why ruin it by playing it again? Never mind that I didn’t actually really like how it played that much…

Final Thought: A thought you might have about Transistor is “why isn’t it just totally turn-based?” but it’s obvious once you’ve played it for a while that the overhaul required to make enemies work and balance it would be almost an entirely new game. Sometimes you just go down a path and there’s no going back.

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[everygame]

The Internet Is Dead. Plant Flowers In The Corpse.

The Internet is dead.

This is not a eulogy, but an acknowledgement. An acknowledgement that what I’ve come to accept the internet to be is dead. An acceptance that in the name of ease, I’ve absorbed myself into a corporatised space that is at this point not simply eating itself but eating me, us and everything that we create.

And I think: fuck it.

In 2023, when I started publishing exp. again in print, I was, I think, trying to close my eyes to it. I liked–and I still like, I love–the purity of print, the focus. I still want to make things and put them into the world. But I also just love writing, and sharing it. For a long time, I’ve relied on existing sites for my work–be that big platforms or outlets, but of course what happens is they pivot, they get sold, they get erased. And it can feel like we’re always searching for a settled high ground–Bluesky feels great now, but is it just a little rocky outcroppings in poisoned sea, bound to erode or be subsumed?

At the end of 2024 I published Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24, which I think works as a nice culmination of my last decade of writing. But as I’m not going to stop, it seems necessary in our new dead internet to do something that I’ve been meaning to do for ages, which is plant and cultivate my own space properly and invite you to visit it. Not just hope that you’ll see something I’ve posted as you scroll, but offer something that you can actually choose to engage with. Where my writing finally stays, where you can properly search and explore it, where I can expand beyond what I’ve been doing if I like.

It's here: https://www.expzine.com.

I think there’s a danger of nostalgia here, some sort of limiting call back to the idea that you’d, like, log on the internet and type “https://www.expzine.com” in every morning after you’ve read the three or four webcomics you keep up on (wow, Superosity is still going!) but I think that’s why I’ve become enamoured with the mindset of POSSE–Publish On (your) Site, Share Everywhere–and using it to its fullest. So I’m going to be posting here, then spreading this to every part of the stupid corporatised internet I can be fucking bothered with. Let decay feed growth.

To support that, I have (sorry) started a new Patreon with refreshed tiers to accompany my currently existing Ko-fi that has been supporting the continuation of my writing and publication of my zines and books. Unfortunately, Ko-fi’s tools aren’t robust enough, so this seems to be the simplest way to offer new articles to supporters on this site first, so if you aren’t already a supporter, please check it out. 

(Something worth emphasising I’ve continued to set the lowest tier at just $1 a month–so it’s as little as $12 to support the only* video game criticism website on the internet)

*as far as I'm concerned

If you are already a Ko-fi supporter: you don’t have to do anything. You can continue to support me on Ko-fi and I’ll be sharing articles–in full–over there a week early as usual. But if you’d like to move over to Patreon, I’ll be sending you a free month of the tier your current donation is equivalent to, so you don’t feel like if you want to switch over you’re being double charged or anything.

If you don’t want to support, that’s fine! You could just sign up for the newsletter, which is going to remain free and collate the posts of the week plus some extra waffle. Probably, I haven’t really planned them yet.

If you just want to continue reading on tumblr: That's also fine! I'm just going to continue posting articles here too. POSSE, baby!

And if you don’t want to do any of that, I’m not entirely sure why you’ve read this far. But the point stands: if you don’t like our dead internet, grow your own.

[everygame]

Batman (ZX Spectrum)

Developed/Published by: Jon Ritman, Bernie Drummond / Ocean Software Released: 05/1986 Completed: 01/04/2025 Completion: Finished it. God help me I finished it.

It all seemed so simple.

Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond’s “Head Over Heels” is a big video game (or should I say, computer game) in the personal history of Mathew; bought because it was so lauded in the likes of Amstrad Action, it really did blow me away once I played it: a true adventure featuring two protagonists with different abilities that you have to use together. It seemed like a work of genius to me.

So when I was looking over 1986’s releases, I noticed the pair’s previous isometric action adventure, Batman, and thought it might make sense to play. See if the magic of Head Over Heels was there from the beginning, and set the table for a replay of Head Over Heels at some point in the future.

I’d consider Batman a bit of a joke in the non-UK gaming community, probably because anyone who is looking up Batman video games is going to discover that the first Batman game is a ZX Spectrum release that features Batman wandering around an isometric, bizarrely decorated Batcave looking for parts of the “Batcraft” where the enemies look like melted dogs and basically touching anything kills you. It’s just so weird, lol!!!

What’s generally forgotten in the discussion is that in the mid-1980s, no one gave a fuck about Batman. It had been nearly twenty years since the TV show and Wikipedia notes that even Batman comics circulation had reached an “all time low” by 1985. His fortunes would turn around rapidly–The Dark Knight Returns would actually start being published before Ritman and Drummond’s Batman would come out–but considering the era, from Ocean’s perspective it will have been an opportunistic gamble: grab a cheap license on death’s door and try and squeeze some more juice out of it. And they did give it to one of their best developers, who’d already given them a lot of success with the Match Day franchise. Clearly it wouldn’t matter too much that he could barely remember who Batman was…

Anyway–I’m just going to cut to the chase here and say that this took me about six months to finish, and as a result I’ve lost most of the specific game history I’d dug up about it and all that remains is a lot of vague “I read somewhere that Ritman said…”. So don’t quote me on anything but my memory is that Ritman has been quoted as saying that he wanted to best Knight Lore, and then Drummond came in and started drawing like a cyclops head with flippers and he was like “alright!”

Knowing this, I should probably have played Knight Lore first, but getting into Rare’s entire back catalogue would be a whole other thing, so I can just say that even with a prior understanding of the isometric action adventure, Batman is a brutal experience.

First things first: it’s really hard to parse visually on the original ZX Spectrum. The environments are surprisingly detailed, but because it’s all in monochrome, it’s really quite hard to discern what everything is, and no way to tell what’s going to kill you when you touch it. I had hopes that the Amstrad CPC version with its wider range of colours might fix that, but there’s no consistency from room to room so it sort of just looks insane.

If you want to play this in 2025 with normal human eyes, there’s a fantastic remake by Retrospec (that’s, er, fifteen years old itself), or you can go back and play “Watman” a DOS remake from 2000 (so closer to the release of the original than now.) However if you’re really determined to play this (which I don’t recommend) what I recommend is to play the MSX2 remake. It’s pretty much what you’d imagine the ZX Spectrum original to be if it had full color–right down to the performance. 

And, of course, then you get the ability to quicksave and load, because without that I’d have never been able to finish this in a million years.

The version I played looked like this. Significantly easier to parse.

It’s not simply that Batman is full of things that kill you. It’s that the game is designed to force you to play perfectly from the first screen. Enemies seem to have a truly random movement routine (hope you love shuffling around waiting for them to select a direction away from you) but that’s not an issue as much as that there’s no leeway in the collision detection, and in fact the game is designed around that, generally requiring that if you want to make a jump you actually have to position Batman so he’s got about one pixel left on the platform he’s “standing on” so you can reach the next. Hilariously, the manual makes excuses for this:

“To make certain jumps it is necessary to hang by the ‘merest thread’ on the edge of the Carbon Re-inforced Batcloak - you may need practice to perfect this feature!”

(This isn’t even the funniest excuse in the manual, which also notes “The Joker and the Riddler do not appear ‘in person’ in the game, as Batman is all too familiar with their image. The henchmen they have selected are unfamiliar to Batman and this further complicates his task.”)

So yes, the game is exacting. And with 150 rooms to explore, it’s also bloody confusing. It’s actually not as non-linear as you might think–a lot of directions you go don’t really head anywhere–but once you get deeper into the game your head will spin, and every game over feels like being kicked full in the groin when you realise how difficult it’s going to be to get back to where you were (although the game features a save system of sorts based on when you pick up particular collectibles, it’s unforgiving at best.)

And on top of all that, the puzzles are intense. I will have to go back to Knight Lore to see just how complicated things are there, but it’s a bit like when you go back and look at things like Wizardry or The Bard’s Tale. You’d expect that these genre originators would be simple, but somehow they’re significantly more complicated and off-putting.

Here, you can sense Ritman almost understanding how to provide an on-ramp for players as the game is designed that you first collect Batman’s gear, slowly growing his abilities as you go (you can’t even jump at first) in a smaller section of the map that’s particularly linear. But one of the very first puzzles will kill you multiple times because it requires that you walk the wrong way on an invisible conveyor belt and then do a pixel perfect jump????

It soon gets absolutely absurd. I’m not going to lie. After beating my head against this game for months off and on–struggling to understand the maps I was able to find (isometric maps on paper are confusing!)--I eventually just started watching and carefully following someone’s playthrough on YouTube (a playthrough that, notably, they die a bunch of times on.)

I usually love using contemporary maps and walkthroughs. But you try and work this from Amstrad Action Issue 9 out (it spreads over two more pages!)

This revealed to me that certain screens had insanely unintuitive solutions that I just don’t think I’d ever have worked out. The screen where you have to catch a wizard’s hat and then catch an enemy on top of said hat otherwise they’ll block your path. The screen where you have to manipulate several teapots to reveal a completely hidden piece of the batcraft. Or my favouite, the screen where you have to time dropping a spring on the top of an enemy’s head so you can ride them and jump off at the right time to get to the exit???

I have no idea how anyone did any of this in the first place. Playing Batman has to be ones of the most demoralising gaming experience I’ve ever had, genuinely feeling like being trapped in a carnival funhouse until I can solve a rubik's cube while a car alarm goes off (don’t play this without making Batman’s footsteps silent…)

I’m aware, though, that a lot of people don’t feel this way, considering it’s been remade so many times! Which actually makes me extremely worried that Head Over Heels isn’t the masterpiece that I remember it being.

Well, guess I’ll find out soon enough!

Will I ever play it again? I played it more than anyone ever should.

Final Thought: Certain things just aren’t worth beating, and I’ve definitely given up on things before, but my fealty to my memory of Head Over Heels really was overpowering to the point where I thought I had to, that I would simply find something here. And to be fair, by the end of my playthrough, I was dying far less, and I could probably get through a significant chunk of the game now legitimately if I really wanted to.

I really, really don’t want to.

Please don’t make me.

Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24 is OUT NOW! You can pick it up in paperback, kindle, or epub/pdf. You can also support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up digital copies of exp., a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

[everygame]

Mach Rider (NES)

Developed/Published by: Nintendo Released: 01/05/1984 Completed: 30/03/2025 Completion: Finished 10 courses–there’s no ending.

Another early NES title that seems to go largely unremarked and unremembered, Mach Rider surprises me because since I began working through all the games I own/have access to in (vague) chronological order, this this is actually the earliest raster-scrolling racer I’ve played. I mean, of course in my history I’ve played Pole Position and the like, but I guess I just assumed I’d have had easy access to something more iconic in the genre before this. You can argue that Super Hang-On counts, because the original version of Hang-On was out before this, but it feels like a bit of a cheat. And indeed, I’m now quite baffled that Pole Position wasn’t included in Namco Museum for Switch. 

And now I’m remembering the Pole Position TV show and its banging theme song. Can you believe that it only ran for 13 episodes and it’s completely seared into my mind? I really wished they’d make toys of the cars when I was a wean. Ah well.

(You’re here for these digressions, right?)

To get on topic, Mach Rider is a strange one because Nintendo passed up releasing F1 Race, a much straighter racing game, in the West, and released this as the first racer on the system. But it’s not, exactly, a racing game. In Mach Rider, you play the titular hero in the year 2112 [“Rush Klaxon!”--Canadiana Ed.] who is racing across a devastated future landscape looking for survivors. Your superbike is equipped with four gears and forward guns, and as you race you have to avoid, shoot or bump off course enemy “quadrunners” while also avoiding ice, oil slicks and other debris in the road.

Most unusually, the game has a strangely split design in its story mode (“Fighting Course”) where for some reason on the first level you are racing with energy counting down, and you can’t game over (unless the energy runs out) but the quicker you can finish the level the more lives you earn for the rest of the game, where you can game over. I’m not entirely sure why this is, but it might have something to do with the major secret of Mach Rider.

You see, the first time you play Mach Rider–and probably for a bunch more goes, maybe all the goes you ever have of Mach Rider–you’ll notice something. It’s hard as balls. Actually–it’s unfair as… is there a kind of ball that’s unfair? Lottery balls? It’s as unfair as lottery balls (you can use that one if you like.)

I love a rear-view mirror in a video game (who doesn’t remember the one in Rad Mobile, with the Sonic toy dangling away from it) but here you have to really pay attention as you immediately die if you collide with anything that you aren’t at least matching speed with. What this means is that you really need to be taking the courses at full speed because otherwise cars just shoot up behind you and crash into before you can do anything. But if you are going at full speed, when you go around corners you can’t see and react to, say, rocks or barrels in your way, so you just crash into those before you can do anything. It could be said you’re in between a rock and a hard… car.

This feels… rubbish. You can get into a groove of, say, racing along in third gear, going up to four when someone is on your tail, and then slower on corners, but it can’t protect you from completely unseen hazards particularly well, and you will, probably, put the game down in frustration. Because it’s just sort of annoying.

But I mentioned Mach Rider has a secret: a power-up system that I doubt many know about because it features such a (sigh) Tower of Druaga-esque series of requirements:

To become invincible to on-course obstacles:

Shoot and destroy exactly 3 blue drums at the side of the course and then bump enough enemies off course to their death that you end with over 180 bullets (“blocking” enemies gains bullets.)

Infinite ammo and auto-fire:

Destroy exactly 12 black drums on a level that has them.

All shots are one-hit-kill: 

Destroy exactly 6 bomber balls on a level that has them.

Now, I honestly thought this might be made up because the requirements seemed so stupidly hard. But on the first level, you have the ability to practice without fear of game over, so if you just start by slowly shooting three drums and then practice on the course you can eventually unlock the invincibility and then… Mach Rider becomes quite playable!

Now, you do lose these power ups if you die–but you might not have that many lives to begin with, and the invincibility makes the game close to trivial as you can blast through all the levels in fourth gear, only really having to worry about bomber balls, which can still kill you out of nowhere (the main reason you probably want to go out of your way to get autofire–but it’s much harder to get that consistently or consistently early.) 

It’s like the team at Nintendo–or rather HAL, who put this together–couldn’t really work out a way to make the game not frustrating without making it too easy, so they bodged in a system where the pro-strat for Mach Rider is to get really good at unlocking the first power-up on the forgiving first level and then hang onto it for dear life.

I suppose it doesn’t really matter–the game doesn’t have an ending (you do ten levels, then there are ten more, then it just loops) so the game is ultimately only a score attack. But I don’t know if I’ve ever played a game like this before–one where it’s passable if you know one weird trick and absolutely rubbish if you don’t!

Will I ever play it again? I gave myself a cheeky save state after the first ten levels but I don’t see much reason to go back.

Final Thought: Mach Rider is ostensibly named after a toy Nintendo put out in 1972–a hot rod racing toy that they licensed from Hasbro–but I don’t see any meaningful connection between them. It’s possible Nintendo used the name simply because they had the trademark? 

More likely though I think they used it because the game feels so inspired by the always popular Kamen Rider–the Mach Rider even sort of looks like a Kamen Rider, and included a setting inspired by Mad Max (which also featured biker gangs.) One could even posit that “Mach” and “Max” sound a bit alike.

(But that last one doesn’t really work because Mach Rider is transliterated as “Maha Rider” in Japanese.)

Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24 is OUT NOW! You can pick it up in paperback, kindle, or epub/pdf. You can also support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up digital copies of exp., a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

[everygame]

Blue Prince

Developed/Published by: Dogubomb / Raw Fury Released: 10/04/2025 Completed: 22/04/2025 Completion: Entered room 46.

I have great respect for the craft and effort put into Blue Prince.

But I don’t think Blue Prince respects me.

…

Before I dig into that, let’s actually explain what Blue Prince is. At a high level, it’s a puzzle adventure deck-building rogue-like-like (phew)  in that it takes design cues from things like Myst or the 7th Guest. So you wander a mysterious location–in this case, a stately home–solving logic puzzles and pulling levers in the hope they do something you can at least vaguely understand, all in an attempt to get to the “antechamber” room you can see at the other end of the map.  

However, in this mysterious location, every time you enter a new room, you place that room on the map from a “hand” of locations drawn from an (unseen, but slightly manipulatable) deck. Rooms feature up to four exits (though may be dead ends) and can contain puzzles, objects or actively negative effects, and can influence other rooms. So, for example, you can draft a utility closet and turn on the power for the garage, whether or not you’ve drafted it already–so you might prioritise drafting it if you haven’t. 

You place these rooms, moving through them until you either are stuck placing only dead ends or run out of steps. Each day you’ve got a limited amount of rooms you can move through (including backtracking) and once that ends, your day is immediately over and you must restart with everything reset–other than any permanent upgrades you’ve managed to unlock or bonuses for the next day, which include new areas, upgraded rooms, and things like daily allowances of the game’s currency (gems and coins) or even extra steps.

If this sounds like a great piece of design–it is! Blue Prince has taken a format–the rogue-like-like deckbuilder–which isn’t always a slam dunk, and tied it logically to 3D exploration in a way that feels both surprising and exciting. The simple puzzle of putting the home together–trying to use dead ends in a way that doesn’t cut you off from the antechamber, placing rooms you haven’t seen before, hoping for the rooms you know you need–is “one more go” par excellence: you want to place another room, and each room leads to another. And if you fail? Dead ends, out of steps? Well, if you start again you’ll already get to place more rooms. So start again!

But here’s where respect comes in. Where, for me, the cracks begin to show. Because Blue Prince isn’t a “fair” Rogue-like-like. You can quibble the concept of fairness in games in the lineage of Rogue–after all, the original game is doubtlessly impossible to complete on the majority of runs–so let me state first that I believe that Rogue derivatives should aspire to every run being winnable. Doesn’t mean that the player wouldn’t have to play perfectly but it should be possible.

Why does this matter? I’m certain that a lot of people already disagree with me on this as a starting position–and if they’re already primed to defend Blue Prince, note that the game actually has an achievement for finishing it on a single run from a clean save, which I’ll get to. It matters because I’ve got an addictive personality. It matters because Blue Prince, more than any other game I’ve played, made me wonder why we love Rogue derivatives but hate loot boxes.

Yes, ok, loot boxes cost money. But Rogue-like-likes cost time. A game with loot boxes, sure, a whale can spend thousands–they miss a hit? That dopamine rush is just another spin away. A Rogue-like-like?  You died, you made a bad decision, you didn’t get to the end? That dopamine rush isn’t just promised by completing the game. It’s soaked into the entire thing. You get a hit on every draw, every placement. Every tiny success is a tiny loot box being opened, chipping away at one big one offering success or failure. 

But the trick is you fail on one, and that entire loot box is taken away. And in an “unfair” rogue-like-like, sometimes that bit loot box just contains “failure”. Nothing you could have done about it.

The game cost you an hour, maybe more, of your life, and said “give me more of your life. You’ll enjoy it. This time you might win! Think how good that would feel.”

Call this moralising if you like, but I know myself, and I find that promise very, very hard to walk away from even when you know the game is rigged. I’m good with money. I’m not good with time. I’m the king of time as a sunk cost–but I also know when I’m having my time wasted.

And Blue Prince wastes your time. 

Look, there are many times in the game that you’ll make a mistake that will end a run. But I also had many runs where it either became obvious I couldn’t win–I never saw the object I needed for a room, or I never saw a room I needed full stop–or that the game just gave me a clear fail state: hands of dead-ends, or most egregiously, only rooms that would block off the antechamber (after I’d unlocked it!)

In these cases, the expectation is, I suppose, that you’re doing something else to help “build” your ability to win on the next run–a classic Rogue-like-like move. Setting aside that I had many (many!) runs where I was able to give myself nothing on the next run–many rooms that give you a “next run” benefit being dead ends or otherwise frustrating if you’re trying to “win” on each run–such design gives the game away that your time is being wasted. You weren’t going to win. Give Blue Prince an hour, it’ll give you a wee bonus next hour. Just one more hit. Aren’t you having fun?

The most egregious thing, however, is that in all of these cases I was trying to “win” the game by doing what it told me the “win” state was–entering the antechamber. I was aware there was a further "room 46" and that Blue Prince is a game of cascading mysteries, but I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced a “fuck you” as blatant as the experience of reaching the antechamber for the first time. I won’t detail it, but Blue Prince does nothing to celebrate or reward you for this, or really any wins. It’s not even justifiable as a critique of the Rogue-like-like loot box: it’s more like being told you’ve been given a present, and being given an near-endless Matryoshka gift box where when you get to the end there’s just a note that says “This isn’t the present.”

It really does feel to me like Blue Prince goes out of its way to waste your time. Much has been made of the “pay attention to everything” puzzles, which can have a cryptic crossword-esque trick to them, but the issue with them as with everything else in this game is that they’re a one-trick pony–and in a Rogue-like-like, you have to see the pony do that trick over and over again! I can see absolutely no reason why after I unlock a safe once I have to go to it and tediously type the code in again every run, but the nadir are the puzzle rooms, where you do things which are barely puzzles. I mean just weeks ago I was trying to find some good in Donkey Kong Jr. Math, where you just do simple math puzzles, but in Blue Prince there’s a room where you literally just do Donkey Kong Jr. Math-level puzzles over and over again! Even if you love Blue Prince’s core and don’t consider multiple runs a waste of time why would you ever want to do any of these puzzles more than once? It’s not like you’re doing something entertaining in itself, like a Picross or something. It’s just… do some maths!

Never mind that if you even want to understand a lot of the early game, you want the Magnifying Glass item, which I didn’t see on like my first… three or four runs (so hours into the game.) Meaning that in maybe my second go I’d unlocked a room, solved the puzzle that would allow me to look at things in that room, and then… gained nothing from it, because I didn’t have another item. I literally solved a puzzle and got nothing. Nothing!!! Too bad, RNG said no.

(To be completely fair to Blue Prince, what persists and what doesn't is strangely inconsistent. A few rooms do keep things set between runs–probably because they involve such a huge amount of running between levers.)

Here’s my take, ultimately. A video game lives or dies on its mechanics. I’ve written previously on the transition between games as pure mechanics–you play them for the joy of play–and narrative–you play them to see the end. A Rogue-like-like is one of the purest attempts to split the difference, and the requirement, in my own framework, is that the game doesn’t misplace the “reward” (i.e. “I beat a run”) in the timescale of “I have seen either all the content or enough content to understand the systems so completely I am no longer surprised.”

Players who love the systems, get, with Rogue-like-like, the ability to play the game as long as they want–like an old school arcade game, almost. Players who want the experience, the reward, can move on feeling good rather than feeling beholden to it. A game like Slay The Spire or Balatro is successful–a winning run is possible from the start, and doesn’t individually take too long, but there’s far more depth if you want it. You can stop whenever you want, because there are no carrots to dangle. Just your own enjoyment.

The joy in Blue Prince’s mechanics becomes short-lived, and I don’t think so much because placing and exploring rooms isn’t fun–it’s because everything around it becomes such a pain. By my last runs, I was literally running full speed through the mansion, and every action I’d done a million times already felt like a punishment. But the insidious promise of success–that my luck would come around, that the RNG would release me–kept me there, like a drunk down bad at the blackjack table. You can say I should know how to walk away. I say: they're done everything in their power to keep me there, and they aren't even playing fair. Who's really to blame?

Blue Prince didn’t respect me, so I stopped respecting it. It has all the worst impulses of Rogue-like-like design all wrapped up into a deceivingly attractive package, and I’ve left it with a completely oppositional viewpoint. I think this game tries to flatter you that you're a genius while really it's turned you into a rat mindlessly pushing a button hoping for treats, a donkey endlessly chasing a carrot that’ll never come.

Logic and reasoning are the reason we’re human, don’t waste them on this.

Will I ever play it again? No, and frankly, it did a lot to make video games feel like a completely waste of my time in general. A truly empty experience.

Final Thought: Above I mentioned that you can beat Blue Prince on a fresh save file. But obviously, no one could beat it first time and I believe, at this point, that RNG would make it impossible to beat the game every time even with full knowledge of the game first (though I’m willing to be proven wrong–it doesn’t change much.) 

*Spoilers follow*

If you’re wondering when I explicitly lost respect for Blue Prince, it actually wasn’t when the Antechamber had a key and a note in it and not even like, an achievement for reaching it (a weak reward, but at least something.) It was when I discovered that the route I’d found to the underground (the fountain) using that key led to… an area where all I could do was move a minecart, and if I tried to change the lake height to get to the actual "endgame" I could no longer use that door. Which led to the realisation I could complete the game without ever actually going to the antechamber first. 

I will give Blue Prince one point here–the game does feature a lot of different routes for solutions–but it’s really there I discovered Matryoshka gift boxes weren’t empty: they were a cascading collection of “fuck you”s.

For example–and this is likely to surprise anyone who has played this–I beat the game without ever placing the "foundation" room. Blue Prince’s RNG is so weirdly punitive I think I only saw it once, or twice, and didn’t place it as I needed other rooms (for real though, why is it a rare room. Why doesn’t it just always come up after the first few runs?) In the end I beat the game by using only the tomb and pump room, which requires an annoying amount of the game’s already annoying RNG and doesn’t even need the key, which made everything I’d spent so much time doing feel like even more a complete waste of time. 

But I'm free now. And I'm never going back.

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