#gear's gaming gournal

[mr-geargrinder]

Gear's Gaming Gournal: I'm Yeeking out

I'm juggling too many projects, but one of the things I decided to do right now is finish playing YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG before the update drops. I started playing at the start of the year and then could not bring myself to keep playing, because it was just that miserable. Now the big update is out tomorrow and I have like.. 3 or 4 more hours of bullshit to slog through. I initially planned to blitz through the game before the update went live, which was announced December 31st, 2023...

This game is bad in ways I didn't originally think it was possible for games to be bad. Not just for the meme reasons, but for deeply technical reasons. This is a game that could have every scene and every chunk of dialog randomized and it would make about the same amount of sense, and would suck in the same ways to play, because the combat never improves, nor changes.

There's zero cohesion to the places you go, the things you learn, and the character moments that are vomited onto your lap in between enduring the worst, clunkiest, least fun, most unsatisfying combat system and character management mechanics you'll ever find in a game. This is a game that severely fucked up basic menu navigation, even after going through several major updates and fixes.

In a lot of ways, I think the meme of YIIK has undersold just how bad YIIK actually is. You expect it to just be hours of a fart-huffing pretentious hipster going "UHM ACTUALLY LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT METAPHYSICS AND VINYL RECORDS??" but it's worse in so many other ways. The whole game

Alex isn't even that bad. The problem is that he's at odds with the confines of his own fiction. It wants to be a story where Alex needs to learn to be a better person, but 1) he's not really, truly that bad, 2) he is trying to do good in his own dumb way, and 3) the story overtly makes him the most important person in all realities who must go to great lengths to save all realities from an endless cycle of destruction that he somehow caused (never explained), and that everything he's been obsessing over is all connected and it's just the nature of all realities and soul space and so on that he will always end up gravitating to these specific people, no matter who they are or what lives they're living, and always end up at the center of some inter-dimensional intersection of relationships and world ending supernatural problems. But the story pretends that's not the case and

Like the "who cares about your dead sister?!" scene hits different when you remember that moments earlier, they were just in what is supposed to be a life or death situation, but every character except Alex suddenly acts like none of that happened and they were just, I don't really know, standing in an empty sewer while Rory talked about being suicidal?

And at the same time, they yell at him for being insensitive, but don't correct him about there not being a sewer full of imitation Ninja turtle monsters and a super dangerous ("WE NEED TO RUN! NOW!!") inter-dimensional Alpaca warrior aided by several of the explicitly dangerous Soul Survivors, which are confirmed to be a real thing in the fiction. That seemingly really happened, but apparently it wasn't a big deal and is never mentioned ever again.

And that's what's so frustrating. The story wildly fluctuates between everything and anything on screen being simultaneously diegetic and not at the same time. Soul space and "the Mind dungeon" and leveling up are real, but at the same time, random battles and monsters are only vaguely acknowledged, but never addressed. There is a single instance of a character's combat power being mentioned in dialog, and another vague reference to "gaining abilities" by getting stronger, but the narrative never wants to make a clear ruling on what is "real", what is part of the story, and what is gamified abstraction. Instead of doing that, it's all of it, none of it, and a little of both whenever it needs to be.

This led to a lot of people who are silly enough to defend and praise the game to assume that Alex is an unreliable narrator and that nothing in the story happened exactly the way he explained. I think that's a terrible way to tell a bad story, which still means it's bad and doesn't explain why the combat system and menus and mind dungeon leveling system suck so much. Also, I don't think that's true for a second. I think ACKK went through many wildly different drafts. At one point they wanted to make hipster Earthbound. At another point, they wanted to make post-modern Scott Pilgrim. At yet another, they wanted to make Persona, but with more conspiracy theories, internet nonsense, and also the Elisa Lam case as the center piece.

And now they are remaking the game yet again, and going off the demo, instead of trying to capture the pure essence of the idea that they failed to execute, they are leaning into extremely exaggerated visuals and surreal nonsense that seems to lean extremely hard into the idea that it's saying things you can't understand, so you can't judge it unless you get it in the right ways.

It's a fascinating case study in game design and storytelling, but it's still a terrible game, and if there's anything I'm trying to say here it's that you shouldn't play YIIK. Maybe observer it from afar or just don't waste your time like I did and play something good instead.