Recent reviews by alivedovedoeat

OSR is when the linear dungeon crawl with scripted, mandatory combat encounters looks vaguely like the illustrations in Holmes and lists your character class as wretched peasant.

There's an aesthetic departure in this game not just from the look and feel of Dark Souls but from a certain strand of From Software's aspirational fantasy-realism that you can see as far back as King's Field or Armored Core in the mid-90s. The opening is character-focused and deliberately camp, with letterboxed in-engine animated cutscenes of groups of characters gesticulating like puppets at one another. Everyone wears bold-colored costume-y outfits that make them look like MMO characters. You fight Ray Harryhaussen monsters and become a bright green zombie when you die. All the levels are these wide-open combat arenas that do nothing to disguise this fact with an effort at architectural plausibility; every area looks like a desktop wallpaper. Dark Souls II takes place in the ruins of formerly inhabited buildings in the same way Doom takes place in a military installation.

If From's usual output is video games trying to evoke a place, Dark Souls II is a video game trying to evoke video games. This is a legitimate stylistic choice and it's one of the things the game does best. In renouncing the tone-building that the rest of these games engage in, it's easier to approach in a spirit of unadulterated juvenile fun. I played this game mostly in the company of a friend and I think its basic silliness meant that doing so added more to it than it would to any other game in the series. After doing Old Dragonslayer in the first couple hours and meeting the covenant leader who tells you to ♥♥♥♥ off, I murdered him and collected the halberd he was wielding, which turned out to be remarkably good for that early point in the game but which I kept using long after its viability had faded because of how much its double- and triple-pirouette moves characterized the avatar. I can't say I've ever developed a From player-character in my head much before, but the style of this game really facilitates that kind of playfulness. There were so many good moments in this playthrough that became part of a story of this particular run: halberd-twirling into a stack of exploding barrels in Lost Bastille, getting chased around with no health by the creatures in No-Man's Wharf after their light-aversion wore off, charging from behind at a pair of pyromancers in Earthen Peak and having one immediately turn on a dime to nail me with an lethal fireball-kiss. For a series ostensibly with ostensibly masochistic tendencies, you don't get a lot of these big untelegraphed comedy-deaths elsewhere.

Most of these moments are packed into the first few hours of the game, which are its most successful. Old Dragonslayer is a great early-game boss concept, with the familiarity of the Ornstein moveset giving the player a measure against which to feel out how much slower and strict on action-economy the game is than Dark Souls. Lost Bastille might be the best single level in the series; it's shockingly dense and branching, it's a gauntlet that develops in unexpected ways while building on its core mechanical gimmick, it's got a great boss-runback for Ruin Sentinels with a few risk-reward elements, and the boss itself is a really taxing one that teaches the player how to keep track of the behaviors of a large crowd, and how lifegems reorient combat around taking damage in controlled bursts instead of necessarily avoiding it. There's secrets and optional areas everywhere in a way that makes the game-world feel so much more robust, and in conjunction with limited early-game access to healing items and infrequent checkpointing adds an element of dungeoneering and attrition.

This all falls apart almost immediately afterwards and never recovers. By the end of the first third, the game's reoriented around its true mechanical focus: minor variations on the Sentinels from Anor Londo in Dark Souls for about twenty hours. The normal enemies are all this. The bosses are all this. Almost every living thing in Dark Souls II, by the halfway mark, is a large, slow knight that swings a weapon at the player and then stands still so that she may do the same. Sometimes this enemy may be parried, but most of the time one must side-roll, counter, and wait. Level design collapses around the same time into corridors with brief and occasional side areas, but it's just as well; the prime reward for exploration is more opportunities to fight this single enemy in all its many guises. Whether this process is miserable or simply dull is dependent on whether the player chooses to extend it by ten to fifteen hours in playing the DLC.

It was worth replaying this, once, to see the best and the worst of the series juxtaposed against one another, but I could in good conscience advise another human being to keep playing this after getting to Earthen Peak. The B-team giveth and the B-team taketh away.

The John Wanamaker Building, the grandest department store of it's own age, has been empty the last six months, after having been in continual operation for the previous 114 years. It had already been half-converted to offices in the early 90s, and by my own time even the three floors still devoted to retail had become outsized for their purpose, sneaker displays and cloudy glass cases of costume jewelry squatting in the atrium between rusticated columns, barely obscuring the marble floors. As a child, the effect of the cold fluerescent light on black and white stone and the inhuman scale contrasted with the modest commercial displays did not seem like an accident of history but instead malicious and scary.

Still unoccupied, the building opened briefly for an event yesterday, for the first time since retail had left. Nothing had been set up beyond a few chairs and folding tables; aside from a few refurbishments and the crumbling plaster bases of the columns, it looked as it might have in 1911. There was nothing there to distract from the great negative space of the atrium, the third-floor clerestory, the domed ornamental roof of the pipe organ like a mihrab. When a building that grand on that scale is emptied out, it becomes a temple; in the absence of visible human activity, one infers the presence of God.

The tragedy of our time is that it is easy to identify the things which a post-industrial economy will no longer produce and much harder to identify why it does not produce them. Some confluence of a growing bourgeois, an abundance of cheap labor, mass production and the pride and noblesse oblige of 20th century capitalists made the department store happen, and some confluence of suburbanization and changes in consumption habits made it archaic. The developer's present plan is to turn the upper levels of Wanamaker's from offices to luxury apartments, the second and third floors of the store to offices, and to have some street-facing businesses on the first. So it goes; this will doubtless meet the needs of the city better than what was there before. The building itself, and the fact that they'll keep doing the light show because Philadelphians would actually kill them, will continue to attest that something else was once done here.

I presume Lordran is as robustly interconnected as it is because that facilitates a greater variety of experiences than either a linear sequence or freely selectable independent levels. Draining New Londo before doing anything else is an approach the player can just stumble onto, and which changes the sequence, the difficulty curve, the order of item acquisition and the angle from which one proceeds through a level. Approaching it this way was both organic and novel enough to feel like I'd stumbled on an informal alternate game within the system, and anticipates things like the Zelda randomizer in just how much of a change in experience it brings about by reshuffling familiar parts. Fighting late-game enemies in early-game also gives some real utility to parrying as a means of dealing meaningful damage one otherwise couldn't; there is a version of Dark Souls, fully accessible since release but rarely played, in which it's the From game that made those a big deal and not Bloodborne.

The other function which links between levels serve, though, is to develop a sense in the player for where she is in relation to everything else: first of all, not very far. Lordran isn't a country or even a city, but a complex; most of its areas are linked by elevators and stairwells. New Londo is in the basement of the building Firelink's built atop, directly adjacent to the sewer system around which Blighttown is built. That system is itself far too monumental to serve a place like the Undead Burgh, which sits astride walls ten times it's height visible everywhere in the world above ground. Everything in this place hosted a scale of activity no longer imaginable, was built to a purpose that no longer exists and repurposed for what does: we don't need running water anymore but we do need plank huts for freaks.

I don't think Sen's or Anor Londo work very well as levels unless the player is new enough to be getting her ass beat by snakes or knights, though I can still remember how fun it felt to do so back in 2012. Anor Londo works, though, because the contrast between it and the rest of the game isn't just the fact that it's gone from the nasty to the pristine, but that we're seeing the same scale of architecture and kinds of construction we've seen everywhere else, which in this case has neither been allowed to rot nor to be adapted to the lives of ordinary people. You have to run for a full minute across a bare piazza to get to any point of interest. Two of the four people who live there have imaginary goddess wives and a third's might as well be imaginary given the inviolable fog wall. It's the one part of the world that history has not touched, where God is present in the absence of human scale, and it contextualizes the rest of the world as a recasting of this original type.

This visual language is infinitely more original and affecting than anything written on a sword description or any monologue about how the age of the gods is over and the age of man hath come. As a series of game-spaces which characterize one another in the way they connect and the way they follow and break a pattern between them to achieve an affective goal it's up there with anything else.

In the early hours of the game I came across a wood-textured hexagon sitting behind the starting town's magitech upgrade shop, with some smears of color on in, and my instinct was to regard it as a generic videogame junk object. On a later visit I realized it was the same model as the sign in front of the shop, and thought it was a clever reuse. Later on, though, the owner of the shop mentions, in a scrap of dialogue one will only see if one makes a point of talking to everyone in town after every plot update, that he was trained as a clockmaker as a young man. The next time I passed into the alley behind the shop it struck me that the object back there had a worn-away painting of a clock on it: it's the sign the store had it front before it made the switch to selling orbments.

*Trails* isn't interested in challenging the genre of fourth-generation JRPGs in which it's working: none of this detail feels incompatible with or even complicates the archetypal town NPC to whom it applies. It makes him and the world he constitutes substantial, taking the utilitarian ephemera endemic to the form and imbuing it with more care than it was meant to hold. *Trails*' design is informed by an unaccountable belief that JRPGs are important. I can't, in spite of its best efforts, share in that belief, but its love for both the genre and the specific world it presents worked on me.

This all requires a certain amount of player buy-in, a willingness to participate in the imaginative exercise of stitching these details together, which I was only able to offer this attempt. I'd started the game twice before and quit in Rolent with the impression that the 00s-style localization was nicely written but that I wasn't terribly interested. It's a game which gives back what one's willing to put in, and in light of that I think that my own playstyle this time around was the ideal way to experience it: with friends, assigning each character as a voice role. This mildly inflated my playtime from the sensible 30-40 hours the game seems to have been designed around to 104. By volume, about half the dialogue in my particular amateur-theater playthrough of *Trails in the Sky* is not in the script of *Trails of the Sky*: most of that inflated playtime came from us improvising skits between the cast.

The specifics of this approach are, of course, non-transferable. The pure serendipity of being woefully underequipped to deal with Lorence because I'd insisted on giving Estelle and Kloe matching Lily Necklaces and Wool-knit Hats as a matter of role-playing, and still managing to pull it out first try by having Scherazard feed Estelle jelly beans and a tomato sandwich so she could get a well-timed crit, was totally unique, but I recommend playing *Trails* as fanfiction-inflectedly as possible.

For posterity, I did call the ending: not the obvious fact that Joshua was a child assassin from a shadowy organization but the beats of him confessing to Estelle before revealing that he'd have to leave her, as well as some specific bits of phrasing, like his saying that the five years he spent with her were a dream from which he'd have to wake. This was in the context of Joshua getting early access to White Gehenna, an AOE move that feels broken in the first chapters of the game: after some intermittent bad jokes about this being his Whiteboy Blast I suggested offhandedly that this was power he'd gained in a pact made in his shadowy past with the White Pharaoh, that he'd draw on his last reserves of it in the final chapter to save Estelle's life, and that he would then be forced to tell her that he was always with her on borrowed time and that now, per his contract, he would be taken to Utah to build pyramids, with the second game following Estelle's journey to rescue him. This was more or less it.

Worst aspect of the game was, without a doubt, Carnelia. As for the best NPCs, I'm torn between Stella, Estelle's possessive childhood babysitter, Reina, the boarding school girl devoted to ruining her roommate's life, and Ralph, the neglected househusband unhappily married to a woman whose sole passion in life is bloodsport.

Gordon Freeman stepping off the tram car is the most elegant reveal in the medium: after minutes of moving through this facility as an ordinary person would, presenting his job and academic history, looking at small men and big structures, he glides over the walkway like Quakeguy while the guard shuffles after him. While nearly every other employee vocally suppresses their doubts and sleepwalks into disaster, Gordon moves like he's already fighting a guerilla war. The verbs available to him are expressions of contempt: switching the alarm on at the front desk, flickering the lights in an office, exploding the microwave. They're the acts of a man who does not expect to have his job much longer. All of this is archetypal, the man who sees the coming crisis and cannot match the social inertia which drives it, but it's accomplished here without dialogue through the vocabulary of the game itself.

The acts of petty mischief which Gordon can perform during the introduction are optional, and in this represent a typical quality of the game's set-pieces: an invitation to play a role. In the turret-stairwell section of Office Complex, the player runs past the automated chaingun into a room full of headcrabs. She might simply run past them -- there's nothing to stop her -- but the game asks if she'd like to do scene, to bait them out past the gun and see them taken out by it; the map designer thought it'd be neat. Crushing soldiers with the car lift or taking out the Gargantua with an air strike in Surface Tension are much the same. These aren't practical actions, they're a little fiddly and by no means necessary, but they're present and highly telegraphed in case the player agrees that they'd enhance the scene.

There's some fantastic innovations in level design here; Black Mesa is laid out not like shooters of its time, to link together in a complex and memorable way, or in consideration of architectural realism, but in regard only to time. Every corridor is as long as the game needs to create a sense of separation between scenes. The running speed means they're often impractically long and nearly featureless. This concern for consistent pacing isn't as overmastering as Valve's curated player experiences would get, but it does necessitate an unprecedented linearity, the result of which is that there's not a single slow moment in the game.

The fantasy of seeing one's workplace razed to the ground is universal enough to be one of the basic kinds of disaster movie. Gordon's complete lack of hesitation in gunning down dozens of US marines is a more individual feature of the narrative. There's an evident mistrust here for the ability of a society to project power through industrial technology and through organized violence, and a suggestion that these are inherent qualities of social organization which will eventually subsume all others. Xen, initially so alien, gives way to the same patterns of life seen in Black Mesa, only more nakedly totalitarian: a featureless factory full of drones constructing soldiers. Laidlaw would come back to this idea throughout the series, but it's at its simplest and bitterest here: here's the end result of organisms stratifying themselves, buddy.

On Hard, a straight exchange of gunfire with even a single grunt can easily leave the player dead. An ambush, of which the game is full, is often instant death, and the best approach is usually a counter-ambush. Survival's contingent on caution and aided greatly by luck and foreknowledge. A game with high-damage, hitscan enemies who cannot be stunlocked has a fundamentally different ethos than the genre norm of the time; damage is inevitable, the skill ceiling is lower, and gunplay is made out not as an expression of martial virtue but as something in which individual agency plays a smaller role.

The ending's a wonderful punchline to an ordinary-man-pushed-too-far plot: Gordon, whom the cast has treated with contempt and indifference through most of the game's script, either underestimated or callously sent to his death, finally has the fact that he's special acknowledged by the one man with no vanity to blind him, no reason to pretend he's otherwise: the devil. Satisfied?

Perhaps the only game more enamored with physics objects than Half Life 2, and infectiously so. As Reddit users in 2011 would describe an instinct to use the portal gun in their daily lives, so too do I now have the impulse to pick up and chuck empty beer bottles.

I played Luna-Terra as the most resigned cop, as a paragon of uncharismatic adult compromise, and yet she still found it in her to shoot her womanchild ex in favor of a fluffy three-girl polycule.

I'm assuming that there are bad endings, or at least endings with a little more substance, but I don't know if I care to play a second route. The whole effort is kitsch without a sense of humor, something which appropriates the thematic structure of early-00s Gainax while insisting, without adding much substance, on a dry profundity that those shows never aspired to.

That missing sense of humor, or even just a sense that any fun was had in its composition, could have made the piece work. The fight sequences, in particular, are made up of creative writing program prose poetry which I found painful to read and yet too rote to be called cringe. They're obviously intended to evoke sex, but what this amounts to is a series of coy allusions to topping and bottoming and characters grinning deviously at one another while reading their Twitter posts aloud. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, this is erotica written as if it were a painful duty.

The decision to split the game into scenes which can have no real consequence beyond filling one of three meters willingly sacrifices the possibility of a dramatic structure, of character growth, or of developing relationships. The aforementioned ex betrayal and polycule ending didn't come out of the game's events: Luna-Terra's decision to lunafy terra seems to have come about offscreen prior to the game's start, and her shockingly robust sense of solidarity with the other two pilots seems to have been formed because she was mildly charming during robot impact play.

Ultimately can't help but feel this is using its medium and genre not to support its themes but to avoid developing them. I hate to have to say this sincerely but I think the Halimede RP account deals with a lot of these ideas more succinctly and completely.

Can't overstate how mortified I was when I closed this and found that I had gone just over two hours. Perfunctory puzzles, absolutely no laughs. What I imagine going to an escape room by yourself is like.

I enjoy literature in the tradition of sentimental European Orientalism as much as anyone, but I've often found myself wondering why, for example, Knulp dies at the end of Knulp. Why, instead, does God not say to him "I'm not done with you yet, Knulp!" and imbue him with his divine power, allowing Knulp to go Super Saiyan and fly back from the mountain to the village of his birth, where he could finally tell the woman he'd loved as a boy how he'd felt. It's long overdue, of course, but I'm truly grateful to Thatgamecompany for rectifying this oversight.

Solid level design and some short-lived mechanical novelty, but never really rises above being good by the standards of a campaign in a multiplayer FPS. Rare example of a game that understays its welcome, there's a few more hours worth of ideas in this one. The ending's effectively set up and then delivers absolutely nothing: it was very funny when the villain threw an Apex Legends ad at you, though.