Recent reviews by Plim

I enjoyed the world of Arcadia Bay so much that I can't bring myself to uninstall the game.

Maybe it's because the real world is so strange this year that this was so appealing to lose myself in, but I found this game to be a beautiful escape. I think it's rare that a video game can convey such a sense of place and time like this one can. For me the music helps incredibly with this. I've listened to some of the licensed music before and some of it was new to me but I think that these songs will now always remind me of this game. Obviously this is largely subject to musical taste, but even if it's not your thing, I feel like you could still appreciate how the feelings of melancholy and introversion come through in the musical choices.

I also really fell in love with the characters. Initially I found the dialogue to be awkward and cringe inducing, but whether intentional or not I felt it kind of made sense that it would be. These are teenagers. If I listened back to what I said at 18 I'd probably cringe even harder. It ended up being really endearing to me.

Nostalgia is also such a big factor of this game. Somehow it is immediately nostalgic despite the fact the setting and characters are far from the kind of childhood I had. I guess it's that feeling lonely and out of place during childhood/adolescence will strike a chord with many people, myself included. Obviously time travel is a large important element of the game, and I love the fact that a lot of the themes of the game are (to me) about losing the innocence of childhood, wishing you could travel back to when things were better. It really sells the concept.

There are plenty of things in this game that are worth talking about, it could probably be picked apart endlessly to pick up on all of the symbolism and subtle foreshadowing (that I only noticed when replaying to collect all of the optional content). It's probably also worth mentioning that some of the issues tackled in the game are not done perfectly, and could even be construed as shallow misrepresentations of what people actually go through, but at the end of the day this is an episodic adventure game. It's not a groundbreaking new formula, it's not trying to say anything revolutionary. I'd even suggest that it's pretty derivative, and is much less subtle with their popular culture influences, many of which being referenced either directly or through fairly obvious easter eggs.

To finish up, I'll say that this game may not mean as much to you as it did to me. But if you allow it to draw you in and really experience the world of Arcadia Bay it may not let go for a while after finishing.