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Comment on Games: Your personal year in review for 2025 in ~games
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Comment on Games: Your personal year in review for 2025 in ~games
Evie LinkThis year, as with every year, I played a lot of games. I'll omit the ones I picked up for the Backlog Burner event this November, all of which I've already written about at length, and go back to...This year, as with every year, I played a lot of games. I'll omit the ones I picked up for the Backlog Burner event this November, all of which I've already written about at length, and go back to the start of the year, when I bought game pass for one month and frantically played several major releases -- only one of which left a lasting impression.
Obsidian's Avowed, Machine Games' Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and NeoWiz's Lies of P all took up a great deal of my time, but for the first two, that's really all they did. I found both to be kind of fast-food style games: fun, cheap, and insubstantial, but lacking the qualities I usually look for in their close genre neighbors. The Great Circle's immersive-sim elements were its best feature but also were fairly shallow; its adventure story might conjure nostalgia for some, but I don't remember 9/11, so it didn't leave a mark on me. And Avowed was, like The Outer Worlds before it, a good time with some notably excellent design decisions, some notably gripping scenes and ideas, but as a whole, it still felt bland and pre-digested. Lies of P, on the other hand, proved to be a challenging and delightful time; its exquisite boss design, and its well-paced and constructed levels, have made it maybe my favourite souls-like of all time, sparring with Remnant 2 for the spot, in the same year I played Shadow of the Erdtree. I still haven't played Lies of P's DLC; when it goes on sale, I look forward to it.
This year I played quite a few independent games, too, of course. Signalis and 1000xResist in the earlier part of the year; both games feature futuristic lesbian clones in a dystopian setting; though Signalis is a PS1 style horror game, and 1000xResist a walking sim, both became instant favourites for their fantastic writing. 1000xResist, in particular, fed my heart through a blender several times; if its political commentary was on the nose, its story about family, trauma, and growing up broken -- and the ways our brokenness can break the world, too -- challenged my most core beliefs about empathy and forgiveness, and spoke to me in a way that few works of art have. Throughout the year, I gradually chipped away at Sifu, too -- an hour or five every month -- I found I had to be in a particular mood to play it, a sort of irritable and listless mood, but for those few time, it was a lot of fun, and though the character action elements pushed me away a bit, I still really enjoyed it by the end.
I decided to give Obsidian another chance, and picked up Pentiment, which everyone says is their best-written work by far. Everyone is right. I have never played another game like Pentiment, a game that is sharply written, incredibly unique in its presentation, impressively reactive, and grounded in close and careful examination of a historical period that was largely unfamiliar to me. Pentiment is a story of the end of an era; a dawn of new social structures, new modes of creation, new views on religion and power. And its commentary on all these themes is incisive, affecting, and novel, with a lovable protagonist and a twisty plot.
Abubakar Salim is one of my favourite voice actors in the business, but I found his debut action-platformer (with Metroidvania elements), Tales of Kenzara: Zau to be lacking both in sharp, unique deisgn decisions and affecting story beats. What stood out to me was the art direction, which was consistently beautiful and striking, and the gameplay systems and the visuals were more than enough to propel me through the 12-hour game.
I played Zau because, this year, I accepted that Hollow Knight: Silksong was never going to release, and decided to play other metroidvanias instead -- including Nine Sols, whose combat was so engaging that I realized that, like, who even needs Silksong, anyway?Probably my game of the year this year, Hollow Knight: Silksong, was then nigh-shadowdropped. Conversations about this game have largely been consumed by conversations surrounding its difficulty, to which I can only say, I agree with every ciriticsm anyone has made of this game, and I would see not one frame of it changed the slightest bit. Vibrant, beautiful, challenging, and, in a flow state, delightfully fun, Silksong is possibly the most intrinsically rewarding game I've ever picked up. But what shocked me about it was its cohesion. Unlike Hollow Knight before it, Silksong has a clear plot, strong themes, and the unified vision to make them land with a surprising deftness. Hollow Knight had the world design, the atmosphere and the set pieces it needed to make me feel, but its sequel's ideas often made me think, as well.
When I played everyone else's game of the year this year, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (a game I'd been eagerly awaiting since its first teaser trailer showcased an incredibly strong art direction), I was sorely disappointed both in the game and the state of the conversation of the surrounding it. Clair Obscur felt to me like an unpolished debut effort, a six or seven out of ten if you want to hear a score, with incredibly strong and exciting and unique ideas, but none of the skill or deftness required to execute on them, leaving me with a strong feeling of missed potential: of unexplored themes; of combat that never pushed me to my limits; of a story that failed to do its characters justice; of a world that never felt sufficiently real or, after The Twist, sufficiently constructed. But the conversation surrounding the game seemed at many times, even coming from critics I otherwise tremendously respect, to fall into fanfiction; to act as though the games triumphantly grappled with ideas it only ever grazed the edges of in subtext; to act as though its characters were complete, its world was coherent; as though it was an unequivocal masterpiece born from the head of Zeus, which only thirty people ever worked on, which had no institutional backing, which really put a boot up the ass of all these unsustainable triple A studios. In small ways, it made me come to hate a game that I initially enjoyed, and was arrested by, enough to play twice straight through. I felt the same way about Baldur's Gate 3 a couple years ago, albeit to a much lesser degree, but I wonder whether the reaction to Expedition 33 communicates, what I feel it does: the immaturity of games and games criticism as a medium, or whether I'm the one who's in the wrong here.
No year would be complete without me playing gacha live service games. This year, I mainly played Limbus Company and Reverse: 1999. The latter, a left-wing gacha visual novel, contained a couple of chapters -- "Folie et Deraison" and "1987 Cosmic Overture" -- that are genuinely, genuinely, some of my favourite stories in any game -- fuck it, maybe, some of my favourite works of literature. Reverse is a game that is constantly grappling with the art, the stories, and the ideas of generations past, and in this wrestling, if it never illuminates some new vivid truth, it at least conveys so acutely the joy of the struggle. Almost never dramatic, bombastic or heightened, the game's structure as almost a magical realist short story collection allows it to present a wild buffet of fascinating stories across a variety of genres spanning the twentieth century, and when it stumbles and drops a dud, it never takes long to recover and blow me away again. Reverse is so good that it might genuinely be partly to blame for how much I disliked Expedition 33, actually; comparing the scenes from Reverse's best chapters, which blew me away so, to segments of Expedition 33, released at around the same time, to touch similar themes, it was like night and day. Claire and Obscur, one might say.
Limbus Company never blew me away thus. Its relationship with classical literature is never so nuanced and thought provoking; its takes on Faust, on Moby Dick, on The Stranger or Don Quixote or "The Metamorphosis" often feel more like adaptation or fanficition than serious engagement. But there is value to taking these stories and characters into its almost comedically bleak, dystopian, SCP-punk world, to intensify and lightly modernize them -- and there is value, too, in the fact that all the game's gacha systems can and are intended to be bypassed via grinding, which gave me a lot of time to listen to some of the audiobooks which did blow me away. Steam says I've played 650 hours of Limbus this year, most of which would have been grinding. That's a lot, a lot more than any other game, but it was worth it, because I listened to so many fantastic books during those hours.
Before the end of this year, I aim to finish Wanderstop, to buy UNBEATABLE, and to take a swing at Promise Mascot Agency, three more indies I meant to play this year but haven't quite gotten around to. Wanderstop has been fun so far; I make tea or espresso every morning, and its extravagant and nonseniscal tea machine does a good job at simulating the relaxing ritual these routines can become. Davey Wreden, Wanderstop's writer, is to blame for breaking my brain with The Beginner's Guide, and while Wanderstop probably won't be such a shrill and brutal experience, I'm so far finding it to be very nearly as impactful.
I'm sure there are other games that I've played this year and failed to mention, but these were the ones that stuck with me the longest. Right now, I'm craving some Minecraft, so hopefully the Tildes Minecraft server ends up relaunching some time soon!
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Comment on November 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 4 Discussion in ~games
Evie Link ParentThis is also a response to @kfwyre It's funny you should mention the Sistine Chapel, because the writers of Reverse: 1999 made almost this exact point in, of all places, the crossover event they...This is also a response to @kfwyre
It's funny you should mention the Sistine Chapel, because the writers of Reverse: 1999 made almost this exact point in, of all places, the crossover event they did with Assassin's Creed. The story concerns a group of artists painting the frescoes on the dome of a cathedral; it explores their creative frustration with the restrictions placed on them by the church, their inadequate pay, their love for each other and their art, and their need to secretly create their own work, hidden on the structural components of the dome, that actually expressed all this, something just for them that no one else might see. The creation of art has never in recorded memory been a pure pursuit untainted by capital. Constraints, even unreasonable constraints, can in fact help create greater art than would be possible though wild and totally free expression. But it can still be a bit miserable, to have to write a crossover story with Assassin's Creed because the higher ups demand it, or to, say, introduce two new characters at the climax of the story because you always need two new characters to sell every patch. Gachas, mobile games, didn't become the bulk of the gaming industry in China and Southeast Asia because the people living there happened to be super greedy, but due to easily identifiable historical conditions. But it's a fairly restrictive structure for games that now, the majority of artists in that gaming industry have no choice but to work under. Even if I sometimes enjoy the results, you can feel the chafing and it hurts. I'm very glad for the devs' sake that PC games are becoming more prominent and accessible over there.
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Comment on November 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 4 Discussion in ~games
Evie (edited )LinkThis might be my last week posting for this event -- Thanksgiving promises to be busy! If you never hear from me again, I love you all! If you do hear from me again, please don't hold my...- Exemplary
This might be my last week posting for this event -- Thanksgiving promises to be busy! If you never hear from me again, I love you all! If you do hear from me again, please don't hold my melodramatic flourishes against me. I think both my writeups are a bit dogshit this week, and I went on a tremendously tedious gacha sidequest (what do you mean? that Wildcard 2 slot was always there, doesn't your card have one?) But a Bingo! is a Bingo! and I couldn't ask for a better group of seniors to play it with.
Mode: Standard Winning Bingo! Finished 5/25 Y N O H S
✅ SomaB G X K
✅ KeylockerR T E ★ Wildcard
✅ Children of the SunP W V M
✅ Metro GravityF A Q C
✅ Citizen SleeperI D U L $ £ ★ Wildcard 2
✅ Morimens€ ¥ —
Keylocker
Wee-oo-wee-oo. What’s that sound? Oh! It’s the DNF alarm!
Yeah, I couldn’t finish Keylocker, which makes for a disappointing way to complete a bingo. I feel worse about this than usual; I picked up the game on the back of a writeup from another Tildes user, @SingedFrostLantern, which makes my failure to finish it feel like a personal failing for some reason. If you want a full discussion of the game, their post is much better than mine; I only got four hours in.
What bounced me hard with Keylocker was a combination of a few things. First of all, the writing, which I found to be bad even for video games. Of course, the world-building is completely off-the-wall, just delightful (music is outlawed! You’re a Saturnite cyborg!) – the game bills itself as Cyberpunk, but aesthetically, and with the complete, joyful nonsense of its setting, it feels more psychedelic than that. But the worldbuilding does nothing to save the abysmal dialogue. Every character I’ve met in the game has a super over-the-top personality complete with super eye-rolling speech quirks. It's like the writer of this game heard that good characters have distinct voices and, as many amateurish writers do, took it way too far. I didn't get anywhere near far enough into the game to comment on the other aspects of the writing – the themes, the structure, even the overarching plot. But what I saw of the scene writing was bad enough that, frankly, I didn’t care to. What you’re left with, then, in this turn-based RPG, is the combat, which was probably perfectly serviceable. What I played of it felt slow, tedious and repetitive, but the buildcrafting and systemic depth present even in the opening hours was enough to make me think it would get good eventually. And the rhythm timing elements, a la Paper Mario (or Sea of Stars, or Expedition 33), added some degree of skill expression. Even so,I wasn’t having fun with it for the time I played it – getting through sessions was a slog, and I often felt the desperate desire to be doing literally anything else. I climbed up onto a stepstool to dust the moulding this week, for the first time in well over a month, because it was an excuse to not play Keylocker! And then felt guilty while I reaped the praise and thanks from the lovely ladies I live with.
For this event, I planned to play another rhythm game that was supposed to come out this month: UNBEATABLE, which is also set in a world where music is illegal and you do crimes, which also has an anime-inspired artstyle, but which, in its demo, had charming, heartfelt writing that positively leapt off the screen. Unfortunately it hit a critical QA snafu and had to be pushed back to December, but for me personally, someone who’s really only tolerated turn based combat, there’s no real reason to play this when that is coming up. So, even though there were some things in Keylocker that interested me – I haven’t even mentioned the cool use of music in the opening! – I constantly found myself asking , “what am I doing here? This is a hell of my own making, a prison erected from my stubbornness!" Even as much as I was disliking it, I wanted to beat the game, I really did. I was going to try. But I hit a save bug – or possibly just made a mistake; I’m not sure – that wiped out over an hour of my playtime, and that was curtains. Other people seem to really like Keylocker, so if you like the version of it presented in SingedFrostLantern’s writeup, give it a try! It may be your kind of game. But it certainly wasn’t mine.
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Morimens
So, I didn’t enjoy Keylocker, but some friends had suggested that I try Morimens instead – a Chinese-developed, cosmic horror-inspired gacha game; two of my special interests colliding. So, with an unexpected surfeit of free time, and, wanting to have something to write about before the end of the week, I downloaded it. Despite the fact that it doesn’t fit on my fucking bingo card. Because I have a gacha problem.
Not enjoying a singleplayer turn based game, and downloading a gacha instead, is a bit like if you didn’t like your dinner, so you decided to chase it with a shot of heroin. But for the brief time I played it, I found Morimens fun, engaging, and, most of all, interesting. Not necessarily as a work of art, separate from its content model and monetization. More as a representation of the gacha medium itself; a medium, I will here argue, that is actually largely separate from full priced one-time releases; a medium, I will here argue, that is in crisis. And amidst that crisis, Morimens is a game divided; divided between the pursuit of a unique – if underdeveloped – vision, and a desperate pursuit of ever more money, ever more players, ever more growth. In this division, we see two paths forward for the creative live service medium: a path towards a new era of prestige, innovation, and creativity, and another that leads to stagnation and creative death.
Morimens’s closest gameplay comparison is the prototypical deckbuilding roguelike, Slay the Spire; its closest aesthetic and spiritual comparison, meanwhile, is to the gacha game Reverse: 1999. And I think you’d be better served to play either or both of these games than Morimens, which combines elements of them in a way that is not entirely clumsy, but not particularly interesting either. Essentially, Morimens is a low budget, non-voice acted visual novel where inexpressive PNGs ramble at each other and witness the horrors together. In between story segments, the gameplay consists of roguelike dungeons where you take a team of four PNGs – sorry, “awakeners,” the game’s name for its characters, into a dungeon: collect cards, prune your deck, gain artifacts to buff your build, and fight enemies with your strike, defense, and special cards. Unlike Slay The Spire, where you play as only one character, your whole team is your character, with each of your four characters having their own small deck consisting of three unique cards, a special “rouse” card that can only be obtained in the dungeon, a strike card, and a defend card. As a result your deck is really not one deck but an intersection of four smaller decks, and interesting and fun synergies abound. I’ve enjoyed playing a team containing the characters Nautila and Caecus, two characters who “counter” – striking back when taking damage – and whose cards synergize with each other in interesting and often bafflingly strong ways, given the right builds. Morimens’s gameplay is certainly its strongest element, at least so far; most modern gacha games are simplistic and easy, designed to minimize friction at all but the highest difficulty levels, and their character kits tend to be designed in a prescriptive way that obviates the need for thought, planning, or moment-to-moment decision making. Not so with Morimens. Though its dungeons are much shorter on average than a typical roguelike run, they are still chock full of challenge and of short, medium, and long-term decision making. But, on the other hand, you could also just play Slay the Spire. And if Morimens’s gameplay sets it apart from most other gachas, its story, though aesthetically unique, is full of all the worst habits of gacha storytelling. It’s tropey, poorly considered, and even, at times, the wrong kind of stomach churning.
What’s the deal with gacha storytelling, anyway? Well. I think that the live service story game, composed of not just gachas, but MMOs and, like, whatever the hell Destiny is, is a medium of itself, in much the same way that we treat television as a different medium than film. The expectations of players are different; so too is the mode of production; so too are the techniques employed. The stories are much more episodic; where television is often written to be more melodramatic, less subtle, more aggressively emotive than film, to use the passage of time in the real world as an element of its storytelling; to connect viewers in the long term to the status quo of its characters and its world, the same can be said for the live service narrative game. And the modern, post-Genshin Impact gacha game is the purest distillation of this format; not only are its characters and world what keep you invested, they are also what you invest in; spending your hard earned in-game resources (and, the executives hope, real world money) on characters to use in combat and/or exploration. There’s an interesting incentive here: make a character compelling, likeable, well-written, desirable, and people will be more willing to buy them. This can manifest in pretty gross ways, with the way women and even children are objectified by the game designers and by the camera, even when it makes no sense for the story; this, it should be said, happens in Morimens to a slightly alarming degree, with one of the most overtly disgusting character designs for a young girl I’ve ever seen. I will not, it should be noted, be playing Morimens long-term. It can also manifest, however, in an interesting incentive: to write characters so compelling that people will want to spend money on them.
In Reverse: 1999, the alternate history gacha visual novel, there is a character named Marcus. A teenage Hungarian girl, forced by circumstance into government work she’s completely unprepared for, marginalized for her neurodivergence, her femininity, and her arcane powers, she is the main perspective character in chapter 6: "E Lucevan le Stelle". In this chapter, she’s sent to Vienna on the eve of the first world war, where she meets an opera singer who is madly in love with her unlicensed Freudian psychiatrist, where she sees death, destruction, unjustifiable political violence and the reaction to it, and is consumed by a deep desire to leave all this behind and go home, clashing with her desperate need – and social responsibility – to uncover a crucial, life-saving truth about magic. Through it all, the writing behind her dialogue and her VA’s performance are authentic, engaging, and at times, the right kind of stomach churning; few things have left me as raw and wrung out as her as her mad, helpless grief at the climax of the story. So, after completing the chapter, despite the fact that Marcus didn’t synergize with any of my teams, despite the fact that I couldn’t really use her in combat, I went to the “pull” screen and wasted my hard-earned in-game currency on one of the most affecting characters in any gacha game. In Reverse: 1999, I have done this several times – so too, in a couple other gachas; with Arlecchino in Genshin, Ereshan in Black Beacon, Magic Bullet Outis in Limbus Company. But for Reverse in particular, I am so routinely affected by the game’s writing, its world, and the sharply political stories it aches to express with its characters, that I find myself even spending real world money on it (albeit not much) – something I don’t often do in any other gacha game. In Reverse, the incentives line up perfectly: a niche, unique vision, a fanbase that has bought into it, the budget and the creative chops to realize it, in a way that happens to serve the gacha monetization model.
Morimens wishes it were Reverse: 1999. I don’t speak here of the aesthetics – the similar artstyles, the (as far as I can tell coincidental) lore similarities, the overlaps in setting and structure. I mean that Morimens, despite its unique, horror–infused vision, has, in the space that I’ve played it, failed to create the cohesive, unique, and engaging story and world it desperately reaches toward. Its “strong vision” is largely found in its gameplay and its aesthetic. Its gory, creepy character designs are sometimes striking, make no mistake, but the writing surrounding them is often weak, tropey, and dull. Morimens is a historical fiction cosmic horror game, but it doesn’t offer a new perspective on history or on the fear of the unfathomable. So far, I have found that its historical setting is merely set dressing. I have found that it steps, slack-jawed, into the old bigotries at the heart of Lovecraft’s horror – demonization of artists, of the poor, of the mentally ill, of the people treating them; of the deviant, the strange and the other – steps into them simply by accident, by careless and unimaginative reproductions of genre conventions. And I have found that whatever horrors the game is able to conjure with its strong visuals is deflated by the fact that the protagonist is an ultra-special cardboard cutout girl who cannot die; deflated by the fact that the dead or dissolved can and must ultimately be resurrected for gameplay purposes; deflated by a cast of characters that are as often designed and written to be hot and quirky, as they are to be queasy and horrible. Morimens is a unique game, no doubt. It has a strong aesthetic vision. But it lacks the clarity to keep you around on the strength of that vision alone; lacks the production value to keep you invested when its vision so often falters. This is a visual novel with no voice acting, with inexpressive PNGs as characters rather than, say, the Live2D models seen in the higher budget visual novels. Maybe you might want to stick around for the gameplay, though. Is that enough? When Slay the Spire exists?
For much of Morimens’s 2-year lifespan, it has been rumored to be in hospice. Rumors, more than whispers, saying “end-of-service soon.” The game was made on a low budget, rushed out the door with an inadequate translation, low production values, and insufficient marketing. It has never made much money. Its difficulty, the odd quirks of its gacha systems, and its, uh, penurious vibes turned away players; recently, the developers had to promise that, should the game run out of money, it will be released as an offline singleplayer game for posterity’s sake (good for them!) But, flawed though Morimens is, its aforementioned issues aren't really the only thing to blame for its precarious position. Much worse, less imaginative games have made much more money, in different times. The problem is that the gacha market is becoming oversaturated and pancaking, with, it seems, a bland new gacha released every day; with established games bleeding players to upstart competitors; with players highly sceptical of the idea picking up yet another live service game that will, in tough economic times, pressure them to spend and spend heavily. How to stay alive, in that market? Morimens, I think, wanted to be Reverse: 1999. Wanted to carve out a niche but appreciative fanbase with the strong, unique creative vision its creators must believe it possesses. But it failed, or the niche it found was too small. So now, they turn to the other path, the way other gacha games are trying to stay afloat: with dark patterns and aggressive monetization. If they can’t find a large playerbase, they’ll wall in their existing niche and squeeze it for all it’s worth.
Hoyoverse released Genshin Impact in 2020, and one sentiment I often heard about it, expressed by players who were, like me, new to the medium, brought in by Genshin’s accessible open world and their COVID-inspired listlessness, was that people were surprised by how unobtrusive the monetization really was, how easy and un-punishing it was to be a free-to-play player. This was, ultimately, an illusion; Genshin is probably one of the most efficient extractive engines to ever be described as ‘art.’ But Hoyoverse were, at the same time, conscious of the fact that players don’t really like to feel like they’re being upsold. And Genshin was designed to hide its monetization, to make its absolutely absurd pricing all but invisible to those who didn’t want to see it. Every gacha game released after Genshin adopted large chunks of its design bible, including when it came to monetization; though most games after it were, for a time, substantively more free-to-play friendly in an attempt to compete on price, they maintained the same doctrine of hiding their monetization and only occasionally nudging players to spend, counting on player psychology to make the jump to the cash shop unassisted. Now, however, as the gacha industry founders – as Genshin and Honkai and other established IPs make less money than ever, as new competitors bite at their ankles, die horribly, and give way to new competitors, even Hoyoverse itself has abandoned this player-friendly pretext, with more aggressive, naked monetization strategies than ever: more powercreep, more special packs, more spending events, more restrictive teambuilding; more reliance on getting multiple copies of a character to unlock their potential. More incentives to spend, in Genshin and almost everywhere else in the space. And yet more game announcements, as if saturating the space even further with even more, ever worse slop will save it. Even a game as financially hapless and pitiful as Morimens has its own recent clone in Chaos Zero Nightmare, which is like Morimens with few of the strengths and even more of the weaknesses. And Morimens itself, under the aegis of a new publisher, is one of the most aggressively monetized modern gachas I’ve ever seen. Long–time players say it’s pretty free-to-play friendly. Sure, I’ll buy that; they would know better than I. But the game is full of every dark pattern you can imagine, all kinds of ultra-limited-time spending events, cash-only banners, several different free reward tracks where the currency you get pales in comparison to the (obscenely priced) paid track, notification to direct you to the shop every day, special offer popups on every login. And why not? It might keep the game alive, and at least the developers of Morimens actually do need the money to stay afloat.
But, I worry, this is the path the whole gacha space might go down. There was a time I thought that niche, compelling titles like Reverse, or like Limbus Company, like Path to Nowhere or Arknights or Cookie Run Kingdom or Trickcal: Chibi Go or Heaven Burns Red might be the future of the live-service medium, that up-and-coming creators would understand the importance of creative clarity and artistic integrity to stay afloat, to thrive, in a tough and competitive market. Then, earlier this year Black Beacon released, and I was swiftly disabused of that naive notion.
Black Beacon was a tragedy, because its Borges-inspired surreal time-travel story was the best-written launch story arc I’ve ever seen in a live–service game. But you cannot play it now – and, at least in the global market, it will not be continued; the tantalizing threads it spun will never come together into a gorgeous tapestry. The game launched with technical issues, you see; with no PC client, and poor controller support, despite being a demanding action game. With certain buried bits of UI not properly localized from the original Chinese. With unequal rewards between servers. Many of these issues were fixed relatively quickly. Still, recently, Black Beacon announced an unceremonious end of service. It was creative, it was unique, it was well-written, and it wasn’t enough. If Black Beacon died like that, what could happen to Morimens? To every other upcoming gacha, (at least, those not developed by the titanic Hoyoverse and pushed with its infinte marketing spend), to all the stagnant and bleeding games already released? To Silver Palace, to Arknights: Endfield, to Infinity: Nikki, to Girls Frontline 2? Not all of these games are or will be masterpieces, or even any good. But maybe, if they can snag and hold onto a small playerbase, they can continue to make safe, inexpensive content while squeezing players until the sun rises in the west. Maybe that’s enough to sustain a business. It’s not enough to sustain an artistic medium. It’s not enough to sustain my interest.
I love live service narrative games, because every time they tell a fantastic story within the constraints imposed by their monetization model, by government censorship, by a punishing release schedule and unreasonably low budgets, it feels like a miracle, a poppy piercing a paving-stone. But, I think, as the constraints imposed by an increasingly hostile, saturated, paved-over market become stricter and starker, the medium might be headed for death, or maybe a pruning, where many games, studios, and unrealistic creative ambitions will die – to make way for the ensuing generation. Or maybe, for nothing at all. Who can say what the future holds? What we have now, though, are interesting games, challenging and punishing and even, occasionally, beautiful art objects. Implausible creative successes, like Reverse: 1999. Tragic failure like Black Beacon. Games that have gone long in the tooth and bitten their own tongue, like Genshin and a host of other stagnant, septic, festering titles. And Morimens, a game that can’t decide how it wants to move forward, that’s struggling to stay alive on the back of a flawed vision in an environment that’s indifferent to it. The most interesting thing about Morimens, then, isn’t the game itself; it’s the creative crossroads it stands at. Maybe that’s why, after the period at the end of this paragraph, I’ll never think about it again. Still. At least the gameplay was fun while it lasted.
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Comment on Hytale is saved! in ~games
Evie Link ParentSpeculation, but honestly it feels kind of like when an entertainment company slaps the name of a popular IP onto a largely unrelated property just to sell copies -- like with Arkane's 2017 im-sim...Speculation, but honestly it feels kind of like when an entertainment company slaps the name of a popular IP onto a largely unrelated property just to sell copies -- like with Arkane's 2017 im-sim Prey, or like how the Callisto Protocol was supposed to be set in the world of PUBG somehow. The Skyblock thing is a hook primarily -- and there is still the Skyblock gameplay of building out a small personal island into a big base, it's just, the resource gathering process, and the core progression model, is very different.
One surprising benefit of the Skyblock format is technical. Hypixel Skyblock's shared spaces are island chains in the sky; there's a main hub island, several mining islands with different tiers of resources, a forest island for woodcutting, Nether and End islands for combat and bossing. You travel between islands with seamless player launchers. But actually, each island is also a separate instance. When you step on the slime blocks to get sent flying from the main central island to the Farm, during the flight, you're secretly also getting moved into the Farm server, of which there are several copies to support any surges in player population. Minecraft servers aren't very good, they can't actually handle an MMO number of players usually. But the separate islands concept provides a useful framework for playerbase segmentation that still feels natural and seamless while you're playing.
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Comment on Hytale is saved! in ~games
Evie Link ParentIt's always fucking impossible to Hypixel Skyblock to people. "Oh, yeah, it's like an MMO but in Minecraft. And you can do all the Minecraft building and stuff, but only on your island. No, it's...It's always fucking impossible to Hypixel Skyblock to people. "Oh, yeah, it's like an MMO but in Minecraft. And you can do all the Minecraft building and stuff, but only on your island. No, it's not a mod, it's a server." But It's the only MMORPG I've ever seriously played. I don't know how many hundreds of hours I spent on my island farming potatoes and sugar cane (I played during the hiatus, before the garden update) or in the dwarven mines gem hunting. I've played a bit of Wynncraft too, but It's my understanding that Skyblock is more like OSRS while Wynncraft is more like WOW. I think Skyblock is a genuinely interesting game, the way it's total self-directed ness when it came to skilling, collections, content blends with Minecraft's own sandbox feels really unique. Every Minecraft system from fishing to enchanting to building was updated to bring it in line with MMO genre conventions, without losing the quintessential "Minecraft" feel. And even if I'm not going anywhere near that rabbit hole ever again I'm interested to see what comes of Hytale. I think the Hypixel team have regularly acquitted themselves as game designers.
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Comment on Is trying to become an author insane in times of LLMs? in ~tech
Evie LinkBeing an author is already not commercially viable. There's probably only a double digit number of authors out there who can live on book sales, and it's dwindling; most authors come from...Being an author is already not commercially viable. There's probably only a double digit number of authors out there who can live on book sales, and it's dwindling; most authors come from generational wealth, or take professorships, or are married, etc. But regardless of how LLM development progresses, I know some people will always want to read human writing. I always will. So, don't write to sell books. Write because you have an aching something you need to express, a story that must be told. If people like it, then profit may come, but it's never even likely, much less a sure thing.
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Comment on November 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 3 Discussion in ~games
Evie Link ParentI really liked Noah Gervais's video on Pacific Drive. In addition to being a critic, he's an avid roadtripper and shitbox-mechanic, and he said that dealing with the car and its quirks really...I really liked Noah Gervais's video on Pacific Drive. In addition to being a critic, he's an avid roadtripper and shitbox-mechanic, and he said that dealing with the car and its quirks really built a relationship with the car in a way that mirrored the relationship he's had with real cars.
Not that I liked Pacific Drive when I played it earlier this year, mind. The repetition especially only gets worse as the game goes on. It's way too long to have as little encounter and anomaly and world design variety as it does. I wish I'd had the sense to cut my losses after 12 hours like you did. I found that with some of the annoying mechanics turned off under the difficulty menu it at least made for a decent podcast game
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Comment on November 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 3 Discussion in ~games
Evie Link ParentIt was actually SingedFrostLantern's write-up on Keylocker that convinced me to buy it! Thanks for the link, though; I didn't have the commenr saved to hand. I'm glad you liked my commentary, and...It was actually SingedFrostLantern's write-up on Keylocker that convinced me to buy it! Thanks for the link, though; I didn't have the commenr saved to hand.
I'm glad you liked my commentary, and that you hit on it at the right time. When I read books, I'll often put them down for a while after each chapter just to think about them. You do have to be careful not to let your thoughts crystallize before you're even done with the thing; to leave room to be surprised and delighted by the art still, as I was last week with Citizen Sleeper. I've enjoyed reading your writing too :)
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Comment on November 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 3 Discussion in ~games
Evie Link ParentI think this is the central conflict Soma awakens in me. It is central to creating good art criticism -- at least, if you, as I do, view it as an art unto itself; "the spectacle and the curtain at...I think this is the central conflict Soma awakens in me. It is central to creating good art criticism -- at least, if you, as I do, view it as an art unto itself; "the spectacle and the curtain at the same time," as the poet said -- that you be an artist in creating it. I'm keenly aware of this; I have a five thousand word piece posted on this website about, roughly, how goddamn much Genshin Impact once meant to me. But, it's like this. When I think of my favorite games of all time, kfwyre, there's one gacha game anywhere near that list, and it's not Genshin. I think, for me, I have the inescapable notion that to some extent, to love a game is not enough. It must also stand up to close and vicious scrutiny. The gacha visual novel Reverse 1999 has story arcs that are so well written they rival or exceed my favorite novels, chapters which I have read and reread and found astonishing new depths each time. I did not play it to keep from freezing to despair, as I did with Genshin. But Genshin Impact is an awfully written game, that wrenches everything inside it into tragic and disappointing submission in service a ruthlessly exploitative business model.
What I'm saying is, I love Soma now, because of my circumstances. When my circumstances change, I may no longer love it, if I spare too much thought to justifying the harsh criticisms I had while playing. I think my desire to keep it at a distance comes from that; to keep the love, or at least the memory of love, as my foremost impression of the game.
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Comment on November 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 3 Discussion in ~games
Evie (edited )LinkTwo more games this week. I do hope to finish one more game this month, Keylocker, for the bingo, and I've already begun. But it's slow going and I'm not sure I'll have the time for any more...- Exemplary
Two more games this week. I do hope to finish one more game this month, Keylocker, for the bingo, and I've already begun. But it's slow going and I'm not sure I'll have the time for any more beyond that.
What follow are my writeups for the week, which as always try avoid major spoilers, but not all spoilers. Read at your own peril.
Mode: Standard Bingo! Finished 4/25 Y N O H S
✅ SomaB G X K R T E ★ Wildcard
✅ Children of the SunP W V M
✅ Metro GravityF A Q C
✅ Citizen SleeperI D U L —
Soma (CW: hideously self-indulgent analysis)
Here’s a question I’d like you to consider: is it moral to have children? Not ‘ethical’ – ethics, broadly speaking, are morals generalized to a population, and ‘is it ethical to have children’ is the eugenics question. No, I'm asking, would it be right for you, the reader, to have kids, knowing what you know about yourself, your family, and the state of the world right now. This question is one I, unexpectedly, found myself considering while playing Soma, Frictional Games’s 2015 horror classic. And questions like this one are, in a roundabout way, why I don’t really want to talk about Soma in any length or breadth of detail. But here we are. I can only do my best.
People often ask me, “Evie, how are you so sexy? Can I have your number? Oh, and, incidentally, how do you write such good game criticism all the time?”
To which I reply “Genetics and hormones, sorry I’m taken, and well, it’s all about your mindset.”
You might intuitively assume that the work of writing about games occurs while writing – you’ve finished the game, and now you have to sit down in front of an endlessly blinking cursor and find a way to separate wheat from chaff, good from bad, experience from intent, with your words as scalpel. And you will have to do this, to a certain extent, but the real challenge of art criticism lies not in the criticism but in the art. How do you engage with a work, open yourself to it, in order to best understand it and, later, best communicate it?
The trick, I think, is to play the game, read the book, stare at the painting. Don’t think about what’s happening analytically, just experience the work. Then, only when you step back from the gallery wall, when you finish a chapter, when there’s a moment of downtime while you’re riding an elevator to the next level, feeling whatever feelings the art has stirred, then and only then you think about those feelings, and you think about what qualities of the work produced those feelings. It is one thing to write: “Soma is a scary game. There are jump scares, monsters, and troubling psychological themes.” It is another thing entirely to write, “while playing Soma, just walking around, I found myself suddenly wracked with frisson, pausing the game, yanking off my headphones. Just for a second, to catch my breath. There wasn’t even a monster, I was just walking, on the sea floor, and yet I just… couldn’t take a second more of the game’s oppressive atmosphere, an atmosphere largely created through visuals and sound design. We’ll return to this topic shortly, but for now,”
Not only is the second example better written, it’s also more engaging, because it ties my specific, human experience of the game to the game’s formal qualities. As a result, instead of a bland evaluation of whether the game is 'good' or 'bad,' or a listing of things that are in the game, the reader gets a better sense of the experience of playing the game, the reactions it can elicit, and, perhaps incidentally, who the writer is.
Similar techniques apply to writing about story, theme, structure, characters, et cetera. But the core idea is that good critique is grounded in your specific experience with the game. You can damage that experience by being too analytical, by myopically obsessing over whether what you’re playing is working or not, moment to moment. Breaking your immersion by thinking too much about the artistry behind the experience. I thought, quite frankly, that that was going to be be the experience I had with Soma.
Going in, I knew how Soma ended. I knew its core themes. I knew almost all its key plot beats. I knew all this, because Soma is an oft–discussed horror classic, that tends to stick in the minds of the people who play it, and because I’m a fiend for games criticism, and read or watch as much of it as I can find. So I expected that my playthrough of Soma would be a primarily analytical exercise; that my stay at Pathos-II, the research station at the bottom of the sea that our protagonist, Simon, has his psyche crammed into, would be largely emotionless and unaffecting. That this was not the case; that my time playing Soma affected me deeply, set my head spinning, scared me and fascinated me in equal measure, was a true delight. I’m also not sure whether or not the game itself had anything to do with it. I’m worried that, the game having short-circuited my critical brain, if I turn it back on, it’ll only be severely diminished by the examination; Thus, the long tangent about how to write good criticism. But I’ve digressed, stalled and dissembled enough, I think. Let’s, at least for a bit, talk about the actual game.
Mechanically, Soma is probably best described as a horror walking sim, where you take a linear path through an undersea facility in full collapse, collecting readables, solving very light puzzles, and experiencing a gripping and thought-provoking story. Narratively, thematically, Soma is a close cousin to several games that are near and dear to my heart: Prey 2017, Dead Space, Signalis – two of which, I wrote about for a Backlog Burner event last year. But experientially, in terms of gameplay, Soma is more similar to, say, What Remains of Edith Finch. It’s largely free of mechanics, gameplay, interactivity. The whole bulk of the challenge in the game is pathfinding around or hiding from monsters, and not even in a cool, “stealth gameplay” way. There are no bins or closets to hide in; hardly any ways to lure or distract or decommission monsters. Only waiting behind a table for them to wander somewhere else. The monsters, therefore, aren’t really the scary part of Soma. At best, they’re speed bumps, at worst, annoying speed bumps. No, what’s scary about Soma is the atmosphere, the world, the weight and scope of its themes.
Soma is a true psychological horror experience; my mind was often occupied with mute terror at what had happened to the residents of Pathos-II, and what was happening to me as I explored it. And with questions: should I feel guilty for killing that robot? Is Catherine dying repeatedly, every time I unplug her? Is it moral to have children? That’s where the fear comes from, I think, the uncertainty. Simon, the player character, is kind of a dumb guy. He’s probably never even heard of the Teletransportation Paradox (the philosophical quandry that underpins Soma’s world and story); certainly, he regularly fails to think through the implications of major reveals. It’s never frustrating so much as it is sad; there’s the sense that Simon, and all the past residents of Pathos-II, some of whom who killed themselves after having their brains scanned for upload into a digital paradise, are coping with the end of their world and willful ignorance is their drug of choice. But it also means that core questions that the game introduces or explores are never introduced. You have to sit with them, deal with them yourself, if you want to be able to stop thinking about them.
The rest of the horror in Soma comes from the setting. The bottom of the sea, in a cavitating research facility, with creaks and groans and shrieks of shrapnel scraping, mingling with the footsteps of horrific biomechanical amalgamations on the other side of the wall or ceiling. And then, outside of it, wandering through an indistinct murk, following a trail of work lights that, obscured by distance, look more like the eyes of some colossal cephalopod. Finding the wreck of a sunken ship. Not knowing whether entering it has made you safer, or more vulnerable. Soma was, to some extent, always going to work on me; I’ve joked that my first horror movies were nature documentaries, the episodes of Planet Earth that dealt with the deep ocean. And I have formative memories about traveling to the US Virgin Islands for a destination wedding, about being urged deeper into the sea by my dad, about feeling a big and slimy and breathing something brush up against my foot. But, personal history notwithstanding, certain moments – walking the sea floor for the first time, or coming to the edge of a plateau and looking down into nothing at all – were among the scariest moments I’ve experienced in any game, and that’s thanks to Soma’s soundscapes and its visuals, which look very aged in some moments but, on the seafloor, amid rusty wreckage and swirling clouds of silt, can seem almost indistinguishable from reality.
But this is the difficulty I’m having with Soma. If I wasn’t so fucking thalassaphobic, maybe I would think the game sucked. The monsters aren’t scary. The mechanics aren’t there to support a ten hour walking simulator. I wasn’t ever scared by, say, Signalis, not this viscerally, but that game actually had gameplay – challenging, punishing, oppressive gameplay, that cultivates a mood, a horror unto itself. So the question is, is Soma scary, or did it just scare me? When I describe the elements of the game that make the horror work, they feel shockingly flimsy. “The game looks good.” “The sound design is evocative.” Great. I’ve just described, like, most games that release nowadays. And this doesn’t just apply to the horror elements of the game, either.
Our main characters, Simon and Catherine, are tasked with carrying the weight of the game’s story on their back. Though you meet or hear from other characters, it’s mostly in the frame story, or simulations, or in sort of ‘audiologs’ that Simon can retrieve from the diving suits of the dead. Most of the game, it’s just Simon talking to himself, or when Catherine, a digitized person, is plugged into the base, talking to Catherine. And frankly, I think both performers do a fairly bad job with the material they’re given, which is also often clunky and subpar. Dialogue is often unnaturally phrased in an uncanny-valley kind of way. Characters in conversation often don’t sound like they’re replying to each other’s line reads. Both main characters default to a tone that is in Simon’s case affectless and in Catherine’s that of a grade school teacher giving a lesson to a chronically uncomprehending child. This is a failure of voice direction, probably, and also of dialogue writing. But as much as I can point to this general deficit of quality I can equally point to scenes that were exquisitely written and performed: Simon’s final explosion at Catherine, Catherine’s memory of a Taipei she never truly experienced, Sarah’s death scene. I’m worried that these moments, which even made me tear up with their sharpness of writing and their clarity of performance, were only accidental; that if I dig too deep into Soma's scenes, I’ll find that there’s nothing there really worth analyzing.
I feel the same way about the game's themes. I mentioned the Teletransportation Paradox, which asks: ‘Is a perfectly scanned and recreated replica of you, still you? What does it mean to possess “continuity of self?” Is there even any such thing?’ It’s core to Soma’s themes; the Simon you play as throughout the game is a recreation of an early digital scan of the original Simon, created in a doctor’s office; as a first subject of such scanning, he became almost a placeholder, default personality uploaded thoughtlessly to many databases, many research stations. Catherine’s plan to save humanity involves creating a digital paradise for scanned replicas of the dead Pathos-II crew. Your journey to save them involves simulating humans to interrogate them, then “killing” them, in a harrowing scene; it involves creating new copies of yourself; involves grappling with an AI that tries to upload dead consciousness into robots to save them, but ends up torturing them instead. Soma presents enough permutations of its core problems, with enough variations, that it feels like nearly a complete exploration of the theme, and invokes fascinating questions along the way, like the aforementioned “is it moral to have children?” More specifically: is it acceptable, for Simon to create copies of himself, with the brain trauma he’s endured, with the horrific state the world is in? Simon never thinks about this, but I certainly did. I’ve been thinking about this question a lot lately, sort of… belatedly mourning my own infertility, and have come to the conclusion that no, I’m mentally ill enough, traumatized enough from my own relationship with my parents, in a precarious enough position, living in a bleak enough world, that I couldn’t justify having kids to myself. And so the question comes: did Soma raise that question, or did I, and I just happened to play Soma at the right time? If I really dig into its exploration of the aforementioned Paradox, will I find unexplored depths, or will I discover that Soma, while a decent primer, has nothing new or interesting to say on the subject?
I love Soma, and it’s easy for me to explain why. I’m a good critic, I’ve thought about such things before. I could compare Soma to other great works of art, could examine its mien in considerable depth. Could explain to you why precisely it’s been so beloved to those who played it, and so influential to those who came after it. What I cannot do is say, “Soma is a great game. I recommend you play Soma. Soma really holds up. If you’re a fan of horror games, you’ll love Frictional’s 2015 game Soma.” Because I don’t know. I don’t know if the game is a good experience, if it’s scary, if the story is good, if the themes really resonate. What I know is that it worked for me, but I’m worried that, if I dig any deeper, my perception of the game will worsen, and my experience will be diminished. If you want a better answer or summation than that, play it for yourself.
Let me leave you with an anecdote. One of the women I live with used to love the film Everything Everywhere All At Once. She watched and rewatched it with all her friends. Broke down crying on the couch with me, the third time she saw a certain scene. It was such a good film, I think, that it got her invested in film as a medium. And now, she’s a film buff. She watches un-subtitled Eastern European films about bureaucracy, Argentinian films about men who shit on their enemies' windshields. Silent French films about bourgeois yo-yo players. She has (gasp!) a Letterboxd account. And she told me, recently, while we were sniping good-naturedly at each other over a draft of a script she'd written and I'd edited (rather ruthlessly), that she thinks that Everything Everywhere All At Once is overrated, that she agrees with most of the criticisms it gets from (in my opinion) contrarian film buffs. But, I thought, caught short, I held you while you cried over that scene with the donut, and murmured indecipherable things about your own family.
Sometimes, it’s better to let your experience with the art stand. Sometimes, you don’t really need to dig any deeper than that. It might not even be the game's fault. Maybe all the problems I have with Soma, simmering away in my subconscious, would dissolve into nothing under the harsh light of a full and proper analysis. But for now, I love the game enough not to risk it.
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Children of the Sun (CW: normal, sensible and brief analysis)
It was not my intention to alternate between story games and gameplay games this Backlog Burner, but so far, that’s what happened. I played Citizen Sleeper (story) then Metro Gravity (gameplay) then Soma (story) and now Children of the Sun, which certainly possesses a story, yes, but only one shown in what feels like ten minutes cumulatively, in wordless bursts of comic panels between levels. No, though Children of the Sun’s story is surprisingly rich and well-implemented for how sparse it ultimately is, the real reason it’s here is to provide context for the game’s puzzle shooter levels – which are the real reason you’re here.
If only there existed a game that had both gameplay and a story. Ah well. A girl can dream.
In Children of the Sun, you play as a nameless girl, the survivor of a high-control paramilitary sex cult that enslaved and killed her parents, as she takes up a rifle and slaughters her way through Montana in a magically enhanced revenge tour. You only have one bullet, one shot per level, so Children of the Sun’s gameplay consists of finding a way to line up your shot so that you can kill every enemy in a level – there are often as many as ten or fifteen – in a single shot. This can be accomplished by “bouncing” your bullet from one enemy’s head to the next, by blowing up gas cans, by bending your shot midair with magic powers. So the gameplay feels less reminiscent of, say, a Sniper Elite, more reminiscent of a SUPERHOT or a Ghostrunner, where the goal is to find the perfect route through a level to kill every enemy in one attempt, requiring both mechanical skill and careful planning to execute.
As a puzzle game, Children of the Sun does more than enough to keep itself interesting and engaging for its less-than-three–hour runtime. Introducing new enemy types, new powers to counteract them, and levels with different types of challenges: a timed level, where if you don’t hurry, more enemies will spawn in. A car chase level, where you have to bounce your bullet between moving automobiles. More puzzle-y levels, where it’s all about finding the right path; more improvisational levels, where almost any strategy can work, and it’s all about execution. I found the game was rich both in cool mechanical discoveries that made a level click together, and the sort of “speedrunner thrill” of perfectly executing a difficult series of maneuvers. And since each level has a leaderboard, you’re encouraged to improve your runs, to push even further for a high score and a higher rank. I probably won’t be replaying any of Children of the Sun’s levels, but even so, it was cool to grind out some weird, tough, unintuitive solution to a level even on a first clear, see that my score had ranked in the top 1000, and know that not a lot of people thought of that, and that their strategies didn’t score nearly so well.
Children of the Sun isn’t a story game, but it certainly creates and reinforces a strong mood. With its jarring, garish art design, its sparse soundscape, its nonlinear comic panels, its non-puzzle gimmick levels that task you with cleaning the gun, hunting for food, or kneeling for and embracing other cult members in a dream. All these things, I think, mainly serve to at once clue you into and distance you from the mindset of the traumatized main character, who thinks thoughts like “I Just Killed A Man Now I’m Horny” and (directed to the cult’s leader) “Soon the sun will start shining through a bullet shaped hole in your head,” who both is incredibly violent towards the cult and misses the comfort, the family, that they once provided her. It’s a visceral experience, but you’re held at a distance, I think, feeling more like an observer, or a subject, than a participant. After all, you don’t play as the former cultist; you play as her bullet.
Children of the Sun took me only two and a half hours to beat, and I had a good time with its puzzles, and was intrigued and engaged by what story there was. I can’t say it was life changing, or that I fell in love with it like I did its genre neighbors – SUPERHOT got me into puppy play (look, honestly, we don't have to say anything more on the subject); Ghostrunner got me, briefly, into speedrunning; Children of the Sun will most likely not get me into anything, but it was a compelling and tidy experience, and I strongly recommend it, without even one of my usual self-obsessed wishy-washy qualms to hold me back.
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Comment on November 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 2 Discussion in ~games
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Comment on November 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 2 Discussion in ~games
Evie Link ParentThank you! If the combat scares you off of Metro Gravity, I should add that there's an accessibility setting that triples the parry windows -- this more or less trivializes the combat, for those...Thank you! If the combat scares you off of Metro Gravity, I should add that there's an accessibility setting that triples the parry windows -- this more or less trivializes the combat, for those who just want to do the puzzles, the platforming, the exploration, and experience the spectacle of the bosses.
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Comment on November 2025 Backlog Burner: Week 2 Discussion in ~games
Evie (edited )LinkWasn't sure whether I'd be able to participate this month, busy as I've been with my novel writing, but I have time enough for five games, at least! You'll forgive me for batch posting my writeups...Wasn't sure whether I'd be able to participate this month, busy as I've been with my novel writing, but I have time enough for five games, at least! You'll forgive me for batch posting my writeups at the start of the week, I hope.
Bingo! card
Mode: Standard Bingo! Finished 2/25 Y N O H S B G X K R T E ★ Wildcard P W V M
✅ Metro GravityF A Q C
✅ Citizen SleeperI D U L This week I played two new games, Citizen Sleeper and Metro Gravity. Writeups follow; you can assume these will contain vague and general spoilers, but avoid major story spoilers where possible.
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Citizen Sleeper Writeup
It’s always a pain to finish a game during the Backlog Burner event and to know that your backlog has not in fact shrunk one bit, because earlier this year Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector released, and immediately after finishing the first one I went to Steam and bought it. I’m about to be a bit harsh on Citizen Sleeper in this review, and what I want to be clear about right up front is that I think this game, a management sim-meets-Disco Elyisum style RPG, where you explore a space station and try to build a life there, is very good. The worst that can be said about it is that it’s derivative and poorly paced and painfully light – and I will be saying all that. But I don’t want the strengths of this game to get lost in the shuffle, so let’s start with those.
Citizen Sleeper is, mechanically, very more-ish. Fundamentally, the game plays like this: at the start of the day, you roll a pool of one to five six sided dice, depending on your current health. You then spend those dice around the halo-shaped space station megastructure The Eye, doing odd jobs or progressing questlines or hacking – choosing which tasks should get the high rolls, and which ones should get the low rolls. By completing jobs, you unlock conversation scenes that will progress one of several sidestories and provide roleplaying opportunities. Often, key jobs and quests will come with a time limit, giving you only a set number of days to complete them, or forcing you to wait a set number of days to progress them. Each day is short, lasting only a few minutes – I completed the game in ninety in-game days and nine real-world hours – and you’ll often have multiple irons on the fire, multiple timers running. My thoguht process often went something like, "well, in three days, the ship dealing scrap will arrive, so I can craft a shipmind for X quest, but in four days, I have to pay this guy’s bar tab, so I should do some jobs in the meantime, and in this job, I have to decide whether to spend my dice on actually doing work, or on searching for clues about the underlying mystery before I get fired."
And at the end of the day, you think, well, it’s just a couple more days until Y happens, so I should keep playing until then, and it’s always just a couple more days to get something big done, with multiple overlapping timers, so the game is very difficult to put down. I played Citizen Sleeper in almost a single sitting, only breaking to eat and to clean the bathroom, and I didn’t even intend to – you know, nine hour game – but the mechanics were so propulsive that I just couldn’t stop. It helps that the story is pretty well-written, too. On The Eye you meet a diverse, colorful cast of characters belonging to a homogeneously grimy group of factions: corporations, gangs, corrupt unions. And the writing isn’t unusually beautiful, the dialogue isn’t unusually believable, but it isn’t trying to be. This is a competently written game that knows exactly what it is; that is at its best when telling stories about a cast that’s like, thirty percent male, thirty percent female, and thirty percent NB, where politics serve as an ever present subtext, where there are no easy choices or everybody wins scenarios. Which is most of the time. It’s a pity, then, that I’ve read this story before.
Citizen Sleeper has an achievement called A LONG JOURNEY TO A SMALL UNKNOWN PLANET. This is a reference to Becky Chambers’s novel The Long Way to A Small, Angry Planet, and, alongside Disco Elysium, that book is clearly Citizen Sleeper’s biggest reference point. If you’ve read Chambers’s novels, you’ll immediately recognize in Citizen Sleeper both direct references and an extremely strong tonal and structural resemblance. Circumstantially, both stories seem rather bleak, but by focusing on relatively hopeful and empathetic stories of community and solidarity, both spacefaring something-punk worlds ultimately feel quite cozy and, in low moments, even a little weightless. Both stories largely lack a main plot, instead taking on an episodic narrative structure comprised of largely disconnected character-driven stories. In Citizen Sleeper, you play as a robot consciousness with no legal rights; the way that story is handled will strongly remind you of The Long Way’s sequels. In some respects, Citizen Sleeper actually surpasses Chambers’s book. Because its episodes progress on these overlapping timers, they feel muddled together, creating a greater sense of a more textured, cohesive world, where all the characters are living their lives in parallel, so that even if their paths don't really cross, at least they're not arbitrarily disappearing from the narrative whenever an episode doesn't need them. But in most ways, Citizen Sleeper is worse than the novel that so clearly inspired it, with weaker prose and dialogue, and much worse pacing, especially towards the end (unfortunately, the game overstays its welcome). What’s really missing here, I think, is intertextuality. Citizen Sleeper owes a great debt to the Chambers's Wayfarers series and to Disco Elysium, but it also fails to really say or do much of anything that they haven’t. It doesn’t challenge them, or disagree with them, or add to the conversation those texts are having, except to say, “mhm, definitely!” Its politics are obvious if you’ve ever played, like, the modal indie game before. Its writing is much better than the average game, but weaker than the average novel. It entirely lacks a main plot, meaning that this is a game that’s basically only side-stories, a serious flaw when even Disco had its murder investigation and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet had its titular journey. The game really feels like a freshman effort, the bright-eyed attempt of a young team to emulate what they loved about their favorite art, and not going far enough to equal, much less surpass, their influences.
But what the hell, I teared up twice to the end of side quests in Citizen Sleeper. The bright-eyed young team might not do much that’s new, but they do enough that’s interesting, vulnerable, and human to make the game well worth your time. There are even a couple neat bits of commentary hidden in there. Like, with all of the different jobs you’ll be doing in a single day, the game can feel pretty gig-economy-y. In one day, I’ve tended bar for Tala, I’ve scrapped a ship for the union, and I’ve grown mushrooms for the commune. And this is actually built into the world, with a scene that depicts the difficulty characters have getting permanent work assignments, forced in the meantime have to take a ticket, wait in line, and hope their number gets called for scrapper work or whatever. There are a couple of neat ways the simple mechanics reinforce the world like that. A lot of extraneous little details that make The Eye feel more real, alive, and cohesively thought-out, with a strong sense of place. There are lots of ostensibly redundant restaurants or apartments with different meals and prices tailored for the class of the usual clientele. There are lots of different completely optional jobs, with different risks and pay rates. There’s a cat that only appears in one scene, but you can still feed it every day (in the futile hope it might one day turn up again). The Eye possesses such a strong sense of place, that it even weakened certain decisions. When two out of three main “endings” – the questlines that will roll credits; yes, you can do all three of them – involved the choice of whether to leave The Eye or set out for somewhere unknown, the choice was trivially easy for me. This place feels like home – why would my character, on the run all their life, leave it for another unknown? It’s also cool that you often have the option in dialogue to just… not say anything. I probably clicked “Stay silent” in my playthrough more than every other dialogue option combined, which allowed me to roleplay a type of character that you can’t usually get in RPGs – one I’m actually fairly similar to in real life, the more reserved, introverted type – and the writing very naturally accommodates this choice. So the game is at a baseline just well made, and it’s also not devoid of its own little charms.
Like I said, though, Citizen Sleeper really outstays its welcome. Its late game quests are easy to complete with the abundance of cash and skill points you’ll have, but have long timers between stages, meaning you’ll be spending a lot of days with not much of anything to spend your dice on and lots of time to grow tired of the game, only drawn forward by the tediously ticking timers and the nearly empty questlog. What sucks is that you know there’s no grand climax waiting for you at the end, just another (probably impactful) end to a sidequest that nevertheless won’t tie into a bigger picture or meaningfully develop a larger theme. So you’re just growing mushrooms for ingame day after day, looking forward with dread to the three post-launch endgame “episodes” that promise to be more of the same, for yet more hours.
Unfortunately, the episodes don’t make a strong early impression. By the late game, with nearly every skill unlocked, I found it trivially easy to complete all their stages, all their challenges, without ever being anywhere near a zugzwang, without ever having to think about how to spend my dice. And the writing is at its most overtly political, as you're challenged with handling a refugee crisis; here, again, Citizen Sleeper still says nothing revolutionary, and the more explicitly its characters talk about their political opinions, the less believable and the more clunky they sound. This only gets worse in the second episode when it becomes clear that the refugees in the flotilla, and the people on The Eye keeping them in stasis due to political and social anxieties, will have to join hands and work together to avert a natural disaster; an eye-rolling cliche; a painfully easy resolution to a problem that often, in the ral world, is deeply intractable and unjust. And once again, the final choice will be about whether to leave The Eye with the refugees, or stay on, with its tapestry of flawed people and flawed organizations. A choice I’ve made twice before, which will be no more interesting the third time.
I’ve been reading a couple books lately featuring leads who desperately want to go home. These are Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel Trilogy (don’t look it up, lest you think less of me), and China Mieville’s The Scar. These protagonists, Phedre and Bellis, they have experienced firsthand the cruelty and corruption of the imperial cities they grew up in, and yet, they are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to get back to their homes, to protect them, not out of nationalism, but out of some aching, unnameable desire. Were I a few years younger, I wouldn’t have understood this feeling, but I think I get it now. As a kid, my family spend a lot of time – years, consecutively, always in the process of moving. When we finally settled, I was afraid that if my family found out about my identity, they would throw me away. As a young adult, I moved from the midwest to Texas back to the midwest back to Texas to a different city in Texas, uprooted by work and COVID and depression and transition. And I never felt like I had a home. Just, a lot of places I’d lived for a while. Then, three years ago, I moved with the ladies to Seattle, and suddenly, that was that. Suddenly I understood what it means to love a place so much you can never leave it. Suddenly I knew what it was like to be home.
For me, if Citizen Sleeper has an emotional core, more than the vague and predictable explorations of politics, personhood and identity it contains, it’s that story of finding a community and making a home for yourself that resonated with me along all its disconnected threads. And even if it’s frustratingly predictable and a little contrived and contains so many dropped commas that I wonder whether it was proofread, that third and final episode would, at least, be a nice bookend to the experience.
So, I settled in to play it, and was proven delightfully wrong about just about everything.
In the third and final post-launch episode to Citizen Sleeper, finally, all of the stories that you thought were finished, all the characters who never interacted and sometimes felt like they existed in separate worlds from one another finally come together to deal with the natural disaster threatening The Eye and the refugees. In a climax that feels so organic that I’d almost believe that it was planned, every major dangling thread, much of the worldbuilding, many plots that seemed totally disconnected all converge into an elegant and satisfying solution to the crisis. The cat even shows up again. And, breaking my heart, many of the citizens of The Eye, worried about whether this tenuous solution you devise will work, still say goodbye, and leave with the refugee flotilla for a new and uncertain future. If it’s a little slapdash as a climax, it still ultimately ties together all of Citizen Sleeper’s mysteries and provides a satisfying and gut wrenching goodbye to its world. And finally, the game also dares to say something a little bit new. It portrays The Eye as a society with no history, only a fledgling culture, and therefore no strong bonds between its people. They are in danger of being washed away by the tide of flux, yes, but also by the corporate structure vying for control of the system, by the internal conflicts in the station. Meanwhile the refugees retain a powerful relationship to their culture and history; are at once imprisoned and guided by it. Thus, saving the Eye and the refugees is not just about stopping the “natural disaster.” It’s about helping them shoulder the weight of their patchwork histories, and bear that weight forward into the boundless future. For the Eye, to create their own stories, their own identities, separate from the traumas that have defined them. For the refugees, to be able to move on without breaking their neck from craning it backward. Work that cannot be done in the space of the game, but hangs heavy over the ending, as I, predictably, choose to stay on The Eye and face the coming disaster with all those who remain.
For the first time in the game, the camera pans out, capturing the whole Eye in one single shot. The dialogue box promises crises, disasters, and tensions to come. Throughout the game, I’ve seen the corruption within this place and without: the people who want to bend it to their own ends; the people who hate what it represents, and want to destroy it. I’ve watched as normal, innocent people struggle against its inequalities, trying their best to find a sense of community and stability within it all the same. I’ve watched people leave, and felt sorrow at how the city will miss them, and hope that they’ll find what they’re looking for. But this place is my home. I never once thought about leaving it.
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Metro Gravity Writeup
This was a really interesting game because it is, ostensibly, a blend of two genres I love: Metroidvania, Soulslike – with three I don’t care for: platformer, puzzler, rhythm game. Metro Gravity is like if Hi-Fi Rush (a game I DNFed) met Mario Galaxy (my favourite childhood game) met Manifold Garden (another game I DNFed), tied together into a 3D Metroidvania. The idea is that you’re a (ludicrously caked up) witch who can control gravity, exploring a strange dream world where characters come to – deal with their trauma? Purge their guilt over past mistakes? I don’t know, it’s a vague, impressionistic Soulslike story, though at least a pretty tidy one. So I won’t speak too much on the writing – I felt the game’s tone was a little light and whimsical for the tricky themes it tried to explore, but it’s really hard to say whether that’s an actual flaw, with how little story there is by volume. What I will say is that every other element of this weird genre mishmash ultimately really works, and I had a lot of fun with the game, even if it made my head hurt.
Because you can walk on walls and ceilings (and every surface, actually), the opening to this game is really confusing, disorienting, and exhausting. At the beginning, I could only play Metro Gravity in thirty minute bursts without getting a serious headache, and I found it impossible to build a conceptual map of the space in my head, like I usually do with Metroidvanias. But eventually, you do adjust, or I did, and the spaces started to make a lot more sense, link together more cohesively, and not make my brain leak out of my ears. That said, were it not for the fact that this is the only “M” game on my backlog, and part of the easiest Bingo on my card, I almost certainly would have DNFed just from how rough the beginning was.
Once I adjusted though, and unlocked the grappling hook, moving around the levels was a genuine pleasure. The fact that every wall might have a door in it, but so might the ceiling and the floor, adds a level of depth to exploration that I wasn’t expecting, and the game makes good use of what I’ll call “falling puzzles” where the best way to traverse a room is to position yourself and align gravity so that it will make you fall towards your destination. These platforming challenges aren’t the only puzzles to be solved, of course. There are also electricity puzzles, laser puzzles, temperature puzzles, and block-and-button puzzles. Structurally, the game works like this: you find an area. In that area is a hub, with three or four chains or beams of light or wires leading off into nearby rooms. In each room is a puzzle or a battle; do the challenge, activate the power source or whatever, and once you’ve done all of them, the hub will open up or move aside or shine down to reveal a new area, or a boss door. This structure is, it must be said, extremely repetitive, but the areas and the puzzle mechanics are varied enough to keep things interesting, making good use of your unlocked abilities and offering a satisfying difficulty progression. The same cannot be said for the combat.
Metro Gravity has rhythm game combat, in a sense. It’s not that you have to attack or dodge on beat to succeed; it’s that, as I understand it, your inputs are kind of buffered and the moves don’t come out until the next beat in the music, so ultimately you’re sort of forced to be attacking and defending in rhythm with the enemy. Unfortunately, most enemies are just big health pools with one or two clearly telegraphed attacks that demand either a parry, dodge or jump in response; most enemies in the game, aside from bosses, feel more or less the same to fight, and it gets old by the end, so that’s a shame. The real standouts of the combat are those boss fights: there are five of them, by my count, and they’re all fantastic set pieces – really challenging attack sequences, set to great music, with the boss dragging you through several different locations, each one playing host to a new phase with a new attack pattern. These boss fights do a really good job of conveying the boss’s character – what they did that made them need to come to this virtual therapy world – without saying a word. It’s a bit unfortunate, though, that the boss fights are true rhythm game sequences; your attacks literally do nothing to them, except to increase your score and combo – until the song ends, whereupon the boss becomes a flaccid punching bag for you to finish off. It would, perhaps, be too much to ask for these fights to be actual fights, to have the music hold and loop until you did enough damage to progress to the next phase. That change would probably make the music much harder to compose, and make the boss fights feel less like a dance. But there’s a bit of a sense of a lack of agency with the boss fights that I wish the game did more to alleviate. The later boss fights do get a bit better by allowing you to, say, climb a snake in a big platforming section to continue the battle, which is what I’m looking for, but it’s still not quite enough.
It’s rare for me to actually enjoy the puzzles in a puzzle game – I usually find them either trivially easy or impossibly difficult, with no in between; it’s like, either I solve a puzzle very quickly, or I get bad tunnel vision and never solve it at all. But I actually found this game to be an exception, or maybe just I sign I’ve gotten out of that cognitive rut. There were a lot of puzzles that I kind of had to muddle through because the game doesn’t quite explain its gravity mechanics as well as it should – mainly, that when you change the gravitational direction of an object, it keeps that direction permanently, or until you change it again – but also, more than a few times where I had that satisfying “aha!” moment where the solution just clicked. It helps that this is a pretty obscure (read: underrated) game, and doesn’t really have any guides available for the tough puzzles – and at some points, believe me, I looked. So although I got stuck a couple times, and even thought about writing that I thought about quitting, I had a pretty enjoyable time pushing through and figuring things out. That said, I’m not going to fully 100% complete this game. Some of the optional puzzles make my head hurt just looking at them.
Metro Gravity is a really weird, niche game. It’s drawing on so many different influences and ideas that there are gonna be some parts of it that you dislike no matter what. In no world could the game be described as cohesive; for example, the rhythm elements and the puzzles have truly nothing to do with one another, ever. But it also feels very singular, polished, and well executed. This feels like a game that one guy really wanted to make, and even if not every part of it clicked for me, I still ultimately had a ton of fun. I mean, there’s great music, there’s a cat enemy that fucks with you by forcibly switching your gravity, there’s a grappling hook. What more needs to be said?
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All in all, a pretty good week. This coming week I'm working my way through Soma and Children of the Sun, and hopefully starting in on Keylocker as well. After that, we shall see.
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Comment on Crossdressing Garbage in ~creative
Evie Link ParentNo one asked about your friend. I'm sure they were struggling, and needed help that you could not give. To go on and say that, from your limited experience, all crossdressers are fetishists, and,...No one asked about your friend. I'm sure they were struggling, and needed help that you could not give. To go on and say that, from your limited experience, all crossdressers are fetishists, and, by implication, bad people, is the definition of bigotry. Like you, I have known some people who crossdressed and, also, struggled with mental health, torched relationships, made a cabbage of their lives. I have also known some who were kind and lovely and beautiful people. And I have seen the first kind turn into the second, with support and with distance and with time. Not to mention all the trans people who crossdress first to explore; not to mention the queer people who do so as performance art. You would likely say my experience comes from an echo chamber? You are no doubt older than me, but I think in this matter I have seen much more than you. Whereas you are the one generalizing your limited experience to slur a hurting stranger.
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Comment on Timasomo 2025: The Showcase in ~creative.timasomo
Evie Link ParentI don't know shit about music really but I worked on musical theatre for years and you have a voice for it Kind of an wild pull but this reminds me of the music from the Big Fish stage musical...I don't know shit about music really but I worked on musical theatre for years and you have a voice for it
Kind of an wild pull but this reminds me of the music from the Big Fish stage musical adaptation. It feels a bit like a song and then its reprise (with ~2:40 onward being the reprise). I thought you did some melodically interesting stuff in the back half and I liked the fugue? section with both the voices. And there's already some great imagery here already -- "lifeless crystal road" for example is just so evocative. Definitely worth developing further imo.
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Comment on Timasomo 2025: The Showcase in ~creative.timasomo
Evie Link ParentWow, this was really visceral. The art style, of course; it feels raw and laid open. I really liked the layout on pg.6, and the redactions too. The -- what is it, decreased detail and saturation?...Wow, this was really visceral. The art style, of course; it feels raw and laid open. I really liked the layout on pg.6, and the redactions too. The -- what is it, decreased detail and saturation? on pg.9, really centers you and your experience in a way that feels really freeing and soft in contrast. It's a really vulnerable piece, so thank you for sharing -- I can relate a little bit -- being trans, I recognize some of the sort of volatile anxieties and self-criticism that I had when I was just beginning my transition. Exploring how you present yourself, whatever your identity is, can feel really precarious when society clings so tightly to its norms. But you learn a lot about yourself when exploring, and ultimately I think you'll come out the other side freer and happier. At least, I did. Would love to see more, whenever you're ready to post it :)
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Comment on Timasomo 2025: The Showcase in ~creative.timasomo
Evie Link ParentI actually really like that "Gash" project. It's a very evocative concept to me and the execution is simple and competent enough not to detract from the piece. The colors are very striking too,...I actually really like that "Gash" project. It's a very evocative concept to me and the execution is simple and competent enough not to detract from the piece. The colors are very striking too, and the brick red really guides the eye. Not everything has to be some groundbreaking (hah) masterpiece! Cool to see your progress with the patches too.
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Comment on Timasomo 2025: The Showcase in ~creative.timasomo
Evie Link ParentIt's very kind of you to say so! Very reassuring, too. I kind of forget when I'm working on this stuff that there's anything good about my prose, or that my dumb jokes are funny, which I guess is...It's very kind of you to say so! Very reassuring, too. I kind of forget when I'm working on this stuff that there's anything good about my prose, or that my dumb jokes are funny, which I guess is just the way of things.
I actually worked as a dramaturge on a couple productions as well, back in college. Did research for a production of Radium Girls -- the play about the women who got cancer making glowing watches for the Great War -- and a weird anachronistic production of Oedipus the King. I hadn't clocked that I was drawing on that experience for Poppy actually but in hindsight it probably should have been obvious.
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Comment on Picador unveils China Miéville’s new novel, twenty years in the making, to be released September 2026 in ~books
Evie LinkOh hell yeah. Mieville is my favourite speculative author, and while I certainly don't begrudge him his last decade of writing left wing theory, or making a graphic novel with Keanu Reeves, I'm...Oh hell yeah. Mieville is my favourite speculative author, and while I certainly don't begrudge him his last decade of writing left wing theory, or making a graphic novel with Keanu Reeves, I'm thrilled for his return to the novel form. In particular I'm happy it's another woman protagonist; his previous female leads, Avice Benner Cho and Bellis Coldwine, are some of my absolute favourite perspective characters in any book.
It's best in this context to think of "gacha games" as "content-driven live services;" as opposed to "gameplay-driven live services," eg live service shooters; the reason to stick around in a gacha is the regular addition of new core content: new story chapters, new regions to explore, etc. In Reverse 1999's case, the game's genre is "visual novel;" it's a linear story game told with Live2D character models on static backgrounds. "Gacha" is the content and monetization model; it means the game adds a new major story/content update every six weeks; the content is available to everyone for free; it's monetized by "pulling" characters from the story -- obtaining them in a system involving random chance, where you can buy more in game currency to get more pulling attempts.
With Reverse, a story game, the question is, well, what do you use the characters you pull for? And Reverse answers this by having a very light turned based battle system, where you deploy three or four character teams to tackle enemy cops, cultists and cryptids. You might say, "combat? Well, how is the game a visual novel, then?" I stick with the visual novel label for Reverse because, though there are battle nodes in the main story, usually it's like five or ten trivially easy one minute battles in a three to six hour story, and often the battles feel contrived, or are abstractions of other nonviolent conflicts. In one recent story chapter, battle scenes represented 1). Scrubbing a stubborn stain off a pot 2). Purifying the air with a ramshackle air purifying machine and 3). Playing a difficult musical instrument -- they're there to give you something to do in story segments, like, say, the trial minigames during Danganronpa. That is, they're minor diversions that exist in service to the story.
You might wonder, "well, if the combat is so easy, what's even incentivising me to spend money on the game?" What indeed. Reverse 1999's CEO recently did a Chinese-language interview where he implied that Reverse's per-player revenue was well below that of big hitters like Genshin Impact. The idea is that tougher, non-story endgame combat challenges will give you extrinsic motivation to pull, and your attachment to the characters resulting from the remarkably written story will provide the intrinsic motivation. But the endgame stuff is all still fairly easy with rag-tag teams and a little strategizing, and long-term players can collect most characters without spending any money at all, so the developers have recently mostly opted to monetize the old-fashioned way: by selling skins at fixed prices, and by making sure older characters are still meta-relevant so that you'll use them and have cause to want their skins.
The fact that you can more or less ignore its entire monetization system and just experience the sometimes-incredible story, for free, might be one of Reverse's core strengths. It's incredibly accessible.