The second of Playdate’s signature “seasons”–bundles of games for the becranked handheld launched on a weekly basis for a set number of weeks–launched on May 29th this year, and on the 6th of June, friend-of-exp. Brandon Sheffield posted this:
Wasn't feeling Wheelsprung in the new Playdate Season 2 drop, something felt off for me. And well! There you go. play.date/games/wheels…
And… surprising? If you’re unfamiliar with Panic, the Portland-based Mac app developer who have been flush enough to not just put out a boutique handheld but even do things like put out Katamari Damacy t-shirts back in the day just because they could (I had the silver one, and I still miss it) they’re supposed to be one of the good ones. Their publishing arm put out Thank Goodness You’re Here, the official exp. Game Of The Year 2024, a beautiful, hand-crafted experience of regional and human specificity, and have just recently released the similarly human work Despelote, so it seems odd that they’d be so ok with our era of AI slopification that they’d not only allow it on Playdate but intentionally publish products featuring it.
The developer of Wheelsprung, Nino van Hooff, did respond to Sheffield on Bluesky, stating:
“Github Copilot was used for auto-completing single lines of code … As for text: I used chat gpt as a kind of dictionary and to explore level names. It might come up with Rolling Ripple and I would use that as inspiration for Ripple Ride.”
Rolling Ripple? This kind of “I used it but only in genuinely unnecessary ways” sounds more like a slippery slope to me. You couldn’t ask your co-developer or playtesters or QA team or publisher for level names? You couldn’t… finish writing the lines yourself?
As someone who hadn’t picked up Playdate Season 2 yet, and who has a strict “no AI” policy, I was interested to know what Panic had to say over this. So I got in touch with them and though it took a while, they did actually get back to me. Cabel Sasser, Panic’s co-founder:
“We hadn’t considered the possibility that a Season Two game might use LLMs, and in hindsight, that was naive — we take full responsibility for that. In the future, we’ll change our Season application and make sure we ask detailed questions about any LLM use in submitted games up-front, setting proper expectations early on.”
But considering they missed this, did any of the other Playdate Season 2 games feature GenAI?
“We tripled checked, and no other Season 2 games use any LLM-generated content.”
Alright then, but what if you’ve got a similar “no AI” policy to mine, but you’ve already bought in?
“If a customer feels hoodwinked by Wheelsprung’s use of LLMs, we totally understand, and they can reach out to our support team directly. While we’re not sure what we can do yet (it’s very complicated) but we’re working on some ideas.”
So there you go. Though this is disappointing, it does sound like the concerns have been heard, and while I’ll continue to hold off purchasing Playdate S2 (and it’s what I’ll advise) I don’t feel I have to scrap an article on Despelote that I already had in progress now (phew). If you’ve already picked up Season 2, I do suggest getting in touch with their support–at least to let your opposition to GenAI/LLMs be known. Let’s not just hope that Panic will decide to implement a blanket ban on GenAI/LLM use in titles they publish or on Playdate–let’s make it clear that’s the right move.
And for what it’s worth: though I’ve just written an entire article on this, I’m not interested in the public shaming of the developer (or Panic). I simply hope this is a lesson in the insidious ways GenAI is being made inescapable and how it is being positioned to encroach on human creativity subtly enough that people overlook it. Think of the tools you use in your practice–there’s probably some stupid fucking AI button somewhere, promising to make your work just a little bit easier. It won’t, and it’ll make what you’re doing a little less human. A little less you.
But they want you to click it anyway. So they can pretend what they’re offering is actually useful, so they can raise more money to drop more city-sized data centers that suck up more lakes of water and more fossil fuel, ever accelerating our planet’s death spiral. Fuck that. Let’s be better than that. Let’s be one of the good ones.
Hello and welcome to the very first exp. Dispatch! A little later than I expected for a variety of reasons. But at least with the delay I fixed the mailing address so this doesn’t just go immediately into your spam box, like the confirmation emails for, uh, about half of the people who have subscribed, who therefore won’t be reading this in their inboxes. Oops!
Hey, do you hate in-line advertising? We do too! We’re only ever going to do it here at the start of our newsletter posts because we want you to get these missives in your inbox a day early. Sorry!
This week on exp.
exp. was on rare sale at the Toronto Games Week Indie Game Emporium last Sunday the 15th! There’s a decent chance if you’re reading this you signed up for the newsletter while there, so thanks!
Really proud of this one, and I think it speaks for itself. It should do—it’s four thousand words long. If you aren’t a subscriber, you can subscribe on Patreon to read this right now!
I’ve updated my way of titling posts, and it’s here I was like… “er…” because I forgot sometimes I write articles about games released in specific versions after I’ve written about a “primary” version. This doesn’t really matter for anything modern–everything comes out on everything–but it does when I’ve got, like, four versions of Ghosts n’ Goblins or something on the backlog. Anyway, I settled on square brackets. Yes, this kind of thrilling peek behind the curtain is what you’re going to get if you’re subscribed to this newsletter.
While I get the archive up and running on the site properly, I might as well prompt people to read some really, really old stuff, because not all of it made into Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24 (buy now! etc.) This has since been remastered, though I’m sure these ancient thoughts hold up. Thoughts that mostly made me now go “would be nice to replay Sleeping Dogs, I never wrote that one up.”
“The zine is written particularly with allies in mind. It provides some background information on the UK’s anti-trans moral panic, and offers some suggestions for easy things people can do.”
The Secret Passage #2 Kickstarter is almost over, but there’s still time to back it!
Mutual Aid
CRT Pixels is a Bluesky account I’ve been following for a while who shows off why I’m such a stickler for playing retro games with CRT shaders or on real hardware when I can–it’s how the art was supposed to look, innit. Their partner was recently diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer and a gofundme was started for support because, of course, America is a hellzone. If you know me personally, you’ll know I lost my best friend to a shock stage 4 cancer diagnosis, so this one hit home. Support if you can.
“Madam President, in order to save billions of lives, it is imperative that you sign off on nuclear attacks on London, Paris, Moscow, Beijing, Islamabad, Delhi, Pyongyang and Tel Aviv, and sacrifice one American city as contrition.”
“You know as the President of the United States of America, I could never do that.”
“I understand completely. We’ll nuke two American cities and spare Tel Aviv.”
Bad! I’d consider myself somewhat ambivalent on the Mission: Impossible franchise as a whole—even the good ones are sort of patchy—but as derivative as Dead Reckoning was, I considered it still a jolly good time at the movies. This however is interminable. The first sequence explains what’s going on as if you’re going to suddenly be prompted to press start, but then every sequence after that, for what feels like three hours, is just characters saying over and over again how Tom Cruise (I mean… Ethan Hunt) is the ultimate human, not simply humanity’s chosen defender but the only one who could possibly defeat the antagonist. And that everything he had ever done was correct, even though it didn’t seem like it at the time. And if they’re not saying that, they’re recounting that the stakes are the complete annihilation of all life on Earth to the point where it feels completely meaningless.
And bizarrely for a film that goes to such efforts to heighten the stakes, the action sequences badly lack them, because Tom Cruise (er, Ethan Hunt) is an invincible godlike being. There’s a lengthy underwater sequence that’s tense because Cruise is told repeatedly “if you do this, or that, you’ll 100% die” but then he breaks those rules and is completely fine. Then there’s an entire biplane sequence over a macguffin that legitimately makes no sense because it was already established that Cruise was trying to give the baddie the macguffin anyway!!!
It does end in the most hilarious dispatching of an antagonist since probably Beyond The Black Rainbow, though. I seriously couldn’t believe how goofy it was.
If you like any of the non-Tom Cruise characters, well, they get pretty much nothing to do. Excited to see Pom Klementieff again? Well, her character stands around to say a sentence in French now and again and to get absolutely no closure—and to be honest, she’s one of the lucky ones.
Also this movie ends without Tom Cruise even doing what he said he was going to do? They spend all this time talking about how destroying the “Entity” would “destroy cyberspace”—literally they never refer to the internet, it’s always “cyberspace”—so I was kind of hoping for an Escape from LA ending here (greatest ending in cinema history) but no.
The only reason that I’d assume this movie keeps the door slightly open for a sequel after all is that Tom Cruise was certain that this was finally going to be the one where a stunt killed him and he could finally rest.
No such luck for him, but I don’t know why they have to punish the rest of us for it.
Developed/Published by: Sandfall Interactive / Kepler Interactive Released: 24/04/25 Completed: 27/05/25 Completion: Completed it, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves with too many details yet.
Alright, so in order for me to critique Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, I’m going to have to go into far too much detail on why video games are hard to critique, a problem that left me as the only video game critic in the world (as far as I know.)
[If you really don’t want to read the next thousand-odd words at any point you can skip ahead. But don’t come crying to me if you don’t understand where I’m coming from.]
Video games are hard to critique because video games aren’t really just “one thing.” They don’t neatly fit into a single form where the audience can make an assumption that they know what the (ahem) experience of “experiencing” it is (is there a better way to say that?) While there are exceptions, of course, you can generally expect when you sit down to watch a film, you’re going to sit down and watch it. When you sit down to listen to an album, er, you sit down and listen to it.
(Other experiences are available.)
Now, absolutely, that’s the broadest expression of what you’re doing–consider it the first layer of experience. The hope, of course, is that in experiencing the work, you are absorbed to the point where you forget anything about your existence as a “person on a surface in a location” and instead exist in the world that is being presented–consider that the second layer of experience.
Now, that second layer does not remain static in the face of genre or stylistic choices. To take film as an example, editing, soundtrack, many “artificial” things happen that do not line up with our linear, continuous experience in the first layer. In some respects, these artificialites are not simply absorbed, we recognise them, we work with them. There can be some level of interactivity (if not affect upon) the works–we knit together a non-linear narrative as it goes. Our eyes scan the screen in a movie, our focus dances from instrument to voice at the insistence of the songwriting on an album.
Games, however, have a less “clean” line between the two layers of experience. “Play” is a different experience than “watch” in that first layer, and both change the type of absorption you experience in the second layer: you may be embodying a character rather than empathising. You may be in competition rather than conversation. And then within that genre and stylistic choices make different demands: maybe you are in “play” mode a lot. Maybe you are in “watch mode” a lot. Maybe the type of play changes.
As I’ve played a lot of old games by now, I’ve become interested in, and written about, the “transition points” of video games where technology has allowed newer forms to emerge. Don’t consider this definitive of the state of the art, but for the sake of my hypothesis, a summary:
Games begin as competition: think Pong or Breakout. There’s no narrative. You are, essentially, playing a game as people know it either against another or “the computer”. A sport. You may be able to win, but you may just be seeking a high score. Play, not watch.
Games evolve to have a narrative “reason” for the experience: think Space Invaders. There’s a framing, if not a narrative. If you can win, it’s not the “goal” as much as it is an end-point for “besting” the machine. Play, not watch, but with narrative context.
Games make the narrative a distinct part of the experience: think even as simple as Super Mario Bros. Suddenly the game becomes about the story. You’re “rescuing a princess”. Narrative is doled out like “reward” for your success in the game. When you finish the game, it’s like finishing a book. You can put it down. Play and watch!
It’s here that the concepts of “diegetic” and “non-diegetic” story come into play. The diegetic narrative in Super Mario Bros. is that you’re rescuing a princess. The non-diegetic story is that you’ve run forward and jumped over a block and then you ran into a koopa and you died and then you came back to life and you ran forward…
In some respects, this non-diegetic story is part of the magic of video games, in that it affects both layers of experience at the same time. On the first layer, you’re not sitting and watching: you’re pushing left, then A. But it seamlessly translates on the second layer to running left, and then jumping. But it doesn’t represent narrative.
So then you get games that try and make the narrative a “part” of the play, at various levels of success. Maybe you’re finding the narrative in the world via logs (not great). Maybe you’re pushing buttons during the cut-scenes (eurgh.) Maybe your character’s death and rebirth is explained via narrative, or you get to make choices that change the narrative–at some level of manageable granularity. Maybe they simply try and make what you’re doing in the game make such rock-solid sense diegetically that it all works seamlessly. Maybe they do that by forcing the player to do things whether they want to or not (and then smugly admonish them for it later).
It’s not, exactly, a solved problem. Nor is it, essentially, actually a problem. It simply reflects the nature of video games as an experience. Sometimes you are playing them. Sometimes you are watching them. Sometimes the mechanics are thematic with narrative, sometimes they aren’t. The first layer you inhabit changes (“I’m watching. I’m playing”) though this may not affect the second layer (“I’m rescuing a princess.”)
I don’t think there’s a kind of game that represents this split better than the JRPG.
Now, again, I don’t want to imply that I think there’s anything wrong with the way JRPGs use narrative and play. But they have, to me, always represented a particularly aggressive split between watching and playing (though don’t let me stop you yelling “but what about Hideo Kojima” or something.) JRPG battles, something you do famously a lot, almost exclusively happen in an “alternate reality” from the rest of the game right down to how you interface with them. Not even play maintains a consistency of experience.
[cough]
So that’s why when I write about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, it feels ridiculous to try and write about it as a complete work. Because my remembered experience of it does not reflect something I can critique as a whole. The game merges exploration and a battle system to a narrative which, to be completely honest, never engage in a way where one was in my mind during the other. It’s entirely possible that it’s different for you–I’d be interested to know what you felt the game might be doing to make that possible for you–but ultimately what it means this is a tale of two parts. A game and a narrative.
Er, though we need more preamble…
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: The First Impressions
Now, the thing about Clair Obscur is that I wasn’t originally interested in it at all. With a surfeit of JRPGs available–in fact, a surfeit of Persona-style JRPGs available–the idea of playing a Western one with “realistic” seeming graphics didn’t have much interest for me at all. But then friend-of-exp. Justin Decloux (buy his Blu-rays!) gushed about how much he loved it while other buzz was swelling, so I thought–fuck it. I’m trying to keep up with the cutting edge now! It can’t all be obscure Famicom releases!
I went in almost completely blind: I knew it was about a bunch of French people taking on an enemy, the Paintress, who every year killed the segment of the population who had reached a certain age, and it was a JRPG. But it wasn’t until I began playing it that I understood it wasn’t a “Logan’s Run” style “once you’re thirty, you die!” situation but a “every year the age counts down–so time is running out for everyone” situation. Compelling!
And Clair Obscur has a wonderful introduction, as we’re introduced to the main characters on the day of the Gommage, the day each year that section of the population is lost, and the day before the expeditioners head off on their quest to defeat the Paintress. Very quickly you learn about the hero Gustave, his ward Maelle, and experience the pain of his loss of a “what could have been” in Sophie, an old lover.
As a purely narrative experience, I genuinely thought it was incredible. I’ve never been so moved by a video game so quickly, with tears coming to my eyes. All the stakes were right there. I was blown away.
Anyway, then the wheels started to come off a bit.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: The Game
I’ll preface this by saying I think Clair Obscur is a very solid game. But it’s messy. Overambitious.
I’ll also start with the criticism that you might think is the most unfair. The world of Clair Obscur, once you are outside of Lumière… I don’t like it!!!
Everything is way, way too visually busy, and yet there’s very little I think to be absorbed by. Every location seems to be over-textured, noisy, but my most major issue is with enemies, who feel completely characterless and often unparsable; annoying to look at not in the way Michael Bay’s Transformers are but in a way that made me think of them anyway. I had no sense of awe when taking them on.
Which is a shame, because really here it’s the battle system that’s the star.
I say that, probably, because the environments do not feature good level design. Like, at all.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has led to a lot of column inches (well… social media posts) about the lack of a mini-map, and I have to say that I would generally not be terrifically bothered by that if it wasn’t for the fact that Clair Obscur just does the exact RPG map thing which everyone already hates: you come to a crossroads. Do you go left or right? Is there anything telling you which way to go? No? Uh…
Yep, this is a game where I’d say for a significant portion of the running time you don’t have any good sense if you’re going in the “right” direction, and I think the messy environment art doesn’t help at all. It’s particularly problematic when the game features super-hard “battle system skill check” enemies on side-paths, and in the very first area I reached one and was like “wait, why the fuck is this game suddenly impossible, how am I ever going to complete this” when the actual way I was supposed to go was nearby, but not obvious at all.
So the “no map” issue people keep bringing up is one of those things where you have to look at the “note behind the note” to understand what the issue truly is. Er, not that it helps. It’s too late to do anything about it.
To get to the battle system: it’s excellent, with caveats. On the basic level, it is a traditional turn-based battle system, but featuring both quick-time events and dodging/parry mechanics based on timing. This creates an interesting problem: you need the reward for doing these to be high enough that you want to do them, but not so high that they need to be done perfectly every time. It’s interesting that the intuitive design–attacks are QTEs with on-screen prompts, dodging/parries are purely reactionary–probably makes it harder to balance, as decreased damage output only prolongs fights, whereas taking more damage fails them more quickly, yet QTEs are simply easier than parries.
Not that I’d switch them around, but Clair Obscur doesn’t exactly nail the mechanics–and has a strange sort of take on them anyway. The decision seems to have been made that the baseline is that the player isn’t really supposed to be successful at dodging–certainly not successful at parrying–very much at all because it’s so powerful (you don’t take a hit at all!) so enemies from the very beginning of the game have annoying, tricksy attacks, with odd windups, slowdowns and so on, so you have to learn each enemy very well before you can survive a battle without taking hits.
But!
The game also makes a lot of attacks able to nearly one-shot your characters! Clair Obscur makes the decision to be economical in its enemy encounter rate–you see them in the levels, there aren’t that many, they only respawn when you reach checkpoints–but expansive in battle length, so the design decisions seemingly made here is that players will, during lengthy battles, survive via healing enough to get to the point where they can start to dodge and parry. And the game is quite forgiving with healing and revives, giving you a fresh set every checkpoint.
My belief is that they tried to create a battle system with no “lows” or sense of grind, where every battle feels winnable, but hard fought, and always engaging. And I’d argue that they were mostly successful once the player re-aligns their expectations to that.
For example: you don’t have to hold onto healing/revives, so just use them. And you shouldn’t be trying to parry until you learn how to dodge that enemy’s attacks, because the timing is so severe. (I basically gave up on parries completely.)
Even at that though… I did get bored and annoyed with it at times, and I do wonder how much that has to do with how overcomplicated, yet oddly derivative, the character designs are. Each hero has an extremely specific design style–several of which are wholesale cribbed from Slay The Spire, which I understand, but feels… odd–and they all have huge skill trees. As with largely giving up on parries, I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t get how to upgrade my characters until I just sucked it up and followed a “best builds” guide, but even when I played around, the issue seems to be that each character’s design is played in such a specific way that it can be somewhat samey. Slay the Spire character designs work because you don’t actually know what cards you’re going to have in hand each turn–you’re working to build your deck across the game until you do. Here, you know what you’re playing each turn, and you just do that while hoping to hit your timings.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s still good, it’s generally enjoyable, but I do notice that the weaknesses are never more stark than when the game asks you to hone in on mechanics such as when you’re fighting the optional bosses (that you generally stumble into by accident.)
But the game is also forgiving: you can bump it down to easy whenever you like at no cost, so you can do it whenever something gets on your tits. I played through this on normal, bumping down to easy on optional bosses (who can still one shot you at that level!) and only had a touch of grinding at one or two points, not that I can remember why.
If this was all Clair Obscur was: no narrative, just a dungeon crawl, people would still like it a lot, and I think I’d still like it a lot. But it’s not just that, is it.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: The Narrative
Clair Obscur’s narrative is a fucking bin fire.
[deep breath]
Sorry, ok. You probably remember me saying in my first impressions that “I’ve never been so moved by a video game so quickly” by the game’s prologue. Which is true.
But as for the rest of the game… I hope you like information being obscured from the player unnaturally! Like, one of your favourite things should definitely be characters not asking the obvious question anyone would in the situation!
Now, you can write a story however you like. Personal taste and all. But from my perspective, I consider it a weakness when I can tell a story has been written to get to an emotional or narrative beat no matter what. When reality or characterisation falls to the wayside because you have to hit this beat and you have to hit it here.
One of the interesting things about Clair Obscur is that as much as the game is divided cleanly between “play” and “narrative” the narrative feels like it doesn’t show up as much as you’d expect–at least, the backbone of the narrative. Each area (“dungeon” equivalents) plays out with a little chatter, but a lot of character work and story is relegated to when you make camp, and as you can only do that outside of the dungeons if often has to be forced. You really feel the segmentation, and when the big narrative moments come, they are in stark relief, and it’s at the end of each act this “need to hit the beat” is clearest.
I have come to the conclusion that the narrative has been designed to manipulate you into feeling certain ways only to then work to contradict your feeling. But they don’t have the chops to make this smooth or believable. In fact, this is the first game I’ve played since (cringe) Bioshock Infinite where I felt I should just look up a timeline to actually try and understand what’s going in the game to make sure I wasn’t totally off base with my feelings on it–while it wasn’t completely necessary, ultimately, it did help (and I highly recommend this one by Nor if you want a look yourself.)
But let’s get into it.
Obviously, spoilers are going to start showing up… now. If you want to play this, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t exactly, you should consider my conclusion “fun but flawed!” and flip away from this tab to come back to in like 26 hours. See you soon!
Look, I’ll give them something. I didn’t know, at all, that I was going to get Aeris’d. It should have been obvious with Gustave’s wee skill tree and everything and it’s incredible that when I looked up a build for him I never got spoiled. But this a perfect example of a “we have to make this beat happen.”
Gustave fights a guy who killed the entire rest of the expedition, while already wounded to… to what exactly? Maelle is trapped, he’s not buying her time. Why is the baddie killing Gustave at this point anyway? This just happened to happen after most of the party jumped off a cliff?
It’s bollocks, and it’s fake, and I felt annoyed, not sad.
So then new protagonist Verso shows up, and proceeds to… not be asked by any of the characters any of the questions you’d probably ask. They just go on an adventure with him because he showed up and so that a character can later find incriminating information and go “oh no!” that leads to… well it doesn’t lead to much at all does it. They get to the end, they kill the Paintress and then… oh no! That wasn’t the real baddie!
Which is revealed by Verso reading a letter from his sister. Meaning that Verso didn’t know something that, based on everything else (not least that he killed the Paintress to free her, my interpretation being with the knowledge this was his “real” mother) he would probably know. Ok!
At which point we learn that this entire thing was all bollocks anyway because everyone lives in a painting created by the “real” (dead) Verso and his mother and father were fighting in it using their powers of creation and destruction. Ok!
Look, I kind of get the Act One To Act Two switch, as poorly handled as it was. I think there’s something kind of interesting in ripping away a character that I really enjoyed to replace them with Temu Jack Sparrow and then let me mistrust them (more than my party did!) to the point that I don’t use them in battles and let them get really behind in experience (which eventually matters).
But the Act Two to Act Three switch is just utterly mental in a way that I don’t think any player can prepare for, playing a weird sort of trick on the player for being absorbed in the second layer of experience. “Actually all these characters you’ve grown to love aren’t real.” “What, you mean like because they’re in a video game? I know that, but I’m absorbed in the reality of the narrative.” “No, because they’re paintings that think they’re real people… in a video game.”
I’m not going to get involved in a “if you prick us, do we not bleed?” analysis of this third-order existence because the game doesn’t go deep on it itself, instead revealing that, ultimately, every time they talked about how the painting in which the entire game happens has a “part of verso’s soul in it” they meant literally, and his soul was essentially a small boy that was being tortured to keep the painting alive.
That’s right folks. It’s Omelas. You’ve been living in Omelas. How do you feel now!!!
Well, it turns out a lot of you people out there are fine with Omelas. I mean I don’t need to play a video game to know that, I live in a world where Palestinian children are being murdered every day to no end, but it’s stark to see people feel annoyed that the game ends with the question “do you destroy a painting full of paint people to free a real person’s soul or do you trap all the paint people in Peaksville?” when what they want is a happy ending and damn the child.
(To be fair, the game is really fixated on making it sound like the option is between “let Maelle’s dad burn the painting or let the painting continue to exist because everything will be fine, no really, everything will be fine”.)
I need to emphasise: this is not the game you have been playing. At all. I am so thankful that the third act is just one dungeon (Unless you want to do a lot of side quest stuff) because what the hell. There’s like this perfectly interesting game about a quest to get death back to happening normally that suddenly becomes a story about a bunch of characters you’ve never met fighting over a painting.
In conclusion:
Will I ever play it again? No.
Final Thought: Alright, that’s not really a fair conclusion to my thoughts on the narrative. My conclusion, really, is to ask people to consider: what is the story they’re actually trying to tell? Because Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 feels like a game of Exquisite Corpse on an act by act basis, where the epic conclusion completely subsumes any themes or narrative you had experienced to that point to… to what? To make sure players got a choice of two endings??? They put all this effort in to force beats and then none of them seem to matter anyway???
So yes, some respects, Clair Obscur is a cautionary tale of the damage narrative can do to the layers of experiencing a game. In others, it’s a fun, flawed game with a shite story. And those are ten a penny.
Developed/Published by: Namco Released: 22/08/1986 Completed: 15/04/2025 Completion: Got the “Happy Ending” by shooting down the Air Successor in Mission 26. Version Played: Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1
Sky Kid is, with some reservations, a wee hidden gem of an arcade game. I described it as a “strange little dead-end in the side-scrolling shooter universe” when I wrote about it, and while I stand by that, I wonder now if my framing is a little wrong because of the post-Xevious, post-Gradius context. Playing Sky Kid again in its NES port, I was struck by the thought that it might be as much inspired by something like Choplifter. While it doesn’t match in terms of design really at all, there’s a spiritual lineage: one is a “simulation” of being a helicopter pilot, and the other is a “simulation” of being a biplane pilot. The concerns in either are not that of Xevious/Gradius, where you move a frictionless collision box around, but one where you have to use your helicopter/plane using its actual characteristics to survive and succeed.
I do think taken in that framing I like Sky Kid even more. Revisiting the arcade version before giving this version a run through I was struck by how bright and attractive it is, the pleasure of doing loops, and how unbelievably rewarding it was to nail an enemy base with a bomb dead on.
Sky Kid on NES is an excellent recreation of that in terms of play, but unfortunately, it just doesn’t look anywhere near as good due to the NES’s more muted colors. At this point in the NES (or rather, Famicom) lifecycle, it’s a bit of a disappointment, with for example Ghosts ‘n Goblins doing a much better job of capturing the character of the original game despite having the NES palette to work with. It’s not as bad as Pac-Land, but it doesn’t look much better. Someone over at Namco was letting them down.
There is some effort made here to make this a different(-ish) experience from the arcade–there are more levels, a few of them are shooting galleries, you get some wee interstitial animations–but we’re still not at the point where NES games are diverging from their arcade counterparts to be particularly deeper or richer, and Sky Kid gets every bit as frustrating as it was in the arcade as you work your way towards the end of this. In fact, maybe more frustrating. As in the original, the design doesn’t support bullet hell, but bullet hell is what it gives you.
As with the original, this plays better as a score attack, but I think when you have the chance to come home with a copy of The Legend of Zelda or Metroid by this point… well, it’s not even been a year since Sky Kid came out in arcades and it already feels out of date. A biplane in a world of jet fighters: charming, but you ain’t picking it.
Will I ever play it again? I like the arcade version. I have the arcade version. This one isn’t necessary.
Final Thought: What I don’t have is Sky Kid Deluxe, the arcade update which has a range of minor differences. It was released by Arcade Archives for Switch and PS4, which I definitely support in theory, but absolutely cannot justify purchasing because… well, I’ve played Sky Kid twice now. That’ll do. Maybe I’ll see it in an arcade one day, I’d like to.
Developed/Published by: Jaelco Released: 22/08/1986 Completed: 13/04/2025 Completion: Completed all 20 different levels (it loops.)
Well, more fool me. When I wrote about Ninja Jajamaru-kun, the game that precedes this in the series, I wrote that it “[didn’t do] enough to make me put up with ININ’s bullshit to get the sequels.”
Unfortunately, having a bunch of Nintendo gold coins to use up before they expired and seeing the Ninja JaJaMaru: Retro Collection going for $2.99 made me go “well, it’s basically free, why not.”
I’ll tell you why not: because… do ININ even like retro games? Are they just an avenue to prey on a group of willing suckers–i.e. retro game collectors? Because not only is the Ninja JaJaMaru: Retro Collection bare bones, it doesn’t even work correctly.
Now, feel free to consider this anecdotal because I’ve only tested this on my Nintendo Switch Lite–and no youtubers or the like have really covered this release in depth (I imagine it’s niche enough to not have done that well.) But if you try and play JaJaMaru no Daibouken with the included CRT shader on it creates so much slowdown that you actually can’t play the game. It completely tanks.
It runs fine if you don’t have the CRT shader on, but, frankly, I’m a CRT boy. I don’t care if it’s even that good a shader or filter (notable exception: the excretable one on the Astro City Mini) just as long as it does something to muddy up the graphics. The games were literally designed to be seen on a tiny crappy telly via a noisy RF cable, so it just feels wrong to me to see them all crispy and HD.
So that was $2.99 down the fucking drain–but at least I haven’t dropped money on the Turrican Anthology or something [“yet”–Ed.] But let it not be said I’m one for giving up. Thanks to my trusty Trimui Brick I could quickly and easily get set up to play this through with an acceptable CRT filter, and I suppose that’s the way I’ll play the rest of this collection (god knows I’m not picking up a Switch 2 to try and see if it improves the performance of a CRT shader…)
But, uh, let’s actually talk about JaJaMaru no Daibouken, eh?
It’s rubbish.
Will I ever play it again? No!
Final Thought: Oh, alright, I should probably say more than that. So… I suppose the interesting thing is that JaJaMaru no Daibouken came out just under a year after Super Mario Bros. (Ninja JaJaMaru-kun was released after Super Mario Bros. too, actually) and it’s the first obvious Super Mario Bros. clone I’ve played chronologically. Sure, it’s possible Pac-Land for Famicom was rushed out after matter of weeks in development (though unlikely) but that was based on a pre-existing design, and Wonder Boy doesn’t feel that much like Super Mario Bros. when we’re being completely honest.
But JaJaMaru no Daibouken feels like exactly what you get if you ask someone to take the art and engine from Ninja JaJaMaru-kun and turn it into Super Mario Bros.: it’s got side-scrolling levels, blocks JaJaMaru has to hit with his head to get coins and power-ups out of, and… well, I mean, that’s enough. It’s not exactly the Great Giana Sisters, but the “hit blocks with your head” thing is enough. Case closed!
I’ve previously mentioned that the original Super Mario Bros. doesn’t actually feel that good to play–we’ve just all misremembered that, because the later ones do–so I can’t really beat up on JaJaMaru no Daibouken for not controlling that well (floaty jumps and that.) What I can beat it up for is just being so bloody half-arsed. Levels look like they just threw down blocks in any old combination, and although the game features 20 levels, but half of those are boss battles that you don’t even have to complete–if you die, you just go to the next level and don’t even lose a life. And the game doesn’t have an ending or anything, it just loops. Which actually leads to the ridiculous situation that you can reach the “final” boss, fail to rescue Princess Sakura, and then… just go to the second loop. Deeply uninspiring.
JaJaMaru no Daibouken keeps a lot of the flavour of the (by this point) established JaJaMaru franchise, though, which doesn’t as much feel like something they did to differentiate as much as it’s just what they had lying around. The power-ups act like they do in the previous game and JaJaMaru’s uncontrollable frog pal Gamapakkun shows up too, albeit rarely. Though weirdly, the most interesting mechanic from JaJaMaru-kun, that you have to jump on enemies heads so you can shoot them, doesn’t show up here! (Maybe they thought it was getting too close to Giana Sisters-esque “let’s get sued” territory.) There’s an annoying learning curve in that you’ll never know which enemies kill you on touch and which don’t until, well, you’ve been killed by them, and weirdly one enemy that shows up right at the end, the Tanuki, can’t be killed but you can jump on their head to stun them. So… half of a mechanic from JaJaMaru-kun, for one enemy, just to confuse us, as a treat.
It’s all very inconsistent, but because of the terrible level design, you quickly work out that you’re just supposed to run through the levels ignoring all the enemies as much as possible. While it’s true this is optimum for Super Mario Bros. too, the level design there ensures you engage with enemies in interesting ways. Here your engagement is generally things like “oh an enemy spawned directly in front of me and killed me with a projectile before I could react.” or… actually it’s usually that one.
JaJaMaru no Daibouken is over very quickly, so it’s a very minor waste of life. But it is a waste, I won’t lie.
I actually think this might be the worst one of these?
I say this as someone who has sat through Eternals, to which this movie, bafflingly, decides to be a direct sequel. If the MCU is going to start binning off things like Kang, they’ve really got to suck it up and start retconning entire movies and TV shows that haven’t worked out. They happened in a different universe or whatever. It’s unfair to force me to remember things that suck.
I suppose the joke is on me though because I still watched this. It feels like the kind of granularity required here is unnecessary, but watching this you understand there’s a difference between “soulless content” where people might have had “ideas”, “concepts”, perhaps even a “mindset” and “goals”–in films as bad as the aforementioned Eternals, or The Marvels–and something that seems to have been cobbled together for no other reason than to exist.
It’s entirely possible this was intended to continue the kind of “vaguely spy thriller” feel of the earlier Captain America movies, which was pounded into mush by five different writers, countless more rewrites and reshoots, ending with what’s barely a conspiracy with a shifting reason from a hidden mastermind whose reveal leads to the kind of reaction the word “nonplussed” was invented for (unless you just laugh at how stupid he looks. How can you treat Tim Blake Nelson like this?)
Like: this is a movie where a bunch of characters get Manchurian candidated, attacking when they hear a particular song, and no one says “did no one notice that song playing suddenly before all hell broke loose” in any of the sequences where they’re trying to defend the people who went loco.
But I’m getting hung up on details in a movie that even visually has no connection to reality. It’s insane a movie looks this bad. The first fight scene doesn’t have the impact a regional filmmaker working in his own backyard could manage, and every dialogue sequence makes it look like they didn’t get access to the Volume so they asked Neil Breen if they could use his setup. They compensate by making the lighting so flat and bright that for all I fucking know they might actually have been some of those places.
Ah man. I can’t resist pointing out that the climax of the opening scene is that Sam has to fight… a large man. Like just a big guy. I guess he has a beard? It’s so hilariously underwhelming. Later action sequences are no better, completely weightless and because of the complete failure of narrative, absolutely stakes free. Like… we all know you can’t beat up a hulk, so why are we watching a character attempt it for about twenty minutes?
I suppose the main thing that’s interesting about this film is its politics, which manage to split the difference between “milquetoast” and “completely toxic” somehow. I’d be very interested to know how everything here got shaped into a movie where the first Black Captain America says things like “sure he threw me in prison and let you be experimented on for 30 years against your will, but he’s the president and we should trust him now!” which manages to make Falcon And Winter Soldier (which really copped out by the end) almost look revolutionary.
It doesn’t help that one of the major character here is based on an explicity Israeli nationalist superhero, played by what appears to be an Israeli child with progeria whose make-a-wish was to be in a Marvel movie (I assume after having their top choices, “I’d like to blow up a hospital full of children sicker than me” and “make the IDM mixes I post online popular” turned down.) I like the way they pointedly say “none of us have to be defined by our past” without saying anything like “it’s doing the right thing now that matters” because, well…
Really the moment of this movie that stands out the most to me, though, is when Sam stands meekly by while an old black man is roughly thrown to the ground by cops, mustering up the strength to shout something like “wow, be gentle!” which the cops completely ignore. I’m not sure a Marvel hero has ever seemed more pathetic. You feel a deep sense of embarrassment watching it, and, to be honest, throughout the film. You ask yourself, what were these people thinking? And you realise: nothing. these people were thinking… nothing.
Developed/Published by: Infocom Released: 22/08/1986 Completed: 18/04/2025 Completion: Completed it. 304/304 points (though points are random and I believe you get them all just in the process of beating the game.)
Phworr, eh lads? Etc.
Right, that’s me got all the 90’s video game magazine parlance out of the way [“you forgot ‘or something’ and to do a made-up Ed’s note”–made-up Ed.] so I can put my “pretending to be a serious games historian” hat on for the first Infocom game I’ve played since Trinity–surprisingly, all the way back in 2023. If you’ve been following along, you’ll be aware I’ve been picking and choosing Infocom games to play through, leaning towards the work of Steven Meretzky, and I’ve been looking forward to playing this for a while, his “return” to a more normal sort of adventure game after the big swing (and commercial miss) of A Mind Forever Voyaging.
Based on a joke title Meretzky posted on a whiteboard featuring upcoming releases for Infocom, Leather Goddesses of Phobos is a strange release, I think. Infocom had always made games for adults, but never “adult” games, and there hadn’t really been any commercial “adult” games for years at this point. Softporn Adventure came out in 1981, and unless you’re Portuguese and have fond memories of Paradise Cafe for ZX Spectrum that was about your lot. So it seems like quite a gamble for Infocom to release something that appears so risque–but then Leather Goddesses of Phobos isn’t really an adult game at all. In fact, it’s barely smutty at its most extreme, and Meretzky, wanting to drum up a bit of controversy after the failure of an anti-Reaganite art game, decided “sex sells” and Infocom as a group went for it: digging through Meretzky’s papers, he sent a sheet of possible game ideas to the other imps (this may have been the standard procedure at Infocom?) for his next game, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos won out, where its sexual content was expressed as “very soft-core; see Barbarella as an example.” (it doesn’t even go that far, to my eyes.)
(The sheet is quite illuminating in general, a kind of ideation that I recognise as a game developer. We have another attempt, I think, to court a bit of controversy with “The Interactive Bible”, an interesting if not-yet-fully-baked design idea “Blazing Parsers” and then something that’s optimistically trying to make making a game quicker, “The Viable Idea.” Personally, I’m sad we never saw an Infocom spaghetti western.)
Unlike some other Infocom releases, I don’t really have any personal history with Leather Goddesses of Phobos outside of memories of the (very) mildly titillating screenshots of its sequel, Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X! In fact, the main thing I have to say is that I only realised this wasn’t called “Leather Goddess of Phobos” after playing it for a bit, which won’t make me cry “Mandela Effect” as much as “Goddesses is such an inelegant word, it’s bizarre it isn’t just Leather Goddess. My brain was correct, reality wasn’t.”
But anyway, what is it actually like to play Leather Goddess(es) of Phobos?
I’ve been a bit up and down on the Infocom games I’ve played–some might say unnecessarily hard on them, judging them by the coddled standards of 2025. But Leather Goddesses of Phobos gets off to a good start. Unlike Trinity, where you essentially never know what you’re actually trying to do overall, Leather Goddesses of Phobos more or less immediately has a character hand you a laundry list of items to collect, and then you go “oh, I guess I just have to collect these, then.”
As good as that is, it’s also a little… underwhelming. Having picked and chosen, I’m aware that I’ve not seen everything that Infocom has to offer, but I’m still surprised that I haven’t played an Infocom game since Deadline (their third game) that gave me any sense of anything except a static world. Leather Goddesses of Phobos gives you a Floyd-like companion (Trent, or Tiffany) but they barely seem to exist, and even when you meet characters in the world they feel so… un-interactive. Maybe, at best, they take part in a little vignette.
I suppose with Leather Goddesses of Phobos I’m really realising–and perhaps chafing against–the limitations of the text adventure at least in the mid-1980s. In some respects, you want a text adventure to have the feeling of a book; limitless, enveloping imagination. But in other respects, you want to play it like a game. You want to be reacted to. It’s probably, why, to be honest, characters have been so sparse in these games–because when you try and interact with a character, and they don’t do anything, or it feels wrong, the illusion of being on an adventure is broken. You’re not reading a book, you’re on a dark ride and suddenly the lights slam on and you’re aware you’re looking at a mannequin, not the king of Mars.
Somehow, the fact that characters in Deadline might like… walk into another room just abated that, and I’m not asking for characters to roam across the planet here, but maybe if they piped up a bit more. Felt a bit more worth talking to. The issue with making a “funny” game is that so much of comedy is character work, and here, really, the only character is the parser.
But I’m being a bit harsh, because Leather Goddesses of Phobos is otherwise an extremely solid classic rooms and items, bread and butter text adventure. The best I’ve played since Meretsky’s own Planetfall, and arguably the best I’ve played full stop. It’s understandable, accessible, and I never had to use an Invisiclue to the point where it just told me what to do–well, except in one particular case.
That one I’m just going to spoil, actually. One of the things that makes Leather Goddesses of Phobos work so well is how well integrated the feelies are. Sure, I don’t have the box to hand, but there’s a comic which includes a couple of direct hints for some puzzles, a map which is unbelievably necessary and helpful, and a scratch and sniff card, which I’m sure nearly 40 years later is completely useless even if you opened a brand new box, but which is a really cute and silly B movie-adjacent idea that’s perfectly fitting. One of the things it does is prompt you to “smell” things in the game to work out what they are (which it thankfully tells you in text–scratch and sniff cards have always barely worked). Early in the game (for me–the game is fairly open ended) you sniff and discover some chocolate, which, of course, you’ll hang on to. Later, for reasons, your mind will be transferred into a gorilla. But you’re not strong enough to break out of the cage. I assume you can see where this is going: you need to eat the chocolate to get strong enough to break out of the cage.
You know, that famous thing about gorillas. That chocolate makes them strong.
This is, obviously, nonsense. The only animal-related fact I know about chocolate is that it kills dogs and I certainly wasn’t hanging onto it in the game expecting I’d use it to kill a poodle or something [“you said ‘or something’ after all”–90s Ed.] Considering that banana is one of the most recognisable smells you could possibly use on a scratch-and-sniff card, I had to assume that Meretsky simply thought that giving you a banana would be too obvious a solution so went with the impossible to work out chocolate, but I couldn’t find anything in his notes to reflect that. According to the ever reliable Digital Antiquarian, Meretsky tested the scratch and sniff scents on the other imps to select the most recognisable scents to then use in the game, and I do think it adds insult to injury that one of those chosen scents actually *was* banana! But it’s used elsewhere!!!
I even found a playtester who complained about this exact puzzle:
“It is reasonable to not eat the chocolate and even suspect the sugar rush, but why oh why would you put the chocolate in the cage?”
I suppose he’s more complaining that this game features more than one puzzle which requires hindsight, and to be honest, they should have fixed those too. But in general, Leather Goddess of Phobos is logical and fair, while still managing to make puzzles funny and clever–the best of The Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy without the worst of it. There’s a puzzle about kissing a frog that will immediately put you in mind of the famous babel fish (and which made me laugh out loud) and a puzzle involving a mysterious machine and wordplay that is so perfect and silly that it’s maybe one of my favourite things in an adventure game ever–possibly worth the price of admission alone.
The game does still undercut itself though–for seemingly no reason. There are definitely ways to manufacture yourself a no-win, dead man-walking situation, for example, all of which I miraculously managed to dodge due to the order I did things in, and I definitely had a few puzzles where by all rights I was just lucky to not have to resort to clues. One object on your list you need to specifically look somewhere you might not look to find, and then you need to be really specific with the parser to do what you need to do to get it. Another requires a vignette that you need to be in time for (though that one I immediately sussed what was up–the “dead end” was just so suspicious to me. But I reached it almost at the end of the game–if I’d got there early, I could have had to replay nearly the entire game.)
The game’s maze–which people find famously annoying–is a perfect example of how the game undercuts itself. You have the map in hand. You have the required clue. If you’re patient, it’s actually really satisfying to navigate it, and I did so… and then the torch I was using burned out, and I had to do the whole thing again much more efficiently. Close to hundreds of turns. It was so unnecessary! I was having fun!!! Why punish me for not being perfect!!!
These moments, however, are far rarer than you’d expect. I noted above that the game is fairly open ended, and I’m not sure if there’s a “preferred” way to work through the game, but as I said above in my playthrough I never entered a vignette where I didn’t have something to hand I needed (though it’s possible, I’m sure) and if I got stuck somewhere there was always somewhere else to go for me to solve something else. I never put this down annoyed–well, apart from the fucking maze. Well, not the fucking maze–the fucking torch (I honestly did think the maze was clever.)
I think the thing about Leather Goddesses of Phobos is… it’s probably as good as one of these things is going to get without a much more modern design philosophy. You know what you need to do and every time you sit down and play it you get a little closer to doing it–and it’s charming while you do it. But it’s never sexy. I did play it on the “LEWD” setting and took every opportunity for a bonk, because I’m still thirteen at heart, but my dander remained unfrothed; it doesn’t even reach the heights of Alter Ego! I guess I’ll see how I get on with [checks to-play list] Leisure Suit Larry??? Eugh!
Will I ever play it again? You know, it’s possible. It’s not likely, but it’s possible. And I will play Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X!, which I don’t believe anyone likes. Because why not.
Final Thought: In some respects, Leather Goddesses of Phobos suffers for not being something special like A Mind Forever Voyaging, but it also sort of is, as the last true success Infocom would release before the company began an unstoppable slide into oblivion, and for that alone it should be celebrated. At the very least, if you like text adventures, though, you know how to play them, and you can live with the idea you might have to reload a save on occasion, this is a solid couple of tevenings. Oh sorry, I mistyped… tevenings. There must be a mysterious machine around here somewhere for that…
This is not a eulogy, but an acknowledgement. An acknowledgement that what I’ve come to accept the internet to be is dead. An acceptance that in the name of ease, I’ve absorbed myself into a corporatised space that is at this point not simply eating itself but eating me, us and everything that we create.
And I think: fuck it.
In 2023, when I started publishing exp. again in print, I was, I think, trying to close my eyes to it. I liked–and I still like, I love–the purity of print, the focus. I still want to make things and put them into the world. But I also just love writing, and sharing it. For a long time, I’ve relied on existing sites for my work–be that big platforms or outlets, but of course what happens is they pivot, they get sold, they get erased. And it can feel like we’re always searching for a settled high ground–Bluesky feels great now, but is it just a little rocky outcroppings in poisoned sea, bound to erode or be subsumed?
At the end of 2024 I published Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24, which I think works as a nice culmination of my last decade of writing. But as I’m not going to stop, it seems necessary in our new dead internet to do something that I’ve been meaning to do for ages, which is plant and cultivate my own space properly and invite you to visit it. Not just hope that you’ll see something I’ve posted as you scroll, but offer something that you can actually choose to engage with. Where my writing finally stays, where you can properly search and explore it, where I can expand beyond what I’ve been doing if I like.
I think there’s a danger of nostalgia here, some sort of limiting call back to the idea that you’d, like, log on the internet and type “https://www.expzine.com” in every morning after you’ve read the three or four webcomics you keep up on (wow, Superosity is still going!) but I think that’s why I’ve become enamoured with the mindset of POSSE–Publish On (your) Site, Share Everywhere–and using it to its fullest. So I’m going to be posting here, then spreading this to every part of the stupid corporatised internet I can be fucking bothered with. Let decay feed growth.
To support that, I have (sorry) started a new Patreon with refreshed tiers to accompany my currently existing Ko-fi that has been supporting the continuation of my writing and publication of my zines and books. Unfortunately, Ko-fi’s tools aren’t robust enough, so this seems to be the simplest way to offer new articles to supporters on this site first, so if you aren’t already a supporter, please check it out.
(Something worth emphasising I’ve continued to set the lowest tier at just $1 a month–so it’s as little as $12 to support the only* video game criticism website on the internet)
*as far as I’m concerned.
If you are already a Ko-fi supporter: you don’t have to do anything. You can continue to support me on Ko-fi and I’ll be sharing articles–in full–over there a week early as usual. But if you’d like to move over to Patreon, I’ll be sending you a free month of the tier your current donation is equivalent to, so you don’t feel like if you want to switch over you’re being double charged or anything.
If you don’t want to support, that’s fine! You could just sign up for the newsletter, which is going to remain free and collate the posts of the week plus some extra waffle. Probably, I haven’t really planned them yet.
And if you don’t want to do any of that, I’m not entirely sure why you’ve read this far. But the point stands: if you don’t like our dead internet, grow your own.
Developed/Published by: Supergiant Games Released: 20/05/2014 Completed: 10/04/2025 Completion: Finished it.
It’s been a couple of years since I went through Bastion(!) so I thought I’d boot up another Supergiant game, and decided to just move forward chronologically when I checked and saw Transistor was pretty short–I just keep putting off anything that seems like it’s going to take ages to complete these days. Plus it’s always nice to see how a studio evolves.
Not knowing anything about it, I assumed–what with the isometric graphics, and the lady with the big sword–that Transistor was “more Bastion” in terms of being an action title with light RPG elements, but it’s actually something much weirder–an awkward meld between Bastion-style real-time mechanics with a turn-based battle system that’s similar to something X-COM, or more specifically like Valkyria Chronicles, with free movement and action-point system.
I’m so sincerely not a fan when promo screenshots hide all the UI–in Transistor’s case, they go as far as completely hiding the entire battle system (which looks like this.)
There’s also a bit of the deckbuilder to it. While the game doesn’t have a huge or ever-changing range of abilities, each time you level up you select new abilities and each is able to work as an action on its own, an upgrade to another action, or a passive ability, leading to a pretty wild amount of combinations which are meant to emphasise your chosen playstyle. So you can double and triple down on your favourite ability by adding upgrades and passives that support it, or you can try and make a “hand” of abilities that work in conjunction–maybe you want to tank damage; maybe you want to be a glass cannon, maybe you want to spawn helpers or play stealth. It’s all some amount of possible.
It sounds really good, and interesting, but I’m sad to say it doesn’t work, because the combination of real-time and turn-based combat is never comfortable. It’s not so much like eating a chocolate and peanut butter cup as trying to eat spoonfuls of peanut butter while chocolate pours from a faucet that you can’t turn off. The game seems to be balanced around using your turns in a tactical manner, but you have to wait for your action points to regenerate in real time. You are defenceless during that period (unless you upgrade one of your abilities to be used during recovery) so you’re stuck running around being attacked until you can get back into a turn.
This isn’t fun at all! The enemies are fast and the action frantic, so any time you’re not in a turn you feel like you’re barely keeping your head above water, soaking up damage. I’m sure there are mitigations, and it’s entirely possible if you’ve played this you created a hand of abilities that made the experience smooth, but Transistor really fails at explaining anything about how to play it.
It’s probably part of the game’s storytelling–it starts in media res and slowly reveals what’s going on–but it feels like there’s no help in getting comfortable with the mechanics. There’s a “backdoor” area that appears periodically where you can take part in “tests” that throw you in at the deep end so you can learn by trial and error what different abilities do and how to combine them, but I’ve finished this and I’ll say that I’m actively unsure if I ever played this game correctly. I ended with a build focused on long turns to allow me to debuff and do massive melee damage, which sounds really rewarding, but I still spent most of the time taking damage and running away, even with one attack set for use during recovery. If that’s intentional, I just don’t get it.
The upgrade system really probably does have too many options and is fussy to interact with.
It really feels like one of those designs that someone came up with because it sounded good, and then you get to this point in development where you have it all built but you can’t find a solution to a problem like “what do people actually do while waiting for turns to recover” because the core of the design, ultimately, just doesn’t meld. It seems likely they found people being able to use all their abilities in recovery (for example) made the turns either unimportant or overpowered and then couldn’t solve it so just powered ahead because it roughly works. I’ve watched a few playthroughs of Transistor and everyone else seems to have played it similarly to me–different abilities, but same tactics. It doesn’t really look any more satisfying a play experience than the one I had, which is a bit of a shame for a game that puts such effort into having an insanely modifiable range of abilities. You just never feel like you’re excelling, just surviving.
To speak positively, Transistor’s arms-length narrative did grow on me. I think largely down to the performance of Logan Cunningham as The Transistor; he sells the game’s noir-like setting while expressing deep pathos; he’s talking to someone he loves, and you can always hear it in his voice. You could argue it overpowers everything else in the game; the enemies have no character and the main antagonists are barely there. The central characters are the only ones you’ll care about–thankfully, they’re sensitive to that, and when the game ends, at least that feels satisfying.
Transistor really isn’t a game I could recommend, though, even as short as it is. It just doesn’t come together.
Will I ever play it again? I’m generally glad when a game includes a new game plus, and while I could unlock more abilities and so on, this is one of those stories that feels like such a nice closed loop, why ruin it by playing it again? Never mind that I didn’t actually really like how it played that much…
Final Thought: A thought you might have about Transistor is “why isn’t it just totally turn-based?” but it’s obvious once you’ve played it for a while that the overhaul required to make enemies work and balance it would be almost an entirely new game. Sometimes you just go down a path and there’s no going back.
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