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Author: Mathew Kumar

  • VILE: Exhumed (Cadaver, 2025)

    VILE: Exhumed (Cadaver, 2025)

    Developed/Published by: Cara Cadaver / DreadXP
    Released: 05/08/2025
    Completed: 06/08/2025
    Completion: Explored enough to trigger the end credits, then nosed around a little more.

    It’s impossible to talk about VILE: Exhumed without talking about the moment in time in which it finds itself released–and in fact, how it found itself released. After all, I probably wouldn’t have played it otherwise.  Originally due to be released on Steam on July 22nd, the project stalled unapproved for a month, during which Steam instituted a new rule that forbid “Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers.” The game was delayed, and just days later on July 24th itch.io also found itself at the mercy of payment processors, deindexing all NSFW content (though it’s worth noting this specifically means making unsearchable, not removing or banning–and they were able to re-index free NSFW content a few days later.) A bunch of Australian Mary Whitehouses would later claim credit for this entire wave of morality policing.

    In this climate, Steam officially banned VILE: Exhumed on July 28th, with the stated reason that the game featured “sexual content with depictions of real people”–which were it true, could probably be a violation of payment processor requirements (unjust or not). But having played VILE: Exhumed, I can state that unless it’s well hidden, it doesn’t. What it does feature is the implication of sexual content, and while I’m certain those who love to obey in advance could waffle that’s a grey area or something, sometimes you need to tell a story that features things adults do–and considering the other things that feature in this game, the sexual implication seem like the least objectionable thing about it.

    With the game unreleasable on the main storefronts, developer Cara Cadaver and publisher DreadXP decided to take matters into their own hands and release it, in full, for free as shareware (with 50% of profits going to Toronto’s Red Door Family Shelter) on the 5th of August, and it’s in this context that I chose to play it. 

    As a game, VILE: Exhumed is in the genre I’d call digital archaeology–or at least, I would, if apparently that wasn’t already used by actual archeologists for when they use computers and that. But what I’m describing is a game where you–as a person at a computer–role play as a person at a different computer, and dig through the files to try and solve a mystery. This genre encompasses things such as Her Story to Hypnospace Outlaw, and differs, I would say, from a potential genre marker such as “digital procedural” because the computer itself is a defining characteristic as an artifact you explore and from which you excavate: the interface is part of the puzzle, part of the the game–it is not purely dressing for a cerebral exercise.

    (And “digital procedural” is a useless term in context anyway. “Procedural” is completely bogarted by procedural generation in gaming’s parlance.)

    In VILE: Exhumed, there is no context as to why you have begun digging through this old computer–the game is experienced entirely within the diegesis of it. In fact, I’d say this reflects the game’s absolute commitment to player interpretation. There are many ways to imagine yourself while playing if you’re predisposed to playing a role, and I think that can deeply change the experience.

    Whoever you are, you experience the game by clicking around–opening software, reading chat logs and e-mails, visiting webpages, even playing a game-within-a-game. VILE: Exhumed is not a long game, and nor is it one that breaks the conventions of the genre I’ve (possibly) imagined–the puzzles you are going to solve generally relate to scouring text and taking notes, hunting around screens for hidden or unexpected things, and using that to work out what passwords are, so you can trigger the appearance of new things to click or new information, which can start the cycle again.

    The pleasure of this is how non-linear it can be, and VILE: Exhumed is non-linear to the point you can trigger the ending within a handful of actions–and you’d miss an incredible amount of context if you did so (say by following a solution or something, which would defeat the entire point, anyway.) You aren’t locked into a designed narrative–your play creates the narrative. It’s very immersive!

    Which is why it’s such a great setting for horror. The most obvious comparison I would give is the found footage genre–it feels real, so it’s more immediate and visceral–and there are echoes of the V/H/S franchise here, certainly. But for me, the movies that most came to mind related more heavily to the themes on show here, such as Adam Wingard’s earlier work (Pop Skull, A Horrible Way To Die) and in particular J.T. Petty’s “pseudo-documentary” S&Man (which I highly recommend.) VILE: Exhumed is exploring something deeper about the genre of horror–prodding at the edges where fact and fiction might be blurry, where exploitation and misogyny are more clearly perceived.

    So while VILE: Exhumed may be a victim of the current moment, it is also a game that struggles with what this moment is about–and I think how you feel about that is going to be heavily affected by the lens from which you approach it. As I said above, the lens can be as simple as the “role” you imagine yourself playing. Maybe you’re a cop, digging through the computer to find evidence. Maybe you’re the owner of the computer, reliving your “great works.” Maybe you’re just… you.

    This has an effect. From one lens, for example, VILE: Exhumed could be considered moralising: representing the fans of horror and pornography as twisted by their consumption of it. Sure it uses horror to get its point across, but it’s simply rubbing your nose in it–trying to disgust you. Showing you what it really is, what the threat of unfettered access really is.

    From another, VILE: Exhumed is instead an unpleasant celebration of the unjustifiable. Your reward for success in this game is getting to pour over and enjoy gory images of misogynistic abuse and murder. 

    Now, from the artist’s statement, we know neither lens the intended experience, and I think it would be completely fair to call them bad-faith readings! But what I find challenging is the game’s dedication to the diegesis leaves it completely open to interpretation, and either viewpoint feels as valid (if extreme) to me, as strange as it may seem to see a banned game as one that can be read as in favour of its own banning.

    But VILE: Exhumed is disturbing and uncomfortable, and that it doesn’t take a moment to direct moralise–or even contextualise–what you are seeing has the double-edge of making it feel affectingly real but narratively inconclusive. It takes you on a journey to a place you simply may not wish to go and leaves you there.

    Certainly, for me, as much as it plays (cleverly) with low resolution video to imply a lot, there are certain things (notably some images of hunted animals) that I genuinely wish I’d never seen (you can choose to censor content–though it was too late for me, it’s something I recommend particularly if you don’t want to see anything with animals. And yes, I can see the double standard.) While the game is hardly the level of new French extremity, I think these representations suffer the same questions over aestheticisation. You either revel or are repulsed, without a structure to understand.

    And further, I think this correlation of horror and pornography with snuff and exploitation is the game’s most concerning invocation of “slippery slope” tropes, and it made me wish the game had more to say on consent. How as a viewer do we truly know that when we watch something extreme, that it’s actually “ok”? What if the performer says it’s ok, but is actually under duress–and under capitalism, can people truly make fully free decisions? What is the limit of consent when it comes to the infliction of bodily harm, legal or otherwise?

    These issues are not solely limited to horror or pornography–performers can be forced to perform, and regret performing many kinds of non-sexual or violent acts–but they provide an easy “gotcha” for the moralist and the potential for even the most thoughtful to err towards illiberalism, all of which has led to the situation video games have found themselves in. I’m interested in questioning that, and I don’t know if it’s a question that VILE: Exhumed is interested in, or equipped to deal with.

    The more I think about this one, the more I think it just is. You find a dusty computer that contains something horrible, a truth about the world. Maybe you knew it already, maybe it changes you. Maybe now you think what it shows should be banned–after all, look at what it could lead to! Maybe you want to see more.

    Maybe that all just says something more about you. 

    Will I ever play it again? No thank you!

    Final Thought: The most important thing about all of this: it doesn’t actively matter what the “point” of VILE: Exhumed is, it’s artistic merit, if it’s even any fucking good at all! While thematically disturbing, nothing you see here is even close to what you’d see in a Terrifier movie, and those are terrible, have no point or artistic merit, and literally come out in cinemas. Even if VILE: Exhumed was as graphic, it would still have the right to exist and be released as any artistic work does. Whether or not you wish to experience it is a different story.

  • The exp. Dispatch #7

    The exp. Dispatch #7

    The triumphant return of the Dispatch after a week off because I was too busy. Sorry! Still, it means a bumper crop of article and zine links.

    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 fortnight on exp.

    Subscriber Post: Firework Thrower Kantaro’s 53 Stations of the Tokaido (Sunsoft, 1986)

    A game I didn’t expect any reaction to but I’ve already had a few people saying they’ve played it as well and like me at least found it interesting.

    Unlocked Post: Paradise Killer (Kaizen Game Works, 2020)

    Unlocked Post: DAIVA Story 6: Imperial of Nirsartia (T&E Soft, 1986)

    From The exp. Archive: Mirror’s Edge (DICE, 2008)

    From The exp. Archive: Resident Evil 5 (Capcom, 2009)

    exp. Du Cinéma

    The Naked Gun (2025)

    Watching this in the theatre, I was struck by just how sad it was that it felt so unusual to be watching a broad comedy with an audience. You could almost feel everyone tense up initially when the movie started being intentionally illogical: “can they do that? I’m only used to nominally funny things occurring between CGI action sequences.”

    Once everyone was able to relax, this was incredibly funny, managing—for a while, at least—a return to the rapid-fire nonsense of the great spoofs with a similar hit-rate (not every one a winner, but the next one is quick enough that it doesn’t matter.)

    There are a couple of all-timer sequences in this, and my critique is going to feels harsh because I think we’re all so willing for this to succeed and for movies like this be allowed to exist again, but The Naked Gun’s problem is that it simply runs out of steam. There’s an incredible peak that it can’t seem to follow, and while it’s not like I’d want the movie to be longer (85 minutes? *chef kiss*) the jokes suddenly get a bit weaker, more sparse, and the narrative feels not so much underbaked—which would be fine, it’s a spoof—but missing entire ingredients. The climax is so limp, in fact, that I have to question if it’s what was originally intended, and it (sadly) had me thinking a bit too long about the film in general: “you know, they could have gone harder on that joke… they should have built on that gag more… there was a good chance for a callback there.. man, Paul Walter Hauser went underused…”

    It’s not the end of the world that they didn’t completely nail it, and I still think everyone should go and see this and let some joy into their life in this sick, sad world. And if you didn’t go and see Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, go twice to make up for that.

    Also reviewed this week: KPop Demon Hunters

    Other Zines

    Forgotten Worlds #6. The Sega issue

    “100+ pages of dedicated to classic Sega magazines … , with exclusive interviews and insights from the people who were there.”

    VGHF Acquires Early Game Magazine Computer Entertainer

    “The magazine, which ran from 1982–1990, has been released into the Creative Commons for anyone to use.”

    Summer Sale: ON: Volume One – Now 50% Off! Ends Sunday

    “ON is the ultimate celebration of gaming’s past, present and future. We give the very best writers in the industry freedom to write their dream feature and combine those words with bold and experimental design in a luxury journal.”

    Pound the Pavement #15: Handala

    “This is a slightly-updated reprint of a small zine I created for the Librarians and Archivists With Palestine Box Set that was compiled for Booklyn back in 2014. Previously it was unavailable outside of this exclusive box set. The zine itself is a compilation of 29 photos of cartoonist Naji al-Ali’s Handala character painted, pasted, stenciled, and screenprinted around the Palestinian Occupied Territories.” (via Tiny Cartridge)

    And Finally…

    There’s been a lot of debate over what this year’s “song of the summer” is, but I’ve got no idea why, Neil Cicierega has got it completely sewn up. Sing it with me, everyone! Blankets… blankets… blankets…

    Next week on exp.: A game for the current moment.

  • Firework Thrower Kantaro’s 53 Stations of the Tokaido (Sunsoft, 1986)

    Firework Thrower Kantaro’s 53 Stations of the Tokaido (Sunsoft, 1986)

    Developed/Published by: TOSE / Sunsoft
    Released: 1986
    Completed: 24/07/25
    Completion: Kantaro got all the way to Momoko–but I did use a warp at the last possible moment. Saved at the start of every level.

    Strange happenstance that after so recently writing about a game that features a country’s most famous road that I should write about another, in this case Japan’s Tokaido. I guess I’ll have to pick up a copy of King of Route 66 next (yes, I’m seriously considering this.)

    With a name so long it could probably be a light novel (or, *cough*, JAV) Firework Thrower Kantaro’s 53 Stations of the Tokaido (directly translated from the original Japanese, かんしゃく玉投げカン太郎の東海道五十三次) is a deeply forgotten game that has really only bubbled up for being included in Sunsoft’s recent “Sunsoft Is Back!” retro compilation. But I will say: it’s actually fairly interesting: an Atlantis No Nazo-a-like.

    Released less than three months later, Firework Thrower Kantaro (is there a good abbreviation for this? FTK53SOTT? I guess the answer is no) seems to be an attempt to take the Atlantis No Nazo playstyle, improve it and situate it in an (almost) completely linear experience compared to Atlantis No Nazo’s bonkers, warp-heavy speedrun design.

    While I don’t have a source for this outside of The History of Sunsoft Volume 1, Firework Thrower Kantaro was apparently created by TOSE rather than internally at Sunsoft (as Atlantis No Nazo was) so it does seem like the company was tasked in making “another” Atlantis No Nazo at short notice, possibly to the point that they were given the game’s code. I have no source for that and have no idea how common that would have been in Japan at the time–it does seem unlikely, but maybe TOSE were already deeply trusted by that point–but the characters control similarly and defeat enemies by throwing slowly arcing projectiles. In Atlantis No Nazo you’re throwing dynamite and having to wait for it to explode but in Fireworks Thrower Kantaro you’re (thankfully) throwing fireworks that actually explode on impact, which immediately makes things a lot more playable.

    And while the game is essentially a linear trek through the fifty three stations of the Tokaido–a shocking bit of false advertising, by the way, there are only twenty-one levels–it’s not as simple as that. Because (get your klaxons at the ready) continues the endless inspiration of Xevious [honk] and The Tower of Druaga [honk] as well as Super Mario Bros. [hon-squee] (I’ll have to get my klaxon replaced, I’ve worn it out. Not surprising at this rate.) While you can attempt to “brute force” your way through the levels, you are actually expected to consistently find hidden items in the stages which allow you to get past certain enemies and obstacles. 

    In fact, you can’t beat the game without doing so. Thankfully the game doesn’t require you do any stupid nonsense like The Tower of Druaga and instead just relies on the original Xevious’ system of just shooting unmarked areas of the stage to reveal the pickups. 

    What that ultimately means is that you just have to be hammering the fire button at all times and then trying to remember where things appear. Annoyingly, the game is weirdly exacting about where explosions happen for things to appear, and this game is so generally unloved that the only solution that I could find that pointed out where a lot of (but definitely not all!) items were was in Japanese.

    As a result of this design, I actually started Fireworks Thrower Kantaro over several times before giving it a “proper” go, and the collectible system has some give in it, but it seems highly related to how skilled you can become at the game as you play it–because it is hard.

    Like Wynn before him, Kantaro can be sluggish at the most annoying times, and the game has some weird, probably buggy quirks like an inability to duck when you’re directly next to objects. While you’re never going to be overwhelmed by enemies, they are unpredictable and kill you instantly, meaning that even if you’re only facing off against one old man leaping about and another one who shoots you periodically with a gun one wrong move can screw up your run. 

    But the game does have forgiving checkpoints and some early opportunities to rack up extra lives for those who’d like to iron-man it. If you can collect three scrolls–which you use to ward off evil ghosts that appear and kill you otherwise–you get a pair of geta so light that Kantaro can hop across the clouds, where you can find the occasional cloud that just racks up so much high score that you come away with three lives (unless you land wrong and vibrate off it–frustrating.)

    Other collectibles also have specific uses. You need ofuda to pass certain checkpoints or the enemy there will cling onto you, slowing you down. You need to spend an eye-watering five coins to ward off the prostitutes(!) that chase you around in the areas that (in the name of historical accuracy) they actually stalked. You need swords to take down… weird looking blokes (I’m not sure what their deal is.) And you need two coins to pay to make “bridges” to cross certain water features. 

    Not all of these are an automatic failure–with skill, you can for example jump across rooftops to avoid eager sex workers. But certain things, like showing up without the coins you need for a bridge, end your run entirely.

    Of the collectibles, the coins have the most interesting economy. If you can collect ten you are actually able to warp three or six levels ahead, which makes you really not want to spend them on anything but bridges. I was only able to do this right at the end of the game and I struggle to see how you could do it much earlier, but I suspect even with the help of a guide I was either missing a decent number of collectibles or just not good enough at the game (if you faff around too much bombing everywhere, eventually the game does start to spawn enough enemies that you just won’t survive.)

    Anyway. Having said all of that, Fireworks Thrower Kantaro is, at best… fine. It’s not as interesting or as replayable as Atlantis No Nazo, though it does feel much better to play. It’s somewhat unique in how specific the setting is, though if you wanted to get your feudal Japan on, the first game in the Goemon franchise did come out just a few months earlier. The hidden objects that can ruin runs aren’t as annoying as, say Xevious: GAMP No Nazo, but they don’t exactly make the game more fun, just a memory or note-taking test. I enjoyed it while I was playing it more than say, JaJaMaru No Daibouken, but as I’ve said before: in 1986 you could already have The Legend of Zelda for your Famicom, or just wait a month for Metroid.

    Will I ever play it again? I’m good!

    Final Thought: As far as retro collections go, Sunsoft Is Back! Is… decent! The CRT filter is too clean and bright for the NES/Famicom in my opinion, and doesn’t allow you to turn off curvature, which I dislike, but it’s alright, there’s a wee museum, you get the manuals (untranslated, but just hold up your phone and google translate if you absolutely have to?) and it’s just generally pleasant enough. You can quibble them only including three games, but you can already play Route 16 Turbo and Atlantis No Nazo on Switch Online I suppose (well, the former if you install the Japanese version of the app, which you should.)

  • Paradise Killer (Kaizen Game Works, 2020)

    Paradise Killer (Kaizen Game Works, 2020)

    Developed/Published by: Kaizen Game Works
    Released: 04/09/2020
    Completed: 19/07/2025
    Completion: Convicted everyone who deserved it. Or did I?

    Paradise Killer is weird.

    Weird in that way that saying it’s “weird” is reductive. Because it’s weird in the way something like Twin Peaks is–weird because the decisions it makes are trying to open you up to something deeper. Discombobulation is not the point, but a result of pushing the boundaries: trying to express themes, thoughts and ideas in the way that they need to be expressed. That feeling of strangeness? It’s your brain twiddling the dials, trying to find the game’s wavelength.

    I went into Paradise Killer close to blind. I knew it was “vaporwave” and that Brandon Sheffield liked it, but that was–literally–about it. I legitimately had no idea until I played it that it wasn’t a straightforward visual novel, but that it had full 3D movement!

    That design is actually a pretty damn important aspect of Paradise Killer that, somehow, it’s easy to miss–the promos concentrate, perhaps sensibly, on the character design and ~vibes~. But Paradise Killer is (I think) a great example of an unexpected genre-meld, taking a visual novel detective story and spreading it around in an open-world first person collect-a-thon platformer. The funny thing is that the game it most made me think of was Crackdown. You know how one of the purest joys of Crackdown was just… jumping around, collecting those orbs? Well, that’s pretty much what you spend your time doing in Paradise Killer, as you leap around paradise, picking up a huge variety of completely useless things, currency, and very occasionally clues. It’s consistently entertaining–hitting that lizard brain need to see if you can get somewhere, then getting there, and then collecting the thing that was there (that you don’t even need)–and very cleverly gives you something to do as you ferry between different suspects collecting testimony. If I have a criticism it’s that the game’s traversal upgrade system barely exists. There are three foot baths in the game that upgrade your abilities, but once you’ve got a double jump, a dash and a (slightly annoying, intentionally frictiony) radar, you’re done, and I did that within the first… hour (I played for something like eighteen!) I’d have loved to have played this getting faster, bigger jumps, more powerful, but maybe they just couldn’t be arsed with it. Maybe they just didn’t think it was that important. But it feels like a real missed opportunity, because once you’re about halfway through and you’re schlepping across the island and there aren’t as many shiny things to pick up, it starts to feel like a bit of a chore.

    Intriguingly, they don’t want to make not-shlepping too easy. While the game does include a fast travel system, it’s extremely expensive in the game’s (limited) currency, blood crystals. Save points are fast travel points, but you have to spend a crystal to unlock it, and then every time you travel from it, it costs a crystal. You also have to spend this currency for other things that probably feel more important even if they’re not, so that does mean that if you’re extremely tight with consumables like me, you might fast travel rarely (if at all.) I certainly only started doing it once I had a huge buffer of blood crystals and was collecting the last two or three pieces of testimony I needed to finish up my case. It just felt wasteful otherwise.

    But speaking of the case. Paradise Killer has one of the most unusual settings I think I’ve ever experienced. Before you begin playing, you probably think, as I did “ok, a beautiful vaporwave island with unusual characters. Got it.” But as soon as you start playing, the game makes it clear that it’s not so simple at all, and asks you to piece together what’s actually going on. And what’s going on is completely fucked up.

    In Paradise Killer, you play Lady Love Dies, part of a group of ageless beings, the Syndicate, who (at least on paper) are attempting to resurrect the alien gods that they worship by creating paradise in a pocket dimension. They do this by kidnapping humans from the “real” world, enslaving them, and then when the attempt at creating paradise inevitably fails, ritualistically slaughtering them all before moving on to the next island and trying again.

    The game begins at the failure point of another paradise, Island Sequence 24. Every citizen has been killed, the Syndicate was preparing to move to Island Sequence 25, only for the Syndicate’s leaders, the council, to be brutally murdered. The island is immediately locked down, no suspects can leave, and as Lady Love Dies, the Syndicate’s lead investigator, you are called back to investigate the murder after being exiled for the island for 3,000,000 days for being deceived by a god (in the game’s fiction, despite the Syndicate’s goal, the gods are not even to be trusted by them.)

    When I say Paradise Killer is weird, this is what I mean. You are leaping about a beautiful island paradise, bumping those vaporwave beats, talking to beautiful, largely charming people who just happen to commit a genocide on the reg. It’s… weird. And uncomfortable.

    The best comparison I can come up with is to imagine that the worshippers of the Great Old Ones of HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos weren’t, like, weird fish men or indescribable shapeless forms but hot dudes and babes, but that they were absolutely as completely disinterested in the idea of humanity as anything but cattle in their attempt to resurrect not so much pure evil but pure cosmic indifference. And that you play one of them and you’re supposed to be invested in them solving a crime.

    The important–and difficult–aspect to emphasise here is that it’s not like you’re playing a nazi. It’s like… did you ever have an ant farm? Sea Monkeys? You know they eventually just die, right? They can’t survive in the artificial space you’re holding them in. But the likely fact is that the idea of ants or tiny crustaceans as beings who deserved a life rather than, well, something curious to observe or forget about, didn’t even cross your mind. The gulf between you is so vast. That’s what’s going on here. That’s who you’re playing. Humans are the ants.

    This is… complicated, and to be honest, I’m not entirely sure how I felt about it as the background of this game. The suspects that you deal with are–generally–tired and frustrated with the system they’re part of, a cycle they can’t seem to affect. The murders occur, in the way they occur, because people are trying to create change. 

     But it’s selfish change. There is no idea of restorative justice here. In fact there’s no sense that anything can change– when you make a certain class untouchable, the system will roll on. 

    So there’s a lot tangled up in Paradise Killer, and I think the thing that disconcerts me the most about it is how big and open to interpretation the themes are, but how easy it might be to not think about it all that deeply. To sort of just… enjoy the world, uncritically. I think the game does a lot of work to make that possible. The case you’re solving is genuinely interesting even with a narrow focus, and the open map allows you to solve it almost entirely in a non-linear fashion (although I found myself with several sticking points–it would have been nice if they highlighted case-specific collectibles once testimony implied what I needed to grab, some require far too much scouring.) You will, undoubtedly, invest in what’s going on, and then fixate on what the best course of action is; who really deserves judgement?

    What’s interesting is that I played it very much down the line. I played it the way the game seemed to want me to: to follow the letter of the law. But at the end of the game I was most disappointed that while Lady Love Dies could execute everyone she deemed guilty, she wouldn’t turn the gun on herself. Because she was as culpable as any of them for it all. They all deserved judgement. But that’s life, I suppose. We sacrifice a few, call it justice, and the system endures.

    Will I ever play it again? I don’t, ultimately, think this is a game that rewards more than one playthrough. I also don’t think I’d actually like to return to this world of cosmic horror.

    Final Thought: Whether or not I’d return to it, I do think Paradise Killer was brilliant. Though it deals with heavy themes with a light touch, I do want to make clear I don’t think the game is problematic for doing so–I think it’s challenging. “Weird.” Paradise Killer gave me a lot to chew on, and I think if you’re up for it, it’s worth the effort really engaging with.

  • The exp. Dispatch #6

    The exp. Dispatch #6

    In this week’s Dispatch: after playing Wheels of Aurelia, I decided to look at its main inspiration, Il Sorpasso. And a capsule review of Luth Haroon’s INSERT/DATE/HERE.

    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.

    Subscriber Post: DAIVA Story 6: Imperial of Nirsartia (T&E Soft, 1986)

    Even I wonder why I wrote about this one but it is on Switch Online in the west!

    Unlocked Post: Cyrano (Popcannibal, 2025)

    Unlocked Post: Wheels of Aurelia (Santa Ragione, 2016) 

    Wheels of Aurelia is now delisted on the App Store, though in some respects the story of the control tech companies have over access to art has evolved in the face of both Steam and itch.io delisting/deindexing NSFW games under demand from payment processors reacting to the pressure of far-right activists. There’s a great resource here that can help you pressure the payment processors in return.

    From The exp. Archive: Threes (Vollmer, Wohlwend, 2014)

    I made myself sick of Threes before 2048 was even a glimmer in a cloner’s eye, and I think it’s important to reflect that the things that ultimately stopped me playing it were very deeply considered: there’s a great Wired article that goes into just how deeply they thought about it all.

    exp. Capsule Reviews

    INSERT/DATE/HERE (Luth Haroon, 2025)

    Play INSERT/DATE/HERE and then come back, ok?

    How do you feel? Did you keep clicking? Did you stop? Did you just close the window after it said game over, or did you continue? How long did you click?

    …

    When INSERT/DATE/HERE was shared by friend-of-the-zine Mare Sheppard, it was made clear what it was about–and I don’t think when you start playing, that you can really have any doubt what you’re doing from the first click anyway. It made me think of the “Death From Above” sequence from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which (in a reading which absolutely requires the author be stone-dead in your mind) I always read as a meaningful juxtaposition of how some people kill by pushing a button vs. the gritty reality of on-the-ground warfare. A touch of nuance with your exciting Hollywood-style story where any action is justified by the fact you’re fighting “real” baddies.

    But the reality of this kind of warfare is the person pushing the button doesn’t even really think about if they’re fighting baddies. They aren’t thinking about them as people at all. And if they did, they wouldn’t care. 

    In INSERT/DATE/HERE we face a genocide that has been streamlined into a series of clicks, likely performed by a drone operator, miles away, sitting in a chair in front of a computer just as you are. What they are doing has been so disconnected that it is as if they are poor, special Enders, allowed to do what they’re doing without ever really having to understand it. So disconnected that the clicks you just performed could very well have been as real. The perfection of dehumanisation. 

    I clicked. I clicked until I hit my quota and then I watched what that actually meant. And then I clicked, over four hundred times, to symbolically bury every single person I killed–until it was clear that not every one could be found. Because of course, many of the murdered will never be found, or counted, or their existence will simply be disputed, whether we have seen it with our own eyes or not. As I write the window remains open, knowing that there will be no closure, there is nothing I can do, and that tomorrow the same thing will happen again.

    Free Palestine. Donate: gazadirect.com (verified direct aid campaigns) / UNRWA / PCRF / MSF

    exp. Du Cinéma

    Il Sorpasso (1962)

    Claimed as an inspiration for Wheels of Aurelia by Santa Ragione, I was interested to discover the influence to be less straightforward than the setting of the Via Aurelia, with both game and film using the beautiful setting to try and dig more deeply into the Italian society of their era.

    Italy is in the honeymoon period of post-fascism in Il Sorpasso, while in Wheels of Aurelia, the characters have already lived through a decade of the “Years of Lead.” In some respects, both works lull you into a false sense of security that they really aren’t about much more than what you see. In Il Sorpasso, it immediately feels… expected. Almost formulaic. A shy student lets a brash character, Bruno, use his telephone, and seems to end up kidnapped out of politeness. Their adventure, of course, opens him up. Maybe he’ll start to believe in himself?

    Well… no. In retrospect Il Sorpasso is prescient in theme: that trying to be carefree in the face of your failures may ultimately have a cost to those who believe you. Bruno is charming, insightful, but his failures are not that he’s blunt or that he’s incapable of taking anything seriously. It’s that he’s a would-be rapist and an absentee father, one who returns to find his teenage daughter in a relationship with an elderly pedophile* and after realizing his own irrelevance does his best to at least get some money out of it—but ends up abandoned, with only his mousey thrall left to impress. But his lesson has worked too well, and as always, it’s the next generation that suffer.

    If you’re unfamiliar with commedia all’italiana (Italian-style comedy)—and listen, I was—that something called a “comedy” could be not just so annoying (Bruno honks his fucking car horn a million times in this) but so deeply bleak comes as a surprise. The cinematography is stunning, the women are beautiful, but Il Sorpasso says: don’t let it fool you. As Wheels of Aurelia explores, for many, it did.

    *I had to look this up, the age of consent in Italy is fucking 14 even today. Christ.

    Other Zines

    8 Things You Can Do To Stop ICE

    A free one-page trifold zine by CrimethInc. that you could print out and just leave places (if you’re an American.)

    Palestinian Family Fundraiser Zines

    A huge collection of free zines focusing on individual Palestinian families seeking support that you could just print out and leave places (whether or not you’re American.)

    And Finally…

    Matt Farley’s 2013 film, Local Legends, is streaming for free on Youtube for the next week (until the end of July) and it is, arguably, the best, most honest statement on how it feels to make art–to make anything–in the modern world. You should watch it.

    Next week on exp.: A trip to paradise.

  • DAIVA Story 6: Imperial of Nirsartia (T&E Soft, 1986)

    DAIVA Story 6: Imperial of Nirsartia (T&E Soft, 1986)

    Developed/Published by: T&E Soft / Toshiba EMI
    Released: 11/1986
    Completed: 08/04/2025
    Completion: Liberated all 14 planets, but didn’t discover the enemy homeworld of Nirsartia.

    There are a few Famicom-only games that Nintendo have released in the West on their Switch Online service–and far more that they haven’t. Which makes it so absolutely bizarre that in 2022 they released this, DAIVA Story 6: Imperial of Nirsartia, an action/strategy hybrid that’s almost completely forgotten, on the service.

    You could assume it’s that they were looking to fatten up the service with something where the rights were easy, but this was released before things like Golf and Mach Rider! And it’s not like it’s been released by a company who has put a lot up on Switch Online–as far as I can see, the current rights holder D4 haven’t released any other games via Switch Online before or since!

    But let’s get into what DAIVA Story 6 is, because it’s… complicated. You see, in 1986, T&E Soft, largely still fresh off the success of Hydlide, wanted to make a new game, but couldn’t align on if they were going to make a strategy game or an action game. So they just… slammed them together. And then they had to face the question of what system to make the primary platform. Realising that if they made one game and then ported it to other systems they wouldn’t be using those systems to the best of their abilities, they decided on a completely bonkers plan: to make seven different games all of which use the same game design, but which make the most of each system and which feature a deep, interconnected narrative based on Indian mythology (but in space.)

    According to information sourced from The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 2, this undertaking would turn out to be so insane that the lead developer, Yasuo Yoshikawa, would go blind.

    (Temporarily, but still.)

    Strangely, despite being the sixth game in the series, as the simplest game, Daiva Story 6 was released first, with the rest of the games following shortly after (apart from the seventh and final which unifies the stories of the previous six–due to the aforementioned blindness, it would be released somewhat later and be somewhat different, being entirely a grand strategy game with no action aspect.)

    To be honest–none of this particularly matters if you’re only going to be playing Daiva Story 6, because it’s got barely any narrative apparent in it. In Daiva Story 6, you cycle between three modes:

    An overhead section where you control a space ship flying between different planets. Planets start the action levels, but there are also enemy ships in space that begin in ship-to-ship battles, and you can return to your home planet to increase your squadron of ships for said battles.

    The ship-to-ship tactical battles, where you position your ships each turn and then watch them fire missiles and lasers back and forth with enemies.

    The action levels: a side-scrolling shooter where you control a mech that can jump and fire. Before each level you get to place three power ups during the level–a smart bomb, some missiles, and a health refill.

    Daiva Story 6 is… not good. If it was just the action levels, it would be a forgettably janky Famicom game–not quite Mystery of Convoy, but close enough. Really the main reason to know the lineage is it explains the why of why you’re doing these three disparate, undercooked modes: they feel like the kind of thing you’d play on a Japanese PC of the era and they are!

    But they are so undercooked in an attempt to make them accessible. The overhead section is ultimately just a menu. The only thing that really stands out about it is that the enemy ships sometimes attack planets you’ve liberated, which is a lot less than the other games, which have you actively assigning defenses to planets, making manufacturing orders and so on. 

    The ship-to-ship battles seem to have almost no tactics at all, just being a war of attrition outside of some tricks like lasers but not missiles firing through asteroids. And I can’t tell if this was intentional or not, but you never have to do them. You can just let planets get captured and then redo the action level again, which is probably quicker.

    The action levels, which should be the highlight are, uh… not. I love that you can place the power-ups, which is apparently a more detailed system in the PC versions (you can earn more power ups, etc.) but the power-ups outside of the health refill (aka “just place it before the boss”) need perfect foresight to place anywhere even mildly useful. 

    They also made the really strange decision to make you just… not collide with any of the level. The levels auto-scroll, which makes me think they just didn’t have a solution for what would happen if the character got stuck on the level. What this means is that while you can jump around, you are generally best just trying to keep your mech at the lowest part of the level.

    Proper collisions have to be something they gave up on because, like, the levels have sequences that read like you were meant to hop across lava via platforms and stuff. Instead you just… stand still and scroll through it.

    It feels insanely janky and unfinished, and as a result the game veers between “completely trivial” on anything but the hardest difficulty, and “complete fucking bullet hell” on the hardest–one of which is boring, and the other which is, well, unfair, because the controls are so crappy and floaty (every level has a differing amount of gravity, which could be sort of interesting, but it adds little.)

    Unfortunately, the game requires you beat it on the hardest difficulty to unlock the “true” ending that ties into all the other games (which also, seemingly, had insane requirements to get their true endings.) I was not going to bother with this because… it’s boring! Even if the game didn’t feel crappy to play, it’s extremely samey–every action level feels the same, and because there’s no point to the ship battles, I didn’t do them. 

    Basically: not worth going blind over.

    Will I ever play it again? I really do think it’s quite interesting that they made seven of these in a year. And listen, I did watch (skip around) some Youtube playthroughs of the different PC versions to compare and contrast. But I’ll never play any of them.

    Final Thought: If your imagination was captured by this mania, the good news is that you actually could play (almost) all of them thanks to D4’s hilariously expansive Project EGG emulation service. 

    It seems that all of the games apart from the second, “Memory in Durga” for the FM-77AV are available on the platform, though it requires a monthly fee–and no, none of the games have shown up on Project Egg’s “EGGCONSOLE” releases for Nintendo Switch. 

    Although this has all reminded me of the existence of EGGCONSOLE, I wonder what’s there that I might like to play? Gotta be better than this, surely?

  • The exp. Dispatch #5

    The exp. Dispatch #5

    Two subscriber articles this week, and a surprisingly successful trip to the archive.

    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.

    Subscriber Post: Cyrano (Popcannibal, 2025)

    It’s always surprising how little you actually know the classics, despite feeling like you’re always submerged in references to them.

    Subscriber Post: Wheels of Aurelia (Santa Ragione, 2016)

    This post has some urgency, as Wheels of Aurelia will be delisted on iOS on the 25th, so rather than make this the regular weekly post I thought I’d make it a bonus post so it can be unlocked a day before it’s delisted (though you can pay just $1 to support and read it now.) I suppose unless Apple decide to not delist it (they won’t) and if you don’t want to pay anything, you can just download the game now for free, skip reading my thoughts on it and just get stuck in. That’s valid!

    Unlocked Post: Pro Wrestling (TRY, 1986)

    Although I posted this with the western cover, I regret not sharing it with the Japanese cover so… there it is! Gaze upon the chibi-adjacent Inoki!

    From The exp. Archives: Fable III (Lionhead Studios, 2010)

    Thanks to a wee repost from Sasha’s Retrobytes, this one got some traction on Bluesky, with lots of people sharing their own bitter disappointment in Fable III. Including someone saying their brother almost “puked from rage” at the ending, which is like… steady on!

    exp. Du Cinéma

    Detour (1945)

    A beautiful example of what you can do if all you’ve got is a couple of sets, a rear-projection screen, a fog machine, and Ann Savage. Admittedly that last one is really important.

    Feels like it ends too early, but there’s also something really funny about our down-on-his-luck shmoe main character going “alright, I’m beat” and walking out of the movie.

    I wrote this short, quippy review of Detour (1945) on Letterboxd this week because I went to see it as part of the “Important Cinema Club Classics” series at the Fox Theatre in Toronto, and that gives me the opportunity to recommend listening to the Important Cinema Club, the best cinema podcast you can listen to, hosted by my friend Justin Decloux, and Will Sloan, who is also a person I know.

    Other Zines

    KNIFE

    “greetings i have made another zine, this is about how i got my hands on a knife at age ~9” 

    Queen’s University Library has digitized a collection of rare, self-published sci-fi & fantasy fanzines, making long-lost voices from 1940s–1980s more widely accessible.

    “The thirteen titles chosen for our project are periodicals with multiple authors. Most can be loosely classified as self-published, small print-run fanzines or zines within the science fiction/fantasy/speculative fiction genres … published in Canada featuring predominantly Canadian authors.”

    The Ipoh International Zine Festival (25 – 27 July, 2025)

    “The Ipoh International Zine Festival takes place in #poh, Malaysia from 25 – 27 July, 2025. Location: Aras B, Pasar Besar Ipoh, time: 12 pm – 6 pm. Includes: Zine bazaar, Workshops, Zine launches, DIY craft tables, Panel discussions, Exhibitions.”

    And Finally…

    Obviously normally I want to end the newsletter on something funny or cute, but I think it’s important to, at least briefly, discuss the recent controversy over Modretro releasing Wayforward’s licensed Sabrina game for GameBoy Color. I’ve been posting a thread over on Bluesky about it, where I note–accurately–that Modretro is arms-dealing zionist Palmer Luckey’s gamewashing arm. Wayforward first openly publicised the release, then deleted everything because it was bad PR, and then had to make a statement to Time Extension probably because they got told off by ModRetro. But it’s clear now that they were deeply and happily involved in this whether or not they see any money from it, so fuck Wayforward. Do better.

    Next week on exp.: The sixth game in a franchise you’ve never heard of.

  • Wheels of Aurelia (Santa Ragione, 2016)

    Wheels of Aurelia (Santa Ragione, 2016)

    Developed/Published by: Santa Ragione
    Released: 20/09/2016
    Completed: 16/07/25
    Completion: Completed seven endings and unlocked every checkpoint.

    Wheels of Aurelia is being delisted from the App Store on July 25th because of Apple’s anti-art App Store requirements, and as it’s been made free by the developer in response, I thought I should pick it up and play it through. While Wheels of Aurelia will be available on other platforms–and if you’re reading this after it’s been delisted, you can pick it up there–it’s not exactly a preservation issue, it really does speak to the complete devaluation of creative work in our tech industry-led culture. Companies like Apple expect apps to be updated regularly, but of course, a game can just be… what it is (never mind the fact that a lot of apps don’t really need to be updated or changed much, if at all, either.) And let’s not forget the cultural vandalism of binning off everything from the old 32-bit App Store rather than working to keep them accessible.

    Apple are cunts, basically. And I think this matters in the case of Wheels of Aurelia for the same reason I wrote about Despelote in the context of our AI slopscape: Wheels of Aurelia is a genuine attempt to make a human work, but one that is still, specifically, a video game.

    Set in Italy in the 1970s, the player is cast as Lella, a woman taking a road trip to France for mysterious reasons, accompanied by Olga, who she met only the night before and has her own reasons for taking the trip. In some respects, the game could be described as a visual novel, but I think that’s a little reductive–I’d call it a “car conversation simulator”, because it captures the feel of something any driver will know well–when you’re engaged in a conversation while driving and are able to split your attention seamlessly between the conversation and the road.

    Here it’s cleverly provided by making the driving as simple as possible. You head forward automatically and can switch lanes to overtake and speed up (a bit) by swiping but that’s really it. While you’re driving, the conversation flows, and you can choose between a few different responses each time you’re prompted. So as you drive, you’re mostly listening, or thinking about what you’re going to say next, only occasionally making a point of taking active control of the car.

    I really have to emphasise that this is the ideal video game interpretation of the car conversation. If the driving was literally any more complicated, I’d have to think about it, and when I’m driving, I don’t think about it. I’m just… driving!

    Something else I appreciate about this is that it doesn’t tell one long narrative. It actually does the one thing I always want games to do–make it impossible to see it all in one playthrough, make each playthrough short, but make each playthrough tell a whole story. Wheels of Aurelia, if you play it once, is very short–less than twenty minutes. But as you play, you can pick up hitchhikers. You can change your travelling companion. You can choose which town to head to next. And you can always choose to say something different.

    I thought I’d be done with one playthrough, honestly, but through the dialogue the game doesn’t just progress a narrative, but paints a portrait of Italy in the late 70s. Like Ecuador in the early 2000s, it’s nowhere I know anything in particular about, and the game (cleverly, I think) gives you encyclopedia entries (sourced from Wikipedia–now that’s some savvy effort-saving) to fill out anything in detail that you like–though I was happy to let it just flow, to feel immersed in my lack of perfect context.

    The thing I would say surprised me most is that I actually wished it was a little longer per playthrough! I appreciate that the game doesn’t shy away from serious, adult topics, but the endings feel a little sudden, like you haven’t spent quite enough time with the characters to get totally comfortable with them. While you draw more of them out each playthrough, it feels like you’re just capturing a snapshot of someone’s life–and the endings imply a little too much by comparison. It can feel unearned. And if you’re a completionist, I suspect that trying to see every ending here will get pretty repetitive–better to just play it until you’ve had your fill and leave some things unknown.

    Sometimes there are just games that just… do what they’re trying to do. Wheels of Aurelia is one of them. There’s no “update” that they could make that would be worth it to make Apple happy: it deserves to exist, and be played, as it is.

    Will I ever play it again? There are many endings I haven’t seen. Ironically, this is kind of a perfect iOS game–I can imagine picking it up and giving it a run through to get an ending I hadn’t seen at some point in the future while I’m in a waiting room or something.

    Final Thought: I was interested to read that one major inspiration for this was the Italian film Il Sorpasso, as the movie it immediately put me in mind of was the Italian film Rabid Dogs. Though that is tonally incredibly different…

  • Cyrano (Popcannibal, 2025)

    Cyrano (Popcannibal, 2025)

    Developed/Published by: Popcannibal
    Released: 07/03/25
    Completed: 10/07/25
    Completion: Completed it.

    I was looking for something quick to play through and I saw that I’d noted that this recently (re-)released adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac was under an hour, so I decided to give it a run through.

    The most interesting way to think about Cyrano is that it feels like one of those “abridged” books for children–it’s a gentle, extremely pleasant introduction to one of the classics. The likelihood is that while you’re familiar with the concept (poetic man with large nose helps attractive thicko woo the woman he secretly loves) and you probably know one famous scene from many, many parodies (the one where Cyrano feeds Christian lines to charm Roxanne) you probably don’t know anything else about the story or setting–and Cyrano provides the broad strokes in charming fashion.

    While you get to enjoy the story, the majority of your interaction comes from JRPG-style battles and “letter writing” and the way these two sections connect is really fun and interesting, even if they’re individually a touch simplistic. The JRPG battles are so simple, in fact, they tend towards unbalanced. You can’t choose which enemy to hit and healing is weak, meaning it’s more luck than tactics. But each enemy defeated gives you a playing card, and each playing card has (most of) a line of poetry on it, so when time comes for Cyrano to write Roxanne a letter, you make the best poker hand you can from the cards you have managed to collect, and then those cards form the basis of the letter, upon which you can type your own flourishes for fun.

    I genuinely think this is quite a brilliant concept and I couldn’t help but wish that perhaps the game was longer and the mechanics given more space to flesh out–get crunchier, more tactical. You can’t, for example, roam around to get into more battles and get new cards. There are no upgrades to cards or gear or whatever. This is completely fine for something of this length, but it’s a mechanic ripe for exploration if anyone wants to.

    Something also worth mentioning about the letter writing: Cyrano was originally released in 2021 as part of a pack to support LudoNarraCon, and this new version’s main addition is to add controller support–allowing this to, for example, be played on Steam Deck. But because the game features you adding your own text to letters, you need to at least be using a soft keyboard, which as we all know, sucks. You can just skip this aspect completely as it has no mechanical effect, but it does mean you’re not taking part in a fun aspect of the game that personalises it for you (at the end it shows you all the letters you wrote) so that’s kind of a bummer. It would have been nice if there was a “I don’t want to type” version that just filled out the whole sentences on the cards for you–even if it would be less funny.

    I’m quibbling, however. Cyrano is a good example of how much work a strong narrative and a breezy runtime can do for a game–especially when paired with lovely, appropriate art. You do feel like you’re enjoying a play, and at the end I found myself rather moved–Cyrano is a classic for a reason.

    Will I ever play it again? It’s not going to play out any differently. But it does make me fancy watching another adaptation. Maybe that Steve Martin one???

    Final Thought: The most surprising thing about Cyrano is that it doesn’t feature the most famous scene! I thought it might feature it still using the poker-hand letter writing mechanic, but it’s excised. In fact, the version of the story here shuffles about and changes things more than I expected–all the more reason to revisit the story elsewhere.

  • The exp. Dispatch #4

    The exp. Dispatch #4

    This week on exp.

    Subscriber Post: Pro Wrestling (TRY, 1986)

    I have (generally) been unimpressed with Nintendo’s black box output, but along with Golf, this one was a really nice surprise.

    Unlocked Post: Despelote (Cordero/Valbuena, 2025)

    The only article you’re going to read about a video game that includes a reference to Jeanne Dielman and Fishing With John. Probably.

    From The exp. Archives: Gunhouse (Necrosoft, 2014)

    I don’t do these that often, but when I feel like I know the developer really well–maybe too well to honestly critique their work–I cadge an interview with them. Here it’s a really deep design interview with Brandon Sheffield that’s probably obsolete because it’s so specific to the PS Vita(!) version of Gunhouse. Looking forward to another round when Demon School comes out (wishlist now, etc.)

    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!

    exp. Du Cinéma

    Thunderbolts* (2025)

    The main issue with Thunderbolts* isn’t really the film’s fault: it is, of course, the MCU’s. Because—and I think this is borne out in how fatigued and almost indifferent the positive reactions to this movie are—if the MCU is a banquet you can never leave, Thunderbolts* is like receiving a perfectly delicious hotdog after being forced to down a cup of cold sick. It’s a good hotdog! But you still sort of wish you were anywhere else.

    You can feel the weight of the MCU machine—gotta advertise those future movies—but they actually work to get you on side rather than relying on that alone. That they were able to immediately and unceremoniously kill a character no one likes? Unbelievably funny, gives you just enough to make you go “oh, maybe this was made people who actually like movies.”

    Not only that, that they might actually want the images you see on screen to be cool and enjoyable? The action is clear (they do a fun riff on some iconic Terminator imagery) and it even hits the comedy beats well enough that I actually laughed out loud at points. There are even… themes! And it manages to tell a complete story!!!

    Christ, that kind of praise really is grim, isn’t it? But I suppose that’s where we are. Ultimately, I liked it! But I kept thinking “please don’t make me drink any more sick.”

    Follow Mathew on Letterboxd.

    Other Zines

    Kill Or Be Killed: A No More Heroes Fanzine

    “Preorders for KILL OR BE KILLED ZINE are OFFICIALLY OPEN! They’ll be available until August 5th.”

    BreakSpace – Issue 2

    “Our scorching Summer issue features 38 reviews of new ZX Spectrum games, Type-ins, interviews and loads more.”

    And Finally…

    Mikolai over at Forgotten Worlds wrote a cute blog about their experience of publishing zines using the JRPG as a metaphor, er, a few months ago. But it came up in my feed recently and is an interesting manifesto/guide if you’ve ever considered it yourself. Give it a read!

    Next week on exp.: “You don’t have to put on the red light.”