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Category: Every Game I’ve Finished

  • The exp. Dispatch #9

    The exp. Dispatch #9

    I think I’m going to settle on the dispatch being biweekly–doing it every week has felt like overkill. I think I imagined this newsletter as just links to the articles of the week, but each time I’ve thought of doing that it’s felt like such poor value for your no-money that I’ve ended up doing more, so this is, probably, better for all involved. Let me know if you feel any different. Onwards!

    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!

    Cheeky ad-blocker? Sign up here!

    This Fortnight On exp.

    Subscriber Post: Many Nights A Whisper (Deconstructeam/Selkie Harbour, 2025)

    Listen to Together by Nine Inch Nails while reading this. If you know, you know.

    Unlocked Post: The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986)

    Nice to get to call out Wes Fenlon’s excellent Read Only Memo and Phil Summers’ Hand Drawn Game Guides here. Not the last time Phil’s work will be mentioned at the very least.

    Unlocked Post: VILE: Exhumed (Cadaver, 2025)

    You know, I really thought this game would create a bit more discussion online considering the context in which it was released, but I guess not!

    From the exp. Archive: Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (Intelligent Systems, 2008)

    Digging this old article up made me realise I never managed to cop that fancy re-release Nintendo did of the Super Famicom original, despite really trying, and then I completely forgot to download it digitally anyway. It’s really bizarre that Nintendo took to these limited releases for Fire Emblem and that Super Mario collection. Why? I guess they did limited Mario and Kirby releases in the days of the Wii, but it just seems so weird to go “you can’t buy that now” in the digital shop of infinite shelf space.

    What’s that? I’ve got a digital zine collection that I’ve only ever released temporarily? Uh… shut up.

    From the exp. Archive: Hollow Knight (Team Cherry, 2017)

    The Silksong hype is real, man. This article, despite being from 2020, was just about the most read thing on the site in the wake of it being announced. And I don’t even like Hollow Knight!

    exp. Capsule Review

    Merge Maestro (Stingless, 2025)

    Had heard rumours this was the new roguelike-like obsession of the moment, so thought I’d give it a shot–it’s not like I feel like I’m wasting my life as it is. But I bounced off this basically immediately. Of the roguelike-likes it’s most similar to Luck Be A Landlord in that it’s very simple, entirely focused on a core loop–here, playing a symbol-based Threes-like to fight a succession of waves of enemies until you either lose or win the run by beating a final boss enemy. After each wave you get to upgrade one of your symbols, each of which has a special ability, and you’re basically trying to make your deck work synergistically so that as you merge symbols you’re doing massive damage and making your board better. 

    If that sounds… fine, it… is. I mean it’s really quite generic feeling, probably not helped by the fact that is uses emojis for the symbols, and maybe if you really love Threes this will light your fire, but it’s got the same kind of problem that Luck Be A Landlord does, where there’s a billion symbols (here 300!) that all do different things and you can find yourself heading in the wrong direction based on your rolls or just not being able to pull anything together. You can get Balatro-esque insane numbers going, but I certainly couldn’t be bothered to try.

    I don’t mean to beat up on this one too much, because it’s from a small developer, completely competent, reasonably priced and I assume for the right kind of player absolute catnip. If anything I’m surprised at how much this failed to get its hooks into me. Am I burned out on the genre, or will another game draw me back into it? You know what, I’m not in a mood to find out any time soon.

    exp. Du Cinéma

    War 2 (2025) / Coolie (2025)

    Thank goodness I’m here to keep you up to date with the latest Indian cinema releases. Absolutely why you subscribe to a video game newsletter. But for real though, War 2 is a banger.

    Zine News

    ZINEDUMP

    “ZINEDUMP is a new Toronto zine fair that aims to provide a venue for the open expression for independent publications, radical art and ideas. The inaugural fest will be held on Nov. 9th between 12-5pm at the Cecil Community Centre.”

    Still time to get submissions in if you’re quick–the deadline is August 31st.

    Amiga Addict 39

    “The new issue of AA is out, in which we look at  Fast Food 2 and the history behind the Oliver Twins original!”

    Incredible to think that there’s an modern Amiga magazine that’s run for 39 issues. I haven’t been able to keep up.

    How To Report ICE

    These single page, easy to print and distribute zines give information on how to report ICE for specific cities/areas in the US.

    And Finally…

    What’s this???

    Next week on exp.: The Stampers get ripped off for the second time. Allegedly.

  • Many Nights A Whisper (Deconstructeam/Selkie Harbour, 2025)

    Many Nights A Whisper (Deconstructeam/Selkie Harbour, 2025)

    Developed/Published by: Deconstructeam, Selkie Harbour
    Released: 29/04/2025
    Completed: 23/08/2025
    Completion: …

    Fuckin’ hell.

    The last couple of years have been incredible for shorter narrative video game experiences, and in a weird sort of way, it’s almost like there’s like an unspoken arms race to make them shorter–no, not shorter, more focused, more concentrated. I’m not sure at what point we reached the nadir of games–particularly those of the triple-A persuasion–being a never-ending procession of endless “content”, but there’s something deeply refreshing about the idea that whether intentionally or not, game designers have discovered there’s a value in fermenting a game design, boiling it down into a playable umami. A rich flavour that lingers and sticks with you long after in comparison to the once-prevailing wisdom that players should be faced with an endless chocolate cake and forced to eat it like they’re Bruce Bogtrotter, quality be damned. Games that say, “we’re not just chocolate cake! We’re an endless buffet!” but the entire experience is, as I once said about Horizon: Zero Dawn, like chewing through a gym mat.

    By comparison, Many Nights A Whisper gives you one thing to do. One perfect, polished thing. It gives you as much time as you want to do that thing, in a genius and thematic invitation to self-direction, though you’ll probably wrap things up within an hour, hour and a half. And I don’t think it could manage what it does any other way.

    In Many Nights A Whisper, you are the “Dreamer”, chosen to practice with a slingshot for ten years in preparation for a single shot at a distant chalice that, as part of a sacred ceremony, will ensure everyone’s wishes will come true–at least, those whose wishes are heard and accepted by the Dreamer. The game begins with the ceremony fast approaching, and as people begin to deliver their wishes, finally the Dreamer’s slingshot range is able to be expanded with hair from the cut braids of those whose wishes are accepted. And so the player is given freedom to practice their expanding slingshot against increasingly distant targets each day, and then each night, they hear and choose which wishes to accept by cutting the braids of hidden petitioners.

    And that’s it, until one day, you have to make the shot. And you really do only get one attempt.

    In a strange way, the thing that Many Nights A Whisper reminded me most of was The Bear’s incredible season three opener, “Tomorrow.” While the show itself has, ironically, lost focus completely–and to be honest, the very next episode in season three does its best to blow up its thesis, anyway, Tomorrow movingly, non-linearly, shows chef Carmy’s sometimes beautiful, sometimes painful, sometimes awful history intertwined with his work, his process for forming a new menu for the titular restaurant. Layer by layer, the episode offers an affirmation:

    You are not simply the sum of what has happened to you. You are what you choose to do with that.

    It is an aspirational song of praise to putting everything of yourself into your process. It’s like when you watch one of those NHK documentaries about a factory that hand-produces lacquer bowls, or something. You think, you are reminded, that you are a corporeal being that exists in the world. You can imagine the simple yet deep pleasure of mastering something, putting yourself into it, knowing every movement, until it becomes second nature; the work sings a song you woven not just by your hand but by the life that got you to that point.

    In a world that almost feels more virtual than real now–forever interrupted, beauty shortcut with slop, isolation and othering as policy–these things make you face up to how you’ve hardened. They make you long for a honest dialogue between yourself and the world: and make you content with the fact that being honest with yourself is maybe the only thing you can control.

    You are not your context. You are what you choose to do there.

    Many Nights A Whisper doesn’t give you a world to explore. It gives you the role of the Dreamer–designed clearly to visually reference the modern incarnation of The Legend of Zelda’s Link–in a small courtyard that only hints at the larger world. You’re wearing (and I would love to know the story behind this) an Ixnay On The Hombre t-shirt, your mentor has a big telly… but this otherwise could, if you squint, be Hyrule. Many Nights A Whisper gives you a context you already know, and an interaction you already know. Left trigger to aim, right trigger to shoot. It asks you to consider your process, and engage with just how hard you want to work by giving you a safe, understandable, recognizable space to work in, with no distractions.

    And while it does that, each night it ask you to consider why you’re doing it. Is it just because you’ve been asked? Because you want to make people’s wishes come true? Whose? Who deserves it, and who doesn’t? What is the world you want to create by your hand?

    Many Nights A Whisper describes itself as an interactive essay, which I think is a little precious. Because it is very much a video game, a visceral video game. At first, you make your little shots into nearby chalices, you accept easy, uncomplicated wishes and enjoy the reward of “levelling up” your slingshot. A few in-game days later you’re making micro-movements and cursing as you miss shots at chalices far in the distance, then trying to navigate the wishes of the selfish and confused. “I need more distance” you think, “but this person is unworthy.”

    And then, suddenly, the ceremony is due. You have one last afternoon with which to perfect the shot. Can you? Walk away from the spot you’ve chosen, line it up. Hit. Walk away, spin around, line it up. Was that right? Hit. Alright, if I get it a third time, I’ll move on. Walk away, spin around, put the Steam Deck down, make a cup of tea, dunk a chocolate digestive, fuck half of it broke off, burn your finger trying to dig it out, back to the kitchen and grab a spoon, urgh it’s too soft now, back to the Steam Deck, you know the chalice was right at this point on the screen… wait, move it here. No, there. Miss.

    Fuck.

    As someone who is extremely free with walkthroughs, save states and the rest–games are to be enjoyed–one of the meaningful things about Many Nights A Whisper is how deeply it engenders an urge to do it right. To give yourself over to the process. To try and try again to make a lacquer bowl with all the knowledge of the history that made it what it was and made you what you were. I played for real. I tried many different ways, I practised. I spent far longer than I’d expect I would have trying to get myself to the point it was second nature. Until I realised I was overthinking it. If I took a breath, stopped, and attempted a shot based simply on what felt right–a shot based entirely on the accumulation of practice, I’d make it. But if I kept trying, I’d get tangled in it. Micro-movements, losing my place. I’d start to miss. 

    So I stopped practising. There’s only so much you can prepare. I didn’t even make sure my last shot was a hit. I simply trusted in my process.

    At the ceremony, I took a breath. I closed my eyes, I thought about everything I had gone through. Was it really just an hour, or was it a lifetime? I pulled back the slingshot, and I fired.

    Will I ever play it again? I am somewhat interested in what happens if you do certain things different ways, or if certain things play out differently on different playthroughs. But at the same time, my experience was so singular, and the tension so real, that if I ever play this again it’ll be a long time yet.

    Final Thought: It’s a rare video game that I say “this could only exist as a video game” but Many Nights A Whisper is one. The preparation and tension of the shot is pitched perfectly–the game is just long enough that it feels like it matters if you fail, but not so long that it makes attempting it in the first place seem insurmountable. It is to experience, mechanically, the crunch-time moment of an underdog sports movie, layered with all your own effort to get you there, holding, quite literally, everyone’s hopes and dreams with you.

    Many Nights A Whisper is, currently, my game of the year. And it ain’t even close.

  • The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986)

    The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986)

    Developed/Published by: Nintendo R&D4 / Nintendo
    Released: 21/02/1986
    Completed: 17/08/2025
    Completion: Beat it for the second time! 

    Well, I can’t be playing obscure ones all the bloody time.

    I have a long history with The Legend of Zelda, as a lot of people do, though like many–if not most(?)–non-Americans/non-Japanese, my history does not begin with the original game. For me it started with Link’s Awakening, and I wouldn’t play the original until 2004 when I was able to treat myself to a Famicom Edition Gameboy Advance SP and a copy of the Famicom Mini Series Legend of Zelda. I remember being so excited to finally play such an iconic game, picking it up, getting completely lost, dying a million times when struggling with the stiff controls, and then deciding the cute little box was just a nice thing to have on my shelf and moving on with my life.

    I would go on to finish The Legend of Zelda years later–trading off the controller with BancyCo’s Benjamin Rivers–and even wrote a limited zine about that experience (I keep meaning to do a proper “history of exp.” page on this website, and I will, but today is not that day.) That completion–around 2011–meant I classed The Legend of Zelda as “previously completed” on the big “I’m not neurodivergent I promise” spreadsheet I keep, and I didn’t intend to return to it until I read in Wes Fenlon’s excellent newsletter Read Only Memo (worth subscribing to! As long as you’ve subscribed to mine too, obviously) about romhacker infidelity’s SNES port, which could be considered completely faithful while still featuring a bunch of lovely quality of life fixes. And considering I have a wee emulation device I adore, and found myself with a bunch of downtime due to some work I’d picked up that involved a lot of sitting around waiting for things to happen, I thought… why not? It’d make a nice change, and refresh my context for 1986.

    Something that is really important to mention, though, is that this time I came prepared. Now, I can’t remember if the wee Famicom Mini version of The Legend of Zelda came with a reproduction manual or not–I don’t have it to hand–but I’m assuming it didn’t (or if it did, I overlooked it, because what is this, a manual for ants, etc.) but I’ve long learned my lesson since I was downloading Infocom games and being baffled by them–you read the manual. And when you do, well… The Legend of Zelda isn’t baffling at all.

    Well, for a bit. And it’s still hard as balls initially, but we’ll get to that. I was shocked when I read through the manual–and this is true of the Japanese manual too–that it literally explains, cleanly and clearly, all the things you can get, all the enemies you’ll face, gives you instruction on what you’re trying to do, and then includes a complete walkthrough on how to get to the first dungeon (and guidance on how to get to the second.) I guess I’d never looked at the box closely before, where it literally says “Includes invaluable maps and strategic playing tips.”

    I’m reminded of that classic bit of weirdly banal Shigeru Miyamoto lore, that he likes to learn a city by walking it (who doesn’t) and imagined him going “I mean I do start with a map and a destination though. It only makes sense. I don’t just walk out the door and start wandering. I’d get lost.”

    Because, of course, this does all make sense! No one at Nintendo is thinking “well, people will be playing this without the manual in the future.” Back then, the manual was part of the product, and it really does a great job in getting you through the early stage of the game… at which point you can throw yourself into getting properly lost, equipped with more hearts and weapons to survive it.

    Historical Aside

    Christ, what’s going on here? A boxout? I haven’t done one of those before. Now, despite what I’m saying about the manual here and the game being intended to make sense with it, there is a possible–if unlikely–alternative which relates to a rumoured influence on The Legend of Zelda. John and Ste Pickford are quoted as saying that one of the Stampers, founders of Rare, had referred to The Legend of Zelda as “Miyamoto’s rip-off of Sabre Wulf”. Now, The Legend of Zelda actually does have notable similarities to Sabre Wulf and Rare’s earlier title Atic Atac, and one of the interesting things about Sabre Wulf is it comes with a manual that tells you almost nothing at all–I suspect many players didn’t even decipher that they were supposed to collect four pieces of an amulet from it. 

    Separated at birth?

    So if you take the Stampers at their word–and remember, they were tight as fuck with Nintendo, meeting with the company potentially as early as 1985–the complete bafflement I and many players first met The Legend of Zelda with could have been as intended as anything.

    The thing about the opening of The Legend of Zelda though… no matter what, it’s fucking hard. You’ve got three hearts, a weedy sword unless you’re at max hearts (which won’t last long) a shield that barely blocks anything, and you have to get comfortable with moving and attacking only on the four cardinal directions while your opponents seem to move near randomly. Playing it “for real” I died a lot, but the game is also shockingly forgiving for the era, bringing you back to life at the start with everything you’d collected intact–even dying in dungeons just brings you back to the start.

    This has the great effect that exploration and experimentation always feels worth it. You can delve into a dungeon just to see what’s down there, wander to a new area to see what you can find, and do “suicide runs” to get a necessary item if you know where it is. It’d be sort of perfect if the game wasn’t so stingy that you respawn with just three hearts filled no matter how many you have, because they have an abysmal drop rate. (I won’t lie, towards the end I did abuse save states just to quickly cheat at the gambling game so I could keep myself stocked up with potions. Life did eventually start to feel too short.)

    Because the game is so open, it does resort to (klaxons at the ready?) the Xevious/The Tower of Druaga “find the hidden stuff to progress” design. I am inclined to be a little more forgiving than usual here because of the open world and that the game does drop hints, even if they are obscure in Japanese and mangled in English. Back then everyone had a lot more time, a lot fewer games to get through, and the communal solve experience had continued from The Tower of Druaga in arcades to The Tower of Druaga at home (in Japan at least.) But I’m sure many kids, stymied, just took to bombing every wall and setting fire to every bush, and I can’t really justify that–the game definitely doesn’t drop enough hints, and there are definitely too many moments that can bring your progress to a dead-stop without outside help.

    Thankfully, in 2025 I was just able to refer to Phil Summers’ incredible Hand-Drawn Game Guide, which… look, it’s cheating, it’s a walkthrough, but it’s got such an easy, homegrown charm, it’s like your pal is helping you through the game. I can’t recommend it more highly if you’re approaching this game for the first time–read the manual, follow it, then as soon as you get too bored or lost, or just don’t feel like you’re making enough progress, just start referring to it.

    And anyway, you still have to beat the bloody thing yourself! If I have a real criticism of The Legend of Zelda it’s that it just doesn’t feel that great to play. The extremely stiff feeling of combat never goes away, and the enemies that require you manoeuvre carefully to hit them like Darknuts and Wizzrobes can absolutely suck a dick. Wizzrobes in particular, which are fucking everywhere in the last few dungeons. Unsatisfyingly, the end of the game does feel like a bit of a sprint as you basically try and dodge as much combat as possible, because it offers no reward. The terrible health drop rate is quite a negative, honestly.

    Saying it doesn’t feel that great probably sounds completely disqualifying for The Legend of Zelda, but I do have to mention again that it exists in the context of 1986 in Japan, and was still close to cutting-edge when released just over a year later in the rest of the world. Despite what the Stampers might have said, and even despite the existence of things like Ultima IV, at this point no one has put as complete a package together as Nintendo has. For the second time after Super Mario Bros. they’ve created something new out of whole cloth and no one else even saw it coming.

    Will I ever play it again? After all of this, I’m suddenly reminded what I was actually going to do when I intended to “replay” this was to play through BS Zelda for Satellaview. Oops. Well, I can still do that whenever I like.

    Final Thought: The craziest thing about Nintendo creating something this new, this different, this polished?

    They’ll do it again in a matter of months.

  • The exp. Dispatch #8

    The exp. Dispatch #8

    This week on exp.

    Subscriber Post: VILE: Exhumed (Cadaver, 2025)

    This was a really difficult one to write about, and while I really hesitate to bang on about how exp. needs your support to continue at this level, well, it does, so please consider supporting us on Patreon (preferrably), ko-fi, or pick up a zine or the book. Here, I chose to dig into a banned game with heavy themes that reflect the current moment of moral panic, but which I found… inconclusive. Would love to hear what others thought of it, or what I wrote about it.

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

    Speaking of people getting in touch to say what they thought of a game, I’m still surprised by just how many people have popped up to say they love this one. I hadn’t heard of it before!

    From the exp. Archive: Toy Soldiers: Cold War (Signal Studios, 2011)

    Wrote about this one all the way back in 2014 and was surprised to look Signal Studios up and discover that they’d quietly gone out of business in at some point in 2023, their last release a HD remaster of the original Toy Soldiers that no one liked. One of the only things I was able to dig up about the closure actually was a tweet from the official Toy Soldiers account: “TSHD was not handled well by the publisher or me—limited resource, tons of delayed/bad dev caused by idiotic public policy and other unexpected events—deals fell through—over time—resources gone—the rest is history.”

    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. Capsule Reviews

    Mindset GO! (Magicave, 2025)

    Spent some of the last few weeks playing this mobile and web puzzler, and as it’s been made by friend-of-exp Ste Curran I can’t in good conscience give it a “proper review” but I do want to recommend it anyway. In fact I’ll go ahead and explain that I’ve already recommended it to other people as an antidote to a few things–engaging with anything from the New York Times, a propaganda company with a games arm (or vice versa) or playing any of those fucking terrible games that show up when you use any mobile app with ads (more on that on a bit though.)

    Mindset GO! is the kind of design where when you play it you think “wait, how have I never seen this before?” as it features an incredibly simple design: you’re just sorting shapes based on one or more feature that they have. If they’re a triangle, or yellow, that sort of thing. You put them into circles, which might intersect as a Venn diagram does–meaning you need to put yellow triangles there, but can put just yellow, or just triangles, elsewhere–and you don’t necessarily know what all the features required are.

    This starts embarrassingly easy, but quickly gets… difficult. The Venn diagrams become more complex, and then suddenly you’re sorting (say) wee cat faces instead of big simple shapes. The thing I most appreciated about this game is that you can feel your brain expanding as you work out systems and techniques to beat harder and harder levels. Almost subconsciously you find yourself pre-sorting shapes, or able to keep two concepts in your mind at once that you couldn’t before. It’s deeply, deeply satisfying, and it’s all wrapped up in a terrifically thoughtful UI.

    As highly as I recommend it, this is a free-to-play mobile game, and you therefore have to engage with that whole… thing. Meaning mobile ads rear their ugly head here if you don’t quickly stump up the no-ads tax, and if you’re determined to stick to free-to-play while you’re feeling the game out, every single part of this carefully curated puzzling experience is smashed to bits when what feels like out of nowhere you get an ugly, often broken slop advert for whatever the algorithm has decided you would like best (it’s certain I’m a woman in her mid-50s, obsessed with her dying plants but unable to get up from her chair to do any exercise.) This really means that you basically have to spend the $3.99 to enjoy this on mobile really before you get to the point where it gets its hooks into you. As a result, you may wish to play the web version at first, then make up an account to save your progress? 

    Weirdly, one of the main reasons to play this now is to play and enjoy the real thing before you start seeing its clones advertised in its own ad slots. Some weird AI voice saying how playing “Shape Sorter” will stop you getting Alzheimer’s, or maybe an entire fucking streamed version of “Venn Diagram Royale” you have to play through where you have to shuffle a bunch of diamonds into a circle to stop a king being squashed by, I don’t know, a big Monty Python foot or something. Why the fuck are we supposed to be saving a fucking king anyway? If god chose him god can bloody well save him from rising sand or being dropped in some lava, the sponging prick.

    Other Zines

    One More Win: Ridge Racer Type 4 Fanzine

    “Due to POPULAR DEMAND I’m doing another print run of my Ridge Racer Type 4 fanzine.”

    Retro Game Zine: Buy 3 Get 1 Free on ALL ISSUES

    “Catch up on missing issues, or jump in with some big savings. This promotion is applied at checkout and runs until the end of the month.”

    COMPUTE!’s Gazette – July 2025 (Volume 1, Issue 1)

    “For the first time in 35 years, COMPUTE!’s Gazette returns to serve the vibrant retro computing community. This premiere relaunch issue is packed with exclusive news, in-depth articles, community stories, and classic type-in programs that celebrate the golden age of computing.”

    Mega Fun Newsletter

    “I’m launching a weekly newsletter that brings together all my writings, podcasts, videos, and creative endeavours in one place for your unmeasurable pleasure. If you like what I do, you must subscribe. Your life depends on it.”

    (Ok, that last one isn’t a zine, but Justin Decloux is one of my favourite people and he does so much incredible stuff, you’re going to want to keep up. I mean you already subscribe to this rubbish, don’t you?)

    And Finally…

    This article, The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con is, I think, the most important, insightful thing you can read about the AI mania full stop. It’s from a few years ago, but if anything more important to read and understand as AI tries to create a stranglehold over the mainstream. Share it with anyone who might be buying the hype but considers themselves rational. It gets to something really key about AI: it’s not “just” a scam: it’s an illusion that preys on our urge to fool ourselves.

    Next week on exp.: A legend? No. The legend.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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…