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.
Developed/Published by: TRY / Nintendo Released: 21/10/1986 Completed: 05/04/2025 Completion: Defeated The Great Puma!
Nintendo’s output on the fledgling Famicom/NES is… patchy. And nowhere is it more patchy than when it came to video game representations of sport, where they can somehow manage to literally solve golf game design and then months later be willing to put their name on things like Soccer and Volleyball, which are, frankly, absolutely horrendous. Even with Nintendo warming up by late 1986–they’ve just put out Metroid, for example–you can’t help but expect Pro Wrestling to be a bit of a dog, considering the sport (or at least, sport-adjacent entertainment) has a lot of terrible, lazy video games to its name, and this specific release is most famous in gaming circles for having a win screen that declares “A winner is you!” which probably was funny once.
Well, it isn’t a dog! A bit like how Nintendo lucked into working with Satoru Iwata on Golf, with Pro Wrestling they also managed to hire someone who knew exactly what the fuck they were doing: Masato Masuda.
Masato Masuda–who passed away in 2014 at the untimely age of 48, sadly–is best known by the wrestling hardcore as the creator of Fire Pro Wrestling, generally considered the greatest and most important wrestling video game franchise (even by people who love AKI’s wrestling games like me) and according to an interview in CONTINUE Pro Wrestling was made “mostly by [himself]” with “someone else who did the graphics.”
Although not a sport that would see as many games released as, say, golf, wrestling was reaching its zenith in popularity worldwide, so before Pro Wrestling there were several high profile releases from Sega and Technos that I’m sure Masuda will have tried, and two wrestling games would appear before this on Famicom: Tag Team Match: M.U.S.C.L.E. and Tag Team Wrestling (both of which would appear on the NES before Pro Wrestling, too.)
So–not having played any of those–I can’t make any educated claims that Masuda was “solving” anything about wrestling games with Pro Wrestling. But whatever prior art existed for him to pull from, Masuda understood a few things:
Pro wrestling is about unique characters.
Pro wrestling is about grappling–and the wide range of moves that result.
Pro wrestling isn’t about winning or losing–it’s about ebb and flow.
Now, I won’t pretend that Pro Wrestling clicked for me immediately. It has the immediate problem of any 2D games where you can move in and out of the screen–not being exactly sure where you need to be to connect with attacks–and the systems by design are a little obscure. Succeeding in pulling off moves from grapples can feel a bit random, too. Does initiating the grapple confer advantage? Does it even track who initiates? Actually, how do you initiate a grapple? Is it timing? I’m button bashing, but sometimes I don’t go as hard and still win?
As far as I can tell–from nosing around a bit–the game relies on a stamina system with regeneration, with lots of “triggers” based on stamina levels. So you’re basically trying to wear down your opponent’s stamina enough that they don’t get up long enough so you can pin them, but if you’re slow–or they start beating you up, their stamina recovers.
(This matters because as you play through the game, enemies seem to gain stamina and regenerate faster.)
The genius of this system is that it ties into the ebb and flow of a “real” wresting match perfectly. You have to wear down your opponent to pull off bigger moves, but they can also suddenly go on a tear by kicking you in the face before you manage the grapple you’ve been building towards. You can misjudge when to pin, get a kick out, and have the entire match turn on its head. And vice versa! If a match isn’t going well, it’s can sometimes only take a single correct move to swing the momentum back.
Pro Wrestling also features, well, all the actual features of a wrestling match. Not only is the referee who has to run into position, you can jump of the turnbuckle, throw your opponent out of the ring and then leap onto them, get ring outs, and so on. The building blocks are all there for every match to tell a story.
This is aided, of course, by the game’s memorable characters such as Star Man and The Amazon (famously inspiring Blanka.) Each character has individual special moves–the Amazon’s all illegal moves that can end with him begging innocence to the referee, amusingly–and are inspired by real wrestlers. Fighter Hayabusa is transparently based on Antonio Inoki for example, though Giant Panther will always be debated–I suspect he’s actually based on Fritz Von Erich, the patriarch of the Von Erich family due to the use of the Iron Claw, that he famously feuded with Inoki and that it doesn’t look like any of his sons–but that’s pure conjecture.
But the point is that with whichever character you choose, there’s something special to work for, and it adds to the narrative you create through play–you survive the Amazon cheating like crazy, pull off the iron claw and pin! The crowd goes wild!
I won’t lie–often when I’m playing these older games, I’m sort of just… working through them like a job. But Pro Wrestling? I just played it! Once I was comfortable with how it played, I settled on King Slender (the Ric Flair analogue) because he had an easy move to pull off (the backbreaker–he’s the only character with a move you can pull off by pressing A only from a grapple) and had fun until I hit a genuine brick wall.
Pro Wrestling isn’t a long game–it’s built around winning five matches to become the VWA champion, then ten title defenses until you take on “Great Puma” to become VWA/VWF champion–three loops of the roster. But by the third loop your opponents are unstoppable–they regenerate stamina quickly, pull of grapples faster. I couldn’t go any further.
And really, that’s ultimately Pro Wrestling’s weakness–it all works up to a point, and then as a player you have to go “ok, how can I cheese this.”
For me, that was starting again with Fighter Hayabusa, abusing his “Back Brain Kick” and ring-outs. While it’s not a guarantee, if you can get your opponent on the mat and then position yourself right (Hayabusa’s midriff around where your opponent’s body is lying) you should be able to kick them in the head as soon as they stand up, and spamming this at the start will alow you to either start pulling off grapples or let you throw them out of the ring and then just run them into the barriers till they can’t get up quickly enough.
It would be some demoralising, terrible wrestling for the audience, but at least for me it’s what I had to resort to for the last chunk of matches.
However–that’s if you’re determined to beat this (maybe you have a blog or something where you’ve tied yourself to doing that.) I assume most players who played this either just had fun playing a wrestling career–it does track wins and losses, and you can just play it–or took part in two-player matches, where all the obscurites of stamina and grappling probably lead to absolutely epic battles. I certainly haven’t played a better two-player game on NES or Famicom by this point in 1986–and I may not for a while!
Will I ever play it again? Unlikely, but not impossible!
Final Thought: A funny and strange fact about “A Winner Is You” is that it isn’t even the original win quote. Seems that in the original release of this it just said “Winner Is You” and in a later revision they “fixed” the English by just sticking an A at the beginning.
Which is a really strange fix! You’d assume someone who actually spoke English might have pointed out that’s not better–and it’s not like “You Win!” has a character limit or something.
The fix also seems to have changed a “bug”–that if you play King Slender it takes longer to get to the first championship. This was something I didn’t mind and originally assumed was “balance” because King Slender’s back breaker seems so powerful–though when I got later in the game and realised I could basically never pull it off, my opinion on that changed somewhat…
This week in the exp. Dispatch we’ve got an exclusive PICO-8 capsule review, an exp. Du Cinéma that didn’t feel long enough to give its own post, as well as all the usual week’s round-up and zine links. Incredible value!!!
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!
Panic would probably not be best pleased that I turned another article on something they published into a rumination on the place of AI in creativity, but I’m proud of this one. I really think it’s worth subscribing for!
On one hand, I think it’s good I have this record of games I’ve played. On the other hand, I have no recollection of playing this at all, so does it matter that I did?
exp. Capsule Reviews
Dino Sort (Adam Atomic, 2025)
I wrote about getting into PICO-8 games recently by way of Adam Atomic’s Prince of Prussia and owning a Chinese emulation handheld (a subscriber exclusive) and Adam recently dropped Dino Sort which I don’t think I can justify an entire post for, so isn’t it brilliant I have this newsletter now?
Anyway, Dino Sort is a brilliant wee game where you shuffle around dinosaurs to get them into the right positions based on their personal requirements (e.g. “don’t put me next to a predator”) very much in the style of Rush Hour. There are 26 designed puzzles which will probably take you, I don’t know, forty-five minutes to polish off or something, and though it will require some logic and lateral thinking, it’s good because at least I never ended up in one of those situations where untangling all my dinosaurs was going to be annoying or impossible the way it would be in a Sokoban game or something (god I hate Sokoban.)
Also as someone who actually hates when a puzzle game has a billion puzzles–the “infinite pizza” problem, you eventually get sick of even pizza–I loved that this was something I could pick up, play and put down, but if you really wanted to keep playing this, you can because it generates a daily puzzle every day. They’re of varying quality, but just think, you could play it every day instead of doing a Wordle, because The New York Times can fuck off.
exp. Du Cinéma
Pee-Wee As Himself (2025)
Pee-Wee—or should I say, Paul Reubens—has had an outsized influence on culture more than people give him credit for, deeply affecting the brains of a generation of millennials (my brain included) and helping define kitsch as a force in the 80s and 90s. He deserves his flowers, and as praised as this documentary has been, I can’t help but find it a bit… slight.
Archive footage is catnip for me, and there’s absolutely hunners of it here, but you get the sense here that either due to the loss of Reubens or his intransigence they couldn’t quite pull this together into something that feels complete. It limits itself to a chonological telling of Reubens’ life and struggles to make connections to knit anything close to a statement together.
(I wonder if they had plans to build to Reubens walking around a museum of all the things he’d collected as a physical representation of his life, but even that I question.)
For someone with as complicated a life (and who is actively passive aggressive here!) the attempt at haigography comes across as disingenuous. It just seems wrong to portray (for example) Phil Hartman in such a one-sided fashion, or to gloss over the idea that people might be fair in feeling that the original Pee-Wee show was created by a collective and Reubens maybe didn’t treat a lot of people well on the way up.
But in turn, his personal and legal troubles aren’t given the depth you’d expect either—especially considering his final statement makes it clear how one in particular so deeply coloured his later life. It almost feels as uncomfortable as Reubens in discussing it. He was stitched up! You may have to go into uncomfortable detail to exonerate him, but why hold back? Interrogate it!
Maybe it’s fine. Like all of us, Paul Reubens was messy and incomplete, so it makes as much sense as anything for this documentary to be the same. This is just what people are. They leave us, and maybe you try and dig through what they left and try and make sense of it. But better, I think, to enjoy what they gave you while they were alive.
“Presenting issue 1 of the World’s Cheapest ZX Spectrum magazine … This inaugural Springtime edition covers games released in Q1 2025.”
And Finally…
Doujinshi are essentially zines, so I suppose I could just have put this in the “Other Zines” section, but I tremendously enjoyed reading this ROMchip translation of Hiromasa Iwasaki’s 2024 doujinshi Legend 7: Why Do 2D Games Usually Go to the Right?
It’s really one of those things that, if you know anything about video game development, actually seems really obvious, but you’ve probably never thought about in detail before. Officially sad now that I didn’t know about this zine before so I could have been hunting out copies of it (though I’d struggle to read much of it in the original language.) But better late than never.
Next week on exp.: I jump a little bit forward from GAMP No Nazo in 1986, and a winner is me!
We live in an age of AI encroaching on everything we do. An age in which in particular it is going to have a noticeable effect on creativity, as the big guys look to it as a solution to that pesky problem of “having all the value being created by workers” and (some) small guys look to it, perhaps naively, perhaps without diligence, as a way to create work that competes.
And indeed, this has already happened to Panic, the publisher of Despelote, who found their second season of releases for the Playdate handheld infected–and I will use that pejorative–by generative AI, by a developer looking for shortcuts (as covered in a recent article.)
This kind of use is likely to become endemic in the games industry–for another example, 11 Bit Studios’ The Alters has also been discovered to have used ChatGPT for “placeholder” text.
The question I have however, is if these developers understand that generative AI is a flattening force. It is a product created by feeding it everything we’ve ever created, built only to mulch it up and spit it back out as slurry. Now, the big guys don’t care. What they want is a fat pipe of chemical lowest common denominator.
But how are you going to stand out if you fertilise your fields with that? Little knowing that it eats the fields it lies upon?
Maybe those who are using it to “compete” don’t care either. Maybe you just have to get what you can and get out before it’s all over. Maybe you can fool yourself there’ll be a Mars here too, once the earth is salted.
—
But instead of that… why not embrace your humanity? Why not spend all your effort on making something that reflects… you? Instead of creating what is common, what everyone recognises, why not create work that not everyone recognises, but in which they can find commonalities? Why not make something like Despelote?
An AI could not make Despelote. Only a human can, because only we are able to make the non-obvious connections in the story of our lives.
Here, designer Julián Cordero recreates the experience of being a child in Ecuador, but specifically during the Ecuadorian national football team’s historic qualifying campaign for the 2002 World Cup.
This is probably not the most obvious setting you can imagine when you are creating a game about the world of children and how it interacts with the world of adults. Similarly non-obvious are the decisions made in which to represent this, which it does in a form that I feel only video games could manage–while also introducing (in my opinion) a new kind of cinematic flair. One that does not look to mainstream cinema’s style but the art house.
It opens with you playing what appears to be a retro game: Tino Tini’s Soccer 99. Despite this being a reference to Dino Dini, and Kick Off 2 and the like being fucking rubbish (sorry, this is a Sensible Soccer house) this is actually a brilliant wee overhead-view football game that could be released on its own terms, with a simple and rewarding “flick-to-kick” control scheme. But as you play, you start to overhear your parents talking, and then, cinematically, quite unlike any other game I’ve played, the camera slowly pulls away from the television, until finally, your dad turns off the telly.
In Despelote, as it would have been for any of us, such is your lot as a child. You find yourself pulled around by your parents, told what to do–and given limited amounts of free time. And what matters is in that free time you don’t really have anything to do. You can run around, maybe you’ll find a ball to kick (beautifully, controlled just as in Tino Tini’s Soccer) but there’s nothing to hunt out, nothing to unlock, no rules for playing with the ball. It’s just you, some other kids who might want to aimlessly kick a ball about, and a world of strangers, almost all of whom are captivated by the ongoing football matches on the telly (unfortunately the game doesn’t really allow you to just stand and watch too–though you’re likely to run and check on the score when you pass a TV.)
I’m not going to lie–after the shine of kicking a ball wears off (which really does feel fucking great) and you realise what’s happening, Despelote is properly boring, and if you’re a progression-focused twat like me, you’ll probably really struggle with it. While it’s not exactly Jeanne Dielman (and you can play through Despelote in nearly half the time it would take you to get through that) it’s working in that kind of perhaps punishing milieu. It wants you to feel the boredom and frustration of the limits of childhood–and to strain against them as a child does.
Throughout, you get flashes of how Julián will grow up, how his love affair with football will evolve as he does; fragments of memory that ask you to remember that these childhood afternoons that maybe felt so boring were actually fleeting, and you can never have them back. It’s not as much about being Julián as it is about you–what these moments make you think about, how you remember your childhood. I remember my own childhood. Scotland in Italia 90. Then a flash of sitting in a car on a rainy day. Now I’m at an uncle’s, watching the penalties that ended the 1994 World Cup. Now I’m drunk for the first time, years later…
I remember.
I suppose there’s some concern about American exceptionalism here–after all, the Yanks don’t really like “soccer”. Maybe it’s unfair to imagine the American “gamer”, unable to take the steps from soccer to their own sports obsessions. After all, their “world” championships only include their teams [“And Canada’s!”–Canadiana Ed.] so that sense of a national collective that crosses political and societal boundaries may be a step too far. Maybe to many, Despelote is just foreign, and boring.
But that, to me, represents the state of the art. The boredom of Despelote is not what has stuck with me–what has stuck with me is the themes, the ideas. Someone is saying something–something about themselves, and hoping that it makes a connection with you, your experience.
It’s not perfect, but it’s human. These days, what more can I ask?
Will I ever play it again? It says all it needs to, once.
Final Thought: One of the more interesting background facts about Despelote is, of course, that Julián Cordero’s father directed Ratas, ratones, rateros, the “first Ecuadorian film with international-standard production values” which gives reason to why this game features (in my opinion) a different sort of cinematic influence. But I think this influence has also leads to one of the most amazing cameos I’ve ever seen in a video game: a DVD of Fishing With John!!!
Developed/Published by: Namco, Tose / Namco Released: 19/09/1986 Completed: 28/04/2025 Completion: Completed it–but with a complete collapse in dignity, having to abuse save states starting around area 14.
Well, it’s been a while since the Xevious klaxon has gone off here in exp. towers–I think the last time we mentioned it was actually Tower of Babel–but here it goes off because we’re only bloody playing the first “real” sequel to Xevious! And it’s yet another Famicom game with Nazo, aka “Mystery” in the title. They were mystery mad in Japan in the mid-80s!!!
If three years feels like quite a gap for a game as successful and influential as Xevious to get a sequel, it’s worth mentioning that this is actually the fourth game in the franchise. Xevious in the arcades got an update in the form of Super Xevious (to which this has no relation) and then–and this is true–Xevious creator Masanobu Endo made a game starring an enemy tank from Xevious, Grobda, because he thought it’d be funny.
Grobda seems pretty forgotten now–and I don’t think “the top-grossing arcade game in Japan for December 1984” is quite enough to believe it was that much of a success. But of course, we know that Xevious itself was a huge success on Famicom–so it only makes sense for Namco to bang out a sequel. In this case, Endo probably didn’t think it was funny–he was on record as believing that a direct sequel to Xevious was unnecessary, and he’d left the company a year earlier.
With Endo’s guiding hand missing, Namco–with the aid of Tose–did something that I think on paper makes sense. They looked at the huge success of Xevious, an Endo joint. They looked at the huge success of The Tower of Druaga (oh dear, set that klaxon off as well) also an Endo joint. They looked at how Tower of Druaga’s mystery design had been implemented into basically every other game coming out at this point, and thought: well, it’s chocolate and peanut butter, innit? Smash ‘em!!!
So with Xevious: GAMP No Nazo, you play Xevious levels where you have to do a particular action to progress–this is actually a bit less punitive than the original Tower of Druaga, where you can keep playing through the game with no way to win because you missed something. This can be as simple as defeating a boss (hardly a secret) or as annoying as finding hidden things in the level or interacting counter-intuitively with enemies.
To put none too fine a point on it, this doesn’t work. At all. It’s obvious that at least Japanese players had become comfortable working through obscure fucking nonsense without the cameraderie of the arcade, but a vertically scrolling shooter puts pressure on you in a way that Tower of Druaga’s mazes didn’t–you can’t navigate back to something you’ve missed, and having to do an extra loop in GAMP No Nazo to get back there is brutally punitive.
Because GAMP No Nazo is miserably hard. There’s no sense here of the push-and-pull “intelligence” of the enemies of the original, just walls of bullets and, frankly, unfair bullshit from the very start. The first level sets the tone by featuring clouds that obscure enemies and bullets meaning you can be killed by something you can’t even see.
Trying to find what’s required to get to the next level just isn’t fun because of the high tension and sense of a “wasted run” when you get to a point and progress. The things you’re asked to do aren’t very interesting, either–while I’m hardly going to ask for the misery of The Tower of Druaga and having to, like, kill enemies in order, or something, the game only thinks to do something obvious like offer you different routes in levels like… twice.
You can choose to play this like Xevious: to see how far you get, how high your score goes by just memorising all the requirements, which isn’t actually so bad. And the game… sort of works. But it’s not as fun as the original, feeling more predictable and rote before getting ever more absurdly difficult, and I certainly wasn’t sure why I was bothering at a point–each time I’d think “maybe this is ok, actually” I’d start a new run to try and get further and get killed by enemies hidden by clouds immediately, sapping any urge to continue.
Namco might have been able to get away with this bar for the fact that it’s mid-late 1986 and the Famicom has already seen the likes of Gradius and Metroid, and Castlevania is out in a week. They went big with this one–no more numbered boxes, a special golden cartridge–which raises the question if they knew they had a pig on hand that they hoped more lustrous lips might help. Because it feels like Namco is getting left behind in both tech and design on the Famicom: GAMP No Nazo doesn’t look or play any better than the original, and that came out in 1984! At this point, the Famicom is Konami’s to lose…
Will I ever play it again? It isn’t worth it.
Final Thought: Namco, obviously, will be ok. But the sad thing, really, is that Xevious won’t be. The series that really started it all will limp on with a few sequels, but won’t ever be an important factor in the shooter genre ever again.
Developed/Published by: Sandfall Interactive / Kepler Interactive Released: 24/04/25 Completed: 27/05/25 Completion: Completed it, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves with too many details yet.
Alright, so in order for me to critique Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, I’m going to have to go into far too much detail on why video games are hard to critique, a problem that left me as the only video game critic in the world (as far as I know.)
[If you really don’t want to read the next thousand-odd words at any point you can skip ahead. But don’t come crying to me if you don’t understand where I’m coming from.]
Video games are hard to critique because video games aren’t really just “one thing.” They don’t neatly fit into a single form where the audience can make an assumption that they know what the (ahem) experience of “experiencing” it is (is there a better way to say that?) While there are exceptions, of course, you can generally expect when you sit down to watch a film, you’re going to sit down and watch it. When you sit down to listen to an album, er, you sit down and listen to it.
(Other experiences are available.)
Now, absolutely, that’s the broadest expression of what you’re doing–consider it the first layer of experience. The hope, of course, is that in experiencing the work, you are absorbed to the point where you forget anything about your existence as a “person on a surface in a location” and instead exist in the world that is being presented–consider that the second layer of experience.
Now, that second layer does not remain static in the face of genre or stylistic choices. To take film as an example, editing, soundtrack, many “artificial” things happen that do not line up with our linear, continuous experience in the first layer. In some respects, these artificialites are not simply absorbed, we recognise them, we work with them. There can be some level of interactivity (if not affect upon) the works–we knit together a non-linear narrative as it goes. Our eyes scan the screen in a movie, our focus dances from instrument to voice at the insistence of the songwriting on an album.
Games, however, have a less “clean” line between the two layers of experience. “Play” is a different experience than “watch” in that first layer, and both change the type of absorption you experience in the second layer: you may be embodying a character rather than empathising. You may be in competition rather than conversation. And then within that genre and stylistic choices make different demands: maybe you are in “play” mode a lot. Maybe you are in “watch mode” a lot. Maybe the type of play changes.
As I’ve played a lot of old games by now, I’ve become interested in, and written about, the “transition points” of video games where technology has allowed newer forms to emerge. Don’t consider this definitive of the state of the art, but for the sake of my hypothesis, a summary:
Games begin as competition: think Pong or Breakout. There’s no narrative. You are, essentially, playing a game as people know it either against another or “the computer”. A sport. You may be able to win, but you may just be seeking a high score. Play, not watch.
Games evolve to have a narrative “reason” for the experience: think Space Invaders. There’s a framing, if not a narrative. If you can win, it’s not the “goal” as much as it is an end-point for “besting” the machine. Play, not watch, but with narrative context.
Games make the narrative a distinct part of the experience: think even as simple as Super Mario Bros. Suddenly the game becomes about the story. You’re “rescuing a princess”. Narrative is doled out like “reward” for your success in the game. When you finish the game, it’s like finishing a book. You can put it down. Play and watch!
It’s here that the concepts of “diegetic” and “non-diegetic” story come into play. The diegetic narrative in Super Mario Bros. is that you’re rescuing a princess. The non-diegetic story is that you’ve run forward and jumped over a block and then you ran into a koopa and you died and then you came back to life and you ran forward…
In some respects, this non-diegetic story is part of the magic of video games, in that it affects both layers of experience at the same time. On the first layer, you’re not sitting and watching: you’re pushing left, then A. But it seamlessly translates on the second layer to running left, and then jumping. But it doesn’t represent narrative.
So then you get games that try and make the narrative a “part” of the play, at various levels of success. Maybe you’re finding the narrative in the world via logs (not great). Maybe you’re pushing buttons during the cut-scenes (eurgh.) Maybe your character’s death and rebirth is explained via narrative, or you get to make choices that change the narrative–at some level of manageable granularity. Maybe they simply try and make what you’re doing in the game make such rock-solid sense diegetically that it all works seamlessly. Maybe they do that by forcing the player to do things whether they want to or not (and then smugly admonish them for it later).
It’s not, exactly, a solved problem. Nor is it, essentially, actually a problem. It simply reflects the nature of video games as an experience. Sometimes you are playing them. Sometimes you are watching them. Sometimes the mechanics are thematic with narrative, sometimes they aren’t. The first layer you inhabit changes (“I’m watching. I’m playing”) though this may not affect the second layer (“I’m rescuing a princess.”)
I don’t think there’s a kind of game that represents this split better than the JRPG.
Now, again, I don’t want to imply that I think there’s anything wrong with the way JRPGs use narrative and play. But they have, to me, always represented a particularly aggressive split between watching and playing (though don’t let me stop you yelling “but what about Hideo Kojima” or something.) JRPG battles, something you do famously a lot, almost exclusively happen in an “alternate reality” from the rest of the game right down to how you interface with them. Not even play maintains a consistency of experience.
[cough]
So that’s why when I write about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, it feels ridiculous to try and write about it as a complete work. Because my remembered experience of it does not reflect something I can critique as a whole. The game merges exploration and a battle system to a narrative which, to be completely honest, never engage in a way where one was in my mind during the other. It’s entirely possible that it’s different for you–I’d be interested to know what you felt the game might be doing to make that possible for you–but ultimately what it means this is a tale of two parts. A game and a narrative.
Er, though we need more preamble…
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: The First Impressions
Now, the thing about Clair Obscur is that I wasn’t originally interested in it at all. With a surfeit of JRPGs available–in fact, a surfeit of Persona-style JRPGs available–the idea of playing a Western one with “realistic” seeming graphics didn’t have much interest for me at all. But then friend-of-exp. Justin Decloux (buy his Blu-rays!) gushed about how much he loved it while other buzz was swelling, so I thought–fuck it. I’m trying to keep up with the cutting edge now! It can’t all be obscure Famicom releases!
I went in almost completely blind: I knew it was about a bunch of French people taking on an enemy, the Paintress, who every year killed the segment of the population who had reached a certain age, and it was a JRPG. But it wasn’t until I began playing it that I understood it wasn’t a “Logan’s Run” style “once you’re thirty, you die!” situation but a “every year the age counts down–so time is running out for everyone” situation. Compelling!
And Clair Obscur has a wonderful introduction, as we’re introduced to the main characters on the day of the Gommage, the day each year that section of the population is lost, and the day before the expeditioners head off on their quest to defeat the Paintress. Very quickly you learn about the hero Gustave, his ward Maelle, and experience the pain of his loss of a “what could have been” in Sophie, an old lover.
As a purely narrative experience, I genuinely thought it was incredible. I’ve never been so moved by a video game so quickly, with tears coming to my eyes. All the stakes were right there. I was blown away.
Anyway, then the wheels started to come off a bit.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: The Game
I’ll preface this by saying I think Clair Obscur is a very solid game. But it’s messy. Overambitious.
I’ll also start with the criticism that you might think is the most unfair. The world of Clair Obscur, once you are outside of Lumière… I don’t like it!!!
Everything is way, way too visually busy, and yet there’s very little I think to be absorbed by. Every location seems to be over-textured, noisy, but my most major issue is with enemies, who feel completely characterless and often unparsable; annoying to look at not in the way Michael Bay’s Transformers are but in a way that made me think of them anyway. I had no sense of awe when taking them on.
Which is a shame, because really here it’s the battle system that’s the star.
I say that, probably, because the environments do not feature good level design. Like, at all.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has led to a lot of column inches (well… social media posts) about the lack of a mini-map, and I have to say that I would generally not be terrifically bothered by that if it wasn’t for the fact that Clair Obscur just does the exact RPG map thing which everyone already hates: you come to a crossroads. Do you go left or right? Is there anything telling you which way to go? No? Uh…
Yep, this is a game where I’d say for a significant portion of the running time you don’t have any good sense if you’re going in the “right” direction, and I think the messy environment art doesn’t help at all. It’s particularly problematic when the game features super-hard “battle system skill check” enemies on side-paths, and in the very first area I reached one and was like “wait, why the fuck is this game suddenly impossible, how am I ever going to complete this” when the actual way I was supposed to go was nearby, but not obvious at all.
So the “no map” issue people keep bringing up is one of those things where you have to look at the “note behind the note” to understand what the issue truly is. Er, not that it helps. It’s too late to do anything about it.
To get to the battle system: it’s excellent, with caveats. On the basic level, it is a traditional turn-based battle system, but featuring both quick-time events and dodging/parry mechanics based on timing. This creates an interesting problem: you need the reward for doing these to be high enough that you want to do them, but not so high that they need to be done perfectly every time. It’s interesting that the intuitive design–attacks are QTEs with on-screen prompts, dodging/parries are purely reactionary–probably makes it harder to balance, as decreased damage output only prolongs fights, whereas taking more damage fails them more quickly, yet QTEs are simply easier than parries.
Not that I’d switch them around, but Clair Obscur doesn’t exactly nail the mechanics–and has a strange sort of take on them anyway. The decision seems to have been made that the baseline is that the player isn’t really supposed to be successful at dodging–certainly not successful at parrying–very much at all because it’s so powerful (you don’t take a hit at all!) so enemies from the very beginning of the game have annoying, tricksy attacks, with odd windups, slowdowns and so on, so you have to learn each enemy very well before you can survive a battle without taking hits.
But!
The game also makes a lot of attacks able to nearly one-shot your characters! Clair Obscur makes the decision to be economical in its enemy encounter rate–you see them in the levels, there aren’t that many, they only respawn when you reach checkpoints–but expansive in battle length, so the design decisions seemingly made here is that players will, during lengthy battles, survive via healing enough to get to the point where they can start to dodge and parry. And the game is quite forgiving with healing and revives, giving you a fresh set every checkpoint.
My belief is that they tried to create a battle system with no “lows” or sense of grind, where every battle feels winnable, but hard fought, and always engaging. And I’d argue that they were mostly successful once the player re-aligns their expectations to that.
For example: you don’t have to hold onto healing/revives, so just use them. And you shouldn’t be trying to parry until you learn how to dodge that enemy’s attacks, because the timing is so severe. (I basically gave up on parries completely.)
Even at that though… I did get bored and annoyed with it at times, and I do wonder how much that has to do with how overcomplicated, yet oddly derivative, the character designs are. Each hero has an extremely specific design style–several of which are wholesale cribbed from Slay The Spire, which I understand, but feels… odd–and they all have huge skill trees. As with largely giving up on parries, I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t get how to upgrade my characters until I just sucked it up and followed a “best builds” guide, but even when I played around, the issue seems to be that each character’s design is played in such a specific way that it can be somewhat samey. Slay the Spire character designs work because you don’t actually know what cards you’re going to have in hand each turn–you’re working to build your deck across the game until you do. Here, you know what you’re playing each turn, and you just do that while hoping to hit your timings.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s still good, it’s generally enjoyable, but I do notice that the weaknesses are never more stark than when the game asks you to hone in on mechanics such as when you’re fighting the optional bosses (that you generally stumble into by accident.)
But the game is also forgiving: you can bump it down to easy whenever you like at no cost, so you can do it whenever something gets on your tits. I played through this on normal, bumping down to easy on optional bosses (who can still one shot you at that level!) and only had a touch of grinding at one or two points, not that I can remember why.
If this was all Clair Obscur was: no narrative, just a dungeon crawl, people would still like it a lot, and I think I’d still like it a lot. But it’s not just that, is it.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: The Narrative
Clair Obscur’s narrative is a fucking bin fire.
[deep breath]
Sorry, ok. You probably remember me saying in my first impressions that “I’ve never been so moved by a video game so quickly” by the game’s prologue. Which is true.
But as for the rest of the game… I hope you like information being obscured from the player unnaturally! Like, one of your favourite things should definitely be characters not asking the obvious question anyone would in the situation!
Now, you can write a story however you like. Personal taste and all. But from my perspective, I consider it a weakness when I can tell a story has been written to get to an emotional or narrative beat no matter what. When reality or characterisation falls to the wayside because you have to hit this beat and you have to hit it here.
One of the interesting things about Clair Obscur is that as much as the game is divided cleanly between “play” and “narrative” the narrative feels like it doesn’t show up as much as you’d expect–at least, the backbone of the narrative. Each area (“dungeon” equivalents) plays out with a little chatter, but a lot of character work and story is relegated to when you make camp, and as you can only do that outside of the dungeons if often has to be forced. You really feel the segmentation, and when the big narrative moments come, they are in stark relief, and it’s at the end of each act this “need to hit the beat” is clearest.
I have come to the conclusion that the narrative has been designed to manipulate you into feeling certain ways only to then work to contradict your feeling. But they don’t have the chops to make this smooth or believable. In fact, this is the first game I’ve played since (cringe) Bioshock Infinite where I felt I should just look up a timeline to actually try and understand what’s going in the game to make sure I wasn’t totally off base with my feelings on it–while it wasn’t completely necessary, ultimately, it did help (and I highly recommend this one by Nor if you want a look yourself.)
But let’s get into it.
Obviously, spoilers are going to start showing up… now. If you want to play this, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t exactly, you should consider my conclusion “fun but flawed!” and flip away from this tab to come back to in like 26 hours. See you soon!
Look, I’ll give them something. I didn’t know, at all, that I was going to get Aeris’d. It should have been obvious with Gustave’s wee skill tree and everything and it’s incredible that when I looked up a build for him I never got spoiled. But this a perfect example of a “we have to make this beat happen.”
Gustave fights a guy who killed the entire rest of the expedition, while already wounded to… to what exactly? Maelle is trapped, he’s not buying her time. Why is the baddie killing Gustave at this point anyway? This just happened to happen after most of the party jumped off a cliff?
It’s bollocks, and it’s fake, and I felt annoyed, not sad.
So then new protagonist Verso shows up, and proceeds to… not be asked by any of the characters any of the questions you’d probably ask. They just go on an adventure with him because he showed up and so that a character can later find incriminating information and go “oh no!” that leads to… well it doesn’t lead to much at all does it. They get to the end, they kill the Paintress and then… oh no! That wasn’t the real baddie!
Which is revealed by Verso reading a letter from his sister. Meaning that Verso didn’t know something that, based on everything else (not least that he killed the Paintress to free her, my interpretation being with the knowledge this was his “real” mother) he would probably know. Ok!
At which point we learn that this entire thing was all bollocks anyway because everyone lives in a painting created by the “real” (dead) Verso and his mother and father were fighting in it using their powers of creation and destruction. Ok!
Look, I kind of get the Act One To Act Two switch, as poorly handled as it was. I think there’s something kind of interesting in ripping away a character that I really enjoyed to replace them with Temu Jack Sparrow and then let me mistrust them (more than my party did!) to the point that I don’t use them in battles and let them get really behind in experience (which eventually matters).
But the Act Two to Act Three switch is just utterly mental in a way that I don’t think any player can prepare for, playing a weird sort of trick on the player for being absorbed in the second layer of experience. “Actually all these characters you’ve grown to love aren’t real.” “What, you mean like because they’re in a video game? I know that, but I’m absorbed in the reality of the narrative.” “No, because they’re paintings that think they’re real people… in a video game.”
I’m not going to get involved in a “if you prick us, do we not bleed?” analysis of this third-order existence because the game doesn’t go deep on it itself, instead revealing that, ultimately, every time they talked about how the painting in which the entire game happens has a “part of verso’s soul in it” they meant literally, and his soul was essentially a small boy that was being tortured to keep the painting alive.
That’s right folks. It’s Omelas. You’ve been living in Omelas. How do you feel now!!!
Well, it turns out a lot of you people out there are fine with Omelas. I mean I don’t need to play a video game to know that, I live in a world where Palestinian children are being murdered every day to no end, but it’s stark to see people feel annoyed that the game ends with the question “do you destroy a painting full of paint people to free a real person’s soul or do you trap all the paint people in Peaksville?” when what they want is a happy ending and damn the child.
(To be fair, the game is really fixated on making it sound like the option is between “let Maelle’s dad burn the painting or let the painting continue to exist because everything will be fine, no really, everything will be fine”.)
I need to emphasise: this is not the game you have been playing. At all. I am so thankful that the third act is just one dungeon (Unless you want to do a lot of side quest stuff) because what the hell. There’s like this perfectly interesting game about a quest to get death back to happening normally that suddenly becomes a story about a bunch of characters you’ve never met fighting over a painting.
In conclusion:
Will I ever play it again? No.
Final Thought: Alright, that’s not really a fair conclusion to my thoughts on the narrative. My conclusion, really, is to ask people to consider: what is the story they’re actually trying to tell? Because Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 feels like a game of Exquisite Corpse on an act by act basis, where the epic conclusion completely subsumes any themes or narrative you had experienced to that point to… to what? To make sure players got a choice of two endings??? They put all this effort in to force beats and then none of them seem to matter anyway???
So yes, some respects, Clair Obscur is a cautionary tale of the damage narrative can do to the layers of experiencing a game. In others, it’s a fun, flawed game with a shite story. And those are ten a penny.
Developed/Published by: Namco Released: 22/08/1986 Completed: 15/04/2025 Completion: Got the “Happy Ending” by shooting down the Air Successor in Mission 26. Version Played: Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1
Sky Kid is, with some reservations, a wee hidden gem of an arcade game. I described it as a “strange little dead-end in the side-scrolling shooter universe” when I wrote about it, and while I stand by that, I wonder now if my framing is a little wrong because of the post-Xevious, post-Gradius context. Playing Sky Kid again in its NES port, I was struck by the thought that it might be as much inspired by something like Choplifter. While it doesn’t match in terms of design really at all, there’s a spiritual lineage: one is a “simulation” of being a helicopter pilot, and the other is a “simulation” of being a biplane pilot. The concerns in either are not that of Xevious/Gradius, where you move a frictionless collision box around, but one where you have to use your helicopter/plane using its actual characteristics to survive and succeed.
I do think taken in that framing I like Sky Kid even more. Revisiting the arcade version before giving this version a run through I was struck by how bright and attractive it is, the pleasure of doing loops, and how unbelievably rewarding it was to nail an enemy base with a bomb dead on.
Sky Kid on NES is an excellent recreation of that in terms of play, but unfortunately, it just doesn’t look anywhere near as good due to the NES’s more muted colors. At this point in the NES (or rather, Famicom) lifecycle, it’s a bit of a disappointment, with for example Ghosts ‘n Goblins doing a much better job of capturing the character of the original game despite having the NES palette to work with. It’s not as bad as Pac-Land, but it doesn’t look much better. Someone over at Namco was letting them down.
There is some effort made here to make this a different(-ish) experience from the arcade–there are more levels, a few of them are shooting galleries, you get some wee interstitial animations–but we’re still not at the point where NES games are diverging from their arcade counterparts to be particularly deeper or richer, and Sky Kid gets every bit as frustrating as it was in the arcade as you work your way towards the end of this. In fact, maybe more frustrating. As in the original, the design doesn’t support bullet hell, but bullet hell is what it gives you.
As with the original, this plays better as a score attack, but I think when you have the chance to come home with a copy of The Legend of Zelda or Metroid by this point… well, it’s not even been a year since Sky Kid came out in arcades and it already feels out of date. A biplane in a world of jet fighters: charming, but you ain’t picking it.
Will I ever play it again? I like the arcade version. I have the arcade version. This one isn’t necessary.
Final Thought: What I don’t have is Sky Kid Deluxe, the arcade update which has a range of minor differences. It was released by Arcade Archives for Switch and PS4, which I definitely support in theory, but absolutely cannot justify purchasing because… well, I’ve played Sky Kid twice now. That’ll do. Maybe I’ll see it in an arcade one day, I’d like to.
Developed/Published by: Jaelco Released: 22/08/1986 Completed: 13/04/2025 Completion: Completed all 20 different levels (it loops.)
Well, more fool me. When I wrote about Ninja Jajamaru-kun, the game that precedes this in the series, I wrote that it “[didn’t do] enough to make me put up with ININ’s bullshit to get the sequels.”
Unfortunately, having a bunch of Nintendo gold coins to use up before they expired and seeing the Ninja JaJaMaru: Retro Collection going for $2.99 made me go “well, it’s basically free, why not.”
I’ll tell you why not: because… do ININ even like retro games? Are they just an avenue to prey on a group of willing suckers–i.e. retro game collectors? Because not only is the Ninja JaJaMaru: Retro Collection bare bones, it doesn’t even work correctly.
Now, feel free to consider this anecdotal because I’ve only tested this on my Nintendo Switch Lite–and no youtubers or the like have really covered this release in depth (I imagine it’s niche enough to not have done that well.) But if you try and play JaJaMaru no Daibouken with the included CRT shader on it creates so much slowdown that you actually can’t play the game. It completely tanks.
It runs fine if you don’t have the CRT shader on, but, frankly, I’m a CRT boy. I don’t care if it’s even that good a shader or filter (notable exception: the excretable one on the Astro City Mini) just as long as it does something to muddy up the graphics. The games were literally designed to be seen on a tiny crappy telly via a noisy RF cable, so it just feels wrong to me to see them all crispy and HD.
So that was $2.99 down the fucking drain–but at least I haven’t dropped money on the Turrican Anthology or something [“yet”–Ed.] But let it not be said I’m one for giving up. Thanks to my trusty Trimui Brick I could quickly and easily get set up to play this through with an acceptable CRT filter, and I suppose that’s the way I’ll play the rest of this collection (god knows I’m not picking up a Switch 2 to try and see if it improves the performance of a CRT shader…)
But, uh, let’s actually talk about JaJaMaru no Daibouken, eh?
It’s rubbish.
Will I ever play it again? No!
Final Thought: Oh, alright, I should probably say more than that. So… I suppose the interesting thing is that JaJaMaru no Daibouken came out just under a year after Super Mario Bros. (Ninja JaJaMaru-kun was released after Super Mario Bros. too, actually) and it’s the first obvious Super Mario Bros. clone I’ve played chronologically. Sure, it’s possible Pac-Land for Famicom was rushed out after matter of weeks in development (though unlikely) but that was based on a pre-existing design, and Wonder Boy doesn’t feel that much like Super Mario Bros. when we’re being completely honest.
But JaJaMaru no Daibouken feels like exactly what you get if you ask someone to take the art and engine from Ninja JaJaMaru-kun and turn it into Super Mario Bros.: it’s got side-scrolling levels, blocks JaJaMaru has to hit with his head to get coins and power-ups out of, and… well, I mean, that’s enough. It’s not exactly the Great Giana Sisters, but the “hit blocks with your head” thing is enough. Case closed!
I’ve previously mentioned that the original Super Mario Bros. doesn’t actually feel that good to play–we’ve just all misremembered that, because the later ones do–so I can’t really beat up on JaJaMaru no Daibouken for not controlling that well (floaty jumps and that.) What I can beat it up for is just being so bloody half-arsed. Levels look like they just threw down blocks in any old combination, and although the game features 20 levels, but half of those are boss battles that you don’t even have to complete–if you die, you just go to the next level and don’t even lose a life. And the game doesn’t have an ending or anything, it just loops. Which actually leads to the ridiculous situation that you can reach the “final” boss, fail to rescue Princess Sakura, and then… just go to the second loop. Deeply uninspiring.
JaJaMaru no Daibouken keeps a lot of the flavour of the (by this point) established JaJaMaru franchise, though, which doesn’t as much feel like something they did to differentiate as much as it’s just what they had lying around. The power-ups act like they do in the previous game and JaJaMaru’s uncontrollable frog pal Gamapakkun shows up too, albeit rarely. Though weirdly, the most interesting mechanic from JaJaMaru-kun, that you have to jump on enemies heads so you can shoot them, doesn’t show up here! (Maybe they thought it was getting too close to Giana Sisters-esque “let’s get sued” territory.) There’s an annoying learning curve in that you’ll never know which enemies kill you on touch and which don’t until, well, you’ve been killed by them, and weirdly one enemy that shows up right at the end, the Tanuki, can’t be killed but you can jump on their head to stun them. So… half of a mechanic from JaJaMaru-kun, for one enemy, just to confuse us, as a treat.
It’s all very inconsistent, but because of the terrible level design, you quickly work out that you’re just supposed to run through the levels ignoring all the enemies as much as possible. While it’s true this is optimum for Super Mario Bros. too, the level design there ensures you engage with enemies in interesting ways. Here your engagement is generally things like “oh an enemy spawned directly in front of me and killed me with a projectile before I could react.” or… actually it’s usually that one.
JaJaMaru no Daibouken is over very quickly, so it’s a very minor waste of life. But it is a waste, I won’t lie.
Developed/Published by: Infocom Released: 22/08/1986 Completed: 18/04/2025 Completion: Completed it. 304/304 points (though points are random and I believe you get them all just in the process of beating the game.)
Phworr, eh lads? Etc.
Right, that’s me got all the 90’s video game magazine parlance out of the way [“you forgot ‘or something’ and to do a made-up Ed’s note”–made-up Ed.] so I can put my “pretending to be a serious games historian” hat on for the first Infocom game I’ve played since Trinity–surprisingly, all the way back in 2023. If you’ve been following along, you’ll be aware I’ve been picking and choosing Infocom games to play through, leaning towards the work of Steven Meretzky, and I’ve been looking forward to playing this for a while, his “return” to a more normal sort of adventure game after the big swing (and commercial miss) of A Mind Forever Voyaging.
Based on a joke title Meretzky posted on a whiteboard featuring upcoming releases for Infocom, Leather Goddesses of Phobos is a strange release, I think. Infocom had always made games for adults, but never “adult” games, and there hadn’t really been any commercial “adult” games for years at this point. Softporn Adventure came out in 1981, and unless you’re Portuguese and have fond memories of Paradise Cafe for ZX Spectrum that was about your lot. So it seems like quite a gamble for Infocom to release something that appears so risque–but then Leather Goddesses of Phobos isn’t really an adult game at all. In fact, it’s barely smutty at its most extreme, and Meretzky, wanting to drum up a bit of controversy after the failure of an anti-Reaganite art game, decided “sex sells” and Infocom as a group went for it: digging through Meretzky’s papers, he sent a sheet of possible game ideas to the other imps (this may have been the standard procedure at Infocom?) for his next game, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos won out, where its sexual content was expressed as “very soft-core; see Barbarella as an example.” (it doesn’t even go that far, to my eyes.)
(The sheet is quite illuminating in general, a kind of ideation that I recognise as a game developer. We have another attempt, I think, to court a bit of controversy with “The Interactive Bible”, an interesting if not-yet-fully-baked design idea “Blazing Parsers” and then something that’s optimistically trying to make making a game quicker, “The Viable Idea.” Personally, I’m sad we never saw an Infocom spaghetti western.)
Unlike some other Infocom releases, I don’t really have any personal history with Leather Goddesses of Phobos outside of memories of the (very) mildly titillating screenshots of its sequel, Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X! In fact, the main thing I have to say is that I only realised this wasn’t called “Leather Goddess of Phobos” after playing it for a bit, which won’t make me cry “Mandela Effect” as much as “Goddesses is such an inelegant word, it’s bizarre it isn’t just Leather Goddess. My brain was correct, reality wasn’t.”
But anyway, what is it actually like to play Leather Goddess(es) of Phobos?
I’ve been a bit up and down on the Infocom games I’ve played–some might say unnecessarily hard on them, judging them by the coddled standards of 2025. But Leather Goddesses of Phobos gets off to a good start. Unlike Trinity, where you essentially never know what you’re actually trying to do overall, Leather Goddesses of Phobos more or less immediately has a character hand you a laundry list of items to collect, and then you go “oh, I guess I just have to collect these, then.”
As good as that is, it’s also a little… underwhelming. Having picked and chosen, I’m aware that I’ve not seen everything that Infocom has to offer, but I’m still surprised that I haven’t played an Infocom game since Deadline (their third game) that gave me any sense of anything except a static world. Leather Goddesses of Phobos gives you a Floyd-like companion (Trent, or Tiffany) but they barely seem to exist, and even when you meet characters in the world they feel so… un-interactive. Maybe, at best, they take part in a little vignette.
I suppose with Leather Goddesses of Phobos I’m really realising–and perhaps chafing against–the limitations of the text adventure at least in the mid-1980s. In some respects, you want a text adventure to have the feeling of a book; limitless, enveloping imagination. But in other respects, you want to play it like a game. You want to be reacted to. It’s probably, why, to be honest, characters have been so sparse in these games–because when you try and interact with a character, and they don’t do anything, or it feels wrong, the illusion of being on an adventure is broken. You’re not reading a book, you’re on a dark ride and suddenly the lights slam on and you’re aware you’re looking at a mannequin, not the king of Mars.
Somehow, the fact that characters in Deadline might like… walk into another room just abated that, and I’m not asking for characters to roam across the planet here, but maybe if they piped up a bit more. Felt a bit more worth talking to. The issue with making a “funny” game is that so much of comedy is character work, and here, really, the only character is the parser.
But I’m being a bit harsh, because Leather Goddesses of Phobos is otherwise an extremely solid classic rooms and items, bread and butter text adventure. The best I’ve played since Meretsky’s own Planetfall, and arguably the best I’ve played full stop. It’s understandable, accessible, and I never had to use an Invisiclue to the point where it just told me what to do–well, except in one particular case.
That one I’m just going to spoil, actually. One of the things that makes Leather Goddesses of Phobos work so well is how well integrated the feelies are. Sure, I don’t have the box to hand, but there’s a comic which includes a couple of direct hints for some puzzles, a map which is unbelievably necessary and helpful, and a scratch and sniff card, which I’m sure nearly 40 years later is completely useless even if you opened a brand new box, but which is a really cute and silly B movie-adjacent idea that’s perfectly fitting. One of the things it does is prompt you to “smell” things in the game to work out what they are (which it thankfully tells you in text–scratch and sniff cards have always barely worked). Early in the game (for me–the game is fairly open ended) you sniff and discover some chocolate, which, of course, you’ll hang on to. Later, for reasons, your mind will be transferred into a gorilla. But you’re not strong enough to break out of the cage. I assume you can see where this is going: you need to eat the chocolate to get strong enough to break out of the cage.
You know, that famous thing about gorillas. That chocolate makes them strong.
This is, obviously, nonsense. The only animal-related fact I know about chocolate is that it kills dogs and I certainly wasn’t hanging onto it in the game expecting I’d use it to kill a poodle or something [“you said ‘or something’ after all”–90s Ed.] Considering that banana is one of the most recognisable smells you could possibly use on a scratch-and-sniff card, I had to assume that Meretsky simply thought that giving you a banana would be too obvious a solution so went with the impossible to work out chocolate, but I couldn’t find anything in his notes to reflect that. According to the ever reliable Digital Antiquarian, Meretsky tested the scratch and sniff scents on the other imps to select the most recognisable scents to then use in the game, and I do think it adds insult to injury that one of those chosen scents actually *was* banana! But it’s used elsewhere!!!
I even found a playtester who complained about this exact puzzle:
“It is reasonable to not eat the chocolate and even suspect the sugar rush, but why oh why would you put the chocolate in the cage?”
I suppose he’s more complaining that this game features more than one puzzle which requires hindsight, and to be honest, they should have fixed those too. But in general, Leather Goddess of Phobos is logical and fair, while still managing to make puzzles funny and clever–the best of The Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy without the worst of it. There’s a puzzle about kissing a frog that will immediately put you in mind of the famous babel fish (and which made me laugh out loud) and a puzzle involving a mysterious machine and wordplay that is so perfect and silly that it’s maybe one of my favourite things in an adventure game ever–possibly worth the price of admission alone.
The game does still undercut itself though–for seemingly no reason. There are definitely ways to manufacture yourself a no-win, dead man-walking situation, for example, all of which I miraculously managed to dodge due to the order I did things in, and I definitely had a few puzzles where by all rights I was just lucky to not have to resort to clues. One object on your list you need to specifically look somewhere you might not look to find, and then you need to be really specific with the parser to do what you need to do to get it. Another requires a vignette that you need to be in time for (though that one I immediately sussed what was up–the “dead end” was just so suspicious to me. But I reached it almost at the end of the game–if I’d got there early, I could have had to replay nearly the entire game.)
The game’s maze–which people find famously annoying–is a perfect example of how the game undercuts itself. You have the map in hand. You have the required clue. If you’re patient, it’s actually really satisfying to navigate it, and I did so… and then the torch I was using burned out, and I had to do the whole thing again much more efficiently. Close to hundreds of turns. It was so unnecessary! I was having fun!!! Why punish me for not being perfect!!!
These moments, however, are far rarer than you’d expect. I noted above that the game is fairly open ended, and I’m not sure if there’s a “preferred” way to work through the game, but as I said above in my playthrough I never entered a vignette where I didn’t have something to hand I needed (though it’s possible, I’m sure) and if I got stuck somewhere there was always somewhere else to go for me to solve something else. I never put this down annoyed–well, apart from the fucking maze. Well, not the fucking maze–the fucking torch (I honestly did think the maze was clever.)
I think the thing about Leather Goddesses of Phobos is… it’s probably as good as one of these things is going to get without a much more modern design philosophy. You know what you need to do and every time you sit down and play it you get a little closer to doing it–and it’s charming while you do it. But it’s never sexy. I did play it on the “LEWD” setting and took every opportunity for a bonk, because I’m still thirteen at heart, but my dander remained unfrothed; it doesn’t even reach the heights of Alter Ego! I guess I’ll see how I get on with [checks to-play list] Leisure Suit Larry??? Eugh!
Will I ever play it again? You know, it’s possible. It’s not likely, but it’s possible. And I will play Gas Pump Girls Meet the Pulsating Inconvenience from Planet X!, which I don’t believe anyone likes. Because why not.
Final Thought: In some respects, Leather Goddesses of Phobos suffers for not being something special like A Mind Forever Voyaging, but it also sort of is, as the last true success Infocom would release before the company began an unstoppable slide into oblivion, and for that alone it should be celebrated. At the very least, if you like text adventures, though, you know how to play them, and you can live with the idea you might have to reload a save on occasion, this is a solid couple of tevenings. Oh sorry, I mistyped… tevenings. There must be a mysterious machine around here somewhere for that…
Developed/Published by: Supergiant Games Released: 20/05/2014 Completed: 10/04/2025 Completion: Finished it.
It’s been a couple of years since I went through Bastion(!) so I thought I’d boot up another Supergiant game, and decided to just move forward chronologically when I checked and saw Transistor was pretty short–I just keep putting off anything that seems like it’s going to take ages to complete these days. Plus it’s always nice to see how a studio evolves.
Not knowing anything about it, I assumed–what with the isometric graphics, and the lady with the big sword–that Transistor was “more Bastion” in terms of being an action title with light RPG elements, but it’s actually something much weirder–an awkward meld between Bastion-style real-time mechanics with a turn-based battle system that’s similar to something X-COM, or more specifically like Valkyria Chronicles, with free movement and action-point system.
I’m so sincerely not a fan when promo screenshots hide all the UI–in Transistor’s case, they go as far as completely hiding the entire battle system (which looks like this.)
There’s also a bit of the deckbuilder to it. While the game doesn’t have a huge or ever-changing range of abilities, each time you level up you select new abilities and each is able to work as an action on its own, an upgrade to another action, or a passive ability, leading to a pretty wild amount of combinations which are meant to emphasise your chosen playstyle. So you can double and triple down on your favourite ability by adding upgrades and passives that support it, or you can try and make a “hand” of abilities that work in conjunction–maybe you want to tank damage; maybe you want to be a glass cannon, maybe you want to spawn helpers or play stealth. It’s all some amount of possible.
It sounds really good, and interesting, but I’m sad to say it doesn’t work, because the combination of real-time and turn-based combat is never comfortable. It’s not so much like eating a chocolate and peanut butter cup as trying to eat spoonfuls of peanut butter while chocolate pours from a faucet that you can’t turn off. The game seems to be balanced around using your turns in a tactical manner, but you have to wait for your action points to regenerate in real time. You are defenceless during that period (unless you upgrade one of your abilities to be used during recovery) so you’re stuck running around being attacked until you can get back into a turn.
This isn’t fun at all! The enemies are fast and the action frantic, so any time you’re not in a turn you feel like you’re barely keeping your head above water, soaking up damage. I’m sure there are mitigations, and it’s entirely possible if you’ve played this you created a hand of abilities that made the experience smooth, but Transistor really fails at explaining anything about how to play it.
It’s probably part of the game’s storytelling–it starts in media res and slowly reveals what’s going on–but it feels like there’s no help in getting comfortable with the mechanics. There’s a “backdoor” area that appears periodically where you can take part in “tests” that throw you in at the deep end so you can learn by trial and error what different abilities do and how to combine them, but I’ve finished this and I’ll say that I’m actively unsure if I ever played this game correctly. I ended with a build focused on long turns to allow me to debuff and do massive melee damage, which sounds really rewarding, but I still spent most of the time taking damage and running away, even with one attack set for use during recovery. If that’s intentional, I just don’t get it.
The upgrade system really probably does have too many options and is fussy to interact with.
It really feels like one of those designs that someone came up with because it sounded good, and then you get to this point in development where you have it all built but you can’t find a solution to a problem like “what do people actually do while waiting for turns to recover” because the core of the design, ultimately, just doesn’t meld. It seems likely they found people being able to use all their abilities in recovery (for example) made the turns either unimportant or overpowered and then couldn’t solve it so just powered ahead because it roughly works. I’ve watched a few playthroughs of Transistor and everyone else seems to have played it similarly to me–different abilities, but same tactics. It doesn’t really look any more satisfying a play experience than the one I had, which is a bit of a shame for a game that puts such effort into having an insanely modifiable range of abilities. You just never feel like you’re excelling, just surviving.
To speak positively, Transistor’s arms-length narrative did grow on me. I think largely down to the performance of Logan Cunningham as The Transistor; he sells the game’s noir-like setting while expressing deep pathos; he’s talking to someone he loves, and you can always hear it in his voice. You could argue it overpowers everything else in the game; the enemies have no character and the main antagonists are barely there. The central characters are the only ones you’ll care about–thankfully, they’re sensitive to that, and when the game ends, at least that feels satisfying.
Transistor really isn’t a game I could recommend, though, even as short as it is. It just doesn’t come together.
Will I ever play it again? I’m generally glad when a game includes a new game plus, and while I could unlock more abilities and so on, this is one of those stories that feels like such a nice closed loop, why ruin it by playing it again? Never mind that I didn’t actually really like how it played that much…
Final Thought: A thought you might have about Transistor is “why isn’t it just totally turn-based?” but it’s obvious once you’ve played it for a while that the overhaul required to make enemies work and balance it would be almost an entirely new game. Sometimes you just go down a path and there’s no going back.
![Sky Kid [NES] (Namco, 1986)](https://expzine.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/sky-kid-nes-front-cover.jpg)
