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Tag: 2025

  • Horses (Santa Ragione, 2025)

    Horses (Santa Ragione, 2025)

    Developed/Published by: Santa Ragione
    Released: 02/12/2025
    Completed: 04/12/2025
    Completion: Finished it.

    “Artists must create, critics defend, and democratic people support . . . works so extreme that they become unacceptable even to the broadest minds of the new State.”

    –Pier Paolo Pasolini, in a 1974 debate as quoted by Naomi Green in their essay “Salò: Breaking the Rules”.

    Horses has been out for exactly a week, and I’m certain that if you’re reading this you’re already sick of the discourse (damn my adherence to schedule!) We actually raced through the talking points in record time, to be honest, it was barely a couple of days before we got the “well, you know, it’s actually not that good/what’s all the fuss about really” essays. Milking horses in real life is impractical and low-yield, and here we’ve reached the point where we’re drawing dust.

    However, that doesn’t really change the material facts of the matter: irrespective of quality, Horses is an artistic work that has been de-facto banned from the two major storefronts–due to opaque processes and without recourse. I’ve written about this happening before–in fact this year–when Cara Cadaver’s VILE: Exhumed was banned from Steam (and then released for free) due to what appears to have been a misunderstanding of that game’s use of real footage as pornography and the wider context of morality policing by payment processors. 

    Interestingly, Santa Ragione are at pains to point out that this ban occurred in June 2023(!) and that it “has nothing to do with the recent restriction on adult content pushed by payment processors.”

    There’s an urge to try and uncover the reasoning for the ban, but it’s to stumble about in the dark. Santa Ragione concentrate on–as much of the discourse has–that an unfinished sequence in a version “scrambled together” for early submission featuring a child riding on the back of a naked woman triggered the ban, but after the ban of VILE: Exhumed, I’m not so sure that (even benign) FMV footage or payment processors as a factor can’t entirely be ignored as, at least, a supplemental reason to keep the ban enforced. In particular with the ban from Epic, who didn’t choose to ban the game until December 1st(!) with the stated reason that they don’t sell AO rated games1 (despite Santa Ragione’s protestation that Horses had received PEGI 18 and ERSB M ratings) it smells to me like a simple pre-emptive decision to avoid controversy that could lather up into the kind of issue with payment processors that could affect their bottom line. It’s just easier.

    So really, it’s not so much the specific reasoning for the ban that matters2, but the context: that we exist in a world where art not cannot exist without being a commodity–Santa Ragione cannot merely hope that people experience their art, but that they purchase it–and where wide access to that commodity is tied to an oligopoly (if we’re being kind to the Epic Games Store) or monopoly (if we’re not) who have absolute power over the market. It is satisfying to poke at the hypocrisies of a storefront like Steam, but it is, ultimately, a problem of capitalism.

    If you’ve read this site for any length of time, you’re probably sick of me saying things are capitalism’s fault. Well, they are, and the interesting thing about Horses is that this issue of commodification under the ultimate power of an opaque system is critiqued by the work itself. And this has echoes with another piece of Italian art which I have seen paid lip-service to in other essays on Horses: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom.

    It is not easy to find a usable representative image of Salò, but this will do.

    Pasolini is a complicated figure with a huge legacy, though one that has been somewhat narrowed in the popular imagination due to the reputation of Salò (his other transgressive works like Teorema don’t really get a look in) which, unfortunately, I’m not going to help. What’s important here is that Salò existed as a work contemporary to 1970s Italy, an era of intense political turmoil only “post-fascist” in so much that it came after the fall of both Mussolini and the Italian Social Republic (which forms the setting for Salò), and in a period where Pasolini was concerned with the “new facism” of neo-capitalism.

    In an era where art is being flattened into a homogenous, global product, it is important to understand Santa Ragione as human creators whose cultural specificity does not necessarily line up with the enforced Western (American) default, and that is reflected in this era also obviously being of great importance to Santa Ragione. Their game Wheels of Aurelia–itself embroiled in a delisting controversy–is set in this period, and movies such as Il Sorpasso (1962) and Rabid Dogs (1974) clearly inspired it. There is no such clean line of inspiration between Salò and Horses but I see a continuation of thought between them.

    The thing about Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom is that its reputation precedes it. Portraying, as it does, the the torture, rape and murder of teenage victims by four powerful fascists and their collaborators, it generally features high on not just “most scary” and “most disturbing” lists but “movies you should never watch” lists, and continues to be banned in some countries. But if taken merely as a series of images, in 2025 it really isn’t… that bad. Would it be able to feature on the Criterion Collection if it was? I’m not so sure. Watching it now, you wonder what Pasolini would have made of the internet, and in particular the sea of easily accessible pornography where you can see the participants of things that the fascists of Salò could not perceive. If Salò was to rage against the idea that fascist dehumanisation was being continued via the commodification of the body and ultimately captures the mind, what would he make of the masses willingly3 performing online what was once considered unwatchable? More disturbing things are streamed online from bedrooms in middle America than we ever see in Salò. Indeed, in Salò Pasolini uses a cold, distant gaze to implicate us; could he have perceived a future where not just the camera is drawn so close, but the audience can tip to push things ever further?

    But what sets Salò apart is that it is not titillating4. It is not intended to excite, even shock seems like a side-effect. In fact, it was an attempt to create a work that was indigestible.

    “I told myself: I have to react and make products that are as inconsumable as possible. I know it’s utopian, because everything ends up being consumed. At the same time, I know that there is something inconsumable in art, and we need to stress the inconsumable quality of art. Therefore, with all my forces, I will try and produce difficult and indigestible works.”

    –Pier Paolo Pasolini, Le Regole Di Un’illisione, as quoted by Simona Bondavalli in their essay “Lost in the Pig House: Vision and Consumption in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Porcile”.

    This, for me, chimes all too well with Horses.

    Horses is a cinematic game–in that it directly and intentionally references the form of surrealist cinema (which notably, is distinct from Pasolini’s style.) It’s in black and white; almost completely silent (using intertitles for dialogue) and features the continuous sound of a projector. Combined with the farm setting, the game feels like it is set somewhere within Mussolini’s reign, but like Salò, there are anachronistic elements (though they are more apparent: a VHS tape, for example.)

    The player takes the role of Anselmo, sent to spend two weeks at a farm to learn the meaning of work. We know nothing about Anselmo–we don’t even know if he knows what’s going on at the farm before he gets there, though he seems unhappy about the prospect of working there either way. The farm–as you certainly know by now–is run by a disturbed farmer who keeps a group of men and women as “horses” by drugging them and locking horse masks onto them. He is supported in this by his “dog”, Fido, similarly a man in a dog mask, and then you, the player as Anselmo, as you do video game farming tasks for him: picking carrots, feeding the dog, chopping wood, before you become increasingly entwined in the control of the “horses.”

    As I said above, I do not believe Salò is intended as a direct inspiration, but there are parallels. The first that will come to mind is a sequence in Salò where the victims are treated as dogs, one of whom is harshly beaten when he does not cooperate (although this is a short, stand-alone sequence rather than the victims’ continual state.) More is the parallel of Salò’s men of power: the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate and the President, who have their parallels in the game’s farmer, businessman, vet and priest. I think it’s unlikely the analogue was intended–the characters are much less deeply intertwined in Horses–but their inclusion as symbols of fascist systems cannot be overlooked.

    In the essay Disney, Salò, and Pasolini’s Inconsumable Art, Owen Schalk summarises Pasolini’s “indigestible work” by way of Barthes “suspended meaning”:

    “This technique is not meant to expel meaning. Rather, it creates a sense of ambiguity in which meaning is not directly signified and is therefore suspended, refusing to provide the viewer with easily digestible symbols … Rather than producing art with the intention of manipulating consumers through predictable emotional patterns and easily understandable symbols, suspended meaning challenges easy digestibility by introducing deliberately indigestible elements to the work.”

    Although I think Horses is widely accepted as a narrative game, I think Horses intended “tactic” is to introduce a game with the signifiers and mechanics of the “farming” genre, which runs the breadth of Stardew Valley to Farming Simulator, in order to maximise the impact of its indigestible symbols. The game implies that it has a daily schedule design with tasks to check off, but discards and warps that at will almost immediately, creating something that frustrates and disconcerts as much as the setting.

    And Horses does not–cannot–rely on the dispassionate extremity of Salò to be indigestible. If in Salò we must look directly at the human body, abused, in Horses we must look directly at the uncanny valley, itself a desecration of the human form. There’s been criticism of how goofy a game with such heavy themes looks, but the grotesque puppetry of the horses makes a mockery of them and is as symbolic of their devaluation and dehumanisation.

    As an indigestible work I think Horses, like Salò, frustrates. Indeed, it makes me question the suitability of linear narrative video games for it unless designers are willing to push the form further. In cinema, the audience is implicated by their gaze; in games, the player is implicated by their play. Even in a film as indigestible as Salò, we debate and try to bargain with it, hopelessly. Why don’t they refuse? Why don’t they rise up? The film’s only glimpse of a kind of resistance that shakes the fascist’s power comes from a collaborator and only after we’ve seen a succession of the weakest characters turn on each other to save their skin–despite the fact that they are living through something unbearable. Film is very good at making us feel helpless, because there, we are. But games are almost all empowerment fantasies, and the ones that try to break us down so often offer us only the alternative of “the only way to win is not to play” rather than make us collaborators so we can continue even if in misery.

    As Anselmo, we must play along whether we want to or not. Every player certainly thinks “well, I’d just leave” but… they can’t. The gate is closed, and there is no escape. Whether or not the stakes for Anselmo exist, at first we don’t feel them without the ability to truly test them. If Anselmo isn’t allowed to escape, let me try. I’ll reload. If Anselmo can walk off the farm whenever he likes, let him. I’ll do it. Make me collaborate, don’t force me to. 

    The strange thing is, at its best, Horses does engage with this issue head on. Later in the game, your position as collaborator cemented, a horse will not cooperate. The farmer’s dog gives you an option of how to deal with the horse: to offer, as the cliché goes, the carrot or the stick. Each carrot you offer returns no cooperation and leads to the stick becoming bigger and more dangerous, and the dog angrier. I found myself pleading for the horse to just cooperate, because I knew the next thing I would have to do was beat it. 

    Whether or not I truly had a choice over that doesn’t matter, because I willingly gave those carrots. Horses made me not just perform the act of collaboration, but embody it, and it made me feel shame in a way the early game’s railroading does not.

    The scene that has received the most commentary however is the scene that Santa Ragione believes caused all the trouble and where Horses shows its hand: when the businessman’s5 daughter makes it clear that no one is under any illusions about what the horses are, and that the horses are people who represent a threat to the system.

    I think you could argue that this represents a flaw in my argument that Horses is indigestible art; after all, if you spell it out this clearly, isn’t that quite… understandable? But under that criteria, Salò would also fail for making its setting explicit. Even in Salò the victims are not random (one is notably called out as from a “family of subversives.”) But to return to Schalk: “the technique is not meant to expel meaning.”

    The difficulty of a work like Horses–if we accept my hypothesis that it exists in the spectrum of indigestible art–is that it is not a work about the horses, what happens to them, or Anselmo’s journey. It’s existence is, like Salò, a political act, to stand in opposition to the inauthentic, easily digestible product that floods our culture. 

    I chafe at every mention that Horses is “like an A24 horror” considering the formulaic nature of “elevated horror.” I wrote earlier that I wondered what Pasolini would make of modern pornography; I don’t need to wonder what he would think of the Netflixication of cinema, work designed to go down so smoothly you don’t have to engage with it at all. We seemed to have crossed a rubicon where it’s not even that mass culture is inauthentic; it no longer seems to actually exist. The audience is so captured by capital they create viewing numbers to maintain a stock price while themselves receiving no value; a subscription to white noise to fold laundry to.

    In this sphere, the value of Horses is that it must be engaged with, and it is ultimately that which makes it a threat to the hegemony of capital. At its best it does not just see the danger of commodification on our body and mind: it makes us feel it, perform it, and, ashamed, intend to refuse it. 

    Salò was not banned because of shock value alone. It may be an extreme example, but it suffered extra scrutiny for the same reason works as benign as To Kill A Mockingbird: an audience roused out of its slumber is a dangerous one. In 1975 Pasolini saw a world where the audience had to choke on the indigestible to wake. Horses may be more obvious, more on-the-nose in narrative by interactivity, but in doing so it takes the indigestible and asks the audience to not just wake from choking on it, but to spit it out. 

    You may think I’m giving Horses too much credit here–or implying conspiracy in its banning. But the same way that audiences are enveloped by the miasma of capitalism, companies like Steam and Epic are unconsciously risk averse in protection of the numbers. Santa Ragione focuses on the possibility that a little girl riding a naked woman was the reason for the ban; but I wonder if they’ve considered it was what she said that was. That she gave the game away.

    “Each of us is a cog in the machine; we must all do our duty so society can function properly. So dangerous ideas are a concern for everyone.”

    Will I ever play it again? I’ve already spit it out.

    Final Thought: If I find one flaw in my argument, it is that Horses ultimately concludes in a very “video gamey” way. Pasolini famously struggled with the ending of Salò, ending on an abrupt non sequitur after taking things as far as they can go. Horses instead asks the player to engage with an actual puzzle (which comes as a surprise; the solution is also a little vague in game, meaning I can imagine a lot of players get stuck here, and I personally found it annoying to the point of it breaking immersion). It leads to heroic rescue and ultimately escape–one which implies reclamation and reconciliation. Depending on your viewpoint, this hopeful ending either continues the themes as a call to action for the awakened viewer or the kind of satisfying resolution that allows a return to slumber; the indigestible made digestible. The question is, I suppose, as always, what you are willing to swallow.

    1. It has been mocked elsewhere but that this rule has an explicit carve out for crypto (“the only exception is for products in cases where an AO rating was applied solely due to the usage of blockchain or NFT technology”) is toe-curlingly embarrassing. ↩︎
    2. Although after saying all of that I have to also attach Paolo Pedercini’s idea that it might relate to the fact that by just being called “Horses” it contaminates searches to a genre that horse-mad weans would be looking up, like if you called a game “tractors” and it was all about tractors with big floppy dongs flopping about. Hang on, let me get on the asset store… ↩︎
    3. I should say supposedly willing here to be specific, but I don’t want to get too far afield of my main point in the moment. I touch on this in my essay on VILE: Exhumed, but there is an irony in that in Salò we can see a crying victim be debased with awareness that the shoot was actually pretty jolly, full of football games and risotto meals, but you really have no way to judge if in even vanilla pornography the performers are willing participants, as capitalism is always a coercive element. ↩︎
    4. I would argue it is titillating, intentionally, until the rules are inverted at the villa, but again, I’m in danger of getting lost in the weeds here. ↩︎
    5. This character is never referred to as such, and is a designation I’ve made on the statements of his daughter: “My father makes sure that [the farmer’s] business opportunities keep growing.” ↩︎
  • Baby Steps (Cuzzillo/Boch/Foddy, 2025)

    Baby Steps (Cuzzillo/Boch/Foddy, 2025)

    Developed/Published by: Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, Bennett Foddy / Devolver Digital
    Released: 23/09/2025
    Completed: 13/11/2025
    Completion: Finished it. I took the stairs, obviously.

    Baby Steps is incredible. I think it’s almost certainly going to be the best feeling game I play all year, if it hasn’t locked it up already. I think it’s brilliant.

    But have you ever played a game that you just… disagree with? 

    To be clear: not that it disagrees with you like it’s some clam chowder that got left out in the sun. That you disagree with it–say on a moral, or ethical level.

    With Baby Steps, it would be too strong to say that I disagree with it ethically or morally. But I do think I disagree with the principles on which it was designed. On the… mindset in which it treats the player.

    But before we dig into that, let’s talk about what Baby Steps is.

    Baby Steps is designed by Bennett Foddy, who developed the game alongside Gabe Cuzzillo and Maxi Boch. You likely know Bennett Foddy from QWOP or Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, games which find comedy, pathos and of course frustration in unforgiving physical simulation (or maybe you know him best from the Best British Games Spectacular I did with him on the Insert Credit Podcast. It’s certainly how I do!) In Baby Steps, you play Nate, who is transported to a mysterious alternate reality and who then… well, it’s not entirely clear what his actual goal is. He needs the loo and probably wants to get home, but mainly he walks, hopefully forward, because that’s what you make him do.

    It is this aspect–the walking–that is such a revelation. Although I’ve played QWOP (I mean who hasn’t, you can play it right now for a while if you fancy) I have to admit I never Got Around To It With Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy. So while it’s possible that game felt fucking incredible, even if it did (does) because this is a new Foddy game explicitly about moving your legs I just assumed moving any distance at all was a grim nightmare of concentration and pain like QWOP.

    But it isn’t that at all! In fact, moving your legs is almost easy! Using the triggers to control each leg, once you have a rhythm you can just push forward and tap each trigger and move forward at a pace that–while not exactly an open-world sprint–is almost effortless. You might think that minor changes in elevation or little rocks and things like that are going to fuck you? Honestly, once you’ve got used to walking… no? I don’t think I’d even been playing an hour before I got used to the micro-adjustments required to keep walking over a huge tree knot without falling over–you just see when the foot connects, and you move the other one. Simple!

    You will be shocked at how comfortable you’ll be moving quickly even in situations like this. Perhaps… too comfortable.

    It’s even more impressive when you actually have to do something that requires a bit of finesse. Almost immediately the level design presents to you a hat hanging from a pole, that you know you can only collect if you climb a small pile of bricks. In doing that you realise that as long as one of Nate’s feet are planted securely, you can take your time lifting your leg, using the analogue stick to swing it around and into position without fear–well, much fear, things can still go wrong–of falling over. The game goes from a steady tap-tap-tap to a more interesting puzzle–about how well you can judge placement, how much patience you have, and how well you can avoid overconfidence.

    At its best, Baby Steps is a pleasure to play. It’s fun just wandering around, seeing where you can go. Falling over happens–and don’t get me wrong, just because you can get into a rhythm, it doesn’t mean you won’t fall out of it, or just not recognise the movement you need to make, and trip–but it’s alright, right?

    The problem with Baby Steps, for me, is that it’s not just a fun sandbox. It’s a video game with a beginning and an ending. And so, ultimately, it expects you to progress. And as you progress, the game goes from “I’m having fun moving” to “I have to get this step exactly right. And the next one too, quickly, because if I don’t I’ll slip, and I’ll have to do another five minutes of climbing just to get here… ah fuck, I fell. Well, at least I’ve done all these other difficult steps thirty times, I won’t… fuck.”

    Now, absolutely, you could say “well, you don’t have to do any of this. You can play it however you like. You’re putting all of this onto the game but you’re doing it to yourself, mate.” But the world is transparently designed with paths that funnel you into challenges and with environmental art that points you in the direction you’re “supposed” to go, and those challenges go out of their way to make sure you are punished for failure with complex runbacks that only get worse the further you get in an individual challenge.

    Sure, sometimes they’re just trying to make trouble for you with the direction they’re pointing (and problematically, sometimes they don’t make it clear at all where you’re supposed to go, so hope you enjoying wandering around lost) but there were many points where I couldn’t find an alternative path than the one I was beating my head against, and I’m sure any others were a ballache anyway.

    So it’s here that we come to our disagreement: why does Baby Steps have to be punishing?

    I know, I know. It almost sounds completely ridiculous when I say it. But there’s a weird disconnect between the pleasure of movement, the opportunity for exploration, and the complete smugness of the level design that makes sure that your failures are multiplied–and which loves to place gotchas as late as possible in a climbing chain.

    The punishment works at such cross-purposes to the world, too. You know you have to get to the big obvious landmark you can see in the distance, but it’s an open(-ish) world, and you can see something interesting you might want to go and look at instead. But if the perambulation required to get there is difficult–or worse, it’s going to be difficult to get back–I didn’t want to do it, because what if it wasn’t anything, or (worse) was a gag about how I’d just done something annoying and difficult for nothing?  Apparently Baby Steps has 109 cut-scenes, of which I saw something like, I don’t know, nine. Because the rest I’d have to hunt out, and fuck knows how much time and frustration it could cost me when I wanted to actually progress again.

    “Hang on,” you might be saying, “I thought you said movement in this game was a pleasure. It can’t be that bad can it? Surely?”

    It’s interesting, because if I’d stopped playing this game after the first few sections, I’d say that’s fair. Initially it feels like the pathing the game guides you down doesn’t so much force you into repeating the same sections to progress, but there are a lot more falls where you slide off to somewhere else and have to get up a different route, which kept things interesting. But the desert area was the death of that. They introduce sliding–meaning you need to chain steps quickly–and then I found myself in a section where–unless I’m completely wrong–I simply could not find another route. And it required crossing a bridge that, if it fell required I restart the game.

    Come on. That is rubbish.

    But it’s not as rubbish as the part where I had to work my way up a cave system holding a lamp, where the ending seems purposefully designed to make sure I trip and drop the lamp all the way to the bottom and have to either do the whole thing again or turn my gamma up and hope for the best (the latter worked in the end.) I think that’s the absolute nadir, but at that point the magic was lost, and the rest was just a grim march to the end, with nary a smile from me.

    This. Fucking. Thing.

    In a New York Times profile1 contemporary with the release of the game, Foddy wondered:

    “..When I’m making games that are intentionally frustrating or annoying or boring … I’m trying to do that in a way that people will derive pleasure from. Why do people continue to do things that make them unhappy? I think that’s maybe the great mystery of being a human being.”

    Because the New York Times is crap, I don’t think they dig into that deeply enough. Foddy is intelligent enough to distinguish between “pleasure” and happiness: doing drugs provide pleasure but not happiness; you can be sad and still have a wank. (Indeed, there can be a near-sexual tension to frustration; the need for a release that isn’t coming, and if it doesn’t come probably a wank does the trick, but it’s not going to make you happy.)

    The problem, from my perspective, is that the reason people do a thing (play a game) that makes them unhappy is because… they want to win! There’s a goal, a payoff. It’s not that deep, and there’s the smugness of “the only way to win is not to play” in Baby Steps, and I think that’s a limited form of thinking. You designed the bloody thing!

    This way of thinking is impressed–in fact, enforced–by the narrative of Baby Steps. Nate is something of a cipher, but he has signifiers. He’s a loser, he doesn’t seem to be able to communicate with anyone, or anything, particularly well. He is–and this is important–seemingly completely unable to take assistance, never mind help, which is implied to relate to his sense of masculinity, though everyone else in the game reacts in bafflement to it (oh, everyone else in the game is a man, by the way. For a game that examines the problem with men, it is funny that it doesn’t let a woman speak once).

    I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to note that while Baby Steps has a narrative, all the cut scenes are improvised (Cuzzillo  as Nate, Foddy as… everyone else) and that does make me wonder how deeply they planned the narrative to begin with (it certainly seems somewhat… loosely sketched.) But it does have a couple of big beats, the most important of which is a decision the player must make to either take on an absolutely insane challenge or… take the clear and obvious easy route.

    The problem with this is that it’s classic, top-down narrative design. You reach a point in the game with the signposted choice that reflects ~themes~ rather than, you know, it coming from the emergent play. It’s especially egregious here, because why the fuck does the game unavoidably make me do all this insanely hard bullshit first before it allows me to throw my hands up and go “honestly mate, I don’t give a fuck?”

    Because I don’t. I’ve talked before about my opinion on save states and rewinds, the fact that I’ve always loved Jeff Minter’s “start a level with your best high score that you got to that point” design concept and all of that sort of thing. I just don’t think runbacks are fun, or even interesting past a certain point, and Baby Steps is the purest runback experience there is, because every time you have to return to the challenge where you failed, you have to work for every step.

    You might hope the challenges are designed so you fall only part of the way down. You would be hoping in vain.

    If you ask me, I think there should be a Baby Steps: Gigachad Edition where as soon as you get tired of the game, you can press a button, Nate accepts his failings and via a magical girl-style transformation sequence Nate gets fucking ripped you can quicksave wherever you fucking like. This isn’t even a joke! I’d have explored so much more of the game and actually enjoyed the experience a lot more, and for me, the whole point of playing games is to enjoy them [“Is it? I’ve read your articles and I’m not sure I believe you”–Ed.] The “lesson” of Baby Steps doesn’t apply to me, and it certainly doesn’t at the point in the game where it’s trying to teach me it. 

    The point, of course, does stand in the opposite direction. “Maybe I like the misery.” If you do, no one is stopping you playing this the way you like, or with your hands behind your back or upside down. It’s all completely valid, unless you’re the kind of prick who resents the idea that other people might use the easy route. Hell you can have an extra achievement for never turning on Gigachad mode if that makes you happy. Have ten, I don’t care. But I reject when a game is like “You play it like this, and only this, and also I’m standing over here, pointing at laughing at you while you play it, for playing it.”

    So yeah. Baby Steps. The best feeling game of the year, that I don’t agree with at all. 

    Will I ever play it again? Gigachad edition, baby! While this article has been critical, I do want to say that I actively recommend Baby Steps. But I do think you should just fuck about in it and not consider it a challenge to be beaten, because it’s so, so fun until it’s not. In fact you can make your own Gigachad edition if you like, though the quicksaving doesn’t save any items you’re holding so it’s not helpful if you’re say stuck in the cave. Uh not that I would know (I absolutely do know).

    Final Thought: I really don’t know if this is adding insult to injury but one of the issues I had with Baby Steps, to be honest, is that I didn’t find the cut-scenes… that funny. Maybe I’m sugar coating that a bit: I didn’t find them funny. (Well, the one joke with the map2 that pops-up for a split second is really, really good.) Nate is so annoyingly whiny and obstinate, and if he’s just slid off a mountain forty times it generally makes you want to actually murder him (I assume Cuzzillo is spending his royalties on an armed guard.) Foddy’s characters are, mostly, twats. It’s all just so abrasive, and the game makes a point of trying to force you to watch them via skipping cut-scenes being a mini-game in themselves. Which I’m sure they also thought was funny.

    But that said: even though it’s in the game as a punishment in itself, I enjoyed the twenty-eight minute cut-scene you get if you skip all the cut-scenes. It’s just Cuzzillo and Foddy being real with each other, it’s charming and easy and, unlike the rest of the game, warm. Should have had more of that!

    1. I’m not linking the NYT despite quoting them, because fuck the New York Times. ↩︎
    2. Something I wanted to mention here, because it didn’t really come up, is that I agree with Foddy that you can spend the whole time staring at a mini-map in an open world game, and that Baby Steps is nicer without it (on paper… the most samey-looking areas can fuck off.) ↩︎
  • Frankenstein (2025)

    Frankenstein (2025)

    Guillermo del Toro seems like a lovely guy who cares about the craft of cinema, but if it wasn’t clear by now, Frankenstein hammers home once and for all that he has absolutely no sense for story at all. At all!

    Even though it’s been adapted so many times before, I’ll give him that Frankenstein is a bit of a weird one to adapt because it has a layered structure to rival Inception, where at one point you’re reading a letter in which a sea captain is explaining the story that Victor Frankenstein told him based on the story that the creature told him. There’s a reason most adaptations don’t bother with this naive storytelling style, and it’s because it’s immediately absurd when a character tells another character their entire life story full of what would (in context) be irrelevant detail, and del Toro doesn’t help himself by picking and choosing when to be faithful to Mary Shelly and when to not. Frankenstein tells his life story to a sea captain? Check. This happens after the creature goes beast mode on the crew like you’re watching a fucking Marvel movie? Uh… check?

    There are just so many bizarre and wrong-headed decisions here that it’s hard to know where to start. There’s a lot of waffle in Mary Shelley’s original novel, but Frankenstein at least creates his creature in, like, the fourth chapter. Here, del Toro shuffles all the component parts so he can spend spend literally an hour and a half on a new build-up where Elizabeth is Frankenstein’s brother’s fiance and her father (an invented character, not in the original book) is bankrolling his experiments… for his own nefarious reasons! 

    Even once the creature shows up, we get more invented scenes where Frankenstein abuses it because [auteur klaxon] del Toro needs to make sure we love the monster. Even though the creature’s already existing story is there to do that!

    Del Toro called Frank Darabont’s script for Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation “pretty much perfect”–a version that is far closer to faithful than this, but which is reviled because it’s completely over the top–and considering Darabont has so publicly made a point that Shelley’s original work was “subtle” it’s genuinely hard to understand why del Toro has changed so many things to make them more obvious (I hope you enjoy seeing “Chekhov’s escape flume”) and then thought Oscar Isaac should in turn chew scenery with such gusto and only offer him glasses of milk to wash it down with.1

    Look. It’s an adaptation, and del Toro can do what he likes, but I think that ultimately these changes add up to something that at points is so wrong that I’m not sure that del Toro is able to see anything beneath the surface. Del Toro seems determined to make anything that could be subtle unsubtle, anything quiet loud. A character literally tells Frankenstein that (gasp) he is the monster. I hope audiences cheered when that happened.

    Maybe it’s just that del Toro falls so in love with the monsters and the set decoration and doing stuff that’s cool in his eyes that he loses sight of honouring the original work. In the original Frankenstein, the creature longs to be accepted but isn’t because of his appearance. He is rejected by Frankenstein, then accepted by the blind patriarch of a family that he hides from while learning from, only to be chased away by the family when they actually see him and are terrified.

    Here, instead, we see the creature find the blind father killed by wolves who he then kills in an omg epic fashion before the family find him with the father’s corpse, misunderstanding things and so he has to run off. This is not the same!!!2

    It seems like this is all there so [auteur klaxon] it can be clear that the only person who truly sees the monster for who they are is… a beautiful, intelligent, lonely woman. Who could have foreseen this!

    I suppose what’s funny about that is the auteur touch doesn’t even really matter, because the whole thing is leading to an ending so unbelievably unearned, so forced that I almost couldn’t believe it. Frankenstein recognises what he means to the creature and they have a meaningful ~father and son~ moment. That doesn’t sound that bad but it plays out only a step below the film ending with them heading up to the ship’s deck to play catch. 

    Don’t get me wrong, I understand what del Toro is trying to do, but it’s like every instinct he had was wrong, completely blinded by how much he falls in love with his own vision rather than trying to make something that speaks to anyone who isn’t already fully bought into it. His Victor Frankenstein is such a relentless, one-note villain, his creature so over-the-top vicious at points yet infantile and innocent at others, that there’s no ring of truth to it. No meaningful closure. No tragedy.

    No tragedy, I guess, other than del Toro believed this to be his dream project, his pinnacle, and then this is what he made.

    Follow Mathew on Letterboxd.

    1. What is the deal with Oscar Isaac? He’s so good in so many things, but then he shows up in this and things like Moon Knight with absurd, unbalancing energy. Is this what the directors want? If so… why? ↩︎
    2. And while I’m here, and I know this is a personal bugbear, but wolf attacks are historically rare, and it’s so fucking lazy to portray them as insanely dedicated, vicious killers. And it’s especially disgusting to do that so you can show the monster you want to fuck killing them graphically (which would be even worse if it didn’t look so brutally CGI.) You’ve got all this imagination to come up with coffins with face windows and you can’t come up with something better than fucking wolf attacks? ↩︎

  • and Roger (Tearyhand Studio, 2025) / Florence (Mountains, 2018)

    and Roger (Tearyhand Studio, 2025) / Florence (Mountains, 2018)

    and Roger

    Developed/Published by: Tearyhand Studio / Kodansha
    Released: 23/07/2025
    Completed: 06/11/2025
    Completion: Finished it.

    Florence

    Developed/Published by: Mountains / Annapurna Interactive
    Released: 14/02/2018
    Completed: 06/11/2025
    Completion: Finished it.

    This year for me (and perhaps for many others) has very much been the year of the short game, and I’m not complaining. In fact, I really think it’s the direction the industry has to go towards. Sad to say but as excited as I am to play, say, the remasters of Dragon Quest I & II or Final Fantasy Tactics, they’re just getting thrown on the backlog to join the likes of Persona 3 Reload. Whereas if I hear about a game that I can play quickly and get a full experience from I jump at it. This has paid off tremendously sometimes, sometimes not, but it actually doesn’t matter as long I’ve experienced something with an idea and a point of view. My time hasn’t been wasted, when in some other games an play session the length of one of these games could be spent grinding, or cut-scenes, or on nothing very much in particular.

    It does make these games a little hard to write about if I’m not actively warning you off of them, because the urge is to just say “well, play it” especially if the feeling is that going into too much detail might spoil the experience.  This is a problem that feels a little more immediate than it often does with cinema, where–for whatever reason–it feels a little easier to talk around the work. You can be a bit less direct.

    So before I go into too much detail on and Roger, I’d like to say that’s it’s a worthwhile experience–it’s one that I was surprised by and found deeply moving. If you consider yourself open minded and think you’re ok potentially having an ugly cry, I think you should give it a shot and you can come back here later.

    So what’s interesting about and Roger is that it’s a Florence-like. I’m not sure if it’s the first one of these! What’s particularly interesting about and Roger is that it takes the basis of Florence and infuses its interactivity with real meaning in a way that makes the originator seem completely facile. 

    When discussing Florence, I think it’s important to begin by discussing the conditions that the game was made under, with Mountains’ lead developer Ken Wong accused of being verbally abusive to staff. Wong has apologised, but I don’t think I would have chosen to write about it if it wasn’t, I think, really important contextually. Especially considering and Roger’s lead developer, Yona directly praised it in conversation with Patrick Klepek at Remap:

    “I think it’s the most wonderful game I’ve ever played … It taught me the value of storytelling through games.”

    Florence tells the complete story of a young woman’s romance with a cellist in a confident and seamless combination of motion comic and mini-game. If we’re following the inspiration chain I have to wonder if the game was particularly inspired by Jenny Jiao Hsia’s and i made sure to hold your head sideways, a “flatgame” and another beautiful short experience that I’d urge you to take some time to play whenever you have a spare moment. I’ve got no particular proof Florence was inspired by flatgames–and you can trace more gentle, linear interactive storytelling to at the very least Brøderbund’s Living Books–but the continuous nature of the experience–outside of the deeply mistaken decision to include too-frequent chapter breaks–calls them to mind. However, I think for many the easier comparison would be a narrative, less-intense Warioware, as each scene features a game mechanic that you have to learn and then perform to progress.

    For example: to brush your teeth, you move the joystick back and forth. To form a speech bubble, you click jigsaw pieces together. And so on.

    Florence’s issue is that these mechanics are not, in themselves, fun! They are simply roadblocks to the next scene. Rather than Warioware, it’s more like a game almost entirely made up of the way interactions work in Heavy Rain. You know how you have to move the stick to, like, open a door and if you don’t do it right, you fail? And it’s just a waste of everyone’s time? Florence, despite its short running time, can often feel like that. 

    There’s one interaction that works and that I think is quite clever, it’s the aforementioned “jigsaw pieces as dialogue”. On your first date, each puzzle features a lot of pieces to fit together, but on later dates the pieces become simpler and quicker to fit together. It’s the one place in which function meets form, where, just as in a burgeoning relationship, you find the conversation flowing easier and easier.

    (If I was going to go deep on symbolism, however, I’d like to note the fact that the final puzzle features two jigsaw pieces fitting together, the piece with the extrusion representing the male character, and the piece that has the hollow for it to fit representing the female character. It’s a little… I don’t know… ill-considered?)

    Florence also suffers because it just doesn’t have that much to say. It’s proof that interactivity isn’t enough. You are better served by reading through No Girlfriend Comics again, which I don’t think pretends to have any gravitas and says something probably more relatable.

    Seriously, there’s a part of Florence that’s just this. Actually, not exactly this, you need to click through to see the animation.

    The thing that bothers me most about Florence, actually, is that it doesn’t even commit to its story. To get into spoilers, after her breakup, Florence returns to the painting that she always put off. No reason for this is given: she’s shown at the start as having succumbed to routine; and it is implied that the relationship falters for the very same reason. If I’m being completely fair, these moments–big, bad breakups–lead to a lot of change in people’s lives and reorientation on what’s important, but that beat is missing here, and while maybe it’s too neat, that the game misses the chance to offer closure by, for example, having her ex be invited to her art show for a “goodbye and thank you” beat… I know you could say it’s too obvious, but to end with what really amounts to nothing speaks, frankly, of immaturity. 

    Florence is a pleasant, but forgettable experience. Nice, maybe a little sad, but there’s so much more going on in real people’s lives and relationships than, well, things that can be summed up in little mini games.

    Such feelings would make you think that and Roger isn’t going to work at all. After all, you still progress linearly through a series of scenes, you still perform mini-games to move forward.

    But and Roger understands something about its position as a video game–that we have expectations of it. We don’t expect it to cheat or lie to us. and Roger begins to do that to us immediately. Buttons you expect to click move. Then new buttons appear. When you finally press one, it doesn’t do what you expect. It’s unsettling, it’s frustrating, and it is deeply intentional.

    In and Roger, you play a young girl who wakes in her home and discovers things seem to be… different. Time doesn’t seem to be working right. Performing ordinary actions is complicated. And where she expects to find her father, she finds a stranger, who is acting like everything is normal while doing things that make no sense.

    In some respects, the game is a mystery: the player has to work out why these things are happening, and what’s really going on. In other ways, it’s not really a mystery at all. You understand quickly that something is heartbreakingly wrong, and nothing you do or try to do is going to be able to change that.

    Above I mentioned the terrible, pointless added interactivity of Heavy Rain. I think everyone who ever plays that thinks: “This is stupid. Who can’t open a door?” and I think in context that’s fair: you’re playing an able-bodied character. People don’t think about or actively perform opening a door. You just do it automatically. Pressing “A” at a door to watch an animation of it happening is more real than “performing” the action. But what if you’re not able-bodied? What if opening a door is hard because you aren’t quite sure where the handle is, moment to moment? What if the action your brainwaves transmits doesn’t line up with what you’re trying to do?

    In and Roger, the player is forced to consider that. I think there’s a possibility that the way it does it could be viewed as a gross simplification, and I think it’s important to guard against the idea that by experiencing it you truly “understand” what it means to have a disordered mind or a disabled body. But I reacted to it. I would love to know what advocacy groups think of it, but I do hope that I’m not off-base in thinking they’d approve–even if only as a tool for empathy.

    and Roger does have issues. The game is intentionally frustrating, and I do think for some players that could bleed into being actively angering–there’s a few mini-games where your actions are obscure or obscured, and unlike Florence, some players may actually get stuck (interestingly, for me these were not games where the game was “messing” with me, but in the middle section that cleverly plays more straightforward.)

    I think the game also makes maybe one too many big narrative swings towards the end. I think, ironically, one revelation is made to increase our empathy, make us more aware of the cost these things have on more than just the central character, but it’s disturbing and unbalances things. Earlier moments of frustration work well enough.

    But at the end, and Roger destroyed me. Surprisingly so–my reaction felt like it came out of nowhere. I’ve been touched by, well, I’d say a version of what this game is about, and the game’s ultimate message: that all we can do is love; that it’s not a weakness but a strength… it hits, because it’s real. The issues that and Roger deals with is not as simple as what Florence deals with, but it’s something that at some point in your life you realise you’re going to deal with–a lot. And really love is what’s going to keep you going, no matter how hard it is. 

    It’s easy to roll your eyes at that, and I think there are many people who are going to bounce off of this if they don’t connect with what it’s doing or what it’s about. And many might chafe at what I assume will be the most controversial thing about and Roger–that it comes from a clearly Christian lens.

    I’m an avowed agnostic, and I will say that this aspect didn’t bother me at all, because it doesn’t feel like the game proselytises at any point. In fact, I think it probably says something more about my expectations that when a character mentions praying quite naturally, my eyebrows raise in surprise. 

    I’ll admit, in media now we’ve come to expect “overt” reference to Christianity to say something about the character, to feature in their arc, rather than being a background detail. And this game does end with a quote from 1 Corinthians. But the game isn’t about Christianity. It’s simply one a fact of the character’s lives–and a fact of the creator Yona’s life. and Roger is richer for it, in my opinion, though I do think your mileage may vary.

    But all things considered? and Roger is very good. It is thoughtful in its use of mechanics and representation of themes, while also having a strong vision behind it. And I think it just existing makes the world a slightly nicer, more empathetic place. There’s not a lot of things you can say that about.

    Will I ever play them again? Although I think Florence is important to understand and Roger from a design perspective, I don’t think it matters a jot if you’ve played it before playing and Roger. In fact, I’d say you really don’t need to bother with Florence in the first place. As for and Roger? I’m not sure I could go through it again, emotionally, but I’m glad I did it once.

    Final Thought: The one thing that’s a huge clanger with and Roger, and I do have to make a point of this, is the inclusion of achievements. I think it just goes against everything the game should be making you feel, and your immersion in it. If you can turn even the notifications off, please do. You just don’t need them (and no game does, in my opinion, but that’s a different story entirely.)

  • The exp. Dispatch #12

    The exp. Dispatch #12

    Everyone who ordered exp. 2602 (or the value bundle!) before mid-Oct should have (or soon be receiving if they’re far-flung) their physical copies! Digital copies were also sent out this week—check your spam if you don’t see them, and get in touch if you still don’t.

    I’ve been gladdened by the images people have shared with me of their copies (our header image here via Chris Baker) and if you’ve enjoyed the issues, please do share on social media. I don’t want to moan too much, but I’ve been turned down for every zine fair I’ve applied to since I launched exp. 26021 so I do, unusually, have a bit of stock to shift (I ordered more than usual due to strong pre-orders and because I was, it turns out, a bit hopeful the invites would flood in.) Let me know if you know any zine stockists who’d be interested, or outlets who might spread the word—I’m already eager to start the next!

    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 Month On exp.

    Subscriber Post: Alex Kidd In Miracle World (Sega, 1986)

    Unlocked Posts: Zombi (Ubisoft, 1986) / The Texas Chainsaw Massacre / Halloween (Wizard Video, 1983) / Without A Dawn (Makkonen, 2025)

    Although my last block of articles was intentionally Halloween-themed, I’d have to argue this last month really represents what I’m trying to do with exp. We have an honest look at a recent indie, articles that dig into the history of less-known video games while also offering critique, and a reappraisal of a better known title with modern eyes but still historical context. All from my very specific, personal lens—openly subjective, but hopefully enjoyable and illuminating. These articles only ever seem to take more and more time, but I’m really happy with this and I hope you are too.

    From The exp. Archive: Pursuit Force (Bigbig Studios, 2005) / Soul Sacrifice (Marvelous/Japan Studio, 2013) / What Did I Do To Deserve This, My Lord? (Acquire/Japan Studio, 2007) / Papers Please (Pope, 2013)

    Meanwhile, you can really see how much patchier my articles were in the first year of taking exp. online—there are some ones which I think really hold up (most notably Papers Please)—and then a lot of things which are more just “here’s some quick thoughts on what I just played.” Which is fine! In some respects, I always imagined this as roleplay as a game reviewer for a 80s or 90s game magazine in its pomp—lots of games to review, you don’t know what you’re going to get and have no specialisation, and you can write whatever you like. Which I suppose it still is, but now I do a bit more than open Wikipedia to pull up dates. [“Not much more…”—Ed.]

    exp. Du Cinéma

    One Battle After Another (2025)

    This feels like it was forever ago, I should endeavour to get the newsletter out a bit more often, eh? Been a fallow month for my writing on cinema (though I did make a point of promoting Harvest Brood as a top-tier Halloween viewing.)

    exp. Capsule Review

    Puzzmo Mini Crossword (Orta, Zach and Friends, 2025)

    Puzzmo has been kicking around for a year now, offering an alternative to the New York Times’ stranglehold on digital newspaper games. I kicked Wordle a long time ago because I just don’t think you can ethically engage with the NYT now, and I think that Puzzmo offers an ethical alternative (though Hearst Newspapers is involved?)

    I haven’t really engaged with Puzzmo since launch because I’ve tried to avoid filling my time with this kind of thing post-Wordle/post-stupid Marvel Snap addiction, but in October they (I think specifically Puzzle Editor Brooke Husic) put together a nice run of thirty mini crosswords that attempted to help build a budding crossword player’s abilities. I’ve been more interested in crosswords since discussing them with Chris Remo/discovering Stephen Sondheim was a fan, and while I didn’t remember to do the mini crossword every day, the ones I did I enjoyed, felt I learned something from, and didn’t take an annoying amount of time out of my day.

    The good news is that Puzzmo is continuing the minis, and so am I! While they aren’t specifically teaching you how to do them now, I think they’re still worth a shot for the crossword curious (you can reveal characters if you’re completely stuck, for example.) The only issue I really have is that they have so many settings to make input suit you, but when you’re “fixing” an answer it doesn’t work the way I’d imagine—if you have a letter in a space but start typing in the space before that, it doesn’t overwrite that space but jump over it. It’s led to a lot of garbled answers, but I suspect the way they do it is intended for crossword masters playing for speed. Maybe I’ll get there.

    Zine News

    Zine Dump

    Alright this is one of the zine fairs I was turned down for but I’m not salty. Even if you’re reading this on Sunday there’s still time! Get down to Cecil Community Center before 5 p.m.! I’m so not salty that I dropped off five copies of exp. 2600 for the community zine table that you can pick up for a bargain price if you’re quick.

    From Masher To Master 2 (Patrick Miller)

    “This book is intended to serve as your companion through your own personal journey into fighting games … only this book will help you navigate the process of becoming a fighting game player.”

    Alright, not a zine, exactly, but Patrick Miller has just released a sequel to his original From Masher To Master book (“No, you do not need to have read the first book to get the most out of this one. I highly recommend starting with this one first.”) it’s PWYC and if you have any interest in fighting games there’s no one I would trust more to guide you. And it’s reminded me that I should probably stick at least the digital version of Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24 on itch.io…

    BreakSpace Issue 3

    “Featuring 58 reviews! 2-new BASIC type-ins! Interview with Gabriele Amore! Elite BASIC coding tips!”

    …and actually, maybe the zines too? I don’t know how I’ve overlooked how thriving the zine/book space is on itch.io, and I also can’t get over the labour of love that is BreakSpace, a Speccy mag with tons of content that’s completely free!

    Funland Issue 4

    “Thrills! Chills! Evil computers! Eldritch horrors! Ghouls! Goblins! Even penguins! Folks if this one doesn’t make your hair stand on end you may already be a corpse.”

    Funland really out here putting the rest of us zinesters to shame with their consistency, and if you’ve been looking for a bargain, their Halloween issue has a demonic discount and is just $6.66.

    And Finally…

    I’ve been under a lot of stress the last month or so, and one thing I’ve been slightly embarrassed about is that I’ve given into nostalgia the disease, turning to playing Youtube videos of old Amstrad CPC games in the background as a soothing balm even if—to be honest—the videos aren’t often very good. Just as I thought I was kicking the habit, here’s ChinnyVision with the best video of the lot and he didn’t even script it. A lovely personal trip through a selection of Amstrad CPC games that matter to him that, surprisingly, picks a lot of the games that mattered to me. Particular shout-outs to Trap Door, the (in my memory) superb port of Paperboy as well as some of the more well-remembered games like Sorcery+ (which terrified me) Chase HQ and Head Over Heels.

    As I suspect you have no connection to the Amstrad CPC, it might be worth a watch if you’d like to know more. One day I’m sure I’m going to be digging into the CPC’s bounty here, so you might as well do a bit of homework first.

    Next week on exp.: A game makes me ugly cry.

    1. For what it’s worth: It’s still great there’s been so many to apply to, and that the competition is so fierce. I’ll get ’em next time. ↩︎

  • Without A Dawn (Makkonen, 2025)

    Without A Dawn (Makkonen, 2025)

    Developed/Published by: Jesse Makkonen
    Released: 19/05/2025
    Completed: 14/10/2025
    Completion: +++ +++ +++ +++ +++

    [This article includes a major spoiler for Without A Dawn and reference to self-harm. It’s short, so you may wish to play it first, though I will admittedly go on to explain that I don’t recommend you do.]

    Vibes.

    Horror is so much about vibes.

    I know that’s is pretty much baby’s first media literacy, but I was lucky enough to see a work in progress of Joe Meredith’s latest film, Harvest Brood, as part of my buddy Justin Decloux’s 24-Hour Horror Movie Mind Melter, and I’ve been thinking about it because I was so blown away by Meredith’s careful curation of vibe. Despite an obviously low budget, the film uses the SOV (“shot on video”) aesthetic to mix imagery of post-industrial suburban America, “true-crime” documentary talking heads/rostrum camera, and goopy lo-fi gore to create something genuine and unsettling. Something that lingers; a perfect movie to watch in the wee small hours, eyelids drooping, losing connection between what’s real and isn’t. Drifting off, perhaps, into your own reverie of deserted strip malls at dusk, or the feel of damp leaves underfoot as you trudge past suburban homes decked out in Halloween decorations, only to awaken confused or distressed.

    This feeling–the space between the real of the awake and the disordered unreality of sleep, is explored in Finnish developer Jesse Makkonen’s visual novel Without A Dawn, and a preoccupation he’s had across his releases in titles such as Silence Of The Sleep and Afterdream. The visuals, however, of Without A Dawn are immediately arresting, with stark, limited palette pixel art filtered to appear as writhing ASCII art, not so much “All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead” as symbolic of the fog of slumber, that our visual processing can be so easily scrambled by our own systems.

    But vibes are not visual alone.

    A short game–I was surprised to find it the shortest I’ve played this year, even when compared to games such as Cyrano–Without A Dawn concentrates on an unnamed character who has cut themselves off and retired to a remote cabin as a form of escape, but finds themselves troubled, unable to sleep, questioning: did I see something? Is something strange happening, or is it all in my head?

    There are a variety of styles of visual novels, and Without A Dawn takes the most restrictive path, as a nearly completely linear experience with no major branching. There are only a couple of situations in where you even get a choice that doesn’t lead straight back to the same options if you don’t select the “right” answer, and while I do think it’s intentional–the game is about a creeping inevitability, about the illusion of choice–even in such a short game it’s quickly transparent that your choices are meaningless and it’s immediately unrewarding to even have to do them (real “why bother asking if you know what the answer is?” hours.) 

    I think it more than edges the game towards problematic, too, because what it treats as inevitable is… suicide. Now, whether or not it is I think you could debate–perhaps it’s no more real than anything else–but I think it’s just as easy to say I’m soft-pedalling here, it reads clearly as such and even goes so far to reward the player with a climax with an abstract beauty, ultimately telling them this was the “right choice”.

    It feels dangerous. Even if you retry, the game makes it clear that you will, ultimately, never be able to resist or escape it. The only thing the protagonist is allowed to do is end it.

    Like VILE: Exhumed, Without A Dawn struggles with the problem horror often does: what are you actually trying to say? Vibes are not just aesthetic; it is to find a frequency that harmonises with our understanding of the world, and in horror it must find that frequency to create the discord that unsettles us. In Without A Dawn, the inevitability feels false, it feels authored, because it gives the player no real way to fight it. It simply doesn’t ring true, and as a result the game collapses. Particularly disingenuously, as soon as the game ends, the developer appears–still clothed in the game’s creepy aesthetic–to directly ask you if you’ve enjoyed the game and if you’ll give it a review. It’s utterly immersion-smashing, and makes you feel like he hasn’t taken anything he’s shown you seriously. Horror vibes and suicide chic as product, first and foremost, rather than being about anything at all.

    When writing about a smaller game, I want to err towards forgiving. But Without A Dawn isn’t merely hollow, or frustratingly uninteractive; it’s ill-considered to the point of negligence. 

    Will I ever play it again? Absolutely not.

    Final Thought: I hope that Meredith will be able to complete and release Harvest Brood soon, a work where vibes are in service of an exploration of a uniquely American decay. I also hope the trailer convinces you to keep it on your radar:

    Update (28/10/2025): Harvest Blood is available online now, and you can watch it, in full, on Youtube for free!

  • One Battle After Another (2025)

    One Battle After Another (2025)

    Been thinking about this one a lot since I saw it, rolling it around and considering if it’s worth giving my take on it, but I keep coming back to my frustrations with it in the face of what feels like a weirdly universal uncritical praise, so I guess I can’t keep my mouth shut.

    The thing I keep thinking about, really, is how incredible the middle of this film is. The entire segment where we see real community action at work, as Benecio Del Toro’s Sergio St. Carlos leads us through their worst case scenario–an aggressive immigration raid–with efficiency, thought and care right down to his interactions with individuals. It is beautiful, moving, a masterful piece of film-making, and I think almost certainly going to be one of the very best things I saw this year.

    It’s what makes it so frustrating to me that the rest of the film’s treatment of activism and fascism is so… hacky, and that it’s been given such a pass. Paul Thomas Anderson is a filmmaker who doesn’t mistake setting for story, but here I do think he does our current moment a disservice, whether or not the reflection is mere happenstance.

    I feel like Anderson views (for example) the opening sequences of revolutionaries as “inspired by” or within the spectrum of the blaxploitation era, but I find something so… unpleasant about a well-off, successful white man writing black revolutionaries as largely ineffectual thrill-seekers who get off on their notoriety, considering the actual era contained movies of revolutionary power such as The Spook Who Sat By The Door (a movie Anderson must be familiar with.) I’m not offended by the image of him giggling behind his MacBook as he writes out a character called “Junglepussy” but isn’t it just sort of… embarrassing to sit there watching the result, however well made?

    Potentially not as embarrassing for all involved as his later treatment of the “revolution”. Look, I know we all hate two-factor authentication but the password stuff has to be some of the direst “student revolutionaries should get a job” hack comedy possible. Absolute fucking baby food for the smug middle-class cunts that are the general audience for a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. And the “Christmas Adventurers Club” stuff isn’t much better. We were all happy to see Kevin Tighe, but abdicating the responsibility for fascism to small groups of white men in hidden backrooms when we know it happens via large groups of white men in front of our fucking eyes sucks. As many people have pointed out, the most chilling character in the movie is the military guy who dispassionately, chillingly dismantles a group of teenagers, and he’s a non-professional actor who was actually in Homeland Security.

    [takes breath]

    Anyway, while I’m at it, and while you’re potentially  rolling your eyes at how humourless I am, facial disfigurement as a punchline can also fuck off. And the ending being our main characters enjoying consumerism and a weak sort of “it’s up to the next generation” beat? What was I saying about baby food for middle-class cunts?

    It all, ultimately, makes the claim that this film is some sort of actual political statement feel like wish-casting from both the leftist cinéaste and the right wing chud. It’s the setting for a story about family, and that’s about it. I wish it wasn’t so ironic and detached, but at least it’s not about how much he wanted to fuck his art teacher again.

    But as I said, I think about the middle of this movie all the time, and I loved the payoff in the climax (even if I did get a little tired of the undulations, sorry.) I respect the craft, but I guess with PTA for me it always comes down to if I’m buying what he’s selling rather than just appreciating what he’s doing. Here? Not so much.

    Follow Mathew on Letterboxd.

  • Pipistrello And The Cursed Yoyo (Pocket Trap, 2025)

    Pipistrello And The Cursed Yoyo (Pocket Trap, 2025)

    Developed/Published by: Pocket Trap / PM Studios
    Released: 28/05/2025
    Completed: 25/09/2025
    Completion: Finished it, though with a caveat that will be explained more or less immediately.

    Before we get into the article: you can pre-order a copy of exp. 2602, my brand new zine, right now. If you haven’t picked up any issues yet, there’s a discounted bundle of all three zines! Patreon members get an even bigger discount: subscriptions start at just $1!

    Don’t really have a good reason why I chose to play this above nearly everything in my to-play list recently other than, in a weird sort of bloody-minded way, I just wanted to play something that wasn’t Silksong, but you could conceivably pick up because you wanted something like that… without being like that. And hey, it says “cursed” in the title. That’s sort of spooky-adjacent, right? Fits the pre-halloween mood? Maybe?

    Pipistrello And The Cursed Yoyo was actually the perfect antidote for someone who was burned out on Silksong discourse without ever having touched it. Because feast your eyes on this:

    Image via https://gamersocialclub.ca/2025/06/23/pipistrello-and-the-cursed-yoyo-review/ because I was too lazy to take the screenshot myself. Sorry.

    Pipistrello And The Cursed Yoyo has the greatest difficulty settings I’ve ever seen. It’s genuinely amazing that it’s this granular. The game has a default difficulty and then you can just decide what parts are too much of a ballache for you. I know there’s been so much discourse over this–even before Silksong, John Walker has loved wading into it, god bless him–but here at exp. Towers we side with the idea that you should be allowed to play a game however you bloody well like. As much as I love thinking about and dissecting authorial intent in video games, as soon as the fucking thing is out the door you can treat it however you like. 

    If there’s one thing I’d possibly have wanted, it’s for the developers to include their own easy/medium/hard presets, but I actually think it works well enough that you can start the game, play for a bit and then realise what’s causing you unnecessary pain–and it doesn’t mean you’re breaking the game. It think it can be quite interesting to discuss, for example, when, where and how “runbacks” or other punishment mechanics can be a design choice that enhances, rather than detracts from a game, but I like that here they accepted that possibly you can just decide if it’s something you want to bother with or not, without fiddling with other levers if you don’t want to. I think you’re going to know pretty early if a mechanic like losing money on death feels fun or even legitimate to you or not–for me, I quickly turned it off because I was dying enough it was just going to lead to having to grind for cash, pointlessly bloating the playtime, and I’m, honestly, too old for that shit.

    (About half-way through the game I would also turn off fall damage, because the platforming challenges get extremely finicky, and the extra reload time was enough to annoy me. The game’s upgrade mechanics include upgrades specifically to reduce fall damage and cash loss, so this felt perfectly within the spirit of the design. Just a little extra edge.)

    Anyway, Pipistrello And The Cursed Yoyo is described by Pocket Trap as a “Yoyovania” but that’s not really what it is–it’s more clearly inspired by The Legend of Zelda in the Link To The Past milieu. You play Pippit (weirdly not Pipistrello, that’s their auntie?) the yoyo obsessed failchild of a family that holds a monopoly over all the energy in the city where the game takes place. Due to the monopoly squeezing every last penny from the city’s companies, the leaders of the four biggest companies decided to kill the matriarch, Madame Pipistrello, by sucking her soul into four big batteries which will provide limitless energy for their capitalist dreams (this makes sense, for reasons.) But Pippit intervenes, a fifth of Madame Pipistrello’s soul ends up in their yoyo! So off you go on a pretty clear quest: head to each company, beat up the owner, steal the battery, then once you have all four, put your auntie back together.

    This is all done via a charming, chunky top-down Zelda-a-like; designed almost exactly look like it’s being played on a Game Boy Advance (the game even opens with a 3D model of a GBA-look-a-like, and you can play the entire game on it if you want, with an LCD filter and everything.) When I started to play Pipistrello And The Cursed Yoyo, I was loving it. It’s bright, the controls are responsive, battles are fun, and there’s a great sense of progression as you explore the map collecting coins and finding new areas. But unfortunately, as the game loads on more mechanics, it starts to get… unwieldy. The bright and colourful graphics don’t have a lot of good clean “tells” on what you can do where, and while that might be because they want you to puzzle it out and experiment, it’s not so great when you’re in the middle of chaining traversal abilities to then have to work out what the next one you need to use is. And then actually executing traversal… well, it has the double whammy of the individual moves often being awkward to execute with the design expecting a high degree of competency. Every move has you pressing at least two buttons together, and moves only chain in certain ways, so when you reach the point–as you will–where you’re having to do something like six actions in one go or start again, it can get absolutely frustrating. (Again here, that the difficulty settings allow you to actually half the speed of the game is a life-saver. I won’t lie: I did it two or three times.) 

    The ultimate problem is that often you find yourself finishing a challenge and wondering–was that the way I was supposed to do that? Did I cheese it somehow? They can be so hard, or difficult to parse, that you never actually get to the point where you feel mastery, and that’s a problem. It’s even more of a problem in a game that feels like it should be open like its inspirations. Areas are obviously gated by traversal abilities, and it seems to limit you to two “dungeons” available at a time as a result, but each time it felt I went to the “wrong” one of two first and had to double back to the other one to actually progress. I really can’t tell if that is as designed, or if I just never understood traversal as well as I should have. 

    Battles are mostly fine–a good range of enemies, and intentionally designed encounters–but I think it’s here that the designers make arguably the strangest decision of all. The upgrade system is fairly normal–badges that give abilities or passives that you can equip, and permanent upgrades that you unlock–but the permanent upgrades require you to engage with a “debt” mechanic where you “pay off” the upgrade while suffering a hindrance. So, for example, you might have less life, or enemies won’t drop health.

    At best this is just annoying. While I get the idea, the implementation just means that you spend the entire game weaker than you actually are (and you can enter certain situations completely screwed–nothing like facing a boss with one health and not being able to do anything about it unless you want to return the upgrade and get less money back than you’ve paid in.) If the permanent upgrades had designed hindrances, like “you must use this loadout” or “yoyo can’t be separated from string in battle” (just off the top of my head–not specific recommendations) it could be interesting, forcing you to play in different ways than you have, but it’s usually just “the game is harder” which should make you want to just go to the difficulty menu and make the game… not harder. Again, it’s just holding you back from any rewarding feeling of mastery.

    These aspects–that the traversal is tuned towards extreme competence, and that the upgrade system means you never feel powerful–mean that Pipistrello And the Cursed Yoyo starts to outstay its welcome before you’re done with it. You can be done with the main path in something like 12 hours, and I really didn’t want to give it any more–which is sad, because when I started it I really had it in mind that I’d be searching out all the badges and unlocks, but the main path is so seemingly linear you don’t have much reason to go back on yourself with new abilities, and I just ended up wanting to push through to get it all done. It’s really only thanks to those difficulty settings that I could, honestly (if I had been stuck grinding for cash for the upgrades, I’d probably still be playing it.)

    Was it worth getting to the end? For me, yes, because I had to see where the narrative went. Not because I was loving it, particularly, but because it’s so… odd. The game has you as heir to what is basically a capitalist crime family that’s led by an awful person bleeding people dry, and then the other companies are even worse? I mean it’s not exactly Bioshock Infinite’s “If a cow ever got the chance, he’d eat you and everyone you care about” but let me just say they hardly plant any seeds for the face turn that you’re expecting will show up. I’m not sure quite what they were going for–I suppose it’s supposed to be some sort of commentary on capitalism, but it’s muddled.

    Anyway, here we have one of those classic examples of a game where finishing it kind of just put me off it, because the flaws just became more and more apparent. If it was half as long, or if I was the kind of person who was fine only playing half of something, I’d probably be raving about this. Oops!

    Will I ever play it again? There’s a new game+, which probably gives you a reason to go through the early areas again with all the abilities, but… to what end?

    Final Thought: I feel like I’ve been harsh on this one, so one thing I do want to say is that even if I did think it outstayed its welcome, it’s not for want of the designers trying. They go to extreme effort to make sure every area you visit has a new concept for you to deal with. Fans, lasers, switches, moving platforms, dark areas… each time they take an idea they leave no stone unturned, and so you’re always engaged. If you gel with this game–particularly when it comes to traversal–you really get your money’s worth here, and it’s even possible that if you’re just a little more aggressive with easing the difficulty settings than I was, you’ll hit a sweet spot either way. And for what it’s worth: I can see the counter argument that the team should have worked harder to tune the game to “avoid” having to include all these difficulty options, but the game’s issues are not ones that could be fixed by that.

    If you like the look of this, I’d still consider giving it a shot. Just… don’t try to be a hero and stick to the defaults. I don’t think it’s worth the pain.

  • The exp. Dispatch #10

    The exp. Dispatch #10

    Well, very funny to say in the last dispatch that I’d go to biweekly and then not actually send out another one for three weeks. Well, I’ve got a good excuse.

    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!

    Recently On exp.

    Announcing exp. 2602 For Pre-order Today!

    Said excuse! I suppose I did send this out to all subscribers at the start of the week. exp. 2602 has been in the works for a while, but it was put on hold when I rebuilt expzine.com, and then actually launching it got delayed even longer because I was so dissatisfied with ecommerce options like bigcartel and ko-fi (ko-fi in particular badly screwed me recently) that I decided to self-host—after all, I already have the website. I somewhat understand why people just pay to have someone else handle it all by now… but at least so far it seems to be working. Also—please consider pre-ordering! This is the last weekend before I absolutely have to get it to the printers, and your orders make sure I know how many to print!

    Subscriber Post: Elechead (Namatakahashi, 2021)

    This week’s subscriber post showed up a little late because of the announcement, so I hope people don’t overlook it. Namatakahashi is doing something really special in indie games right now.

    Unlocked Posts: Gravity Bone (Blendo Games, 2008) / Metroid (Nintendo, 1986) / Many Nights A Whisper (Deconstructeam/Selkie Harbour, 2025)

    Man, when you see the games listed out like this I really grasp how some people find it hard to hook into what I’m doing here. But my tastes are too catholic for me to limit myself to being, like, only an RPG or retro blogger or something. If you only want to read one of these, please read about Many Nights A Whisper—there’s only a few short months to find out if it stays at the top of my games of 2025 list. But uh… obviously read them all.

    From the exp. Archive: Cart Life (Hofmeier, 2010) / Soulcalibur: Broken Destiny (Project Soul, 2009) / Star Wars Pinball (Zen Studios, 2013)

    A couple of really throw-away articles here but I still think what I wrote about Cart Life hits. A “compelling and thoughtful critique” according to Eggplant‘s Rob Dubbin, so that’s nice. Surprisingly on Twitter, the website where linked articles go to die, I got some feedback on Soulcalibur: Broken Destiny too. @Yoshicookie, apparently a Kilik main, let me know it’s “actually the better version of [Soulcalibur IV], if it had proper multiplayer.” Good to know.

    exp. Capsule Review

    Blobun Mini (Cyansorcery, 2025)

    Didn’t really pay attention when downloading this because it looked so cute when it showed up in my feed–I guess I assumed it was a Crush Roller-a-like, or something. However, it turned out, concerningly, to be more of a “hard” puzzler, where you’re trying to fill in every square in a map with your cute little slimy bunny and you lose if you need to backtrack to do it. It’s not Sokoban, exactly, but it (maybe unfairly) raised memories of every game I’ve ever played where you do a complex chain of things but have fucked it up at one point in the last 100 moves and have to try and make sense of it.

    As a result I was initially considering putting this down completely, but I decided to stick with it for a bit as it’s a free PICO-8 game, so I was able to pick it up on my Trimui Brick whenever I had a spare moment (don’t leave me with my thoughts! I need to be doing something, please don’t leave me with my thoughts!) and Blobun Mini won me over for several very good reasons. 

    Firstly: every part of it glows with polish, from the charming UI through the responsive movement. Secondly, the game has an unbelievably smooth difficulty curve. It introduces new concepts carefully–and it has many for a game with just sixty levels–and every map is short enough that you never have too much to fix if you screw up. And thirdly, the game is unbelievably forgiving, with a complete rewind and even hints to start you off on each level.

    Much like Dino Sort, if you’re looking for a charming puzzler that you can pick up and put down and eventually finish you can’t really go wrong with this (I mean, it’s bloody free) and if you like it so much you can go ahead and play the “full” version of Blobun, which does look like it’s too much for me, but that’s fine.

    The only problem I have with this, actually, is that I finished every level but the last level didn’t “tick off” so it looks like I haven’t. A bug, maybe? But it’s a minor quibble.

    exp. Du Cinéma

    Superman (2025) / Evil Puddle (2025)

    Something something, catholic tastes. This is the second time a Motern Media production has shown up in this newsletter, so I assume you’re all complete converts already.

    Also reviewed: Eddington (2025), The Devil At Your Heels (1981) and Mountainhead (2025).

    Zine News

    Middle-Aged Teenage Angst Issue 1

    “Middle-Aged Teenage Angst: The Zine is now available to buy in print or as a PDF. 52 pages of new writing by me on forgotten TV, old mags, radio, wrestling, growing up, badges and, of course, music.”

    Retro Game SuperHyper Fanzine Issue #5

    “YES!! Over three years late, but I kept my promise, and the fifth issue of RGSH fanzine is finally finished and ready for you!!”

    This came out a fair few months ago now, but only came to my attention (as zines often do) thanks to Forgotten Worlds.

    ASTRO Gaming Lifestyle Magazine

    “This is a magazine that explores gaming as a lifestyle (think Nintendo Power meets curated fashion and lifestyle magazine). The book features 60 pages of my artwork alongside photography and featured community projects.”

    This is absolutely beautiful but I’m sad to note that it’s also fifty-nine dollars. I think it’s neat that there are higher-end zines and journals out there—think the amusingly similarly titled ON and [lock-on]—but I have to admit that I don’t have the funds to keep up. Maybe they’ll be up for a zine trade?

    zeenster.com

    Moheeb Zara’s free zine making app now works on mobile! Make your own zine and then charge sixty dollars for it. That’ll show ’em.

    And Finally…

    This is a fun one. I’d put off watching this until I finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, as I’d heard the book this talk (from two years ago!) was about heavily inspired it. When you watch this you’ll be absolutely shocked as to how much of a, well, complete rip-off Clair Obscur is, and of a book that was apparently a huge success in France! I’d be fascinated to read what French fans thought of the game—if they were just completely nonplussed by the things international audiences found fresh and exciting. Maybe that’s why the game makes such, er, big swings at the end? To differentiate it?

    Anyway, I’m absolutely gasping to read La Horde du Contrevent now. Considering I moved to Canada anyway, I should have really bothered to give a shit about French in high school. I guess if I can sell more copies of exp. 2602 I can be taken seriously as a publisher and try and get the rights? There’s an English translation sitting there waiting!

    Next week on exp.: Well, I did the Metroid, so…

  • Evil Puddle (2025)

    Evil Puddle (2025)

    When introducing Evil Puddle as the first film in his pre-TIFF Midnight Dankness screening (which raised over $4000 for PCRF and Islamic Relief Canada!) Peter Kuplowsky compared it to Eddington as a work of post-COVID cinema, and it is, I think, an excellent lens to view it from.

    Eddington is a cynical film that, if it argues anything at all, argues that we are all deeply alone–enveloped by our solipsism so completely that there is no such thing as community, and catastrophe only exposes our urge to self-preservation above all. That we are, ultimately, trapped in our own minds. Unable to see that we’re prey for higher powers and forces that we don’t–and couldn’t–understand.

    To me, this is the worst kind of satire–the kind that allows you to be smug because you’re clever enough to know how bad things are and clever enough to know there’s nothing to be done about it. A self-fulfilling inaction.

    Evil Puddle argues, instead that community is very, very real, in both narrative and form. From Matt Farley, Charlie Roxburgh and the cast of locals and fans that pitch in to play roles in their movies, Evil Puddle is a 1970s folk-horror disaster movie by way of community theatre in which some unlikely events lead to a small town’s water supply becoming, er, evil.

    Heavily featuring a magic rock, I’m unclear if after Magic Spot Farley and Roxburgh are creating a new thematic series of “magic rock” movies to follow their earlier, triumphant series of Druid movies, but the water which kills you instantly but otherwise looks completely normal and benign (you know, like, say, air with a virus in it) is the key factor here. Like classic disaster movies, the film flits between disparate characters who all face peril in different ways due to their predispositions. So, for example, you see some kids who have been using a hose to clean off rocks for a new tranquillity garden. You see a group of ne’er-do-well’s who seem to do little other than hang around a pizza parlour complaining about the free tap water. You see, er, a dance instructor and his student who happen to be learning close to a sprinkler (I think you get where this is going.)

    The movie doesn’t linger on punishing characters for their hubris–refusing to trust experts, or attempting to exploit others in their time of weakness–instead choosing to celebrate the characters who work together in even the smallest ways. Evil Puddle is unique in making one of its most rousing sequences about how sometimes the best thing you can do is accept some mild inconvenience rather than put yourself or others at risk.

    That this movie has been made by a community is what makes it all so dense with meaning. If you’ve followed the Motern Media universe for any length of time, it’s genuinely moving to see how the actors you know have aged and changed but that they’re still showing up, because that’s what people do. 

    It’s easy to be cynical. It’s unarguable that the tools that we use every day are being warped by big tech to isolate us ever more. But AI ain’t going to show up when you need help and it ain’t going to make a movie a tenth as good as this one, made with friends and family when they’ve got spare time, where it’s obvious when they’ve shot several scenes in single afternoons. Because you can’t replace community, you can only participate. Rather than inviting the audience to wallow in their smug inaction, it inspires. You could do this too. You can do anything you want. Someone probably wants to help!

    And the beautiful thing about Evil Puddle is that just by watching it, even if you have no idea where to start, you already get to join a community: the community of Motern Media fans. Hell, you can call Matt Farley right now if you want (his phone number is 603-644-0048. Give him a call, tell him this review sent you.) Why be smugly alone? Join us, it’s much nicer here.

    Follow Mathew on Letterboxd.

    Update (31/10/2025): Evil Puddle is available for purchase on Vimeo now!