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Tag: video games
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Wild Gunman (Nintendo, 1974)
Developed/Published by: Nintendo
Released: 1974
Completed: 31/05/2026
Completion: Played Reel A and C.
Well now howdy, y’all, gather round as I tell the tale of how I played the only Wild Gunman in the West….
*cough*
Ach, I cannae be arsed keeping that up for an entire essay.
Yes, in what can be considered an insane stroke of luck, I just happened to be within driving distance of Ontario Pinfest, Ontario’s only pinball show (though I admit I hadn’t actually ever heard of before) and 74XX Arcade Repair, aka Callan Brown, just happened to be taking his recreation of the North American Wild Gunman cabinet there. So obviously I had to go.
Wild Gunman has been covered in some detail before, so I’m somewhat wary of just reiterating a lot of prior work. I recommend Kate Willaert’s lengthy article on A Critical Hit that goes into the history, and I similarly have to push you towards Callan Brown’s video, where he goes into great detail about his own research after discovering an auction for some of the original 16mm reels.
But to summarise Wild Gunman’s story: the game was released in a fascinating period of Nintendo’s history, as it continued its transition from playing card manufacturer into entertainment powerhouse. Already successful in electronic toys, the company was continuing to expand, and Hiroshi Yamauchi hit upon the idea of using the company’s existing toy gun systems to create a laser clay pigeon shooting system, and to then install it in abandoned bowling alleys, as bowling as a fad had come and gone in Japan. It looked sort of bonkers:
This was, by all accounts, extremely successful until the 1973 oil crisis hit, leading to a ton of orders for the system being cancelled. This pushed Nintendo into debt to the point of bankruptcy–they had created a smaller version of the Laser Clay Shooting System, Mini Laser Clay for arcades, but it wasn’t enough of a success. Satoru Okada, Gunpei Yokoi’s “right hand man” and an engineer at Nintendo R&1 told Retro Gamer in 2016:
“Nintendo was in such poor financial state. I remember that president Yamauchi came to see us and said: ‘We need money. But in order for banks to lend us some, we need to show them that we have new fun projects to launch. In short, find me some new fun projects quickly, even if we cannot really sell them!’ Since we still had a lot of material left from the Laser Clay, we came up with the Wild Gunman project in a hurry. In the end, the president liked it and he insisted we sell it.”
Wild Gunman’s big benefit is that it’s immediately a lot more thrilling than simple clay pigeon shooting–because clay pigeons don’t shoot back. As designed, players step up, put on a holster(!) and pistol, with the idea that they’ll be shown five different opponents. The opponent’s eyes will flash, which is the player’s cue to draw, cock the pistol, and fire–all before the opponent shoots them. The goal is to shoot all five to get a perfect score, shown by lighting up all the sheriff badges on the machine.
The original Wild Gunman is a clever bit of tech, in that it uses two 16mm projectors, and it would switch to the second if you shot your opponent to show them falling over (otherwise it would just keep the first projector running). There were four film reels that operators could purchase, allowing them (I guess) to switch them out or, if they were feeling flush, have more than one machine running. What’s really fun is that I think you could assume that the footage was re-used from something else, because by virtue of the rich 16mm film stock it just really feels like something from a legitimate spaghetti western, albeit an especially cheap one. But according to Okada, it’s not! He states that the footage was shot by Yokoi, and it featured actors/random whiteys local to Nintendo who they found and shot at Dreamland, the now sadly demolished Disneyland-inspired theme park in Nara.
However, I’m going to have to quibble with Okada on his recollection, because there are four film reels, and if you look at the flyer, you’ll notice something:
Film reels A and B have a background that’s very building heavy. If you look at an image or map of Nara Dreamland, that seems correct. Inspired by Disneyland, it has its own version of Main Street, U.S.A., and I’m sure if you collected enough images from the park you could pinpoint where these shots were taken.
However, film reels C and D are suspiciously… deserty, and several feature guys riding horses. It doesn’t match any area of Dreamland I’ve managed to see online, digging through different sites.1 I found this pretty suspicious. I got briefly excited when I saw that some of the footage in reels C and D match footage in adverts for Nintendo’s light gun toys while looking something else up in Florent Gorge’s The History Of Nintendo (1889-1980), but that’s almost certainly re-use as the toys in question (Custom Gunman and Custom Lion) didn’t come out until 1976.
However, I would still gamble that these second reel sets were not in the original Japanese release of Wild Gunman, and possibly created for the North American release, which also heavily changed the cabinet design. If I’m correct in my hunch, this creates a new mystery: who shot this footage? The different canisters and film stocks that Brown has aren’t really helpful there. It seems unlikely it was, say, Sega (who hilariously released the North American version of Wild Gunman) but I’m sure a proper historian will dig into this and solve it at some point in the future.
That all said: How does Wild Gunman feel to play?
Now, I can’t say definitively, in some respects, as it’s worth noting the original Japanese version–initially called Gunfight–has a slightly different design, and Brown’s recreation of the western version has some changes (indeed the gameplay is a re-creation in Unity.) To have the exact experience of the Western version, you could hope that the guy in California who apparently has a real cabinet has put it back together, or possibly you could make your way to Vierzon in France and hope that the original machine that was seen there at a music festival(?) in 2011 is still there. But that said… I can’t imagine it’s that much different, and I’m confident in saying: Wild Gunman was great fun.
One of my absolute favourite arcade machines is Quick & Crash, Namco’s novelty quick draw game, and while Wild Gunman doesn’t quite hit the highs of breaking a “real” ceramic cup and being timed down to the millisecond, what really stands out is how close it is anyway–and I’m sure in 1974 the live footage was more than enough novelty.
It’s all about the experience of drawing the gun. There’s so much tension in preparing to shoot, and as much as you prepare yourself–”don’t shoot before you see the whites of their eyes,” you recite to yourself–the urge to panic and draw early is high. It’s exciting, too, that the game expects you to cock the gun before firing, adding just a touch more complexity to the experience.
Wild Gunman even features two levels of difficulty. Players can optionally turn on the “Foul Check” mode which requires that they draw and cock the gun after the opponent’s eye-flash, making the timing even harder. I have to admit I didn’t check with Brown if this mode had been implemented when playing the re-creation, as I was generally overwhelmed by the experience (on my first play he just told me to cock the gun early, and on my second I forgot to put the holster on, which is probably why in the video I took I look so cool and skilful.)
If I’m going to be a little critical, it feels like such a missed opportunity that the game doesn’t tell a bit of a story, though. It doesn’t need to have an intro or outro or whatever, but you can’t help but feel that the fact the game is just five random standoffs and then it’s over feels… wrong, considering the potential of using video. To have more sense that you were in a shootout against a band of outlaws or something.
But I also sort of get it. You can “lose” every battle, so it’s not like it makes any sense anyway, and at least originally they were filming random white guys they found in Japan and they probably just had to make do with what they got.
I played Wild Gunman twice at Ontario Pinfest because I was a bit shy and I didn’t want to bogart the machine. But I could happily have played it until I “mastered” it, the same way I have to play Quick & Crash until I’m as good as I remember being at it (good. The best, even. Don’t ask me to show you though.) That’s really remarkable for a game from 1974.
Will I ever play it again? I’m sure I’ll be back at Ontario Pinfest, or maybe Brown will be showing the machine elsewhere–I’ll be happy to play through the other two reels.
Final Thought: As exciting as the discovery of the Wild Gunman reels were, there’s a Nintendo shooting game reel that I suspect will never be found but which should be an A Day The Clown Cried level grail: according to Gorges, Yokoi and Nintendo created a prototype called Fascination using the Wild Gunman hardware, where the aim was to watch a (specifically noted as) Swedish woman dance around, and each time she paused to shoot off a piece of clothing until she was dancing around in the buff. This was never released (unsurprisingly) but was apparently very popular with the staff of Nintendo. I bet it was, the dirty buggers.
- And trying to work out which are AI slop websites that stole other people’s images. It’s getting harder and harder to work out what’s legitimate and worth linking. ↩︎
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Slay The Princess (Black Tabby Games, 2023)
Developed/Published by: Black Tabby Games
Released: 23/10/2023
Completed: 28/03/2026
Completion: Completed it twice. I couldn’t leave them there.After Milk Inside…/Milk Outside… I wasn’t feeling particularly positive about this one, feeling a bit concerned that another delve into inner-voice horror might not be the right move and I should just play something nice again. But I was surprised to discover how much I loved this; it absolutely deserves its plaudits.
It opens with a simple ask–get up to that cabin and kill a princess. I think initially this is going to go a few ways depending on what kind of player you are–you might just do it, you might fight it, or you might simply get stuck arguing with the voice that’s telling you to do it, as the game offers an either impressive or annoyingly self-aware amount of options for the kind of player who like to see where the edges are. Whatever happens, pretty soon you’re going to see some fucked up shit.
And before very long at all (well, depending on how long you spend arguing) you’ll learn you’re stuck in a loop. I think it’s that aspect where the wheels of the game come closest to coming off, because what starts as a simple story (“just kill the bloody princess”) becomes really huge and weird and existentially complicated. There’s a lot of detail that I admit I don’t really feel is necessary (I almost longed for the abstraction of Milk Inside…); the game could benefit from leaving at least a little more to mystery.
But it doesn’t take away from the enjoyable puzzle of trying to play the game your way. You’re not choosing who to date, here, but you’re trying to live up to your own code, reacting to what the game throws at you, and I appreciate the game often forces you into unwinnable situations.
Of course, like any choice-based game, they haven’t been able to cover every eventuality. On my second playthrough, where I really tried to stick to my guns, that I was occasionally forced to do things due to lack of other options really stung. At the end of the game I genuinely cared what happened, which I think really proves how well the game works (admittedly helped by the rich art and excellent voice acting.) I’m really surprised it never garnered more than an honourable mention at the 2024 IGF for Excellence in Narrative.
It’d be a bit rich to say the game was overlooked–lord, they’ve got enough money now that they’re publishing other games–but if there’s any possibility you have overlooked it, as I had until this sudden burst of research… don’t?
Will I ever play it again? There are a lot of more paths in that I could explore, but I’m completely satisfied.
Final Thought: I really wish I had a more consistent theme across this “theme week”, but I’m not ashamed to admit it came down to length. Sorry Raptor Boyfriend, Doki Doki Literature Club and more, once you’re creeping past an hour or two I go back to looking at my pile of unread books. It should really stand out, to be honest, that I played Slay The Princess twice. That’s how much I liked it.
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Milk Inside a Bag Of Milk Inside A Bag Of Milk / Milk Outside A Bag Of Milk Outside A Bag of Milk (Kryukov, 2020/2021)
Developed/Published by: Nikita Kryukov / Forever Entertainment
Released: 26/08/2020 / 16/12/2021
Completed: 22/03/2026
Completion: Bought milk / Went to sleep.These psychological horror video games form a pair in a way that I can’t really separate them—and indeed, as they’re sold as a bundle now, I don’t think you’re really meant to anyway. This is somewhat annoying, considering their lengthy titles, which for the sake of completeness I will list in full here once and only once: Milk Inside A Bag Of Milk Inside A Bag of Milk and Milk Outside A Bag Of Milk Outside A Bag of Milk (phew.)
Dealing with themes of trauma, depression, grief—though Milk Inside… in a more abstract manner–these games have a thriving analysis industry with all sorts of lengthy Youtube videos picking them apart, which I’m absolutely not going to compete with.
In Milk Inside… you’re an inner voice1 trying to help2 the protagonist get to the store and buy some milk. Like many of the Canadian-inclined, although this game comes from Russian game developer Nikita Kryukov, I assumed they put milk in bags in Russia for similar reasons they do in (some parts of) Canada but it’s entirely a translation mistake3. In Milk Outside… you’re trying to help4 the protagonist go to sleep after buying some milk.
These games are… fine! There’s an interesting sort of “Evil Dead to Evil Dead II” transition as the first game is grimy and unpolished whereas the sequel has a far glossier sheen, opening with a whole anime intro that reveals the protagonist is a girl cute enough to be dubbed “Milk-chan” by many fans (to be honest, it’s probably more of an “Evil Dead to Army of Darkness” level of glow up). There are more endings and routes to play with in the sequel too.
It’s a matter of personal taste, I guess, but these games didn’t really connect with me. The first game is sufficiently creepy, but something about that it identifies you with a voice rather than the girl herself detached me from the experience, and the second game is a touch to cutesy for me, and feels strangely drawn out even at merely an hour (compared to the first game’s sprightly twenty minutes, anyway.) A point-and-click segment feels like it should have been a nice little twist, but I kind of resented it for drawing things out.
It’s obvious I’m the outlier here; many people have connected with these games on a deep level, and while I found them interesting enough, they just didn’t stick with me. If they sound or look particularly interesting to you I think it’s likely you’ll respond better to them.
Will I ever play them again? There are a lot of paths I didn’t explore in Milk Outside… but I’m not especially interested, and the triggers are vague in a way that I think makes the game more conducive to a one-and-done. I don’t mind that, I do appreciate a game that wants you to play it once and get “your” story, but at the same time, I’m not sure if that was the intention here.
Final Thought: While I’ve got you… I have to complain about the fact that milk bags in Ontario are 1.33 litres. You can’t buy a glass bottle in that size!!! You’re stuck using a grody plastic jug that you put the bag into or giving up and buying the even less eco-friendly cartons or expensive fancy milk in returnable glass bottles (for more money) unless you want to start doing annoying fixes like always immediately drinking .33 litres of milk, or decanting into either a bottle that’s way too big or into two bottles. There’s got to be a better way!!!
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Doomed Love (Cooper, 2021)
Developed/Published by: David B. Cooper
Released: 11/06/2021
Completed: 22/03/2026
Completion: Finished it with every ending!I feel like every article I start recently has me open it by going “I had a research-related reason to play this…” and even though that’s usually true, how much it matters is debatable. I’m a man of rabbit holes, and it just happens to be the rabbit hole I found myself heading down was one of visual novels, and I wanted to play some quick ones to feel them out again. Although it’s a genre I like, I tend to rarely engage with it1, and I don’t think I’ve played one since… Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney in like 2022?
(I suppose it depends on how genre essentialist you are. Ace Attorney is an adventure game, in many respects, and Paradise Killer and 1000x Resist skirt close to visual novel. I’m not really that bothered about genre, but in this case I was looking for what people think of as “pure” examples.)
Anyway, Doomed Love is in the dating sim parody genre? Sort of? It gives the reviewers of Edge what they always wanted (you can talk to the monsters) as you play a simple zombieman preparing for the “Icon of Sin Festival” with your friends Cacodemon, Revenant, Mancubus and Demon–one of whom you may wish to take to the festival…
I believe visual novel-style dating sim die hards rankle a bit at the way in which the genre can be treated as a joke (especially as a marketing stunt, as seen with I Love You, Colonel Sanders) but Doomed Love (I think) joins the like of Hatoful Boyfriend in taking the style seriously–even if it doesn’t go to the absurd lengths that Hatoful Boyfriend does.
It’s a simple game–there’s only a couple of choices, and you can run through the game with every possible “date” within about twenty minutes–but it’s charming, and somehow there’s no friction with the game’s treatment of the cast of Doom as (essentially) high schoolers. I suppose you could complain that means that the Doom setting is really just a bit of set dressing, but I prefer that it takes the visual novel more seriously than it takes Doom.
I mean, I was really surprised by how in the short runtime each little narrative pays off. My absolute favourite being the Demon storyline, where the Demon becomes comfortable expressing their own unique identity and choosing their own name.
“It’s got a good heart” seems like a weird thing to say about a game about demons, but, well, Doomed Love has a good heart.
Will I ever play it again? I’ve rinsed it, so I’m good.
Final Thought: I googled David B Cooper and realised his name is… D. B. Cooper. Incredible to think he’d turn to writing visual novels after such a sensational crime.
- Weirdly, this is because usually when I think of playing one I look at my shelves of unread books and think “you know, if I’m going to do all that reading…” and then I just read a bunch of random Wikipedia pages or something instead. ↩︎
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King’s Knight (Square, 1986)
Developed/Published by: Square, Workss / Square
Released: 18/09/1986
Completed: 20/03/26
Completion: Finished it. Saved after every level until the final level, which was an orgy of save states, I’m afraid.This article is featured in Pixels and Polygons Quarterly 2026 Q2! It’s available as both physical and digital editions, available from the Pixels and Polygons webstore and Patreon respectively.
I don’t mean to do it. I don’t mean to keep adding games to my list of games to play. But when Darren Hupke of Pixels and Polygons asked if I had any articles on lesser-known Square games to hand for inclusion in a new issue, and I realised I really didn’t, I decided I’d take a look at their earliest output because playing Ubisoft’s Zombi really woke me up to the fact that the early history of even these huge, iconic companies is poorly remembered, and it’s sort of criminal because they really can be very interesting and illuminating.
Early Square is challenging to decode. The Japanese game companies that started in arcades–or sprung into existence with the Famicom–can be easier to parse because their games were more likely released internationally, but Square is a company that sprung from Japan’s rich homegrown personal computer market–an aspect of the growing industry that often goes completely overlooked in western games writing.
It’s another one of those things that I think shows an unusual kinship between Japan and the UK (along with things like “small island nation with outsize cultural footprint” and “horrific colonial past”): there’s an entire world of unique, interesting computers that formed a huge part of gaming culture that just goes almost completely forgotten because it didn’t “reach” America (even though in many cases versions of these games–or their game design lessons–would.)
Now, to be fair, Japanese game companies were quicker to transition to consoles than those in the UK (it’s interesting to think that it’s really only Rare who saw the writing on the wall, endeavouring to transition to the Famicom around about the same time as its Japanese contemporaries.) And the language barrier is uniquely high here, because you’re not just dealing with Japanese, but Japanese on an 80s personal computer. Square’s very first game was “The Death Trap” a text adventure, and while I’d love that to be the earliest Square game I play and write about, it’s untranslated and the entire game’s text is in katakana (only one of the three Japanese scripts) making it unbelievably hard to parse even if you’re a skilled reader of Japanese (of which I am not.)
So, ironically after all I’ve said, that means the earliest game developed by Square I can successfully play is King’s Knight, their first original game for Famicom! But it’s still a meaningful one to start with, as an important predecessor to Final Fantasy, being a fantasy-themed vertically scrolling shooter designed by Hironobu Sakaguchi and featuring music from Nobuo Uematsu.
Previously Square had really only developed adventure games, and let me say… you can tell. It feels like Sakaguchi read about Xevious, tried to mush an RPG into it, and then at no point had anyone test the game to see if it made any sense or if it was possible for an ordinary human to complete.
You can feel though that even with the obvious inspirations, Sakaguchi is trying to do something unique with King’s Knight–or at least, something a little more clever than just a shooter with hidden secrets. The setup of King’s Knight is very much your generic fantasy codswallop; Princess Claire has been kidnapped by a dragon, and so four heroes must quest–and ultimately work together–in order to save her. There are some pretty classic “slightly lost in translation” Japanese hero names here: we have a knight, “Ray Jack”, a wizard “Kaliva”, a lizard, “Barusa” and a thief, “Toby.” Each of these heroes gets their own vertically scrolling shooter level before the final level where you use them all at once.
Each of the heroes is featured on the Japanese title screen. They–along with the credit for Workss–are removed for the US release. This is one of the things where you can feel the effort to do something different. You don’t get multiple lives in King’s Knight; if a character dies, that’s it, and you just move onto the next level(!) indeed, if you manage to complete any level, it takes you to the final level so you can attempt to complete it, though it’s impossible to complete without all four heroes1.
King’s Knight is–at its face–a brutally unforgiving game where you can’t afford to lose a single life. The design does try to take the edge off: firstly, you don’t die in a single hit; you’ve got a life bar. Secondly, the levels are covered in power-ups. This is done in a really strange implementation of the Xevious “uncover secrets” design that kicked off so much of Japanese game design in this era: your bullets destroy raised terrain, and the levels are almost entirely raised terrain.
You can actually jump up onto it–which has, as far as I can tell, limited use–but really what you’re going to be doing is hammering the fire button to destroy as much of it as possible. Enemies will pop out, which is supposed to make you be a bit more careful, but as they just run straight at you–and the level is covered in enemies anyway–it’s really not that much of a deterrent. You’ll otherwise reveal power-ups to increase your strength, defence, speed or jumping ability, health arrows (up arrows restore your health, down arrows hurt you) and on each level there are four “elements” that must be collected so each character can cast their spell on the final level–one of which is in a dungeon sub-level, which you also have to reveal by destroying terrain.
King’s Knight has an uneasy puzzle game design that visually destroys the fantasy illusion, because quickly the screen is covered in up and down arrows like you’re playing Dance Dance Revolution and failing badly. I do understand where Sakaguchi is coming from. King’s Knight is a post-The Tower of Druaga title, and I suspect on seeing that game’s implementation of light RPG mechanics he was eager to take its system of upgrades and feed it back into a shooter, but didn’t want to fall into the same “work out what you have to do to progress while autoscrolling” design that Xevious’s sequel Super Xevious: GAMP no Nazo would fall into (stunningly, released the day after this in Japan.)
The problem is that this kind of design still takes you away from the joy of playing a shooter, replacing it with the grim memorisation of a map. You barely pay attention to the enemies. Indeed, you barely pay attention to taking hits, because the levels are flooded with symbols and you just can’t afford to miss the elements or upgrades, so you rely–as much as possible–on picking up health arrows to survive.
The power-ups (and downs) stick out like a sore thumb. A single mistake can end your entire run, but thankfully they realised this was shockingly cruel because King’s Knight has a rudimentary save system. After you’ve been through all the levels at least once on the title screen you can press Select instead of Start to go to a party screen that shows the power levels of each character and choose which ones to play, skipping the levels of characters you’ve fully powered up to get to the final level quicker. This doesn’t improve things much–you still have to complete the game in one sitting–but at least you don’t have to do every level to get to the final level. This splits King’s Knight into two stages: playing it until you memorise the first four levels, and then hitting your head against the brick wall of the final level endlessly.
A lot of games of this era I can’t believe anyone completed; King’s Knight is up there, because in the final level you’re no longer just one hero but all four on screen in formation. This functionally means that your hitbox is four times the size! Just surviving would be hard enough, but the game adds a couple of new quirks to make it harder: the level is covered in statues of lions, dragons and gargoyles that require you attack them with the correct hero to kill them quickly (they attack relentlessly) which requires you move your heroes over symbols on the floor of the level to change their formation. You also need to change formation to make sure the correct hero is at the front so they can cast their magic spell at the correct time–which isn’t going to be obviously apparent (especially as there’s no feedback if you’re trying to cast the wrong spell, or the right spell at the wrong time.)
King’s Knight, until the final level is a strange shooter that would be pretty basic and forgettable–far less engaging than something like say Twinbee–if it wasn’t for the strange terrain mechanic, but the final level is like playing a bullet-hell shooter where your character takes up a quarter of the screen. It’s made even worse by the fact you can’t control who is leading the formation easily–if you get who you want at the front, you can get stuck in areas of the screen as the change symbols suddenly become obstacles that can automatically end your run as they force you to change to the hero that can’t cast the next spell you need.
It’s not impossible, but it’s a grim march of memorisation and luck for very little reward.
King’s Knight was also released on MSX shortly after the Famicom release, and while it’s slower and jerkier, it has one particular aspect that you really feel the loss of in the Famicom version: there’s a status bar that lets you know your current hero’s power levels and if they’ve collected the needed elements.
Square obviously had some fondness for King’s Knight: not only did they release it for more Japanese home computers (the NEC PC-8801mkII SR and Sharp X1) in 1987, they’d choose it as their inaugural release for NES as Squaresoft in the USA in 1989. This is a nice edition–coming with a map and a detailed instruction booklet–but it’s a strange release because the game would have felt so dated by 1989. Not even in just comparison to other NES shooters; Square had released more technically impressive games with other publishers and Nintendo Of America would still take over publishing duties for Final Fantasy in 1990, so it was either some sort of low-stakes way for Squaresoft to get up and running, or Square simply liked the idea of starting their independent publishing in the US with the same game they did so in Japan.
I wish I could say King’s Knight was a noble failure, but it’s simply a naive one. Too hard, too awkward and ultimately, not fun. But it does show that Sakaguchi was thinking about how to get an epic quest with four unique heroes on Famicom, so maybe it does have its place in history.
Will I ever play it again? I’d really rather not.
Final Thought: Another argument that Square have a particular fondness for King’s Knight is that a remake of it was released in 2017 on mobile, King’s Knight: Wrath of the Dark Dragon, retconning the game into the Final Fantasy XV. Sadly, the game was shut down in a year and is now lost. They really gotta stop doing that!!!
- It might be possible to get to the very end of the level with just Toby if you are superhuman, but I don’t think so. You could definitely get to the end without Kaliva, but the final boss has to be hit by all four heroes, so you’d still be unable to finish the game. ↩︎
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UFO 50 #4: Paint Chase (Perry, 2024)
Developed/Published by: Jon Perry / Mossmouth
Released: “October 1983” (18/09/2024)
Completed: 21/12/2024
Completion: Completed it.After the experience of Ninpek, I played Paint Chase a couple of times and realised I’d have to complete a whopping twenty-five stages in one go to finish it, and I decided that I couldn’t be arsed and put UFO 50 down completely and played a bunch of other things instead. But after finishing Indika I thought I’d load it up and, uh… I guess it’s sort of funny that I should rail against the vision of UFO 50’s creators that you should have to “git gud” in order to finish games in this collection and for me to finish this quite easily on like, my fifth go.
Now, to be fair, Paint Chase isn’t exactly easy. A maze-painter game in the style of Crush Roller/Make Trax, as a wee race car the player is trying to paint in the majority of a level before the timer is up–while enemy vehicles spawn from spawners and paint the level in their own color unless you can destroy them. It’s a very clean, simple and rewarding design, which they evolve quite carefully across the twenty five stages via level and enemy design.
At first, you’ve just go the spawners, some speed boosts and enemy cars that you destroy by smashing into; but quickly the game introduces wrinkles such as buttons that change the level layout, and enemies that blast paint everywhere if you don’t get to them in time.
In fact, you can barely go a level without them introducing a new concept, which is almost certainly what is going to make you fail the game and have to–annoyingly–start the entire thing over again. While Paint Chase does feature some Pac-Man-style interstitials that help explain what enemies do, you still often find yourself on a level, see something like a red bomb, and then have to trial-and-error you way to working out that you can only destroy them easily by driving into them while boosting.
Now, this is a pretty classic bit of game design, really. I mean, I’ve beaten The Tower of Druaga, probably the most brutal “uh, try some stuff?” video game in history, but [taps watch] I don’t have all day here, and having to restart Paint Chase because I didn’t know what an enemy would do until I did it can, frankly, fuck off. For example, there’s an enemy towards the end of the game that I genuinely think is such a clever subversion–if you boost into it, as you want to do with basically every other enemy, you will spread the enemy paint across the screen as you skid. So the game now requires you to carefully plan when to hit a boost or not, adding another layer to the play.
Once I knew that… fun! Working that out by having to start the game again? No thanks!
I won’t lie–I looked up an enemy guide online for this, and once I knew what everything did, Paint Chase was a lot more pleasant. There are still some frustrating levels–the enemies you have to come at from a specific direction are never easy to deal with–but when you’re playing the game on a level playing field, it’s… fun, actually. Whisper it, but I could have happily played it for longer–the enemies allow for way, way more levels to be made than there currently are.
I won’t lie, though–I’m unbelievably happy that I was able to polish this off so quickly, and I think for some players even with an enemy guide this one might be a nightmare. But then I’m also sure that loads of players beat Ninpek on like their third try. Horses for courses.
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Gris (Nomada Studio, 2018)
Developed/Published by: Nomada Studio / Devolver Digital
Released: 13/12/2018
Completed: 05/04/2026
Completion: Finished it. Did most of the extra puzzles for the first couple of sections then lost the taste for it and only did extra ones by accident.Gris has sold over three million copies and been out for eight years, so I think I can get away with saying: it’s bad!
I can be pretty hard on “artistic” games, by which I make a distinction from pure “art games” and the more commercialised form. The kind of game that may have ~themes~ but still feels like a product. Games that, often, don’t really feel like they’ve got anything to say–or at least, nothing that challenges the audience (not that all art has to be a slog.)
I’m aware that this may be uncharitable; after all, it can be personal preference. We come to anything with the knowledge we already have; a work that might seem obvious and derivative to me might be completely mind blowing to another person who has never seen anything like it. So I shouldn’t–really–beat up on Gris too much for being trite.
In Gris, you play the titular character who–after waking up in the palm of a crumbling statue–travels through a 2D platformer world gaining abilities, collecting stars and facing off against a black creature who seems to want to stop her bringing colour back to the world.
There’s no dialogue, but the game is–blatantly–about grief and the “black dog” of depression, and if you think that “binging colour back to the world” and being chased by a big inky black creature that’s trying to stop you is sort of an embarrassing way to explore those themes, well, snap. But I did intend to be charitable on this aspect, so let’s just let that slide.
What I can’t let slide is that Gris is simply not enjoyable to play, with a catalogue of design flaws that make it–despite what should be a breezy, sub-four hour playthrough–miserable. First: the game does an absolutely horrific job in making it clear what is something you collide with or not. What’s foreground, background and so on.
The game is very art-forward, which is understandable, but it feels like there’s no consistency. There are so many sections–especially in a later swimming section–where I repeatedly just hit myself against walls because it looked as much like background as anything else. I admit was on an Steam Deck, so you could argue the game’s reliance on zooming out a huge amount is at fault, but I don’t really think “you need a big monitor or telly” is much of an excuse, or even true.
What do you collide with here? The level design is also full of the kind of decisions that should have been caught long before release. Pretty much every level begins with you being dropped somewhere so you can head either left or right… with no hint of a critical path. Indeed, sometimes the game takes you back to a hub and every time it happened I thought “oh, I’ve made a mistake here” but I hadn’t. You could argue that’s kind of a magic trick–I was always heading in the right direction–but if I’m still feeling uncertain and unclear, it’s not so much a magic trick as “something confusing that happened.”
A lot of the problem relates to the fact that the game doesn’t make movement especially fun. Gris makes the classic error of making your movement unpleasant at first so it can get better later (rather than starting good and getting excellent; I admit I just complained about this in Promise Mascot Agency.) If I enjoyed movement, I’d be more inclined to explore when hit with a variety of directions I could possibly go.
Gris feels like she’s moving very slowly in those massive zoom-outs (you’ll beg for a dash) and when they introduce swimming, it’s so frustratingly slow and gummy it’s just awful (and don’t think you can try and double-jump your way out of the problem–each time you get dunked, making it feel even slower.)
And yet ironically, one of the worst things about Gris is that in key narrative moments–big chase scenes–you lose control completely1 reducing you to a mere spectator of the beats that should be thrilling. It’s not a relief to not have to move Gris; it just makes you wonder why you’re bothering to play any of it at all.
For a game that wants to be about overcoming adversity, it’s a problem that the actual adversity that the game provides is simply a catalogue of tiny frictions that make every interaction with it low-level annoying. The puzzles–which use Gris’ growing range of abilities–are basically fine and paced acceptably. Indeed, one aspect of the level design I appreciated was how they tucked the “extra” puzzles for collectibles around the critical path puzzles so they kind of worked as a second challenge on the “same” puzzle. But after the first level, I just stopped doing them, because I wasn’t interested in struggling with the game feel any further than I really had to.
If I’m being completely fair to Gris, even if I found the narrative at best basic and obvious, you could go over this game, get rid of all of its frictions and you’d have a solid–if maybe uninspiring–puzzle platformer. It feels very much like a problem of not getting the feedback when it could have made a difference, not listening to it, or simply not having the time to act on it. But who am I to speak? As I said, this sold millions of copies. They’re fine!
Will I ever play it again? I’m good. The team went on to make Neva, and I suppose I have some interest if they were able to fix the problems of Gris with it, but not enough to find out.
Final Thought: There’s an extra cutscene for getting all the collectibles, and something I suppose I do find sort of interesting is it makes the exact theme of the game explicit. Now, you might think I’d be against that, considering everything I’ve said, but in a weird way the cutscene does “cap off” the narrative in a way the normal ending doesn’t, and I think it’s kind of a shame that they hide it from most players. I contain multitudes.
- Pedants may wish to note that you can slightly move Gris left and right or up and down in some of these. But it’s meaningless. ↩︎
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Promise Mascot Agency (Kaizen Game Works, 2025)
Developed/Published by: Kaizen Game Works
Released: 10/04/2025
Completed: 10/03/2026
Completion: Finished it doing pretty much everything outside of getting all the garbage and signs.I was a big fan of Kaizen Game Works’ Paradise Killer, even though I came to it late, and I’ll admit to being a bit hesitant about Promise Mascot Agency, considering the risk–a UK company making a game about wacky Japanese mascots?–but I was concerned before playing Paradise Killer that it’s vaporwaveyness was going to be grating, and it more-or-less worked, so I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Well, Promise Mascot Agency is a textbook example of that “difficult second album.” There’s a lot to like here, but there’s also a kind of messiness to it. If it was literally an album, there’d be some really discordant stuff on there, the kind of album where you want to skip every third or fourth track because it doesn’t work, and on which none of the other songs are quite fully-formed enough to quite get their hooks into you. Not an album, even, where you feel ambition got the better of them, just one where they noodled too much, for too long, and ended up with something that almost–but not quite–works, and to do anything else would require throwing away all the work they’d already done, and what’s there isn’t terrible, so it doesn’t deserve that.
In Promise Mascot Agency, you play Michi, aka “The Janitor”, a classic, Yakuza-series style honour-above-all super amazing guy, which means it makes perfect sense that he’s voiced by the literal Kazuma Kiryu, Takaya Kuroda. Michi and his yakuza brother, Toki (who doesn’t seems sus immediately at all) are ambushed on a job, leading to his family owing a truly absurd amount of debt and his death a requirement. Lucky for Michi, however, the family happens to own a failing mascot agency in Kaso-Machi, a town where Yakuza never go because… it’s cursed! The kind of curse that kills any Yakuza who goes there. Considering he’s a dead man anyway, Michi heads to Kaso-Machi in his shitey old kei truck, aiming to raise as much money with the help of a sentient finger before he croaks from whatever it is the curse does.
Promise Mascot Agency is, in a lot of ways, a mechanical follow-up to Paradise Killer. Both games are open world genre mash-ups: if in Paradise Killer you were playing a sort of first-person Crackdown smooshed into a deduction game–leaping around to collect clues–in Promise Mascot Agency you’re (kind of) playing Burnout Paradise, but driving around to collect the mascots and other things you need for the management sim. You never control Michi outside of the truck, so if you’re not driving around, you’re either in cut-scenes or menus.
Like Paradise Killer, going around the world collecting stuff is great! It’s a complete pleasure to explore, smash signs, pick things up and so on—well, past a certain point. Again like Paradise Killer, there’s an upgrade system, and while it’s better here–there are more upgrades–it’s got a problem which upgrade systems sometimes face: the upgrades don’t make the kei truck more fun they make it less shitty.
I get it from a narrative standpoint–the truck isn’t really supposed to be some incredible off-road super car–but much like Paradise Killer, one of the very first things you’re going to want to do is just find most of the upgrades and be done with it. You don’t need them all immediately, but there are a couple that make exploration so much nicer (and more rewarding) and those ones do feel like they probably should have been handed out on the critical path close to immediately, leaving the others as nice to haves.1
But really Promise Mascot Agency’s true problem is–sadly–the whole “mascot agency” bit. Game director Oli Clarke Smith has said that the original idea came from the team’s art director, Rachel Noy, and the original idea was a 2D Kairosoft-like, but that Smith and tech director Phil Crabtree “wanted to create something bigger.”
They have certainly created something bigger, but it betrays the entire concept of the game. There’s no real management at all. You hire mascots–choosing their compensation–send said mascots on jobs, and that’s about it.
That really wouldn’t be the worst thing–I’m fine with simplicity–but for the fact that for some reason there’s also a card game jammed in. When mascots go on a job, there’s a percentage chance–higher when they’re new and low rank–that they’ll fuck up the job somehow (getting stuck in a door because their head is too huge being the classic example.) The way you solve this problem is that you have “hero cards”–collected in-world–with which you can play a simple card game to defeat the problem. The problem has HP; you play cards of the required type to damage it.
It’s not a difficult or in-depth game at all. It’s basically Top Trumps, though as you upgrade the cards by playing through the story or collecting more collectables, some cards will give you more actions or allow you to draw more cards, but generally you just play the cards with the highest damage. It feels like a really half-formed idea, and the problem is that you do it fucking endlessly.
Now, the game gives you the option of sending mascots off with consumables that will make this game show up less, but that bumps up against the game’s design otherwise, where you’re really trying to make as much money as possible. The kind of player who doesn’t use health potions on bosses “because they might need them” isn’t going to buy and burn thousands of yen worth of consumables just to give themselves a 50% less chance of a mini game that’s “quick.”
And as quick as it is, it’s unbelievably annoying to send a bunch of mascots off on jobs, think “ah, now I can do the thing I like: driving around collecting shit” and drive 30 seconds only to have a bunch of alerts meaning you have to play the card game three or four times.
It’s really disastrous for Promise Mascot Agency. Unlike Paradise Killer, where collecting stuff really ties deeply into the conversations, and getting to do another conversation with new stuff is a pleasure to aim for, in Promise Mascot Agency the actual mascot agency is just an annoyance. If you’ll allow me to return to that album metaphor, it really feels like if you got an album and there was a car alarm that set off randomly in every song. And not in a good way (I feel like I need to say this for everyone who’s a fan of experimental, car alarm-based music.)
It’s just really hard to get into an enjoyable flow with Promise Mascot Agency until you get to the point where you don’t need money any more, and when you don’t need money any more… you don’t need to send mascots off anyway!
To be honest, the whole game is just quite oddly paced. You can blame my min-max brain again, but they introduce the idea that you need to send money back to the family in a certain chapter fairly early into the game, but before that chapter you don’t have to, and you can do basically everything else in the game. So… as soon as I realised that I could play it without slowing my accumulation of money by having to send cash back (and I could instead spend it all on town upgrades or other things that increased passive income) I did that for as long as I could stand, and then basically speedran the actual plot.
And that plot is… ehhh. You obviously know why the job went wrong immediately, and the mystery of Kaso-Machi is… fine. Paradise Killer’s plot is pretty messy, but I found it came together well, but Promise Mascot Agency just doesn’t feel that rewarding. And it’s actually a problem of the mechanics.
In Paradise Killer, the reason the ending works is because it’s building on everything you’ve done: your entire time spent building a case (or cases) is all used at the end, and you really do shape what happens by your play. In Promise Mascot Agency, the climax is a big mascot competition where the odds are unfairly stacked against you. Going into it, I thought “oh man, this is actually where the card game is going to matter. It’s going to really require me to have upgraded all my cards and play them in the right order to do enough damage to win.”
But… it doesn’t. The entire end of the game is completely scripted. You can just not bother to try at all because you get deux ex machina cards in your deck after some forced losses.
This sucks! It sucks so much! It makes all the effort you expended feel wasted and it hammers home that the card game isn’t really anything at all other than something to gum up your time spent playing this.
I got to the end of Promise Mascot Agency completely and utterly deflated. It’s a game that just works against itself. I had a jolly time driving around and collecting stuff, and while the story isn’t any great shakes, I liked the character designs and enjoyed some of the mascot story beats. But what’s portrayed as the core not only isn’t really there, the game would probably be better if it was removed.
Ah well, third albums are usually good, aren’t they?
Will I ever play it again? Rinsed this. Well, I didn’t do the races, or some of the other extra content, but I didn’t have much urge to do any of it.
Final Thought:
Speaking of the character designs… Matriarch Shimazu. If I didn’t think everyone at Kaizen Game Works knows what they were doing with Matriarch Shimazu some of her later character poses makes it exceedingly clear they knew what they were doing. Let me simply say: 🥵.
- I suppose the argument could be made that the most necessary ones are pretty hard to miss, but they can still be missed… ↩︎
