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  • 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.) ↩︎
  • Flotilla (Blendo Games, 2010)

    Flotilla (Blendo Games, 2010)

    Developed/Published by: Blendo Games
    Released: 03/25/2010
    Completed: 13/07/2025
    Completion: Survived an entire run with… caveats.

    Well, I didn’t get the Xbox out as I said I wouldn’t in my Gravity Bone essay, but I did decide to play some Flotilla on PC. This worked out in my favour because I almost immediately remembered why I gave up on Flotilla the first time–that I don’t have a fucking clue how to move ships in 3D space–and was then able to abuse a save mod to be able to literally not die in my first or second battle every time. I mean I literally died in the tutorial on my first run!

    Flotilla is an interesting one, because it’s a good example of a “nearly there”, a work that makes you think of a huge hit that came later that just nails what it was trying to do. In this case, it’s FTL, which takes the metagame (travelling between nodes in space, experiencing events or battles) but ties it to a much more understandable battle system more inspired by board games like Space Alert and a clear drive towards a conclusion.

    In some respects, it’s a shame that Flotilla wasn’t a success, because arguably FTL misses some of the spirit of Flotilla, but in others, it makes total sense. As I said above, the battle system is extremely taxing. Not only does it require the player have a really strong understanding on how to position things in 3D space on a 2D screen, you also have to be able to predict how multiple opponents will themselves move in 3D space, because turns happen simultaneously. And ships are only really vulnerable from above or below, so it’s not even a matter of just trying to make a beeline to enemies and wipe them out–you have to track how they’re oriented and consistently flank them to do any damage.

    In my case, once I had worked out how to move my ships (you do x/y movement first, then z, which while not intuitive, does make sense if you can stand to constantly reposition the camera to see what you’re actually doing) I quickly learned I have no knack for prediction whatsoever. Send a ship to flank? It’d just end up miles away from the ship I intended because that ship would move in a way I didn’t expect–or somehow it would end up exposing its belly while flying directly at it. Again: I died on the tutorial.

    The mistake Flotilla makes is that it’s designed to be a short, replayable experience–each run is supposed to be, like, a half an hour, as you’re cast as a starship captain with seven months to live–but thinks that makes it ok that you’ll die in the first couple of nodes tens of times because the game is hard. It doesn’t! You just feel like you’re not getting it. You never get to settle in, see the campaign play out a little.

    It would be unfair to call the game complicated–the rules are very simple once you understand them. It’s just that the combination of rules, interface and simultaneous movement makes the whole thing deeply frustrating, and it stops you enjoying the metagame, which hints to everything that FTL would do. You get to experience cute events which can pay off in future events or battles, ships “level up”, and you can get useful upgrades for them. You can even expand your fleet with new and bigger ships. 

    You’ll probably face those bigger ships before you get any yourself though–nothing quite as demoralising as getting further than you ever have and immediately having your ships carved into pieces by a “beam ship” that the tactics now require you keep your distance from (how!!!)

    One thing I do like–perhaps counter-intuitively–is that the game doesn’t have a final boss or conclusion that you’re working towards as in FTL. In FTL and other games of this sort–your Cobalt Cores, for example–you have to always be building towards that final battle. If luck doesn’t grant you the build you need or are working towards–your run is pointless. Here the end is: you die, either in battle or from your terminal illness. There is an “endless” mode (added after release) but I like that the idea of the game was just “have fun in space until you die!”

    The problem is that I don’t find the battle system fun at all, so I can’t! In the end I just used save backups to play a full run, which of course, was meaningless. But it was nice to have this deadly, upgraded fleet after rescuing some cats and ripping off some hitchhikers before I shuffled off this mortal coil. Felt like I’d done something with my life.

    Cats!

    It’s that stuff that makes Flotilla so charming, and kind of what kept me battering my head against it so pointlessly. It’s got style. Panache. And I think if you like this type of taxing, 3D space battler, well, this is a step out of the norm and all the better for it. But it’s not for me.

    Will I ever play it again? Absolutely never, no. There’s a sequel, Flotilla 2 for VR, and  feel like moving ships around literally in 3D space might make it more playable. However…

    Final Thought: Flotilla 2 cuts the campaign out completely! Even if I was to get fancy and pick up a Steam Frame or something being unable to rescue cats drops what feels like the unique selling point of the game (for me.) But at the same time, really the battle system is the distinguishing factor, and I don’t actually like it! So I suppose if I want to play a node-based event/battle roguelike-like with funny events, there’s like… six hundred I haven’t played. I can just play one of those.

  • 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.)

  • Alex Kidd In Miracle World (Sega, 1986)

    Alex Kidd In Miracle World (Sega, 1986)

    Developed/Published by: Sega
    Released: 01/11/1986
    Completed: 1/09/2025
    Completion: Finished it. Save states were used (for some obvious reasons.)

    The discourse has long moved on, but a while ago there was a “revelation” that the extremely French CEOs of Sandfall (of Clair Obscur fame) and Lizard Cube (of Sega remake fame) didn’t play Nintendo growing up. This was one of those classic “Americans learn that their experience isn’t universal… and decide that’s stupid and wrong” online spats where everyone got annoyed at each other’s ignorance. Usually it’s like, learning people in another country prepare or enjoy a food in a slightly different way, and it’s always a bummer: that yes, the US believes its culture is the “normal one”, that the US view is dominant and pulls focus so much that even people in other countries might not know their own history, and that it’s never a learning experience for anyone because the urge to dunk on each other rather than celebrate a diverse history is completely overpowering.

    Which was interesting timing for me to play Alex Kidd in Miracle World. It’s really only the second time I’ve played a Master System game to write it up, having only previously played Fantasy Zone because I suddenly hungered to play a version of Fantasy Zone (because Fantasy Zone fuckin’ rules.) It’s interesting timing because the Master System, to me, represents so much about just how different video game culture is across the world, and how different people’s personal experiences of it can be.

    I mean, first of all, it wasn’t even originally the Master System, releasing in Japan in late 1985 as the Sega Mark III, where it failed to compete in really any way with the Famicom. It was then released in North America in 1986 around about the same time the NES went wide, only to get crushed by Nintendo’s stringent licensing agreements with third-party publishers, leaving it with a deeply limited game library.

    In Europe, however, it wasn’t released until 1987(!) and despite Sega managing to completely botch the UK launch, it managed to massively outsell the NES (as it would, quite famously, also do in Brazil under the Tectoy brand.) And then loads of games aimed at these specific markets would be released that wouldn’t see the light of day in Japan or the US!

    So the Master System was, and wasn’t, a success. It did, and didn’t, have loads of games and mindshare. And even on that you need to get a little more specific, because if you’re thinking about Europe things get even more fragmented. You might think “oh, it outsold the NES, so it was the biggest thing in games.” But of course, if you know anything about the era, you know the biggest thing in games there were home computers–at release it was competing with the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, even the Atari ST and the just released Amiga 500. And depending on what country you’re from, which of those was dominant could have been completely different–I’m sure for many of the developers at Sandfall and Lizardcube, the first 8-bit computer to mind is the Amstrad CPC due to its popularity in France1 [“It should be anyway”–CPC Ed.].

    Of course, they might not have an 8-bit computer to mind at all, depending on their age. Because not everyone is tiresomely playing through games before their time (ahem), and the era you came of age in has a huge effect on how you see certain things. To get personal, I don’t think I was conscious of a video game “industry” until around 1991(!)–I am pegging this, roughly, to the point when I started getting issues of Amstrad Action [“Hurrah!”–CPC Ed.]. But I’m also aware that by then my entire experience of, say, the NES was those kiosks in Currys or Dixons that let you play Fester’s Quest for literally ten seconds. I certainly never knew anyone who had one.

    Because I didn’t come of age–or at least, understanding–in the “true” 8-bit generation, the thing about the Master System that stands out to me–even as an Amstrad CPC owner in the twilight of the 8-bit systems–was that it felt like a “poverty” system.

    This might seem cruel, and indeed, incorrect. Even in the 90s the true poverty system was probably the Atari 2600–or the 7800, still being flogged in catalogues–but you have to remember one thing: Sega’s own advertising. The Mega Drive had been released in Europe in 1990, and kids were seeing adverts like this:

    It’s impossible to overstate how unbelievably cool this seemed to me as a child. A suave adult who lived in a truck with a spinning gaming chair??? You’re just going to have to trust me on this that it didn’t sound as bad then as it sounds now, because now that’s a real “hello, human resources???”

    But the point is–why would anyone want a Sega that wasn’t the Mega Drive? That wasn’t as good as the Mega Drive, a system that looked this cool? Poverty! Poverty!!!

    And it’s from this, perhaps, that you might argue Alex Kidd In Miracle World has caught a stray. Because as the in-built game on a poverty system, it just had to be rubbish. A wee game they included for people who couldn’t get any games with the system. I mean it had to be crap–it didn’t even come on its own cartridge!

    First impressions don’t help. Sure, the Master System had really bright graphics compared to the NES’s muddy browns, but the NES was a complete non-entity in the average British schoolchild’s mind. And Alex Kidd opens with probably one of the least exciting first screens ever, where you head down and immediately have to get to grips with Alex’s weird, slippery movement.

    As we know, platform game feel in 1986 wasn’t a solved problem–I’ve said it again and again that the original Super Mario Bros. just feels sort of weird–but Alex Kidd has a really slidey, sloppy feel, a little too fast in a way that looks wrong; you feel yourself sliding a collision box around rather than controlling a character, which isn’t helped by just how strict that collision box is–there are no close shaves here. Get even close to an enemy and die.

    Alex Kidd really only makes sense, at all, once you learn that the developers were literally just trying to do everything different from Super Mario Bros. to compete with it. Shmuplations comes to the rescue again with a translation of sega.jp’s meisaku interview with developer Kotaro Hayashida, where he notes that one of the most famous things about the original Alex Kidd release–that the jump and attack buttons are reversed–was done just to make it different (“when I look back on it, it’s just nonsense” he admits.)

    I mean it’s probably why you go down at first, right? Because Mario goes right, and they’re hardly going to make the game go left (for reasons. Although Alex Kidd does go left on some levels!)

    But look, it’s 2025. Let’s not get lost in our first impressions, let’s not blame a game for going out of its way to not be Super Mario Bros. and for not being cool enough to be on the Mega Drive. I mean it’s cool enough to be included in Sega Ages, getting a great Switch port with new FM soundtrack, right? So, is Alex Kidd in Miracle World any good?

    Ehhh… look, I really tried, but it’s a mess. It’s a game that absolutely feels like a group of people attempting to best Super Mario Bros. who not only didn’t understand that game, but didn’t know how to design one in the first place. Because Alex Kidd in Miracle World really feels like a completely random grab-bag of ideas outside of it featuring a wee guy who jumps around and can destroy blocks. The story is weirdly overcomplicated (The city of… Radaxian? Prince… Egle???”) and the levels don’t have any consistency.  There is some Wonder Boy DNA as you often use vehicles that work like Wonder Boy’s skateboard, and there’s even some Balloon Trip in there too, but suddenly you’ll find yourself in a somewhat non-linear castle that feels more like a Mega Man rather than a left-to-right scrolling level as usual and you’re just expected to get on with it.

    (Something that’s interesting to note, in retrospect, is how the slightly better graphics of something like Alex Kidd In Miracle World have a strange cost to them. In Super Mario Bros. you don’t mind that everything is just blocks, because there’s a consistency to the low-fidelity. In Alex Kidd, when you come to a screen with blocks designed very transparently to make you navigate them a certain way, it just looks sort of unfinished.)

    I suppose, from another perspective, you could instead see Alex Kidd as a game that’s full of surprises and variety, and I don’t think you’d be wrong. It is bright, and cheerful, and there is a charm enough to it that keeps you playing. But it never feels good to play–keeping Alex Kidd from sliding to his doom becomes unbelievably taxing in the latter stages of the game–and there are a bunch of unbelievably annoying gotchas to kill you off all over the place (I haven’t mentioned the rock-paper-sissors bosses, but they do the same thing every time, meaning you either die and redo an entire level at best, or just use save states like a person who doesn’t have time to waste.)

    So, in a weird sort of way, finally playing Alex Kidd, I have to admit that I was wrong in considering it poverty. It’s a full game that people put real effort into, not just a tossed-off pack-in, and if you’d got a Master System you’d have played the shit out of it. There was value there.

    But I’m not wrong now in thinking it isn’t very good.

    Will I ever play it again? Of course, that’s a very personal opinion! Circling back to what I was waffling on about at the start of the article, Alex Kidd is beloved enough in some cultures that it even received a full remake, Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX, by a Spanish team created explicitly to make it. And in the spirit of celebrating the wonderful diversity of video game cultures, I’ll probably play it. Why not? Alex Kidd isn’t that long, it’d be nice to see it from the idealising eyes of some Spanish lunatics.

    Final Thought: I should probably make it clearer–and god knows that I mean to go through all the essays and clear up some of the categorising details–that because I don’t consider North America to be the most important market, when I “date” a game I just use the earliest date unless there’s a really good reason not to. So for example here with Alex Kidd in Miracle World, the release date is November 1986, the Japanese release date. This feels absolutely necessary when covering games like, say, Star Soldier, which would get released literally three years later in North America rather than Japan, completely removing it from the context required to understand it.

    1. See my article on Zombi, from just last week! ↩︎
  • Zombi (Ubisoft, 1986)

    Zombi (Ubisoft, 1986)

    Developed/Published by: Ubi Soft (it used to have a space in it…)
    Released: 1986
    Completed: 28/10/2025
    Completion: Everyone escaped!

    Man. We’ve absolutely got to get access to old games sorted. I’ve talked about this previously–most notably when discussing MULE–but I think it’s good to reflect on the fact that Zombi is the first game ever released by one of the most recognisable game publishers in the world, Ubisoft, and in order to play it I had to scrabble around online to find it–and then scrabble around even longer to find it English. And then have to fiddle around with emulators because emulating old home computers is just not as plug-and-play as emulating old consoles is.

    Now, you could argue that Ubisoft might prefer that Zombi not be accessible, because one of the first things that you’ll learn about it is that it’s a completely blatant rip-off of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, to the point where–and I’ll go into more detail on this later–you actively need to know the plot of the film to understand how to progress in the game. Which makes sense, considering the game is called “Zombi”, the literal title of Dario Argento’s cut (released, fact fans, nine months before George Romero’s definitive version in non-English speaking countries.) The game was, at best, on some shaky legal ground (you’d think they’d just have ripped off Night of The Living Dead instead–no copyright issues there). For their part, Ubisoft haven’t tried to paint it out of their history–they do mention it right on their website–but its 2012 Wii U title ZombiU has absolutely no connection to it, and then re-releasing that as Zombi on Steam and elsewhere does go some to making finding their first game absolutely more of a ballache, whether that’s intentional or not.

    (It could be worse, I suppose–most of Ubisoft’s other earliest titles, such as Fer &  Flamme (“Iron & Flame”) weren’t even released in English, leaving the likes of the poor old CRPG Addict absolutely flailing.)

    As Ubisoft’s first game, it would probably serve us to dig into the founding of Ubisoft a bit, because it explains quite a lot. Ubisoft began as the Guillemot’s family business (though the family, in effect, does still control it) selling, uh, the things farmers need to farmers. The five sons of the family, however, had bigger ideas: first selling audio CDs (then a brand new technology), then computers and software, before realising that they could buy hardware and software from the UK–where it was half the price of a French distributor–and resell it on to French consumers undercutting competitors and still making a tidy profit. Before long they were engaging in a roaring trade of computer games, and so obviously decided they had to take the next step in (ahem) vertical integration: making the games themselves.

    Well, not exactly themselves, obviously. It’s not like the brothers got their hands dirty with that. As was usual for the time, they got school children to do it for them. Yannick Cadin–still a high school student, though eighteen so I am being a bit hyperbolic by calling him a child–would code the game despite having (in his own words) “never written a program of more than 100 lines in assembler”, along with graphic designer Patrick Daher and screenwriter Alexandre Bonan under Sylvie Hugonnier1, all of whom appear in Zombi as the main characters (though if Cadin looks like his video game equivalent, he’s a terrifying fellow.)

    What makes this even more interesting is that as a French company, the games that Ubisoft will have been importing will almost certainly have been for the Amstrad CPC, because the system was uniquely popular there, meaning that Ubisoft’s first game would be a CPC exclusive for several years until it’s ported to the usual suspects (Spectrum, C64, Amiga, ST, and PC.)

    As a result, I really wanted to play this through on CPC, as it was, after all, my first computer, and I so rarely have a decent excuse to play anything on it. Zombi on Amstrad CPC looks like this:

    At least, this is the version that everyone seems to have online. Intriguingly, in Retro Gamer Issue 204 there’s a claim that there were “separate versions for 64k and 128k machines (the latter benefited from more detailed graphics)” though it’s completely unsourced and I can’t find any other reference to it or difference in versions online. What’s important either way is that Zombi is an absolutely fascinating example of one of my favourite things about this era of game development, something I’ve talked about many times–the fact that genre has not ossified. There are no expectations.

    Zombi is, sort of, a dungeon crawler, with the dungeon here a shopping mall. It’s also sort of a graphic adventure, because most of the game is about collecting objects and then using them in particular ways. But, there are zombies roaming, and you have to fight them in real time, so it’s sort of an action game–maybe the first survival horror! On top of that, characters have to eat, and sleep, so it’s also sort of a pure survival game. And at the same time, it isn’t even that simple, because you have four characters, and you can use them all separately, switching between them whenever you like!

    It is a lot, an astoundingly broad game design for a teenager at a completely inexperienced company to pull off, and apparently it only took about six months (Cadin, modestly, claims it could have been done a lot faster.) What gets so interesting about it is that there seems to have been absolutely no thought taken to make anything about the way Zombi tries to pull its disparate genre ideas together match anything gamers of 1986 might have already seen.

    Now, to be fair, it is France, it is 1986, and it is the Amstrad CPC. Games such as The Bard’s Tale wouldn’t hit that system for a couple of years, so I really can’t say if the Zombi team had ever seen a first-person dungeon crawler. But if they had, they apparently rejected samey corridors to instead prioritise making each location visually unique over every other consideration, because the interface is completely bonkers.

    Most apparent will be the menu at the bottom of the screen. The Amstrad CPC didn’t have mouse as a default input, so they had to get creative, meaning that you have to scroll back and forth through a list of everything you might want to do (bafflingly, the scroll direction was backward from my input, which I imagine must be how they intended it.) That already makes doing really anything awkward. But navigating is even more insane. Rather than a “dungeon” it’s better to imagine the world of Zombi the same way as a text adventure–each screen you see is a series of rooms with distinct entrances and exits. However, the game doesn’t tell you what exits there are. While you can work some of them out by what you can see, in many cases (for example, things behind you) you have to blindly attempt moving there–and the game on CPC has absolutely no feedback when you do anything wrong. You almost can’t be sure you’ve even done anything in many cases.

    (Well, unless you’re outside, in which case you stumble into a horde of zombies and immediately die. Or if you move backwards off the mall’s balcony without a rope, and fall to your death.)

    You don’t navigate the world by doing anything sensible like moving with the arrow keys, however. Instead on screen a tiny wireframe representation of the space appears, and then you have to select what direction you go (for example, selecting the outer frame to move backwards.) It is completely inelegant in a way that somehow also feels like a stroke of genius, in that it’s arguably far clearer than movement in an early first-person dungeon crawler (think how many times you could move in those wireframes and not actually be sure you moved) but is also unbelievably clunky and frustrating.

    You can see the wireframe representation in the middle here. I’m trying to move right.

    The game has some other quirks–similarly stylistic, similarly related to developer immaturity. The game honestly looks good for the system, with a stark grey and black palette (that again makes me wonder why they didn’t go for Night of the Living Dead) and the clever decision to make anything on screen you can interact with pop with a bright blue colour. The game feels genuinely atmospheric and lonely as you creep around the dead mall, scavenging for what you need, but it does seem that they didn’t quite know how to get the zombies into the game in an exciting way. When you’re in a room with a zombie, they’re just given a portrait on the same line as your heroes portraits, and after a number of seconds you’re officially attacked. What this means is that you have to bash keys rhythmically (boo!) to beat them to death with your hands, taking damage the whole time. You can avoid this if you have a ranged weapon–you can use the gun before you’re attacked, and take part in a simple, almost golf swing-meter like system where you just have to hit the button at the right time to kill them.

    Unfortunately, navigating the menu to get to the gun in time was, for me, like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube behind my back, and so, unfortunately (and I’m not proud of it) I had to give up on the Amstrad CPC version for my own sanity. Thankfully, when the game was ported to Atari ST and Amiga four years later, Alexander Yarmitsky took over porting duties and changed the interface to something more contemporary, so I pulled up the Amiga version to try it there.

    In the ported version2 all the weird controls are replaced with, thankfully, a cursor-based system and direction arrows around the screen so movement makes more sense (well, there’s some double duty taken where “forward” and “back” also mean “up” and “down” but I’ll take it.) You can also see zombies now, who sort of… toddle across the screen so you can headshot them with the cursor before they attack you. It’s maybe too easy, but it’s certainly more engaging.

    I’d love to say that makes the Atari ST or Amiga version definitive, but… it’s in full colour! Not only does this remove all of the atmosphere, it means that you literally can’t tell where any of the interactibles are on the screen, turning what was a perfectly understandable adventure game into a baffling pixel hunt. It is… ruinous, and it really means that if you want to make sense of the game you have to use a walkthrough (and probably a map).

    This is something you’ll want to do after a while, because you’re eventually going to need something to do. If there’s one truly disappointing thing about Zombi–outside of there not being the perfect mama bear option for me, our retro game Goldilocks–it’s that as just a survival game it’s not that interesting. It’s neat to wander the level, kill the zombies, and have to eat and sleep, but there’s no incident. I think as a kid it could have been something I loved to noodle around in–there’s a lot of space for your imagination–but the CPC’s controls just kill any thought that I would have.

    When you actually intend to beat the game, it’s weirdly trivial (when it’s not tedious) as long as you can actually spot where the things you need are and know the plot of the movie. First you have to block all the entrances to the mall; then you have to kill all the zombies and put them in cold storage so they don’t reanimate (I’m not sure if you have to turn the electricity on in the basement to do this, but I did.) Once you’ve done that, the mall is immediately attacked by Hells Angels, and you just need to steal petrol from their truck for your helicopter, get in and escape. 

    If it wasn’t for having to trawl the whole map for every zombie–don’t forget you can move backwards, because I missed one and had to cover the map about three times–and then lug them down to the cold storage, only being able to carry about three at a time, this would be over in about ten minutes. But I don’t even think they made you kill and store all the zombies to pad the game out–I think it’s just because, well, that’s what happens in Dawn of the Dead, isn’t it?

    I’m not quite entirely sure how to explain it, but a raw enthusiasm for the source material shines through via touches like that, and even if functionally they’re not good game design, something about Zombi is charming. I don’t know if I recommend it as such, but I think if there was a monochrome “can see objects” version with the updated controls I actually think I would.

    At the very least, more people should know about it. I guess I’ve done my bit!

    Will I ever play it again? Come on Ubisoft, release a 40th anniversary ultimate version with the proper colours. I dare you. 

    Final Thought: If you want to play through this, the best help is (surprisingly) Amiga Action’s walkthrough, even though as an Amiga Power boy I’d never admit it. They do screw up the map a bit–they don’t distinguish between inside and outside on the first level so it’s confusing, so you might want to use it in conjunction with this other map which is, sadly, unsourced (but I assume from one of the many French CPC mags.) Or just draw around the mall interior with a pen or something. But as usual, I recommend not just jumping straight to the walkthrough–it’s more fun to noodle around first, even just the big beats I gave you above should be enough to get you through the game really if you’re willing to map it yourself.

    (Actually, that’s a lie. Even with the map and solution I usually couldn’t find where to click on most of the screens to use buttons and things without basically clicking everywhere. Sigh.)

    1. This is a bit of an assumption. Most sites explicitly state Hugonnier was director of marketing/PR, but Cadin refers to a “certain Sylvie” who “explain[d] that she was approached to set up a video game publishing house and, as she ha[d] some experience in this field, she [was to be] the director of this new company.” Surely the same person. ↩︎
    2. Well, in the ported version for Atari ST, Amiga and the ZX Spectrum. Cadin ported the PC version and doggedly stuck to his original control scheme and the Commodore 64 porting team followed his lead. Unfortunate. ↩︎

  • The Texas Chainsaw Massacre / Halloween (Wizard Video, 1983)

    The Texas Chainsaw Massacre / Halloween (Wizard Video, 1983)

    Developed/Published by: Ed Salvo (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Tim Martin and Robert Barber (Halloween) / Wizard Video Games
    Released: 1983
    Completed: 22/10/2025
    Completion: I played ‘em!

    The schedule for new articles has gone a bit squiff due to life difficulties (let’s just say: if you weren’t already a subscriber, I’d be asking you to subscribe here with big wet wobbly eyes) and I had planned to do a really interesting game–the first from a very well known company, yet it doesn’t get talked about much–this week, but it’s simply taking too long to get through. So I’m going to lean on the crutch of some crappy Atari games (not least because I only mentioned The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in my Poltergeist essay) and then of course write far, far too much about them anyway.

    I’m combining them because it’s sort of hard to talk about them separately without repeating yourself relating their provenance, which relates very much to the absurdities of the pre-’83 gold rush and the resulting fallout.

    It begins with Games by Apollo, a company formed purely as cash grab by someone with no knowledge of video games–unusual at the time, but surely not the first, and absolutely not the last. That company would have its own “gang of four”-esque exodus led by Ed Salvo (who would go on to develop The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) because the company was apparently so mismanaged: The founder, Pat Roper, grew the company beyond its means to compete with Activision, and frustrated with traffic in Dallas got distracted with a plan to create two-person helicopters(???) Within a few weeks of the exodus the company collapsed.

    Somewhat desperate to get their fledgling company, Video Software Specialists (VSS) off the ground, a very strange saviour would swoop in, obviously attempting to cash-in in what was–by then–a rapidly collapsing market: Charles Band’s Wizard Video.

    If you’re familiar with Charles Band by this point, it’s probably due to his relentless, desperate exploitation of whatever IP he happens to have to hand and can make something as cheaply as possible with. Perhaps you’ve seen one of his eight (eight!) Evil Bong movies [“Don’t forget the Gingerweed Man spin-off.”–Ed.] or one of the fifteen (fifteen!) Puppet Master films? [“At least some of those are… ok?”–Ed.]

    At the time however, most of those films were but a twinkle in Band’s eye, and Wizard Video was his home video distribution company through which he was able to distribute titles such as (yes) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. On Band’s own website he describes the decision to get into video games thus:

    “A forward thinking company, Wizard foresaw the potential for massive growth in home video gaming and produced adaptations of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and HALLOWEEN for the Atari 2600, which were in effect the very first horror console video games ever released.”

    I genuinely love the use of “in effect” there, because they absolutely weren’t, and they literally chose to do this while the market was crashing, which makes the portrayal even funnier.

    Either way, it seemed that Band’s idea was to exploit the IP of the most popular videos they’d been distributing, and try and make hay with the fact that these were adult video games (Mystique’s “Swedish Erotica” games had come out the year earlier.) There were three planned games, and ironically the most adult, Flesh Gordon–based on the 1974 sex comedy–would never see the light of day with not even a prototype found1. The other two games would however, with both The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween seeing release at some point in 1983–seemingly close to the Halloween season if we can base that off the timing of contemporary review (we probably can’t).

    The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

    According to Ed Salvo, this was developed in “about six weeks” and he told Digital Press that he was “not real proud of this one, but we had to eat.” Which is actually a change of tune, because in 1983 he wasn’t even willing to admit he’d worked on it, with an aside in the announcement of the title and Flesh Gordon in the Feb 1983 Videogaming Illustrated stating:

    “We were asked–make that begged–by the designer of these Atari-compatible cartridges not to reveal his/her name. We won’t.”

    (They actually hint that you can work out who it was by reading the previous issue, but I couldn’t. I found this funny quote from Bette Davis though?)

    Frankly, it’s completely fair that he wouldn’t want anyone to know he worked on this, because it’s absolutely terrible, even by the low bar set by any Atari 2600 game (buy exp. 2602, etc.) As Leatherface, you run right (or left, doesn’t matter) to chase “tourists”, trying to avoid fences, thickets (makes sense) cow skulls (ok) and wheelchairs (lol) to catch up so you can chainsaw them to death. 

    There’s supposed to be some tactics to this; your chainsaw is constantly idling, creating a timer via remaining fuel and when you actually run the chainsaw the fuel runs out faster–and you only get extra fuel for a certain number of successful kills. But it doesn’t work at all, because there’s no meaning in which direction you run as tourists always appear, and then when you try and chainsaw them they… teleport behind you? Repeatedly?

    There may be some kind of timing aspect to starting your chainsaw otherwise they “dodge” you–but I couldn’t work out the timing at all. Worse, probably, is getting stuck on one of the obstacles, where you get awkwardly frozen for what feels like an age. The wheelchairs that fly onto the screen are very very funny–clearly one of the few things they pulled from the film, which apparently they hadn’t even seen before getting the contract–but it’s otherwise just annoying.

    The game also has a bizarre coda when you lose all your lives: one of the tourists runs onto the screen and appears to kick Leatherface in the balls. It made me laugh the first time I saw it, but it does, well, make a mockery of the whole thing.

    I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this game was originally planned to be a touch more in-depth–because you can move left and right, I assume they were planning a kind of Defender-like system where you had to run around the level getting all the tourists to then move onto the next, but in six weeks they just ran out of time or (more likely) just couldn’t be arsed because they knew they were shoving out a dog to a company that didn’t know what it was doing during a historic market crash.

    Halloween

    Ed Salvo, again via Digital Press, notes that although this was produced by VSS, it was actually contracted out to a couple of different ex-Games By Apollo developers, Tim Martin and Robert Barber. It’s possible that these names ring a bell if you’re a real old-head, as they’re two of the founders of MicroGraphic Image, and there they would develop the beloved (sort of!) and influential (also sort of!) Spelunker!

    As with VSS and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the money from Halloween allowed Martin and Barber to found MicroGraphic Image along with a fellow called Cash Foley [“when you riffle a stack of paper against a microphone”–Sound Dept. Ed.] and all three would develop Spelunker.

    I think there’s something very serendipitous about the shlockmeister Charles Band indirectly helping the creation of one of the most infamous “kusoge” (and to be honest, that’s the kind of thing that he should trumpet on his website rather than statements that aren’t vague enough to not be obviously incorrect.) Unfortunately, the company wouldn’t last too long even with his largesse; the reason Spelunker is so well known is that it was ultimately sold off to Brøderbund at which point (sadly) Barber and Foley’s names would fall off the marquee. Foley explained on his blog:

    “Spelunker was Tim’s original idea and programmed the game logic. When the game was released, we made a strategic decision to put Tim name out front.  Besides, we were all convinced this was the first of many games and we would all have our turn.”

    Sadly, they didn’t, and Martin and Barber don’t seem to have discussed their time developing Halloween online at all, so I am stuck, as usual, with a lot of supposition and my own interpretation. Foley, for what it’s worth, says:

    “The game was really very good considering the restrictions of the the Atari 2600 and was ahead of its time in content and usage of the Halloween theme music.”

    I’m gonna say he’s being too kind here–although I do think he’s more or less correct about the music.

    With The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I’m really stretching to say that they had plans for the game beyond what you see, but with Halloween there is, genuinely, an actual attempt at game design, and it almost works.

    The screen shows two levels of a house, in which you (in this case an unnamed babysitter) must navigate to find children that you are attempting to rescue from the (also weirdly unnamed) “killer” (you know, Michael Myers2.)

    To do this, you can move through the house left or right, and go into doors which teleport you to another room. When you see a kid, you can press the fire button, at which point they “lock” to you as if you’re holding hands, allowing you to run to the “safe rooms” at the end of each house where Michael won’t show up (there’s no reason given for this, and I wonder if akin to The Empire Stikes Back, they simply didn’t have space to add graphics to make this make sense–like bundling the kids out of the house via a window, or something.) In the safe rooms the doors more obviously move you between the top/bottom levels, which isn’t that important in the game as released, but I imagine felt more important in the game as designed.

    While this is going on, Michael is pursuing you in an amusingly relentless way. I don’t know for sure, but I assume he just spawns from a random screen entrance within a random range of time, meaning that you can run off a screen where he was and have him appear from the other side of the screen within a couple of seconds. Each time he appears a honestly decent (for Atari 2600) recreation of the Halloween theme plays, and you know what? It’s effective! You want to get the fuck off that screen! Immediately!

    Against Michael you have only a few tactics. Obviously, there’s running away. Alternatively, you can try and juke him; if you’re leading a kid, you can let go so you can dodge and then try and grab the kid again, which is high risk. Rarely, you might find a knife in the level, which allows you a very short range stab that can hit Michael if you can get the timing right. It doesn’t give you any extra downtime or anything, but it’s worth points.

    As I’ve said, as a game this almost, sort of, works. Collect kids, avoid the enemy, occasionally get the chance to turn the tables. Unlike The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, even the deaths are rewarding–the babysitter and even the kids(!) get decapitated with a wee Atari blood spray, and there are other touches that show that they seemed to be invested in making something, you know, actually good: some rooms have “electrical blackouts” so the light flicks on and off–you might find yourself in the room, see nothing, have the lights go out, and Michael suddenly appear. That’s fun!

    The problem is that there isn’t really a good solution to the game design’s one obvious flaw: you can get stuck running back and forth between rooms trying to avoid Michael when you’re trying to rescue a child, as he will repeatedly spawn in front of you. Obviously, you’re supposed to juke him; but in practice, it’s much easier to run away and hope that the random number generator will work in your favour, giving you enough time that he spawns behind you instead. 

    It’s possible that players who spent a lot of time with this game did get the dodging down pat and get something out of it–E.C. Meade in a contemporary review in Videogaming & Computergaming Illustrated surprisingly called it a “wonderful game”–but there’s just not quite enough here. Like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it needed to be a Defender-like succession of levels with a set amount of children to rescue and with punishment for letting Michael kill them for this to really pop.

    But at least there’s an actual idea here. In fact, if you wanted to be really generous you could say this still prefigures things like Clock Tower or the immortal enemies in things like the Resident Evil franchise, or even the hand-holding of Ico. I mean, I wouldn’t go that far, but you could.

    Will I ever play them again? Oh my no.

    Final Thought: But whither controversy? Interesting to note that although E.C. Meade was a fan of Halloween–though cooler on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre–his co-reviewer Jim Clark was much more prudish. On Halloween he stated “It takes a sick human to enjoy this sick game” although weirdly he found The Texas Chainsaw Massacre “marginally less offensive.”

    A few months later Phillip Edwards of Fresno CA would send in a letter to Videogaming & Computergaming Illustrated to say “Make no mistake about it, the games Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween are harmful and dangerous. A disgrace. Jim Clark’s reviews and perceptive insights were right on.”

    But that seems to be about it!

    1. Amusingly, at AtariProtos.com the (anonymous, but possibly Ed Salvo?) programmer claims that Wizard Video stole the near-final version and intended to publish it without paying. ↩︎
    2. What’s annoying here is that they could have referred to him as “The Shape” as in the film’s credits. But I suppose that might have been confusing for Atari 2600 gamers expecting an actual cube or triangle or something, considering that’s what most of the fucking games look like. ↩︎
  • 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!

  • Poltergeist (Tandy, 1982)

    Poltergeist (Tandy, 1982)

    Developed/Published by: Unknown / Tandy
    Released: 1982
    Completed: 02/10/2025
    Completion: Well… I saw all three levels.

    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!

    It’s October, which means it’s a time of spooks, Draculas, werewolves, and finally getting to wear that light coat you love. Since writing about Castlevania, I thought it might be fun to spend the rest of October with a bit more of a focus on the Halloween season the way I do for Christmas, but I was quickly struck by a key difference between the seasons: in the Christmas season, everything “Christmassy” actively relates to, or features, Christmas. A “Christmas movie” has Christmas in it–even if it’s completely tangential to the plot, it’s at the very least set during the season. But during the Halloween season, we really don’t need everything to relate directly to Halloween. Sure there’s your, well, Halloweens, your Ernest Scared Stupids, but no one is making a case that you include films that just happen to feature Halloween as “the best Halloween movie” that everyone should watch every year–well, unless there’s someone out there with Die Hard-like passion for Marriage Story, or something.

    What we instead require is that our Halloween content be, well, scary. Or at least a little unsettling. So it felt like it wouldn’t really make sense for me to limit anything I played this month to things that were directly Halloweeny, and instead just nose around the horror genre and pull up anything I found interesting or surprising. Which is how I ended up playing Poltergeist for the TRS-80 Color Computer.

    I’ll be honest–I know absolutely nothing about the TRS-80 Color Computer. In fact, I assumed it was a version of the TRS-80, which would make sense, but it’s actually a completely different system. So it’s not the system that made me think to boot up Poltergeist. I decided to look at it because I think like many people, I particularly associate this season with horror movies, and it just seemed utterly surprising to see that one of the biggest films of 1982–directed by Tobe Hooper, produced by Steven Spielberg–somehow had a game exclusive for a computer that, at this point, is pretty poorly remembered. 

    It gets even more surprising when you consider that 1982 is pretty much ground zero for the movie tie-in. Sure, there have been licensed games before–read all about Superman in exp. 2602!–but in 1982 suddenly movie tie-ins, and Spielberg tie-ins specifically, become big business, with Raiders Of The Lost Ark and (unfortunately) E.T. showing up.

    It wasn’t just Spielberg getting in on the action: we’ve got The Empire Strikes Back for Atari 2600, Star Trek: The Motion Picture for Vectrex, multiple Tron games, even an adaptation of Fantastic Voyage, a movie from 1966! Poltergeist really is an outlier, however, by being released on a home computer where the market lent far more hobbyist. The TRS-80 Color Computer–known fondly as the CoCo–would eventually be popular enough to have several magazines that covered it, but at the time of Poltergeist’s release only The Rainbow would exist, and it really wasn’t much more than a fanzine (no shade!)

    I can’t find anything about Poltergeist in it, or anywhere else, so the game, outside of my direct experience of it, is a bit of a mystery. What I do know is the game is an early example (maybe the earliest) of the bread-and-butter of the movie tie-in: the “each level is a minigame that reflects something you know from the film” thing that most famously Ocean Software would run into the ground.

    On the first level, you’re running around what looks like a Mondrian but its actually a suburb, with the goal of collecting the things that will allow you to rescue Carol Anne (sorry, I didn’t go over the plot of Poltergeist: a wee lassie gets sucked into a telly and she needs to be rescued. There.) It would be over-selling this segment to call it a maze game–it’s no Pac-Man, not even Head On, as you run around the grid avoiding cars by ducking into driveways to grab items like towels that maybe have some importance in the film (can’t remember.) I suppose it’s the early 80s so there aren’t speedbumps and signs saying “Twenty’s Plenty” everywhere, because every car is going maximum speed and will kill you, which, I mean, I think I’d probably want to move out even if there weren’t ghosts. Especially with a madman running around stealing very ordinary items from people’s houses.

    Thankfully, if you just hold down the fire button when the level loads and keep holding it the cars never spawn–up to you if you want to abuse it, but it can be quite annoying to get killed by a car because you have to go near the edge of the screen.

    The second level is sort of a Frogger-a-like, where you (some disembodied footprints) have go up the stairs, avoiding, uh, holes, pretzels(?) and the poltergeist itself, which makes a direct line for you. You basically just have to roast it up the stairs, and be lucky–you can’t hang around waiting for the right opening.

    The third level is… confusing. Is it supposed to maybe represent, like, flying through the television? (It’s just described as an “energy field” in the manual.) Faces fly towards you that you have to shoot before they pass you using an annoying gunsight that fights you, and that you can’t shoot too early because one of them will be Carol Anne (represented by a wee stick figure) who you obviously can’t shoot. And that’s it.

    This is, obviously, rubbish. And barely representative of the thing it’s based on. I suppose we could be impressed by the last level, but it’s barely the level of Starship on the Atari 2600, and close to impossible (for the amount of effort I wanted to put in, anyway.) I find it really hard to believe this could have entertained anyone for very long at all–and if you do get good enough to finish the third level (something it looks like only one person on Youtube has ever managed) all you get is a bit of text saying the house is clean–which is at least a direct reference to the film, I suppose.

    Poltergeist feels like a film that if you were going to adapt it you’d rather do something like a text adventure in the era, but it does seem (from my little research) that games on the CoCo tended towards arcade experiences, which probably explains why this is what it is. I suspect, also, that each level is just whatever the programmer had lying around that they’d been noodling on with the explanation bolted on after. I can’t imagine Spielberg was too impressed–if he ever saw this–and to be fair, neither am I.

    Will I ever play it again? My promise to you: I’ll boot this up if I’m ever hanging out with Steven Spielberg.

    Final Thought: Weirdly the era was not just Spielberg adaptation heavy but Hooper-heavy, with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre showing up on Atari 2600 within months!

  • 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.

  • Castlevania (Konami, 1986)

    Castlevania (Konami, 1986)

    Developed/Published by: Konami
    Released: 26/09/1986
    Completed: 09/09/2025
    Completion: Finished it. I did do a save state before Dracula though, to avoid repeating an exploit.

    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!

    I’ve been in the trenches of 1986 for such a long time by this point that I feel like, sometimes, I lose a bit of perspective, so as I reach Castlevania, released within two months of Metroid (and also on the Famicom Disk System) it’s good to take a minute to reflect again on the strength of the release calendar for the Famicom. It’s not just Nintendo’s groundbreaking output, for example, it’s also incredible arcade hits such as Gradius and Ghosts n’ Goblins coming home in solid ports.

    And with the influence of The Legend of Zelda and especially Metroid going to take more time to disseminate, I think it’s important to consider Castlevania within the post-Super Mario Bros. milieu where the arcade still reigns supreme as the state of the art. You went to the arcade and wanted to play games that good at home, and developers wanted to sell people on their “arcade quality” experiences, even if there was no arcade title attached.

    I’m assuming you can see where I’m going with this, but the interesting thing about Castlevania is as much as it is tied to the Metroidvania genre–and would begin dipping its toes into that within a month–the first game is no more attempting to create an expansive, “home” experience than Konami’s earlier port of Gradius is. If you’re being generous, you could claim that Castlevania is Konami’s attempt to make the style that’s already worked so well for them in the scrolling shooter for the arcade–short, hard games with impactful, unique levels and standout bosses–translate to the side-scrolling action game/platformer for the home. If you’re not being so generous, you could say this is Konami’s rip-off of Ghosts n’ Goblins.

    That one probably works better.

    I don’t think it’s unfair, really! Ghosts n’ Goblins is a good port, but it looks weedy. It’s hard not to imagine Konami, given the extra power of the Famicom Disk System, thinking that they could simply do something better, and the hallmarks are all there. A spooky setting. A stiff, inflexible hero who struggles with platforming. Limited power increases and different weapons to collect, which all have important situational uses. When you look at the original Japanese titles it looks even more sus. Ghosts n’ Goblins is “Demon World Village” Castlevania is “Demon Castle Dracula” (to not get too into the weeds on this, Demon isn’t spelled exactly the same, but they do both use the kanji 魔.) And if you don’t consider that case closed? Well, there’s also the difficulty.

    The bloody difficulty.

    Unlike Ghosts n’ Goblins, Castlevania absolutely lulled me into a false sense of security at the start. There’s no Red Arremer here as a harsh wakeup call, and the first boss, a bat (which does have a bit of the Red Arremer about them) is easily dealt with if you have the axe subweapon, which is literally in a candle right before them.

    Once you’re in the second level, however, all bets are off, as you’re suddenly facing the dreaded medusa heads paired with the fact that you lose a life if you fall into a pit (easy to do as you get stunned and knocked back on getting hit) and it only gets worse from there. There are some absolutely hair pulling moments.

    Really, Castlevania feels like a game that shouldn’t work, because hero Simon Belmont is so slow and it’s such a challenge to react to anything. But the game has a weird sort of pleasure in its heavy, exacting feel. Simon slowly moves forward and really feels like he’s absolutely thumping the enemies in front of him, and a bit like a shooter it’s all about finding your racing line through the game, collecting the right subweapon at the right time and learning where the meat Dracula has stuffed in his walls are for safety (good poll if they ever add polls to Bluesky: would you eat Dracula’s wall meat? Yes / No / If I was really hungry, I guess). 

    There’s also an intriguingly vestigial sort of hidden, sort of experience system–if you use subweapons a lot enemies eventually drop upgrades that let you have up to three on screen–but it’s foiled by the fact you want to switch subweapons a lot and you lose the upgrades when you do (why!!!) but if you can master it you can absolutely cheese some of the bosses–I mean, it’s how I saw the end of this…

    I even like that Dracula’s Castle sort of makes sense as a layout. I mean, it doesn’t really, but I like that they made the drop that happens after you fight the mummies sort of the correct length, and then you might be surprised that the “clock tower” section of this game is so short, but it’s tall and thin… like a clock tower!

    The brutal difficulty of Castlevania makes some sense on the Famicom Disk System because you could save at any stage(!) and when the game was re-released on cartridge in Japan it got an easy mode–although it removes knockback on hit, which just seems weird (if you’re interested, it’s included in the Rumbleminz SNES port, the method by which I played this.)

    Ultimately, if Konami set out to best Ghosts n’ Goblins… well… they did!

    Will I ever play it again? I will play its many, many remakes and… side-makes?

    Final Thought: Yeah, so, the weird thing about Castlevania is that it came out on Famicom Disk System just a month before it came out on MSX2 (a version generally known as Vampire Killer, as it was titled that in Europe.) Although Vampire Killer shares graphics, enemies, and is still a trudge through Dracula’s castle, individual level design differs completely, as levels are non-linear and you’re expected to search them for a wider range of items, upgrades and keys to unlock doors to the next level!

    Annoyingly, I can’t find good information on why the games are so different, outside of pretty generic speculation (“now, PC games drive like this [mimes driving like a huge nerd] and Famicom games drive like this…”) so it’s really hard to say what concept “came first.” if the MSX version was the original idea, then my Ghosts n’ Goblins hypothesis–my Ghosts n’ Goblothesis–is incorrect. 

    I do feel like it would be a bit unusual if both games weren’t directed by the same man, elusive series creator Hitoshi Akamatsu, and Castlevania II would go on to be much more of an adventure, which would be a mark against my goblothesis, but weirdly according to an amazing shmuplations translation, Akamatsu was inspired by The Maze of Galious, which is itself a post-Vampire Killer design, so who knows. I guess I can get closer to finding out if I play it, so let’s see how long I can avoid that for.

    Update 2025/10/01: Actual game historian Kate Willaert got in touch over on Bluesky with some critical context:

    “My understanding, from delving into this era of Konami, is that the two versions of Castlevania were developed in parallel, with the teams possibly sharing ideas with each other, and so neither game is “first” nor the “real” one. See also MSX vs. FC Goonies, which laid the groundwork for this game … While it’s possible that Ghosts N Goblins inspired some surface elements, my personal theory is that the foundation of Castlevania can be found in the computer game Aztec, which was fairly popular among a particular generation of Japanese game devs.”