Recent reviews by farla

KinitoPET is my best friend in the whole world, I want to stay with him forever and ever :))))))

I really wish there was a "mixed" option for reviews. Get it when it's on sale, and it's a cute little game with some good moments, if you can bear its very glaring flaws.

"Seen" is a very short runner/puzzle hybrid set in a dystopian world with a very simplistic aesthetic. I am obligated to parrot the other reviews by likening it to "Inside," a game I admittedly haven't played just yet. The visual design is fantastic, and the pacing is reasonable for a game of its scope and price. The runner levels are a mixed bag, but the main story is nothing that takes more than a couple tries to accomplish. The difficulty of the puzzle levels is satisfactory; I cannot gauge whether there are actual difficulties in the puzzles, or if I am simply really bad at the sort of puzzles in this kind of game. The story is clearly designed to take center stage, and it lands quite well when it matters. The music essentially carries the game and does a fantastic job maintaining the atmosphere.

All that said, there are four unavoidable flaws which can diminish the experience if you aren't prepared for them. The first one thankfully has a remedy: I would recommend disabling achievement notifications on your first play-through. The achievements in the game are letters you can use to spell funny words on your profile (this might be its own motivation to play the game), but the way they are acquired is by collecting the main collectibles in the game, meaning that you will regularly be inundated with many, MANY achievements all through the experience of playing the story. This on its own will often break the immersion. The second issue is one which sadly cannot be fixed: the game contains text, and it's BAD. The game is absolutely smothered by the inspirational quotes plastered nearly everywhere, and they are very aggressively the r/im14andthisisdeep kind of quotes. Even the "blue = hope" and "red = discouragement" in the tutorial is already shoving the developer's specific reading of their own visual storytelling against the player's face.

The third issue is that sometimes the world feels more goofy than sad; every interaction you have with other people in the game is hostile towards you, and they are often comically violent and sadistic towards you. Sometimes this hits, but when it doesn't it just feels utterly ridiculous and breaks immersion. This ties into a neglected mechanic: you cover your ears to avoid harsh noises from radios and the foul mouths of other people, but this comes with no punishment other than reducing your field of view. In fact, this reduction of field of view is too small to heavily impact runner levels while providing a great deal of assistance in parkour during the puzzle sections. Perhaps this is a fair choice for the devs, but it feels a little off for this mechanic not to have some kind of cost to its overuse.

The final issue is perhaps the one which is the worst: the controls just aren't good. They do a good enough job to get you through the game, but they are uncomfortable even at their best, and the way that you'd expect them to work isn't how they actually work. This is especially the case when you jump, since that's the clunkiest of all the actions. The moment you let go of the jump button you start falling straight to the ground, which isn't a bad choice but does create a steep learning curve if you're used to platforming in other games. On its own it would be fine, if the controls weren't also sluggish and imprecise, compounding with the difficulty of the challenge levels to produce moments where multiple frame-perfect inputs are necessary to clear some challenges. It's in spite of these awful controls that I managed to get through even the main story, given that this game definitely isn't the genre I typically play.

The game is often on sale, often for less than a dollar like when I got it, so for its price it's not at all the worst you could get with your money, but it also isn't quite the best. It's flawed, but just artistic enough that I think it deserves an honest try.

eh, still lots of room for improvement, but it's mostly playable now.

Hearing what happened with the game made me come back to it. I do not regret the decision. It was strange how the game almost seems to reflect a good amount of the dynamic Scott discussed between Alec and the other developers, and their perception of Alec's life. I should announce this immediately: there are going to be a lot of spoilers in this review.

It is genuinely a shame that Alec went as he did, unaccountable for the actions he committed against those living, and within a tangled web of controversies from the times he did many people wrong. I find it pointless to focus specifically on Zoe, because even Scott came out saying that he could characterize his experiences with Alec developing the game as a form of abuse, and there are many others with whom Alec interacted who characterize him the same way in their own descriptions of their time with Alec.

And that brings me to the story of the game: Mae is attached to the past, as described in the phrase "The universe is forgetting you." God (or what Mae considers God) has forsaken Possum Springs, an old mining town which is crumbling as the world moves forward... without it. Mae's interactions with Gregg and Bea are as though nothing has changed among them, as though Gregg is still the Gregg he was when Mae left for college, as though Bea has continued on living happily. But all this falls apart as the story progresses and it is discovered that while Mae was out barely changing, everything around her was changing. Possum Springs is dying now, and her friends have moved on in her absence at college. Gregg is enthused by Mae's return, but speaks of "the plan" to move out of Possum Springs, the dying town where Gregg and Angus are the only gay couple and the town itself no longer suits who they are. Mae discovers all the relics of her past, not as they were, but rather as aged items stowed away (such as Mallard) or left to crumble away (the remains of the Food Donkey and the rotting robot she and Gregg take home for Angus). Bea is now moving far forward, left in charge of the Ol' Pickaxe as it struggles to keep in business, sales dwindling every year.

The whole of Possum Springs is very clearly in decay. Teachers who are not retired are now having to work side hustles, dialog from people still working in Towne Centre shows the lack of diversity in work now as the factories close down and the city is overtaken with the nature of a service economy and stagnating pay. They could start working for Ham Panther out by the highway, but it is characterized as "murder" (quite fitting, given the efforts performed by those who do not want to see Possum Springs fade away). Harfest happens, albeit far from as Mae idealized her childhood experiences. Possum Springs struggled to keep itself able to attract any kind of business at all, but nothing seems to help them and they struggle to choose what history to leave behind them to improve the town. Dilapidated buildings stand as skeletons of what used to exist in Possum Springs, a reminder of an idealized past that will never return.

This brings us to what I find to be the most important elements of the story, given current events: Mae's rebellious nature (read: past and some present acts one may reasonably consider resembling abuse), and its ties to the conservative (to put it lightly) death cult in the abandoned mine. Mae's past is not one she is remembered fondly for. She hospitalized someone in a fit of rage, later characterizing it as an incident where she only saw "shapes" instead of people and objects, facing disillusion from the reality before her. This is why she came back home from college, having felt that same disillusionment there after some time. She felt as though she was called to return to Possum Springs for.... whatever. She feels trapped in an idealization of her life and her world (e.g. Possum Springs), and it shows. She is incredibly uncomfortable and almost unable to come to terms with the events of her past at first, refusing to acknowledge why she got the nickname "killer" and lashing out at a former date in drunken rage. She imposes on her old friends, not truly having moved forward through life as they did. She is reminded who she is and what she did, but she seems to not truly acknowledge initially the weight of these actions and her attempts to live them down without meaningfully addressing them. As the story begins to come to a close, Mae and the others enter an abandoned mine, following after a strange group of men. This is where they learn the fate of Casey, a friend of Mae's who purportedly went missing: he was taken away by the death cult, forced down The Hole At The Center Of Everything. This sacrifice, as discussed by the cult, led to the growth of flowers in town. In a rather violent scene, Mae and company struggle with one of the cultists as they try to pull Mae back down to be sacrificed. They succeed, leaving the cultists down by The Hole, their only way back up effectively gone forever. The conservative death cult is left to fade away, a relic of the past rightfully turned away from to let everyone move on, even Mae.

There is a ton of depth and character to the game, from the stories of the miners who fought the bosses back in the day, to the witticisms of every character, to the small details and minor details you only pick up on by playing over and over. The game was crafted with love, the music fitting the game perfectly and the story giving a very clear look into the politics of small towns and the fight of the workers to find jobs that treat them well (or at least not as terribly as their current jobs in the changing economy) through the stories of the miners and the other workers in the game. The story serves as a cautionary tale about getting too attached to things as they are.

I think the people who are so mad about Holowka's death are precisely the people who missed the entire message of the game. They are the Mae in this story, forced to come to terms with a world that is moving on, left victims of a very conservative group luring and subsequently destroying disillusioned youth to approach an idealized conception of the past. The world is moving forward, and Mae is forced to accept that things will change, and not always for the better for past ideals. Only time will tell if those currently clinging to their idealized Alec will ever move past him.