faea gaming: June '25
Hello!! I’ve been taking much more of an interest in horror lately, both in and outside of games. It’s a genre I’ve sort of avoided for most of my life, but recently started to become very interested in the ways stories and ideas can be conveyed through horror; it feels like one of the most universal languages in storytelling. So I’m making an effort to stack up and get through a lot of those! Anyway, let’s talk video games.
Games I Finished
Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere (JP)
This is good… this is crazy, crazy good. I’m absolutely enamoured with the game’s dour tone and world – the war-torn cyberpunk hell whose politics hurt everybody involved and feels inevitably hurtling towards wartime apocalypse. Its methods of delivering information – through news articles, mission briefs and one-sided video calls – feels like a far more ambitious version of Armored Core’s dehumanising storytelling, but with far more ideas and methods of expression being pulled out than Armored Core thanks to being a much more story-focused game. I had an unusual love for pursuing all the different endings in this one, for how each route doesn’t quite give you enough information to make sense of the world’s events, so understanding it all requires all different perspectives. Some of the actual events and characters are handled in ways I don’t really gel with, but I think that’s a very minor complaint when put against the overall tone, and only really reared up near the end of my ending-hunt.
Flight is not exciting, but very fun nonetheless; it takes a great deal of effort to just get the plane to do what you want it to a lot of the time, and while missions do get repeated across the routes, there’s enough unique and interesting setups that push your flying abilities in all different ways. I am a little weary of the more difficult dogfights, though: enemy planes sometimes decide that they’re REALLY good at tailing you to a degree that I don’t know if I’d ever be able to do, which made a lot of them feel like an exercise in almost fruitlessly trying to shake them off for minutes at a time, then getting a hit in if I’m lucky. And while getting better didn’t really make me better at shaking off enemies, it did make me a lot better at getting my shots in where they counted.
Touhou Fuujinroku ~ Mountain of Faith
Immediately an incredibly strong entry – it's got some of the most interesting patterns and accomplished aesthetic design (this game's Stage 4 is one of the best stages in the series so far, and the The Gensokyo the Gods Loved into Fall of Fall combo is unbelievable), but.... the bomb system is, quite frankly, really really silly, and the 5 power cap feels like it encourages spamming to skip anything you don't really feel like doing that day; in my 1cc that was Nitori, which still left me with enough power to recover from all the bombing (at least if I didn't mess up so much, lol). My opinion of this game sort of inversely correlates with how much I pressed the bomb button: I’ve soured on it a little compared to other Touhous since 1ccing and not really having an urge to go back, but I think if I ever reach a skill level where I can play this with no bombs this could become a proper favourite.
Reimu A and bomb spamming means you don’t really have to learn most of the game that’s kinda awesome
Silent Hill 2 (2001)
It can be hard jumping into a game that’s both extremely highly-acclaimed in similar circles to mine, and that I have high hopes for on a personal level. Suddenly there’s an extreme pressure to like it; or not only to like it, to like it for the right reasons, to like it correctly, and it’s a pressure that often very easily colours my relationship with said game. …So, I’m going to start this by saying that I don’t think the “horror” gameplay of this (or its predecessor, for that matter) is any good. While in both cases it’s accentuated by frankly some of the best visual and sound design I’ve seen in the medium, they get numbed down by a game that’s basically “run around touching every door until one of them doesn’t say “It looks like the lock is broken. I can’t open it.””, and “hope you didn’t miss a key you need to solve a puzzle twenty minutes in the future” (I hate the puzzles in this game!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). Sometimes, you even get to shoot a monster three times and then kick it! I don’t even buy the idea that the combat sells Harry or James as an “everyman”, considering how quickly and effectively they take to either blowing up grotesque monsters or Olympic sprinting past them. It stings a bit more after playing SH1, cause it’s really just more of the same but with the novelty gone.
Anyway sometimes you get a little break from all of that and get to see a story bit and those are generally pretty good! The voice acting is wonky in a fun way, and the VA and cutscenes are directed really well as to say an awful lot about the characters without actually saying very much (made abundantly clear after watching a SH2R version of a scene I just saw and seeing how much more uncommunicative and, well, worse it was). I wasn’t particularly grabbed by the supporting cast’s stories, but everything that linked back to James himself I found really compelling. And I really liked the way it laid out its storytelling: how it opens a lot of unanswered mystery to ruminate on while licking broken doors, before challenging your ideas of the world and characters right at the end. It’s hard to stay completely unspoiled on a game as mammoth and ripe for theorycrafting as this, so I went in with my ideas coloured by out-of-context pre-perceptions of the characters, and it was nice to see some of my resulting ideas proven sorta wrong.
Is Silent Hill 2 the best horror game ever made? Is it the pinnacle of storytelling in a video game? I dunno, man, but I thought it was Pretty Good!
Resident Evil (1996)
An example of every single element – mechanics, design, aesthetic touches – working in tandem for its singular experience of Survival Horror. Crawling through the Spencer Mansion is a sprawling resource management puzzle where static, non-respawning enemies means constantly weighing whether it’s worth spending resources (bullets) now to save resources (health) later, or to run past with the hopes of saving bullets at the risk of taking a hit. Enough wrenches are thrown in (difficult aiming and dodging, variable health, unavoidable enemies) and enough information is obfuscated to hide and muddy said puzzle nature and keep it interesting in the moment-to-moment as well as the long-term. It’s just as satisfying to freely run back and forth through an area you cleared an hour ago as it is *dissatisfying* to get chomped by some guy you completely forgot you ran past. As much as I genuinely sort of hate the Hunters (enemy type that can sometimes just solo you in a game about long-term resource management and attrition, INCLUDING your ability to save), it’s a really strong trick to test what it’s teaching: before I was blasting zombies as much as I could as long as my ammo didn’t get too low, now I’m realising I spent too much early on and I’m struggling with very few healing items and limited ammo, having to meticulously route my way back through the mansion in order to encounter as few enemies as possible. I’m also a big fan of most puzzles being navigational or adventure-gamey logic than Explicit Puzzles – I struggle with all of the above, and had a hard time remembering specific rooms I hadn’t been to in a while, but I find the deduction puzzles in, say, Silent Hill a comparatively massive momentum-crash.
It won’t be a unique observation to say that the sort of tension this creates relies on risking frustration: dying and having to re-do bits over and over, or locking yourself in a situation with really low resources that you just have to Deal With. I do think this is valuable in itself – not only do you need genuine risk to create fear and tension, dying during a long trek gives you the opportunity to do it better next time, to save resources in the long run. HOWEVER, I did find a lot of my deaths bore tedium more than anything: having to re-do an awful lot of busywork before getting back to the Real Bits, or spending a not-insignificant amount of the game repeating short sections over and over by virtue of being one hit away from death with no healing because I couldn’t get to grips with Hunters. It makes me wonder if there’s a way to format survival horror that keeps the tension while shedding the tedium or frustration that might come with it… but I don’t think it’s the end of the world if there isn’t.
(played as Jill btw)
Enjoy the Diner
Cute little thing :) fairly simple and short adv but I liked it enough to play through in one evening. I really like the contrast between the grounded and the supernatural, and how everything feels wrapped in an enviable level of warmth, understanding and compassion. There’s a big soft spot in my heart for stories where people act almost unusually kind towards each other, and I really love how the framing of the story ties in with it here. One of the post-credits bits basically confirms a character I like as aro but in a way i’d normally find annoying but I like the game too much to take it that way happy june month everyone :)
Ib (2012)
Very glad to be playing more foundational RPGMaker stuff!! I liked this :) it’s cute, has better spooks than I expected from a cutesy-looking horror, and has really nice character dynamics (I like Garry a lot more than I thought I would). Some of the story stuff reminds me of, of all things, a Goosebumps book I had when I was a kid, except with like much more interesting characters and implications because this isn’t a children’s book series lol. I love the aesthetics of the later bits sooo much that stuff’s so me!!!
Electric Fairyland
FAIRY GAME FAIRY GAME FAIRY GAME… WAHHHHH
Cute little collectathon with a cool “interconnected micro-level” structure. Visual design is absolutely gorgeous and each level is small enough to feel like a lil diorama. The actual verbs are extremely simple: you walk, run, jump and glide, you run into things to pick them up, you wrestle with a slightly awkward but not-that-bad-really camera, and the platforming challenges are very simple and there are only a few levels where you can actually “die”. Although I do like the camera: it’s fixed to an eight-directional (horizontal), three-directional (vertical) view that never quite puts itself into the position you want it to be in, but they play with depth perception in a way where changing the angle can give a whole different perspective on a level. It’s short, it’s cute, it’s easy, it costs less than a bus ticket, I LOVE FAIRYYYYYYY
Games I Haven't Finished
Atelier Elie: The Alchemist of Salburg
It’s hard for a really cool and unique idea to feel as impressive the second time, so Elie had the odds stacked against it to begin with, but I also don’t think this is quite as sharp as the first game. Combat feels almost like an afterthought, with combat and alchemy levels being separate (so combat EXP doesn’t improve your crafting) and no bosses blocking off gathering spots as in Marie, which in turn basically removes one of the purposes of alchemy – making items for now-unimportant combat – and twists the game into almost-exclusively a menu game past the first year. Not to say I haven’t enjoyed it!! This formula is always gonna be fun to me, I just think this one is a little less interesting. I like the sort of out-of-nowhere yearly exams as another vessel to make you feel a bit stupid, and I’m a big fan of how it calls back to the first game a lot as a way to give the town a sense of placehood and history. I sorta tapered off once I figured out the game’s differences, but I’d like to go back and finish it.
Crusader of Centy
Had to hop on the spiritual predecessor to Community POM (one of my “almost completely unknown games that I like Well Enough so have implanted it into my personality”), but there’s an allure that game had through its unbelievably striking visual and musical theming that made up for the honestly fairly basic combat. What I played of Centy just has a lot of fairly basic fantasy motifs! I like the idea of the “clearly kinda Zelda-inspired game but much more focused on combat”, but I think said combat needs to be much more interesting than what either of these offer.
Onimusha: Warlords
Interesting premise (melee action game that controls and is generally styled like RE1; top down fixed camera tank control movement, small map with significant focus on puzzles, etc.) whose idiosyncrasies are sort of let down by how basic it all ends up feeling. Early on, it feels good: you’ve got basic combos with some different use-cases, a block that often gets you knocked far away from the enemy, and a quickstep dodge for aggression. But it feels worse and worse as it goes on because nothing actually changes: the block button solves almost all enemy attacks with practically no risk and different combos don’t really give you different opportunities, so it ends up playing like “block, smash the attack button, repeat”, where the enemy that gave me the most trouble has delayed swings that wouldn’t feel out of place in Elden Ring. The map-crawling isn’t that inspiring either: opening the map takes like five seconds of menuing, respawning enemies had me wanting to run past everything I could to avoid taking hits (while early on my approach was opposite: grind easy enemies Metroid-style in hopes of getting a health drop), and there are mandatory locks that require currency-gated upgrades to require; if you didn’t kill enough enemies, or just wanted to invest in something that actually affects your combat, well it’s time to get grinding.
Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin
Let’s get this straight: this is an action-platformer MUCH more than it is a horrifyingly-detailed rice farming simulator. In my short time so far, the latter has felt somewhat sidelined compared to the amount of time you spend launching reasonably fun combos at enemies that don’t really fight back. There’s also a sort of muddied sense of tedium: aspects of farming are supposed to be annoying, and it does that fairly well, but other parts of the game drown you in very Modern Game-feeling Kill X Thing checklists that feel like they’re supposed to be much more engaging than they actually are.
I like the game more than I’m probably showing – I like Sakuna (the character) despite sorta chafing with the Anime Silliness writing style, and I think the structure of the game is strong – I really like the rice farming, and having another activity to accompany it to while out the seasons works well. But I still feel a little wistful for the game I wish this was: less (or even just better?) combat, and more time spent on the fields.
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Thanks for reading as always :) As usual, feel free to drop something in this box if I said something interesting or if you want to tell me any horror stuff I should play/watch/read. See you next month!