faea gaming: September '26
Hello again. It’s September, so I’ve been sick for basically the whole month. Sickness and work being unusually intense this month have made it somewhat of a blur… I don’t really know what I’ve been doing. I look at the calendar and it’s the 11th, I blink and it’s the 20th; I remember I passed my driving test, I remember I had a Christmas tree thrown at me, and I haven’t put down a single word for my journal because I don’t know what I’ve been playing? I don’t know if I have? I think this is what I played this month. Probably?
Games I Played This Month
Royal Edoma Engine
Video games challenges are generally expected to be designed around the game’s restrictions: a game with instantaneously responsive controls allows for much denser use of obstacles due to the ease of physically moving through them, whereas one whose movement involves a greater deal of physical friction to wrestle with would be expected to have a sparser set of obstacles as they already naturally interact with the physical control of the player character. Of course, this isn’t limited to character movement properties; it can be anything, and Royal Edoma Engine’s ‘restrictions’ exist entirely on the visual side: a Viewpoint-style isometric shoot ‘em up perspective with an enormous player sprite wearing a small but totally invisible hitbox. So then, the question is: how do you build a shoot ‘em up around these visual obfuscations? Well, certainly not by reducing the bullet density to suit, in this case: though the stages are rather light, the bosses leean very heavily into danmaku bosses through and through, using less tight but more complex pattens just as often as intensely high bullet density that is just completely unreasonable to navigate through safely. What it does do, in turn, is both have an immensely generous health bar and a healing bullet-cancel hyper: picking up items fills a meter, and activating the meter when it goes above 70% capacity transforms all bullets on-screen into items, causes shooting enemies to spawn items, and causes items to heal throughout the hyper duration rather than filling the meter.
How does it all play out? The general strategy is simply to avoid as many of the densely unavoidable patterns as possible, through a few methods. One is rank control: rank is explicitly tracked, and the manual states that it is reduced by using the hyper when the meter is not maxed out, and on death. Rank control doesn't feel too impactful on Novice, and is certainly an excessive optimisation as opposed to having it naturally drop when dying on hard sections, but the differences can still be felt particularly in early stage sections – keeping rank at 1 or 2 makes most of the second stage simply not fight back at all. The second is through boss phase skips: bosses have an overall timer, rather than per-attack, and timing it out ends the whole boss; you can certanly break the game harder than I felt inclined to by this, but finding a comfortable attack on a boss with an excessively-dense pattern and simply dodging it for a minute or so can be easier than playing out the boss in full. Hypering through a pattern is only really a last resort for those that can't really be skipped, be it a midboss, the start of a main boss, or a section of a main boss that just doesn't have an easy pattern to use to time out – the dynamic being that taking too much damage before the nasty pattern might mean the second health bar gained from the hyper isn't enough to tank through the pattern or what comes after. Is this an interesting dynamic for a shoot 'em up? I wouldn't say so, but I think the patterns that are just loose enough to force interesting macro-dodging as opposed to desperate damage tanking make up for it.
I did clear this but I did so at 8pm the day before posting and OBS was very resistant to capturing the game window, so I need to put some actual effort in to making a watchable replay upload lol
Touhou Gensoukyou ~ Lotus Land Story
Feels somewhat half-baked below Lunatic with a year or so more of STG experience under my belt, so it’s probably a good thing that this is probably the most approachable Touhou Lunatic by a long shot. On lower difficulties, interesting stage choreography is heavily undercut by how easily those challenges wind up solved by either the most basic streaming, or sometimes by literally standing still! Lunatic doesn’t change much in stages beyond giving most basic enemies single aimed shots and densifying the shots of more significant enemy types, but just filling in the gaps with popcorn enemy fire does a lot to keep things wholly engaging and chuck a mean wrench in the sections that do already work. The key factor is that most enemy paths bring then very close to the bottom of the screen, meaning that failing to actively take them out on Lunatic will have them firing bullets at awkward angles from the side or even below you, cutting off basic streaming attempts and forcing much stranger movement if not just blindsiding you completely. Bosses still tend to awkwardly loop a small set of basic patterns over and over until they collapse, but some of the more interesting ones become satisfyingly nasty, and swapping from Reimu A to Marisa A in my casual playing has done a lot to help the more repetitive ones – by having far more damage throughput than what Reimu is capable of, and by simply not fighting Marisa to begin with, lol.
Eigengrau (purchase here)
Entering the game is to be shoved into what is presenting itself as a run-based arcade shmup, with an awkward handful of preset options: the difficulty settings being ‘easy’ or ‘hard’, and a default shield value of 10 while the greyed-out P2 has a default of none. Jumping in with these defaults will likely result in an initial run that drags somewhat aggravatingly, with the game’s >1hr runtime and the ability to take over fifteen hits per stage – the ‘shield’ revealed to be a secondary health bar that both refills between stages and occasionally between stage sections. Each stage section plays out as a different gimmick, usually very explicit ones – wind direction changes altering movement and firing, having to run through boxes in a certain order, being stuck to a specific grid, etc – while being asked to kill the enemies on-screen as quickly as possible. Each section has a rank associated with clear speed, as well as multiple secret objectives that will likely crop up incidentally… none of which seem to have any clear impact on the run itself.
It’s all very confusing and at times somewhat irritating, and then, after a first play that lasts likely over an hour, the game reveals its hand… possessing a “Level Select”. Its design makes much more sense under this context that it initially pushes itself as far away from as possible. Lots of the gimmicks are, at least in my opinion, annoying more than interesting, either punishing failure just by losing time or just distracting from the core shmup gameplay far too uninterestingly… so you can pick and choose which ones to play and put time into, with the time losses and secrets of dubious usefulness making much more sense under this context. Though I still don’t really like it that much – the gimmicks are still often too overbearing as to feel like they’re warping the game around themselves; on Easy the stages don’t tend to have enough bullets to interact with them, often not really feeling like an STG at all. And you have to tap-fire to shoot with full movement speed in a time attack game…!
I’d say it’s about halfway to being an interesting rally against STG tradition, being a game both trying to push as many boundaries as possible mechanically as well as feeling more interesting when focusing on single level grinds as opposed to full game runs, but by my mark it’s still adhering to that form too closely – forcing an initial Full Run Attempt before unfolding its stage select structure, as well as needing to replay multiple full stages in a row to unlock more sections to solo-grind, feels at odds with what I feel its best traits are. I’m not opposed to having the option of doing full runs, but with how long it is, how many one-off ideas it’s putting onto the table, and how much it does care about its time attack and bonus objectives, I think I’d have been much more willing to accept this game for what it largely is if it were more wholly built around a level-select unlock structure – and games like the photography Touhou games exist, so it’s not unprecedented to begin with.
Peret-em-Heru: For the Prisoners (translation patch here)
Pretty silly early RPGM-horror Corpse Party successor: an Egyptologist ropes in a bunch of tourists to use as meat shields while exploring the Pyramid of Giza, the pyramid itself begins judging each person in the group for their sins, and the main character has to save them all from being killed by the traps in the temple. The temple itself weighs every sin equally – defiling the pyramid, sexual assault, and stealing a cheap necklace from a shop before the events of the game are all equally punished by gruesome death within the judgement halls of Anubis, and the main character as well reflects on these all as equal sins through their theatrical internal monologue. It is all presented very awkwardly, in a way that feels like the outward belief of the game – not just the in-universe mechanics – is that these are all equal as well! The means of saving characters ranges from fairly interesting to also somewhat awkward: menu commands need to be used under certain contexts or at certain times to save characters from death – some of these take an extra level of problem solving or applying understanding of the story, and others simply ask you to use the skill you just learned in the right place within the next minute or two of play. I don’t know how much I liked this game, but I can’t say I didn’t have a very good time playing it: the dialogue and prose (in the fan translation I used) are entertaining, the portraits and low-colour environments are very well drawn with a particular note to some really strong battle scenes!, and there’s a plucky energy to being a confident trailblazer of what would become an important slice of the RPGM scene.
Kaze no NOTAM (translation patch here)
I got forced to play a little of this… There’s a part of me that really respects the lack of control over the hot air balloon – only being able to move in one of five randomly-selected directions at once (which can often roll the same direction multiple times) – against the game only offering fairly strict missions which expect deft control of the balloon to make specific long-term movements across the map… which sometimes you will simply not be allowed to do. There is a level of risk mitigation in not overcommitting to a specific direction, in case the next set of wind directions then force you into a bad situation – into a mountain, out of bounds of the map – but it is, well, luck. The person who can either see the aim of actually achieving these objectives as secondary to the immediate experience of trying to control the balloon, or who just loves the idea of this sort of thing holistically, would absolutely love this game – I don’t feel there are many of those people, and I’m certainly just a little too goal-oriented to not get a bit annoyed when the wind decides to checkmate me over and over again, but I think it is still rather captivating. It's a great game to talk over with friends; you have to pay fairly constant attention so it doesn't become completely mindless, but the actual act of flight doesn’t take much more than making a decision on which direction to take, and then coasting until the wind changes. I'd like to play more of these experimental, atmospheric '90s Artdink games some time… Aquanaut's Holiday? Tail of the Sun? We'll see.
~*ʚїɞ*~
Huh? Hi, yeah? Uh. Right. Um. Thank you for reading, as always. This time of the year is always one of the toughest for work, so that plus sickness has made this month quite tiring for I guess very normal and boring reasons, lol. Apologies if that shows through too much in the tone of the post... Anyway, I remember making a comment some months ago about this journal format feeling a little unsustainable. Those feelings have been coming up again a little more recently, in part due to some degree of writing burnout (I, again, didn’t write anything for this until about the 20th, and my Pop’n TwinBee piece was mostly written about a month before publishing), but both the format itself and the high effort nature of it feel at odds with both my energy levels and some of my goals. My main goal with writing nowadays is, I suppose, to share interesting things and hopefully drive enough interest in them to perhaps even get somebody to try one of them themselves. I think this journal format is good for that, in the sense that I’m sharing lots of games, and fun for me to write as well!, but my growing hesitances are:
~ The intent of the journal is to share everything I play that I feel I can say something interesting about, but sometimes it takes so much energy that I end up missing some games anyway! Royal Edoma Engine was one I missed from a month or two ago that I wanted to highlight and talk about and it felt apt to put it here – ludonarrative or whatever – but others have just been missed entirely…
~ I play a lot of games right now!! I am lucky enough to have few responsibilities beyond my job, and sometimes that means I play an awful lot of games in a month (especially since I like shorter games a lot!). Beyond the aforementioned energy cost of writing about all of them… I wonder if they’re sometimes just too long? I don’t see very many people wanting to chew through the entirety of some of them at once.
~ With the length of them, I wonder how likely people are to actually retain any one game they read in a long journal entry? My bias is that I have very poor information processing from purely visual stimuli, which is a fancy way of saying I struggle with reading myself… but I don’t know how much I would if I were reading my own journals as somebody else. I feel like pieces on single games or a small group with some throughline might be better for actually ‘boosting’ games. (I have thought about fleshing out some of my entries about games I’m more passionate about into full pieces, though, and some literally have started out as that, so it is still helpful to some extent there.)
In regard to the last two points, I’ve thought about having an index at the start to let people click around to what might interest them, but I am also very aware that I play a lot of games that most people will likely not be familiar with in the first place… The ideal, I guess, is to build towards a giant tagged index of games that people can click around on a different page, and get linked to those sections of each journal entry, but that’s very much beyond my (energy-related) capabilities to implement right now, and would likely need very heavy signposting to to make sure people actually know it’s, like, there. And, to be clear, this isn’t a thinly-veiled “I want to stop writing these”, to be clear – I would just say it outright if it was – but I feel like there might be a different approach to this that would make it a little more manageable at times… I don’t really know, though. I’m definitely going to at least keep doing this approach until the new year – that feels like a nice time to make meaningful structural changes, if they are going to happen. But I think I’d appreciate some sort of input on any of my thoughts, since… I’m not the reader. I don’t have your perspective. And I’d like it :p.
Since I haven’t been doing that much this month, I think????, I haven’t been reading much, either – I don’t really have much to share. Instead, I’m going to give a note to Critical Distance – chances are you’re familiar with them if you’re here, but they do regular weekly roundups of video games writing, featuring a lot of independent writers like myself; a lot of what gets featured leans less towards the more direct mechanical breakdowns that myself and my peers tend to lean into, but not only does that mean you get a good deal of variety, and a good host of potentially new voices to keep an eye on… but they have been featuring us more than I’d have expected recently. If you’re reading this with your own blog or other outlet, you can email them your RSS feed if you’d like to draw their attention – I didn’t get confirmation that I’d been ‘noticed’, but they did start sharing my main articles very shortly after I did.
I’ve also updated my ‘about’ page’s section of links to be a bit more descriptive about each person. It’s taken me literal months! to do this, so I have trimmed down the list a bit temporarily while I get cute blurbs for all my friends and favourite writers ready, but in return I’ve compiled a list of buttons – mostly taken from Warp Point lol – to link to basically everyone I know who writes, who seems chill by my mark, and who has an 88x31 button to link with. And if you have a blog (or well, an art criticism / discussion blog in particular, I guess) and a button, and you make your presence known to me, I will almost definitely put you down there as well, unless you actively don’t want me to for any reason. It’s a bit of an impersonal solution with how many people I want to link to, but I want to keep these writing circles, well, circulating, and I think it’s better than being particularly exclusive. (And one day, once I re-immerse myself into more creative spaces, I'll probably end up making it its own page with all sorts of different creatives beyond just writing… look forward to that as much as I will be.)
Hope that makes up for the lack of actual article links this time. I have been doing a few other things as well: I’ve nearly finished Threads of Fate, I’ve been playing Disco Elysium through alongside a good friend, which is very good, and I’ve been playing Castle Crashers through alongside another good friend, which is not very good. I spent a little time window-shopping some of Compile’s early shmups, which I like a lot but didn’t get deep enough into to want to write any sort of blurb. I've also been playing a secret other game that I've been writing about, which hopefully will reach you in the next week or so. (I'm very happy with how well-received my last piece was, by the way!) I dropped off film watches for most of the month thanks to work starting back up, but got to watch A Chinese Ghost Story a week or so ago, which I really enjoyed.
Okay, thank you for reading again. Bye bye. See you next month. ~♡