electricity went out and I was listening to radiohead so it felt v appropriate to play this

“Is so prettyy so beautifull all the boys wants mee~ The mean girls hates me because of this!” feel like this everyday asf

rlly vibe w squishy moss’ stuff, def made by someone raised online in fringe twitter and neocities circles and who is obviously a deeply hurt person. love the dioramas they make, how every game is a beautiful collection of photographs. good stuff <3 don’t know if I can recommend unless ur like deep into traumacore aesthetics and gross and edgy imagery and stories but yas I love it and think it def has a reason to exist

-dude it’s so wild how edgy things could be in the mid 00s in a way that didn’t seem tasteless or needlessly provocative but instead was just edgy to further the plot n characters. like I think this was rated teen but there’s some v dark themes here that I wasn’t expecting for a game that looks and feels so childlike on the ds.
-love ds 3d graphics sm, chunky and blocky little polygons. flower sun and rain, style savvy and this are all very fucking cute and unmatched in terms of aesthetic. running around on this cute little beachy island that’s like totally abandoned and the dusty af mansion, the caves at the end w the blocky trees hanging over the characters. also just rlly love the designs for all these characters and rlly enjoyed seeing beautiful 2d drawings of the characters turned into blocky chibified rough caricatures.
-tbh when this comes out on switch I will probably pick it up bc I don’t know if my broke bitch laptop can play wii games well (I think it can but idk) but I also don’t know if I’ll replay this unless it’s majorly diff in terms of the story. like they rlly could’ve either cut out a lot of fat/backtracking or made this a lot longer adding in lots of characterization and motivation for the characters, but instead it’s a weird middle length for a game where by the end I was kinda idk bored??? idk I think the switch vers. looks rlly cute, love how switch games look for the most part.
-the two blonde dudes are kinda yaoi idkkkkk…
-the story is soooo cute, mostly why I wanted to play this even though I barely knew anything about the story I just always thought ashley’s design was so slay. but yeah def connected w this and w ashley and her search for family she doesn’t even rlly know if they want her around or who they are. it’s why shattered memories is one of my fave stories the more I think about, this isn’t totally comparable and not nearly as good for a variety of reasons but I still found ashley’s relationship w her dad rlly cute and sweet. also liked all the parallels between her and d and how so many adolescents feel like lost and lonely and invisible. heavy important stuff for what is basically a kids game, wish I played as a kid but tbh I was a dumb kid and would’ve gotten stuck on puzzles early on especially if played before I had iphone.

rlly rlly beautiful and everything I value in both art and just the world in general. I’ve wanted to work w animals and environmental protection and I fully intend to go to school for that…eventually lol. at first was annoyed that they didn’t more in addition to the visual novel type of storytelling. like they created such a fully well realized world and animals w their own history and lore and ways of living and the art is just so beautiful that I wanted to freely explore it instead of being set on a predetermined and linear path. but I started thinking about it and it makes sense both to ally and thematically, like the framing device is a docu crew and the filmmakers cannot and will not interfere w anything that happens regardless of whether or not they want to. they can only see what their cameras permit them too, they are also stuck on a straight path of which there’s no deviation and where they cannot stop events from happening. tbh when a second chapter does come out I rlly do hope it follows a diff character/breed of marine life w the whale calf just making sporadic appearances, seriously I do think w time and future releases this will come to be better than kr0 in terms of stories like these in this medium.
reminded me of the time I was on a vacation w my bf and we were taking a Lyft somewhere over a bridge, beneath us from inside the car I could see a manatee swimming away. this game made me feel exactly how I did that day, w so much love and appreciation for this world and all of its inhabitants…

this series is one of the only pieces of media I’ve stumbled across that accurately sums up how it feels to be in ur early/mid 20s and live in a Big City in the modern world. it makes me consistently feel like tony in the pilot of sopranos where he’s talking about coming into smth once everything has been done and discovered. it’s not necessarily bad but it is jarring to read up about the history of a place and find out how it was once a real place for both art and commerce and now it’s rlly not much, it’s weird and gross to be able to track the history of a well documented city that u live in and see what used to reside there. most places like this where I live that haven’t been turned into a luxury restaurant or hotel or shopping center lay dormant and abandoned, collecting dust and wires hanging from ceilings. scary stuff!!

bort doll smack cam !!

consistently impressed by all the diff animation styles and angles and framing present in this series, no better way to flex ur talent than making a game that makes fun of art museums.

rlly funny one, enjoy how much these games seem to be made by ppl entirely bored and burned by contemporary art and it’s insistence on it as a consumable marketable good and also it’s moral standing. how most if not all big blockbuster movies or triple a games or prestige tv shows are incredibly right leaning and seemingly only cared about morals and coming out looking better and smarter than it’s audience. the opioid epidemic joke here v funny

recently me and my boyfriend have been rewatching Hulu’s normal people which isn’t great but I think the source material and those characters are some of my absolute favorites. it’s a story that’s underneath everything else about the failings of previous generations on younger ppl. ie connell and marianne aren’t bad ppl at all but have the capacity and the learned knowledge to be bad and awful towards their friends, each other and to themselves. the family life of marianne compliments things for her and connell’s financial situation (already being poor and coming of age in the recession) makes things harder for him. the past failings of past generations screwed things up for the next. and bc of the open-ended-ness of both the book and the series the implication if viewing the characters wholly pessimistically is that they too will mess things up for whoever comes next and each other bc they weren’t taught any better.

Rekinder more than any other piece of media I’ve consumed is about future generations reckoning and reaction w their parents generation.

there’s that rlly cringey and also very famous segment in the fight club movie where brad pitt, standing in presumably for all of gen x, says that they’re a generation of men raised by women and that is more or less why they are failed men for lack of a better term. it’s a good theory and a good scene in practice, blaming the past without doing any introspection is a good bit and would actually work if not so deadly serious and even worse sexist and espousing borderline MRA talking points. rekinder is about rightfully aiming blame at others while also holding urself accountable for ur own actions and shortcomings regardless of how u ended up that way.

it’s also a game very of its time and of its place, very edgy and scenemo. the jokes and the references sure but most importantly the visuals. it reminds me a lot of weirdo indie horror animation I would watch in my teens, a lot of it rlly well produced but also not rlly saying anything. rekinder says sm in such little time, it’s also def about how kids and teens as time progresses they become more and more desensitized to their own environments. I was a preteen when the Boston bombing happened and I remember day of making tasteless weird jokes to my friends and asking my family who even cared and why was I supposed to care. it was supposed to be shocking and upsetting definitely but I felt nothing when it happened and when national tragedies happen now I try to have empathy and sympathy but I can’t say I’m any closer to “getting” it. just that I’m more mature and less edgy w how far removed I feel from stuff like that. this past week YouTube randomly recommended me a real liveleak video. there is rlly no reason why the algorithm suggested this to me, I just happened to stumble upon it while searching smth completely unrelated up. I didn’t watch it obv but the thumbnail to the v short vid made it very clear what was about to happen. it was gross and weird to even see the image but it was also hard to realize that that’s a real human life, it feels distant and fake and the memory of it more or less completely left my mind and with time will totally leave my mind. and I had a similar experience w a drawn piece of cartoon gore present in the very end of the game, it felt sudden and it was gross looking but it felt just as distant and fake as that thumbnail. the children in rekinder are so completely desensitized to their real world that their demeanors and attitudes aren’t rlly different once the tone of the game shifts about ten minutes in. and it’s because of their fathers and mothers and those parents fathers and mothers that they’ve ended up in a world where nothing is shocking and nothing is scarier than the world in which they’ve already spent their whole lives growing up in.

cute game and a very hopeful one at that, idk maybe generation alpha will buck certain cycles that every preceding generation hasn’t been able to^_^
traumacore but with hope and love in every moment
I love the deviant art tier drawn portraits of the main characters and how the backgrounds are still present in their little character models and not like edited out.

kind of this weird point of middling jank and very half baked story beats and gameplay mechanics. both of which could’ve been so much more interesting if not glorified jerk off simulator for horny millennials in Europe and Japan. like if this was a two hour long arcade cabinet that you’d find in like a speciality arcade I would vibe w it a lot more. instead it’s like this very middle of the road weird piece of obscure ps2 history that rlly should’ve never been a console game. shame too bc I rlly do like the aesthetics the game is trying to go for w such an intensely low budget, I like the fog and I like the closed in cramped corridors. Chicago has such a cool rich history to it wnd so many very vibey and yeah scary iconography and landmarks that it’s a bit of a shame it just uses all interiors that look like they could be in anywhere in America or the rest of the world. I do like the fog and I do like the anime girls puking up blood and slug monsters, I like the zaka tv logo and I like the flavor text ur rewarded w for finding random items in each level. I do think it takes advantage of the fact that ur a cameraman too, like there’s rlly cool mise en scene going on, stages are almost set up like a diorama for a horror house and I think it’s cool they rlly do allow u to frame other characters in cool and interesting ways, the boom mic guy appearing out from behind a palm tree as he drunkenly rants. it looks good and u get to make it look better if u want. idk how can u not love low texture fast food bag in the style of like in n out that just says FOOD on it and which u can interact w. reminds me of those insurance ads that are poking fun at horror movies, like anything that can go wrong does. but also end of day it’s way too boring for how short it is and also v casually misogynistic which yeah is expected in the genre but just bc it’s expected doesn’t mean it’s excusable. one of my favorite boxarts ever though, both for europe and japan tbh and it sucks that the game doesn’t at all deliver the aesthetics that it promises.

tbh more games should be directly inspired by giallo, it’s a cool aesthetic and I fuck w it. also idk huge fan of the idea of reoccurring characters that feel right in whatever situation u put them in. that’s why as a teen I so heavily connected to smth like the original clerks, those are characters that u can easily imagine in a whole bunch of different scenarios. the rules of the narrative and the worlds laws u don’t get bound to when u make such an instantly likeable character as the protag in this series. love the score for this one, very on brand giallo vibes w this screeching cheesy guitar solo that occasionally pops up. definitely smth here about gender and gender politics and the expectations placed on both women and men and maybe future games will delve into that further. also idk I have good memories of being a kid in a pre-iphone world and going to art museums and just being stunned by them, I haven’t been to an art museum in like six years now lmao. every museum in a major metropolitan city is seemingly catered to selfie instagram which sucks a bit but yeah it’s cool that this almost is an interactive art exhibit and I feel like every game in the series I’ve played so far directly comments on the way we consume media and art in the 2020’s and how we are becoming further and further removed from having any kind of positive relation or meditation w art.

so so so glad I waited so long to play this one. any earlier and I was def not emotionally mature/stable enough to play something this meditative and slow and dark as this.

u can def tell this was made by a musician, stuff like how tiles make up the score for that worlds music is rlly rlly neat and I love it. found myself clanging the bell on the bicycle in tune w the music a lot. also very shocking how many of the songs I knew just through cultural osmosis, it makes smth as dark as this feel more comforting than it actually is and less otherworldly than it tries to be but in like a positive way. there’s an interview w one of the kinsella brothers where he mentions not even rlly being into emo/90s math rock/other stuff like capn jazz and yet ended up being a trendsetter for a whole sub genre of emo. it’s how I feel about this. obv the earthbound influence is front and center and also kind of lulls you into this sense of tranquility bc it’s smth familiar. like I never played earthbound for myself, it’s just not a kind of game that I can devote time to, but I did watch my boyfriend play the entirety of it on our modded wii when we originally moved in together and so seeing stuff like the mall looking area where u get the flute or the nes styled worlds or even the designs of the neon ghosts reminds me of half-watching him play that. it’s cute I love it. but I think more than anything this is def inspired by silent hill and other survival horror of its era.

kinda sucks that any kind of art that’s like vague or mysterious or doesn’t spell itself out for u now needs a BLANK EXPLAINED article or video for everyone that felt somewhat confused by the newest a24 horror film. idk no shame if smth leaves u feeling confused, I just watched blade runner 2049 w my bf this week and I literally kept asking him to explain it to me bc I don’t get get it. and I don’t understand all the imagery here and that’s okay, I don’t need to. the search for answers w smth like this is kinda idk dumb and redundant. this says everything it means to say, it can mean anything u want it to bc it’s so open ended and cryptic and vague and no one would technically be wrong bc the creator of the game has never said what it’s actually about, and even if they did and even if this meant smth super specific and personal to them like it most likely did doesn’t mean it can’t mean smth else entirely to u.

v relaxing, have played this for an hour or two each night after coming home from work and it felt good like it felt rewarding and also comforting.

reminds me of just in a general way of the feeling of being vulnerable and exposed, not many games, not even many horror games or other pieces of media make me feel so strongly like this. it reminds me of watching the 2001 horror movie pulse w some guy I barely knew in my basement as a teenager or when me and my boyfriend were taking a bus w a transfer on it back from a festival late at night and this very old very big drunk guy kept following us around and harassing/hitting on me. obv nothing happened in either situation but it’s like the feeling that it might and how that kind of sticks w u for a while after. scary stuff imo