New year new me, by which I mean same me but finally getting around to playing/replaying a few things I've had on the backburner for a good long while.

Hell Pie - I keep trying dogshit 3D platformers in the hope of feeling something but this one takes the cake for being especially ass. Spumco grossout closeups, atrocious level design, and made by people who think Scarface references are timely, it's utterly not worth anyone's time to a degree somehow exceeding my lowest expectations. I saw the demon swinging from a chain and had pleasant memories of Whiplash on the Xbox. This is not that. This is an insult to video games as an art form and to the concept of a human lifespan as a finite resource to be treasured and spent judiciously.

Shantae and the Seven Sirens - They've done this five times now and I somehow fall for it every time. Shantae is a series laden with such baffling design decisions that are enshrined as dogma, but also an unrelenting earnestness and joy that's essentially absent in damn near anything these days. Shantae may be a mess, it might have the writing of a low-budget cartoon and the art of a PG-13 newgrounds flash, but it has a real heart and that's what keeps me coming back despite myself. The transformations are cute too.

Kingdom Hearts 1.5 Final Mix - I've played this game to completion probably a half-dozen times on PS2, PS4, and now PS5. If and when the series comes to steam and I can get it for less than $200 I'll probably try it there too with mods. I love Kingdom Hearts, ardently and truly. It is among my favorite series and I will defend it without apology. I always remember the first game being slower and clunkier than later ones, but playing it judiciously (and actually going out of my way to focus on magic for once) it's far more clever and well-structured than I ever really gave it credit for. Levels are dense with verticality and paths that reward coming back with new abilities, magic is versatile in combat and the environments are filled with small puzzles that reward using it cleverly. There's a real cohesion and confidence to the design that it somehow lost in the sequels, possibly from trying to be too many things at once. KH2 at its best is still some of the best action RPGs have ever been, but I think taken as a whole across the peaks and valleys KH1 may be the best the series ever was.

Helltaker - Sokoban isn't really my speed, so Baba is You and Patrick's Parabox were a bit too spicy for me. I didn't expect the game I mostly knew in passing from e621 to be equally backbreaking in its scant runtime but here we are. Short, charming, and knowing exactly what it's trying to do with laser focus, I deeply appreciate this sort of design.

Kingdom Hearts 2.5 Final Mix - Holy shit I always forget how long it takes to farm drive forms, even when you're really giving it the gusto and weaving it into your gameplay. This is my first time playing on Critical, but somehow I feel like this is the easiest it's ever been because I'm actually using my tools like drives, limits, and summons and relying on the fact that everything feeds into each other as long as you play confidently. I'm mostly doing this in order to give KH2 rando a try at some point, because that looks fun as hell and I want to pick up something other than SMZ3 over and over.

Turnip Boy Robs a Bank - The first turnip boy was a dense and charming Zelda clone that took 2-4 hours and didn't overstay its welcome. It knew the comedy of the conceit could only hold so much water and endeavored to get in and get out before it wore out its welcome. This sequel is a mediocre Nuclear Throne/Enter the Gungeon. The writing is worse, the level design is a milquetoast static frame with a random selection of static subrooms, the guns feel like trash, and the metaprogression is tacked on. Everything here feels clumsy and lifeless. A real shame after how punchy the first one was. Somehow still less bloated than Garden Story.

Tribes of Midgard - I had a freudian slip writing this and put "Tripes of Midgard" and it certainly is tripe. Even by the standards of openworldsurvivalcraft I've done this better a half-dozen times, with milquetoast combat, laborious exploration, and a complete dearth of innovation. Even if I wanted this exact vibe I'd just play Valheim.

Gunfire Reborn - I put over 100 hours into this over the years but hadn't played for a few updates. Still need to try Owl and Red Panda, I've mostly been doing Reincarnation 8/9 runs as turtle punching people to death. I like punching people, and it gives me happy memories of Borderlands 2 Krieg; aiming with the minimap because there's too many explosions to see the screen.

Momodora: Moonlit Farewell - It's moremodora. I liked the first Momodora well enough, was fairly unimpressed with Minoria to the point I only got an hour in, and this is another Momodora. It's not trying to impress, there's nothing here you haven't seen before, and after a certain point I was more interested in the rudimentary english cypher to translate the occasional runes than I was in the game itself. Cute art, but it lacks some of the original's charm for some reason and overall the game's a bit unremarkable.

Celeste 64: Fragments of the Mountain - Any platformer that has the balls to open with some of the hardest tech it's going to ask of you in the first 10 seconds with no tutorial and no other option deserves high praise. It has a few of the burrs of a gamejam game but the soul of Celeste shines through brightly in tone and structure. There's not more than an hour or so of content but it's a comfortable reverie.

Satisfactory - Got the buddy I was playing Tribes of Midgard with to try this instead. He'd only ever seen me talk about it when I put 60 hours into it solo years ago and seen the Let's Game it Out videos, so getting him up to speed on building a normal factory has been a bit of an experience. It still feels damn good to slap down some concrete and snap everything to grid. It sometimes feels even better to just say "fuck it this conveyor belt won't become the backbone of my production if I just slap it down here".


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