drone

the good kind, like sunn o)))

  • she/her

♥️ trans / bi / poly
📸 @loni


"Huh! This looks just like Cave Noire. Funny coincidence, I've been playing that lately, and people seem to be saying good things about it, so let's give it a go..."

If you are the kind of game fan that enjoys indie gems that provide new and fascinating experiences, that feel like a breath of fresh air from the average larger budget game, and provide a sense of respect for the player to just get on with the game, or you like sick ass game soundtracks, or you're gay as hell, please do not miss out on it.

Full, rambly spoilers ahead. (I'm not gonna get into a blow-by-blow of the plot or mysteries, but I won't steer away from those elements either):


To start, I'll say I got to 0stranger, and had a bit of a fiddle around with that, then stopped realising I've really cut through the meat of the game and felt very much done. I didn't get any of the more "bonus" endings and there were for sure some loose ends left unsolved.

This was the most interesting game I've played this year, by a country mile. It's a feeling like when I first played Outer Wilds or Tunic, where being in its grips felt like succumbing to a pocket universe of amazement, wonder and discovery and excitement for the slowly unfolding mysteries of the game.

I rarely got tired of the puzzles and, due to the nature of the game, it was fun to revisit those floors and just mindlessly blast through them after having sat down long and hard to think about some of them.

There's a certain push and pull between the player and the game's open-ended web of riddles. On the one hand, the game provides puzzles that require you to sit down, ponder, wait until that crucial lightbulb moment, and that means you can't guide the player by the hand to give a smooth passage through the game. And I loved this - it's something I want to see more in games in general.

On the other hand, I feel like the execution of those puzzles sometimes led to an abundance of downtime, where I'd have that lightbulb moment and understand a puzzle's solution conceptually, but knowing where to actually execute on it wasn't clear. This led to times where I'd literally play through the entire dungeon 2, 3, 4 times just to see if something worked, iterating on inputting my solution each time. Naturally, it is extraordinarily fast to go through those floors with the knowledge of how to solve them and the items after the first run, but it still adds up to a lot of dead time.

Unlocking 5 brands at once at the start of the game after dying short into Lillie's run and refusing the fruit out of curiosity, I had no notion of what they were going to do, but also no notion that I could activate several of them rather than just one. I just guessed one, which ended up being Lillie's brand, and proceeded to struggle with that run without items for hours before acually giving up and then realising I could try multiple brands.

It's cool to figure things out yourself, but boy, my time is more precious than this.

The main throughline of the game (as in, Grey -> Lillie -> Cif -> DIS) could be opaque to the point of frustration in a similar way. When I beat the Cif run, I was given no indication that their run was done and was meant to go back to Gray (or Lillie). I ended up rerolling as Cif, then realising (after asking someone) that there was no point in it and it took forever to get back to the start of the game. I did the Mon dungeon and bomberman boss twice...

But, if you're going to make a game where the onus is put onto the player to think and experiment, having some players lose a lot of time and get frustrated is inevitable and you just have to find the most reasonable balance possible.

Story-wise, while I found the overarching plot about the void lords and the origin of the dungeon (and the general "what the fuck is going on here" of it all) extremely compelling, I ultimately found the more personal story about Gray, Lily and Lillie far more affecting and emotionally resonant, which meant that while Gray's true ending was very cool, the indirect, Deep Loreness of it felt just a little bit too out of reach for there to be any real sense of catharsis.

It led to me thinking "wow, I bet this is really cool for whoever manages to compile this story" - and that's from me, who actually did compile everything into a big google document to lay out that backstory. The context I'd gathered from the snippets of dialogue while exploring the game's meta-puzzle felt like taking in a story from an appendix or wikipedia article.

No matter how cool all that stuff is, it will never match up to a well told, personal story of sapphic longing, love, regret and redemption. Especially with well-realised characters, incredible character art and music to go along with it.

Even the Ninnie segment affected me more than the void lords'/Add's story. I still haven't forgiven the devs for this (oh my god, seriously, fuck you :eggbug-sob:).

I'm not sure if playing ZeroRanger first would have changed this, but either way I'm excited to get into it properly, and when I have some more bandwidth, I'll likely get back into 0stranger too and check out the other "endings" and corners of the game I hadn't poked about in.

I've rambled a lot about my abovementioned quarrels, but I only criticise this because I care. The game was so, so compelling that I really couldn't think about anything else for the couple of weeks I had it going on. I haven't been drawn into a game like this in so long. Also, I know this is a game by a small team and they have punched astronomically above their weight in their execution here and got so much right so I don't wish to complain that they should have done more.

Thank you for a wonderful experience.

Other random notes:

  • The DIS dungeon section was sublime! Every single floor had amazing ideas.
  • The first time I walked onto the UI and realised I could swap out the numbers, my jaw dropped on the floor.
  • The music??????
  • I didn't ask for help for much, but I did at some points and have no regrets. The tail mural I got hints for, I even tried putting screenshots of Tail's tail together in GIMP and still failed to compile and understand it. I also needed a hint for the missing floor and maybe a couple other things, too.
  • There are so few men in this game. Just barely any in sight. I fucking love it.

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