It's that time of year again!!!  So last year I started a brand new tradition.  Spooky games are, quite literally, their own category, right?  Not just horror games, but games with scary theming, games that use dark, spooky aesthetics, stuff like that.  There is quite literally no shortage of games that would be fitting to play for the Halloween season.  October is the dedicated horror month and I think it is fun to do spooky games in October.  So, for the past year, I have basically been quarantining any game I decree as being appropriate for the season to await October to play them.  Now it's finally time to start doing it, to let them out of containment and see what crosses my path.

Now last year, this was incredibly last minute.  I had been playing through a game for much of October, a game I thought was going to be incredibly quick to get through and be a nice break from the game I was playing prior to October, Tomb Raider, a game I really liked but man was it difficult.  So when I stopped playing that game, I went "you know what would be fun, actually" and started playing spooky games.  This year, though, I'm committing to it, I am doing it the entire month, and because I'm me, I'm both very organized AND have created a fun randomized way of choosing these games.  Namely, a big ol' wheel.  I'm spinning a wheel.  Currently, at the time of this writing, it has 32 wedges on it with various percentages for each wedge.  I am essentially weighting them based on two factors: how many games are in the same series as one I want to play and how many backlog slots a game or series takes up.  So like, BioShock takes up 6 slots on the wheel despite only two of those games being spooky themed because I own BioShock 1 and 2 3 times apiece.  Resident Evil takes up 5 slots because I own 4 games in that series I want to play and also two copies of Resident Evil 4.  Stuff like that.  Now that you know the rules, let's jump into:

Spooky Games I Played in October - 2026 Edition

Game #1: Grim Fandango

What a way to start spooky month, right?  With arguably a game that should be played at the end of it.  I probably should've just done this on Halloween/November 1st without the wheel's input, tbh, that's on me, it makes way more sense at the end of the month.  I digress.  So I've mentioned several times my tumultuous relationship with the works of Double Fine.  While I have now played some of their games and really liked them (Broken Age even making my top 100 list as of this writing), that was not always the case.  For much of my life, I associated Double Fine with incredibly interesting worlds, some of the most unique and compelling game concepts you could ever cook up, and some of the worst gameplay I have ever experienced.  Brutal Legend is one of my least favorite games of all time, Psychonauts was a massive disappointment and a lot of their games I had just simply left unfinished before now due to not super gelling with the gameplay.  One of which, was today's subject, Grim Fandango.  One of the greatest games of all time, one of the most beloved games in all of history, and one I had previously gotten about 1/6 of the way through and then was tired of wandering aimlessly and trying to click on everything + everything else and bounced.  This game REALLY needs a hint system.  But, I have now beaten it, I now have retribution for a younger me, so how did I find it now.

Grim Fandango is a 1998 point-and-click adventure game, one of the many iconic and beloved adventure games from LucasArts (The Monkey Island series, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Day of the Tentacle).  It takes place in the Aztec Underworld of Mictlan, which in Grim Fandango's time has had a 1950s retro futuristic face lift.  The souls of those who died in the "overworld" still end up in the underworld, of course, and still need to undertake the years long journey to reach their final replacing in the Ninth realm.  At a certain point, however, the underworld decided to adopt a new way of leading souls to their final resting spot: travel agents.  A travel agency sprouted up in the Eighth Underworld who measure the value of souls and if they were adequately pure of heart in the world above, they can take shortcuts to paradise, turning the journey from a four year long trek across the Underworld to a trek that might take a couple years, mere months, or for those who were truly pure of heart in the before times, mere days.

You play as travel agent Manuel "Manny" Calavera, a soul who is working off his debt in order to earn his place in paradise.  Manny used to be the top dog at his agency, but in recent times he has been effectively shut out, with his charismatic coworker Domino Hurley getting the vast majority of high rate jobs.  Frustrated by this clear and obvious favoritism, Manny decides to rig the system to give himself a high rate client he can make a big commission off of and expedite his path out of here.  This leads him to Mercedes "Meche" Colomar.  In life, Mercedes was a saint, the kind of person who would easily get a fast track to Paradise.  However, when he inputs her information into the computer system, he finds that she doesn't qualify.  Manny is confused and disappointed at this revelation, and his reaction leads Meche to begin her years long trek that she isn't supposed to take.  Manny decides it is his responsibility to go after her, recruiting the mechanic at his work, Glottis, a demon summoned forth for the specific purpose of driving cars, to assist him on his quest.  But there is something more insidious going on under the surface.  There's a reason why Meche didn't qualify for her ticket to Paradise.  A conspiracy that goes across the entire underworld.  And Manuel Calavera has just taken the first steps to uncovering it.

Now, as is normally the case with Double Fine's output, the world that this game occupies is absolutely amazing.  The 1950s retro future aesthetic mixed with the Day of the Dead theming creates something incredibly unique and all its own.  The building you start in, the travel agency, is a truly iconic location.  It's this giant art deco skyscraper that looks right out of an old NYC photo but it also is dripping with Mexican culture from top to bottom.  These giant statues of ancient Aztec gods are scattered about the place, with Manny referring to them as "old bosses from before his time".  The city of Rubacava, where like the bulk of the game is actually spent, juxtaposes this bright, neon Vegas aesthetic with Aztec paintings giving it a super unique look.  The Temple separating the 8th and 9th Underworlds is this massive train station with gorgeous architecture.  It's a brilliant world, pound for pound probably Double Fine's best world.

The game also, as you might imagine, has an incredibly in-depth and interesting cast.  Like, the character work is THE thing Double Fine is famous for, they know how to right brilliant characters.  Manny is such an immediately endearing protagonist, this charismatic, down on his luck guy who is a massive flirt and very manipulative, but with a true heart of gold deep down.  Meche is great, she's such a sweetheart at the start, the woman who can do no wrong, but across the journey we see her kind of evolve into our story's femme fatale as the years of wandering the underworld get to her.  But outside of those two, Grim Fandango is very good with its supporting cast.  Eva is obviously a standout, the cynical and sarcastic secretary at Manny's work who has kind of a friends with benefits relationship with Manny and who keeps her cards close to her chest.  The stoic, incredibly cool, and entirely hypocritical poet Olivia who speaks of revolution but is never too far from the man with the deepest pockets.  Salvador Limones, the freedom fighter who wants to uncover the conspiracy that is taking over the Underworld but has more than a few screws loose and is focusing on exactly the wrong things.  And so on, and so on.  It's a fantastic cast.

It's also a very fun mystery.  Full disclosure, I debated doing a Gaming Diary of this because I really love doing mystery content but I don't like doing Gaming Diaries of the Spooky month games.  I think the fun is having this one big themed post.  It also tells you from the get go who is doing it and you're basically just slowly uncovering the motive and I think that's less fun than a "who is the suspect" mystery to write about.  But it is a fun mystery.  I like, in particular, how it introduces the motive to you in the middle part of the game, only to then take it in like five other directions across the game.  Though I do wish they would've set some things up earlier on, to be honest, so that the audience could be more involved in solving the mystery.  It does sometimes feel like new information is given to the audience kind of out of the blue and it's like "okay, I guess that theory is wrong now".  But the mystery overall is strong.

Also, the decision to make each part of the game a snapshot of Manny's life one year apart?  Brilliant.  Like each Act of Grim Fandango is taking place on the night of the Day of the Dead, which is the only night that the living can interact with the dead in Mexican culture.  And they explicitly make sure to tell us Manny doesn't have memories of his past life early on and that he doesn't really know who he'd visit on the Day of the Dead, putting the player int the seat of Manny's living relative visiting the spirit of their dead family member on Day of the Dead and seeing a snapshot of his life.  And it has the additional effect of letting the game not be bound to a strict timeline and having radical shifts in character personality and motivation because we are seeing them a year apart.  In particular we see Manny's desire for Meche evolve, starting as him wanting to correct an error he believes he made and growing year after year into a proper romance.

You'll notice I haven't really been talking about the gameplay, the gameplay is hard to really talk about if I'm being honest.  So the problem with Grim Fandango is that whether it has incredibly weak gameplay or incredibly strong gameplay is entirely up to the person who is playing it.  Grim Fandango, being a LucasArts adventure game, is incredibly puzzle focused and if you have never played an old LucasArts adventure game, you'll know their puzzles can be very obtuse.  Like there is a logic to them, and if you are attuned to this style of game, it will come to you.  But there is a reason why these games have a reputation for the gameplay being "click on everything + everything else until something actually happens".  Couple that with how complicated some of Grim Fandango's areas are and how sometimes they just do not signpost puzzles well, and you end up with a game that sometimes is incredibly clever and sometimes does not feel very good to play.  

I will fully admit, I consulted a guide, hated that guide, and consulted another guide on my playthrough.  I don't feel bad about it.  And for the most part, I think that I appreciated the cleverness of the puzzles more because of the fact that I only had to focus on how they worked, rather than having to solve them myself.  The entire Rubacava section is something that I appreciate way more for knowing the puzzles than I would've if I had to do them, it has a very good sense of logic to it that makes all the pieces fall into place at the end.  I would be lying to you, though, if I said that at least 30% of the puzzles in this game actively hampered my enjoyment of it.  Screw the lock puzzle in Act 3 in particular, just complete trial and error to figure out how it works.  I would not say the gameplay is bad, I would say it is very hit or miss and depending on who you are, it might be all misses.  All in all though, I really liked Grim Fandango, like, way more than I thought I was going to.  8.5/10, and I could see it going higher the more I think on it, tbh. 

Game #2: Half-Life

I have never played a first person shooter all the way through before.  I guess that's technically not true, I've played through Portal 2 in the past and played most of Metroid Prime.  But neither of those are "proper" FPS games, you know.  Portal 2 is way more of a puzzle game that just uses FPS trappings.  Metroid Prime is more of an FPS but its goal is really to be a Metroidvania.  But as for real FPS games?  Never done one.  Honestly, I imagine I have played less than 10 hours of real FPSes in my entire life, I would on occasion play some Halo or CoD at friends houses but it was mostly for short multiplayer matches and I wouldn't really get to "play".  I would was really more there to inflate kill counts because I didn't play FPS games and so I was the easy target.  This, for many years, led me to believe I hated first person shooters.  But I've mellowed out a lot since then, I'm more willing to try things I never would've before, and so I'm willing to step out of my comfort zone here and dip my toes into FPS games.  And if we're starting on FPS games, might as well try out one of the GOATs, right?

Half-Life is a revolutionary 1998 first-person shooter by icon of the games industry and reason PC gaming is even a usable way to game Valve.  That's right, before Valve made Steam and centralized the entire PC gaming market behind itself, it made video games.  This joke doesn't really work, I know people say it often but like.  The problem with the "did you know Valve made video games" joke is that basically every game Valve makes is well-regarded, beloved, and remains a must-play title all these decades on.  Like, Half-Life is literally the most archaic Valve title as this point, being a very old school PC FPS, and it's still regarded as one of the greatest games of all time.  Trust me, people would not be holding out hope a full 22 years after the launch of Half-Life 2 for a third installment if this company wasn't a complete and total showstopper through and through.

In Half-Life, you play as theoretical physicist Gordon Freeman, a new hire at the Black Mesa research facility.  An apparently government operation, Black Mesa is a super secret underground facility that conducts experimental, physics-defying science.  Gordon Freeman has been hired to assist with experiments on a crystal of unknown origin, something that appears to defy reality itself.  Upon conducting these experiments, Gordon is briefly transported to some sort of alien world, and when he returns to Black Mesa he finds the entire facility in disarray.  Much of its staff is dead, and the entire thing has been overrun by alien monsters, as if the walls between the facility and the planet Gordon found himself on have been completely blurred.  Gordon must survive the facility and escape to the surface, where hopefully help is on its way.  However, the government seems more interested in covering up whatever happened here, leaving Gordon to escape on his own with no allies and both alien and human forces breathing down his neck.  Can he survive this gauntlet and stop whatever is causing these aliens to appear?  Yes, there's a sequel, but like we wouldn't know that when this game came out.

I want to start by saying that as someone who has never played an FPS, Half-Life is a masterful introduction.  I think the thing that makes Half-Life such a good entry point into this genre is how much it has in common with more "safe" game genres.  By which I of course mean "stupid Nintendo games".  While shooting is obviously the core focus of Half-Life, it is a first-person shooter after all, Half-Life has a surprising amount in common with games that younger or "mainstream" gamers at the time would be very familiar with.  It has the incredible gravity-defying platforming of something like Mario or Sonic, with a lot of the game being built around massive platforming rooms where very little shooting happens.  It also has a lot in common with adventure games like Zelda, it has a lot of block pushing puzzles and enemies that are more about figuring out how to beat them the smart way rather than just shooting them until they die.

Which is a thing I love about Half-Life: the game rewards you for working smarter.  Despite being a first-person shooter with a lot of fast paced gun fights to it, the game never forgets that Gordon Freeman is not an action movie hero.  He is a theoretical physicist who happens to have extensive gun training.  The ability for the game to so accurately put the player in the headspace of Gordon is admirable.  Rather than every problem being solved by simply shooting everything until it dies, Half-Life rewards you for being observant, approaching each enemy as a puzzle to be solved, and running if the need arises.  There are just a lot of points where the smartest move forward is just "run until you find a heal."  Which is good that the game made that a valid strategy at various points, because I did, in fact, need a heal.  A lot.  I should've played this on Easy.

The most interesting part about Half-Life though, by far, is its storytelling.  The story itself is a solid science fiction story, there's a lot of intrigue between the invading aliens that are monstrous in a very uncanny way and the government coverup trying to contain this alien invasion before it breaches into the world at large.  Valve hired a science fiction novelist to write the story and I think that really pushes it over the edge, especially for a game of its era.  But more interesting is Valve's distinctive approach to storytelling.  Valve doesn't do cutscenes really, the player is, typically, always playing even as information is being directly told to you.  This seems like it would lead to the player missing crucial story beats since they can just keep going in the midst of important story (and trust me, I did entirely miss the story beat where the military revealed they weren't here to help), but it actually does a lot to keep the player locked into the story.  It's kind of the perfect way to tell a story for this kind of game.

The atmosphere in Half-Life is also killer, I know a lot of people probably will take issue with this being called a "spooky game" but I think it fits.  It doesn't just have a pretty scary science fiction horror/cosmic horror theme, it has some of the scariest monsters in gaming history.  Head Crabs are scarier than you remember, trust me.  But the atmosphere is just generally unsettling, namely due to the mysterious appearance of a suited figure throughout your journey.  The figure, who we now know as "the G-Man", first seems to be some sort of bureaucrat.  We first see him talking to a scientist at Black Mesa from an observation room, where he only briefly looks over at Gordon.  As you and Gordon make your way through the facility, however, G-Man will appear from time to time.  Just walking past your periphery, or up on a ledge where you can't get to him.  But rest assured, he's always there.  Always watching.  Always taking note of Gordon's actions.  Always taking note of YOUR actions.

I basically only have two big complaints with Half-Life.  The first is that boss design is terrible.  Like, the kind of gameplay that makes for exciting gun fights in the main game, where you are just always mobile and trying to find the best opportunity to engage, doesn't make for the most interesting boss design you've ever seen in your life, you know?  A lot of bosses just kind of feel like big, spongy enemies with limited space to keep the fight "interesting".  Especially in the late game.  The second is that some of the platforming mechanics feel a little unpolished.  In particular the move where you jump and crouch in the air to pull yourself up onto ledges.  It's super awkward, it never felt like it worked the same way twice, I feel like most of my time during the final boss was just trying to get it to work.  Otherwise, though, game is excellent.  It sets a really high standard of quality and the fact that it only goes up from here is crazy to me.  Half-Life 2 about to break into my top ten games of all time when I play it, I swear. 9.3/10

Game #3: Resident Evil: Code Veronica X

It's funny how long it actually took me to play a Resident Evil game.  I got into horror late in life.  In what I feel is probably a very common experience for people, I avoided the genre out of a fear of being too afraid to enjoy the genre.  I wasn't actually too afraid of the films/shows/games, per se, but rather I was afraid of the possibility of being too afraid to enjoy them so I just didn't start with them.  And while I came to discover I really adore horror, it still took me way too long to engage with THE horror game franchise and sort of kickstart my horror gaming era.  But, in 2025 I finally took the plunge and started playing Resident Evil with the remake of the first game and I fell in love.  I really liked Resident Evil for its tense atmosphere, resource intensive gameplay, iconic location, and just its overall style.  And I have only grown to love it more since I played it.  So playing another Resident Evil game was not so much a want as an inevitability.  Unfortunately I did not own 2 or 3, the next two logical steps for playing the Resident Evil series, in either their original or REmake forms.  So I instead had to skip to the series' fourth big title, Code Veronica.  Will my second date with the Resident Evil franchise be as lucrative as my first?  Probably not, but hopefully I like Code Veronica a whole lot too.

Resident Evil: Code Veronica X is an enhanced version of the originally Dreamcast exclusive 2000 horror game "Resident Evil: Code Veronica".  Code Veronica spawned after an unsuccessful attempt to port Resident Evil 2 to the Sega Saturn inspired Capcom and series creator Shinji Mikami to create a unique Resident Evil game for the Sega hardware.  While initially trying to create something for the Sega Saturn, the Sega Saturn being a catastrophic failure both in terms of market success and hardware caused the team to move it to the Dreamcast instead.  Originally pitched as the true next game in the Resident Evil series, due to both internal politics and the long time it would take to get both this and the other proposed Resident Evil 3, the Hideki Kamiya followup that would eventually become Devil May Cry, out, caused the series to promote a spinoff of Resident Evil to the main Resident Evil 3 and unfortunately left Code Veronica to be the obscure spinoff on the console nobody owned.  At least until the enhanced version with new story content was released on the PS2 in 2001, wherein Code Veronica would find its audience and become something of a cult classic in the series.  The Resident Evil fan's underground favorite.

In Code Veronica, you play as recurring Resident Evil protagonist Claire Redfield, one of the two main characters of Resident Evil 2.  The beginning of the game sees Claire continuing her investigation into finding her brother, who had mysteriously disappeared shortly before the Raccoon City incident, by raiding Umbrella labs for any information regarding her brother's whereabouts.  On one such raid, she ends up cornered by Umbrella goons and shipped off to an old military training island in the South Sea, a few hours flight from Antarctica.  Not long after her arrival, however, a T-Virus outbreak occurs on the island.  The good news is that this gives Claire a window to escape her imprisonment.  The bad news is that she quickly runs afoul of the island's owner, Alfred Ashford, an eccentric German man who is the heir to Umbrella's fortune and who blames the young woman for the outbreak and putting himself and his ailing twin sister, Alexia, in danger.  Claire must avoid Ashford's ire, find a way to escape his prison island, and discover the hidden origins of the Umbrella Corporation and the true purpose of their experiments.

I want to start by saying how much I love Code Veronica's story.  Of the Resident Evil games I've experienced, both through playing them myself and seeing others play them, CV is probably the best individual story in the entire series.  There's a lot of mystery and intrigue surrounding the Ashford siblings, their island, and their connection to the Umbrella corporation that keeps the player hooked from basically the moment they begin.  Alfred and Alexia are great antagonists, they are very charismatic and compelling villains who manage to be infinitely unsettling due to their complete sociopathy and very charged relationship.  There are a lot of really good twists in the game as well, most notably the big reveal that occurs when you finally corner Alfred and learn the secret relationship between the twins.  And I think it successfully avoids the issue a lot of Resident Evil games tend to have where the late game kind of fails the promising setup the game had up to that point.  Instead they put the big lab area in the middle of the game instead of the end, and come back around to what makes CV work so well after introducing it.  It creates a much better flow than the usual "spending 90% of the game in one location only to go somewhere completely different in the last hour" that usually happens in Resident Evil stories. 

Code Veronica also has a nearly unmatched atmosphere within the series.  It is the first Resident Evil title to attempt to shake up the kind of horror that the series is capable of (before now, it had been a pretty wide reaching "zombie horror) and I think it does it rather effectively.  Rockfort Island is not as iconic of a location in RE as the Spencer Mansion or the Raccoon City police station, but it's not far behind.  It has all this gothic architecture that really sells its different atmosphere, there's a heavy focus on paintings and murals and German culture throughout the island.  The twins live in this castle on the hill that, while modernized in many ways, still has a lot of its old school trappings like a massive foyer with a huge relief painted on the back wall and a lot of secret passageways weaving in and out of the other facilities.  And the monster design also compliments this atmosphere well, retaining the classic zombies the series is famous for but also including more distinctly Eastern European monster looks to it.  Most famously with its second boss (and coolest boss) Nosferatu, a monster that strongly resembles something from Silent Hill but with a distinctive vampire influence to it.

Code Veronica also has some of the best classic RE gameplay to it.  It has a reputation for being brutal, and it's very deserved.  Not only can it be very stingy on resources, with a player having the possibility of running out of ammo on their gun very early game and having to genuinely rely on the potentially dangerous knife combat.  But it has a frankly masochistic scarcity of healing items, with there often being long stretches of game where you have to just wander around injured until you find an herb or, even rarer, a First Aid Spray.  It rewards the player for learning how to dodge and weave around threats rather than fighting them head on, as preserving your resources is critical.  Especially in the early game, where zombies take a lot of bullets and you only find them 15 at a time (which is, best case, 3 zombies).  Which feels very true to who Claire is, you know?  The game tries to paint Claire as something of an action movie heroine in its intro movie, in truth though Claire is actually just a very skilled and resourceful college student who has only been doing this monster fighting thing for a few months at the time Code Veronica takes place.

This game is also very tight with inventory management.  You will, very often, be put into situations where you're having to run back and forth to item boxes in order to switch around your weapon loadout/puzzle items because you hit a roadblock where you need a certain setup.  Which puts you into danger as zombies actually respawn at various points in this game.  There is especially a pretty significant point in the mid game, about 60% through, where if you didn't remove crucial items and put them in the item box you will basically be having a much worse time as those items will be inaccessible to you for basically the rest of the game.  In that way it can be a bit punishing, but it becomes so so rewarding when you figure out how Code Veronica works, you know?  It especially rewards you for prior knowledge of Resident Evil games, my knowledge of the RE1 Remake helped out immensely with this game.  They bring back so many enemy types that are really strong but have massive weaknesses if you know how to exploit them.

I do have two pretty massive complaints with the game that hold it back from becoming an S tier Resident Evil for me, though, and those are the script and the performances.  Now, I know this is going to be a controversial take given the nature of the series, but I actually don't like it that much when Resident Evil goes full B movie.  Like the cheesier parts of Resident Evil games tend to be the parts I dislike the most.  I'm very much someone for whom tonal inconsistencies bother me in games.  I'm famously a critic of the Metal Gear Solid series for trying to be both a braindead cheesy 80s action movie and a serious thought provoking espionage thriller, with it never feeling like the two come together at any point.

Of the RE games I've experienced, CV is the game that breaks its excellent atmosphere with cheesy dialog and bad performances the most.  The performances are very flat, with even Alyson Court's usually great Claire Redfield making her sound like an inexperienced actor on their first gig.  Whenever characters have to show big emotion, it's always the most over-the-top B-movie screaming you've ever seen in your life.  There's a lot of very direct and utilitarian dialogue, a lot of characters saying things in super unnatural ways to more communicate ideas to the audience than anything.  And also CV spends a lot of time trying to build up a romantic arc which does not work, Resident Evil has never been a series that does romance well (nor does it really try to outside of like Leon and Ada, which is a doomed relationship anyways), but the attempt at a relationship between Claire Redfield and Steve Burnside just falls completely flat due to how poorly characterized Steve is.  Which is a shame, because a lot of the dramatic stakes in this game are built around Steve, a character we are clearly supposed to like and sympathize with but is ultimately an unlikable kid who makes things worse for Claire across the board.

Code Veronica is ultimately a very flawed game, but I think it has the strongest bones of possibly any Resident Evil to date.  It's very interesting looking at this game now with the remake on the horizon, because honestly I think Resident Evil: Veronica has a very good chance of being the series' best entry.  Like there's so much going for Code Veronica and I think tightening up the script, giving better performances to the cast, maybe leaning more into the gothic horror stuff and de-emphasizing the sci-fi elements as much and you might have the perfect Resident Evil game.  CV is still a really strong entry though, I'm very glad I played it.  I can see why it's so beloved.  8.6/10

Game #4: Milk inside a bag of Milk inside a bag of Milk

I'll fully admit, I put this one on the list just because of the title.  How can you not want to know what a game titled "Milk inside a bag of Milk inside a bag of Milk" is like?  I would've eventually played this anyways.  Heck, this game has a sequel and I put that on the list too!  It just so happens though that both games are excellent picks for spooky month, being psychological horror visual novels.  This is also like a 20 minute game so it's basically just a freebie, which is good because I'm about to be gone for a couple days at the time of writing this so having a short game to leave off on would be helpful.  It's milking time!  Wait.

Milk inside a bag of Milk inside a bag of Milk is a psychological horror visual novel made by the Russian solo dev Nikita Kruykov.  In it, you play as a person who is playing a visual novel and attempting to help a young woman go into the store to buy milk.  The young woman, who has crippling social anxiety and is on a cocktail of meds to deal with a traumatic experience as a child, has turned her trip to the store into a video game experience in order to help her cope with the difficult performance.  Your job, as the "player" is to talk with her on her journey, encourage her on how to proceed, and most importantly, keep her grounded as she is always very close to losing touch with reality.

Milk uses a very surrealist visual style in order to create its world, an exaggerated view of what I assume is a rural Russian town.  The entire world is rendered in 8 bit visuals, akin to how the world would look if you were viewing it through a Game Boy Camera.  Rather than being black and white, though, the world is rendered in purples and reds and blacks.  It gives the entire game this really specific aesthetic, like you're walking through an all consuming fog.  Which is in line with its themes of anxiety and being overly medicated.  It also obscures some of the more dark elements.  There's a moment where the main character recounts her traumatic history but the visuals show an unclear mess, as if there's a fog surrounding her memories.  And it makes you pay attention when a clear visual presents itself, as it does when you anger the young woman by not helping her or when you finish the game and get her home.

The game also does a very good job of easily putting into the headspace of someone with crippling social anxiety as they try to do simple daily tasks.  A headspace I know all too well, let me tell ya.  The young woman's trip to the store is marred by numerous obstacles.  She has obsessive compulsive tendencies, needing to walk the same number of steps on each foot and when her counting gets cut off by her internal monologue, she shuts down.  She gets distracted easily, her grip on reality often slipping slightly as she tries to do the most basic things.  She views people who try to converse with her as literal monsters, aliens often speaking an entirely different language and who remind her directly of her fears and insecurities.  She keeps getting stuck in loops, another side effect of her obsessive tendencies.  The game is actually named after one such loop, wherein she picks up a bag of milk to then keep saying "it's a bag of milk, now it's a bag of milk inside of a bag, now it's a bag of milk inside of a bag of milk" and so on.  It is deeply unsettling in a way that may be all too familiar to the people playing it.

I don't really have complaints with Milk, it's moreso disappointments with it.  The game is incredibly short and, while it does a lot with its limited runtime, it does also mean it has to be brisk and can't do a lot of fluff.  This means that, unfortunately, its rather effective true scares, the disturbing and provocative images designed to deeply unsettle the player, end up being a rarely used element.  And it's truly a shame, because they're really effective when they do come up.  I wish there was more of them.  Which I guess if your criticism of a game is "I wish there was more", you're in a good place.  Milk is an incredible little psychological horror game that, despite being so little, leaves you with so much.  I really enjoyed it, it's probably a game I will think about often for the rest of my life.  I might even love it enough to put it in my top 10 for the year.  9/10

Game #5: Amnesia: The Dark Descent

I'm going to admit to something that is probably going to surprise you all: I have never seen Amnesia: The Dark Descent be played before.  No, really.  Never happened.  While I was around for the "golden age of Let's Play", which meant a different thing in my circles than it does to basically anyone else, I didn't get on board with the likes of Markiplier or Jacksepticeye.  I wasn't a massive fan of the new wave of "horror Let's Play", where people could "make a 20 minute video in 20 minutes" and get massive success on YouTube.  The Let's Play era I came from was all about meticulous research and trying to be as much a genuine walkthrough as entertainment.  I missed out on a lot of the "viral horror games" as a result, by the time I had finally gotten over myself and started realizing that this new entertaining form of Let's Play wasn't a disgrace to the genre, we were like three FNAFs in and people were just uploading videos to stay where the money was so they could afford to play games they actually cared about.  So I have a lot of catching up to do.  As such, I think it's time for THE viral horror classic, the game people still rave about to this day.  This is: Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a 2010 survival horror game set in the 19th century in a castle in the Prussian wilderness.  In it, you play as Daniel, a man who awakens in the castle with, well, Amnesia.  Unclear on where to go, Daniel stumbles around in the darkness, following a trail of red liquid on the ground until he discovers a note from himself.  He states that, not too long before Daniel woke up, his past self had consumed a potion that would make him forget much of his own past.  The past version of Daniel then apologizes to his present version, because him awakening like this is not for pleasant reasons.  There is a man in the lowest depths of the castle named Alexander who Daniel despise very much.  And he needs his present self to stop whatever plan he is undertaking.

As you can imagine, though, this task is not as simple as "get to the bottom of the castle, shoot a man, live happily ever after."  This castle has been overtaken by a mysterious entity, a being who thrives within the darkness.  The darkness itself becomes Daniel's greatest foe, forcing him to hide within the light if he wishes to survive.  It eats at his sanity, slowly eroding it until Daniel finds himself seeing and hearing things, creaks that sound like steps encroaching on him, the sounds of something eating at him, growls and screams that you're never quite sure if they're truly there.  The darkness is all encompassing, a creature that threatens to consume Daniel if he ever steps out of the light.  Armed with only his trusty oil lantern, which is always seconds from running out, and a bunch of tinderboxes for lighting candles, Daniel must survive the castle itself, find Alexander, and put a stop to his evil machinations.  All the while discovering clues about his own history, his relationship to Alexander, and why the darkness is hunting him specifically.

It is impossible to talk about Amnesia without talking about its killer atmosphere.  It's easy to write-off Amnesia due to its virality, say it wasn't that scary.  Like, the people screaming at Amnesia would scream at FNAF a couple years later, how much could they really speak on horror.  But they got it right with Amnesia.  Its mix of gothic architecture, omnipresent darkness, constant unsettling noises, and genuine scares kills.  It's such a great spooky time, it manages to keep the audience on edge the entire time despite really not having that many situations where they can lose.  Like, there aren't actually that many enemies in the game, I would be surprised if it's over 50, but despite the fact that you will go many rooms without encountering anything that can kill you, the tension is unrelenting.

The game also really effectively puts you into the headspace of someone losing their mind.  Amnesia is most well known for its "sanity" mechanic, the more time you spend in the darkness or in enemy encounters the more Daniel's sanity starts to slip.  And it really does a good job of connecting you to Daniel's POV.  Having cockroaches crawl all over the screen to emulate bugs crawling all over you, the way the game blurs and shakes the less sane Daniel becomes, the way you're never quite sure what sounds you're hearing are diegetic or not.  I'm a really big fan of how Amnesia handles its horror, it's one of the most effective horror games I've ever played in my life.  It's up there with like, Alien: Isolation and Doki Doki Literature Club for me, which is high praise if you know how I feel about those two games.  Which you probably do, I wrote an essay on the latter and if you know me, you know I won't shut up about the former.

To say anything else here would be spoilers and, while I am famously against spoiler protecting in the broad sense, I try to keep these mini (for me) reviews very spoiler free.  It also means if I want to write something more specific on it, I have the room too.  Needless to say, though, I REALLY liked Amnesia.  It is as good of a horror game as people said it was back in 2010, and I'm very glad I got to play it.  I also realize I own most of the other Amnesia games so I'm excited to play them if/when they come up on the wheel, even though I don't really hear people talk about the ones post-Dark Descent like ever.  Not much more to say, fantastic little horror game, an all timer contender.  9.4/10

Game #6: Ghostbusters: The Video Game

Bustin' makes me feel good.  Was anyone else around in 2016 and got gaslit into disliking the classic supernatural comedy Ghostbusters because you were caught up in the midst of a culture war that needed to prove that the original Ghostbusters was actually bad so that people who hated women would not have a leg to stand on when discussing the reboot?  I sure did.  Crazy that so much of a stir was kicked up over a 6/10 movie, but also like.  That's just every film discourse now, ain't it?  A woman exists in a media franchise and so a bunch of people with no useful skills throw a fit online.  I digress.  Point is, I had a broken relationship with the Ghostbusters franchise for many years of my life due to the stupid culture war surrounding Ghostbusters 2016.

It is only within the last several years that I really grew to appreciate the franchise again, especially the first movie.  This appreciation made me want to look into a game that, during the Wii era, I was always interested in but never got around to getting: the Ghostbusters game that released around that time to pretty great reviews.  Fortunately for me, this iconic licensed game got a genuine remaster for modern consoles.  So we're doing it, we're taking the plunge into the world of Ghostbusters.  I was actually supposed to do Simon's Quest here but I'm just going to be real with you, I can't play Castlevania on mouse and keyboard and because Epic doesn't have native controller support and the PC port of Anniversary Collection has DRM which prevents me from loading it up on another launcher, I can't use a controller!  Love that, thanks Konami, thanks Epic.

Partially adapted from an unused script for a third Ghostbusters film, Ghostbusters: The Video Game has you stepping into the role of a brand new Ghostbuster at a time where the Ghostbusters are looking to expand their operation and, more importantly, franchise.  The day the team welcomes their new recruit, however, an surge of supernatural energy flows over NYC, and everyone's favorite ghost breaks containment and finds his way back to the hotel where he spawned.  The team chases Slimer to the Sedgewick, only for something much worse to arrive outside when they attempt to leave: the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.  As the Ghostbusters chase down Stay Puft, they discover that it is looking for a young woman who has been fleeing ghostly activity, and who the Ghostbusters agree to help.  She introduces herself as Ilyssa Selwyn, a prominent researcher into ancient Mesopotamian cultures and religions, with a specific focus on Gozerian studies.  This meeting is the catalyst that leads to them uncovering an ancient cult of Gozer worshipping ghosts who have arisen in Manhattan, and who wish to resurrect their leader, Ivo Shandor, a once great architect and noted genocidal maniac, to conquer the world.  It's up to the Ghostbusters to stop the resurrection and find out who is behind the attempt to resurrect Shandor.

I want to begin by highlighting how well it captures the feel of a Ghostbusters film.  A huge part of this is the presence of fully acted performances by Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, and Annie Potts.  Unfortunately Sigourney Weaver did not return to reprise her role as Dana, and Rick Moranis was retired from acting at this point.  The game really captures the Ghostbusters style of humor, its horror-comedy aesthetic, and even its distinctive look.  The ghosts in this game look like they would in the films, like they are actors in makeup doing effects tricks or are puppets.  It is, truly, a love letter to the first two films, it really effectively captures the vibe and feels like a proper Ghostbusters 3 in a lot of ways.

It also manages to make nostalgia have a purpose, which I really appreciate.  If this game was made even a few years later, it would very much be a "remember this, remember that, remember this" kind of game I feel.  But the game has a purpose for recreating all these iconic scenes, locations, and characters from the first two films.  It takes stuff like the librarian ghost that the gang never caught, a return to the hotel Sedgwick, a return to the History Museum where they fought Vigo, just all these iconic locations and characters and weaves a real narrative surrounding them.  A narrative about Ivo Shandor and how his architecture is all designed to be a conduit for his return, and how many of these locations and ghosts that the Ghostbusters have been hunting for so long tie into the history of Shandor's cult.  This had a chance to go so wrong, to just be a nostalgia bait game, but it actually does kind of work.

Even many of the criticisms I have with the game serve to strengthen its connection to the Ghostbusters franchise.  Its more comedic, riffing moments often come out of nowhere and feel very odd in the moment as they come after big ghost hunting scenes.  It often feels very montage-y, with scenes cut very quickly and very utilitarianly.  Winston is not given enough to do.  It kind of goes too far with the stakes, making these supernatural exterminators into god slayers.  It never makes a really strong case for Walter Peck being a bad guy by any stretch, just exceedingly annoying.  All things that you could criticize the game for, but also, all things that are problems with just Ghostbusters in general.  It is a very good piece of the Ghostbusters franchise.

I don't like playing it even a little.  Ghostbusters: The Video Game seems to choose, in every way it can choose, to be the best Ghostbusters game and not the best Ghostbusters game.  Despite it adherence to the tone, atmosphere and world of Ghostbusters, it is chronically unfun to actually play it in my opinion.  Ghostbusting as an activity is very tedious, with your proton pack doing virtually nothing to most ghosts while they can do everything to you.  It is not uncommon to die multiple times in a mission, especially as some missions are strangely difficult in comparison to others.  Not to mention the fact that your proton pack overheats constantly, with no heat sink present to naturally manage your heat.  You will often get into a flow of "dealing minimal damage to a ghost, only to vent your pack afterwards, and by the time that you get back to busting you have to find the ghost again".  It is slow, it is boring, and I grew to hate it more and more as the game went on.  Like, I admire what this game is trying to do, how it tries to recreate the feel of Ghostbusters really well, and think it succeeds.  But games need to be good at the game part, and I don't feel Ghostbusters is.  4.4/10

Game #7: Night Trap

That's right, we're doing Night Trap!  Y'all know this one, Night Trap is one of the most important games in gaming history and all for the wrong reasons.  Night Trap was part of a series of games that made the United States become wary about the rise of violent video games, and was probably the most infamous game in that series.  Namely because it was the one that the US government was most transparently wrong about, consistently depicting this goofy FMV horror b-movie as if it were a game explicitly about violence against women.  It is not that by any definition and is, in fact, just kind of a bad FMV game.  But with some deceptive editing (later found to be explicitly cut to look worse than it actually was by a certain game company that rhymes with "Intend roe"), it was made to look like something horrid.  In a way, it ended up working out, because now Night Trap is one of the most important games in gaming history and is a game everyone knows about, which is more than can be said for every other Sega CD game.  But, outside of the importance it holds for the history of gaming, how good is Night Trap really?

Night Trap is a horror-themed FMV game which takes place at the home of the Martin family, a group of eccentric people who own a winery in the area.  A brash of disappearances have been occurring at the Martin winery over the past couple years, namely teenagers who get jobs up there only to mysteriously disappear, and the Sega Control Attack Team, or SCAT, has recently discovered that someone has been abducting them using a series of traps scattered throughout the house.  The team has, however, gotten control of the house and sort of set a trap for whoever is behind this.  They've sent in a secret agent ahead of them to pose as one of the Martin family's teenage friends, and now it's just a matter of stopping the teenagers who are throwing a party at the estate from experiencing any harm.  Which is where the player comes in.  The player's job is to scan the video feeds, looking for any ne'er do wells who may be breaking into the mansion, and when the time is right?  You trap them.  It'll be a long night, but someone has gotta save the teens and uncover the secrets of the Martin family estate, and maybe even the secrets of the Martin family themselves (they're vampires, they reveal this in the opening seconds of the game if you're paying attention to the camera feeds).

I want to love Night Trap so very badly, y'all.  I really do.  Because I adore the cheesy 80s b-movie aesthetic so very much.  When are you allowed to just sit there and experience Night Trap in all its glory, it's so much fun.  It's appropriately cheesy, it's super funny, it has a killer theme song, an awkward pacing, it's so good.  It is everything you would want it to be as a 1980s b-horror movie.  I can almost see the queen herself, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, introing this movie in one of her horror movie marathons.  In a better world, I would be part of the cult following that Night Trap has, I love unabashedly dumb games.  I literally posted something about my love for Lifeline on this blog this October!

The problem with Night Trap, though, is that you are paradoxically not allowed to enjoy the enjoyable parts of the game.  Night Trap is designed in such a way that you are always having to jump around the house in the middle of scenes to capture intruders using the traps.  Not only that but there is basically no margin for error, if you allow one of the intruders to get past your opportunity to trap them, they will simply kill your run.  You have to be very precise, your window to catch an intruder is a few seconds at most but even still, if you use this full window, you will likely miss out on another intruder.  More commonly, pinpoint accuracy is required from you, which makes the "optimal play" once you've learned where the intruders appear to just hang out in those rooms until they show up so you can trap them.  At which point you are completely ignoring the fun part of the game in its entirety to push through.  The modern rereleases thankfully do include a movie cut version of Night Trap, but it is something you have to unlock by completing a perfect game first (or just look it up on YouTube).  It's tragic, Night Trap has so much potential to be something wonderful, a cheesy 80s b-movie video game that we can laugh at and laugh with in equal measure.  But as it stands, it's a game that actively fights against itself, that uses entertainment as a distraction to lead you into a fail condition.  It is perhaps one of the worst games of all time, and it is the 9th worst game I have played since I started tracking my game clearing.  1/10

Game #8: Resident Evil 4

I am about to state what is probably one of my worst takes of all time: I don't like Leon S. Kennedy.  I know I know, all my credibility was just thrown out the window.  A big part of this is admittedly because of 9, I will never forgive Leon for what he did to Emily even if it was "technically correct" and I think the idea that him and Grace would be friends after that is absurd.  But it's also that what I have enjoyed about the Resident Evil franchise, both through playing it and watching other people play the games, is the more dedicated survival horror parts to it.  I love the slower gameplay, I love the heavier focus on puzzle solving, I love the interesting locales that feel so rich and iconic.  Leon to me represents the end of everything I like about Resident Evil.  He made the series a horror themed third person shooter and to this day he is a representative of the more action heavy gameplay style of later Resident Evils.  But, Resident Evil 4 is beloved, I want to give it a genuine shot, so, we're doing this.  Be glad I don't do gaming diaries for spooky month games or else a blog entry will drop this month that's just like 20 pages of complaining about Leon's awful one-liners.

Resident Evil 4 follows recurring series protagonist Leon S. Kennedy on a covert rescue mission to the Spanish countryside.  In the 6 years since the Raccoon City Incident, Leon has become a high profile government agent and has been tasked with the protection of the newly elected President Graham's daughter, Ashley.  Literally the day before he was to start, however, Ashley gets abducted by an unidentified double agent and taken to a remote town in the mountains of Spain.  When Leon arrives in this town, he quickly discovers that the entire town is populated by mind controlled zombie servants of a mysterious religious cult leader, Saddler, who controls the populace via a hive mind of parasites connected to their nervous systems.  Not long after arriving, Leon himself gets infected by the parasites, and finds out that Ashley too is infected shortly after rescuing her.  Leon must get Ashley away from the cult, who wishes to transform her into a parasite controlled zombie and use her to start an invasion of the United States, find a way out of these remote mountains, and find a cure before the parasites within them both grow to adulthood and turn them into servants of Saddler.  All the while fighting off the slow, agonizing, painful transformations hitting them both.

I want to start by saying there is actually quite a bit of good to be found in Resident Evil 4.  For instance, Resident Evil 4, especially in the early game, is ridiculously fun.  It took me a minute to actuate to the gameplay of RE4, mind you.  For the first 30 minutes to an hour I was like "oh no, I think I hate this".  The gameplay felt very slow and clunky but still expected you to be quick with action and I wasn't really a fan on immediate play.  I died more times than I want to admit to the opening village section.  But once I got a flow for it?  Insanely fun.  Resident Evil 4 is such a good third person shooter, you just have this really intuitive and fun gun combat that rewards you for being deliberate and firing directly on your mark.  The fact that Leon cannot move while he shoots is an especially big boon for this style of gameplay, missed shots are not just bullets your missing, it's a significant amount of ground you end up losing.  A misplaced bullet or a stubborn enemy you didn't take down as efficiently as you could is either potential damage, which costs one of your very limited number of healing items, or a tactical retreat to get yourself more ground.  It's really fun and makes the player think a lot about how to approach a mob of enemies.

I also surprisingly liked the story a whole bunch.  I didn't think I was going to, because I was very cold to it at the start of the game.  A massive part of that is admittedly that I am cold to Leon and so I was less than invested in what was happening in his life.  But it's actually a super interesting science fiction-horror adjacent storyline.  The mind control parasites are a really fun twist on the Resident Evil zombie formula, and I like how direct the villain's plan is in this game.  Resident Evil, as many series with bioweapons do, tends to have a problem where you just have a big question mark on what the bioweapons was actually supposed to accomplish.  Like, many pieces of zombie media have the idea that zombies were made in a lab to become a bioweapon, but it's just like "okay, but what for".  Las Plagas, meanwhile, has a very direct purpose: it allows the leader to control those who are infected.  And so the bad guys want to just use it to take over the world.  Very clear, very direct, lots of intrigue.  It's a good story.

The performances are, maybe for the first time in the entire Resident Evil series, actually good.  In a way this might be a negative for some people, Resident Evil's questionable line reads are part of the early games' charm.  Resident Evil 4, despite being the first game in this series that is actively trying to be intentionally funny ends up being less funny than its predecessors because it lacks that same silly B movie charm.  RE4 feels way more in line with something like Scream than anything.  But it also makes Resident Evil 4 hit in a way the previous games just didn't.  It's able to convincingly take itself somewhat seriously because of the improved voice direction, which arguably makes the actual jokes stand out more.  And also it lets the game convincingly sell serious plot beats, of which RE4 has many.  Especially after playing Code Veronica earlier this month and having my primary complaints be towards the performances, it's a breath of fresh air.

And, perhaps most importantly, I love Ashley Graham.  There is a lot of criticism you could level at Ashley.  She has very little agency in the story, she is often an oversexualized damsel in distress who screams for Leon's help, she ends up just batting her eyes and going "my hero" to Leon and offers him the possibility of sex when they get back to America as a reward for saving her.  But, I do have to commend them for having a key point of Ashley's characterization being that she has little tolerance for people who see her as a sex object.  She is quick to snap at everyone about them being creepy, she takes nobody's gaff.  It doesn't undo how oversexualized she is (she jiggles with basically every step), but it does help.  I feel like maybe we are supposed to find her "annoying" or "difficult" with how the story frames her in these moments.  But I just think she's extremely entertaining and I think in a less charged time where sexism in the games industry wasn't the most prominent criticism of the industry, we can acknowledge that Ashley kind of rules, you know?

Moreover though, I do actually like guiding her around and having to keep her safe?  We'll get into this more in a second, but my primary criticism with Resident Evil 4 is that I feel that it fails at being a horror game.  And not in the way that like it's not scary, in the way that it just completely gives up.  This leads me to actually really enjoy the Ashley moments though.  Guiding Ashley around is the closest Resident Evil 4 gets to feeling like a proper survival horror game.  You have to be mindful of your surroundings more, think through how you want to progress, and there are severe consequences to every failure.  Leon can take a significant number of hits before he goes down.  But Ashley reintroduces a tension that is sorely lacking from RE4, a part of the game that keeps you on edge and forces you to be deliberate about how you play it.  It actually disappointed me when I found out how much of the game is Ashley-less after having RE4 be called "escort mission: the game" for so many years.  Like even people who play this game religiously will highlight the escort missions and it's like maybe 20-30% of the total game.

As mentioned, though, my primary criticism with Resident Evil 4 is that I don't think it's a very good horror game.  Like, it's not scary for starters, and not in the way the other Resident Evil games aren't scary, I mean RE4 does not seem interested in being scary.  On top of the aforementioned quips, which are pretty frequent and give Leon this kind of action movie machismo that contradicts the environment and atmosphere the game is intended to set, the game just constantly does thing to undermine its attempts to set a darker, more fear-inducing tone.

For instance, the idea that you cannot move while firing is clearly designed to add tension.  Leon takes a vast majority of the screen, creating a very limited field of view in the midst of combat.  You see what is in front of you, allowing enemies to easily sneak up on you and take you by surprise.  It is hypothetically a good system to create suspense and add tension.  Except Leon can just shoot the enemies in the legs and start throwing out kickboxing moves to easily dispatch them.  Not only does this create a very silly visual that breaks the tension, Leon just dishing out suplexes and butterfly kicks, but it pulls the player out of the tense, stationary gameplay.  You are reminded that Leon is an agile action hero and that the way he plays is not indicative of the way he would actually fight if you weren't controlling him.

The game also does not do well with resource management.  Which I know is going to make people upset when I say that because Resident Evil 4's resource management has become a game genre onto itself, people love this part of the game.  But the thing about Resident Evil 4 is that it doesn't have especially tight resources for you to manage.  You will, for the majority of the game, rarely if ever be concerned about a lack of ammunition.  You are drowning in bullets, frankly, so much so that there were more moments where I had to abandon other items to have room in my trunk for bullets than there were moments where I feared I was going to run it.  Tight, limited resources are one of the most important tenants of the survival horror genre, it's the survival part of survival horror.  And Resident Evil 4 just seems entirely disinterested in that part of the game, it doesn't want to be a survival horror game, it wants to be an action-heavy third person shooter with horror theming.

This attitude extends to how RE4 contextualizes enemy encounters.  In a lot of survival horror games, they don't present the player with an overabundance of enemies to fight.  Enemy encounters are rare and staggered and difficult.  They tend to be damage sponges that make you question if fighting the enemy is even worth it.  And that's what it wants you to do.  You have exceptionally limited resources and each enemy you may encounter is a potential make or break obstacle.  You have to weigh the cost of killing enemies with the value you are likely to get from it, will killing this enemy be good because I'm going to be going back through this area later.  Or will I simply be wasting my time and it would strictly be better to dodge and weave around them.  Resident Evil 4 not only gives you so much ammunition and so many hoards of enemies, but it often puts forward that you cannot or should not leave an area until said enemies are dispatched.  It will frequently block your progress until you kill every enemy in a room, or otherwise present an objective that requires you to constantly kill enemies while you protect a specific point.

Resident Evil 4 just does not feel particularly interested in being a survival horror game, it wants to simply be a third person shooter.  Which is, you know, fine.  It is doing its own thing and frankly, it's insanely fun.  I was really digging this game in the first half because, while I always had problems with the fact that I didn't like it not being a horror game, I loved what it was that much.  It had its own strong identity that I found admirable.  But then that too went to the wayside as, in the second half, RE4 does try to be more of a survival horror game.  There comes a shift in the game's fourth chapter where Leon will likely be stripped of the majority of his resources and end up having to rebuild from 0.  A boss rematch followed by several rooms with high numbers of enemies, to the point of seeming infinite.  You can certainly plan for this if you know it's coming and maintain your hoarded resources, but this was a first playthrough so I was out of luck.  And this does kind of put the game at the place I was criticizing it for being.

The issue is that this isn't Resident Evil 4.  Putting the player back to 0 halfway through the game after developing such a solidified identity for what your game is does not mean that you get to be a survival horror game now.  Resident Evil 4 is what it chose to be, a fun, action heavy, somewhat tense third person shooter with sci-fi-horror theming.  That is what Rezzie 4 does best, that is the version of RE4 I was actually like "this kind of rules".  Trying to reverse engineer being a proper survival horror game this far into the runtime just doesn't work for me, you already decided to not be a good horror game, now you're just deciding not to be Resident Evil 4 either.  I genuinely lost a lot of respect for this game during Chapters 4 and 5, it went from a game I was having a lot of fun playing even if it's not exactly what I wished for to a game I actively dreaded.  Resident Evil has a bad habit of sabotaging itself in the end game but Resident Evil 4 isn't just a weird story/environment shift that never fully comes together, it is trying to be a different game, a game it already decided it is not, and that makes me sad.

I just don't really know how to feel about RE4 at the end of this.  At some points during playing it I thought this was one of the most fun games I've ever played, and other times it was something I actively didn't look forward to playing any more of.  The former outweighed the latter in the end, but during Chapter 4 and most of 5 I couldn't stand playing this game and wanted it to be over.  I'm splitting the difference for now, but I would not be surprised if you ask me next year and either I'm significantly more positive on it because I've had time to sit and reflect on what works with it, or this becomes this year's Banjo-Kazooie, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, or Final Fantasy XV, the game clearing game that I thought was okay upon finishing and then upon reflection I realized I can't stand it.  6/10

Game #9: Sorry, We're Closed

Yeah, we're getting weird now.  People are either reading this right now and very excited or have no idea what this is.  The wider public likely knows Sorry, We're Closed from it benefitting from the Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Indie Game Awards controversy.  Clair Obscur had won best indie game, only to have the award revoked later on when it was discovered that they used minimal GenAI at some point in their project, something they stated that was just an experiment to see what the tech could do that accidentally made it into the final game.  Regardless, the Indie Game Awards have very black and white views on Generative AI, as many of us do for good reason including the Clair Obscur team, so the award was revoked and instead it went to Sorry, We're Closed.  Sorry, We're Closed is a much weirder game, a psycho-pop Odyssey into a hellish version of London that blends classic fixed camera survival horror gameplay with arcade-y FPS combat and a cast of characters that are as vibrant and surreal as the game's aesthetic.  It's the kind of game you'll never hear about until you find a friend who loves it and then you slowly realize most of the people you know love it.  So we're doing it, I'm excited to get into it.  This is one of a handful of games I wanted to get to more than the others on the wheel.

Sorry, We're Closed is a 2024 survival horror game famed for its distinctive psycho-pop aesthetic, BDSM-coded character designs, and, most importantly, for being one of the most unabashedly queer video games to ever exist.  In it, you play as Michelle, a young woman who works at a convenience store and obsessively watches a soap opera titled "Dying Petals", which stars her ex-girlfriend, the one Michelle let get away.  Suspicious activity has been occurring in Michelle's corner of the world of late, people have been, more and more, staying within their homes, disappearances are occurring at an alarming rate, her friends and acquaintances have been acting strangely, and more and more there are whispers of demons infiltrating the world of mankind.

These rumors all suddenly hit Michelle at once when, one night, a demonic entity known as "the Duchess" bursts through her apartment door and tells her, in no uncertain terms, that Michelle is the love of her life.  The Duchess then places a curse on Michelle, a clock that is ticking down on Michelle's own autonomy.  Michelle has days to break the curse before she will be forced to submit to the Duchess' whims.  All the while discovering what the Duchess actually wants, and how much of her world is intermingled into the demon realm already.  Michelle must decide who her friends are and, more importantly, who or what she wants to be in life.  And who knows, maybe she'll find love along the way.

Sorry, We're Closed is, first and foremost, a rather effective survival horror game.  I try not to compare games too each other that much, I feel like one of the most important things about being a good critic is to approach each work on its own terms without bringing baggage into the work.  That being said it is rather interesting to play this game immediately after Resident Evil 4, a game I felt did a very poor job of being a survival horror game.  Sorry, We're Closed succeeds in a lot of the ways that game didn't.  It is very stingy with resources, you have to determine whether or not each enemy encounter is worth the cost of either ammunition or HP to fight them.  It's not so stingy that you'll ever run out, mind you, the game has points where they will restock your ammo massively because you still have to beat the game.  It'll never put you in a permanent fail condition.  But you have to choose your battles carefully, as enemies can and often will take more from you than you'll take from them in an encounter.

This is compounded by the fact that the game utilizes fixed camera angles.  I love fixed camera angles, man, that period of time where we just believed fixed camera angles to be an outdated game design ideal was dumb, actually.  They work so well for building tension.  You are, at any given time, at the mercy of whatever the game chooses to show you.  Meaning that enemies that are just offscreen are often blind to you until you get close enough for them to either appear in your FOV or they come rushing at you.  This idea of never knowing what's just around the corner leaves you feeling like you have to play cautiously, approach situations like there could be a demon ready to strike you if you let your guard down, and be very aware of sound cues to get a drop on demons before they get a drop on you.

You're not helpless though.  You can see what is ahead of you by entering first person mode.  The game shifts to a first person mode when you are using your weapons, which is mostly used to have better control over your aiming, but also allows you to survey the area to make educated decisions on how to approach it.  See any hidden secrets that the camera doesn't let you see or look at enemies that are just ahead of where you are and figure out if it's worth it to lure them to you so you can fight them on your own terms.  However, the game locks you in place when you're in first person mode, you cannot move.  So you have to always weigh whether being a sitting duck is worth it to gain information, and moreover, you have to be aware that enemies can easily crowd or sneak up on you while you're surveying or attempting to engage with other enemies.

The combat, unfortunately, is the game's weakest point.  I enjoy it, don't get me wrong, I think it's rather fun, but the way it works does create a lot of "either enemies are the easiest things to take down in gaming history or literally just drain your health to 0 immediately".  Sorry, We're Closed has a mechanic called the Third Eye.  The Third Eye, gifted to you by the Duchess as part of your curse, allows you to see through the demon realm into your own and vice versa, depending on where you are and what realm is blurring into what.  So like, the Duchess runs a 5 star demon hotel somewhere in London but viewing it through your third eye reveals it's actually an abandoned, condemned building in the middle of downtown that hasn't been demolished yet.  During combat, it allows you to stun enemies, as well as reveal their weak points, which, when hit, will deal massive damage and if you successfully chain their weak points, you can kill them quickly without wasting too much ammo whittling down their HP.  However, when your weak points are active, you can ONLY hit them in their weak points, any other bullet will bounce off them dealing 0 damage.

The problems are, a, the stun doesn't really work well.  Enemies are stunned for so little time, if they even get stunned at all, higher demons are incredibly resistant to the stun, that often times you will stun an enemy and by the time you aim your weapon, they'll be on the move again.  Which is not inconvenient if you see enemies coming and can have your weapon trained on them before the stun.  But this is a survival horror game with fixed camera angles where the entire point is enemies coming to bother you off camera.  B, the weak point system can either trivialize combat or make it significantly more annoying depending on the size of your opponent and how spread out their weak points are.  Like, there's no reason not to go for the weak points at any given time, it's the most efficient way to deal with enemies, and successfully chaining weak points stun locks them.  But unless you've memorized the pattern or have lightning fast reflexes, adjusting your aim to hit the weak points can just give the opponents an opportunity to close in and kill you before you have a chance to fight back.  And C, the entire combat system falls apart when you have two or more enemies in a room, they will crowd you, they will decimate your health, and you just have to hope you can kill one and run away fast enough to shake the other guys to regroup and handle them.  All this being said, I actually ended up really enjoying combat in this game, it's so satisfying to chain weak points and I enjoy when survival horror games make you pick your battles wisely, so tactical retreating is a mechanic I really enjoy.

But the thing that makes me really invested in Sorry, We're Closed is actually its surprisingly insightful views on the nature of love.  How it changes us, the sheer emptiness we feel when we are torn from it, how often we think we deserve it but are unwilling to be deserving of it and, most importantly, whether or not love is deserved.  I don't want to get fully into it because I feel like Sorry, We're Closed deserves a much bigger piece discussing its themes but like, it's so fascinating and so insightful.  Like the Duchess believes that demons are so empty and miserable because they were once beings that were so full of love and then were separated from it, and that finding love will bring them what they once lost.  But they don't want true love, because true love is transformative, and they would lose the power and authority they value so greatly.  What the Duchess desires is control, and they are afraid of giving up that control.  But at the same time, the question is always present if the Duchess is worthy of love, if it is worth it to invest in a broken person who hurts people because they might be capable of change.  And it's not a question the game wants to answer, it's a question for the player to answer.  There's so much more to it, it's not a coincidence that Sorry, We're Closed uses a lot of BDSM imagery either, trust me, but like.  It's so interesting, it's so insightful, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since the first play session.  This is a game that's going to stick with me, I've played a lot of great games this year but this one I think is going to be one of, if not the most prominent game I'm thinking about for the rest of my life.  9.7/10

Game #10: Fear the Spotlight

And so we come to the end of spooky month.  Honestly, I thought I was going to get more done.  There are so many games on the wheel that are just like one or two play session games, I don't know, I guess I had it in my mind that I would be doing like one longer game for October and then a million short ones.  Like one Resident Evil and then a bunch of shorter games.  But like, hey, that's the point of using a wheel.  Because of this, however, the final game I was going to do has changed several times.  Initially I was going to do Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father, a classic Sierra point-and-click adventure game starring Tim Curry.  Would've been fitting because we unfortunately lost him earlier this year, RIP the GOAT.  Gabriel Knight is, unfortunately, kind of long for a point and click adventure and so as Resident Evil 4 proved to be frankly too long for the kind of game it was, I ran out of time to do Gabriel Knight before the end of the month.  So I replaced it with two one session games and in that scenario, my last game was to be the second Amnesia game, A Machine for Pigs.  But then I missed a night of doing Sorry, We're Closed and now it's literally Halloween when I'm writing this and so I don't really have time to do Amnesia either.  That's good news for me though because instead I get to do another of the "shortlist of games I would personally want to do more than the others".  We're ending off on a good one this year, y'all, this is: Fear the Spotlight.

Fear the Spotlight is a non-violent survival horror game released in 2024 by developer Cozy Game Pals and publisher Blumhouse Games.  Yes, that Blumhouse.  In it you play as Vivian Singh, a shy, bookish teenager who breaks into her high school after hours to impress her best friend and crush Amy Tanaka.  Amy is a goth girl who is into the occult, and believes that the school is haunted by spirits who have been stalking her specifically and so, with Vivian's help, sets up a seance in the school library.  Said seance goes horribly wrong, with Amy disappearing after successfully contacting a ghost and Vivian being caught in a nightmarish version of her high school.  Despite her fear, though, Vivian sets out on a journey to rescue Amy from the clutches of a myterious spotlight-headed ghost and uncover the hidden secrets of their high school and what really happened when a large part of the school burned down in 1991.

Now, I just want to say from the get go that the atmosphere of this game and its numerous scares are top notch.  Fear the Spotlight, despite its name, has such an unending darkness to it, it's a game that uses its visual and sound design to tell the player that there is always something whispering from the shadows.  Always something watching them from every dark corner.  And these things are not scared to get close.  There are numerous times in the game where you will be invested in a task only to see a ghost staring directly at Vivian, smiling their horrible smiles.  Due to the nonviolence of it, it's more spooky than anything.  Like a Halloween horror house two weeks in after someone complains because their kid started crying and so the performers have to get more creative to scare you.  But for me it was effective, the way it builds up its atmosphere makes every little scare feel earned.

The story is also very well done.  I'm sad I can't really talk about it because I try to keep these as spoiler-free as possible, despite my own feelings about spoilers, just to make sure people can read them but like.  This story's real good.  The moment where it clicks why the villain of this game is a spotlight specifically instead of something more traditionally ghostly is such a good moment, they leave behind so many clues but never tell you outright why they chose a spotlight and I love them for that.  There's a very good little mystery in there about why the ghost wants Amy specifically, it's very fun to unravel the case.  If this wasn't a single play session game I would've maybe been tempted to do a "can I solve Fear the Spotlight before the reveal" style post.  And there is a huge narrative twist halfway through that everyone I've seen get to goes absolutely feral over, it's so good.

The puzzles are also very fun.  It's about what you'd expect from this kind of game, you know.  A lot of puzzles that are more about remembering the environment and where individual pieces go.  But them being standard doesn't mean they aren't fun.  It's a lot of testing your ability to pay attention, which in a game that can be stressful as this, is an absolutely great way to do puzzles.  I especially loved the Tarot Card puzzle, which not only required a lot of setup with finding pieces to other puzzles to unlock the cards but, as you solve it, it tells the story of what Amy wants, initially showing a life in disarray but slowly, as you work through the tarot cards, showing her living happily with Vivian.  They're cute, these two.  There's also a really good pipe puzzle at one point that took me a minute and a really fun fuse puzzle.  Oh, and the garden statue puzzle, loved that one, loved getting to solve a riddle and I loved that it once again said a lot about one of the characters' psyches.  It's a really fun puzzle game, which I guess it had to be, you don't fight in it.

My biggest complaint, though, is that while I think it is a rather effective horror game, I think it is too easy to really be great as a survival horror game.  Which is, allegedly, what the game is, I don't think it's that but that seems to be the consensus.  It's a very light and breezy adventure, while the game does have limited resources (it only has 6 healing items total scattered throughout the game, with your health being the big resource you have to manage), it is exceptionally easy to do a perfect run on your first go around.  I only used a healing item from impatience rather than being caught by the game really.  On top of it just being short, it makes for a very light experience despite its atmosphere and scares.  But also I don't mind having something breezy and spooky sometimes.  Everything else about Fear the Spotlight is absolutely great and I really dug this game.  8.9/10.

Parting Words

Another spooky month comes and goes.  Quite the selection we had this year, huh?  I played two Resident Evil games and didn't like the one that people usually say is the best of them.  I finally put a cap on Grim Fandango, a game that has been on the backburner for a long time.  I played like three games that are going to stick with me long term I feel.  It was a good month.  I wish I got to more games, mind you, I wish I had rolled more of those one play session games but like.  There's always next year.  Part of me is considering not sequestering the spooky games to October and instead just prioritizing them, because otherwise it's going to be a decade before I finish all the games currently on the wheel and by that time I'll add new ones most certainly.  I want to thank you for reading this, whoever you are.  I don't often do these posts where I talk about a bunch of games I'm playing, usually I don't talk about the majority of the games I'm playing unless I think they're worth a diary or a essay or something.  But these are fun to do.  I look forward to the October game-a-thon and I hope that passion comes through in my writing.  See y'all next year for more spooky games, and hopefully I have stopped the mind worms from convincing me to do NaNoWriMo so I will have content out in November.  Until then, thank you, and goodbye!!!

 The term "guilty pleasure" has kind of become a dirty term in the past decade, hasn't it?  A guilty pleasure is a piece of media that you adore despite knowing it is of dubious quality.  It is looking at something, understanding it's bad, and choosing to love it anyways.  It was, once upon a time, a very common term to throw around.  It has always exist, of course, people have always been viewing media that they know is bad but still love anyways.  However, it definitely became incredibly commonplace after the advent of the online space.  In the late 00s/early 2010s, there was a lot of talk of media being "good" or "bad" inherently, we had a new breed of critics with very on the ground, grassroots perspectives that focused primarily on explaining why things, particularly things from their/your childhood, were terrible.  In the face of such overwhelming criticism, it became common to cling to the stuff from your childhood, acknowledging that it might be bad but that it's still fun or still charming.  It became your "guilty pleasure".

But as time went on, this entire ideology fell to the wayside.  The more cynical critics of the early online space fell out of favor, both due to personal controversies and a reevaluation of their critical stylings.  Many critics, no longer bound by brands that often forced them to develop identical styles and voices, began to free themselves from their shackles and find their own space in this world.  And also Linkara was there, making the same awful content he always had and getting way too defensive when anyone criticized his low budget internet show that hasn't evolved at all in two decades where he gives bad opinions about comics.  We were, strangely, somehow entering a world where people were more critical and less critical than ever.  The rise of the video essay was occurring, which tended to focus less on berating media and more on trying to figure out what does and does not work about them.  We strived for a more tolerant society, even as tolerance itself became kind of a sticking point.  And the idea that things cannot truly be good or bad began to take root.  People scoffed at the idea that something might just not actually work, countering with some flavor of "well people like it, let them enjoy it".  Films that had been universally seen as bad were now getting defenders, not because of the film's actual quality but because of the fact that people enjoyed it.  In the midst of this, the term "guilty pleasure" started to seem outdated.  After all, why should someone feel guilty for liking something?  It's just their opinion.

I have never liked the abandonment of guilty pleasure as a term.  My opinion is that, genuinely speaking, it is rather healthy to acknowledge when something is not good but you still enjoy it in spite of that fact.  I earnestly believe that it has been harmful to people's perceptions of things to allow them to openly adopt the stance of "I like it so it's inherently good".  I think in our quest for tolerance and acceptance of all viewpoints, we have incidentally bred a very selfish and self-serving relationship with media, something I have talked about at length on this blog before.  I think that understanding that something is bad for xyz reason, if anything, allows you to appreciate the things you love about it.  So often we assume everything exists on a binary of right and wrong and that something being bad means it's wrong to like it.  As such, I want to talk about one of the greatest guilty pleasures in my life, an ambitious, misguided, wonderful work of art that could only happen in an era where the advancement of technology created a place for creativity that said technology could not hope to accomplish.  Today, my friends, we're talking about...

Lifeline: Voice Action Adventure - The Best Worst Best Horror Game You'll Never Play

What Exactly IS Lifeline?

Lifeline: Voice Action Adventure is a 2003 survival horror game released for the PlayStation 2.  Taking advantage of the massive technological leap between the PS2 and its predecessors, as well as the advent of microphone based games, Lifeline attempts to bring the potential of a microphone game into a place where it can be used for a proper "gaming" experience.  Microphone based games had existed before this, obviously, but previously they were pretty casual affairs.  The Nintendo 64's Hey You! Pikachu, a pet simulator where you go on adventures with the eponymous electric rodent and the Dreamcast's Seaman, a bizarre life simulator where you raise a fish with a human face to adulthood all the while it talks philosophy with you.  Lifeline was among a small wave of games in the sixth generation of game consoles that attempted to use this technology to create more traditional gaming experiences, which eventually lead to the GOAT Odama, shoutouts to the Odama speedrunning world champion.

In Lifeline, you play as a character known only as the Operator.  Set during Christmas of 2029, the Operator and his girlfriend, Naomi, were visiting a Space Station hotel that orbits the planet Earth, part of a series of extraterrestrial vacation spots from a Japanese space travel company.  The hotel is both a hotel and an active research station, and in the midst of the Christmas party being held on the station, an experiment goes off attracting aliens to the hotel and separating the operator from his girlfriend.  Getting injured in his attempts to run away from the aliens, the operator seals himself within the station's security office, unable to move but being completely safe, to await rescue.  However, there's obviously two problems: one, if help does arrive, how will they know where the operator is, and b, he still has no idea where his girlfriend is.  Being trapped within the security office, he immediately begins searching throughout the station for any sign of other survivors.

This leads him to the station's "brig", wherein one of the station's cocktail waitresses is locked inside, having been suspected of being a stowaway.  This is Rio, one of the only survivors of the invasion and the only one that the Operator can find.  Rio is, unsurprisingly, a suspicious person.  We find her locked in the brig, she keeps a lot of secrets to herself, often dodging or deflecting questions about her past and why she was imprisoned in the first place, and it's clear she has some grander purpose that she is not telling us.  Nevertheless, you two quickly strike a deal: you are in the security wing of the station, which is where the evacuation pods are.  Rio has to head your way anyways if she wants to get off this ruined space station.  If you free her, and help guide her to your location using the security feeds, she will help you find your girlfriend and free you from the security room, at which point the three of you will get off this ship together.  Opening the jail cell, Rio steps out, and your adventure begins in earnest.

This is where the core gameplay of Lifeline comes in.  While Lifeline is a survival horror game in the style of Resident Evil where you must manage resources, heal yourself regularly, solve puzzles and so on, Lifeline is really more akin to a point and click adventure game.  Rio does not move autonomously, nor do you control her directly in any way.  You, as the operator, are responsible for telling Rio where to go, what to do, where to shoot, where to investigate, and so on and so on.  You must look around the area, scan for suspicious or interactable parts of the map, and then tell Rio to go there or look at that.  Along the way you will pick up new commands for Rio, allowing the player to interact with her more in-depth or more naturally, and often allowing Rio certain advantages, i.e. giving her AI an auto-function which will start off very clueless but evolve over the course of the game so you don't have to constantly micromanage her.

This gameplay is where the "Voice" part of Lifeline comes in.  Rather than simply clicking on the area and telling Rio "go here", you have to vocally guide her.  This is the core function of the game, you are always in conversation with Rio and she reacts to what you say or do.  It's made to feel like a partnership, she is on the ground trying to fight her way through this nightmare scenario while you have access to all the camera feeds and are trying to guide her to safety.  As previously stated, the intention is that as you go along and guide Rio, she will become more confident and independent.  Her character is even described as having "quick reflexes but poor decision making skills", meaning that while she is quick to respond to commands, she has trouble deciding.  And as you go along, she is meant to gain confidence in her own abilities, and the player will be given the option to trust in her judgement, let her move on her own.

Rio will also begin to open up more and more as you move on.  The player and Rio are meant to form a bond as you progress through the game, feeling more and more like partners.  It's shockingly immersive at times, giving you these quiet moments where you can just talk to her and find out more about her.  Discover the actual reasons why she came to this space station, what she actually knows of its operation.  As you go on, the story twists and turns, every revelation shaking the foundation of the world you knew.  The closer you get to escape, the more unlikely that escape ever coming seems to be.  Will you ever find your girlfriend?  Will you ever be saved from this horrifying encounter?  It's up to how you guide Rio.  This unique relationship between the two parties, the player and the game, makes Lifeline one of the most interesting works of art within gaming history.  A true blend of creativity and technology.  There's just, you know, one big problem...

Nothing About Lifeline Actually Works

If you know of Lifeline, you probably know it through someone else playing it.  It's very likely the reason you've heard of this game is through VTuber and immunodeficiency activist Ironmouse's disastrous playthrough of the game, wherein she got so frustrated that she had to adopt a whole new voice in order to finish the game.  If not her, though, it is probably through another YouTuber or Twitch streamer who is playing this game in order to gawk at the oddness of it.  They may commit to a full playthrough or, more likely, just play the game until it stops being "fun" which is roughly the first enemy encounter and then go "wasn't that weird, y'all".  Indeed, this is how I first got introduced to the game, actually.  Long ago, in the early days of livestreaming, a content creator I watched at the time played through Lifeline and, as is the typical reaction, proceeded to mock and berate the game.  This is entirely fair.  Lifeline is an absolute disaster.

Technological Hurdles

Lifeline is incredibly ambitious.  Attempting to create a fully interactive entirely voice controlled video game for the PlayStation 2, at a time where we had just barely begun to expand the technological limitations of video gaming, was admirable.  Like I said before, only a few years before Lifeline, voice controlled gaming was the domain of pet simulators.  No one had ever truly tried a game this in-depth before, a game this close to being a hardcore title, a game that, should it succeed, could revolutionize gaming.  It was, as you could imagine, an absolute disaster to program.  The game was very close to being cancelled at various points and was basically saved by sentimentality.  To quote an interview with the game's director of game design, Manabu Nishizawa, on the game's official site:

We made two prototypes of this game. We made it on a PC, not a PS2. We made the prototype to see if it was possible to "control a character by giving instructions using voice recognition." Three months after starting the prototype, a brown-haired girl wearing a black sleeveless top, culottes, and boots, holding a gun, stood on the PC screen. Hesitantly, I pressed the spacebar on the keyboard and spoke into the microphone, "Walk." The moment I released the key, I got goosebumps all over my body... I was truly surprised. Along with the subtitle "Yes" appearing at the bottom of the screen, the girl began to walk with a tap-tap. Still excited, I instructed her to "Stop," and she stopped instantly. "Walk" (tap-tap) "Stop" (stop) "Walk" (tap-tap) "Stop" (stop) "Walk" (tap-tap)... We repeated the test so many times that it was hard to tell which was the machine and which was the robot. I felt like I was experiencing the future. Looking back now, I think that if I hadn't had that moment of awe, Operator's Side would never have been completed.

 One of the key problems that the game faces is the voice recognition software itself.  It works okay in the most ideal conditions possible, in a room without too much white noise, with a speaker speaking very clearly, in an accent that the game is trained to understand.  The moment you deviate from those conditions, however, the recognition goes down the drain.  To bring it back to Ironmouse's playthrough, Ironmouse is Puerto Rican, and as such has a specific way of speaking.  She has a very thick accent and naturally talks with an exuberant energy to her.  The game is literally not trained to understand the nuances of her English, which famously caused her to have to adopt a very clear, slow talking American accent to push through the game.

The biggest surprise, though, is not that the game doesn't understand more specific accents from parts of the world the game was not really released in.  No, it's that the game struggles with accents that it's definitely meant to be programmed for.  My dear friend Thomas, friend of the blog, zine master extraordinaire, played Lifeline back in 2020 after getting on a voice-controlled game kick in the wake of his playthrough of Odama.  And, while Thomas didn't struggle to get the game to understand him nearly as bad as Ironmouse did, he did struggle to get the game to understand him a great deal.  So much so that some of his clarified speech for Rio's understanding became a meme, an older post I was writing about Lifeline was named "In Her Mouth" after the way he had to pronounce "Inner Mouth" to get Rio to understand him.  Thomas is from South Carolina initially, and does not have a particularly thick accent.  It seemed, genuinely, like Rio only has a decent time understanding you if you have literally no accent at all, i.e. are part of the Mid-Atlantic "no real accent" group.  And even then, like, I've seen people play this game from that group as well, it's still basically a nightmare.

Not that any of this matters anyways, as the AI in the game is also, famously, terrible.  Rio has been criticized by the majority of people who have played this game as being kind of a complete and total idiot.  Rio is not only difficult to communicate with, but difficult to work with.  She will completely ignore your instructions often just because her AI has difficulty finding the place you want to go or, barring that, just doesn't know how to actually access the information you need her to access.  She struggles with the most basic tasks often, seemingly completely unable to do anything on her own.  The game somehow wants you to both micromanage her and also not to micromanage her, as Rio will get defensive if she feels you're being too overbearing.  Which is, of course, troublesome for this kind of game, since you are literally guiding Rio by the hand the entire time.  Moreover, Rio often approaches situations like a sledgehammer, even when the various puzzles in the game require more finesse.  It is not uncommon for Rio's own AI to just screw up a puzzle by turning an element too much or hitting too many buttons.  The biggest fight in this game is, often, just the fight to get Rio to do anything right.

Combat

But there is also actual combat you must contend with.  Boy is there combat.  So the way that combat works is that Rio is on the floor actually fighting the aliens.  The problem is that she doesn't know where to aim really.  Each alien type has different body parts that she can fire out, and some deal more damage to them than others.  And, moreover, if you successfully destroy a body part, you can disable certain attacks, essentially making the alien less dangerous.  This is all information that you, as the Operator, have accessible to you.  Your security feeds are always scanning the monsters for their biology and their weakpoints.  Once you have the loadout of what you're dealing with, it's up to you to instruct Rio on where and when to run, dodge, and fire.  This is why "in her mouth" is a joke, you often have the option to fire directly into the mouth of the aliens, which can be devastating if performed correctly.

As you could maybe imagine, given the previous statements on the limitations of the vocal recognition software and Rio's own AI, this has every opportunity to go horribly wrong.  While Rio's inability to solve puzzles and scan environments can cause a lot of frustration in to the player, the fact that these are relatively low stress environments with which to interact with her gives the player the grace with her to enter an ideology akin to "I just gotta be patient with her and we can get through this".  Combat is, literally, life or death.  Rio can only take a few hits before she dies, and she not only needs to be dealing damage to the opponent, she needs to be avoiding their onslaught.  Regular enemy fights can be insurmountable walls as early as an hour into the game, as you try to manage a woman who is haphazardly utilizing a handgun she just received and who, famously, does not take orders well.  If you can get the game to recognize your commands, Rio is quick to follow.  Unfortunately, that's really the hard part isn't it?

The attempts to allow Rio to function on her own in combat also do not work.  Near the end of the game's "first act", you will find a command which allows Rio to behave autonomously in combat.  This is, at first, seemingly very handy as giving commands in the midst of combat is very difficult.  Unfortunately, this is not a system of "you tell Rio to act on her own and she makes optimal moves".  Instead, the game chooses to present a system in which Rio's AI will level up the more you trust her to handle things on her own.  So when you get the command, Rio's automatic combat AI is absolutely worthless, she misses like 70% of all shots, it hasn't learned to target weak points, it is basically flying blind.  But as you rely on her, the game will start to make her smarter, enable her to make better decisions in combat.  Hypothetically, this is an interesting mechanic to explore.

There are two major issues with this though.  The first is that you receive this command at the end of the game's first major area and, more importantly, after you would fight the first boss of the game.  This means that Rio is already a substantial portion through the space station and past many of the "gimme" enemies the game has to offer.  There is no effective place to allow Rio to get smarter in combat, by the time you have access to this option which, supposedly, is meant to be helpful you are already past the point where you could realistically start providing Rio a path to allow her AI to grow.  It's rather unfortunate that the AI is not, say, recording the way the Operator tells Rio to fight and putting together a series of "x enemy = this strategy".  I'm sure that would be a technical nightmare even today, much less back in 2003 (although today they would just shortcut it using AI and everyone would hate it), but it also makes this command next to useless.  Alternatively, maybe we should've just started with it, instead of having to unlock it as we progress in the story.

But even if you did want to work with this command, you run into a second issue: grinding.  You could, hypothetically, grind Rio's AI on enemy encounters as soon as you receive the command and buff her up before progress.  Many standard enemy encounters will respawn after you enter and exit so many rooms, so you could just fight those and get Rio where you need her to be.  It'd be time consuming but you could do it, right?  Except, no.  You couldn't.  Because Lifeline is a survival horror game.  Lifeline is not especially stingy with resources, mind you, it clearly understands that you need a bit of a safety net because of how frustrating it can be working with the voice control.  But it does have limited resources, there are limited healing items, limited inventory slots, and a lot of things that can go wrong within these specifications.  Having the time to train Rio isn't the issue, having the resources to train her is.  You could spend all your time grinding her AI to get good at the combat to take the burden off yourself, but you are also very likely to run out of heals.  Moreover, as Rio upgrades her weapons, she loses out on infinite ammunition.  So, not only is grinding a bad idea for the potential to run out of heals, it is a bad idea because you can literally softlock yourself at a certain point by running out of ammunition and not having a gun powerful enough to go forward.

The difficulty of the game is also, just generally, unnaturally high.  The way you control this game is obviously a huge part of its difficulty, Rio is constantly fighting you whether she knows it or not.  But the game is just hard.  Enemies ramp up way too quickly, evolving from simple slug like enemies that take a few shots to kill to massive monsters with six to eight moving parts before you're even out of the first area.  And, unlike other survival horror games of its era, you are not intended to skip encounters.  Whereas something like a Resident Evil game or a Silent Hill game is primarily about avoiding unnecessary firefights to conserve resources, you are often locked into an enemy encounter in Lifeline when one occurs.  You would assume that, given the game's incredibly unique gameplay style, that it would go a little easier on the player.  Create a margin of error to allow them to progress given the hurdles.  Instead, Lifeline is the kind of game where enemies are so prohibitively difficult that every single encounter could take 3-5 tries to get through.  And this is saying nothing of the bosses, which can legitimately take hundreds of tries to get through depending on how much Rio wants to listen.

Rio

Rio herself is also a very questionable of this game, both in her characterization and in her function to the player.  Rio is always depicted as someone who knows more than they're telling.  They're keeping secrets, it's clear that their reason for being here is more than just being hired as a cocktail waitress, and the player is meant to be suspicious of her and her motivations on some level.  As the game goes on, the player discovers that Rio is heavily involved in what is going on with this alien invasion.  Many years ago, Rio was living on Earth with her family.  Her father was a brilliant scientific mind whose research unlocked the alchemical secrets of the Philosopher's Stone.  Stay with me.  Upon this discovery, a target was put on his back, and one night one of his rivals broke into his house and murdered his wife and shot his daughter Rio.  Rio's father cut a deal: let him use the Philosopher's Stone to save his little girl, and he will go with the men willingly.  Rio was saved, but effectively orphaned, and has spent her entire life hunting down the men who kidnapped her father trying to save them.  She has, in effect, been playing dumb the entire time, playing the convenient role of a sexy 20-something cocktail waitress to find her way to the man who kidnapped her father and see justice done.  She not only knows way more than she's letting on, but is even implied by the story to be a genius who is the only person besides her father that can truly unlock the secrets of the Philosopher's Stone.

This is, quite honestly, unbelievable.  Not because of how absurd the plot is, it's a Japanese survival horror game, the plot being absurd is par for the course.  It's basically accepted within Resident Evil that the last 1/3 of the game is going to have a crazy last minute plot twist that kills the tone and atmosphere of the early bits.  No, it's unbelievable because the game is telling you things about Rio that you know are just simply not true.  We know she isn't some sort of genius, we know she isn't just convenient playing dumb.  We've been guiding her for hours at this point.  She doesn't understand how to work a safe!  It is bold of the game to try and convince us that Rio is some sort of genius double agent who is so good at playing dumb that she fools us all when we have spent so much time with her being actually very very dumb.  It is one of the most egregious examples of a game's story and a game's gameplay actively conflicting with one another, a level of ludonarrative dissonance that tends to make players furious when they get to it.

But what Rio's actual purpose in the game is?  That's the part where it gets a little uncomfortable.  As the game goes on, Rio starts to develop a romantic attachment to the Operator.  Despite knowing he is in a happy and healthy relationship and finding his girlfriend being a pretty driving part of the plot, Rio cannot help but catch feelings for the person helping her through this nightmare.  She begins to ask the Operator personal questions, slowly peeling back layers of their own psyche, finding things she truly likes about them.  She is committed to the goal of aiding them in finding their girlfriend, but it's clear that she also wants to pursue a relationship with the Operator.  It's a tale as old as time: you fall in love with a taken guy as you're trying to help him find his missing girlfriend.  There's just like one thing about this whole story that makes it very weird: the Operator is the player.

This is, perhaps, the most confusing decision about Lifeline.  Lifeline, despite its more absurd and frustrating elements, is pretty committed to being a survival horror.  The situation is intense, the resources scarce, the monsters terrifying.  It is very much a hardline horror game with sci-fi elements to it.  Except it tacks on a virtual girlfriend simulator.  In the midst of this horror game.  Like it's not a separate mode when you can just relax with Rio and talk to her, Rio is meant to be your virtual girlfriend right in the middle of you trying to make sure she doesn't get killed by discount Xenomorphs.  It's weird.  It's just simply weird.  Like, I know why they did this, gaming was a very different thing in the 2000s, we were way more sexist.  The first iterations of the show that would eventually become the Game Awards literally had a category for "sexiest video game women".  It was assumed that video games, especially games in more "hardcore" genres, had primarily male audiences in the 15-34 year old demographic, and that said audiences' primary want for a female character was not exactly great writing.

But also this is just absurd?  Like, it's not just a natural thing, either, it's not solely a matter of "as the game progresses and you hypothetically grow more attached to Rio, romance can blossom".  The game actively wants to pursue this element.  There are dozens of commands that you can give Rio, many of which are gameplay related, some of them are fun little easter eggs, but a pretty substantial portion of what you can tell Rio fits in the category of "romance".  Or, worse "objectification posing as romance".  You can tell her to bark like a dog.  You can tell her to pose sexy for you.  You can engage in conversations which are entirely about you, the player's, romantic life.  It's weird.  It's really weird.  It is the kind of thing that a certain section of the audience is going to defend with their lives and that section of the audience is, hopefully, not around that much anymore.  It is part of a pretty poor trend of how we used to depict women in gaming that I would like to think we have moved away from, and it seems like we have given how often weirdos online complain that games aren't for men anymore.

If you could not tell, from this extended section, Lifeline is a pretty bad video game.  Mechanically it barely works, it doesn't give the player much leeway despite the way they have to control the game, it focuses on what are probably the wrong parts of its premise given the voice control nature of it.  It is truly one of the messiest video games of all time.  You cannot help but admire its ambition, its attempts to pave the way for an all-new style of gameplay that no one has ever really tried before.  But it's difficult to want to applaud it after you've spent three hours fighting Rio to do anything, your voice sore and your hopes shattered.  Its reputation is more than earned and I completely understand why people view it as, at best, a novelty and at worst one of the worst games ever made.  There's just one thing about it for me personally, one teensy-tiny ripple that I can't get over...

Lifeline Is One of My Favorite Video Games Of All Time

I started this post out by establishing that Lifeline is a guilty pleasure for me, a game I love despite knowing it's pretty terrible.  But the extent of my love for Lifeline is far greater than I think I implied at first.  I don't just like Lifeline despite acknowledging its faults, I love this game.  To the point that, for a while, Ed having awful taste in video games was a joke amongst my friend group.  Everyone else who has played this game that I know despises it with a burning passion and meanwhile I'm out here like "y'all this game is a masterpiece".  Granted, a lot of the reason why I love this game is just the absurdity of its plot.  I do get an ironic sense of joy out of how bold the decisions made in this game are.  But I also do genuinely enjoy Lifeline.  For as much as some of my appreciation of it is ironic, much much more of it comes from a place of sincerity.

Plot

But first let's talk about absurdity of this game's story.  The game starts out pretty normal, you're trapped on a space station hotel in the midst of an alien invasion, you have to rely on your new friend Rio to rescue you and got off this floating tincan, standard sci-fi stuff.  The first big twist comes, however, when the military finally arrives.  The military set up roadblocks for Rio to proceed, effectively insuring that you, and your still missing girlfriend cannot be saved.  The reason?  They are planning on shooting the space station out of orbit.  See, the space station is not simply sitting up on outer orbit, a derelict ship that the Japanese government can evacuate and then abandon.  It is actively on a crash course for Earth.  And this was done intentionally by the station's head scientist, a man named Joe Powers.

Joe Powers is, as you might've guessed, the man who abducted Rio's father.  He has been attempting to conduct experiments on the Philosopher's Stone for decades now, and he believes that he has finally cracked the code.  His plan is to seal himself within one of the station's safety pods, a near indestructible containment unit created in case the Station ever fell from orbit, at which point the ship would crash into Earth, allowing Powers to get rescued with the stone in tow.  He then wishes to continue his research on Earth, developing a powerful weapon with which he can become the richest and most influential person on the planet.  A role he will presumably be able to maintain forever, as he has just unlocked the secret to immortality.

The Japanese military, as you might imagine, does not want a piece of space debris the size of a 5 star hotel crashing into the planet, bringing about the end of the world because of what is contained within it.  So their plan is to evacuate anyone not involved with the science division of the station and then nuke it out of orbit, destroying Joe Powers, the philosopher's stone, and the aliens that have arrived on the station.  Rio, however, won't let this stand as she needs to still find the Operator and his girlfriend, Naomi.  So she petitions for them to allow her past the blockade.  If she finds the Operator and his girlfriend, they will use the escape pods in the security wing to escape.  If not, they will go down with the ship.  The military hands her a gun and a uniform change and lets her past.  With the knowledge that no one will save them, Rio steps into the lab sector.

After fighting through more enemies, Rio encounters a bizarre sight: a brain in a jar that is capable of speaking through a digital voice.  Rio attempts to ask the brain questions, but it shuts her down pretty quickly.  This brain, you see, has become jaded.  Angry at the world.  Which is, you know.  Valid, given whoever this brain used to belong to is essentially dead, only existing as a floating brain in the jar.  It's incapable of connecting to other people, of understanding their plight.  Only driven by its deep-seeded hatred of one specific man: Joe Powers.  Joe Powers did this to this brain, removed the body down to its most basic components as a punishment.  A punishment for deceiving Joe Powers many years ago.  A punishment for choosing to hide its research somewhere, somewhere Joe could never find it.  For the brain, you see, is Rio's father.  And he never gave Joe Powers the Philosopher's Stone.

So, as previously stated, long ago Joe Powers descended upon Rio's childhood home, murdered her mother and shot her.  As she lay bleeding out, Rio's father cut a deal: if he could use the stone to heal his little girl, he would go with Joe willingly.  That is, for many years, what Rio believed happened.  However, it turns out that shortly after healing Rio, the stone completely disappeared.  Joe Powers has not been running experiments for the past decades to unlock the secrets of the stone, he's been doing it to create a new one.  And his failures to do so are all over the space station.  You've been fighting them throughout the entire game.  Dear reader, there is no alien invasion.  Every single monster you have fought is a failed experiment to recreate the Philosopher's Stone.

Joe Powers has been, essentially, finding people who need help desperately.  People dying of cancer, people who can't walk anymore, people who are on the brink of death.  The people who, even in the future where we can put a hotel in space, have no hope of a cure or a fix for their condition.  He contacts them and states that he is developing an experimental treatment in his lab orbiting Earth.  He pays for their transit and brings them aboard, at which point he imprisons them in his lab and begins running tests on them.  The Philosopher's Stone, among it's many other properties, is meant to heal those who come into contact with it.  Grant them a full life.  Even grant them immortality.  So, if he finds the right formula to create it, he'll know because it can cure these people with no hope.  But he never really did.  So what happened instead was that each and every person he experimented on mutated into a horrible monster.  And on the night of the Christmas party, one of them finally escaped.  Breaking the containment of Powers' lab and invading the rest of the space station.  Throughout the game, you have not been killing aliens, you've been killing horribly mutated humans.

So what happened to the real Philosopher's Stone?  Well, I want to bring you back to the night Rio's father got kidnapped.  Rio got shot and her father had to rush to save her.  Now, he could've simply used the Philosopher's Stone and been done with it, but that would mean Joe Powers getting his hands on a potential weapon that could end the world.  So, working fast, Rio's father implanted the stone into Rio's heart.  It has been keeping her alive this entire time.  Not only that but, unbeknownst to Rio herself, it has given her superhuman abilities.  It's why her reflexes are so quick, why she can take so much damage before going down, why, despite being dumb as bricks as we've already established, she can analyze an enemy well enough to know what the Operator means by "left Thorax".  Rio is a super soldier.  The most powerful object in the history of the world lives inside the heart of a cocktail waitress who believed that she could easily infiltrate a space station to get revenge on its head scientist and NO ONE would ever notice her.  This game is so funny.  Anyways, Rio's father hopes that Rio lived a long and happy life, unaware that he is talking to her, unable to recognize her even if he could see.  And so Rio does the hard thing.  She does the right thing.  She puts her father out of his misery, draining the brain.

There is just one last hanging thread we need to address, though, isn't there?  What happened to Naomi?  She has been missing this entire time, after all, not dead just.  Missing.  Leaving both the Operator and Rio hopeful that she can be found.  Our answer comes late into the game, as we approach the security sector and prepare to face Joe Powers.  And it comes at one of the lowest points of the journey, when Rio has been pushed to her limits and seems on the verge of collapse.  She is cornered by one of the most horrifying beasts on the station, and it looks like, for the first (or more like five hundredth time, to be honest) time, we aren't going to make it out of this.  Then the monster who cornered her gets destroyed by another monster, one we've seen a few times across our journey.  One that is bizarrely non-hostile.  And in this moment, it's looking to Rio with a need to help her.

This monster is, unsurprisingly, Naomi.  In the midst of the chaos of the initial attack, Naomi had been captured and brought down to Powers' lab.  She was, in a sense, Powers' final test subject, the proof of concept that he had successfully created a good enough rendition of the stone.  While the stone did mutate her considerably, it largely kept her humanoid form intact, not transforming her into a mindless beast.  Because of her love for the Operator, Naomi has actually successfully retained her humanity, trying to find her lover.  As such, she has been assisting Rio in her goal of making it to the Operator, trying to ensure all three can get off this ship together.  Bonded by their mutual connection to the Philosopher's Stone, Rio can understand Naomi, who currently can only talk through a bizarre backwards language.  Unfortunately, Naomi's time is almost over.

Naomi has realized what she has become.  She seemed a bit confused by it for a while, not aware of what she was, but now she sees she has become a bizarre alien monster.  What's more is that she's fading away.  Not in the sense that she is becoming more monstrous, but in the sense that she is unstable.  Her new form is breaking down, at any moment she will fade into stardust.  Protecting Rio is, if anything, her last stand.  She believes that Rio can absorb her essence to revitalize her, and so sits with her as she dies, sacrificing herself to give power to the true wielder of the Philosopher's Stone at her lowest moment.  She asks Rio to apologize to the Operator for not being able to make it, and to tell him that she loves him.  And then she fades away, her essence giving Rio a much needed power boost, allowing her to move on.  We mourn Naomi for a brief second... and then Rio realizes that her hurdle has just been cleared for her, meaning that she can now go after the Operator unfettered.  I kid, I kid.  Rio is actually super messed up by Naomi's sacrifice, it's like the weight of everything that happened, all the people who have died or that she has had to kill, hits her at once.

Unfortunately we can't linger on that too long, because who appears at this moment to try and put a bullet in Rio's head?  Joe.  Powers.  This is it, Rio's final confrontation with the man she's been hunting for decades now.  He goes down immediately.  Something I do appreciate about the decisions this game makes is that they stick to the idea that Rio's ability to survive things is because of her superhuman biology as given by the stone.  Every other character in this game just dies to literally nothing.  Rio drops Joe in one shot.  And then rescues the Operator, boarding the two escape pods still on the ship.  Unfortunately things cannot be that simple, and Joe returns to life, resurrected and mutated by his incomplete Philosopher's Stone into a massive monster.  Rio and the Operator work together to defeat the Titanic beast, and fly off from the ship, having survived.  Everyone might be dead, but hey, at least Rio now has a chance, amirite?

The plot is stupid.  Like, just so absurd.  It probably sounds absurd just describing it, it twists in so many ways and introduces just absolutely insane concepts.  Like, they really went all in on the Philosopher's Stone.  But it is actively hilarious experiencing it.  I think Lifeline has only not gotten a reputation for being one of the great "so bad it's good" stories in gaming just because by the time you hit the ridiculous parts of it, everyone is so frustrated by dealing with Rio that they just are done.  That literally did happen to most of my friends who experienced this game, they were out of it for hours by the time the game started compounding ridiculous elements to its story.  Though the absolute insanity that is "Joe Powers" hits everyone eventually.  I adore this story though, it's insane, but in such a fun and sincere way.  It commits to having the most absurd storyline possible in a way that I admire greatly.  I will go to bat for Lifeline's story, it's so fun.

Ambition

But, more importantly, I do genuinely and sincerely love this game.  Why?  The very thing that arguably is the reason why it's so bad: its ambition.  Lifeline is an entirely unique thing.  A game that could only exist in an era where we hadn't yet decided what makes "good gameplay".  I feel like people forget how experimental games were on the PS1 and PS2.  How often developers tried to take advantage of CD techonology to allow you to load up music CDs to meaningfully impact gameplay.  The attempts to do motion control/camera based gameplay.  And yes, even the attempts to make voice controlled gaming a valid gameplay style, something that could be nurtured to create really in-depth experiences.  Lifeline is ahead of its time, voice controls would continue to be experimented with in a significant capacity for a long time and nowadays we could in fact probably make this game work.  Hey Konami, remake Lifeline.  Don't do that, Rio will just be a generative AI, it would be disappointing and unethical.

Lifeline's unique setup, a story and gameplay style that puts the player into the game, is incredibly fascinating to me.  Even though the execution might leave a lot to be desired, when I am playing Lifeline, even in my most frustrated moments, I don't feel that the game is a failure.  The relationship it forms between player and game is challenging, it argues for a level of immersion that a lot of people would likely find unsettling.  Including myself.  As much as I adore this game for this very reason, I also find it deeply unsettling how much it asks the player to be involved within its world.  How much it asks the player to form a personal connection with Rio, not just as an observer experiencing a story, but as an active participant in her life.  It wants the player to form a genuine relationship with this character, both in the sense that you're meant to form a partnership and the game wants you to be romantically involved with her in some capacity.

But, in being uncomfortable, it makes you ask questions.  Should a game break these boundaries.  Should the player be immersed to this degree.  Especially with the rise of AI chat bots and people's obsession with their virtual girlfriends as a result, this boundary is very much broken every day whether we like it or not.  There is a conversation to be had around Lifeline, around when a piece of art goes "too far" in immersing its playerbase.  But at the same time, it makes one wonder if this is valid.  If you can cross boundaries for the sake of an artistic work regardless of if those boundaries are wise.  In other mediums, crossing boundaries is not just common but is a challenging part of the artistic process.  The boundaries that Lifeline crosses might very well be unwise to cross but that doesn't mean they never should be, you know?  And while some of the reasons Lifeline crosses this boundary are pretty gross, others are infinitely compelling.

Lifeline creates such a unique situation that even when it fails to work, as it often does, I can't help but admire it.  Like I said before, even as it is its most frustrating self, a game in which the core functions of it often don't work, I find myself more intrigued than annoyed.  It's such a specific work of art, the kind of thing that gets created when someone has a ton of ambition, a ton of creativity, and is standing upon the threshold of being able to realize it but is just unable to solidify it.  It is something that just could not exist anymore, a game trying something completely all its own with the weight of a major studio behind it, but without the baggage that comes with understanding what "good game design" is.  It's a symbol from a messier time, when trying something was a goal within itself.

I'm not someone who hates the modern game industry, who favors an older time.  I can pretty confidently say that we are frankly spoiled nowadays, games that would've been industry defining hits in the olden days are now just normal every day occurrences.  We are so inundated with good games that partaking in the hobby at all is proving taxing.  But we are too polished nowadays, too familiar with what "good game design" is.  We know what does and does not work and are often too scared to deviate from that.  Lifeline represents a much messier, much worse, but much more creative time.  A time when gaming was allowed to be weird, allowed to try things without the worry that they wouldn't go well.  It's art in its truest form in a lot of ways, the fact that it is a bad game almost comes secondary to how unique of a work it is.

This is also just something about me as a person.  While I certainly enjoy "good" games, interesting games are the ones that really stick with me.  Everybody can make a Metroidvania, not everyone can make an entirely voice controlled survival horror game.  I've played many games since playing Lifeline, many many games.  Just in the past 6 years the number of games I've beaten numbers in the hundreds.  And yet, most of those games roll off my back.  While most of them were good, often excellent, Lifeline is just so weird that you cannot help but love it.  In my mind, it's a masterpiece.  Just a true, unadulterated, unfettered work of art that no one has or likely ever will come close to recreating.  Is it horrible?  Absolutely.  But it's also very beautiful.  It is one of the worst, and yet one of the best.  And I wish I had the confidence in Konami to remake and finally realize its potential without resorting to generative AI for Rio's listening and responses or else I would be like "no but seriously, make a remake that fixes what is wrong with Rio".  But I'm not sure I would even want that, truly.  I think it being kind of awful is part of the charm, you know?