Games I Cleared in March - 2026 Edition

Check out the first entry in this series for additional context on what these are and what the nuances of my Game Clearing is~

Game 1: Revelations: Persona - Beat (Bad Ending)

Okay, let's get this over with.  March possibly started on the worst note any month could start on, with me playing a really bad RPG.  I've gone on forever at this point about why Revelations: Persona was a bad experience, I won't bore you with it again, it's truly a wild game that makes you feel bad for developing a free win because its system is so poorly explained that you feel like it was random.  It is one of the worst games I've ever done for Game Clearing, at least the ones that I'm willing to talk about.  I've played a lot of very bad itch.io shovelware back when game clearing was just any game from my backlog and not my current, more refined way of doing so.  It is literally like the 6th worst game I've played since doing this incarnation of game clearing.

I will say, though, that I did not end up removing Persona 5 from my to-play list.  I talked about doing that several times in the gaming diary about Revelations: Persona and like, I'm still going to give it a chance.  What's funny though is that like, a lot of people have told me "Persona 5 is so much better, even if you didn't like 1 you're likely to enjoy 5 because they're basically entirely different entities".  And I'm sure that's correct.  But I just, hilariously, have a higher chance of DNF-ing Persona 5 just because it's so unreasonably long.  Like, Revelations: Persona is a much worse game but by the time I was like "I shouldn't have played this", I believed I was a few hours from the end.  So I can justify playing until the end.  Persona 5 can realistically be like "I'm kind of sick of this, I liked it for a while but it's wearing thin" but then have an additional 50 hours left to actually play the game.  This is why games shouldn't be 100 hours, exceptionally long games are too easy to drop and then picking them up again means another 50-something hour investment.

Game 2: Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge - Beat

I love the Secret of Monkey Island.  The first entry in the beloved Monkey Island adventure series was one of the first games I ever did for game clearing back when I started taking it seriously in 2023, and for a while I was sure that it was going to make my best list for that year.  It's genuinely one of the best adventure games of all time, it's well written, the puzzles are clever, it gives the player this real sense of adventure.  It's fantastic.  It has that exact same vibe that the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie has, albeit with more pop culture references.  So the sequel, LeChuck's Revenge, was a long time coming.

LeChuck's Revenge sees our bumbling pirate hero, Guybrush Threepwood, on the pirate island of Scabb.  Guybrush has spent the past several months reveling in his defeat of the ghost pirate LeChuck, amassing both wealth and a large ego, which causes his love interest from the first game, Elaine Marley, to break up with him and flee back to her home.  He is here on Scabb Island to try and find leads on the legendary treasure of Big Whoop, a treasure that belonged to a famous pirate crew who buried it on a mysterious island and went to their graves holding onto its secret location.  He hopes to charter a ship and search the Caribbean over for clues.

However, he immediately runs afoul of Scabb Island's tyrannical pirate lord, Largo LeGrande, who was once the first mate of his archnemesis LeChuck and has put an embargo on the island, ensuring no one can sail in or out of Scabb Island.  In his attempts to defeat Largo and get off Scabb, Guybrush accidentally lets it slip that he has LeChuck's beard, a trophy of his previous encounter.  Largo swipes the beard and brings it to a voodoo sorcerer, allowing LeChuck to return to life.  Guybrush must now race across the Caribbean, finding the treasure of Big Whoop before LeChuck regains his full power and finds him to enact his revenge.  Along the way he'll meet new friends, run into familiar faces, and discover the truth about his relationship to the evil pirate who taunts him so.

I'll fully admit, going into this, I didn't expect to like LeChuck's Revenge nearly as much as I enjoyed Secret.  I had seen someone play LeChuck's Revenge many years ago and at the time I was kind of put-off by it.  I really liked Secret's more light-hearted, wholesome tone, Guybrush was a lovable doofus who wanted to be a pirate in the way a child would.  Less raiding ships and long hard days sailing in the sweltering Caribbean heat and more high adventure and finding treasure.  LeChuck's Revenge, meanwhile, depicts a meaner, more egotistical Guybrush who has managed to make everyone mad at him.  But actually playing it, this Guybrush is way more fun.  The fact that he is kind of unlikable now means that the game feels more comfortable having him be the butt of jokes, which allows him to be a more active participant in the comedy.  And they're allowed to have more fun with puzzle designs surrounding characters having to participate in them specifically because Guybrush is now allowed to be kind of a bastard.  He can manipulate people into doing what he wants.

Speaking of which, the puzzles in this game are just way more fun and way more clever.  There's an extended library puzzle that I really like, having to search the files for various books to trade around the Caribbean but only being able to check out four at a time so you have to return some books before you can find others.  There are multiple puzzles with a large amount of moving parts that take a lot of the game to piece together but none of them feel tedious.  That's something that I think keeps Monkey Island as a series talked pretty highly despite being a PC Adventure game from the 80s/90s, a genre infamous for just having absurd puzzles.  Monkey Island feels approachable, like you can really solve these puzzles without having to jump to crazy moon logic.  And LeChuck's Revenge is just better at it than the first game.

This game's structure is also just great.  While I enjoy Secret a lot, the fact that the majority of the game takes place on two giant islands causes it to kind of feel iffy as a seafaring pirate adventure.  LeChuck's Revenge has you constantly sailing from island to island across the Caribbean, using the knowledge and items you collect between islands to progress.  It sells the idea that this is a grand, swashbuckling pirate adventure much better, it's legitimately like everything that was great about Secret is superb in this one and everything that wasn't as great is fixed.  LeChuck's Revenge is the best kind of sequel, a sequel that manages to take its established world and characters and then evolve them in ways that completely recontextualizes this familiar cast.  I even adore the game's rather controversial (at the time) ending!  It's the first game I've played this year that I believes gets the 5/5 rating on my backlog and I adore it to death.  9.6/10

Game 3: Republique - Beat

Republique makes me so sad.  I had such high hopes for Republique initially.  It had a really cool concept, a unique gameplay style, it seemed like it had a lot to say about propaganda in the internet age.  I was ready to call this thing a hidden gem, like, it was super cool.  It reminded me a lot of one of my favorite bad games of all time, Lifeline, but like.  Actually good.  Finding a random indie darling out of nowhere and being able to talk about it to where other people find it is one of my favorite things about playing random games.  But, unfortunately, it really drops the ball in the last two episodes and it ruins its momentum entirely.

Republique is a stealth action game that takes place within an Orwellian dystopia titled, well, Republique.  Republique is an underground city ran by the sinister and charismatic dictator Treglazov, more commonly known as "the Overseer" or "the Headmaster".  You follow Hope, or 930-H as she's known in Republique, a teenage girl who has been raised inside of Republique and who begins the game being busted for hoarding contraband which speaks of revolution.  Hope has recently been contacted by a mysterious unnamed person, the player, who exists outside of Republique and has hacked into its aggressive security mainframe.  The two then form an alliance, looking to guide the young girl out of Republique and out into freedom.  You, as the player, play dual roles, using the cameras to plot out a safe course ahead while also playing as Hope, using the information you've gained to walk her through the facility.  All the while discovering more about the insidious Treglazov and his relationship with the world outside of Republique.

I really like the way Republique plays.  I have a bizarre fascination with games that, instead of putting you in the shoes of a character, put you in the shoes of some sort of entity existing outside of the actual gameplay who is guiding the protagonist through.  See, Lifeline, an objectively terrible game that I find endlessly compelling.  It's an especially fun take for a stealth action game to have, you get to be the eyes over the facility charting out a course and watching guards patterns so you can then lead Hope to safety.  It's very unique and I was really taken in by the gameplay.  There were a lot of points in the first half where I was ready to give this game a surprisingly high score.

It also has a lot of interesting things to say about the nature of propaganda, and especially in the online space.  Propaganda is the overarching theme in the first three episodes of the game, as you make your way through Republique you begin to really see how the Overseer has been manipulating things.  Newspapers from his own personal journalist, a woman who has a deep physical and emotional attraction to the man, are scattered throughout and by scanning the newspapers you can find audio files that detail conversations she's had on how to lie about the events she's covering.  This is in parallel to finding all the books that the Overseer has banned, having even gone so far as to order the execution of his own personal librarian to keep them out of the hands of the people of Republique.  But in the game's third episode it comes to a head where Hope and the player, to remove the final obstacle from Hope's path to freedom, have to become complicit in the propaganda machine by using our always online culture as a means with which to delve into various guards' lives from before they came to Republique.  They then must clip sound bites from these lives and swipe out of context images to spin a narrative to have them removed from their post and detained.

Unfortunately it kind of fumbles in two pretty big ways.  First of all is just that this was a Kickstarter game and so there are expectations that are put upon it that end up breaking the immersion.  For instance, all the non-story important guards in this game that Hope needs to navigate around are represented by Kickstarter backers.  A cool bonus, but it's also very weird scanning their information and seeing their screenname be put in the text of their guard id, as well as a little stamp indicating that indicates they are a Kickstarter backer.  Especially when the backers in question, rather than sending in photos of themselves, send in drawings.  Like literally Tycho Brahe, the Penny Arcade character, is one of the guards.  It's very weird.  It also, being an indie Kickstarter game from the 2010s, is part of an ecosystem where it's expected and/or welcome to have references to other significant indie games.  This takes the form of having the games actually appear as a collectible, with one of Hope's very few allies in her quest to escape having had them confiscated and asking Hope to collect them.  It's weird to see games like Shovel Knight and Hotline Miami appear in this Orwellian society and it's extra weird that you get little sales pitches on every game that appears.

The second way this game fumbles is that, in its final two episodes, it kind of just becomes an entirely different story.  It changes from an Orwellian dystopia plot to a more heavy science fiction plot about clones and genetic memory.  The big reveal is that Treglazov is actually a tech billionaire that has convinced the US government, along with others, to entrust him with their entire data caches.  But instead of storing them on servers, he has created clones with the specific purpose of storing all this data as a person, as human DNA has untold storage capacity.  It's a disappointing way for this story to go, given how strong its dystopian foundation actually is and it kind of sours the whole experience, in my opinion.  Fun gameplay, but the story is just too all over the place and feels like it loses out on its theme right at the finish line.  6.7/10 

Game 4: Hack 'n' Slash - DNF

Why do I keep trying to get water from the Double Fine well?  I have a tumultuous history with Double Fine.  I respect them a whole lot, I think they are a true bastion of creativity.  Every game that comes out of Double Fine is incredibly unique, an idea that could only come about from a studio that values creative spark more than anything else.  And this commitment to the creative has definitely paid off for me sometimes, Broken Age made my best list last year.  On the other hand, I kind of hate them.  Outside of a couple highlights like Broken Age and Costume Quest, I have routinely found Double Fine games to be works that have really neat concepts but the gameplay is actively terrible.  And nowhere is that more apparent than Hack 'n' Slash.

Hack 'n' Slash is a puzzle-adventure game very similar to the Legend of Zelda.  In it you play as a young woman named Alice who has traveled into the mountains to find fortune.  After becoming caught in a trap, Alice discovers a sword that breaks almost immediately, revealing a USB drive underneath.  Armed with this USB sword, Alice quickly finds out she has control over various aspects of reality, being able to hack into them and change various things about their code, hence the name.  It is now up to Alice, alongside her Sprite friend Bob, to hack into the world in an attempt to defeat the wizard who rules over these lands, who himself seems to be a hacker of equal, if not greater power.

Hack 'n' Slash actually starts out super fun, in my opinion.  Being able to hack into every aspect of this world allows the player a lot of experimentation and really enables them to do whatever.  I first tried to play Hack 'n' Slash many years ago, actually, and crashed my computer by setting an enemy spawner to instantly spawn 28,000 enemies all at once just to see if it would let me do it.  Altering variables is actually very intuitive and it's a good system to allow beginners to gain a rough idea on how coding works.  The early game is very entertaining and for many years I was sure I was going to love this game just because of how dumb the stuff you can do is.

Then the honeymoon phase ends and the game starts ramping up ideas very quickly.  In a matter of about a half an hour, you go from "changing the variable on a spawner from spawning 1 turtle to spawning 8 so you can use them to swim across a channel" to "having to figure out how algorithms work with very little guidance from the game itself".  Hack 'n' Slash feels in the early game like a game designed for beginners, that it allows people who have no understanding of coding going into the game to have a baseline from which to understand the basic concepts of coding.  And it feels like, by the time you enter the midgame, you now need to have some existing coding knowledge to be able to progress otherwise you are going to get stuck in the algorithm section and either brute force it or look up an answer.  But those with existing coding knowledge are almost certainly going to get put off by the game's very simplistic early game and it's just like.  I cannot imagine the person for whom Hack 'n' Slash is for, and honestly no one else seems to be able to imagine that person either.  Hack 'n' Slash is pretty widely considered Double Fine's worst game online these days and a lot of people remain upset that the game was the choice to go into production during Double Fine's "Amnesia Fortnight" event, an event they try to host once a year where, for a two week period, they stop production on all existing projects and everyone in the company gets a chance to pitch a game.  It's real bad, in my opinion, and I wish I had never played it in a more serious capacity, wish that my memories could just be of the 28,000 turtles situation.  2/10

Game 5: Spyro: Year of the Dragon - Beat

The PS1 Spyro trilogy is a truly legendary run of games.  I feel like there are very few game series that truly manage to keep up momentum for three games in a row, even some of the most famously great trilogies of all time (NES Mario, Uncharted, Batman Arkham, etc.) I personally either feel have some pretty big lows or just have one game that isn't as good as the others.  And especially with trilogies from before the PS3/Xbox era, you rarely have a trilogy that is consistently good because, simply put, trilogies just aren't consistent.  Spyro's sister franchise Crash Bandicoot is a perfect example of this, three games, all individually very good, all who share the same basic DNA, all of whom are wildly different at the end of the day.  Spyro, meanwhile, is a trilogy of games that is consistent in both game design ideology and in quality, an extreme rarity for any trilogy and especially one from this specific era.  And Year of the Dragon is its best entry.

Spyro: Year of the Dragon sees the young Dragon relaxing at his home in the Artisan World when suddenly a mysterious magic user, a rabbit girl named Bianca, arrives and steals all the dragon eggs.  He gives chase, as he is the only dragon small enough to fit into the holes she dug to swipe the eggs, and ends up in the ancestral home of the Dragons, now known as the Forgotten Realms. Many centuries ago, the Dragons were run off of these realms by a powerful sorceress, and now she has kidnapped the unhatched dragon eggs in an attempt to create a spell that, she says, will restore magic to their worlds.  Spyro must race through the many levels of the Forgotten Realms to rescue the baby dragons, defeat the Sorceress' minions, and gain allies in his battle against this evil mastermind.

It's difficult for me to explain what is truly great about a platformer.  Of the game genres, platformers are probably the genre I most enter a "flow state" with.  Which in itself is probably enough explanation.  In direct contrast to the majority of games I talk about on this blog, games with deeper stories and complex themes to discuss and analyze, platformers are just good, clean fun.  Spyro 3 is just fun, a game I don't have to think too hard about, just vibe with.  I think that's the thing that makes Spyro feel so consistent, they're just excellent vibe games, they feel so chill and approachable.

But that's not to say I have NOTHING to say about Spyro 3.  Something I do really like about it in particular is the inclusion of the other characters, Sheila, Sgt. Byrd, Bently, and Agent 9.  A lot of platformers from the era Spyro is from in particular introduce other characters and gameplay ideas with the goal of introducing variety into the game.  Good game design in this era was not so much "find what your game is and work on perfecting that", it was "try and be the most game with the most ideas".  And these tend to be my least favorite parts of older platformers, I'm thinking very specifically of the Murray races in Sly Cooper 1 right now.  But Spyro manages to make all these characters feel super unique and introduce a lot of gameplay variety while still always feeling like Spyro.  And I appreciate that a whole lot.  I don't feel like I'm playing a different game when I'm playing Sheila's levels, I just feel like I'm playing with a different moveset.  And I think, all told, that's the reason why this Spyro is my favorite of the three, it manages to be the most varied and have the most fun ideas for level objectives, without ever losing what makes Spyro great.  But again, this trilogy is all very close and I don't think, ultimately, any of them are better or worse than the others.  9.2/10

Game 6: TimeOut - Beat

Another entry in the series of "playing random itch.io games I think look interesting".  I should probably just binge more of those, to be honest, as a lot of them are like 1-3 hours long.  I could probably get through the entire backlog I've created for myself of itch games this year if I just hard focused on that.  Maybe when I get further into clearing out my itch games I can do a post that's like "hidden gems from that big bundle we all bought in 2020".  Anyways, TimeOut was, I believe, one of the first games I flagged as being interesting, so it's nice to finally get around to it.  And just in time too, because apparently the dev is working on a new game that's set to be a spiritual successor/a more expansive version of this?

TimeOut is a short detective story wherein you are put in the shoes of a noir detective in a world where your lifespan is your currency.  He has been contacted by a client to take up a case involving the suspicious death of her husband.  Along the way he is stopped by a mysterious man who gives him an incredible offer: a low interest loan of 5 years of additional time where the only payment required of our detective friend is that each time him and this man meet, the detective must give him an hour of time back.  Unable to resist such an offer, he accepts, receiving the five years.  It is only when he gets to the meeting point with his client that all is revealed: someone has been dealing in "fake time", offering them large amounts of time at low interest rates that rapidly drains from the receiver, killing them within hours.  Fake time being what killed her husband in the end.  Our detective must now solve the mystery of who has been dealing in fake time before his own illegitimate clock runs out.

I don't want to say much else because like, this is literally a 45 minute game.  And I do think if you have that big bundle, it's worth playing, it's just a short, fun noir romp with some clever messaging.  The person who made it said that it was inspired by the movie In Time and obviously that's true, it almost seems like a weird alternate universe version of that movie where it's a detective film instead of an action/heist film.  But I think this game kind of sells the premise better, having everyone's time be visible with the press of a button.  You see people just drop dead out of nowhere and also see how truly destitute everyone is, with very few people that detective passes having more than a couple hours of time.  And in shootouts you watch as years turn to months, then to days and then minutes before they succumb to their wounds and die.  It's neat.  A nice short romp, well worth the play in my opinion.  The only real problem is that it does definitely feel like a demo.  6.3/10

Game 7: Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling - DNF

I just shouldn't have played this one.  I'm sorry for playing Bug Fables.  Not because the game is bad but because I should've just been hyper aware that I wasn't going to like it.  I mention this in my gaming diary about Bug Fables, but the fact that I didn't like it actually upset me way more than normal.  Not only because it's like, I spent a significant amount of time on a game I did not like, but also because it made me feel gross.  It made me feel like the kind of content creators that I used to really enjoy and now have lost a lot of respect for, the kind of person who plays things he knows he's not going to like under the pretense of "giving it a fair shake", only to then turn around and have all his beliefs about the subject be confirmed and then he goes and criticizes it on the internet.  This is why I don't like Videogamedunkey, regardless of how good his videos are, his numerous videos on JRPGs are a prime example of this phenomenon.  People way overstate the value in "giving things a fair shake", and especially in a discourse as charged as the one Bug Fables involved in, the Paper Mario discourse, a lot of people have used that pretense to continue to push their beliefs and incite more vitriol about the modern titles.  I'm sorry to everyone who likes this game, I know I didn't approach it in bad faith and I know you know I didn't approach it in bad faith, but the outcome being as I ultimately expected does make me feel like I did, y'know?

Game 8: Pyre - Beat

I fell in love with Pyre on sight.  I almost don't want to write about it too much here because I like really want to just put all my other backlogged drafts on hold to write a dedicated review on Pyre.  This game is fascinating.  Supergiant's oft forgotten third game is by far their most unique, taking their roots in twin stick action games and RPGs and blending it with sports game conventions.  It's one of the most fascinatingly unique games I've ever played and I would not be surprised if it is already my game of the year.  Supergiant does not miss and so far Pyre is my second favorite of the games they've made.

Pyre is an action-RPG that takes place in the fantastical land of Downside.  Downside is a massive prison realm where the enemies of a powerful nation known only as "the Commonwealth" are thrown into to live out their remaining days in a sort of purgatory.  It's a harsh wasteland made of deserts, swamps, and mountains, with very few hospitable regions to be found.  You play as "the Reader", a character you can name and who has some rough customization features.  Reading has been outlawed in the Commonwealth for quite some time, and as such Readers are rare.  And to Downside, valuable.  The Reader, as such, gets picked up by a trio of wanderers named "the Nightwings".  The trio wish to participate in a ritual known as the Liberation Rites, a ritual wherein celestial orbs fall from the sky and two parties battle over it, the victor being able to follow the stars' path to the Mountain that bridges the gap between Downside and the Commonwealth.  Whoever wins the most Rites by the end of their cycle shall be liberated, allowed to return to the Commonwealth and given a full pardon.

Participating in these rites are where the Sports aspect comes in.  I had always known Pyre was a sports game in some capacity, that Supergiant took a lot of notes from sports and sports games to build the system of Pyre.  For some reason though I had always assumed that, as this is an RPG, the sport they took from was baseball.  That they adapted baseball's drafting and trading systems for how you select and manage your party.  Pyre is basketball.  It's a basketball RPG.  You select a team of three, called a "triumvirate", and get placed on one side of an arena, guarding a circular pyre.  The opponents are placed on the other side, with their own pyre, and the celestial orb spawns in the center.  Your goal is to bring the Celestial orb into the opponent's pyre, either by tossing it in there or by slamming one of your characters into it, while also preventing the opponents from getting into your pyre.  It's difficult to really explain why it's basketball and not just any sport describing it, but if you see gameplay, it's absolutely basketball.

Again, I think I'm likely to do a full review of Pyre, so I don't want to get TOO into it.  But I love basically everything about this game and, moreover, I find it very interesting how clearly it inspired Hades.  Pyre is often considered Supergiant's "miss", and that extends internally as well.  Supergiant sees Pyre as something of a missed opportunity, and through what they felt were Pyre's shortcomings they created Hades.  And I do think I concur with their assessment, their opinions on why Pyre kind of falls short are things I feel about it.  Still, this is one of the best games I've ever played, I loved it immediately and I'll probably come back to it periodically to play a "season" or two at various points.  It's so good.  9.8/10

Game 9: Shovel Knight: King of Cards - Beat

Words cannot express how happy I am to be done with Shovel Knight.  I've talked numerous times on this blog about how I used to be very retro game coded, I was the weird hipster in my friend group who "preferred playing classic NES games to the online multiplayer trash that comes out now".  And I used to be way more into retro revivals than I am now, which is presumably why I own Shovel Knight.  I forget exactly when I bought it but I probably bought it after watching a let's play of it from a YouTuber I followed at the time.  By the time I got around to playing it though, my tastes changed and while I do think Shovel Knight is categorically better than the games that inspired it, I also think that if I didn't already own it at this point I would never truly seek it out.  Over the course of the past couple years I've made it through all four Shovel Knight campaigns.  I thought Shovel of Hope and Plague of Shadows were just fine.  I really enjoyed Specter of Torment, though, it was the 15th best game I played last year.  So how does the fourth and final Shovel Knight campaign stack-up?  Well...

King of Cards is the earliest game on the Shovel Knight timeline, taking place before Specter of Torment and, by extension, long before the main campaign itself.  In it, you play as the first boss of Shovel Knight, the arrogant and childish dandy King Knight, before he would be a king.  King Knight, currently just a mama's boy living in his parents' attic, is traveling across the land to finally accomplish his goal of being king.  As luck would have it, a brand new card game is sweeping the nation, Joustus, and the world is holding a massive Joustus tournament.  If one could defeat the three kings of this realm "in combat", you will gain the Joustus crown and the title of King.  King Knight thus sets off, using a loophole in the rules to physically defeat the three kings and try to become the king of cards, enabled on his quest by various citizens of the realm who wish to partake in the quest of becoming Joustus champion.

I want to preface this by saying that I didn't do like any Joustus.  It's fine, but I'm just like "side modes are fun, but I don't want to spend an eternity learning a side mode" with basically any game, even ones I love (hi Blitzball).  So I am judging King of Cards entirely on the platforming levels.  In that sense, I think King of Cards is actually rather poor?  King Knight has the most restrictive movement options of the four playable characters, not even being able to naturally gain that much upward momentum.  Instead what he has to do is charge into an enemy, and then from there he enters a spin move where he can bounce on the enemy and gain the necessary vertical movement.  This causes King Knight to just simply feel like a worse Shovel Knight, a Shovel Knight without any truly unique stuff in his kit and, instead, he just kinda needs a wind up to every move he does.

King of Cards also has a different overworld structure to the other games.  King Knight doesn't face full levels like the other Knights do, instead his world map is filled to the brim with chunks of levels.  Little microlevels that have only a single checkpoint in them, more akin to the size you would see out of a classic Mario game than you'd expect with a Shovel Knight.  The goal is optimization, the game wants you to find the fastest path to the end by doing these small level chunks.  I, however, find this too to be a downside, as it encouraged Yacht Club to now theme entire levels around the worst parts of their existing levels.  Like one of the levels that would eventually become Mole Knight's is an extended version of that part where you're bouncing off the back of the giant beetle and have to clear a path forward for Shovel Knight while not losing the beetle, except now the beetle fakes out by running forward and backward all the time.  I didn't like King of Cards really and I'm mostly just happy to be done with Shovel Knight.  5.9/10

Game 10: NyxQuest: Kindred Spirits - Beat

When the original Wii Shop Channel was closing, I scrambled to find basically any game that people said was worth playing.  And by people, I of course mean "Nintendo Power".  I was a regular Nintendo Power subscriber during the Wii era and I really quickly thumbed through years of magazines to look at WiiWare reviews and find which games were worth buying.  Thankfully, I got a bunch of important ones, like LIT and Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth.  Unfortunately I did not grab all of the games I wanted before it shut down, however, some, not all, of the games I wanted to get would go on to get rereleases on Steam.  Actually rereleases too, not like the hack job that was done on LIT.  And the final game for March 2026 is one of them, the platformer/point and click hybrid based on Greek mythology known as NyxQuest: Kindred Spirits.

NyxQuest is a Greek mythology inspired adventure platformer set after a major catastrophe.  In the games' opening, we find out the backstory of this game, centering around the character of Icarus.  Icarus, the classical Greek figure, in this reality flew on his wax wings not during the day, but during the night, wherein he would fly up all the way past the clouds and into the realm of the goddess Nyx, queen of the night.  The two would become quite close, but of course, Nyx would always have to go when the night turned to day.  But the two would always continue meeting, developing a deeper and deeper bond.  Until one day, Nyx looked down upon the world and found it barren and destroyed.  The mighty Titan Helios, the sun himself, had awoken and judged humanity, destroying their world and slaughtering their gods.  Icarus' belief in Nyx spared her this destruction, but now she is lost on the now barren world.  Lost to find her dear friend and rescue him from Helios' wrath.

Nyx, having descended to Earth, and thus being separated from the night, has to do this while being mortal.  Her powers are severely depleted in this state and she, essentially, is flying on wax wings herself.  She can only really flap her wings a total of 5 times before her ability to fly is exhausted and she must land on the Earth to replenish her abilities. Furthermore, she is robbed of any divine abilities until her brethren, the few gods who hang onto life, grant her their strength, giving her the ability to move things with her mind, control the flow of wind, and eventually to zap her opponents with Zeus' lightning.  She must use these tools to find her way past Helios' obstacles and to the fallen Icarus.

I feel like NyxQuest is a game I would've enjoyed much more if I had played it while I was still in the Wii mindset.  I don't know if other people feel this, but sometimes I feel like Wii games are the hardest games to go back to just because you haven't played Wii games in so long that you're no longer as open and receptive to how touch and go motion controls are.  Granted I'm playing NyxQuest on a mouse and a keyboard instead, but the same premise applies.  The way NyxQuest is played is so distinctly Wii.  You control Nyx's movement with a pretty standard movement system, on mouse and keyboard it was WASD but I imagine on Wii it was with the Nunchuck control stick.  I can also imagine her other options like jumping/flying and gliding were mapped to C and Z, which I imagine was rather comfortable.  The reason I can imagine this being the case is that NyxQuest uses pointer controls excessively.  Nyx herself doesn't actually interact with the world very much, instead the player, using pointer controls or mouse controls in my case, points and clicks to move boxes, move flames, reroute wind, etc.

And it's a thing that I don't think is necessarily bad, I think that if I was playing this back in like 2010 when all I had was a Wii and I was playing it all the time, I would be all over this.  I think this would be a hidden gem on the WiiWare.  The Kid Icarus game we were all clamoring for after Brawl before a real Kid Icarus came out.  Like it's fun, it's fine, I think the problem is me.  I've moved on and this kind of game feels gimmicky to me now.  I like it, but I don't like it as much as I would've back when I was a Wii fanboy.  If you do miss that Wii era though, the time when people had this toy to play with and so tried to come up with whatever idea they could using it, please do get it, I think you'll get a lot out of it, and it's on Steam for like $3.  It's just not my thing anymore.  6.2/10

 In 1983, the video game industry crashed.  While almost certainly the impact of the now famous video game crash of 1983 has been overstated in the halls of gaming history, it is still a monumental occasion.  One of the largest markets in the world and, at the time, the center of the fledging video game industry effectively vanished over night.  Video games in the US went from a lucrative industry to a dead fad over the course of a couple of prominent game releases, only returning due to clever marketing by Japanese game company Nintendo essentially Trojan Horseing US retailers.  The Crash of 1983 is such a pivotal moment that it's not hard to wonder what would've happened if it didn't.  If maybe there was a higher standard of quality that made it so the industry could sustain itself, a way to combat the oversaturation of gaming and the dip in quality that followed.  What would that world look like?

Arcade Spirits - Dating in an Alternate History

What is Arcade Spirits?

Arcade Spirits is a 2019 dating sim that takes place in an alternate 21st Century wherein the video game crash of 1983 never occurred.  This game posits the consequences of this change resulted in two major cultural shifts: the first is that the 1980s culture continued indefinitely.  In the way Fallout kind of posits a world where the shift to nuclear power and the continued focus on vaccum tube technology instead of chips would cause culture to indefinitely stall in the 1950s; Arcade Spirits kind of implies that as a result of video games not crashing the world kind of stays in the 1980s.  The second consequence of this change is that arcades, hence the title, never go out of fashion.  They continue to exist as a viable business strategy into the 21st century, and they run the gambit from massive entertainment corporations to small mom and pop shops.

In Arcade Spirits you play as unemployed young adult that you can fill in with your own name and identity, though by default they are named Ari Cader.  Ari has recently been laid off from a job they really liked and has now been staying at home depressed, concerning their roommate and best friend Juniper greatly.  Juniper, as a result, decides to turn Ari onto a phone app she uses: Iris.  Iris is an AI personal assistant that can do a multitude of things for the user, keep track of their calendar, make notes, read e-mails, etc.  But its most relevant function is that the user can answer questions Iris has and with that information, as well as the data on their phone, Iris can find the user a career path that will make them happy.  Ari very quickly clocks that Iris is more than just an AI assistant, as the app seems genuinely concerned with helping Ari in life in a way that Juniper's Iris never seems to.

The virtual assistant sets Ari up with an interview at a local mom and pop arcade called "the Funplex".  The Funplex is run by a lovely old woman named Fran, who had been running it with her husband for many years before he passed away.  Fran is a bit of an idealist, something that her employees quickly inform Ari of and communicate their thoughts on.  Fran believes the arcade isn't just simply a business, but rather a place for people to find themselves.  She has fought hard to keep the arcade open despite steep competition and an inability to purchase new games, often having to resort to interesting garage sale and auction finds from decades ago, to keep this ideal alive.  She wants this to truly be more than just a cute little retro arcade, but a place for people to come together and grow.  She asks Ari if they are willing to be part of that dream, and after confirming, sets them to work manning the prize counter.

Romance On The Arcade Floor

With that, Ari is turned loose onto the arcade and begins to meet our collection of eligible dating options.  Arcade Spirits is heavily inspired by 80s workplace sitcoms, things like Cheers or Night Court.  The game heavily focuses around a core cast of characters made up of both the other employees of the arcade and the arcade's handful of regulars; a small but closeknit group of gamers who enjoy the simple, intimate atmosphere at the Funplex.  These characters also make up our pool of eligible dating options.  They are the following:

• Gavin - Gavin is the first character you're going to meet in Arcade Spirits, the no-nonsense manager at the Funplex.  He's precise and focused, his priority is on the business side of the Arcade, on trying to dig this place out of the hole.  Everything Fran isn't, Gavin is.  That's not to say, of course, that Gavin doesn't believe in Fran's ideals.  Even if he doesn't fully understand her all the time, Gavin does truly believe in the arcade and its sense of community.  He is just, you know.  A realist.  He sees the numbers and he sees they're not exactly good, especially since they are working with so many older arcade games that require frequent repairs and there is an ever dwindling cache of parts to repair them with.  This, along with his controlling personality and his frequency of getting lost in the numbers often puts him in conflict with the other members of the Funplex staff.  But, despite being such a stick-in-the-mud who doesn't seem to understand the magic of arcade games, Gavin does have his own secret gaming love: he's a pinball wizard.
• Naomi - Naomi is, quite literally, the character that the game was built around.  When they were planning out routes for this game, Naomi's came first and came fastest.  Naomi is the mechanic of the Funplex staff, she works on all the arcade machines in her "garage" in the back of the arcade.  Naomi has a hyperfixation on arcade restoration, something that often puts her at odds with Gavin.  Naomi sees the beauty in these machines, the sheer unadulterated magic they bring.  These machines are important to her, and her inability to throw anything out, while sometimes helpful as she frequently needs to repurpose parts for other machines, is clearly a symptom of her obsession.  She is also, as you would imagine, rather shy and awkward, keeping in the back for most of the day not just do to her "projects" but due to her lack of social skills.  Still, she's kind, affable, and once you get her talking about her favorite thing, it's impossible not to get pulled in by her exuberant energy.  In other words, she's on the spectrum!
• Ashley - Ashley is the last employee of the Funplex and the other person who works the floor.  Part customer service representative and part mascot, Ashley is the resident costume designer and cosplayer.  Comparatively to Gavin and Naomi, Ashely is a relatively well-adjusted young woman, being more friendly and outgoing and often being caught up in the center of the two's arguments as a result.  That is not to say, however, that Ashley isn't her own brand of quirky.  Ashley loves cosplay and definitely feels more comfortable in costume than out.  She also has a bad habit of getting TOO into character, especially at large events.  There's a convention scene in the game where Ashley is in cosplay the entire time and only drops character when she's in very small groups of her friends.  Her obsession with cosplay is just more than a special interest though.  Ashley is experimenting with her own gender identity.  She's recently gotten very into crossplay, she does a lot of cosplay of male characters and finds the feeling she gets dressing in traditionally masculine garb rather compelling.  She's also kind of a gremlin, she is shockingly THE member of the cast who is quick to go "what if we did something illegal".
• Percy - Percy is the first of the three romance options that isn't part of the staff of the Funplex.  Percy is a regular at the establishment who is particularly obsessed with the game "Mr. Moopy's Magic Maze", a parody of both Mappy (one of my favorite arcade games) and Pac-Man.  Percy is rich, smarmy and aloof, he's a British immigrant that moved into the area for his job in stock trading and due to both his effectiveness at said job and its pretty lax nature, he finds himself with loads of free time.  He devotes basically all his free time to the Funplex, trying to achieve a world record run in Mr. Moopy, his apparent life's goal.  Your first interaction with Percy speaks volumes, he's in hot water for hogging the machine and not letting people play, so he offers to buy the machine and let the arcade keep it for him so he has free reign to use it whenever he's here.  Percy can come across as kind of a jerk at first, but quickly you find out why he's like this.  Percy has a serious, incurable heart condition that has put a time limit on how long he has to live.  Combined with his lack of care for himself, much to his friends' chagrin, Percy is clearly obsessive over Moopy because he knows he has an expiration date and wants to leave his legacy on his favorite game.
• QueenBee - QueenBee is my wife.  QueenBee is a professional gamer, a notable figure in the Esports scene for the in-universe MOBA/Fighting game hybrid Fist of Discomfort.  She is not only a regular at the arcade, she is THE regular at the arcade, a prominent gamer and streamer who, thanks to some clever work by Naomi, is able to stream directly from the arcade, using their FoD machine.  In a way, this is a plus, the arcade gets a steady stream of revenue from the Queen as she spends her streaming sessions grinding FoD and battling people who stumble into the arcade wanting to test their best against a prominent figure.  However, QueenBee is not always attuned to the vibe.  She's arrogant, foul mouthed, has kind of a temper, and often ends up butting heads with other patrons, namely parents of small children, at the arcade due to these things.  That being said, she's also sassy and funny and gets along with the staff and most of the adult patrons fairly well, though obviously the group needs to tell her to chill out.  This arrogant personality is, however, a mask.  The Queen is hyper aware of her place as a woman in gaming, and especially a woman in professional gaming.  Bee is part of a prominent ESports team, and she knows that she is on there as a token woman.  There have been plenty before her and will be plenty after her, she knows exactly what her worth is to them.  A pretty face they can parade around as a mascot for a while until she gets "too old" (meaning like 26) and then the first loss they have, they get dropped for another.  QueenBee doesn't just want to be the best, she NEEDS to be the best, or else her career is over.
• Teo - The final of the romanceable options (at least in a normal playthrough), Teo, at first, seems like he's being propped up to be the token "bad boy".  He rolls up with his crew to the arcade and starts making kind of a ruckus, as his group dominates the dancing game machines.  He's sexy and flirtatious, the kind of guy who seems like he'd be bad news in these types of games.  Teo is the nicest guy in the cast.  Outside of his flirtatious personality, which is a thing he cannot stop no matter how hard he tries, Teo is incredibly selfless and puts the needs of others before his own almost 100% of the time.  He's the kind of guy who would check in on his friends at a party to make sure they were getting hydrated, just a total Golden Retriever.  Absolute himbo energy.  He also is very passionate about his craft, he's not only good at dancing video games, he is an excellent dancer.  His crew uses the dancing games at the Funplex as a means to sort of gameify their practice, they do like actual pro dancing at various events and organize flash mobs with other crews on occasion.  He also wants to better himself to a fanatical degree.  This is, however, his biggest weakness: Teo throws himself into projects very quickly and bounces around from place to place, project to project constantly.  He is quick to give up on dreams to embrace new ones, leading to him being kind of wishy-washy about important stuff.

Gameifying The Dating Experience

Now that we've met our core six, let's talk about the dating experience.  Ari is a bit of an awkward and reserved sort by nature, a realistic way of doing the classic gaming trope of a blank slate protagonist.  Ari is not super used to complex social situations and, moreover, people being attracted to them.  They've spent much of their life believing that they are cursed and have kind of opted to keep other people out of that curse.  Luckily for them, they have Iris!

This is one of my favorite things about Arcade Spirits, the gamefication of the dating experience.  Our wonderful virtual assistant, in an attempt to aid Ari in their romantic pursuits, has decided to put the process of romantic pursuits in terms that Ari will understand.  She cooks up an RPG stat screen for them, wherein she will keep track of the responses they give when talking to their potential romantic partners and raise their stats in kind.  As well, she will keep track of their affection with any specific potential partner as the game progresses, letting you know how far along you are with any specific route.  This not only serves as a fun and effective way to spice up the dating sim gameplay, it's also a very effective tool for getting new players into a dating sim.  It gives them a really clear and obvious system from which they can latch onto to ease them into it.

These minor RPG elements are not just for flavor, however.  The outcome of choosing to raise certain stat allows you to influence Ari's personality and how they interact with their friends and/or potential love interests.  The potential love interests all respond better to different responses, QueenBee will like it when you're sassier, Gavin will like it when you're direct, Naomi will like it when you're more kind, stuff like that.  And as you engage with these responses, you'll raise your stats in these areas, allowing you to be able to successfully perform various checks throughout the game that you need your stats at a certain level for.  Just in general, you won't be able to date a character unless your stats in areas they like are high, but these stats especially become useful in the endgame, as the final confrontation(s) are heavily influenced by your stats.

As well, much like an RPG, you are given direct consequences for the responses you choose.  This is not a game where you can maintain good relationships with everyone, while they all will always remain your friends, to get up there with one person does come at the cost of another.  Not only do they favor different stats but, after the first day, you are often choosing to hang out with one person at the cost of hanging out with another.  Certain members of the friend group will, by necessity, fade into the background as you pursue others and these consequences do have a major impact on the game.  More directly though, there are several points where you are thrust into a conversation between two of the friends and forced to choose between them.  As an example, Gavin and Naomi, due to their working relationship and entirely opposite personalities, are frequently caught in arguments.  Naomi's idealism vs. Gavin's realism.  In these scenarios you end up being the mediator often unless you just try and avoid both of them.  To agree with Naomi is to lower your affection with Gavin and vice-versa.  This might be a turn-off for some dating sim enjoyers, I know in dating sims like this people like to keep up good relationships with the entire cast.  But I really like it, I really like that there are consequences to your actions.

A Short, Spoiler-Free Review

Before we get into the actual plot and themes of the game, I want to give a quick spoiler-free review for those who might want to play it themselves and are bothered by games getting spoiled.  I really like Arcade Spirits.  I enjoy its cast of characters, the sort of workplace sitcom setting its going for, many of the individual storylines, and the fun and creative use of arcades and arcade games.  I also love how it utilizes this RPG stat system to great effect, I think that this is a good entry level dating sim because of it.  As someone new to dating sims, the only one I've really played outside of this is Huniepop which is really bad as a dating sim, having this familiar, more game-y aspect to it really eased me in.  I especially love what its main character arc is, I think this game has a lot to say about video game history, 80s nostalgia, and finding yourself in early adulthood.

That being said I do think that some parts of it are less than stellar.  I think its themes can get a bit muddied, especially in the latter half of the game.  The romances can feel a bit tertiary even though the majority of the gameplay is built around dating.  And I take issue with parts of the ending.  It's not by any means a perfect game, but I think it's incredibly strong and I think it's a great way to onboard people onto the genre in question if they maybe don't play dating sims and/or have only played meme dating sims like Hatoful Boyfriend.  8/10

Where Dreams Come True

As Fran establishes when you first meet her, the Funplex is not simply a business.  It's a place to find yourself.  A place where dreams come true.  And that goal of "finding yourself" of "making your dreams come true" is obviously very central to the plot.  As you could probably tell, a lot of the characters descriptions are about them either accomplishing their dreams or self-actualizing in some way.  QueenBee has made it as a professional gamer, but it has caused her a lot of mental and emotional stress.  Ashley is experimenting with her gender identity.  Stuff like that.

But the central arc of the game is Ari self-actualizing themself.  Ari enters into the Funplex as kind of a listless 20-something.  They believe that they are cursed, half-jokingly stating that there is some supernatural force that is at the center of their job and personal woes.  Ari is, as most 20 somethings are, directionless.  Their life had been dictated for so long by hard structures and now they are out on their own and they are drowning because of it.  It's actually a pretty neat touch that Ari has a background as a lifeguard, not just because it preps them for high stress environments like running the arcade floor, but it sets up a very good character trait: Ari is good at saving others even if their life is a mess.  The Funplex, while at first seeming like just a job they're doing, is the environment needed for Ari to self-actualize, to become what they were always meant to be.

Something I enjoy about this is that Ari's self-actualization is actually separate from the romance.  There's nothing wrong, of course, with a romance storyline having "a person self-actualizing because they want to be better for their partner" as an arc.  It's a very classic romance arc, especially in romantic comedies and workplace sitcoms, which Arcade Spirits draws a lot from.  However, I think it is nice that Ari does better because Ari wants to do better, and through that they become more confident and attractive to their potential romantic partners.  Ari finds themselves at the arcade in a very real way, they don't just thrive in the environment, they BECOME the environment.  We see them crave responsibility, asking Fran if they can take on more and more of the arcade's planning, eventually becoming its official events coordinator.  Everyone in the arcade may have a dream to find, but Ari finds their entire life here, and its a storyline I really like.

Polybius

Of course, we can't talk about Ari finding themselves and growing up without talking about the opposite, now, can we.  Enter Polybius.  Polybius is the only arcade machine present in Arcade Spirits that is not a parody of a known arcade machine, this is something that is analogous to a real world thing.  That being said, they definitely used Polybius because it is not real.  Polybius is one of gaming's most infamous urban legends.  The story goes that in the early 1980s, in the city of Portland, Oregon, a mysterious arcade cabinet started popping up in arcades around the city.  It was an abstract shooter similar to a game like Tempest, called "Polybius".  Polybius was, allegedly, an incredibly addictive arcade game that would cause players to play for incredibly long sessions, playing past exhaustion and allegedly causing the death of some players.  The people who played it would report psychoactive symptoms, hallucinations, night terrors, stuff like that, but that they would be drawn to the machine in spite of it.  No one was quite sure who made it or why, but those who remember it remember men in black occasionally descending on arcades to collect from the machine, not necessarily the coins, but data the machine had collected somehow.

Polybius is, almost without doubt, not real.  What likely happened is that a number of different memories had been conflated, creating this legendary game.  There was a lot of uncertainty around video games in the late 70s and early 80s, a lot of unexplained health issues were happening from people playing games but there had yet to be research into the why of it all.  Nowadays, we know that video games can be a trigger for epileptic seizures and other light-sensitive conditions, but back then there was a big question mark and, as such, a big panic around video games and their adverse health effects.  Couple that with parents and other figures paranoia around video game addiction and you have the basis for this hyper addicting, killer arcade machine that haunts us to this day.  And the men in black?  That actually WAS happening.  Arcade owners in Portland were commonly converting their arcade machines into gambling machines back in the day and, as such, there was an FBI crackdown on arcades in Portland.  They weren't collecting data from their secret killer arcade machine, mind you, but there were a number of black-suited men tampering with arcade machines in Portland in the early 80s.

Polybius enters Arcade Spirits in its second chapter, a chapter in which Naomi, Fran, and Gavin recruit Ari to aid them in obtaining new arcade machines for the arcade.  They inform Ari of a mysterious auction being hosted by an eccentric billionaire who saves arcade collections from going to estate sales.  This billionaire believes very strongly in the sanctity of arcades and so he buys entire collections once their owners have become deceased and does private auctions for the local arcades.  He then hosts extravagant parties on his dime for the arcade owners and staff to schmooze.  In this instance, the collection in question belonged to a recently deceased pop star who was pretty big in the 80s but after her success started to waver, she became reclusive and addicted to video games, spending much of her fortune on an arcade collection and spending her time in her personal arcade.

Naomi is sent to investigate the collection, attempting to find either arcade machines they could buy to fill niches in the arcade's classic game selection and/or broken machines that either could be fixed up for cheap or used for parts to repair other old machines.  When she doesn't return and the actual auction nears, Ari is sent to find her in the maze of machines.  That is when they stumble onto Polybius, and it draws them in, compels them with an almost supernatural force.  Polybius seems to sense that Ari is susceptible to its power, that because of their belief in having a cursed working life and having a stagnant social life, they are in a point where it can dig its hooks in and never let go.  It is counter to everything the game is trying to say, it represents the kind of stagnation that many people would find appealing.  A safe, comfortable life that never moves forward.  And it's one that Ari almost finds themselves embracing.  After all, they're happy right.

In the machine, they see a fragment of the popstar that once called this collection hers, sees someone who was content with their life.  But they were never happy.  They abandoned a real life for comfort, abandoned their career for the familiar.  And they beg Ari not to make the same mistakes they did.  To not let Polybius take them too.  And man, it's such a cool use of Polybius.  Arcade Spirits, being a game about arcade games, was always going to have to address the nostalgia of the 1980s in some meaningful way.  It is so easy to get caught up in idealizing the past, taking the best parts of an era and wishing we could live in it forever.  The 1980s especially has been one of the most beloved eras by pop culture, we still are living inside of 1980s nostalgia multiple decades after the 80s nostalgia boom should've ended.  But Arcade Spirits, despite its setting, is not about trying to idealize a time period that doesn't exist anymore.  It's about looking forward, it's about growing as a person and finding yourself.  So using this decades old urban legend, a longtime gaming mystery that people have been enamored with for years, as a representative of the inability to move forward is genius.  And by freeing themself from the pull of Polybius, Ari does begin to truly look forward.

The Actual Romance Part

I want to next talk about the romance because, admittedly, it's something I'm pretty mixed on.  Now, to be clear at the time of writing this, I have done one romance plotline, QueenBee's.  As such, I am not going to criticize the individual romance storylines because I don't have experience with them, nor am I likely too.  I will return to Arcade Spirits eventually but there are some romance storylines I'm just uninterested in pursuing and I don't think that's wrong of me to say.  So anything I say in the following section should be taken with the knowledge that I have only done the Queen's.  I don't expect that to matter but just in case I say something wrong and someone with more knowledge on Arcade Spirits is like "hey, this isn't really true", feel free to correct me!

So, I've previously mentioned that something I find interesting and a quality I like about this game is that Ari's growth as a character is not just about them wanting to grow up for their potential love interest.  They find their own sense of fulfillment in life and self-actualize as a result of that fact.  But a consequence of that decision is that, frankly, the actual romance can feel like a secondary element to the story.  A vast majority of the gameplay is built around you building relationships with many members of the cast but, ultimately, a lot of this game can function whether you date any of the options or not?  It feels like these characters are almost completely unchanged by their romantic relationships in any meaningful way or, if they are, it's one sided.  Again, I'm basing this off the QueenBee route and the other routes I had to engage with when she was busy, but it feels like Ari gives a lot to these characters in conversation but they don't give a lot to Ari back.

This is made even more clear by the fact that the actual dating sim portion of the game ends just after the halfway point of the game.  Following the structure of the workplace sitcom, the midgame is home to two "event episodes".  We'll be talking about the second one, the Beach episode.  The entire crew (including Juniper!) goes to the beach to celebrate after the previous event episode and has fun throughout the day.  They hit up the candy shop, the boardwalk arcade where Ari spent part of their childhood, play volleyball, all the classics.  This is also the point where your relationship gets locked in.  This game allows you to interact with the cast one final time and then, as you reach the end of the day, you will go on a date with the person you have the most affinity with, which will feature some sort of proclamation and you will go steady with the person at the end of this.  It's a good moment and I find it to be a satisfying conclusion to the actual romantic arc, but it does feel a bit odd that this dating sim's dating portion ends at about the 60% mark and then we go into the final arc with our relationship already having been sorted.

That's not to say the romance is irrelevant in the final part, of course.  Conflict does arise based on your romantic partner and your conflicting ambitions.  And in the game's final confrontation with the main antagonist of its final arc, your romantic partner comes with you and helps dictate the conversation.  But it does tend to feel like, somehow, in this dating sim the romance can become secondary and it's unfortunate.  I don't necessarily want to call it bad, because I understand the vision.  They wanted Arcade Spirits to seem more like a realistic relationship between two young adults, people who have their own lives who enter a mutually beneficial relationship that doesn't necessarily define either of them.  It's not an unwelcome inclusion in the world of romantic comedies, again I do think it's nice that this game treats Ari's self-actualization as something separate from their romance.  But I also can't help but feel weird that the romance in this dating sim feels like just a thing that happens sometimes.

The Commodification of the Arcade

Arcade Spirits does not exist in an idealistic utopia.  While the game does present an alternate universe that could hypothetically be seen as a gamer's paradise, it does not shy away from using this setting to criticize the modern games industry and, in general, the state of arcades nowadays.  The need to maximize profit over providing a solid gaming experience.  I don't know if you've been to an arcade in recent years or seen a video of an arcade, I recommend Brutalmoose's videos on arcades,  While arcades do still exist and do still provide players with arcade gaming experiences both new and old, it is not a secret that they've been overtaken by games designed to get players addicted and sink their money into. This is especially a problem in Japan, it's an old joke by now that Japanese gaming companies have stopped really making games and started making glorified slot machines utilizing their IPs.  There are probably more Castlevania Pachinko machines than there are Castlevania games.

In Arcade Spirits, this criticism takes the form of the game's main antagonist, arcade magnate Deco Nami.  Deco Nami runs a chain of arcades that is dominant in the industry, titled "Deco's Palace".  Deco's Palace is similar to real life restaurant/arcade chains like Chuck E. Cheese, GameWorks, Dave & Busters, and the failed DisneyQuest.  It's a massive entertainment center that combines a restaurant, bar, and arcade, designed almost like a casino in some ways.  It's meant to get people in the door and keep them playing for long periods of time, draining their money slowly but steadily.  Unlike the often chaotic but also tight knit vibe of the Funplex, Deco's Palace is massive, clean, and soulless.  It is just a business, and moreover it's a business designed to push other arcades off the map if they're considered even remotely a threat.  Deco is charming, but he's also very clearly sleazy, a complete and total shark who will eat whatever small fish he can get his mouth on.

Deco enters the story after the events of the Polybius section lead to Ari takeing over as the Funplex's event coordinator.  Ari hosts an event that is so successful that it puts the Funplex on Deco's radar as a potential threat.  Deco had always had an eye on the Funplex but even a heartless businessman has enough respect for one of the OGs like Fran, or at least is aware enough that trying to push her out would be a bad move for his relationships with the industry.  However, with this event doing well, even Deco is willing to make a risky play to snuff out a potential serious competitor.  Fran does not wish to sell, knowing that Deco is likely to turn the arcade into another soulless cash machine, if he does not close the location outright.

This meeting eventually results in Ari going to Deco's Palace for the first time in their life, bringing along one of their friends who is best equipped to talk about the business side of things (I brought Percy).  And getting an inside look at Deco's Palace is harrowing but in a familiar way.  Deco Nami's arcade is full of overpriced, low-quality, reheated food that is oversalted and has very little flavor otherwise.  The employees are not only indifferent to the goings-on in the arcade, but actively trying to detach themselves from the ecosystem, lest they be contracted into being free babysitters by the overwhelming amount of parents attempting to use the arcade as a day care.  The machines on the floor all bear the images of familiar faces, the in-game parallels to arcade legends in the real world, but none of them are even necessarily games.  They're coin pushers and ufo catchers and prize machines.  I'm really glad I brought Percy actually because of his direct connection to Mr. Moopy, and his reaction to seeing the timing based ticket machine that bears his name.

It's not difficult to see what Arcade Spirits is saying here.  Deco serves a dual role, he first represents the hyper consumerism that defines the era Arcade Spirits is riffing on.  If Arcade Spirits is a world where the 1980s kind of just continued, Deco represents the conclusion to that, the greed that defined the era, its most soulless parts.  The reason why most 80s kids have childhoods that are just commercials for choking hazards.  But in the context of the gaming space, Deco represents the modern arcade industry as a whole.  An industry that has given up making proper video games to optimize profit.  The industry that favors simplistic, addicting games designed to have quick failure and reward conditions rather than develop full scale games like the olden days that players will gather around and try to top their local leaderboards.

And it's a criticism that I am mixed on.  On the one hand, this makes perfect sense as the villain to this game.  Arcade Spirits is a game with a lot of reverence for the golden age of arcades and classic arcade machines in general.  This game was conceived of by watching arcade machine restorations and the preservation of traditional arcade cabinet is a massive throughline in the story.  There are many scenes where the characters discuss the work needed to keep these machines running and how, despite this, it's a worthwhile investment just to keep these games playable in any capacity.  To see someone just throw them all away in terms of profit is truly sad, a crime against games, game preservation, and against people who could be robbed of these games they may love.  And moreover to replace them with cheap, soulless cash-ins that wear the corpse of a dead IP is kind of a tragedy.

One the other hand, I feel like this is counteractive to the other themes of the game.  Like, Arcade Spirits does a good job of trying not to be just an "old games good, new games bad" sort of commentary on the games industry.  Despite being so steeped in 80s nostalgia, it also criticizes that nostalgia and those who live in it.  To turn around and then have such a heavy handed condemnation of the modern state of arcades feels about thematically iffy to me.  The truth is that arcades do have to get that bag, and these simplistic, for profit games are actually rather fun.  They are providing the arcade ecosystem games people want to keep playing, games they want to get good at, games they want to compare to their communities.  It feels a bit like Arcade Spirits is trying to have its cake and eat it too, both be about looking toward the future and clinging onto the past.  It's something I'm very mixed on, it feels like the story fails to really commit to anything in the end.

The Ending

Perhaps the most upsetting part about Arcade Spirits, though, is how it actually ends.  Not the actual resolution to the core conflict of the game, I find that part good, but the aftermath of the game's ending.  To those who have played Arcade Spirits, it is the most infamous thing about this game.  I have stated before that Arcade Spirits is going for a workplace sitcom sort of vibe.  This is a closeknit group of employees and regulars akin to a sitcom like Cheers.  But throughout the game they become more than that.  They become a group of actual friends, a group that chooses to hang out with one another outside of their pre-established location and who hold a deep love for each other.  The kind of friend group that actively chooses to stay together, even when the context of their friendship is removed.  Ari is the linchpin, mind, the thing that brought them all together, but they found each other as well.  It's an incredibly nice part of this game, that your core cast seem like they've become friends outside of just all being around this one person.

And then two of them leave.  I mentioned in the section about the stat system that there would be consequences to your choices throughout the game.  That choosing to hang out with people comes at the cost of hanging out with other people and agreeing with one person in conversation will lower your affection with the person they're arguing with.  And that the game is tracking all these decisions throughout the game, building your affection with some characters and reducing it with others.  This is where that matters.  At the end of the game, the two characters you hold the least affection with will leave the friend group.  The game does a "where are they now" reel, going through each characters post-game lives and whichever two you held the lowest with just drift away.  This is frustrating, not because like "if I had known this would happen, I wouldn't have made the decisions I did".  I like that the actions you take in this game have notable consequences.  It's frustrating because the game has established that this group of 8 people has become very close and it repeatedly states that they're going to work together and build each other up.  They put so much work into making them seem like a group so closeknit that they're basically family.  And then two of them leave.  It just does not feel properly in line with what the game is otherwise telling us and it's just a bit of unnecessary, out of nowhere sadness to close the game out.

Final Thoughts

I already established this in my review but despite my numerous criticisms, I do really like Arcade Spirits.  I think when it is good, it's an incredibly fun and compelling story about finding yourself using the medium of gaming and the locale of an arcade to accomplish that goal.  It's a very fun workplace sitcom with a lot of interesting characters that are all endearing in different ways.  And it's clear the people who made it have a lot of love for all facets of gaming culture, representing preservationists, esports players, cosplayers, score chasers, etc.  And especially if you are coming into a dating sim for the first time, this game is an excellent starting point, utilizing familiar language to make the player more comfortable within its world.

But it is imperfect, and the ways it is imperfect are frustrating.  It feels like it's thematically all over the place, contradicting itself in key ways.  The romance feels more mature and like an actual adult romance, but because of that it can feel secondary in the story, sometimes it feels like the third most important thing in the story even.  And, of course, the ending is just frustrating.  Its messy, but it's also good when it gets there.  I look forward to eventually returning to it someday, though I promise I won't write a whole other review when that happens.  It's a solid 8/10, big recommend.

Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling - A Gaming Diary

 

I want to temper expectations before we get into this: I am not a fan of the Paper Mario franchise.  Now, I know that's weird, why do I own Bug Fables if I don't like Paper Mario?  Even worse, why do I own a physical copy of it from Limited Run Games?  So for a long time, I did consider myself a Paper Mario fan.  I've talked before about the circles I used to run in online before and Paper Mario was pretty central to those circles.  I had watched numerous playthroughs of the first and second games, as well as a couple of the third and that compelled me to want to play these games myself.  I even actually preordered Sticker Star because, in the leadup to that game's release, I was that excited about a new Paper Mario game.  I didn't get very far, I think I only actually beat the first Paper Mario though that's in question.  This blog was founded on my Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door playthrough, which caused me to adapt a sort of "gaming diary" format I had been doing on Discord for a while into an actual blogpost.  I digress.

The point is that when I finally got around to playing the second and third installments in this series, I had been over it.  These are RPGs for children, I am not a children, I'm not particularly interested in engaging with media as I did when I was a children, and I don't think it is healthy necessarily to try and enter that mindset every time you play a game.  See "i don't like banjo-kazooie" for more details.  So I played them and I found them to be pretty mediocre.  Super Paper Mario has some interesting narrative ideas but takes too long to get there, has a pretty dull midgame in my opinion, and its attempt to adapt the RPG elements into a more traditional platformer makes it worse than the sum of its parts as its lacking in both the fun snappy platforming of Mario games and the more slow, methodical, puzzle driven platforming that defined the Paper Mario series.  Thousand Year Door, meanwhile, I find just to be repetitive and dull, it has a pretty solid plot for a Mario game but the actual gameplay is so uninteresting at points that I find it hard to really care about the parts of it that are good.  I was kinder to it in my blog post about it than I am in hindsight, if that should tell you how I'm currently feeling about TTYD.

Now , this is not to say I'm going to be negative about Bug Fables.  While its obviously useful to understand where a game's inspiration comes from and judge accordingly, especially if you haven't already bought it, every game is also its own individual work of art.  And a lot of them may surprise you.  I don't really like the N64 era of Rare platformers, but I adore a Hat in Time, a game ostensibly inspired by them.  It's even made my top 50 games.  I don't particular like most Sonic games, and especially find the 2D games more frustrating than rewarding but I love both Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Sonic Mania.  Bug Fables can, and likely will, surprise me.  I'm just saying that if I go into it and I'm kind of grumpy, overly critical, and just in general if I'm quick to go "I made it to the end of the third play session, I'm tapping out", this isn't an actual statement of Bug Fables quality.  That just means I was never going to like Bug Fables in the first place.  So with that out of the way, let's get into it!

Review:

I will simply be honest with you: I do not think I am equipped to talk about Bug Fables.  Not only did I, spoilers, not finish it, but playing it was just not a good time for me.  I tried to give it its fair shake and the conclusion that became apparent is that Bug Fables doesn't seem interested in being its own thing using the structure of Paper Mario as a launching off point to be its own thing, it's primary goal is to be Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door but indie.  Being an honest critic is acknowledging when you are ill-equipped to talk about something and I am so about Bug Fables.  As I said in the preamble, me not liking Bug Fables is not a statement of Bug Fables' quality, which I do think is rather high.  I can see why people who love Paper Mario and would want more games like it hold this in such high regard.  It is simply confirming I was never going to like it in the first place.  If you are at all interested, my score is 6/10.

Diary:

3/19/26

I made it through chapter one and most of chapter two in this play session.  This is probably not going to be a surprise given my preamble for this diary but I'm not having an amazing time.  It's the gameplay, is the thing.  The thing I most dislike about Paper Mario is the action commands.  I don't know why this is the system I take so much ire with, I love turn-based combat, I love real-time combat, I even like ATB combat, which is usually what people who like the other styles of RPG combat take ire with for being the worst of both worlds.  And I even like action commands, I love the Mario & Luigi series a ton and think the combat there is excellent.  For some reason the way Paper Mario handles action commands just turns me off it, and Bug Fables is trying to emulate Paper Mario, so it has a lot of these same issues.

I think maybe it's that the action commands for everything you do are different?  Like, in Mario & Luigi, you are only ever timing your A and B button presses, so everything is very intuitive.  It's a combat system you can get good at very quickly and feel like you can master it to the point of being second nature.  In both Paper Mario and Bug Fables, every action command is an entirely unique input, and as such I feel like no matter how much I progress in the game, I'm still having to watch the action commands because I never really learn them. But this issue is especially exacerbated for me in Bug Fables because of how it chooses to adapt action commands.  Like, there is an entire character whose action commands are all randomized inputs meaning that I never get that satisfying feeling of "I've learned what to do in the combat and so now it's second nature", I am always having to be on with them.  The combat is a worse experience for me than the games that inspired it.

That being said, I think in every other way I'm liking Bug Fables more than the duology it takes the most from.  First of all, I just like that your party is a consistent set of three, meaning you have access to their overworld abilities at all times and don't have to switch in and out.  And choosing to upgrade what the party can do as the journey progresses rather than introducing new party members to fill new niches either in combat or in puzzle solving is nice, it allows you to actually get attached to using them.  I feel like in Paper Mario, party members have a bad habit of being the most important character in the world for exactly the chapter they are introduced in and then only ever showing up to solve a handful of puzzles as the game progresses.  You could replace most of them with items and the game wouldn't be any different.  Especially in TTYD where 90% of the time you're using Vivian in battle because she's just better than everyone else.  But here, these are pretty established party members with legitimate roles.

I also just like this party?  Like, they aren't going to become some of my favorite characters of all time or anything but I do enjoy following this trio.  Kabbu is weirdly the standout for me so far, I really like his seasoned samurai vibes and how he seems to have a story for every occasion.  It plays off Vi pretty well too, this hyper and energetic young explorer who is quick to sass people and is in exploring ostensibly for the rewards.  They're a good duo, and it's nice seeing them become actual friends over the first two chapters.  And then there's Leif, who admittedly I kind of feel like gets let down by the tone of the game.  Leif is kind of this engimatic figure, a moth that went missing decades prior only to re-enter into a changed world.  They speak very bizarrely, referring to themself as "we" and sort of having this "man out of time" quality where the way they speak and act is very old school.  But Bug Fables is also irreverent, it's a very light-hearted adventure, and so Leif has a tendency to tell jokes and riff in a way I feel like doesn't fit their character?  But there's also a lot of intrigue surrounding them that I find compelling.

This world is also just really strong.  I really like games starring bugs and I'm glad that more and more people are getting on board with bug games.  It's just cool what you can do with a world at this small a scale, and I think Bug Fables does a great job of using the familiar to build a small scale world.  Like in the main town you go through, there's a theater there for bugs to put on plays and musicals and stuff.  The entire theater is inside of an organ grinder.  The first dungeon you go to is called Snakemouth and the entrance is literally a fossilized snake skull.  It's just fun to look around in this world, see what little details are in it.  And I think it does a good job of justifying the paper aesthetic because of this.  It's like all the characters being made out of paper in this world comprised of a mix of structures built by the bugs and discarded items from humanity just feels right, y'know?

It also feels like a world with a deep history and mythology, if you want to delve into that.  I hesitate to truly get in deep with it because like, I still don't know if I'm even going to finish it, obviously.  But I have been trying to read the lore as I find it and like.  Leif being kind of this man out of time does mean the history is present regardless.  The juxtaposition between the queen he knew, a kind, humble ant queen who was so loving to her people that she refused to build statues in her honor at their kingdom, instead honoring the ant who stumbled upon this land as a true hero; and her daughter, the current queen, an arrogant, militaristic warrior queen who holds a tighter grip on her people is a recurring conflict in the narrative.  A major sidequest is about finding all the lost books on the world's history scattered about the world.  And reading them, they are interesting, you get a lot of insight into how this world came to be and how people reacted to their own history.  It makes this world feel so much more alive, even if the histories are sometimes just a few sentences long.

Also, a lot of the characters are really fun designwise.  Like I love the designs in this game. There were so many times where I looked at a character and went "oh you're cute" or "oh you're sick".  More the former than the latter admittedly.  The super sad, super anxious musician who got ousted by the theater when a major singer came into town has my heart.  I enjoy in particular how they've adapted the bug traits to communicate things about the characters.  One of the recurring antagonists, a fellow adventurer of not great morality named Zasp, is a paper wasp who always looks sleek and angry, signing to the player that he's dangerous.  But his partner, the diva Mothiva, is instead designed to deceive you into thinking she's chill, with her soft wings and warm appearance, while also highlighting "she thinks she's better than you" by having the wings give the appearance of a fur coat.  Character design is my favorite part of this game easily, they're very good at implying a whole lot with very little.  Which is good because these characters often have a couple lines and then you never have to talk to them again, meaning their character kind of has to be entirely in the design.

Like I said, I'm most of the way through chapter 2 and like.  I'm liking the story, but I'm also worried about it.  I like the setup so far, I like that there's this grand mystery around Leif and why they seemed to have been in stasis for decades.  I like that we're not sure if we can trust the intentions of the kingdom we've sworn our loyalty to.  I like that everyone is racing to find the artifacts our little adventuring trio has been sent to find, implying a bigger conspiracy going on than what we're told.  But I also worry about the episodic nature of the game so far.  I worry that this is going to be like one of those games where the story comes in bits and pieces until suddenly, in the final chapter of the game, it's like "here is the entire plot all at once".  Hopefully the fact that we keep running into other entities who are trying to beat us to the artifacts is indicative of a more present story, but I'm cautious about it right now.

3/20/26

I didn't really get a lot done in this play session.  I ended up doing a bunch of sidequests after fighting the boss because I genuinely can't resist a sidequest list.  It's a serious problem, if/when I do the Fallout games for this blog (Fallout 4 and New Vegas are on my list), you will find out how much I can't resist a sidequest.  I will go for so long without ever advancing the plot in those games because I'm like "I should clear out my sidequest list first".  But then, as soon as I'm told "hey, you can fight the final boss now", I'm just like "sidequests?  What sidequests?  I never agreed to do any sidequests!"  This literally happened when I played TTYD a year and a half ago, I did like every sidequest except for the ones that only opened up between chapters 7 and 8.  If I choose to finish Bug Fables, which is a pretty big if at this point, you will see me just suddenly and decisively leave all my sidequests unfinished right before the ending.

So, we met the goddess Venus on our quest to find the artifacts.  Venus is a giant, sapient flower whose roots spread across the world and who is always watching for interesting people because she's bored and lonely.  Upon beating her construct to prove ourselves, she hands over the artifact and agrees to answer Leif's questions to the best of her ability.  While she doesn't really know how or why Leif managed to survive for so long in the spider's web we found him in, she can confirm to Leif that his former partners made it out of Snakemouth safe and sound.  She also drops an incredibly interesting tidbit about Leif: her roots detect the people of Bugaria by some sort of sixth sense, as they have no eyes of their own.  This entire time, Venus could not sense Leif being here and only knows he is present when he speaks.  Even as she looks upon his face, Venus still has difficulty believing he is truly there, as she cannot sense him.

After returning to town, we meet up with the other adventurers of the guild and get informed by the Queen that our next mission is already set.  Unsurprisingly, these artifacts are all designed to work in tandem with each other.  The artifact we received in the first chapter, a mask, is actually something of a cypher that when used translates the gibberish on ancient tablets left behind by the roach sages into roach script.  No one alive knows how to read roach script, but its progress.  When the roach script is translated, it will reveal the location of the Ant Queen's true goal: the Everlasting Sapling, an ancient tree that is said to grant those who eat from it immortality.  It was her mother's goal to find it initially for the good of her people, but given the colder nature of Elizant II, her intentions are probably not so noble.  This brings us to our next mission: to head to the home of the Ant Kingdom's ally, the Bees, and trade for their artifact.  But first, we have an opportunity to sidequest.

There's only like one sidequest I really want to highlight.  Most of them are fine, mind, but again, this is kind of a simplistic style of RPG and so the sidequests tend to just be "go to a place, talk to an NPC, find their lost item, return it to them", y'know.  It's the same way that its inspiration handles sidequests and its fine for what it is, you know.  Gets the job done, especially given the intended audience for those games is young enough to where this would probably be their first experience with sidequests.  But the Monsieur Scarlet sidequest is actually one I want to touch on.

A request appears on the Quest board from fellow adventurers Levi and Celia, a pair of adventurers that our party is on good terms with and who helped us out in the last mission.  When we ask them what is needed, they reveal that they have tracked down a mysterious criminal named Monsieur Scarlet, an eccentric serial killer who posts requests on the board pretending to be a helpless man named Rogu who lures people into his lair only to them drain them of their life force.  Upon defeating Scarlet and running him out of Bugaria, Levi and Celia grant the crew access to an underground tavern, the single place in all of the Ant Kingdom that isn't under Elizant II's eye.  This tavern's patronage is made up of, primarily, criminals, but it's also a place where those distrustful of Elizant II (read: anyone with a brain), can find comfort knowing that for a little while, they aren't having to speak about their dissatisfaction in hushed whispers.  It's also a place to finally trade in your collectibles for prizes!  And there's a card game!  Hey, indie game devs, listen.  I know we all love Triple Triad.  I know we all love Gwent.  Please stop putting card games into your games, actually.  Not every game needs an in-depth CCG side mode.  I'm doing King of Cards soon, can you tell?

After this, we head out to the desert that expands from the Northeast of the Ant Kingdom, connecting it to its neighbors in the Bee and Wasp Kingdoms.  Two things.  First of all, this is where we unlock the ability to go fast, as Kabbu suddenly remembers he can dash.  I really wish they had given this to us sooner, because even though this game tends to be pretty small, moving around the world tends to be very slow and that becomes obvious as you backtrack.  You don't have to necessarily backtrack, mind, if you are just trying to make it through the story you can just fast travel back to the Ant Kingdom.  But if you are sidequesting, you're probably backtracking through areas, and the part moves really slowly.  I would've really appreciated having the dash prior to this for those instances.  But this also totally makes sense why they would give it to you now, the desert has a lot of very big, open screens to dash across and it really sells the increase in scope compared to the previous areas.

The second thing is that entering a giant desert area with a kind of confusing layout just really made me realize how little fun I was having with this game.  Like, this area is so reminiscent of the desert area from the original Paper Mario that I kind of had a Ratatouille moment but not in a good way.  Like if the critic tasted the ratatouille and it reminded him that his mother couldn't cook.  Going through this area confirmed my worries about Bug Fables; that this game isn't going to be a Shovel Knight or a Hat in Time.  That it's truly not a game taking inspiration from games the developers love to create its own fully unique thing.  Bug Fables feels like what it appears to be on the tin, at least to me, a derivative work of Paper Mario in the most uninteresting way possible.  I feel bad because like, I'm just so over this game after 7 or 8 hours in when I've finished much worse games than this which are just as long, if not longer than a full Bug Fables playthrough would be.  See, Revelations: Persona.  But Bug Fables just isn't doing anything for me.  I like a lot about it but I also can't get over the parts of it that I find detrimental.  It's been a boring mediocrity instead of an interesting bad for me and so I'm kinda over it already.  Sorry y'all, I gave it a shot but my total indifference for Paper Mario is winning out.

That is not to say that I'm uninvested in what's happening though.  While the gameplay and general structure are definitely turning me off of it. I do still like these characters and there are some plot/character developments that I enjoy  For instance, in this section I made it to the Bee Kingdom, the Hive, which has kind of been this sort of shadow over the journey thus far.  Vi has yet to really talk about her past, just that she ran away from home because she wanted to become an explorer and the hive treated her poorly for this ambition.  But as we enter the hive, Vi admits that they didn't really do anything to her.  She's been trying to avoid coming home because she was a brat, that she took some teasing about her ambition, blew it way out of proportion, yelled at both the Honey Factory's Overseer and the Queen herself, and stormed off.  She's been avoiding coming home because she knows she's in the wrong but her pride won't let her be the first to apologize.

But when she arrives at the Hive, no one hates her.  Well, that's not true, because Mothiva is there, but no one from her home hates her.  It's not like a warm welcome, tension is still present after what Vi did, especially after shouting at the Queen.  The queen herself greets her with kindness, not saying she forgives Vi but saying that she's proud of her.  That the stories of the spitfire explorer bee who has done what most other explorers couldn't are a point of pride for the hive now.  It's not the welcome she was expecting but immediately she's in higher spirits, agreeing with her friends that the best thing to do would be to apologize to her family and community after their mission is done.  It's a nice little arc and I'm glad I stuck with the game long enough to experience it.  Though I'm still not done with Chapter 3 so for all I know this is about to go horribly wrong.

I'm not going to sugar coat: I am unlikely to continue Bug Fables longterm.  I'll see how I'm feeling after one more play session, I like to at least give most longer games 10-12 hours to win me over.  If I had left out of Hollow Knight in the first couple play sessions I would've never gotten to City of Tears and grown to really like the game.  I want to make this clear, I do not think this game is bad.  If you like Paper Mario, this is a must-play, I could easily see this game being among your favorites.  It's just so not for me.  It wears its inspiration on its sleeve to a degree that I find both uninteresting and off-putting.  Even if I liked Paper Mario to some significant degree, I would be unlikely to like this, is the thing, this isn't just "oh you didn't like Paper Mario so of course you didn't like this".  It hasn't helped but like. I don't really want to just play games that fill in a niche I feel I'm missing and don't really do anything else.  I would just simply be thinking this game is a 7 rather than a 6 and be more likely to finish it.

3/22/26

I have made the decision after finishing Chapter 3 to put this one on ice.  This is not a surprise, I imagine, I have made it no secret that I don't enjoy the actual game part of this game.  I do have to say, though, this is always an outcome I hate.  DNFs aren't something I shy away from doing, I feel very strongly about the idea that a game is done when you are done with it.  But at the same time I'm always sad when a project goes this way.  Especially one as renowned as Bug Fables is, I know it probably doesn't seem like it based on how immediately I was like "I don't like playing this" and how critical I've been of the game since, but I did and still do want to like this game.  I enjoy the story and the characters especially, a part of me wants to see the mystery of Leif unfold.  Not finishing this isn't an easy decision.  But it's the right one.  I got through Chapter 3, did a couple sidequests, and was not having a good time through any of it.  This game really did capture Paper Mario, and it is no more apparent than in its worse moments.

Real quick though, I do want to highlight the soundtrack.  I haven't done it so far and I always want to do it at least once for any game I play.  Bug Fables sounds like Paper Mario, which is also not my favorite thing, I'm not super fond of the Paper Mario soundtracks.  But I would be lying if there weren't some incredible tracks in this game.  I'm a big fan of Snakemouth Den, it's an excellent dungeon track that sells the tense atmosphere without losing the lighthearted nature of this game.  The One Left Behind is a great character theme, it encapsulates Leif so well.  In the Court of the Ant Queen is an excellent castle theme, being very regal and kind of church-like while also being just a bit sinister, implying Elizant II might not be all she says she is.  Golden Lands is a great flower field theme, Harvest Festival is an excellent festival theme, Defiant Root is an amazing desert town theme, High Above, Bee Kingdom is a fantastic theme.  I especially love that last one, it's like very regal and classical but it keeps having notes of electronica in it, communicating the Bee Kingdom's technological superiority.  There are a lot of very good songs in Bug Fables, it may not be a soundtrack I think is always amazing but I like a number of the tracks I've heard.  And there's a cute little anxious butterfly with an ocarina in game you can hear the music from!  I love her so much.

Whoever made the boss of Chapter 3 need Vi to hit it twice for the other party members to do anything when characters only get 1 move per turn, have to give up their move for Vi to move a second time, AND have it so that enemies get up from being knocked down at the end of the turn they are knocked down; I want you to know you are why I'm not finishing your game.  What were you doing.  The boss of Chapter 3 is so unnecessarily tedious.  It's a boss fight that is bound to outresource you not because you lack resources but because your actual damage output is so slow that the boss is bound to just war of attrition your party down.  It's such an annoying boss fight given how limited your options are, made even moreso by the fact that it gets a massive power boost about halfway through the fight.  And the fact that, because Vi is the only real damage dealer in your party, she's going to be doing the most in the fight, keeping her alive is paramount, which is difficult because she has low HP.  There were multiple times in the fight where I got into a situation where it looked like I was going to just lose because the boss had killed Vi and Leif and Kabbu was just sitting there, doing nothing.  I understand that Bug Fables is designed to be a little harder than the game that inspired it, since it's for adults, but I don't think that this boss was hard so much as it was tedious.

There was one final thing I wanted to do before I stopped playing the game.  Vi's drama with the Hive was one of the things I was invested enough in to highlight in the previous section and, since I was able to, I wanted to see a resolution to that story.  So before I ended off, I decided to reconnect Vi with her sister, Jaune, and have the two of them make up.  The nature of the sidequest ended up being frustrating, unfortunately, it's your classic trading quest where you have to go all over the world talking to random NPCs to find the next item to trade for until you eventually find the end point of the quest and work your way backwards.  But it was very sweet and I'm glad I saw it.  Despite the fact that I'm pretty sure what Vi did to her sister was the equivalent of calling her a slur given how Kabbu reacted to it, and also how upset she is that her sister, in trying to protect Vi from the dangerous life of an explorer, tried to stamp her dreams down, the two sisters make up and forgive each other.  Jaune, the Hive's best artist, even makes a painting in honor of the moment, a painting so good that she says even the portraits she has made for the Queen pale in comparison.

I shouldn't have played Bug Fables.  You know, I did the thing I tend to criticize others for, picking up a game you know you're probably not going to like, playing it because you "want to give the game a fair shot", and then being like "wow, I didn't like this".  I'm sorry, y'all.  DNFs aren't fun, me not gelling with a game is not fun.  I want to be clear, I don't think Bug Fables is a bad game at all.  While I don't think I would ever love it the way others do based on my own opinions on this stuff, it's obviously a very good game if you're into this style of RPG.  It's not for me, and I probably could've and should've recognized that fact before I even tried it.  It is pretty embarrassing that this game, which I do acknowledge is a good game, is going on the DNF list but Revelations: Persona, one of the worst RPGs I've ever played, was finished, I'm very sorry about that.  6/10, though I wouldn't be surprised if it makes the worst list this year after I've sat on it for 9 months either, I tend to rate things higher when I play them and am thinking about more "objective criticism" and then my subjectivity overtakes in the subsequent weeks or months.