Category: video games

A Record of the Calamity

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

This collection of meta essays explores the worldbuilding and cultural background of Hyrule and its inhabitants during the timeline of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.

Ninja Lore in Breath of the Wild
On the historical precedents of the Sheikah, the origins of the names “Yiga” and “Kohga,” and how the culture of historical ninja is referenced in the story and setting of Breath of the Wild.

Governance in Hyrule
On the nature and questionable necessity of the Hyrulean monarchy in comparison with other systems of governance in Hyrule.

Zelda and the Calamity
On how Zelda’s repressed emotions may have surfaced in a tragic explosion of chaotic power.

Ganondorf as an Agent of Change
On Ganondorf’s role as the villain of a heroic fantasy, the existential challenge he poses to Hyrule, and the necessity of disruption to an otherwise closed system.

Ganondorf’s Design in Tears of the Kingdom
On the Japanese cultural references incorporated into Ganondorf’s visual design.

The Two Kings in Tears of the Kingdom
On the fantasies of Japanese cultural identity represented by Rauru and Ganondorf, and why the power structures associated with the two kings are disavowed by Zelda.

Bloodborne Background Lore

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

While waiting for the Elden Ring DLC to be released, I decided to try my hand at Bloodborne, a gorgeous and atmospheric gothic action adventure game that somehow manages to withhold even more of its story from the player than Elden Ring. I haven’t seen a concise and accurate summary of Bloodborne’s background lore, so I thought I’d take a shot at creating one.

Before anything, it’s important to establish that Bloodborne is loosely based on H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, whose premise is as follows:

The earth is billions of years old, and it has supported multiple civilizations that rose and fell without leaving any trace of themselves behind. One of these civilizations was that of the Great Ones, whose fungal bodies allowed them to benefit from long lives and peaceful societies. The Great Ones developed technology that assisted them in communicating across time and thereby making contact with other civilizations on the planet, including humans. Because the Great Ones are so physically and mentally inhuman, however, these connections are flawed. Sometimes human communication with Great Ones invokes fear, and sometimes it invokes madness that results in aberrant behavior. 

In order to facilitate more productive communication, the Great Ones created dream spaces that exist alongside the waking world as separate dimensions. In Homestuck terms, these dimensions are “dream bubbles” that function as self-contained terrariums. In other words, a dream bubble preserves a certain place at a specific moment for the educational benefit of whoever accesses it, kind of like an interactive movie. Time doesn’t flow inside the dream; it repeats. This means that you can trap someone in a dream and use it as a type of prison. In the most famous example, this is what the Great Ones did with Cthulhu, a priest of malevolent cosmic elder gods that would destroy organic life on earth if the planet came to their attention.

Using this mythos as an inspiration, the world of Bloodborne has been shaped by three broad categories of Great Ones.

The first is a group of Great Ones who have tried to communicate with humans. Humans have taken blood from the immortal physical bodies of these creatures. In small doses, the administration of this blood cures illness and prolongs life. In larger doses, the blood induces physical transformation. A coalition of surgeon-scholars called “the Healing Church” has established itself as a religious organization in the city of Yharnam so that they may perform “blood ministration” on the populace, whom they’re using as test subjects in their experiments to bring humans physically and mentally closer to the Great Ones.

The second group of Great Ones eschews this sort of direct contact and communion between Great Ones and humans. Their motives have little to do with the welfare of human beings, but they’ve nevertheless acted in opposition to whatever is going on in Yharnam. One of these Great Ones, called “the Moon Presence,” has created a dream bubble for the ostensible purpose of training hunters to kill the humans maddened and transformed by blood ministration. This is the “Hunter’s Dream” that serves as the central hub of Bloodborne.

The third faction is a loosely federated group of spiderlike Great Ones called Amygdala, who have created their own set of dream bubbles. Some of these dream bubbles are maintained in cooperation with humans seeking eternal life in a timeless space, while some were created seemingly for the purpose of feeding from the human souls trapped inside them. I believe the version of Yharnam that the player-character navigates exists within a dream bubble created by Amygdala. 

Essentially, the world of Bloodborne is a dream inside a connected network of dreams that can be accessed by the player-character as they dream. While the Hunter’s Dream exists as a sanctuary for would-be hunters, the dream that contains Yharnam is something like a training simulation. Your character can only wake from these interconnected dreams (meaning: finish the game) by completing the task they are given as they fall asleep during Bloodborne’s opening cutscene: “Seek Paleblood to transcend the hunt.”

It’s not entirely clear what “Paleblood” refers to, but the game offers two primary interpretations.

The first interpretation is that Paleblood is the blood of the Great Ones that caused the scourge of beasts in Yharnam. Once the player-character understands the full extent of the effects of Paleblood on human physiology and society by witnessing the downfall of Yharnam, they are qualified to become a hunter in the waking world. At the end of Bloodborne, the player-character’s mentor Gherman offers a choice. He can release them from the Hunter’s Dream, or they can best him in combat in order to earn the (highly dubious) honor of replacing him as its warden.

The second interpretation is that the term “Paleblood” refers to the human-adjacent children of the Great Ones, who cannot produce offspring on their own and must rely on human hosts. The conditions for the creation of Paleblood children are unclear, and various factions of the Healing Church have undertaken ghastly experiments on the population of Yharnam in order to pursue this knowledge.

If the player locates and consumes three umbilical cords from unsuccessful Paleblood pregnancies, it’s possible for them to be reborn as a Paleblood squid baby (and future Great One) within the Hunter’s Dream. According to the interpretation suggested by this ending, the Hunter’s Dream was created by the Moon Presence in order to select and nurture potential candidates capable of becoming its child.

The game’s title, Bloodborne, therefore refers to the player-character’s ultimate goal. Either they will be reborn as a fully-fledged Hunter after awakening from the bloody chaos of the Hunter’s Dream, or they will be reborn as a Great One after inheriting the Paleblood of their “parent,” the Moon Presence. 

The story of Bloodborne (such as it is) focuses on the player-character’s journey through the city of Yharnam and its outlying areas as they fight the humans who have been transformed into monsters by the blood of Great Ones. The game’s DLC, called “The Old Hunters,” provides additional background information concerning the origins and establishment of the Healing Church through dream encounters with the key figures in its history.

For an excellent synopsis of the story presented by the DLC, I recommend this article: https://www.eurogamer.net/bloodborne-whats-going-on-in-the-old-hunters

For a deeper dive into Bloodborne‘s story presented in well-organized chapters that arrange the aspects of the plot in chronological order, I’d recommend checking out this fan-created wiki, which can be read like a novel: http://soulslore.wikidot.com/bb-plot

Inside

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Inside is a 2.5D puzzle platformer originally released for the Xbox One in 2016. The near-future dystopian sci-fi setting contains strong elements of horror, and players should expect to experience numerous violent deaths. The game takes about four hours to finish, although a longer completionist run that involves accessing hidden areas will be rewarded with a secret ending.

You play as a ten-year-old boy, and you begin the game alone in the woods. The boy has presumably escaped from a shadowy research facility, and he’s being chased by dogs and men with guns. The boy will be killed if he’s spotted, so the player’s initial goal is to move to the right side of the screen while evading capture.

After the boy escapes from the woods, he emerges onto a farm littered with the carcasses of parasite-infested pigs. It’s here that the game introduces its central puzzle mechanic, which involves using a headset to control the mindless bodies of adult humans. When the boy makes his way out the farm and into a decaying city, it becomes clear that these mindless bodies were once marketed to the general population before the apparent collapse of human civilization.

Inside eventually finds its stride, but the puzzles at the beginning of the game have the potential to be frustrating for a first-time player. In order to progress through one of the barns on the farm, for example, the player has to backtrack to the left in order to open the barn’s back door. Opening this door allows a gaggle of chirping chicks to enter the barn.

The game has never previously asked the player to move from right to left, and there’s no indication that the chicks exist other than a faint chirping on the other side of the barn’s back door. It’s therefore not immediately apparent that these chicks are a necessary element to solving a puzzle that already has half a dozen moving parts. The game becomes much better about broadcasting puzzle solutions as it progresses, but it might be necessary to consult a walkthrough at the beginning.

The first quarter of the game also features another type of frustrating puzzle that involves crossing long distances to escape from attack dogs. If the boy dies at any point during one of these sequences, the player has to start over at the beginning, thereby losing up to six or seven minutes of progress. Repeatedly playing through one of these sequences only to fail at the end isn’t fun.

Thankfully, Inside becomes much better at managing respawn points after the boy leaves the farm. Many of the game’s later puzzles involve a combination of careful timing and brutal death, but they allow the player adequate space to stand still and assess the situation.

Tiny birds and bloodthirsty canines aside, Inside is visually striking from start to finish. The sound design is brilliant, and the audio works alongside the graphic design to create a palpable sense of danger and menace. Unlike Playdead’s earlier game Limbo (2010), which was more abstract and fantasy-themed, Inside is grittier and more focused on portraying a disturbingly realistic apocalypse.

As I played Inside, I could envision its story evolving in two ways. My first theory was that the boy is a host for the same parasite that killed the pigs on the farm; and, if he escapes into civilization, the infection will spread and the world will be doomed. My second theory was that the boy is being controlled just as he controls the mindless bodies; and, after he accomplishes his mission, he will be unplugged.

The actual endgame story developments are nothing even remotely resembling what I expected. Instead, Inside gradually transforms into a meditation on bioethics and subjectivity that’s all the more striking because of the player’s interaction with the story. I’m still not sure how to interpret the ending, but the path to get there involves one of the biggest ludo-narrative surprises I’ve ever had the pleasure to encounter. I usually don’t have any patience for concerns over spoilers, but I’d recommend going into this game spoiler-free. The ending of Inside genuinely has to be experienced to be believed.

Oxenfree

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Oxenfree is a horror-themed teenage friendship drama conversation simulator set on a haunted island in the Pacific Northwest. Originally released in 2016, Oxenfree is available on all consoles, and it takes about four and a half hours to finish the story.

You play as a teenage girl named Alex who takes the last ferry out to Edwards Island with her pothead friend Ren and her edgy stepbrother Jonas. They plan to spend the night on the beach, where two girls named Clarissa and Nona are waiting for them with a cooler of beer. There’s an urban legend that old-fashioned transistor radios can pick up strange signals on the island, and Ren leads Alex and Jonas to a sea cave where the signal distortions are rumored to be strong. By tuning into the radio transmissions, Alex ends up opening a portal to a parallel dimension.

I really enjoyed Oxenfree, both when I first played it and when I revisited it earlier this year. The graphic design is gorgeous, the OST is ambient and chill, and the elements of horror are genuinely creepy. The story of Oxenfree is intriguing, and walking across the island while navigating Alex’s relationships with the other characters is a fun and interesting experience.

Still, as a game, Oxenfree suffers from two major problems.

The first of these problems is that Alex walks very slowly. This makes sense, as a major element of gameplay is choosing Alex’s response in real time during ongoing conversations. The relaxed speed of travel also encourages the player to enjoy the scenery and the ambiance. Unfortunately, backtracking is a slog. The frustration engendered by Alex’s sluggish walking speed is exacerbated by the fact that the load times between screens are obscene, usually exceeding sixty seconds. As a result, I felt strongly discouraged against unguided exploration.

In order to uncover the full story of what’s happening, the player needs to embark on a scavenger hunt to collect a dozen letters scattered across the island. Because of the slow character movement and unbearable loading times, I had to give up on finding the letters myself. I was reduced to searching for spoilers online, which isn’t ideal.

As far as I can tell, a Cold War era submarine somehow managed to get itself caught in a dimensional paradox just offshore, and the Edward Island’s “ghosts” are the manifestations of the sailors trying to free themselves. These ghosts are secondary to the main story of Oxenfree, which is about the relationships between the teenage characters.

Although I think the friendship drama might have been more compelling if I had encountered the game at a younger age, Oxenfree’s second major problem is that its writing feels strange and awkward, at least to me.

I really wanted Alex to spend time with the two other teenage girls on the island. I like Nona and Clarissa a lot. I found them to be interesting characters, and I wanted to know more about them. Unfortunately, Oxenfree doesn’t give Alex many dialogue options to interact with either girl that aren’t petty, condescending, or downright bitchy. This isn’t the way that normal people talk to one another, even if they’re teenagers.

It’s clear that Oxenfree expects Alex to spend the majority of its playtime with Jonas and Ren, both of whom tend to respond poorly if the player chooses conversation options that don’t read as stereotypically “masculine.”

To give an example, after something terrible and upsetting happens, Jonas tells Alex that he’s scared. If she demonstrates sympathy or empathy by responding with “Are you okay?” or “I’m scared too,” Jonas will become annoyed or openly hostile. Meanwhile, the uncomfortably callous response of “You’re fine, let’s keep going” is configured as “correct” and doesn’t result in a string of passive-aggressive insults.

There are several different variations on Alex’s personality that the player can choose to express, but Oxenfree doesn’t give the player many opportunities to be chill, or friendly, or sincere, or emotionally vulnerable, or just curious about what’s going on. Each conversation choice generally has three options, but there’s always an additional option of not saying anything. As I played, I gradually found myself “choosing” not to say anything, especially not to the boys.

In other words, the opportunities for roleplaying the character of Alex are limited. I don’t think Alex is supposed to be unsympathetic, but the writer/director’s understanding of how interpersonal communication works feels very specific to a personality and worldview that I don’t understand. The portrayal of these teenagers – especially the teenage girls – is just so mean. The voice actors all give wonderful performances that help the player better understand the characters, but I wish the writing were as nuanced as the acting.

Granted, Alex ends up being the villain of Oxenfree II, so another interpretation might be that she is in fact a bad and selfish person who doesn’t care if she hurts people. If this is indeed the case, though, I wish that the writing had signposted her personality more clearly, or at least given more concrete hints regarding how the true nature of the situation on Edwards Island has affected her character.

Oxenfree has been universally praised, and I’ve even seen people refer to it as a “cozy game,” meaning that it presumably creates a sense of warmth in the player by being unchallenging to play while focusing on a story with themes of friendship and personal growth. I can understand the affective positivity of this reaction, but I also think it’s important to explain why Oxenfree can be difficult and frustrating, especially to someone playing the game in 2024.

Oxenfree is gorgeous to look at and features engaging conversation-based gameplay mechanics, but this is a horror game with slow movement speed and long loading times in which characters are often seriously unpleasant to one another. I maintain that Oxenfree is a unique and interesting game that’s well worth checking out – especially given its relatively short length – but it’s always good to have an accurate understanding of what you’re getting into.

While doing some research about the game’s reception, I learned that Netflix acquired the Oxenfree development team, Night School Studio, in 2021. Netflix produced Oxenfree II, and I read that there’s a live-action series adaptation of Oxenfree in production. This sounds nice, to be honest. Crossmedia adaptations don’t always succeed, but I get the impression that Oxenfree might actually work much better if it weren’t an interactive video game.

Gender and Magic in Final Fantasy VI

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Final Fantasy VI is deeply concerned with the relationship between human beings and technology. The game borrows many elements from Western fantasy and science fiction, yet the story and action are centered around two teenage female protagonists, Terra and Celes, who are variations on the “magical girl” and “beautiful fighting girl” archetypes of Japanese popular culture.

Back in 2016, I published an essay about “Gender and Magic in Final Fantasy VI” on the website of the sadly defunct gaming magazine Kill Screen. Since then, I’ve made substantial edits for clarity, and I posted the updated version on AO3.

This meta essay situates Final Fantasy VI within the cultural context of Japan in the 1990s in order to discuss how the game explores its posthuman themes through the bodies of its female characters. I demonstrate how Final Fantasy VI uses gender as a lens for its exploration of the intersections between biology and technology, and I argue that the otherness associated with Terra and Celes serves as a powerful analogy for anxieties surrounding the future of the human species in relation to seemingly magical biotechnologies.

You can read the essay on AO3 here:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/53596483

The cover illustration was created by Palliceart, an artist with a dual specialty in magical girls and beautiful fighting girls. You can find her gorgeous and ethereal artwork on Twitter (here), on Instagram (here), and on Tumblr (here).

Giraffe and Annika

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Giraffe and Annika is an extremely chill 3D adventure story game with anime-style character designs and panel-by-panel manga cutscenes. The game takes about four hours to finish, and I suppose that whether it’s worth $30 depends on how much you value this type of experience. I played Giraffe and Annika in short stretches during the day to get a bit of emotional sunshine, and it was lovely.

You play as Annika, a ten-year-old catgirl who mysteriously finds herself on a beautiful forested island. There’s a bit of an Alice in Wonderland flavor to the scenario, as Annika doesn’t worry too much about where she is or how she got there, and she begins the story as something of a blank slate. After investigating an empty house belonging to someone named Lisa, Annika goes back outside to find a blue-haired catboy named Giraffe waiting for her. Giraffe tells Annika that she has special powers, and he asks her to visit three dungeons on the island in order to restore starlight to a magical pendant.

The dungeons are themed open-air environments inhabited by roaming ghosts that will drain Annika’s health meter if they get too close. Thankfully, the dungeons are also filled with numerous health-restoring crystals. At the end of each dungeon is a boss battle that takes the form of a simple rhythm game. It’s possible to die from ghost attacks and other environmental hazards in the dungeons; and, in fact, I died a lot. Thankfully, save points and respawn points are so frequent that this isn’t an issue. There is zero stress in this game.

By clearing the dungeons, Annika will unlock exploration abilities such as a floaty space jump and the ability to swim underwater. She’ll also perform small fetch-quest tasks for NPCs who will help her bypass other obstacles. There are various objects that Annika can interact with across the island, but the optional collectibles are just for fun. Objectives are clearly marked, and you’ll never be in danger of getting lost or going off-track from the main quest.

The island is very lush and green and beautiful, and there’s a short day-night cycle that adds a touch of visual flair. I also appreciate the cuteness of the designs of the game’s sizeable cast of NPCs. In order to access the second dungeon, for example, you need to feed carrots to a sea turtle; and, to get the carrots, you have to round up a family of rabbits. The rabbits look like a Studio Ghibli adaptation of Beatrix Potter, and they’re adorable. Meanwhile, the sea turtle is completely photorealistic, which is a good illustration of the game’s gentle sense of humor.

It’s always a pleasure to encounter and interact with new characters, and I really enjoyed the manga-style cutscenes, which play out panel by panel. The character art is comically expressive, and the bright pastel colors are lovely.

It’s difficult to critique Giraffe and Annika, as it’s very sweet and competently constructed. Still, the main 3D playspace of the game can feel a bit textureless, and I also felt that the game wears out its welcome when it starts trying to challenge the player at the very end. I actually appreciate the occasionally amateurish design, as it fills me with a sense of nostalgia for the early 3D adventure games of the PlayStation era. Even though Giraffe and Annika sometimes looks as though it was built with out-of-the-box 3D graphic assets, it’s clear that the creators put a lot of effort into creating unique environments with a distinct sense of character.

Giraffe and Annika probably won’t appeal to someone looking for a deep story or challenging gameplay, but I can imagine that it would be a perfect starter game for its target audience of younger players. As for me, it provided a pleasant and much-needed mood boost during a dismal week in February. Giraffe and Annika is a bright and simple fantasy adventure with cute characters and no unnecessary cooking or crafting elements, and sometimes that’s exactly what you need in your life.

Retro JRPG Lessons from Final Fantasy Mystic Quest

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

In 2023, I tried to play about a dozen indie retro JRPGs. I’ve always loved the JRPG play cycle of slowly gaining strength and resources through turn-based battles and dungeon exploration, and I don’t necessarily find repetitive simplicity boring. Still, I bounced off almost all of the games I tried within the first hour.

In order to think through why I’ve had so much trouble getting into more contemporary retro JRPGs, I returned to Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, which was originally released for the Super Nintendo in 1992. Mystic Quest was intended to introduce American console gamers to the conventions of JRPGs, and its various ease-of-use features allow the player to complete the story in less than five hours. Despite its primitive graphics and gameplay, I had a good time with Mystic Quest, and I took away five lessons about why this simple-as-bricks game works for me while so many contemporary retro JRPGs don’t.

(1) If the game is more than an hour long, there needs to be actual gameplay.

I have a soft spot for indie retro RPGs in which the player does nothing but walk around and talk to people, but there’s a limit to how much of this I’m willing to engage with. Even in a story-focused game, there needs to be some sort of activity that isn’t reading text on a screen.

(2) The player needs to experience this gameplay within the first ten to fifteen minutes.

I think a major aspect of what people liked about old JRPGs is that the player could generally progress from the first town to the first dungeon right at the beginning of the game. Exposition and worldbuilding are important, but not as important as the game being fun to play. Even Final Fantasy VII, which has a famous opening cutscene, sees Cloud and Barret fighting enemies and navigating a dungeon within the first five minutes.

(3) Battles with minor enemies should be over quickly.

This is especially the case at the beginning of the game, when the player is still getting a feel for how everything works. If every random battle is two minutes long, these minutes add up. It doesn’t matter how clever the battle-specific character dialogue or flavor text is; it loses its charm when I see it repeated dozens of times across dozens of random battles.

(4) There should be a bell curve for complexity.

The opening of a game needs to demonstrate the game’s aesthetics and mechanics in a way that shows the player what the game is about. This doesn’t need to be dramatic or flashy or cinematic, and the point is definitely not to overwhelm the player with a giant town filled with NPCs or endless text reels of exposition. All of that should come later, when the player is already invested and eager for more. A game should start simple and gradually become more complex before opening up somewhere in the middle. By the end of the game, though, the complexity needs to decrease as the player becomes more focused on finishing the story. Structure is important.

(5) The player should be able to interact with the environment in region-specific ways.

This is the key ingredient that makes the Legend of Zelda games work so well, and even standard JRPGs like Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy VI incorporate elements of environmental exploration as well. If I’m in a forest, I want to be able to find an axe that I can use to chop down trees. If I’m navigating the sewer system under a castle, I want sluice gates that raise and lower the water level. If I’m in a seaside merchant town, I want there to be secret passages filled with treasure. Exploration is infinitely more enjoyable if the player has something to do.

Okay, one more:

(6) It’s fun to be able to jump.

I’m not going to elaborate on this, because it’s a self-evident truth: It’s fun to be able to jump. Also, if there are cute animals, the player should be able to pet them.

Melissa

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Melissa
https://cattrigger.itch.io/melissa-heart

Melissa is a free-to-play retro horror visual novel about a rudimentary dating game on an old library computer. If you’re okay with dying quickly, it takes about seven minutes to play, but you can add a few more minutes by trying to stay alive for longer. The game has an easily accessible save system, so you can restart at every dialogue choice to see what happens when you beg for mercy. Good luck!

Melissa reminds me of the best parts of Doki Doki Literature Club without the need to scroll through an hour of cutesy school shenanigans. The initial dating game is exactly the sort of thing you’d find on a floppy disc next to Oregon Trail, and both the graphics and the sound design feel nicely textured and deliciously crunchy. The writing gets in and gets the job done, and the twist is a lot of fun.

The developer made a sequel called Morris…
https://cattrigger.itch.io/morris-heart

…that is significantly longer (about 25-30 minutes) and also very good. The retro nostalgia appeal is amplified by the occasional internet dial-up sounds, and at certain points the game asks you to print things out on the library’s public printer, which makes adorable dinosaur noises. Aside from the eponymous Morris, the story featured two additional characters, both of whom are delightfully unhinged. In the comments on the game’s page on Itch.io, a few people said that they’d happily date the evil older woman, and honestly? Same.

It amuses me that Melissa and Morris are both named after famous computer viruses. If you’re interested, I recommend checking out these two bizarre FBI pages, if only for their top-notch banner graphics:

The Melissa Virus
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/melissa-virus-20th-anniversary-032519

The Morris Worm
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/morris-worm-30-years-since-first-major-attack-on-internet-110218

Anyway, it seems like the developer is making a full Date Time trilogy for release on Steam, and I’m intrigued by the work they’ve posted so far. It’s interesting to think that this universe of cursed retro dating games is informed by its own system of deep lore, and I’m always here for monster computer viruses who are down to smooch.

Fishy

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Fishy
https://i-choose-paradise.itch.io/fishy

Fishy is a horror-themed “wholesome” visual novel that takes about twenty minutes to finish. You play as a sweet middle school girl who’s spending the night at an aquarium for a friend’s birthday party. The problem is that she’s deathly afraid of the ocean, and it doesn’t help that there’s mild friendship drama afoot. She gets separated from the group and wanders into a restricted area, where she encounters fish that aquarium guests are never meant to see.

The art of Fishy is fantastic and alternates between genuinely gorgeous and genuinely creepy. Putting the spooky fish aside, the environmental illustrations perfectly capture the magical atmosphere of what it might be like to spend the night in an aquarium. The character designs are lovely as well.

The writing is competent, but the game seems to be aimed at the same audience as its preteen characters. In its determination to be wholesome and teach the player a positive life lesson, the story hesitates to create a sense of tension, dread, or even character development.  

Fishy’s message is that having a prosthetic limb is cool, actually. And that’s great! Prosthetic limbs are in fact cool as hell. Still, the twenty minutes that most players will spend with the game isn’t quite enough time to tie all the various thematic threads together. There’s the player-character’s anxiety + her relationship with her friends + her fear of the ocean + the potentially haunted aquarium; and then, on top of that, there’s the positive message about disability positivity. It’s a lot!

The lack of any real darkness or specificity makes the experience of the player-character somewhat confusing, at least to my adult sensibilities. Like, what exactly is the source of the friendship drama? Why is the player-character afraid of the ocean? Is there something going on in her life that makes her prone to attacks of social anxiety? Why does she react to this situation in such an extreme way? Is she having a legitimate psychotic break?

I always appreciate stories that reach for big goals, of course, and the writing is quite compelling. If nothing else, the characters all seem like real people, and I was interested in learning more about them.  

Also, I have a bit of a crush on the girl in the friend group who knows all sorts of disturbing facts about the ocean and doesn’t mind bringing them up at (in)appropriate moments. I want a whole game about Weird Fish Girl and whatever her damage is. She’s wonderful, and I love her.

All in all, Fishy is a fun story with a few spooky scenes, and it feels like a good visual novel to share with younger children. The hand-drawn art is appealing, and the story goes to some interesting places in a relatively short amount of time. In any case, it’s free to play, so no complaints there. Even if you’re not into preteen friendship drama, it’s always good to spend quality time with the terrors of the deep.

Hypnospace Outlaw

~ Kathryn ~ Leave a comment

Hypnospace Outlaw is an internet detective game set in a parallel universe in 1999. You play as a volunteer moderator who’s tasked with flagging content violations, and the gamespace consists of your desktop, your email inbox, and a web browser that connects you to Hypnospace, a Geocities-style database of websites.

The Hypnospace admins send you a series of cases, and the first one is easy enough to solve. A representative of the estate of an artist who created a popular cartoon character has reported a page displaying unauthorized reproductions. You can find the page easily enough by searching for the character’s name in your web browser, where you see that a first grade teacher has shared scans of her students’ artwork of the character. You can click on each image and use a special tool in your browser to report it, thus removing the artwork from the woman’s page. Once you’ve removed all images recognizable as the character, you’ll get an email telling you that the case is resolved.

Obviously this is a shitty thing to have done, but the game doesn’t give you any ability to do otherwise. If you want to keep playing, you have to “solve” these cases in the only manner provided. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to make choices.

This lack of agency can be upsetting, especially when the game forces you to slap violation penalties on a teenage girl experiencing sexual harassment through DMs. She sent a support request to Hypnospace asking them to address the harassment, and she’s posted screenshots of the chats on her page. When you report these images as harassment, the girl is the one who’s penalized, as the images are hosted on her page.

A female member of the admin staff carbon-copies you on an email that she sends to her boss, asking him if this misattribution can be corrected. Unfortunately, he’s a piece of shit and brushes her off, saying that it’s not his problem. M’lady.

The point of being able to see the internal workings of content moderation is to give the player a sense of how wild and woolly the early public internet used to be. The administrators and moderators managing online communities were young and didn’t really know what they were doing, and there was a complete disconnect between corporate software developers and the end users, many of whom were just kids. In addition to teen drama, Hypnospace also hosts retirees with time on their hands, people who are deeply emotionally invested in the music they enjoy, small businesses doing their best, and a healthy cohort of amateur artists and poets.  

Hypnospace Outlaw has a strong Windows 95/98 aesthetic, and the Geocities/Angelfire style of page design is well-observed, with ample crunchy backgrounds and neon colors and spinning GIFs. What’s less well-observed is the quality of the writing people put on their pages. Even in college in the mid-2000s, I remember finding this exact style of personal webpage and being impressed by how knowledgeable and competently written they were. In Hypnospace Outlaw, however, the writing is uniformly bad. It’s bad on purpose, which has its charm, but I still got the feeling that the in-game webpages are more to look at than to read.  

If you can tolerate the bad-on-purpose writing, however, all sorts of intriguing worldbuilding details begin to emerge. You never learn much, however, only bits and pieces of trivia that are incorporated into people’s discussions of their special interests. The main “alternate” aspect of this universe, which is that people access the internet by wearing a headband while they sleep, is never explained. It’s also not particularly important… until it is. Still, I wouldn’t say that Hypnospace Outlaw has anything as structured as a plot. You’re mainly just here for the vibes.

After the first case, the game becomes infinitely more difficult and complicated, and I had to make constant use of a walkthrough (this one here). I have no idea how I would have figured out many of the cases otherwise. The problem is that there are dozens of public pages, not to mention hidden pages and directories and search terms and tagging systems, and the “clues” you receive are all extremely cryptic. There’s a lot of noise and not much clarity.

In the end, I’d estimate that it’s completely unnecessary to engage with about 70% of the game. There’s no real incentive to sort through the chaff unless you’re simply curious and don’t mind spending time clicking on links and reading through the webpages collected in the various themed directories. I ended up ignoring a lot of the game’s content, but I really enjoyed the pages that focus on urban legends and conspiracy theories. There’s also a page devoted to a kind of lo-fi, found-noise techno called Fungus Scene that I would very much like to exist in our own universe. Personally speaking, I would have preferred more of this sort of “weird but brilliant” creativity and less “kids being immature” cringe humor.

If you beeline through the cases with a walkthrough, Hypnospace Outlaw takes about three to four hours to finish, and how much time you’re willing to spend exploring outside the main objectives will depend on your tolerance for this subjective version of what the internet looked like in the late 1990s. For me, Hypnospace Outlaw is interesting in theory but somewhat frustrating to engage with, and the ultimate message that incompetent techbros can get away with everything from harassment to manslaughter didn’t really resonate as a meaningful story.

Still, despite routinely subjecting myself to some of the strangest titles Itch.io has to offer, I’ve never seen anything like Hypnospace Outlaw, and I’m happy it exists. If you’re at all curious, I’d recommend checking out the free demo. It’s available for the Nintendo Switch, so you can play the game while smoking weed in the bath, which is probably the best way to experience it to be honest.