Author: lowpolyzoe

I was at the library to pick up fiction books and I saw?? a book called Feel the Bern labelled as a Bernie Sanders Mystery with the cover being the meme photo of him made by a guy who apparently made “Obama Biden Mysteries” which I guessed were probably inspired by the 2016 Obama and Biden memes and now the author has written and published Bernie Sanders RPF in the year 2022 and the Auckland Library system had gotten it for some reason

I got it out in bewilderment (I hid it under a translation of Journey to the West) and went home to read and in the first few pages there’s the line “Playing therapist for sloshed, emotionally wounded men is less fun than it sounds.” and my first thought is, who thinks that’s fun? No one likes doing that. Many Words have been Written about how if you’re a woman cis men expect you to do emotional labour for them

The protagonist has named herself Crash because there are probably no other girls named Crash and “like Alexander Hamilton, I had to shoot my shot” and then on page four when she’s entering the campaign office she goes “I hear this is where coal is turned to diamonds!” and Bernie Sanders, subject of the novel frowns and says “We support clean energy here”

The book is filled with little performative preachy moments like they just inserted a tweet right into the text. There’s a comment “about as likely as Elon Musk getting to mars” or “if Bernie is up this early there’s something wrong in the world! Well, there’s always something wrong in the world, see abortion rights and indigenous rights and unregulated capitalism”. This is constant?

I mentioned “playing therapist for emotionally wounded men is less fun than it sounds” earlier, it’s like they took the common phrase “less fun than it sounds” and then mismatched it with the subject of doing something that is already un-fun. There’s one section where the narration goes “There’s a special place in hell for people who don’t turn on their read receipts. It takes two seconds, people!” and I remember that read receipts are typically turned on by default, and that I personally like to turn them off because being left on read is a rude thing to do and I often can’t find time to reply in the moment that I read it. It’s just conflict.

Sometimes in media, jokes are “correct, but not funny”, like when a character gives a parting shot to a fantastical natural disaster with “and people don’t listen to the climate scientists still!” which, yeah Correct but not funny. This book is full of those sorts of things, there’s a section where the small town holding a beauty pageant is mentioned and that it’s less sexist because it trades a swimsuit round for a flannel shirt round, and the protagonist recounts being entered in at ten years old and giving a speech condemning the male gaze, capping it off with “I am a woman, not an object” and like… okay? Good for you and the less misogynist beauty pageant? Am I meant to be impressed that the book has okay politics? Is it meant to be funny?

I looked up the author because I became briefly convinced that the book was made by a conservative trying to make fun of liberals and found his webpage to verify that no, this guy is in fact liberal:

I checked, I was a smidge surprised to see an OnlyFans on a business page, clicking it takes you to a tasteful nude and “you pervert!”)

I think there was an attempt to give the main character’s voice some Twitter-y flavour but that’s not a very pleasant or funny flavour, and the thing about a good tweet is you go “oh that’s so True” and I didn’t ever have that moment reading this book because it’s a more milquetoast, smug, disconnected liberal version of my own politics being reflected back at me.

I don’t like Elon Musk either but also I think it’s weird that the cop character is immediately stated to be gay and that the protagonist’s feelings on the police were decided by “The sheriff’s daughter when I was in high school was mean”. Did you make the cop gay to go “don’t worry he’s a good cop”? There’s so many sledgehammer blunt reminders of The Time This Takes Place In and the State Of The World the lack of references to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in regards to the police is conspicuous.

The actual plot of the novel is someone is murdered and Bernie and Crash Bandicoot have to solve it, and there’s some ties to not-Elon Musk trying to become a maple syrup tycoon and push out all the real good Vermont maple syrup. There are other characters but they’re barely important, it strongly feels like book’s actual content exists to carry the concept of “Bernie Sanders mystery novel” and thus the content is extremely uninteresting, and actually quite short.

There isn’t a real mystery here, there’s no intrigue. There’s repeated references to a fictional mystery novel about a weed bakery murder and a short excerpt, because I guess weed dispensaries are a progressive topic and you could theoretically make a silly mystery novel around it. The murder happens like 30 pages in and it feels like ticking a checkbox on writing the Bernie Sanders mystery novel rather than Wanting To Write A Mystery Novel.

The actual book appears to be 210~ pages long and the last 30 pages are recipes adapted from various online sources or historical cookbooks (mostly the internet) themed around Vermont, New England, or maple syrup. The recipes claim to be adapted from their original sources and I went looking for one of them and found they had indeed made some alterations to the originals, so whatever. They feel crammed in at the end to make the book look longer, a 210-page book with a relatively large font and new chapters every 4 pages feels unusually short. I stole some of the recipes for my database and I will probably not cook any of them

More on confusing segments, there’s a part where protagonist and subject of the book Bernie Sanders get swarmed by bees in the car, three bees crawl through the airvents and the protagonist instinctively grabs a shoe to try and kill them and Bernie is like “no! Wait! We can’t kill any bees, they’re endangered!” (as far as I know, America has been able to deal with bee decline and the real issue is more that native bees are being crowded out by other ones??) and there’s an exchange (paraphrased) “Nobody’s perfect. Not even Obama. Maybe Michelle.” and I can tell so much about the audience of the book with that line.

The very very end of the book is, in about 100 words, the protagonist sees a hand sticking out from the snow and clears the snow around it and discovers in fact a whole body, and then texts senator Bernie Sanders with the following text exchange:

“Got your card, also found another dead body”

“In DC or Eagle Creek?”

“Do you have to ask? :)”

Girl you found a dead body what is this. You were too calm about the first one but they just drop another body being found in the last half page and it’s capped off with a smiley face with a fond text conversation. It’s so paint by numbers you could swap out the murder for literally any other crime or happening in the town and nothing would change.

This is fanfiction, but fanfiction has more love than this put into it. I feel weird about finding this book in the library because obviously I’m not American and it’s weird to find a product of Americans having a parasocial relationship with a politician (albeit, one of the best in the country) in my library. I also personally think a lot of RPF is weird/invasive (though with politicians I’m not really concerned) but even then.

There’s a fandom tag on AO3 ‘Political RPF – US 21^st c’. And if you go there you will probably find a fair bit of Bernie Sanders RPF. To be fair the American RPF politics tag on AO3 is mostly used by people doing little acts of protest against the US government, there is a lot of “I hate these people so I’m going to write them pregnant”. But it’s done for free and it comes directly from the heart, even if it is in anger.

Anyway, this book seems like it was hammered out on its concept alone and nothing else, gave no weight to any of its subject matter besides ticking boxes in making a mystery novel, has annoying narration, unchallenging politics, and damn, I sure found it in a New Zealand library?

I saw a video by someone talking about Love on the Spectrum’s discourses and is this good, is this bad, is this good representation, is it bad representation, is this inspiring, is this wholesome, does this encourage autistic people to go outside and date, does this humanise the cast, does this objectify the cast, is it infantilising as a concept, is it infantilising to say that the show is exploitative of its cast members who consented to this, is it bad to ask the cast on camera questions about sex, is it good for the audience to know that autistic people do in fact have sex, I do not care, I will end the discourse in one sentence, here we go:

Love on the Spectrum is a show with an inherently and insurmountably othering premise packaging autistic experiences for the consumption of neurotypical people.

I want to say though the video I’m talking about, the creator’s special interest appears to be discoursing about this kind of thing and I get it, if you have a special interest you want to explore every nook and cranny of the thing. I’m not condemning the creator, my perspective on the discourse is just from a different angle that the show in question is inherently ableist by its premise and the details of the show are in my mind, irrelevant. I also don’t think the show is meaningfully making the lives of autistic people as a group worse or different, ultimately the show is a reflection of ableism in our culture. Digging through the actual content of the show and talking about how the cast feel is not a *bad* way of engaging with it, but I think it ultimately muddies the waters in a way that isn’t productive.

I don’t always think “switch the roles” is the best argument for things, because it misses asymmetrical shapes of marginalisation, but also think about if this was a show about the dating lives of African-Americans made by white people. Reality TV targeting black Americans absolutely exists, but the key difference is that it’s targeting a black audience. Love on the Spectrum does not target autistic people, and while its cast consists of autistic people, it is made by neurotypicals for neurotypicals, who are presumably interested in the show because they know autistic people are different from them and socialise differently to them.

I reject that autistic people have poor social skills, we just effectively have a different culture. I have never struggled to understand or read another autistic person because we’re just very honest and understand that directness isn’t trying to be hurtful. Neurotypicals however, have weird confusing social rules. Why do neurotypicals get to decide that we’re socially inept because we have a different set of social rules to them?

Back to the comparison – a show about African-American social lives made by white creators for a white audience would be inherently othering, because the premise of the show is to present a different culture to people outside of the culture, and emphasize cultural differences.

If I can briefly discuss the actual content, the show frequently uses goofy music and the chosen shots emphasize the cast members perceived poor social skills or awkwardness.

The people I know who have watched the show watched it for different reasons, to be clear. My family watched it as a comedy and enjoyed a look into the perceived weirdness of autistic people dating. I asked them how they’d feel if me being in a relatonship was televised because of my autism and they agreed it would be weird. My social worker asked me if I’d seen it, she has an autistic adult son and her reason for watching it was she enjoyed seeing autistic people find successful love lives which she hoped her son could find someday. I also said I didn’t like the show and she understood after some ‘but it’s so cute’.

You can find plenty of autistic people or otherwise neurodivergent people creating artwork about their love lives or their thoughts on love, and all of them are significantly more insightful than a neurotypical looking in on autistic people. But also it probably wouldn’t be that interesting just because autistic people are people, and it only becomes interesting if you’re drawing a line between the love lives of autistic and allistic people and pretending autistic people’s relationships are weird and different and television-worthy.

Ultimately though I don’t think the show is measurably harmful, or making the lives of autistic people worse. Love on the Spectrum reinforces neurotypical conceptions of autistic people being meaningfully different, but this is an existing societal concept. I think I could make an argument for the 20 year group stalking campaign of Christine Weston Chandler being more harmful to autistic people societally than this show. There isn’t really anything in Love on the Spectrum that’s ableist in a way we haven’t seen before. It is a product of an ableist world and it reflects that. Still though I think it sucks. No further discussion needed.

Love on the Spectrum is a show with an inherently and insurmountably othering premise packaging autistic experiences for the consumption of neurotypical people. No further discourse.

I’ve tried to write this rundown like six times so I’m just going to presume that the reader is familiar with the source material without doing much explanation. There are several playthroughs to watch on YouTube which will give you a general gist of the idea of the game.

I will be reviewing the main game and not talking about the DLC as I played the game’s PSVR version which is a little shoddy but apparently not the worst VR version.

Not for Broadcast is an FMV game where you play a TV station broadcaster cutting a live news broadcast and making decisions on the ads you play, what you show on the air. Between the video segments you make decisions on your family life.

One of the reasons I want to talk about this game and why I’ve been suffering over it is that it’s one of those games that people rate as better than it probably deserves because the concept is novel.

The game is kind of like Night Trap! If Night Trap! Was Papers, Please but apolitical?

I bought this game in part because there just aren’t many FMV games anymore and I like seeing weird experiment games. That said, experimental games get a lot of leeway because it’s interesting that they’re trying something different. Unless your experiment game is outrageously weird and difficult to parse you’re going to be getting good reviews.

Briefly, before I go into the important bits, I want to touch on the game’s sense of humour. The game’s sense of humour is British in the sense that it’s mean. Most of the recurring characters outside of the major political players are running gags.

You have a useless pretentious artist doing school plays who gets government funding to keep making his terrible plays, including getting a prime-time TV slot.

Later, there’s a theatre troup invited to perform at the capital who are all notably gay with a handful being quite flamboyant.

There’s a football player who’s very stupid and has a play made about his life, mixing real-life retellings with high fantasy. You decide the course of his life by selecting what headlines to run.

There’s a rapper who presents himself as having come from the streets and growing up homeless, when in actuality he’s a prince from a foreign nation who falls back on his father at the slightest nudge. I think he’s meant to be Kanye before his Nazi shit, this game is from 2020 remember.

One section has a pop star composite of Ariana Grande and Miley Cyrus who innocently talks about what her management says about her and is I guess too dumb to notice it’s fucked up. She performs a song which is infinitely more explicit than anything on the pop charts (more so than WAP or Anaconda) which I suppose is what the developers feel pop music by women is like? The song is notably more male gaze-y than actual pop music is.

Early in the game, the National Nightly News has two hosts, Megan and Jeremy. Megan is a news presenter and Jeremy is a miserable bastard. I think he might be more funny if you’re British, but he’s perpetually a downer or actively taking shots at the subject matter in a way he doesn’t have the charisma to pull off.

The game starts ramping up when the not-UK is sanctioned and blockaded by neighbouring nations in response to their left-wing policies, which quickly begins to cause shortages of all kinds. The news focuses heavily on fluff pieces despite this, mentioning the blockade and ongoing effects of the sanctions only at the start of the program.

Jeremy snaps after having to interview a group of people with silly diseases, taking a gun from the on-site not-cop and causing a hostage situation live on air. He does this in protest of the media focusing fluff pieces over the Advance party’s increasing grip on power and the military blockade. He attempts to talk about some underground bomb tests and unusual laboratory tests too, but is cut off. He tells the player to play a tape on-air, or he will kill fucking everyone in the building, including coworkers etc.

Playing the tape will unveil the organised resistance movement against the government is lead by not-Alex Jones, and Jeremy chooses to basically self-immolate in protest, immediately disillusioned with the organised movement. If you don’t play it, he won’t kill anyone, woohoo, but he’ll be taken away and won’t be present on the news anymore.

The game from here will give great weight to Jeremy’s name and self-sacrifice For The News, his self-immolation is to protest the media’s choices on what to report on, not even in protest of the government. The game spends a fair bit of time foreshadowing Jeremy’s death/disappearance, there’s a psychic lady in the lockdown bonus episode who gives a vague but distressed prediction.

I don’t like Jeremy, though, he sucks. He should try being a more positive person. Also talk about the government directly instead of bitching that your news agency isn’t reporting on the right things. It’s the 80s you can probably start your own newspaper.

The politics of Advance don’t really resemble an actual political party or position, because something you fundamentally need to understand with Not for Broadcast is its politics are video game moral decision based instead of politically based.

Advance is (supposedly?) anti-free speech and anti-personal freedoms. Criticising the government can (apparently?) get you disappeared, and reporting your neighbours to the government for anti-government thought is encouraged. Nursing homes are also quickly replaced by assisted dying centres where elderly or terminally ill people can go or be sent to by their family for a week of five-star treatment before being euthanised.

Advance also provides free healthcare, easy to access funding for arts, free access to theatres and art galleries, free food and water for all, an immeasurably improved youth care system, rehabilitative justice as opposed to punitive justice, reformed police, and is socially progressive for the 2020s, let alone the 1980s. They’re in favour of people remaining child-free if they wish. They instate queer rights, and equal rights for women.

The two paragraphs above probably look a bit contradictory to you!

In contrast, the organised resistance movement lead by not-Alex Jones Disrupt is pro-free speech, but pro-capitalist and pro-”job creators”. They more or less advocate for a return to the previous government structure and previous status quo with wealth inequality, a significantly weaker social safety net, and implied fewer civil rights for marginalised groups, but with protected speech.

Different endings of the game reveal different secret agendas and conspiracies about either side, but I’ll talk about those later, because many of the endings directly contradict each other and would make discussing the politics of the two factions impossible.

The Big event of the game is when in response to the military blockade, the not-UK detonates nuclear devices in three major cities in Europe and demands that all countries involved in the blockade agree to be annexed. All countries immediately accept the terms to avoid nuclear annihilation and become ‘territories’.

As the game progresses, you’ll hear that Advance has been able to create programs to feed every person in every territory/western Europe three meals a day. You hear from a foster teen who grew up pre-Advance and recounts the system as being neglectful, uncaring, and rife with sexual abuse, and the immediate changes to make sure they were cared for and protected.

You will also hear that the prime minister Julia Salisbury killed fifteen million people in the nuclear attacks in response to the military blockades.

You have a government which is able to feed hundreds of millions of people three meals a day for absolutely no cost, and the same government is also responsible for killing fifteen million people in bombing attacks.

Again, this comes back to the game’s politics being based around video game moral decision logic rather than coherent politics.

There are like three billion endings so I’m just going to go through some notable ones.

In one ending, Advance is revealed to have put birth control into their free food due to overpopulation concerns. In most other endings, this wasn’t deliberate, it was because of the nukes. I want to point out here that overpopulation is broadly not a left-wing concern and to give Advance a major drawback they have to give them a quality broadly attributed to the right.

In another ending, footage will be aired of Disrupt’s leadership, consisting of former right-wing leaders of annexed countries discussing how to regain control, involving re-taking power and setting up death camps to purge intellectuals and ethnic minorities.

If Disrupt regains power, they’ll re-take the territories of Europe to presumably carry out said purge. They can also end the National Nightly News broadcast and replace it with Rapture Bioshock style propaganda.

There’s an ending where Advance announces a program where the government will pay you cash if you have children, in order to combat the fertility crisis.

The most optimistic ending the game presents is the ending where a new centrist political party Accord looks to win the next election. Accord of course means agreement between several parties.

What are the developer’s politics exactly?

It’s weird to play a game as ostensibly political as deciding whether or not to comply with an authoritarian government’s request to censor the news. Watching one playthrough I saw a comment asking if the game was made by ‘paranoid Thatcherites’ and, yeah that’s the impression I got too.

There are some parts that don’t fit with that, though, like the protagonist and your spouse have gender-neutral names and are referred to with they/them pronouns throughout, presumably so you can better project onto the protagonist regardless of your gender or sexuality. I just do not think conservative developers would do that.

The developers responded to a Steam post mentioning the decision to make the authoritarian regime liberal-left was because they felt it would make the most interesting story, and are more sympathetic to Advance than some of the game might make you think. So the developers are probably liberal and/or centrists.

Living in Paradise

The game’s theme which plays on loading screens goes

I’ve been living in a paradise

It’s awfully nice

if you don’t think twice

… I’ve been living where the food is free, a sanctuary, for all and sundry, I’ve been living in an allegory, ever since you made Advances on me

It is a nice little song, but with how the world is going this game has started to frustrate me more.

When I played the game initially and had a mull over the game’s politics being flavouring for the video game moral decision gameplay it became frustrating. The game is novel being FMV-based, but as a story it just comes down to just “centrism good” and absurd moral extremes. Again like, prime minister who feeds all of western Europe three meals a day for free but also killed 15 million people with nukes.

I made myself finally write this review concisely because the US is looking increasingly Germany 1930s what with deporting legal residents for protesting the on-going genocide in Palestine, sending migrants to off-shore detainment camps, putting a statement out for National Child Abuse Prevention month describing gender affirming care as ‘mutilation’, and intentionally tanking the economy and risking a recession.

This is authoritarianism.

I am frustrated by Not for Broadcast’s “this is a horrible government regime because free speech is restricted, even though the cost of living is almost nothing, food is free, people have reproductive rights, queer rights are enshrined in the government and unquestioned”, like, damn the reduced free speech sucks but the actual bar for punishable speech in this regime seems fairly high from what they show.

We see their rehabilitative programs genuinely working to help people. People who talk shit on the government are taken to them too though, and if Jeremy lives he’ll be brainfucked but they don’t shoot dissidents in the back of the head or put them in camps? The reduced free speech doesn’t feel that much more extreme than current Europe countries, either, is the thing.

There’s an element early on in the game where the government introduces an Advance membership card which allows holders to access government services quicker, and the game is greatly sceptical of this because it’s a new form of ID which quickly becomes mandatory, and that sounds spooky and authoritarian. But it isn’t applied that way, it’s not like you can be arrested for not being able to present one to a not-cop from the looks of it.

There’s a contradiction between the personal freedoms offered by the government like reproductive rights for women and queer rights versus the government’s supposed totalitarian control of its citizens to further the state.

I don’t have a clean wrap-up here, just that overall I find the game frustrating for depicting a weirdly lenient weirdly left-wing regime and going “this is bad because we don’t have this philosophical free speech freedom” when we’re seeing fascism rising worldwide which does actually make people suffer.

This is a response to a video by YouTuber gerg who I do not like very much. In the first 15 seconds of his video about Minecraft spinoffs he makes a joke about slurs, and later he jokes that the Minecraft jail is a Nazi concentration camp. In another video he refers to a warm variant pig as a ‘pigger’ and in this video says “I’m a gamer with a hard R”. He also made a really hateful video about another YouTuber who said he preferred old Minecraft.

I am writing this because I have never seen someone struggle to interpret a text as basic as Minecraft: Story Mode Season 2 and then declaring it 2/10 bad. I might have poisoned the well with my introduction there but it feels dishonest to not mention that.

Minecraft: Story Mode Common Criticisms

Minecraft: Story Mode is branded as a choose-your-own-adventure game developed and published by Telltale Games, Season 1 releasing in 2015 and Season 2 releasing in 2018. This game for many people was people’s first exposure to a Telltale formula video game as it’s one of Telltale’s few games for kids.

I am going to assume that people coming into this are aware of Minecraft: Story Mode and are at least familiar with seasons 1, 1.5, and 2, so I don’t have to explain all of it.

I’m just going to bullet point a few common criticisms and my opinions on them. I don’t think these are ‘refutations’ of these criticisms or arguments, you can decide how you feel about them.

Your choices don’t matter, the game is ultimately linear

This is true to an extent. Minecraft: Story Mode is ultimately a linear game, every episode ends at the same place and the game will end at more or less the same place with a few tweaks or changes. The most impactful choices in the game will be whether you rescue your friend Petra or the legendary hero Gabriel the Warrior in the first episode, and whether you take Magnus and Ellegaard’s armour. The ending choice is if you tell the gathered group that the Order of the Stone was fraudulent or if you let them believe.

The important other choices in the game are whether or not you bring Lukas into your friend group or not. There is a solid bit of variance with how things play out depending on how you resolve arguments or conflict between the characters, like if you side with Lukas or Axel during their fight, if you side with Magnus or Ellegaard when they’re fighting…

It would be nice for games to spiral off in any direction, I agree, but the game has a budget and creating spiralling paths for 4 episodes length would be extremely expensive and time-consuming to write out. I don’t think Telltale was obligated to create super high budget games like that and I’m also of the opinion that as a text if you have these many paths it becomes much more difficult to convey your themes, because a player might miss one path or they might miss another path, they might miss this important moment because they’re doing this other thing. To make this work would require an extreme budget and I don’t think it’s fully fair to fault Minecraft: Story Mode for not having episodes with multiple endings or multiple endings overall. One ending and a more-or-less linear path is the easiest way for the game’s themes to be consistently conveyed.

I think emphasizing “Your choices matter” in marketing of these games is honestly kind of a mistake because really, they’re stripped down Adventure games. People are split on visual novels but if Minecraft: Story Mode was marketed as such instead of a “Your choices matter” game I don’t think this conversation would be the same.

The writing is bad

I don’t really know what people mean by this because the game’s writing is absolutely flawed but people just say “bad writing” and move on without providing examples? I can give one:

Minecraft: Story Mode Season 1 has issues with trying to adhere to a Telltale formula where the characters have mandated conflict because of the stressful situation. Season 2 gets much better by having the conflict arise organically instead. Axel aggro-ing Lukas for not jumping into save Petra (someone Axel doesn’t know) for example, Magnus and Ellegaard fighting without giving a reason besides “ugh”, Lukas exploding in episode 3, etc. I understand why the characters are stressed but it feels manufactured, and often the conflict isn’t tied very strongly to the actual threat. It’s frustrating to watch.

I also want to put forwards that Minecraft: Story Mode is a children’s game and I think it’s unfair to hold it to the writing standard of media for adults. This isn’t a “children can just consume slop”, Minecraft: Story Mode has themes and stakes (I will be going into the themes later). If the themes don’t resonate especially with you I think it might be worth taking a step back and saying “This was not written for me, I am not the target audience”.

The characters have distinct written voices (even without the voice acting), not all the jokes land but they’re fine, you have a handful of standout characters in Season 1, it’s fine. It’s fine. This is not bad writing. Season 2 I would upgrade to good writing even, but Season 1 is perfectly competent.

The QTEs suck

This one is correct the QTEs do suck. Failing them is funny though

The combat sucks

It’s better in Season 2 but yeah it’s pretty bleh.

I’ll move onto now criticisms from gerg and where I agree and where I disagree and provide my thoughts

“A lot of the dialogue options are more or less the same answer“

i.e. having 3 options when Olivia is sad about probably losing the build contest again, all of which are consoling her.

I don’t think all of these should be linked to minutely different outcomes, but this is another budget thing. Mean options for every single piece of dialogue means having more writing time and more lines to record.

Giving Jesse more inconsequential dialogue options means you have something to click/push buttons and I don’t think it’s a bad thing for game flow or just being able to choose what you say.

“There are long stretches of time where I’m not doing anything because I’m just watching a cutscene or dialogue“

Well… that’s why Jesse has lots of inconsequential dialogue options and why there are QTEs.

It isn’t really solved on what to do for moviegames during these long stretches where you’re not walking around or in an active conversation. David Cage games make you perform QTEs but those interrupt the pacing of the scene and significantly weaken many of them.

That said, I kind of think you need to suck it up if you can’t stand just watching the screen as a cutscene plays out for three minutes. In the video, at the very start of Episode 2, gerg immediately puts his feet up to scroll on his phone for two minutes. To be a bit mean you need to lock in and just watch the three minute cutscene instead of ignoring it wholesale because there are no buttons to press.

“The name you pick for your build team doesn’t come back except for one time“

gerg says he claims it came back in episode 1 and that he doesn’t have footage so he may have dreamed it, no, Axel will say “It looks like [group name]’s luck is turning around” in Episode 1 at some point and in Episode 2 if you go to Boom Town your chosen name will be mentioned again. I believe there’s a spot for it to be mentioned in Episode 3 but I can’t remember that, I think it’s if you choose the name Dead Enders.

“The game is forcing me to do things I don’t want to“

In this example he’s annoyed he can’t bypass talking to the Butcher NPC and that the game forces him to talk. If you told Reuben to run for the hills earlier, you won’t know where he is and you’ll have to recover him, so hearing a butcher hawking pork chops is probably going to catch Jesse’s attention. The game forces you to talk to him because it is in Jesse’s interest as a character to speak with him. Earlier in this scene, you can speak to Lukas or dance at the DJ booth, but those can be bypassed because they aren’t story-required.

So… what if you could ignore the butcher NPC? The butcher NPC would then kill Reuben and he wouldn’t be in the rest of the game… which means at the very end of the game, Jesse doesn’t lose his closest friend fighting the Witherstorm. It would be a very bad choice for the game to allow you to just lose Reuben because you didn’t go to the butcher’s stand at the start of the game.

“Choices are contained within that episode“

This isn’t entirely true, everything will kind of manifest at the beginning of Episode 4, but the biggest one I can think of is how Magnus or Ellegaard will feel if you sided with them now that the other is dead, how Lukas will feel about you and if you can stop him from leaving to go find his other friends, if Lukas will swoop back in to help you with the final boss or if he’s just abandoned you… Your party into Episode 4 is very dependent on what you’ve chosen so far with a fair bit of variation.

“I don’t like that the major decisions are highlighted by there only being two of them to make, quote ‘to make things even easier for whatever vermin wrote this trash’“

This is just rude. The people who worked on this game are still working in the video games industry and are writing great games. I wanted to highlight this because listen man you don’t gotta say this about the devs. They’re solid people and it’s not fair to call the developers ‘vermin’ because they had a constrained budget.

“You can’t fail every QTE and die”

This game would be worse if most or every failed QTE resolved in a death. This is, again, a children’s game, and when you fail some QTEs you just get a different animation. When the game ramps up in difficulty more QTE failures will be deadly as opposed to just some of them. The Witherstorm final boss I believe has zero leeway on failed QTEs.

“You can’t win the building competition, no matter what you do, it will burn down”

This is untrue. I can actually provide criticism to the game on this front though. If you tell Axel and Olivia to stay behind and protect the build while you run off after Reuben, they will place cobblestone to protect the build from going up in flames, and you’ll win the competition, with your build being on display at Endercon.

If you remember though, the winner of the build competition will get tickets to see the symposium by Gabriel the Warrior at Endercon. Even if you win the competition though, you don’t get the tickets, and have to scare the bouncer with chickens to make it inside. The note that winners get tickets is completely forgotten.

“Ivor Minecraft’s name is pronounced incorrectly”

All the characters pronounce Ivor that way so I don’t think this is a flaw, this is just how this character’s name is pronounced.

“The gang ignores the wither bomb inside the basement and go upstairs shirking their responsibility to meet with Gabriel”

This isn’t what’s happening. You look at the wither and hear Ivor coming down the stairs, so the gang hides. When you’re discovered, Ivor pulls out an iron golem to drive you out of the room and the conversation upstairs grants you the choice between going downstairs to rescue Lukas, who didn’t make it out of the basement, or pushing through the crowd to inform Gabriel (the greatest warrior to ever live) that there is a monster in the basement threatening everyone there that he needs to go take care of.

“Ivor is an obvious villain and he kills 300 people”

Yeah he is but I have some thoughts on this later. In Season 1.5 Ivor is a core member of the cast and his personality does a pretty direct 180. He becomes extremely excitable and enthusiastic (if not very socially adept), and my read on him is Ivor is just straight-up LARPing the entirety of Season 1. Ivor is an obvious villain because he is in-universe playing a villain.

“The game is boring”

Listen man I think I’ve shown that gerg isn’t paying attention to the game like, at all, so I kind of think this is his fault.

“The game doesn’t let me craft whatever I want/I can’t craft the wrong object”

The very first time you get hold of the crafting function it allows you to craft a lever after Petra’s asked you to craft a sword.

There’s a common event in the game where all the gang will empty their pockets to find something to craft with the items everyone has on-hand, like a bow and arrow or a fishing rod, so you have multiple options in a few places, but they aren’t endless.

If you craft a lever in that first episode even it’ll remain in Jesse’s inventory up until Episode 4 where you can use it to bypass a puzzle in Ivor’s cottage. The game does this it allows you to craft the wrong item but only when doing that makes it come back around.

“None of the cast members have particularly notable personalities or have distinctive character traits”

I’m going to push back on this because each character has a unique style of dialogue. I don’t think the cast of Season 1 is all that strong with exception to Ivor and Soren though, but here, I can lay out the personalities of the main cast:

Olivia is cynical and pessimistic, but the most analytical of the group. “Subtle.” “Yeah,” “-as a punch to the face.” and “It’s hard to pick ‘glass-half-full’ when they keep kicking the glass over”. “Can you throw up inside your mouth?” I will concede again her traits don’t get much of a chance to shine, but they’re there.

Axel is a loser doofus who plays pranks on his friends. He’s brash and a little self-centred and uses his size to push others around, or to protect his friends. He chooses to hide out in the Nether to keep the Witherstorm in one place while everyone runs off to find a solution. Axel delights in the chaos of Boom Town and finds fun in the less immediately life-threatening chaos.

Petra (who is better characterised in Season 1.5 and Season 2) is the cool girl you look up to and wish you were like. Unfortunately she gets little screentime here because she’s either dying of Wither for most of the game or she has no memory, but she still tries her best to lead when unwell and remains an accomplished fighter.

Lukas is a dorky guy who’s loyal to his friends and despite being the leader of the bully group, is kind to the rest of the gang. He’s someone who likes to be helpful, if you kick him out of the dirt hut he spends the night scrounging for food for when everyone else wakes up to try and apologise for the fight he didn’t start. He’s a curious person and is delighted by the inside of Soren’s fortress with its enormous statues and knows more about architecture than the rest of the gang.

I’m not going to say they’re strong characters, they’re not notable, but they aren’t robots, the game is just not especially focused on Axel or Olivia getting their moments to shine.

“The gang don’t have personality-related or ideas-based clashes”

This one is fair criticism, I would say Ellegaard and Magnus fighting is an ideas-based clash given their respective fields are construction and destruction, but still.

In the very manufactured conflicts you are able to take sides with little lasting impact besides what happens in the next scene, a character thanking you for taking their side or a character saying they wish they’d taken your side, etc. The only character who will start to dislike you though is Lukas.

The video reads “Magnus & Ellegaard dislike each other, literally 10 seconds later they are fine and friends” which isn’t true, because in the very next scene they’re fighting again, and in the ‘10 seconds later they are fine scene’, you’ll notice that Ellegaard and Magnus are at the front and end of the group to be apart from each other and are shooting each other looks.

“Everyone in the group always agrees with each other”

In Episode 3 you get the choice to save the Amulet from being washed into the mob grinder or to save Axel and Reuben from being swarmed by monsters. If you pick the amulet, if you have Gabriel with you, he’ll congratulate you and give you a hard talk that it was ultimately the right decision over your friends. Though, if you have Petra with you she’ll scold you for choosing it over them.

There isn’t a lasting impact to how they treat you but it does give us insight onto each character’s opinions. Reuben will also become quite upset and just hang out with Lukas for the rest of the episode.

The group otherwise usually doesn’t disagree on methods for how 2 save the world and that’s true, I wish the conflict between the characters arose organically too!

“Every character speaks in an overemphasized manner”

I just don’t think this is the case, there are a few annoying lines at the start “It’s the order of the losers, again” “haha, good one gill” but no one responds to getting into the End with “WoW We’Re in the END DIMENSION this is REALLY SPOOKY GUYS I hope we find SOREN SOON”, in the example where they enter the end Lukas is fuckin pissed off and exhausted and a little sarcastic.

“I want to play Episode 2 again to see the other side of the Redstonia/Boom Town decision but to do that I have to replay the entirety of Episode 1 again because there is no manual saving or loading”

No you do not. To see the other side of that decision you have to copy your save file into a second slot, select the second save file, go back to Episode 1, click Rewind, and click the final scene, where you have to play for only a few minutes to make it to that final decision.

Alternatively, you can create a new save and start from Episode 2 and roll flip the metaphorical coin until you get the decision you want.

“The Command Block existing raises a lot of questions about the universe, if I exist as someone living inside Minecraft a block that could alter reality would make me question my existence”

This is just a personal yell but I honestly don’t think this is the case. This is also a world where they don’t question why trees float, a Command Block existing is just a part of the world the same way characters in a magical universe don’t inherently question magic existing. At least not any more than we do, I’ve seen people argue that our universe having consistent laws and maths is evidence supporting the simulation hypothesis.

“The game doesn’t use its music very well”

This is fair. In this case he’s talking about the music when you’re fighting Ivor. The Witherstorm theme is good but a lot of the music is so quiet or so barebones synth with a single other lead instrument it’s just not very audible or noticeable. Season 2 fixes this.

I don’t know if the music when you’re fighting Ivor needs to be super dramatic, though. The reason you’re fighting is you find Ivor in an enclosed room and you’re trying to detain him until the others arrive, and Petra or Gabriel pull their sword on him. Ivor is trying to escape the room because ‘I’m the only one who can stop the Witherstorm!’ and you’re trying to keep him there.

The choreography for the fight against Ivor is kind of janky and weird in general, the swordfighting is weird and there’s a lot of underwhelming slow-motion.

“Soren can convince himself to join up with the gang even if you say nothing the entire time, my choices don’t matter”

So there are a few scenes in the game where you have to convince a person to do something, but no matter what you say in dialogue it turns out how you need it to.

I think it could be worth making a version of the game where if you don’t convince Soren to come with, you leave the room and game over and have to try again, but I can see it being tedious to go through the same dialogue trees several times or being dissuaded from choosing specific options if you know that there are wrong options that will lead you to a game over rather than just a different outcome.

In Soren’s case specifically, Soren will complain to you that he’s gone out of his way to avoid people coming to find him to help them fix some issue, but his loneliness is extremely obvious and he hasn’t seen the surface of the Overworld in so long he doesn’t know what it looks like. Soren even asks quietly if Jesse is his friend and if you say no, Soren will laugh nervously and “oh, I see, a joke, between friends!” because he is genuinely desperate.

“Ellegaard dying is the only choice in the game with long-lasting consequences”

This is ignoring the Petra and Gabriel choice, which I’m saying because I don’t think YouTuber man noticed or fiddled with the game beyond one playthrough and then got mad saying his choices don’t matter whatsoever. I notice in Episode 4 he doesn’t have Lukas with him in the party either which is a culmination of your choices over time, because if you don’t have a good relationship with him he will leave and won’t come back to help you in the final boss. If you have a good enough relationship he’ll come with you to help find Ivor’s stuff at the edge of the world.

“I won’t play Season 1.5”

This will be a mistake! I will explain why in a moment!

“We learn in Episode 4 that Ivor is the secret 5^th member of the Order of the Stone”

This is conveyed as early as Episode 1, and shown further in Episode 2. Episode 1 you find a book in the temple which is a required interact which recounts the Order’s history, but including Ivor. Ivor was a member of the Order of the Stone and his erasure is suspect. In Episode 2, the centre stone of the amulet glows when Ivor is nearby, and in Episode 3 starts fading as he leaves. If you only learned this by Episode 4 you aren’t remotely paying attention.

“How did the Order discover the Command Block? We’re never going to explain it who cares how this central core element came into being?”

Hi, so you can’t say this and then skip episode 5-8. While we aren’t told directly, there are some pretty heavy breadcrumbs pointing in the right direction as to where Soren got this.

While traversing the portal network, you find several books authored by Soren scattered across worlds he must have inexplicably happened upon. But to enter the portal network he would have needed an enchanted flint and steel to use on a specific portal. Ivor is also aware of an ancient group of builders, older than the Order, called the ‘old builders’, who created these enchanted flints and steel and portals to other worlds. Through the portal network adventures, we find a technical book written by Soren about creating a one-of-a-kind redstone block in the possession of a former old builder and the current ones have a book of his too.

Soren (according to writer Eric Stirpe on his tumblr) was pitched to be an old builder and return in Episode 8, but marketing vetoed it as they felt returning characters were not good for marketing the game. It’s very likely that we were going to get a direct confirmation Soren built it with the old builders or stole it from them. Though, with the breadcrumbs remaining in the game it’s not a big jump to assume Soren got hold of it through the old builders still.

“There is only one ending”

You can decide how to feel about this, there are variations on the same one ending but yes it is overall one ending. Reuben dies, Jesse saves the day, the New Order of the Stone is formed, Lukas either leaves in the ceremony or is glad to be invited, you tell the crowd that the Order of the Stone was fraudulent or you don’t.

If the game doesn’t have more or less one end point there are no room for sequels. Many games don’t need sequels! But Minecraft: Story Mode is ultimately a product to make money and they leave the door open for more of that money making. How you feel about that is up to you but I don’t think it’s inoffensive to leave the game with a single ending so a sequel can be made, personally.

This is the end of Season 1’s critique. I will once again concede that I don’t think Season 1 is excellent, it’s like, it’s fine. It’s fine. It’s being misrepresented in that video as being worse than it is. It’s fine. A lot of the issues with it come down to general dislike of the genre.

gerg also shows a persistent refusal to actually engage with what’s happening in the story, missing key details repeatedly or asking why a question isn’t answered when he refuses to play a large chunk of the game which allows you to infer the answer.

I think Season 1.5 really shines above the first season with its self-contained storylines and an overarching plotline. The core cast is a lot smaller, shrinking to Jesse, Ivor, Petra, and Lukas. Each character gets more time to shine and they slot into working roles for the story. Jesse is the protag, Petra is the muscle, Lukas is the polite dorky guy writing their adventures, Ivor is the comic relief weirdo. The stakes are a lot lower and at least contained to that episode, the manufactured conflict is gone and only arises when it naturally occurs in the story, etc.

Ivor rarely remembers Lukas’ name, Petra doesn’t like Ivor because he’s too high-energy, Jesse gets to step up and be a hero. Ivor hard carries is my point.

Missing Season 1.5 means you’re missing characterisation and thematic context for Season 2

Season 1.5 retroactively strengthens aspects of Season 1, like again, we see Ivor in his natural state when he’s not playing the villain and understand he’s like that in Season 1 because he’s LARPing the entire time.

We also begin to develop a bit of an overarching theme. There is no big threat, just the gang being lost in a network of portals forced to trial and error each one until they find their way home. The portal network was constructed by an ancient group of builders as mentioned earlier, and some of the people you encounter Ivor will sometimes speculate to be an old builder or to have at least known one. The first confirmed old builder you meet also hates that name.

Ivor is no longer a villain for a start. In Episode 7 you find a world where the population has been subsumed by a giant redstone computer named PAMA who was created to control monsters to perform manual labour, in order to make society more efficient, ‘useful’. Eventually it starts taking over humans and its creator, Harper, is the only person remaining. At the end of the episode once you’ve defeated PAMA you have to ask the town’s freed residents to either forgive Harper for what she’s done and to let her back into society or tell Harper she should probably leave the town and come with you instead.

When you meet the Old Builders, they’re megalomaniacs running a sports league where kidnapped competitors are forced to play team games with the promise of being able to leave if they win. The leader, Hadrian of course never lets anyone leave and strikes a deal with Jesse that if he wins, he’ll let him go free, but if he chooses to throw the game, all his friends will go free (including those kidnapped from his homeworld) at the cost of mining quartz forever and ever. Of course you defeat Hadrian and the other Old Builders and go home free with their portal atlas.

There’s an overarching theme being built here that every legendary powerful person is just a flawed human person, and the vast majority of those people are redeemable. Ivor is redeemed, Harper is redeemed. Hadrian and Mevia, two of the main old builders are not redeemed but Otto, the third is able to use his power to end the games and allow competitors to go home.

Season 1.5 is a showcase of the New Order of the Stone’s golden age, which is important to Season 2, because by the time Season 2 comes around that’s passed. Petra doesn’t get much actual time being herself in Season 1 because she’s sick the entire time, and she’s one of the main characters in Season 2.

If you bypass Season 1.5 you’re missing important establishing themes and pieces to Minecraft: Story Mode as a whole.

Children Don’t Have Purchasing Power

gerg opens this discussion with talking about how he suspects Telltale went under because their games are effectively free to view on YouTube with very little variance in experience if you play it for yourself. I think there’s some truth to this, Minecraft: Story Mode was allegedly Telltale’s moneymaker but I wonder how many people experienced the game entirely through YouTube.

When Season 2 was coming out, the episodes released a day early for YouTubers to stream or play the game even, meaning you could be spoiled before the game even came out because Telltale was releasing it early to influencers.

Children don’t have purchasing power and I was on the older end of Minecraft: Story Mode fans when it was coming out (14 for Season 1, 17 for Season 2) and it was a great fight with my family to purchase subsequent episodes past 1 with my own money because I didn’t have a debit card and going out to buy a PSN card would be a trek. I suspect people younger than me would have parents aware that they could just watch the episodes for free on YouTube and put that on instead without paying a cent.

His argument is that they went under because people can just watch Telltale games on YouTube and get more or less the same experience, I think that’s true for specifically Story Mode because again, children don’t have purchasing power, but I don’t know about their other titles.

Minecraft Story Mode Season 2

His opinions on season 2 were what made me write all this up because I’m kind of bewildered. This guy absolutely misinterprets Minecraft: Story Mode Season 2 and then calls it “bad writing” while missing core points and common tropes in fiction. Minecraft: Story Mode Season 2 is a text for children.

gerg (correctly) praises the character writing improving, the presence of conflict between the characters that arises organically, improved animation and cinematography, and improved visuals. He reports disillusionment by the end of Episode 2, though, ‘flicking through my phone and waiting for the whole thing to end already’.

“The main theme of the game is moving on“

gerg flashes this text on the screen but then completely whiffs past it for the rest of this, and by failing to recognise this he completely misinterprets the text and specifically Romeo as a character.

“The story of Season 2 is about Jesse trying to overcome and defeat The Admin Romeo”

I think this is incorrect, defeating Romeo is the driving point of the story and the main threat but he isn’t what the story is about.

Jesse’s life has changed considerably from his adventuring days, and he’s starting to settle down some as leader of Beacontown. Similar things are happening for his other friends, Axel and Olivia are now residents of Boom Town and Redstonia. They’ve all gathered to meet as a group to hear Lukas’ latest book, this being his next after he published the book recounting his adventures in Season 1.5, which he was also writing during that season if you were paying attention.

They’re all in the situation of being adults who don’t have much time for each other as you used to, and in Petra’s case she’s still adventuring. Her outfit is her armour from Season 1.5 but in remnants. She’s moved to another city without telling Jesse either and doesn’t really like the rest of the group as much, they’re kind of lame these days. The drifting apart is obvious.

Romeo is a god who re-emerges from the ether, Jesse having been brought to his attention after he defeats the Witherstorm. Jesse is his newfound champion, and he arrives at Beacontown as a giant colossus to destroy things (changing the time to night for a more dramatic battle). Once he’s defeated, he shortly returns as a snowman promising eternal night and eternal snow unless Jesse gathers his friends to take on his super cool ice spire game.

Romeo is a counterpoint to Jesse. Jesse and Romeo are both fairly powerful people, but Romeo is a god with near endless power and very little perspective for how other people live and not a lot of empathy. Romeo had similar drift apart with his friends and when Fred and Xara try to push back on Romeo’s behaviour, Romeo feels betrayed, kills Fred (possibly on accident) and imprisons Xara. It’s unlikely that Jesse’s friendships will end up exactly like this, but Petra already moved away without telling Jesse – they could very much have a irreconcilable falling out.

When Jesse breaks the rules and tries to rescue friends who lost in some of the ice spire challenges, Romeo once again feels betrayed, nabs either Petra or Jack as his new best friend and sends Jesse to Minecraft jail like he does with everyone who displeases him.

Romeo eventually starts wearing Jesse’s skin, because no one likes Romeo, but everyone likes Jesse! While wearing Jesse’s skin, he terrorises Beacontown and develops a cult of personality where everyone must praise him, Jesse, for how amazing he is. Romeo later confides in Jesse that he hates being him because people are always asking things from him and don’t want to give a lot back to him.

“Jesse is sent to Minecraft jail by Romeo after he violates an arbitrary rule”

Jesse indeed fails an arbitrary rule and is sent to Minecraft jail, and this isn’t just something random that occurs so the plot can keep moving, it is important to understanding Romeo’s character. When Jesse rescues his friends who lost in various challenges, Romeo is offended that Jesse isn’t playing by his ruleset and isn’t participating in his game. Romeo has god powers and thus has little perspective on how much he’s hurting, and when he sees that Jesse isn’t going to play with him the way he likes, he discards Jesse and punishes him.

“How did Xara and Fred lose their admin powers?”

We don’t actually know that admins are necessarily invincible to other admins. If we guess they’re in creative mode there are niche ways for people to be killed in creative mode, and we don’t know that Romeo isn’t just “/gamemode 0 xara”. It is not a flaw of the story that we don’t know by what mechanism Romeo killed Fred and removed Xara’s admin power.

We know from Eric Stirpe that there was going to be a scene where we see Fred being killed, but it was cut from the game because it would be a scene without being in Jesse’s perspective and it killed the pacing. I honestly don’t think we need to see the specifics of what happened. Xara specifies ‘it was slow’ and that’s all we need to know. This is not something that makes no sense, there are just details we don’t need to know.

“Romeo speaks like a spoiled ten year old… because he is badly written.”

Romeo is a spoiled ten year old because he is a god. This is intentional. If I can call back to word of god again, Eric Stirpe stated Romeo’s general demeanour is inspired by online multiplayer game toxicity, and it has clearly conveyed over very well.

“It’s all a game conspiracy theory makes more sense than Romeo just being evil because he’s evil”

YouTuber man tries to reconcile the supposedly poor writing with the game by putting forward the theory that Xara and Romeo are the only real people playing on a Minecraft server, Romeo is in real-life a spoiled ten year old who de-ops his friend Xara in the console, Fred died in real life, the Order of the Stone are their school friends, and the rest of the cast are NPCs. He posits this facetiously to be more believable and better writing than “Romeo just being inherently evil”, and here’s why that’s an incorrect read.

“Romeo is evil for the sake of being evil”

When Xara is initially introduced, she’s in her highest security prison and unable to leave. If she steps off the pressure plates, then the cell will explode and kill her, and they’re the kind of pressure plate that can’t be activated with an item. I mention this because here the game gives you a choice to leave Jack’s villager husband Nurm, or Stella’s pet llama she dotes on Lluna. If you take too long deciding, Xara will get frustrated with you and take off with both Lluna and Nurm, leaving Jesse imprisoned.

When escaping, you’re intercepted by the Warden who threatens to kill you and himself with TNT if they leave. While the cast is frozen with indecision and fear, Xara responds by just shooting him in the chest with a bow and arrow.

The crew distrust Xara because she used to be an Admin. We can see she has a similar disregard for life as Romeo and is not dissimilarly self-centred from those two interactions.

Being an admin corrupts an individual, because absolute power corrupts absolutely. Romeo is evil because he is a powerful god and has little perspective or thought for other people’s feelings. This is a basic, very common trope in fiction.

“It’s never explained why he kills Fred and Xara”

Romeo kills Fred because as Xara says, “we wouldn’t join him”, in presumably his increasingly violent play. Romeo will only kill Xara if she marches through the gates of Beacontown armed with a bow and arrow. Obviously, she poses no threat to him, but she is trying to kill him. Romeo kills her to clean up any loose ends, because, again, he doesn’t see the value in other people’s lives.

“Romeo is a power-tripping moderator for the sake of it, which I guess is quite standard”

Romeo is a power-tripping moderator because having this kind of power creates inherent evil, it’s absolute power corrupts absolutely. The quite standard comment frustrates me because YouTuber man is close to an epiphany about what the game is trying to say. Romeo is evil because he is a powerful god, and being a powerful god makes you evil.

“Romeo doesn’t deserve redemption… because he’s put you through hours or torment, killed his friends, forced you to fight against your own friends to the death, runs a Minecraft jail, it is stupid that this character is considered redeemable”

This is another reason season 1.5 is important. We know from Season 1.5 that all of these powerful characters are just human beings who make mistakes, sometimes severe and continuous lapses in good judgement even. During the final boss fight against Romeo, you enter stages where he’s clearly afraid and remorseful for some of the things he’s done.

In certain endings, once Romeo is de-admin’d he can even self-sacrifice to save Jesse and friends, or refuse to leave the Terminal as it’s collapsing because he doesn’t deserve to live.

Also, most importantly: Romeo is no longer an admin and is forced back to regular human perspective. The absolute power that was corrupting him has been removed from him.

Romeo’s redemption arc isn’t even befriending Jesse, his next course of action is going back to the world he bedrocked over to try and make things right. If Xara is alive, he accepts readily that she might just kill him, and he might deserve it.

It’s important to note here that leaving Romeo to die or pulling him with you out of the Terminal is not the game’s final, important decision. YouTuber man leaves Romeo to die because he’s an asshole which idk can’t fault that.

Alternate story proposal from gerg

YouTuber man then proposes an alternate story which he feels would be better. I’m going to present it without commentary then give my thoughts. Romeo’s friendships don’t disintegrate with a bang because he’s evil, they fade over time. He notes that this would then reflect Jesse’s friend group. Romeo doesn’t move on and forces everyone close to him to pretend nothing’s changed in their games and Fred isn’t actually dead, Fred just doesn’t play with him, and Romeo blames his friends. Jesse’s rejection angers him further, Romeo being a ‘lonely mad tyrant with no one to share it with’.

He adds that you have many conversations with Romeo with “The Admin will remember that” appearing in the corner, and he wants the big decision to be if Romeo takes you with him or leaves you to die in the Terminal.

Most of these points are already in the story and shows he isn’t paying attention or comprehending the text made for children

Romeo’s friend group disintegrating suddenly with a bang already reflects Jesse’s friend group. We can presume that before Romeo killed Fred that their friend group was already drifting apart. Romeo is a worst case scenario Jesse, he’s who Jesse is afraid of becoming.

Romeo is already arguably forcing people to play with him, he’s playing with mortals instead of other gods. The challenge he sets up in Romeoburg is clearly made for people with admin powers, for a start, but Romeo doesn’t grant the protection of admin powers to Jesse or his friend group.

Fred being dead is important because that’s their friend group’s massive falling out and point of no return. This is not something Romeo and Xara can reconcile. Petra moving out of Beacontown without telling Jesse isn’t nearly at this level but an irreconcilable point of no return in their friendship could very well happen.

Romeo is named Romeo because the writers room felt it was the most ironic name for a lonely guy to have. YouTuber man is proposing more or less the same story, he just wasn’t paying attention or can’t comprehend the text made for children, or thinks that because Jesse’s friend group is drifting apart instead of there being a murder that there isn’t an intended parallel. Fred and Xara clearly parallel Axel and Olivia respectively, even.

Romeo is not the core point of the story and should not determine the ending. This would make the game bad. If you know that Romeo is going to leave you to live or die, the most obvious course for action is to constantly suck up to him rather than convincing him to be a better person. Also obviously the mean options become the incorrect options instead of a choice to take, by giving you a flat good end or a bad end.

Absolutely missing the core part of the story

The final major decision for Minecraft: Story Mode Season 2 is whether you leave Beacontown to run off with Petra to adventure on the road indefinitely, or if you say goodbye to Petra and choose to settle down with your new life as mayor of Beacontown.

In Episode 4, you enter a house Romeo lived in with Xara and Fred a very very long time ago, back when they were still friends. Jesse reflects on some of the things they had inside, noting he doesn’t live in a treehouse with his friends anymore and he hasn’t seen some of his friends in a long time. Petra will have an earnest conversation with Jesse that her life’s path is most likely going to be away from Beacontown, and when she leaves, it might be a very very long time before she comes back, and there’s the implicit chance that she might never return. Will they still be friends, if she leaves without him?

You can comfort Petra by assuring her that you’ll always be friends even if you don’t talk as much as you used to, and that you’ll always be waiting for her. Or, that you’ll be right beside her and that you can’t settle down.

In Episode 2, you have a conversation with Lukas about how Jesse’s been wanting to settle down and throw in the adventuring towel, but that it’s hard to quit life like that. Lukas will note whatever happens, he wants Jesse to be happy.

I think these choices are both really good endings thematically, either Jesse is tired and constrained by settling down and following what he wants to do, in which case he might lose some of his more settled-down friends, or Jesse decides it’s time to retire from the wild life and let his wilder adventuring friends go as he settles into his new responsibilities.

Once again, Romeo is the driving threat and who Jesse fears becoming, not the core part of the story. gerg completely misses the point here.

“Minecraft: Story Mode Season 2 isn’t impacted by your choices”

This is frustrating because Season 2 has a lot more variance than Season 1, like if you allow Radar to develop into a confident person, if you decide to trust or work with Stella, if you do Xara the courtesy of giving her a bed to sleep in, how rough of a time Jack has, like if he loses an eye or if he’s kidnapped by god, if Petra loses her favourite sword. If you give up your sword to some underworld scavengers then when Ivor comes by to murder you in 1 hit, you’ll have to convince him to not kill you instead of being able to fight him. These are more minor outcomes but I think they matter, still.

Romeo and Xara can both die, or both live, or one dies and the other lives. Specifically, Romeo will survive if you allow Radar to distract a giant enderman in Episode 4 as he’ll return in a crucial moment and allow Romeo to save himself. If you don’t have Radar with you then one of the characters from Fred’s Keep will travel with you in Episode 5. There’s a fair bit of variance and two different endings!

Man Destroys Xbox 360 and Physical Copy of Minecraft: Story Mode Season 1

Look man those physical copies don’t do anything these days and this is a trope but c’mon dude it’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. Media for children.

Conclusion

When Minecraft: Story Mode came out it was cool to shit on and to be fair that first episode is kind of rough. Season 2 is leaps and bounds better than Season 1 and Season 1.5 is much better than Season 1.

It’s been almost ten years since Episode 1 released and the nostalgia cycle has finally turned around for it, because the people who played it when they were children are old enough to post on the internet about it being good actually. It is not ‘peak’ but it’s alright. It’s fine. Season 1.5 and 2 are the strong points.

I’m just kind of amazed that I clicked on the video and saw the guy obviously coming into the game in bad faith and refusing to pay attention the second there wasn’t a button to press, repeatedly missing key details, concern trolling about details that don’t matter or are explained in areas where he wasn’t listening or refused to play (where did Soren find the command block, by what mechanism did Romeo kill Fred), completely missing the thematic through-line and declaring the game hot garbage written by ‘vermin’.

Like… are we still doing this? Eric Stirpe who I’ve mentioned several times throughout this as the lead writer of Season 2 is slated as the lead writer for Remedy’s Control 2, a company known for story-driven games, and which won Best Narrative at the Game Awards 2023 for Alan Wake 2. The people who wrote this game did their best with the resources they had, Season 1 was fine, Season 2 good.

I won’t say I’m media literate nor call YouTuber man media illiterate but, this is a text for children. How did you misinterpret it this poorly? Maybe it would make sense if you paid attention to the game?

I want to draw a comparison to the Minecraft movie coming out very soon which is going to be a Jumanji clone. The Minecraft movie is the safest movie I’ve ever seen and for that reason it is going to suck.

Story Mode is constrained by its Telltale formula at first but flourishes in Season 1.5 and 2. Season 1.5 the developers were able to look around the Minecraft community for popular challenges and community activities to draw inspiration. Episode 5 focuses on Sky City, a long-running Skyblock challenge, Episode 6 is uhhh a murder mystery adventure map, Episode 7 is about exceptional Redstone creations, Episode 8 is about multiplayer minigame servers. There is vision.

Season 2 I think is thematically perfect for its target audience, when you’re a kid friends come and go especially as you get older and into adulthood. Accepting that things will change and you may not be as good friends with people as your lives change is an important and resonant message.

Minecraft movie is none of these things. He is steve. Chicken jockey. Minecraft movie bad story mode good. If you don’t pay attention to a story and miss core details you can’t call it definitively bad and claim you can write something much better, because your proposed other ending is almost entirely what the game is but you couldn’t manage the complexity of having multiple themes, completely failing to interpret the text of children’s video game. Thank you for reading, goodbye, I’m going to make buldak noodle.

The Piglet’s Big Game Revisionism of November 2024

Screenshots sourced from Longplay Archive of the Nintendo GameCube version

Piglet’s Big Game is a 2005 adventure game for the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo GameCube. You play as Piglet exploring the dreams of other Winnie-the-Pooh characters, facing your fears and helping them accomplish tasks in dreamland.

I had this game when I was tiny, and it did scare me. The game stuck with me as a teenager because I remembered specifically, two levels were weirdly atmospheric in a way you wouldn’t expect from a Winnie the Pooh licensed game. The levels I remembered were a library level, and specifically a visual of a spiralling bookshelf going infinitely downwards. I also remembered a black and white castle. As a teenager, I thought “man, that’s a game”, and decided to pick it up to play it again to see how it was.

My description was that it was Winnie-the-Pooh Yume Nikki in theming and general tone. Piglet’s Big Game doesn’t have a very musical soundtrack, except at the start of each level where a little friendly tune will play to indicate a save point. Most of the soundtrack consists of short atmospheric loops, much like Yume Nikki. The game has two stand-out uneasy feeling levels, Owl’s dream and Eeyore’s dream. Owl’s dream is set in some wizardry intellectual tower with lots of books and inkwells and classical art, Eeyore’s dream is set in an above-ground Halloween-y area and a stark black and white castle underground.

There are six levels total. Pooh’s dream, a candyland, Roo’s dream, where everything is made of cardboard and crayons, Rabbit’s dream, which is… gardening themed? and Tigger’s dream which is split between a theme park and snowy cliffs. Each level gets longer and more difficult as you progress, and Tigger’s level feels almost double the length of Rabbit’s.

The thing is I didn’t think this game was a hidden gem. It’s an interesting novelty? I will explain more later, but the reason I’m writing all of this is about a week ago I woke up to see that the game had exploded on Twitter with “Hey what the fuck happens in this game” and Piglet running around in the dark dining room area. People learned that one piece of the soundtrack shares a sample with the song Chthonic Symphony from Silent Hill 2 Remake and ran with “Silent Hill 2 remake sampled Piglet’s Big Game???” but it seems like people did come to figure out the sample is from a sound library Akira Yamaoka has the license for.

Then I started seeing people play the game by downloading a 100% completed save file and just running around the completed areas? It’s like running around in Resident Evil if there were no enemies or puzzles left to do. I were seeing people comment things like “oh man this is so spooky, there’s absolutely nothing there, amazing atmosphere and design”. So here’s an actual review by someone who played it as a kid, as a teenager, and briefly as an adult.

I Mean It’s Got Cool Atmosphere And A Cool Fixed Camera But The Gameplay Loop Is Really Tedious And Bad

Piglet’s Big Game is an adventure game at its core. You run around the various rooms, collect objects, use objects to interact with things in the world to progress. You have Piglet’s friends around sometimes to talk to who can provide direction and a reason for what you’re doing.

You have an inventory of four slots which you can view/use with the face buttons. You pick up a candle, it’s on your X button. You walk over to the chocolate, press X, Piglet will use the candle to melt the chocolate, the candle will disappear from your inventory.

The heffalumps and woozles placed around the level will see Piglet and chase you if you wind up in their line of sight. In horror fashion, the woozles move faster than Piglet, so if you can’t leave the room in time, they can and will touch Piglet and scare him. An interesting note, when they’re about to touch Piglet, the game will play an alarm clock ring very loudly.

Piglet can engage his enemies in combat by facing them and pressing triangle to square them up. You’ll be moved to a purple starry void and the enemy will walk towards you slowly as you perform button input QTEs to perform your Brave Face to scare the enemy until they are defeated and turn into a collectable vial.

Every second level exit is gated by a spooky door who can only be scared by the most recently unlocked Brave Face, therefore gating your progress until you unlock them. How do you unlock Brave Faces?

Here’s where the main gameplay loop is. In every room, there will be objects/geometry/level props that contain cookies. Each cookie dispenser contains five cookies. Piglet can kick the object to get the cookies out, which will fly out of the object. You need to run to collect them, and quickly, because uncollected cookies will wobwobwobwob and then disappear back into the object. Piglet’s slow movement speed, coupled with the fact some objects throw their cookies out far, you are basically guaranteed to miss a few cookies on your first kick and have to slowly go all the way back to the object, then kick it again, then walk back out to collect the cookies.

This cookie system is the major issue with the game, and the main form of gameplay. The game expects you to clear every single room and every single cookie in that room if you want to beat the level, meaning the majority of your gameplay is running around each room and kicking things to see if they will spawn cookies. I would argue it compromises the atmosphere that you have to view the levels through the lens of “which object will throw out cookies when I kick it?”, because they can be pretty much anything. Inkwells, chairs, fences, oak logs, trees. Everything can contain cookie.

Design documents put out by the game’s director described the game length as “10 hours for a medium child” and the cookie system makes complete sense when you remember that. Adventure games often got their length by being intentionally indecipherable with nonsense puzzles, but you don’t want to make one of those for your babby Winnie-the-Pooh licensed game. So kicking random objects in the world to spew out cookies which will quickly vanish back into the object is probably intentionally designed as a time padding activity.

Now that doesn’t make the best game, but remember that this is also a PS2 movie tie-in game. The atmosphere is inspired, but it is also product that had to meet a certain length for parents to get their money’s worth. I don’t think this game is the product of developers who had ideas for a bigger or better game but got stuck making a licensed Disney game, I think this is the product of developers who got the rights to make a licensed Disney game and sprinkled in some interesting, fun ideas on the thing they were contracted to work on.

How Did We Get Here?

I was seeing people on Twitter speculate about how the game’s gameplay could work from short clips, noting that when Piglet takes damage from being scared he’ll move faster. They put this as a potentially interesting or fun ‘risk vs reward’ system, but like that’s not actually a gameplay mechanic, nor is there any real reward involved because to progress you’re going to be picking up items or looking for things that will dispense cookies when you kick them.

It is someone who hasn’t played the game speculating about how its gameplay could work or how it’s secretly genius because the atmosphere is fairly novel.

I will admit a reason it’s suddenly taken off is in part that, yeah, Disney wouldn’t allow a spooky Winnie-the-Pooh game to be made these days, and Disney has just been more protective with its legacy characters in the past 15 years.

There are just less games being made these days, too. A lot of the PS2 library are licensed movie tie-in games which have almost entirely vanished from the modern market, they kind of died in the PS3 era once mobile games became similarly lucrative and more importantly, cheap to produce. The trade-off is when licensed games for kids media do come out, currently almost exclusively made by Outright Games or Microids, people forget that those games were almost always aggressively mediocre. The Bluey video game by Outright Games released to mixed to negative reviews, etc.

My point is, in an era where games were cheaper to produce and most kids movies had PS2 tie-in games, there was more room for experimentation. Games would take like three years to produce at most and if it didn’t do good, well, that’s fine, try again next time. So we have this novelty.

Should I Play?

Since the game became a topic of interest its price has shot up on eBay to like hundreds of dollars, and I would hope that dies down quickly but apparently the retro game market in the US just likes to sell games for hundreds of dollars simply because they’re notable even if they aren’t rare, so I don’t know. If you want to play the game still for the novelty of it, downloading a ROM off the internet is much cheaper. Even if you’re like me and prefer real hardware, most PS2 slims have an exploit which allows you to burn patched ROMs to disks which can boot without issue.

Just note that you’ll be paying for the lovely atmosphere in several hours of cookie collecting.

It’s Ok, Kind Of Recommended, Not As Good As People Are Speculating It To Be

Life is Strange: Double Exposure review

Life is Strange: Double Exposure is a sequel to the original Life is Strange. Life is Strange: Double Exposure was developed by Deck Nine and produced by Square Enix.

Double Exposure is the first Life is Strange sequel to follow Max Caufield from the first game. Max is now an adult working at gorgeous snowy Caledon University in Vermont as their “artist-in-residence”, still a photographer, still the same weird Max.

Life is Strange 1 Mini Review

Before I start, this kind of exists next to Life is Strange: Before the Storm being a prequel to the first game, where you play as Chloe Price meeting her best friend Rachel Amber and learning some shit about her mom and family. Before the Storm isn’t especially good in my opinion solely because it feels like it’s meant to justify Chloe being a bad person in the first game, but even then still fails to account for just how awful she is in that one, but anyway.

I did not play the first Life is Strange when it came out and only watched a playthrough from the honorable Joseph Anderson during his 2022 Strangemas streams so I don’t have nostalgia nor a particular attachment to the first game. My opinion of Life is Strange was that it was flawed but I understood what it was going for.

All the dialogue in Life is Strange is kind of… cringe? It’s cringe? Max will look at her perfectly good photo she took and go “It’s so awful, it’s awful, I hate it, I’m ripping it up”. She looks at a tampon dispenser and goes “I’m good to flow, thanks”. She operates a vending machine and says “release the kraken!” Chloe’s first lines on screen are “I hope you checked the perimeter, as my step-ass would say. Now, let’s talk bidness … Wrong. You got hella cash.” She then dies. I’m not going to say it’s good but I’m going to make a case for it, being no, this isn’t how teenagers talk, but it is how it feels to listen to teenagers talk. The teens are going “sigma ohio mewing” or whatever and it does also hurt to listen to, just like playing Life is Strange.

The environment is beautiful Pacific north-west Arcadia Bay, the light is perpetually golden, it’s a coastal town, Max is going to a prestigious art high school, she has a charming photography teacher, she has a comfy dorm, it’s all great. Each episode ends with beautiful sun-dappled vistas and sweeping soulful music.

I don’t like how some of the characters are so loudly designed, David Madsen or Chloe’s stepdad is like… yep, that’s an evil military man, Max’s cool (but evil) photography teacher is sexy. The Mean Girl looks like The Mean Girl and is also I guess a slutwhore because she stays after class to talk to the evil photography teacher.

The game follows Max and her childhood best friend Chloe, Max using her newly discovered time rewind power to help Chloe solve the mystery of where her friend Rachel Amber wound up. Max is able to use her rewind power in the bathroom to save Chloe from being shot and off adventuring they go. While this adventuring happens, Chloe does things like:

• Gets super upset at you and threatens to leave if Max answers a phone call from someone who is actively suicidal, has been a recent victim of revenge porn, disowned by her family, and her schooling being put at risk. Said character can take her own life, too
• Gets mad at you for not shooting to kill her drug dealer
• Steals thousands of dollars from a fund for disabled students at the high school Max attends

You have to enable Chloe’s worst behaviours in order to get the ending where you kiss her at the very end. There are only two real endings, and you get both choices regardless of your actions (this is fine imo, I mind). Your choices are to go back to the moment where Chloe was shot in the bathroom and not intervene, or to just let the causality hurricane sweep through Arcadia Bay, killing everyone but allowing Chloe to live. It’s a trolley problem, yeah, I don’t mind, whatever. The trolley problem is something debated frequently for a reason even if it’s dead simple.

In my mind the overall message of the game is that Chloe is just not worth it for Max. Chloe is a toxic person and she will only get close with Max if you enable her worst behaviours, and then allowing the storm to level Arcadia Bay destroys everything and kills everyone Max has ever known just to keep her. It’s not fair for Chloe to die in that bathroom, it’s not, she doesn’t deserve it, but it isn’t on Max to rescue her from herself over and over again when it hurts herself. Life is Strange is about letting go of a person who you care about deeply but can’t be helped, and to be clear I don’t think that’s the intended read, because…

Life is Strange is a game that feels like it was created specifically for alt teenagers and it loses a lot of luster if you are not a teenager. The game is rich with imagery but much of its meaning is “that imagery looks cool”. Sure you’re putting anarchy symbols everywhere but like are you anarchists? Max’s insecurities probably make a lot more sense if you’re 15, because when you’re an adult you look at that and you’re either annoyed or you want to pat the poor kid on the shoulder and tell them they’re good actually and they don’t need to worry so much. Chloe is also probably cool when you’re 15 and not a really, really irresponsible person who needs to stop blaming her step-dad who is… trying to work with her, to a degree. (I have a problem here being David Madsen is not a perfect step-dad and needs to switch his methods, but he cares and Chloe kind of needs to try and meet him at his level. My defense of David Madsen goes out the window though if you get the optional scene where he hits Chloe, in which case he needs to get out immediately, which makes discussing him annoying, because the dealbreaker is not in every playthrough.)

So that’s Life is Strange 1. Life is Strange: Before the Storm as already mentioned follows Chloe as she meets Rachel Amber, it’s shorter than every other Life is Strange, it’s meant to justify her becoming who she is, and they do this by making Chloe almost as shy and quiet as Max, making her step-dad much worse, and actually everything Chloe does that’s maybe bad was someone else’s idea first, and also despite all this it doesn’t come close to justifying or explaining Chloe in the first game wanting you to shoot to kill her drug dealer and stealing thousands of dollars from a fund for disabled children. There’s also a consistent plot thread of how both Chloe and Rachel (teenagers in early to middle high school) really, really, really hate living in Arcadia Bay and don’t think there’s anything keeping them there, like the fact they’re teenagers. Also the first game is carried like 50% on how beautiful it makes Arcadia Bay, I only feel annoyance when Chloe and Rachel complain about how much they hate it there.

There’s also Life is Strange 2 where you play as teenager Sean and his little brother Daniel fleeing to Mexico after an explosion happens near them with a cop nearby and because they’re brown it’s I guess better that they’re on the run for almost a whole year, losing an eye,and committingactual crimes as opposed to “I know the justice system is really inherently racist but it would be a worst case scenario for these two kids to receive especially long prison sentences because a cop died near them from an explosion they won’t be able to find any bomb debris for, or a weapon”. The game is really really really really boring, you don’t have powers, your little brother does and you need to teach him how to use them and how to be moral with them, also in the middle of the game you just get groomed by this 25-something which is realistic for a homeless teenager but weird because the game doesn’t seem to recognise it’s statutory rape and grooming? It’s also, again, really really boring.

Also Life is Strange: True Colours which exists and I know nothing about but was produced by Deck Nine like Double Exposure is too, and Double Exposure runs on Unreal like True Colours does. Okay. Double Exposure.

Double Exposure

Double Exposure to me, nailed a lot of what made the first game. The game really seems to understand that one of the appeals for the original Life is Strange was that it’s just set in a beautiful area that you’d want to go to. Double Exposure is set in beautiful neo-gothic Caledon University while it’s all covered in snow, and it’s an excellent choice. The soundtrack is still atmospheric and even plays during the walkabout scenes.

Max is now an adult in this game (she was ‘18’ in the original, I refuse, she’s 15. No 18 year old behaves the way she does it makes so much more sense if you say she was 15 instead) and we enter to her breaking into an abandoned building with her friend Safi so she can take photos. She’s gotten really into urban exploration in the last few years apparently and also I guess got used to the idea of digital cameras. Max’s job is as ‘artist-in-residence’ at the university she works at, giving seminars and work for students. They also pay her to live in this enormous house which isn’t remotely realistic but at the same time, they understood the assignment, Life is Strange is in part about wishing you were the protagonist, so.

Immediately, most of the painful dialogue isn’t there anymore. I only cringed at a handful of lines throughout the game. I appreciate that Max is still the same weird hipster with better written dialogue. It makes her actually likeable. I like that she’s obviously grown since the first game too, she doesn’t feel like a kid anymore. She’s confident and self-actualized. It’s great. New Max is great.

Safi is also a good friend, I was genuinely happy to see Max having a supportive friend in her life. You take a look around this bowling alley, take some photos, get out of there.
Afterwards, Max and Safi visit a hipster college bar called the Snapping Turtle and hang out and drink. Here you get to make the decision as to how Life is Strange 1 ended. Were you friends with Chloe or were you in a relationship with her, did she die or was Arcadia Bay levelled? This… kind of seems to be the most important choice in the game which listen I don’t mind.

I selected Chloe to still be alive, and that they were in a relationship because I think that’s the option that leaves Max at a worse place when the story begins.

So yeah, Max and Chloe will have broken up by this point of the story if she’s alive. If they were only friends, they’ll have grown apart. The game will also let you open Max’s phone to read over her text messages, and you’ll be able to read over her last exchange with Chloe. Chloe has moved to St. Louis and there was no invitation for Max to follow, and they’ve stopped talking since. The reason Chloe left was Max’s rewind ability concerned her because she’s not sure Max can’t just rewind to make her say yes to things she doesn’t want to do, and even if Max says she’s stopped using her rewind, it’s not possible for Chloe to prove if she’s being constantly rewound.

It shows interesting growth for Chloe that she’s able to recognise she doesn’t want that and even leave. She kind of makes me think vaguely of Zane from Hypnospace Outlaw in terms of her character, starts out as a shitty awful kid, can die young and tragically, grows up to be fairly average but hanging onto the love of the things they enjoyed as a teenager and is happy.

With all that said, Chloe’s messages on the phone are perpetually pinned high up in Max’s text messages but Chloe will not send another text to Max until the very end of the game… and Max has no choice to reply, she just kind of acknowledges it to herself. Chloe is mentioned throughout the game, and the fact she never turns up at any point is really disappointing. The game goes a fair bit out of its way to give Max trauma specific to losing her hometown, and the fact she did it, so the fact Chloe can’t turn up briefly if she’s alive really sucks. Max considers calling Chloe at one of her lowest points in the game, knowing she’ll pick up for her, and then doesn’t? I honestly expected her to turn up at the eleventh hour, like, car screeches into the parking lot, hair Chloe leaps out with “listen Max I know we aren’t dating anymore but I want to help you with this” and we get to see how much she’s grown as a person. The fact that doesn’t happen is a disappointment.

The inciting incident for the game is Max’s best friend Safi being found dead just minutes after having gone for a walk in the snow. Max discovers her body, has a two-day meltdown (she honestly copes with it better than I think she should), and shortly discovers that her power has reawakened and evolved. This time, instead of rewinding time, she can step between two parallel timelines, the split point being Safi did not die in the other timeline. Max now has to try and prevent her murder and solve it.

Double Exposure is, for better or worse, kind of a retread of a lot of Life is Strange 1’s plot points. The Vortex Club from the first game has an equivalent in this game, Abraxis. There isn’t a mean girl like Victoria exactly but there’s an annoying true crime girlie Loretta who will rat you out to another professor if you decline to comment on Safi’s recent murder. There’s an egotistical teacher who is only kind of a red-herring and is intentionally meant to evoke Jefferson from the first game. Safi shares a fair bit with Chloe, except she isn’t a potential love interest and the murder you’re trying to solve is her own as opposed to another person’s.

I’m also reminded of the alternate timeline in the first Life is Strange where Max hears Chloe say she has to blame everything on her step-dad, or it’s all her fault (i have bad news chloe), and Max jumps back into a Polaroid to make sure Chloe’s birth father doesn’t die in an accident. Max then returns to the present and finds Chloe was in an accident several years ago which didn’t kill her but has left her mobility disabled and in persistent pain requiring constant painkillers. It was a good part of the game, but when you return to the regular timeline it all suddenly feels kind of pointless to talk to all the side characters because damn you’ve seen some shit, why are we bothering with these people again? Having two very similar timelines with equal importance you shift between is an interesting take on this, and I like it. At the end of the game, both timelines are merged with a fair few pains so there wasn’t an important and unimportant one, both were equally real.

You have two potential love interests, Vinh and Amanda. I appreciate weirdly that Max has a male love interest still (who is bisexual himself). I don’t like him and didn’t choose him but I’m glad that Max’s bisexuality is being preserved even when, let’s be real, her main love interest Chloe is a woman. I saw one person on the Life is Strange subreddit (will get back to that later) claim that Max having a male love interest was mandated by Square Enix (source????) and like look, she has a male love interest in the first game. He’s extremely overshadowed because obviously Chloe is the other main character but bisexual erasure is a thing and I would be disappointed if a game quietly decided Max ‘picked a side’ to became a monosexual lesbian by not allowing her to pursue a male character. I am just going to call complaints about that biphobia.

I appreciate the emphasis on making no character fully good or evil, which, at the end of the game the not-Jefferson asshole is still the villain, yeah, he does a bad, but what he did isn’t so awful as to be perpetually unforgivable and that he needs to go to jail forever or something, more that he just kind of needs to take a step back and get outta there. I appreciate that all the characters have socmed pages where they’ll post regularly, including Chloe and Victoria Chase. Potential love interest Amanda has two accounts, a personal account and a comedy account, and she feels like a person that could exist in this place, yeah. I like it.

I will concede the ending doesn’t hit remotely as hard as the first game but they kind of write themselves into a corner of having a storm show up again and not wanting to have the lose your friend/save the town vs save your friend/lose the town ending. It’s kind of a misplaced response to the first game that I don’t think entirely works. Max goes into the storm with Safi and goes through a nightmare sequence where she receives texts from beyond the dead (at least in my playthrough, lotta those people are dead) and has to manually separate out Safi’s essence from the people she encounters, as Safi’s shapeshifting ability has left pieces of her in everyone and this is not good for them, obviously.

The game’s reuse of assets also really starts to wear thin here, you basically glance by every location you’ve been in the game so far but it starts to feel quite repetitive and a few of the scenes feel like they could’ve had a higher budget. There’s a part where Max is triggered to being back in the Darkroom and has to escape the chair, and you can hear Jefferson’s voice but you’re… in the same area. It feels like if they had more money to throw at it it’d look much better.

One of two new locations for this sequence is when you wander through the Oceanview Motel and Casino PT-style and reminisce about being on the road with Chloe. The clock reads ‘exgf’. Earlier on in this sequence you enter the bathroom Chloe is shot in and watch Max and Safi recreate the scene Nathan and Chloe have, bad dialogue included, Max is going to get in a hella lot more trouble than just drugs etc. Interacting with a poster, Max will imagine Chloe getting mad at her for hanging out with someone else like Chloe frequently does.

I sincerely feel like Chloe doesn’t make an appearance in this sequence because they didn’t have the time/budget to make an asset for her. She has a voice credit, though, but when the nightmare sequence consists of Max travelling between the same scenes you’ve already seen with just a black screen cut out cut in between them, it feels really really apparent that these are assets and not places in a persistent world. A higher budget here was necessary.

Anyway, the ending, you separate Safi’s pieces out of everyone and the timelines combine so Safi was never shot and the university is okay. Obviously you can’t have the same gut punch that the first game has with its ending, but I feel like it kind of misses why the endings of the first game are so good. Whatever happens, not everyone is getting out okay, there is some sacrifice.

The university is a bit disheveled from the event but everyone’s alive and Safi is better than ever. Safi has developed some kind of god complex across the course of the game with her shapeshifting power and wants to make a clean break and expects Max to come along to re-find her rewind power, and your answer is to take her deal or to refuse and stay behind with your current life at Caledon.

I don’t feel connected to Safi through the story, especially when she’s dead in half of the timeline and given it’s your starting one, it feels like the real one. Safi in the living world is dealing with her car having been vandalized and losing her book deal as opposed to being dead and it’s hard to attach to her given in Main Timeline, she is dead.

Obviously the correct choice is to not go with her on shapeshifting adventure, but I was in the minority there? Apparently only 25% of people took the choice of not going with her. I was in a greater minority by selecting a minor choice later where Max says she hopes Safi is okay wherever she ends up but she’s not going to chase her anymore, being chosen by 9% of people despite being the objectively correct one.

Despite my complaints with the ending I think the game has a stronger and more focused middle section than the first. I had trouble putting it down and had to make myself go to sleep because I was up too late playing it, and woke up and went back to playing it again first thing. Good game!

Accessibility

Alright so the game had some news cards on PSN which took great pride in highlighting accessibility options. Square Enix also made a press release about it. When you open the game’s setting menu, the accessibility options are there first, before UI, sound options, controls, etc. There are also content warning options which can pause the game before specific things pop up (i.e. discussions of suicide, discussions of sex, violence, drug use).

To be blunt I think the content warning section feels a bit underdeveloped, there are indie developers who have these sorts of things but with greater care. For example, horror games with arachnophobia switches where spiders will be replaced with shattered glass, so it still provides an intended effect of being spooky to people with arachnophobia without causing debilitating anxiety. Life is Strange has a big publisher backing it so I really think they could have gone an extra mile and made slight tweaks to some of the options, like say if you have the drug use trigger on then a character won’t offer you a blunt but will offer you something else instead.

Especially because content warnings are often best used to tell someone “hey, if this could make you upset, maybe sit this one out” as opposed to just telling you that the thing is about to happen. There’s a transphobia mention trigger warning which is approximately one conversation, it would have been so little effort to just record a slightly different conversation.

Max has to go to specific areas to switch timelines, and these areas all have a high-pitched tinnitus sound in a wide radius around them so you can better locate them. You cannot turn this tinnitus sound off without muting sound effects altogether in the sound menu. There are some areas that are so small you will be hearing the tinnitus sound the entire time you are not in conversation. On a bad day for me this could genuinely cause be a migraine and force me to stop playing, and I am astounded a game that wanted to highlight its accessibility options the way it did doesn’t have a “turn off the tinnitus and replace with a quest marker” option. Fortunately I did not play this on bad days, but it was still irritating enough I muted my TV for a long section.

The Life is Strange subreddit really, really hates this game and I think they are wrong

So I had a good time with the game and went oh boy, that’s probably the best Life is Strange besides the first one. I was browsing reddit and found a thread on the PS5 subreddit where people were also talking about how they really enjoyed the game, it surprised them, then someone just made a comment of “yo the life is strange subreddit really hates this game” and I went “huh weird” and they all hate it so much and I just think they’re… wrong?

Obviously they’re entitled to their opinions and I’m going to guess that in a week or longer “I didn’t think Double Exposure was THAT BAD” will start popping up but a major sore point seems to be that Chloe isn’t in the game and that they don’t like that Max and Chloe have broken up. I get it, I’d be annoyed if a sequel to my game came out and I found that my OTP had unceremoniously broken up, but idk maybe they’ll get back together and Chloe will decide to leave her husband she has for some reason to die with Max and it’ll be glorious.

I’m just going to guess there’s a lot of rose tinted glasses towards the first game, because the improvements in dialogue felt palpable to me but the subreddit is insisting the writing is dogshit, it’s terrible, I really don’t know what they’re thinking because the first game spends like 2 hours to just explore a completely alternate timeline smack dab in the middle which you never really return to, the final episode is so long and you have to escape the same photo dungeon twice… Double Exposure feels a lot more focused.

$30 DLC that adds a cat to Max’s house

Double Exposure on PSN had three purchase options, Ultimate, Deluxe, and Standard. The Ultimate edition was listed as the default version on storefronts and cost $149NZD.

The Ultimate Edition allowed people access to chapters 1 and 2 several weeks early which is really cool for a story based game and sets great precedent to sell early access for a good $50. The Deluxe edition was like $130NZD and just added a few extra outfits for Max, the standard game cost $100NZD.

Now that the game’s released, there’s a thirty dollar DLC sitting on my PS5 home page promising “Exclusive Cat Content” which appears to be a subplot in the existing game as opposed to a bonus chapter or the like. $30NZD for a DLC that adds a cat to Max’s house is… possibly one of the worst DLCs I’ve ever seen. Oblivion’s horse armour was sold for $2.50USD, or $4.20NZD. $30 for a cat in an on-rails game is possibly the most egregious DLC I’ve ever seen.

I am a person who’s honestly kind of lenient with micro-DLCs or cosmetic DLCs, they’re there for people who want them, but I’ve never seen a singleplayer game charge 30 dollars for a minor subplot in an on-rails video game.

It’s been pointed out to me that often a lot of these weird little DLCs or digital deluxe editions are an attempt to charge higher for the game with little extra development time? Like, yeah just bundle in the soundtrack and the art book and a few extra costumes for an extra $15 maybe and alright fine that’s not a bad deal. $49 extra dollars to get a cat subplot and early access is really bad!

Summary

Double Exposure is probably the second best Life is Strange, even if it trades the height of the first game’s ending by having a tighter focus and stronger characters through most of the game. Chloe not making an appearance is disappointing even if I like her having left Max. I like the atmosphere, I like Max, I like the little puzzles.

All that said, the developers seemed to want you to pay $149NZD for this and no way, no way. $100 is much more reasonable, even $120.

Recommended

Astro Bot (PS5) Is Phenomenal

Astro Bot is as close to a perfect game as you could possibly get. It looks beautiful, it performs and controls perfectly, there is not one bad or skippable level in this game. It is pure joy from start to finish.

It’s a fairly short game. I was able to sit down and get up to the final world in my first day-long sitting and was fairly sad how it was already close to being over, given 100% completion seems fairly easy too. I beat it the next day fairly early in the afternoon. The launch and announcement trailers seem to have a section from almost every level and boss fight rather than just a slice of the available levels.

There’s the forever discussion on the US internet about if a game is worth $60, AAA games might be jumping to $70, etc. This discussion is tiring because in NZ, AAA games have been $120NZD or more for a long while, equivalent to $74-75USD. Silent Hill 2 will launch here for $140NZD. Our games are already more expensive and getting more expensive, so I’m not going to debate the US $60 number, but I will say it’s an awful lot of labour squeezed into that $120NZD.

My best comparison point is that some games are worth $120 if you put them next to experiences like high tea, a scenic train ticket, attending a concert, and Astro Bot is well worth the price on quality and experience as opposed to length. If you really like to milk value out of your game then you could always pick up speedrunning it?

Tactile

Astro Bot feels absolutely incredible to play. Astro’s Playroom had unbelievable controller feedback and Astro Bot is the same. Every power-up is activated with the triggers, and the resistance makes it feel incredible. It’s like fidget toy satisfying. When you pause the game in a level, you can play with the bots you’ve rescued in that level. I muted my TV at some point and noticed when you move the controller around while the game is paused, you can indeed feel the bots sliding around in the controller with how fine the vibrations are.

The thing is it genuinely doesn’t feel like a gimmick. There was and is substantial frustration that Astro Bot isn’t for PSVR2 (and that Astro Bot: Rescue Mission hasn’t been ported to PSVR2), and while Astro Bot can’t match the immersion in Rescue Mission simply by not being in VR, the controller feedback is so good it genuinely feels like adding a whole new dimension to the game. The power-up where Astro turns into a sponge to absorb and expel water, squeezing the triggers does genuinely feel like the pressure of squeezing a sponge. The click when using the time-stop ability is incredible. The clicking with the punching gloves and the way you really have to push the triggers to activate the thruster power ups. Reassembling every ship part.

Sound Design

Astro Bot has such crunchy sound design. Every sound effect is pleasing and it takes great advantage of the speaker on the controller. I assume there’s no stock sound effects, which would be fine to use obviously, but the sound of every power-up and footstep is extremely pleasing to the ear. When you scrub graffiti off the mothership’s covers the controller vibrates and the sound effects are ASMR levels of pleasing. The fact that half of the sound effects come from the controller add so much.

The director mentioned in an interview if people make enough noise for a PC port that they might consider it, I would hope it gets a PC port so more people can play it, but then I also genuinely feel like they’d be losing so much of the experience unless played with a Dualsense controller. It is that good. The segments that use gyroscope like the ship reassembly or scrubbing graffiti you can easily port to mouse and keyboard but you can’t port the trigger resistance or a speaker on the controller or even the precise vibration. Unless I’m wrong and third party controllers have gotten real good over the past while, but goddamn, only on PS5.

So… The Brand

Astro’s Playroom originally actually rubbed me the wrong way watching my brother play it on his PS5 (back when it didn’t have a game, so no incentive for me to use it or get one until this year) mostly because as fun as it looked, it seemed like a PlayStation brand-image exercise. I’ve never owned an Xbox or a Nintendo home console until the Switch, and I distinctly remember playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf and feeling weirdly alienated by the way the game made the rarest items references to other Nintendo games, which I had not played and don’t really care for.

Playing Astro’s Playroom, I got it a bit better, but still wondered how it would work for someone less familiar with Sony’s brand image. And that’s what it is, really, it’s continuing to solidify Sony as a corporation with interesting history and characters tied to it, but corporations are not your friends. Sony has been doing layoffs, too, specifically closing their London studio who were responsible for the EyeToy’s core titles and more recently, PSVR titles. All of the other games represented in Playroom were not necessarily made by Sony but published by them.

Countdown (now Woolworths) is doing a marketing campaign where for every $30 or so of groceries they’ll give you a pack of their Disney World of Wonder cards. The package tells you they contain Disney, Pixar, Star Wars, and Marvel cards, and you open them, and yep. I got a Winnie the Pooh, Darth Vader, and Spiderman, these are definitely characters who fit together in a coherent brand identity and not Disney flexing how much of mainstream entertainment they own.

When the Astro Bot trailer came out and immediately heavily focused on the character cameos, now looking even closer to their original designs rather than Playroom’s “these bots are actors and they are acting out the video game”, I was a little concerned. Not enough to not be extremely excited for the game, mind you.

Finally getting the game, I actually quite like the way the character cameos are done. For a start, the characters are not actually named in-game but rather named after their traits. Jak is named “Eco Warrior”, Chris Redfield is named “Alpha Male” (Jill Valentine is named “Alpha Female”, it’s allowed), and Aegis Persona named “Protective Android”.

For the more obscure cameos, I’m able to get a gist of the character from their description and not feel like I’m being marketed to, because I don’t know what the characters are from, nor their names. They are effectively a second tier of rescuable bot in that they have a special design and perform actions/animations in the crash site hub level.

After each boss in a world, there’s a level themed around a specific PlayStation game series. This was also initially concerning, to me, when the marketing was heavily highlighting Kratos from the newer God of War games. My worry was that the themed levels would be all recent cinematic-style games as a specific marketing push, but I came away pleasantly surprised, because it genuinely seems Team Asobi was able to pick the games they wanted to make a mechanic out of.

The first one of these levels is Ape Escape themed where you get a net power-up to chase the rescueable bots dressed as monkeys around the level and capture them, and a later level is themed around notable current game Loco Roco. The Kratos power-up is his axe, which you can indeed throw and retrieve like you can in God of War 2018 and Ragnarok. They’re lovely additions to Astro’s moveset. Astro TF-ing to gain a beard and a fur cloak is also deeply funny to me.

In the end sequence and hub world, you clear “x amount of bots rescued required” by approaching certain points and the bots you’ve rescued will help Astro push things, help him cross gaps or safely drop down giant falls by forming a chain, etc. The cameo bots add to this by being distinct designs who you will be able to recognise in the chain and in cutscenes rather than a dozen duplicates of the same robot. You can follow your favourite character in cutscenes and be glad you rescued them.

In General!

The game’s power-ups unfortunately don’t get much time to shine, but this was apparently a deliberate decision to avoid scope creep. The impression I got while playing and having power up after power up introduced and quickly abandoned was that the devs didn’t want anything to have the slightest chance of getting stale, so they pretty quickly stash new power-ups before they’ve so much as finished cooling from the oven.

It does work to keep the game feeling consistently fresh, and it’s not a bad design philosophy at all. Astro Bot was made in 3 years by a team of 60 people, and at this current moment where AAA games take an entire console generation to make, cost hundreds of millions of dollars, kill half of the developers involved, come out to mostly positive reviews, then fail to turn a profit… we need more games like Astro Bot. Shorter development cycle, smaller teams, tightly controlled scope. Modern games do not need to be a developer meat grinder to be good.

Rescue Mission on PSVR has a weird problem. It’s an incredible game, one of the tightest 3D platformers possibly ever, but it is notably low rent in how few assets it seems to have. Rescue Mission also only seems to have like… five songs? Rescue Mission isn’t long at all either, but some of those songs can get extraordinarily repetitive, and it makes the game feel cheap. Astro Bot PS5 for some reason, straight reuses some of Rescue Mission’s tracks, and a few of Playroom’s too, when I was honestly hoping for more variety. They straight re-use the SSD song but with different vocals instead of ‘S-S-D’.

Astro has more personality this game than either Rescue Mission or Playroom. Rescue Mission he’s very cute, waving to you whenever you look at him. Playroom he kind of just… pulls out a PlayStation handheld when you leave him idle, but Astro has dozens of new idles and animations. My favourite is probably Astro looking around him and calling to see if any bots are nearby. When you approach a bot who needs rescuing and isn’t in distress, Astro will try to catch their attention by waving at them. He has new voice acting like little noises when jumping or dying, but they’re never annoying or grating. At the end of each level if you shoot the Dualspeeder into the prize box successfully he goes “bye-bye!”. In the graveyard level Astro is more aggressively spooked than he is in Rescue Mission. Given the game leans in hard on branding and other PlayStation IP cameos, I’m very pleased there was effort to give Astro a stronger personality so he feels like his own character rather than just a vessel for gameplay or branding.

Overall

Astro Bot is incredible and you should buy it right now. Same week as Astro Bot, Sony released their Overwatch competitor Concord which crashed and burned within the week because as it turns out people don’t really want a new Overwatch or another multiplayer game-as-a-service. It was born on the day I went to switch my GP and died before my new GP could get back to me to confirm they’d received my medical records.

I don’t believe in voting with your dollar, the reason games-as-a-service are so popular for companies is that you can get your hooks into gambling addicts and whales to squeeze out a constant stream of cash. Even if your game doesn’t become the new Fortnite you can still have turned a profit based on your target audience being, again, people who have addictive personalities and are more prone to gambling addictions. Games-as-a-service get disproportionate dollar votes because they are designed often maliciously to obtain those dollars. All of that said, Astro Bot succeeding can remind Sony’s execs that AA single-player games are worthwhile to fund. And that Team Asobi are incredible and they should give them lots of money to continue doing exactly what they are doing right now.

Astro Bot as close to perfect as a game can be, 10/10 buy it now