Rynling R&D

Apartment Complex
https://kinerus.itch.io/apartment-complex

Apartment Complex is a short and free-to-download narrative exploration game set in a mostly abandoned apartment building. The only human occupants of this building are its two landlords. You play as one of the owners, who is middle-aged, jobless, and depressed. In an effort to do something with his life, your character takes it upon himself to check in with the tenants, who are not even remotely human.

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From its eye-catching color palette to the dry tone of its humor, Apartment Complex makes me nostalgic for Welcome to Night Vale in the best possible way. This is a chill and creative game about monster friends and postmodern malaise, and honestly? It’s super relatable.

After leaving the opening town of Kalm, I got sidetracked with sidequests. Unfortunately, I haven’t actually managed to complete any of them. The world map is enormous. Even with a chocobo, it takes forever to get anywhere. Since you can fast travel, I think I’m going to go ahead and progress the main story and see how that goes.

Anyway, something that’s stuck with me is how Tifa confronts Cloud after he tells his version of the story about what happened in Nibelheim. She’s basically like, “After I was injured and almost died, I had to go through months of hospital stays and physical therapy, and where the fuck were you?”

Good for her. And also, I appreciate that she admits to dealing with chronic pain despite being very physically fit. Just because you’ve got your shit together doesn’t mean your disability isn’t real.

Now that I finally have time to sit down and play Echoes of Wisdom, I’m really enjoying it. It’s a cute and clever little game, and I enjoy being able to play as Little Kid Zelda exploring Hyrule.

I maintain that the first two hours of this game are rough. Zelda can’t damage enemies effectively, and she dies quickly. In addition, there are too many gameplay verbs mapped onto too many buttons, and it takes a while to get used to the constant menu scrolling. Thankfully, all of these issues disappear with time, practice, and a modest number of upgrades.

If nothing else, it’s nice to take a break from the doom and gloom of the world at large and escape into Hyrule, where problems are easily solved and everyone wants to help you succeed.

It's difficult to say for sure, but I think I like this game. If nothing else, my crush on Aerith continues to grow with each passing day. I'd like to write two short fics:

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I also appreciate the scene between Barret and Tifa after Shinra brings the Sector 7 plate down on the slums. Tifa is in shock and on the verge of a breakdown, and she says something like “this is all our fault.” Barret hugs her while at the same time talking good sense, saying, “You can’t let yourself think like that. Whatever may have come before, it’s Shinra who pulled the trigger.”

Barret and Tifa have their differences, and they butt heads regarding Avalanche's goals and methods in multiple scenes. Still, they support one another when it matters, and they never forget that they’re fighting the same enemy. I didn’t expect to encounter such a healthy model of a progressive resistance movement in a commercial video game, but here we are.

Tifa and Barret have great chemistry in the Final Fantasy VII Remake, by the way. I would happily play a prequel game (maybe along the lines of Teardown) where the two of them are ecoterrorist buddies who do crimes in Midgar.

Also, I think the English-language voice actress nailed Aerith’s personality in the Remake. She seems sweet on the surface, but she’s 100% set on getting her way, and she can be super passive-aggressive when she runs out of patience. She has goddess-tier powers, and she has an appropriate level of self-confidence to match. I feel like the original English translation struggled with her voice (which is surprisingly masculine-coded in Japanese), but she shines as a character in the Remake. I am so in love.

Something I love about the Final Fantasy VII Remake is that it features a giant sprawling sewer level. It also has one of my favorite video game mechanics, which is raising and lowering sluice gates to adjust the water level. And then, a bit later in the game, you get to go back to the sewers and explore an entirely different section. It's a dream come true.

The atmosphere is great too. More than anything, FFVII Remake is about exploring urban infrastructure, with a strong emphasis on utility access tunnels. I'm the sort of sicko who downloads floorplans of academic buildings, prints them out, and then goes through the entire space with a highlighter to mark where I've been on the map; and I've seen some interesting access tunnels over the years. FFVII Remake captures the gritty liminality of those spaces perfectly, and I'd like to think that its sewer level is more or less what real urban sewers look like. Essentially, they're utilitarian workspaces filled with pipes, but they also serve as dumping grounds for everything the municipality doesn't need, from old postboxes to old fax machines to crates of document binders to... more pipes.

I also appreciate Barret's running commentary about safety hazards and how nothing in the sewers would make it past an OSHA inspection. Something I've always loved about Barret is that he's essentially an OSHA officer who finally snapped, and I'm extremely amused by how the FFVII Remake leans into this.

Anyway, FFVII Remake definitely has one of my personal top five sewer levels. It's wonderful.

It's also worth noting that Mara is visually modeled on Tifa. I don't have any feminist objections to girls walking around in miniskirts, of course, but the costume design still feels uncomfortable. I mean, that's not what I would personally wear to Rusty Nail Tetanus City, especially if there are zombies about.

I feel the same way about Tifa btw. There's just so much rusty metal in Midgar. And so many giant leeches.

Playing Crow Country made me irrepressibly nostalgic for Final Fantasy VII, so I downloaded the FFVII Remake on Steam Deck. I'm enjoying it way more as a handheld game than I did when I played it on PS4 with a big-screen tv; it's like the cringe is minimized. I also don't mind Tifa's clothing in the remake, as Barret has his own giant tits on full display. God bless.

What I propose is that we get some gender equality in survival horror as well. Specifically, I want Leon Scott Kennedy to have full frontal nudity. I want him running around swinging in the wind, because I think it's important to both the plot and the gameplay for the player to know why this character is referred to as Chad Thundercock on AO3.

ETA: Well, good news:
https://www.thegamer.com/resident-evil-4-remake-mod-nude-willy/

Affective Uplift During Video Game Play: A Naturalistic Case Study
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3659464

Do video games affect players’ well-being? In this case study, we examined 162,325 intensive longitudinal in-game mood reports from 67,328 play sessions of 8,695 players of the popular game PowerWash Simulator. We compared players’ moods at the beginning of play sessions with their moods during play and found that the average player reported 0.034 (0.032, 0.036) visual analog scale (VAS; 0-1) units greater mood during than at the beginning of play sessions. Moreover, we predict that 72.1% (70.8%, 73.5%) of similar players experience this affective uplift during play, and that the bulk of it happens during the first 15 minutes of play.

Sources (tentatively) say yes!

Echoes of Wisdom opens up a bit after the first dungeon, but the menu tax only gets worse as new objects and enemies are introduced all at once.

Moreover, while I understand the Pokémon battle appeal of being able to choose the exact perfect monster to fight another monster, the AI of all of your summoned monsters continues to be shit. More often than not, the only viable option remains to summon a rock and toss it.

There continues to be an inappropriate density of monsters on the overworld, and my Zelda keeps getting caught in situations where she can't immediately defend herself, takes three hits, and dies. Resources are extremely limited, so you can't just spam potions. I play FromSoft games for fun, so I don't mind dying, but it's somewhat disheartening to see "Zelda is finally a playable character" getting the crap beaten out of her.

Midway through the first dungeon, Zelda unlocks a phantasmal sword fighter form, but it only last for five seconds. The worst thing is that, for those five seconds, the game is actually fun. I resent that this fun is withheld from the player, and also? I resent the implication that it's not actually Zelda wielding the sword, but rather the spirit of Link who's temporarily possessing her body.

I really want to like Echoes of Wisdom, but it's needlessly frustrating and not very enjoyable to play.

Pentiment is a murder mystery exploration game / visual novel along the lines of Night in the Woods, but it's set in Bavaria around the time of the German Peasants' War of 1525. It's very, very good...

...but I haven't finished it yet. The game is structured into three self-contained acts, and I just wrapped up the second act. If you know what that entails, please rest assured that I cried. A lot.

For the first two acts, you play as an artist named Andreas visiting a small town that lies in the shadow of a large Benedictine monastery. There are some fun Name of the Rose style crimes afoot, but everyone in the town and monastery is generally pleasant and kindhearted.

As with Night in the Woods, though, some of the reviews I've read of Pentiment make me wonder if I'm playing the same game. Namely, reviewers have complained about Andreas being a failson, and about how everyone hates him. To which I want to reply: My brothers in Christ, you're the one making the dialogue choices.

Like obviously you're going to get more out of these dialogue-based games if you don't go out of your way to harass and alienate the NPCs. I think Pentiment is a bit more complicated than Night in the Woods, as it requires your adult protagonist to behave like an adult in situations in which it's necessary to take medieval culture and society into consideration. Still, nobody's forcing you to do a conversation-based genocide run. You don't have to be an asshole on your first playthrough. Why not try being nice instead?