Flesh, Blood, & Concrete
https://waxwing0.itch.io/fbc

Flesh, Blood, & Concrete is a free-to-play RPG Maker adventure game that bills itself as “an apartment building exploration simulator.” During its 45-minute playtime, the game delves into themes of isolation, mental illness, and existential dread within the confines of a decaying apartment complex.

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As an aside, I was just thinking that I’d love to see more games set in Eastern Europe. Flesh, Blood, & Concrete is a universal story, but the specificity of the game’s Russian setting adds a unique and interesting flavor. I also appreciate that this “apartment exploration simulator” takes the darker aspects of mental illness seriously but still delights in the playfulness of its morbid style of creative expression. It's one of the more intriguing RPG Maker horror games I’ve encountered, and I’d recommend giving it a shot if you can handle the (literal) viscerality of its imagery.

Aviary Attorney is a four-hour visual novel modeled on the Phoenix Wright series and set in Paris in 1848, right on the cusp of the revolution that ushered in the Second Republic.

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Aviary Attorney is an interesting exercise in how public domain works can be transformatively reconfigured into contemporary media, but it’s also a great game. Obviously I’d recommend Aviary Attorney to fans of Phoenix Wright and to connoisseurs of visual novels in general, but I really want to encourage anyone who enjoyed the themes and message of Pentiment to give this game a chance. It’s got excellent writing, a unique visual appeal, and a satisfying sense of historical specificity.

For the record, this is my position on spending $500 I don't have on a stupid gaming console I don't need:

In May 2023, I got so annoyed and frustrated by Tears of the Kingdom that I put down the Switch controller, walked out to my car, and immediately drove to Target to put a PlayStation 5 on a credit card. The only game I intended to play on the console was Bloodborne. And let me tell you. I sure did play several hundred hours of Bloodborne. It was fantastic. Two years later, I've had my fill of the game, and I don't really touch the PS5 anymore. Still, I have no regrets.

In conclusion, I hope everyone reading this is granted $500 to spend on an unnecessary purchase that gives you hundreds of hours of joy. May we all be financially comfortable and have access to things that make us happy.

PlayStation’s extraordinary effort to preserve its game-making history
https://www.gamefile.news/p/playstations-extraordinary-effort

Fredley’s talk covered the servers and underground mineshafts he and his team are using to save builds of games and scores of other digital artifacts from PlayStation’s past. He also talked about the logistical challenges of their effort and the value of preservation.

Apparently Sony employed a team of specialists to preserve its thirty-year digital history in mineshafts near Las Vegas and Liverpool. I mean, they could just as easily open the data to public digital archives, but still. That's cool as hell.

By the way, storing data (digital or otherwise) in old mineshafts isn't as uncommon as you'd think. In fact, Elon Musk recently tried to "shut down" a big underground facility called Iron Mountain, which houses a bunch of paper records for the federal government under a tiny mining town north of Pittsburgh called Boyers. He wasn't successful of course, but I just think it would be neat if the next Silent Hill game

The First Sin
https://theomeny.medium.com/the-first-sin-c8be873b0432

No other game studio has had such a consistency of narrative tropes as FromSoftware. This is a boon for those who have an interest in examining how FromSoftware tells and constructs a story, what fascinates them, and how they have evolved over the years.

This essay is a deep dive into the connected stories of the four games in the King's Field series. The author also touches on how the themes and motifs of this series resonate with other FromSoft games. I was especially interested to learn where the Erdtree in Elden Ring comes from.

As an aside, I appreciate when people write and publish actual prose essays about retro games. There's no way in hell I'm going to watch a three-hour video essay on YouTube, but I'm more than happy to spend ten minutes skimming a self-published article on Medium.

Yesterday evening I was thinking about how much I love Echoes of Wisdom, so I started a new game.

The initial problem I had with Echoes of Wisdom is that the first two hours can be rough. Thankfully, I think Nintendo might have added some quality-of-life updates in a patch. Here are three big changes:

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I don't think Echoes of Wisdom is supposed to be a difficult game, so it's nice to have these artificial barriers lifted.

I’m not sure how to describe the game Indika save to say that it’s like Dark Souls, if Dark Souls were a no-combat walking sim set in 1910s Russia. It’s an incredible game, but I’m going to need to take some time to process it.

I was actually thinking two things when Indika randomly crossed my radar on Steam. The first is that I’m starting to get nostalgic for the PS3/PS4 era of graphics (ca.2010-2014) where games were very pretty but not yet completely photorealistic. “The original 2011 release of Dark Souls” is a strange liminal territory to aim for in terms of graphics, but Indika occupies this space quite well.

The second thing I was thinking is that it would be cool to see a spiritual successor to Bloodborne set in mid-nineteenth-century Russia. The religion is incredible, the vibes are immaculate, and it would be a pleasure to be horribly murdered while exploring that style of “Russian Revival” architecture. Indika is more Dark Souls (ie, empty ruins) than Bloodborne, but it scratches the same itch.

By the way, a friend was recently saying that Spain would also make a good setting for Bloodborne, and you know what. That would be amazing too. Fuck yes.

I really love Ender Lilies, a 2021 Soulslike Metroidvania about a small girl making her way through a rainy and fungus-infested postapocalyptic kingdom with the help of her monstrously mutated zombie companions. The art design is spectacular, the writing and translation are both fantastic, and the game is a lot of fun to play but doesn't drag on for too long.

The sequel, Ender Magnolia, was released in January, and I don't like it.

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I don't want to say that Ender Magnolia isn't worth playing. Still, it feels uncomfortably bloated, and the artificial linearity of its progression doesn't have any benefits for its nonexistent story. Maybe I'm not upset that Ender Magnolia is "bad," necessarily; but rather, I'm disappointed that it doesn't meet its potential.

Final Fantasy Creator Has One More RPG In Him, Calls It A 'Successor' To Final Fantasy VI
https://kotaku.com/final-fantasy-6-sequel-hironobu-sakaguchi-fantasian-1851749344

But his next project will apparently feel even more closely inspired by one of his old franchise’s peak games. “It’s generally going to follow a similar style to my previous works, and it’ll be something that can be a successor to Final Fantasy VI in a good way—our goal is to create something old but new at the same time,” the veteran creator recently told The Verge. “It’ll be part two of my farewell note.”

Apparently, "part one" was a game called Fantasian Neo Dimension, which totally flew under my radar.

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I'm working on an essay titled "Crow Country is a game about climate change," which is about exactly what it says on the label. To get screenshots to use for the essay, I'm once again replaying Crow Country, and once again I find myself concerned by the outfit the player-character wears to the abandoned amusement park filled with rusty metal, stagnant water, and zombies. I would feel more comfortable if she paired her miniskirt with some thigh-high boots, I'm just saying.

As an antidote to the horrors visited on this poor girl's bare legs, please enjoy some animated gifs of Leon Kennedy dressed like Lara Croft.

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