Recent reviews by Caterjunes

This is a damn fine nightmare. Are we still calling games like Vampire Survivors "bullet heavens?" If so, then I propose that SNAKE FARM is a bullet purgatory.

Specific problems of your own making.

More general problems from way beyond you, towering over you.

And so, so many snakes.

Less game than toy, and easily the best toy of the year. If you're looking for something chill and lovely, look no farther.

This is a game where I've allowed by progress to be slow, and that's generally not who I am, game-wise. It's just that mysterious, and that good.

For whatever it's worth:

I've never met anyone who DID enjoy Dark Souls II who DIDN'T enjoy Scholar of the First Sin.

And I've never met anyone who DIDN'T play Dark Souls II first who DID enjoy Scholar of the First Sin.

I will never finish this game.

Not just in the sense that it can never quite be finished, that it rewards replaying, that speedrunners speedrun it and optimize and optimize, forever. No.

I have never been to the top of this mountain, and I will never get there. This is a game that asked me to consider why I wanted to see the summit in the first place. This is a game that eventually made me decide that I was OK with not reaching the summit, with not seeing the super secret ending just for people who do reach it, with remaining ever excluded from the select few, the elite, the hardcore.

The game did this with humor, and introspection, and design. It's art, in that sense, if you go in for saying that some human activities are art and some aren't. Personally, I don't care about that kind of thing.

What do I care about? Apparently I care about climbing mountains in the stupidest way imaginable, but I don't really care about reaching the top, per se. I care about strife more than I care about overcoming it. I value friction for its own sake, and for what it makes possible. I like knowing that the summit is there, and seeing others get there, and marveling at them for doing so.

I didn't really know this about myself before.

Thanks, game.

It's not helpful to say that you should give this game a try without knowing much (or, ideally, anything) about it. But you've never played anything quite like it.

Fans of Yoko Taro's work often refer to this as his first/only good game. It functions, you see. (And it's got Platinum on board! You know the boffing will be solid.) It doesn't fight you as you try to play it. It's 100% Certified Non-Kusoge.

But it does mess with your expectations in just about every other way a game can. It's weirder than it first appears, and darker, and more thoughtful, and more honest.

I finished this game months ago, and I still think about it at least once a day.

Do consider just playing it.

Consider it, at least.

It's a cop-out (but also the gospel truth) to say that you should probably just play this game without learning anything else about it. What Frog Fractions did for fractions (and frogs) this game does for ponies (and islands).

The bears are come to remind us that all is chaos. All will be left to the bears, and to the shrubs, as empires fall, each in its time.

It is a somnambulant and disquieting reality, this Triple Town. Unknowable Lovecraftian horrors await at every turn. Quake at your smallness! Madness slathers with hunger and claws at your door. Yes, in the gaping maw of madness lies your perdition.

Your perdition is Triple Town.

This seems impossible, you say. Impossible! But all things are possible through Triple Town. All that becomes impossible beneath the great and terrible gaze of Triple Town, all that shall not linger—cannot linger!—in this dismal, eternal city...

...is you.

You say that you have come to conquer and dismantle Triple Town. I tell you that your heroism is the buzzing of a gnat amid a tempest. I tell you that your endeavor is doomed before it has begun. I tell you, for I pity you, that your eternity is but the blink of an eye to Triple Town. Therefore tremble, and depart.

Depart, while there still is life in you, though your retreat, like your bravery, means nothing. Triple Town will find you, wherever you may run. And should you live a thousand thousand lifetimes, your happiness will turn to ash as you hear the bears approaching, their growls crisp and icy and immutable.

And then, darkness.


8/10

Art history, tower defense, Marble Madness (and/or Super Monkey Ball), and Terry Gilliam, placed in a blender by the guys who made Zeno Clash. Seriously, this is the best time ever to be into videogames.