It's not often you get a snowy level in an ice-filled cave that takes predominantly underwater, but that's where Diddy and Dixie find themselves for the majority of their time in the first of two stages in DKC2, Arctic Abyss. You can almost hear the feeling of "Aquatic Ambiance." And then there's Clapper's Cavern, where you again find yourself in another ice cave, but this time you have to jump onto the seal Clapper's back so he'll turn the underground lake frozen to help you avoid the jaws of the ever-hunting Snapjaw. The serenity of the music is a stark contrast to the anxiety of sliding across the ice hoping to make it to some semblance of land in order to jump on the next Clapper before the ice melts and you end up dead to Snapjaw's jaws.
There are still plenty of musical elements here to maintain that cold vibe, especially the glass-chime-like instrument and the whistle-like melody, which also contains an echo-y aspect consistent with the cave stage. I know it's not particularly wintry, but I do love the electronic drum machine snare-hit-clap sound that plays throughout most of the song, and that just adds to the whole ambiance of the song.
It's open wallet Season this, um season. I just opened and perused an email from GOG about their Winter Sale that runs through January 2nd. There's the impending Steam Winter Sale starting December 19th and Nintendo's semi-unorganized eShop kinda-wintery sale that goes until whenever publishers decide to end their respective sales. I don't know about the Xbox or PlayStation because despite what Sarah Bond's PR team says, I don't actually own a dedicated Xbox. And that is all on top of whatever deals and/or promotions are or will be run by Humble, Fanatical, and every other key reselling site out there.
And then, throwing a kibosh on the whole iron works is Epic Games with their free game-a-day between December 19 - January 2nd so there's that to factor in to. All to say nothing of the existing queue on every single platform I regularly use.
The impotence of this blurb of an article occurred earlier today again, in part from that GOG email, but also because I saw that Game Stop has the Final Fantasy I - VI Anniversary physical cart for the Nintendo Switch on sale for $54.99, which is the lowest price I have ever seen that specific collection and had my Game Stop gift card worked at that moment, I likely would have pressed that red "Place Order" button; $9.16 is a pretty good price for each game. But because my gift card didn't immediately work, I began to second guess myself all over again. Did I want this collection for a system that's at the end of its production life? I know Nintendo has said that the Switch 2 will be backward compatible with Switch 1 games (physical and digital?), but I also then thought maybe I'd wait to see if the same collection would have a similar discount in the next week or two over on Steam, then it would be available on whatever computer/Steam Deck I had in the future. Or at least for as long as the game was operational on newer systems and didn't go the way of either Max Payne or the now-delisted Metro 2033 titles (the original ones, not the Redux).
So I've decided to wait and see and potentially face that fomo as the hep kids these days call it. And there are the upcoming Xmas, Chanukkah, and Boxing Day holidays coming up too. So there's that.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for The Liminal Dimension through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
I previously played a game from Airem earlier in the year, Whispering Lane, which was a first-person exploration game with psychological-horror and survival-horror elements that was buggy in a way where you could end up soft-locked, and just too difficult in a way that wasn't fun enough for me to want to finish the game. In Whispering Lane, you had several environments and locations to explore while collecting items to use in puzzles while fighting off the occasional demonic horror. While not an entirely flawless execution, Liminal Dimension feels very much like a game developed by Airem (as if I could point them out of a line-up), in that there looks to be a bit more polish here where you explore a single location through a series of loops and visual distortions that amount to a satisfying game.
There was a bit of tinkering I needed to do on the Steam Deck in terms of controller settings, like mapping the Q and Left Control buttons to two of the back buttons, but apart from that, the game ran beautifully. And while I did notice the hallways tearing a couple of times along the floor and walls, I couldn't be 100% certain that this wasn't intentional, or more likely a result of the game engine handling potentially infinitely repeating hallways. It was something that I could easily overlook and did. I will link my unedited playthrough here, and I'll also include the whole video at the end of the article.
But now, on with the rest of the game. And of course, Spoiler Warnings from here on out.
The premise of Liminal Dimension is that you play the character of Harry who finds himself delirious in a hospital slipping into unconsciousness. When you "come to," you're in an elevator, supposedly in a hotel, which we only know about because of the pre-level narration telling us this. This was the second time, this early in the game that I kinda went "Ehhh, do we need that?"; the first was the computer-generated voice reading an epigraph. This secondary epigraph of sorts I feel is both redundant and not needed. Before we even start playing, we don't need to know that we're in an elevator as it's something that we'll find out in mere seconds. If we're waking up in an elevator, then how do we know that this elevator is located in a hotel and not a parking garage or the same hospital that we lost consciousness in? Then there's the reiterating the phrase from the ???? voice during the opening, that "Exit...It's the key...don't forget...exit." The only thing I can think of is that maybe during playtesting that that line was glossed over so players were missing this key game mechanic? Even mentioning that "Harry stared at the buttons on the panel, searching for the number 3" feels like it was inserted into the game because people couldn't find their way out of the elevator? This is of course just speculation but I don't think that this opening is needed
Once you leave the elevator, everything seems normal enough. You're in a dark green hallway that turns to the left, leading to a hallway of locked doors that dead ends after a right turn. Once you turn around, things start repeating themselves, and it's your goal to find a way out, however, out of what and out to where is an open-ended question. As you walk up and down identical and looping liminal hallways, you're supposed to follow the EXIT signs from what I can tell. Several EXIT signs only have the I halfway lit that I think you're supposed to ignore, but as I was attempting to finish the game and not do a full-on exploration of all of the game's possible mechanics, I would turn around to look for the fully lit EXIT sign. I am also not sure if interacting with the letters and cards you find scattered about are environmental triggers, but this would definitely seem to be the case since when you pick them up, they otherwise obscure the rest of the screen. So picking up cards and following the EXIT sign are essentially what you do for the whole game.
Me being me though, there were a few times when I read too far into the "Exit...It's the key" bit. In one instance, I noticed that the red EXIT was reflected in the glass on a painting on the wall, except that the back of the EXIT sign was facing the painting, so the EXIT should not have been visible in the reflection. I'm willing to bet that that was just something in the game engine messing up and that it was unintentional, but if it was intentional as a literal red herring, then major kudos to Airem for that, because I really enjoyed that effect both visually and feeling that maybe I was seeing something that I wasn't supposed to see or that Harry's brain was possibly playing tricks on him.
The letters, notes, and pictures are where the rest of the obtuse storytelling comes into play. When I first started, I had thought that Harry might have been in an event such as a car accident and was experiencing something akin to Limbo while doctors worked to resuscitate him. However, after reading as many of the notes as I could find I began to wonder if Harry wasn't actually an experiment at exploring a space where people go between life and death. A plane or existence of repeating environments where otherworldly creatures sometimes lurk. I thought of it as a mix between the hallway in P.T. and the film Flat Liners, except the organization running Project Lumen felt more well-funded than five medical students. As the game progressed, it felt more confident that Harry had been purposefully sent to this liminal dimension, although the specific reason I was not able to determine.
Thankfully though, Liminal Dimension does a lot more to mess with the player than I was expecting from a typical game about exploring liminal spaces that throw the occasional beach ball or lawn chair in the middle of your path; albeit those are still spine-tingling moments for me. Here we have visual effects accompanied by an audible stinger to let the player know that something that just happened was supposed to have happened. You might find yourself walking, turning the corner of a hallway for the 87th time, but the camera pulls hard to the left but you're still looking straight ahead. Or were you spun around and now you're looking behind you? Or you're walking down a hallway and suddenly the environment flips so that you're now walking on the ceiling. One of the more trippy effects was when, and I cannot confirm this until I extract that section from my gameplay video and run it through the Oculus Quest 2, but I think the game briefly projects in stereoscopic vision. And all of the in-game clocks that I came across displayed real-world time, which I just thought was a really cool touch.
Eventually, the game concludes with Harry finding his way back to the elevator although the omnipresent whispering voice wants Harry to question the validity of his reality. Is he really going back to the same reality he left? And will he be the same as when he left? Despite the hinting at a larger world beyond what we see in the game itself, hinted at in letters and the final scene, I feel like there doesn't need to be a follow-up to Liminal Dimension that explores this space in greater detail, say with a platoon of armed space marines. Please don't go this route, because as the game stands right now, it was a refreshing take on the exploration of liminal spaces with scripted events that were both entertaining and slightly unnerving.
You know, for the life of me I can't find where this song plays in the game, and I watched two longplays to see if the music that plays during Snowball Run changes at all throughout the game, but it doesn't. And from all of the soundtracks for Kelly Club: Clubhouse Fun and Shelly Club: Clubhouse Fun (the European title of the game), I couldn't find the music used in Snowball Run. So I don't rightly know what is going on with either the soundtrack or the video game.
My assumption is that Manfred Linzner wrote this particular track for the game and it was included in the game's audio files but it was never used. But if this song wasn't used for Snowball Run, being the only winter-related activity in the game, then I don't know where the music for that mini-game came from. I didn't recognize it in any of the other songs from all of the collections of music from this game either; or supposedly from this game.
But as for the music, when I first heard it, I wouldn't've placed it in a wintry scene, at least for the first 15 seconds. Then for some reason that I can't explain, from 0:16 through when the song repeats at 0:25, I could imagine some kind of kids playing in the snow. Something to do with throwing snowballs, running among a forest of snowmen, and sledding down a hill, standard winter activities when you're seven years old. That simple eight seconds is where this song clicked for me, even though it doesn't really have any of the hallmarks of classic wintry effects for video game music. And for that simple reason is why I'm sharing it with y'all today.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Miss Rosen's Wowtastic! Marching Band through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
I have almost nothing negative to say about Miss Rosen's Wowtastic! Marching Band, a strange hybrid of visual novel, puzzle-sorting, and fighting game. The format fits the Nintendo Switch wonderfully both with the controller and touch screen although when I first started I was saddened that there were no motion controls, but we'll get to why that would've been a bad decision a bit later. I'm also going to have a hard time writing something coherent about this game because just like Tux and Fanny, trying to accurately describe Miss Rosen's Wowtastic! Marching Band is like trying to explain in writing why a joke is funny. You have to be there in the moment to hear the setup, see the visuals, and hear the punchline in the context of the visuals and what happened five screens prior just to catch the callback.
But let's give it a try anyway.
Miss Rosen's Wowtastic! Marching Bandis the name of a fictional children's variety show where the titular character of Miss Rosen, who herself is a "living" clockwork majorette figure visits various locations and talks with special guests. Each of the guests has a problem for Miss Rosen to solve which involves performing an items sorting puzzle where the player has to fit a certain number of objects within a given space within a certain amount of time. After several puzzles and dialogue to move the plot along, the setting changes and the process repeats which is the only negative thing I have to say. Each new chapter/episode begins with nearly the same dialogue from Miss Rosen, which works well if you're only playing one chapter/episode at a time, but if you're binging the game, then it could feel repetitive very quickly. I had to only play up to two chapters at a time and then come back the next day
The absurdist nature of the entire game makes all of this work. A lot of the character models look like something out of a kid's toy box, and even the explanations behind how the game operates inhabit a similar mindset. Dunno, for instance, is a small boy who only looks that way because he has a bandana covering his face, masking the fact that he's actually a full-sized Tyrannosaur. Or the fact that apart from the visual novel aspect of the game, the only other thing you do is put objects within the confines of a container. Some of the puzzles get pretty complicated later on in the game such as objects that move on their own, or objects that have to be facing a specific direction before they will be "accepted" as part of a completed puzzle.
There were quite a few puzzles that took me multiple attempts to complete and the game does offer a pass if you're unable to complete a puzzle after three attempts. While I appreciated this offer to skip a puzzle, I managed to complete every one, although I used the touchscreen for finer accuracy for some. For me, the Switch controllers, or likely any controller, were too finicky and not precise enough to get, say, a dinosaur and three enemies in a single book. With the touchscreen, I found that I could move objects literally a pixel at a time which made solving puzzles in the late game a lot more manageable, even if they took multiple attempts. For the most part, the sorting puzzles were enjoyable and continued with the absurd nature of the game.
Without spoiling much, there were even mini-boss fights that incorporated the same sorting puzzles while still maintaining coherence with the rest of the game:
I had a blast playing Miss Rosen's Wowtastic! Marching Band once I stepped back and stopped trying to play as much of the game in a single sitting as possible. When treated like a short TV show and only playing through one or two chapters/episodes at a time, preferably per day even, I found that I was able to enjoy the repetitiveness. The story too was engaging in a bizarre and silly manner, and I did enjoy the crossover with Meringue Interactive's previous game, About an Elfthat looks to be in a similar vein to Miss Rosen's Wowtastic! Marching Band that I will likely pick up at some point in the near future.
"Snow" is the music that plays in the two wintry stages, Frappe Snowland and Sherbet Land. If I had to choose a favorite, it'd probably be Frappe Snowland simply because there aren't the annoying penguins skirting around and there are fewer caves to deal with.
As for how this theme, in particular, is offering wintry vibes, for me it's not so much the melody as it is the jingly bells/tamborine that start off the song. The higher pitch of the melody though is pretty typical for themes that involve ice and/or snow, but apart from that, there really isn't much else about this song that screams, "Watch out how you skid on the ice so you don't fall into the frozen lake all the while avoiding those damnable penguins!" Although, likely because I put so many hours into Mario Kart 64 back in the late 90s playing time trials over and over, that this song automatically sounds like it belongs in the middle of a snowy setting with bopping snowmen that are thankfully more forgiving than those in Slalom.
Well, it's the end of the year and now it's time to look back and reflect on all of the choices we've made over the last 336 days. Look back at all of the games we didn't play, all of the TV shows left unstreamed, all of the movies left to decay in derelict theatres under the oppressive weight of eons of accumulated dust and refuse from civilizations long since past as we speed headlong towards the oblivion of nothingness. You know, Monday, December 2, 2024.
Because it happened less than a month ago, I'm just still flabbergasted at the number of people who anecdotally didn't know that the Affordable Care Act and "Obamacare" were the same thing. Or think that somehow tariffs will be the solution to a well-funded government and "more money in my pocket." Or that somehow PET will be the economic savior in his literal cheaply gilded world. Or that there are people who genuinely voted because they're afraid that a non-cis person is going to burn down the world. Or that somehow Drumpf wasn't really going to use Project 2025 as his transition team's playbook. Racists, homophobes, bigots, etc who hide behind religion and the hope for less expensive groceries are among the worst and we are not a safe space for you; your intolerance and fear does not mean I have to be tolerant of your racist, homophobic, and bigotted beliefs. No, I will not debate you, so piss off.
I'm sure there's more I can say on the matter, but for now, we'll poorly move over to our usual topic of badly written video game talking.
And yes, this is a crutch I will purposefully lean on until I become a better writer, so buckle up Hornsby, it's gonna be a long ride.
I feel like November was kind of broken up into two parts. The first third of the month there were a handful of articles for games I received through Keymailer, and the back two-thirds was "full" of games that I've had for a while and either just started playing of finally wrote about. So really just five games by the look of things, which really isn't too bad when you consider that our site is only an unpaid side gig that I like to maintain in my spare time.
Part of the reason for the falloff in Keymailer games was that maintaining a constant flow of traffic to either/our YouTube channel or Instagram channel is not something that I view as integral to how we operate here. Sure, I post articles here multiple times a week, but because Blogger is a free blogging site, it's not counted towards "coverage." For YouTube and Instagram, you need a hidden number of views on average per day to maintain an "accredited" status. Our Instagram posts are reliant on our weekly articles and we don't do a whole lot of Reels because those take time to gather footage and edit into something that people are going to watch for more than five seconds before swiping up for the next thing. The same goes for YouTube in that I see the analytics for the gameplay videos and they pale in comparison to all of the MIDI Week Singles videos that I post and only a few of those actually break the 100+ views mark. And not every video can be a 0:14 second Owl Bear Growl that's gotten 62,427 views over the last seven years. And then there are the few videos I've made that I thought would be hilarious or well thought out and well edited (based on my lack of self-taught editing skillz) and are sitting at sub-10 views. Ah well.
This is not meant to be a pity party that I'm throwing for myself. I've already decided that I'm not going to specifically create content for those sweet-sweet likes and reposts, I'm going to create content at my own pace and for content that I want to create. Does there need to be a playthrough for Classic Marathon? Probably not, but it's a game that I've wanted to play for some time, and I figured that filming it and putting it up on YouTube doesn't take much more of my time than I'm already spending on YouTube. And it's not like those videos are going to be beautifully edited playthroughs worthy of any kind of praise, it's just me playing without any kind of video or separate audio commentary, and there's already a well-established channel for that.
All of that being said, I do have a handful of more games I received from Keymailer that will be going up in the next couple of weeks, one that I'm super excited about for Friday and the other is a short horror-esque walking-sim. This reminds me, that I've got to put together a short trailer for Instagram in the next day or two.
And now that that blabbering's over with, The Squire seems to be enjoying various video games over the last couple of weeks. He's been frequently as Babbit in New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, which he says is his "favorite favorite favorite game." But he's also been able to finish at least two levels in BIT.TRIP Runner, Donkey Kong Country, and Hatch Tales. We've also been recently playing Castle Crashers which he'll play a couple of levels, but more often than not, he likes to watch some of the character animations before exiting out to the main menu to select a new character (a rather cumbersome process that should've been streamlined 16-years ago. I'm also coming to terms with how he plays retro games on their respective Switch apps and will spam the rewind feature to beat some of the levels in the Super Mario games. He still gets frustrated playing a few games, but that's just an excuse to talk through our feelings and why we play games in the first place. But hey, he's enjoying games when we play together, and that's kind of the point.
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