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.
I had thought about using the first song you hear in the first stage, Arrival: Arrival, being "Landing" but I might actually hold onto that one for an October MIDI Week Single next year. So coincidentally, we move on to "Leela" which is the song that plays during the second stage, Arrival: Bigger Guns Nearby. That's not to say that "Leela" doesn't have a little bit of creepiness to the song, but it's a bit more upbeat than "Landing." By the second stage, you have an idea of what you're in for, with a ship full of aggressive aliens going around corrupting ship systems while you unravel the story of what happened from onboard AI, one of whose name is Leela.
I'm not really sure what's going on at 1:10 through the end of the song with the clicking sounds. I haven't progressed far enough to know if that's a sound I'm supposed to recognize or be afraid of. It is a little unnerving, which is kind of what it's like wandering around the halls of the UESC Marathon when you have no more than 10 feet of visibility and you hear multiple noises all around you.
Now that I'm playing Classic Marathon, I guess I should probably finish writing down my thoughts about playing Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary Edition because why not have a week or two of writing about video games from a company that I've known about for almost 20 years but hadn't really* played anything by them until the last year. I first wrote about the game in August 2023 with an introductory contextual article, followed by a First Impressions article later that week. The first was mainly my thoughts about the series before I started, followed by our typical First Impressions after completing Mission 3: Truth and Reconciliation. In truth, I only played Halo off and on until I finally beat it in February of this year (2024).
Well, I have to admit that I feel a little bit better about Halo: Combat Evolved Aniversary than I did when I first started, and easily after the first couple of missions. There was a certain appeal to fighting the Covenant alongside a bunch of computer-controlled marines, but I definitely found my groove when the game was more about running through the corridors of subterranean complexes fighting off the Covenant, the Flood, and the Flood-infected Covenant. I had issues with several other areas of the game for various reasons, so everything didn't become wonderful once you end up on your own.
During Mission 5: Assault on the Control Room, I felt that I was running through the same two hallways and central operations room for what felt like a couple of hours. Even when I thought I recognized which way to go, I frequently found myself getting turned around and not always sure what it was that I was supposed to be doing apart from killing anything that was on the screen. I did enjoy some of the in-between bases sections where you were driving Sheila, sorry, the Scorpion Battle Tank, and I did rely heavily on her power throughout, even to a fault. But once you had to leave Sheila behind and enter another tower of what felt like the same room and hallway, then I became annoyed/bored/frustrated.
Mission 6: 343 Guilty Spark was where The Flood was introduced. An organism that the Covenant feared and, from what I understood, attempted to keep locked away before Master Chief and company entered the underground facilities. In some ways, it felt like Halo was taking an action-horror route which I would rather play than a straight-up action game. Even the later appearance of the infected marines and Covenant reminded me a lot of the Headcrab Zombies from the Half-Life series although I couldn't find anything that pointed to this theory. It was pretty cathartic, if not still a bit stressful unloading an entire clip from the assault rifle into a swarm of the Flood. It did kind of make me want a straight-up horror/action-horror/survival-horror game set in the Halo universe, but that might be asking too much of whoever the hell owns the IP at this point, to ask them to divert heavily from their base of sci-fi military action shooters.
Lastly was the final mission, The Maw, which consisted of two of the more frustrating levels in the entire game. The last half of the first second of The Maw has you doing a bit of platforming, something that has been very minimal to this point in the entire game. The jumps aren't inherently difficult, nothing Super Mario Bros. or even Super Meat Boy level of platforming difficulty, but you do have to jump to platforms and catwalks with moderate to severe accuracy otherwise you'll over or under-jump, and then have to walk/run back through a large room that looks almost the same from virtually every angle. If you were able to have a map overlay for platforming sections like in Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, then this area would have been a lot easier, but since accurate platform jumping had not been a necessary skill to get through the game, making these jumps while under fire from infinitely spawning enemies was a bit infuriating. The last part of this particular section requires you to either lob grenades or shoot rockets into an exhaust pipe, so kind of like explosive basketball with limited ammo. I died quite a few times here after exhausting my supply of grenades and rockets and was unable to find any more ammo pick ups/drops.
The second half of The Maw consisted of another Warthog-required stage that again, put you in an area that had enough roadblocks to make any steady progression in the Warthog grind to a halt. And since this was my first time playing Halo: CE I didn't really understand how much of the 6:00 timer I would need to drive the Warthog across what felt like half the planet (really, on 2.1 km) to reach the Longsword before the entire complex exploded. This isn't the Super Metroid timer that feels like you only just make it out from the Space Colony Ceres, which does allow for a couple of mistakes as you climb out of the vertical chamber. Here, you really just need to gun it the entire time as much and as frequently as possible or you're going to have to replay this section again and again. My first time through, I reached the final gauntlet where enemies are coming at you from all sides with the pick-up ship in view and the timer down to fewer than 0:05 seconds. I hoped that I didn't need to make it to the ship, that there would be a cutaway to Master Chief jumping to the ship just in the nick of time, but no. The timer reached zero, and the complex exploded along with Master Chief. So no Halo 2 I guess. Except I restarted this section, annoying back at the very beginning of the stage (no checkpoints here) which included a near minute of elevator riding and exposition dumping that you can't skip because it's not a cutscene. I did make it out after making more than a handful of mistakes but still was able to make up time on the slightly rounded straightaways.
And so I did make it, and destroyed the Halo, along with everything on it. Except I doubt that very much even if I didn't know that there are already six games in this collection. I feel like the Flood is going to end up being like tardigrades in their ability to survive deep space for extended periods. Let alone I don't think that the entirety of the Covenant Armada was on the Halo when it exploded. I will likely play Halo 2, maybe over these upcoming holiday weeks if I'm not sinking my time in either Classic Marathon, or Fallout 4, or The Elder Scrolls Online, or Dragon's Dogma, or Triangle Strategy. Maybe I'll wait until I finish a game or two before jumping into Halo 2 because despite all of my criticisms that littered this and previous articles, I did feel like I had played a well-constructed first-person shooter.
*I say "hadn't really" because I did play the first mission sometime before The Shramp and Gary moved down to SoCal, and I played one short match of couch multiplayer with Toddells when he was still living in SF with Chreekat. So it wasn't my first-first-first time, just my first dedicated time.
P.S. Now that you've reached the end of the article, I'm going to include my stats from playing the game. I didn't seek out any of the hidden skulls or other collectibles because my focus was on beating the story, not fully exploring every corner of each level, which might be a bit of a surprise since my level completion time often took far longer than the Par time. But that's just me.
Yes, I died 88 times. I don't know if that's good or bad, but that's me.
I'm not usually fond of releasing a MIDI Week Single article without what I feel is the basic information like the composer's name or at least someone in the sound department. Apparently, Metal Wolf REV is a bit of a strange one in that there are multiple Metal Wolf titles across multiple systems, most of which seem to have only been released in Japan in the early 2000s. There was a Metal Wolf released on the Dreamcast in 2004 that was an action game of some sort by PrincessSoft (although the few screenshots and videos I've found also title this Metal Wolf REV). The same year saw the release of Metal Wolf Chaos by FromSoftware on the original Xbox (although it's also available on Steam) which was a third-person mech shooter with the President of the United States fighting off a coup attempt by his VP. Then in 2006, there's Metal Wolf REV which came out on the PlayStation 2 which was a visual novel from PrincessSoft.
All of that to say, I'm not sure who wrote the music to Metal Wolf REV which was released on the PlayStation 2 in 2006. I'm not even sure what the track is titled or the context in which the song is played in the game. I'm not even 100% sure if this is in fact Track 29 because I've found different songs playing for "Track 24" on three different sites, which is a little frustrating because the psxdatacenter says that the limited edition PS2 Metal Wolf REV has a soundtrack (different from the two song CD here) and that there's an in-game music player with all of the track names. Frustrating.
BUT! All of that aside, whatever track this is, if it is indeed Track 29, is a hell of a banger. Since the PS2 Metal Wolf REV says it's a visual novel, I could only imagine this to be played either during a final cutscene or during the first part of the credits before Track 30 comes in since that's actually a song with lyrics. There's just a little bit too much energy in this song, which is all well and good for the song itself, for it to be played during a dialogue-heavy scene, but I could very much be wrong. So I'll just enjoy this song, whatever its official name is, even if it isn't "Track 29."
Classic Marathon Systems: Windows, macOS Release Date: May 10, 2024 / December 21, 1994 Publisher: Aleph One Developers / Bungie Developer: Aleph One Developers / Bungie Time Spent: 18 Minutes
Sadly, 15 minutes was all I was able to spend in Classic Marathon and if you're familiar at all with my time playing DOOM II, then that's essentially the same reason here. I first wrote about this 12 years ago back on our other side and occasionally this still holds true. It might have something to do with how much the hand/gun bounces while moving, something that doesn't come across in still images. If you watch my short video below, you'll see me back out of the game specifically to see if there was a setting to reduce bobbing/wobble, but there wasn't anything specifically worded for that kind of setting, so I went back into the game to give it a second go, but only eight minutes into that run did I start to feel the first twinges of nausea, so I decided not to try to power through and quit out of the game.
This made me a bit sad because I first heard of Marathon from the third season of Red vs. Blue during a series of episodes where Church was nuked back in time and once I started getting the urge to play Halo I had looked into playing through Marathon first only to find out that it wasn't readily available on most modern (at the time) systems. Then sometime in late 2023, there was an announcement over on Steam that the Marathon series was coming back in some capacity and as it turned out, it was a port of the original 1994 release being released for free. You can see in the video that I did tinker a little with the controls since I wasn't about to use the arrow keys to move around and even in-game I couldn't remember how antiquated the controls were with no ducking or, I think, no manual reload button.
I do have a couple of thoughts during my eight minutes in Classic Marathon though, and that it actually felt a lot like the first stage in Halo, "Pillar of Autumn," where after a series of backstory introduction tutorials, you start fighting a bunch of aliens who've infiltrated your ship. You then talk to a computer AI system (and yes, I read it in Cortana's voice) that gives you your objective which leads you through a series of backroom/hidden passages while making your way around the UESC Marathon. Again, I only made it so far before I became nauseous, so I wasn't able to fully explore the ship and complete the first level.
So now that that's all out of the way, here's my 18 minutes attempting to play Classic Maraton.
I do have the other two Marathon games, Classic Marathon 2, and Classic Marathon Infinity and I'll likely give both of those a go to see if there were any updates to gun wobble/bobble. But if I end up not playing either of the other games in the Marathon Trilogy, then I won't feel too bad (at least for about an hour if I have to stop playing) since the games were all free and I know that plenty of other people out there have been enjoying them. Just not me because of my weak little stomach when it comes to certain first-person shooters.
P.S. I should probably come up with a better name than "A Stage Select Start Attempt," maybe something a little more positive, but still informing the viewer that they're not about to watch an 18-minute speedrun of an 8 1/2 hour game. But for now, I kinda like using "Attempt" in the title in the YouTube video, but for here, I think I'll keep the "First Impressions" title too.
I am somewhat loathe to say that I've now played P.T. because I haven't, which is kind of the whole point of our Emulator Hour articles. That we're publically saying that we've played an emulated game or at the very least, played a game on an emulator for any number of reasons. The reason for playing an adapted and rebuilt version of P.T. the way that I have is because the original P.T. was first made available on August 12, 2014, and was pulled from the PlayStation online store after a falling out between Hideo Kojima and Konami was made permanently unavailable as of May 2015. But hooooooly shit did it make an impression. I did not have a PlayStation 4 at the time that P.T. was available and I'm sure as hell not going to fork over $750 for a 10-year-old console that supposedly has the playable teaser installed on it.
For several years I'd searched for an emulated version of P.T., butmost of my searches led me to Unreal PT, but only in name as most of the links I came across were more than six months old and dead. Then I read an article (I sadly can't find the article or the article that I had written about the article) going over what they (who're they?) felt were the best horror games of all time that everyone should play, and naturally P.T. was on that list, which irked me a bit because of the uber-scarcity of the original game files. That'd be like saying that The Day the Clown Cried is the best movie of all time that everyone should see before they die. But find a downloadable version of Unreal P.T. I did, and play it I did. Kind of.
Very quickly, before I get into actually talking about the game, I want to preface that I know that there are two semi-available emulated ports of P.T. There's Unreal PT that I have played, and the 'closer to the source material' P.T. Emulation 1.4 which is locked behind a Patreon paywall. Between those two available ports, Unreal P.T. has the greatest number of differences such as missing animations, missing assets, and is potentially unbeatable. So with all of that in mind, let's get to Unreal P.T.
Attempt #1
This was technically my second attempt playing Unreal PT, but that first time was mainly to see if the game would run on my laptop, and let me tell you, in this case, 18 frames per second was about what I was expecting. What my point is in sharing this clip, is that I went into this without having looked anything up, although I did know, possibly through common societal knowledge that the game had something to do with a hallway and a creepy-ass woman. I also read a while ago that the creepy woman is supposedly behind you the entire time from a game-dev standpoint and so I kept thinking that she was going to show up, which is why I kept turning around in my Attempt #2 and #3 videos, expecting her to be at the end of the hallway.
Despite not knowing how to open the door on the second loop, what threw me the most was that the door-opening mechanic was just, "walk into door and it will either open or it won't." Maybe I'm just too used to modern first-person survival-horror walking sims where you have to click on the door to open it or press a button to trigger a door-opening action, but this just felt like I was doing something wrong. That and not knowing what I was supposed to be looking for. Like a picture on the ground, but we'll get to that in Attempt #2. I feel like at the 9:40 mark you can feel me really getting frustrated.
Attempt #2
Before jumping into the game this time, I did look up a walkthrough, which was where I found out about the picture on the ground in the second loop (or is it the first loop?). However, I misremembered what I read because I thought that this had something to do with the series of pictures you collected during one of the later loops. But upon zooming in (thanks to the RMB cue) this opened up the door to allow me to proceed through to the next loop.
During whatever-loop-that-is at the 07:14 mark, I noticed my frames per second dropped from 15-18 down to 9. Normally this would likely mean that the game would be unplayable, but possibly because I was already used to a sub-20 fps, this didn't bother me too much. I could still play and feel that the game wasn't absolutely broken. It's not running great, but at least it's running. And then I accidentally shortcutted one of the more iconic shots in the entire game, when you round the corner and see the woman standing at the end of the hallway, all because I rounded the corner too quickly and didn't stop soon enough. But maybe that makes the event creepier since you only see her for a split second before the lights go out? Maybe?
Just a few additional notes on Attempt #2. Nope, do not like that bathroom one bit. At the 10:40 mark, I paused the game because I was playing it at work on my lunch break, and at the time, there was a medication delivery that I had to handle, so I ended up cutting out about four minutes of pause screen. That new modified radio broadcast in the second to last loop was damn creepy, as in goosebumps and all when the voice started repeating the numbers and then again during the last loop when the voice says, "Look behind you. I said, look behind you." And that jump scare at 14:55 legitimately got me. Then I decided that I should turn the lights back on in my office and go back to work.
Attempt #3
This one was the doozy. I reread a walkthrough before playing, and referenced a couple during the repeating red hallway sequence to find the hole in the wall, and once your flashlight starts to change colors each loop. I think this might be as far as you can get in Unreal PT based on some of what I've read about this port's limitations, and I'm kinda okay with that. The solution feels like it's on the level of Lucasfilm Games' point-and-click level of obscurity what with the number of steps into the hallway, and even having to speak a certain phrase or word for the front door to finally unlock; although I also read that that solution doesn't exist in either Unreal PT or PT Emulation 1.4, so there's that too.
The attempt had a lot of good moments in it, from seeing words appear on walls on subsequent loops, to even the amount of frustration of the red looping hallways and actually thinking that the foyer was some level of relief because it was something different. The white screen of death was nice and in a way felt akin to the blue screen of death in Eternal Darkness. Also somewhat being able to piece together the story of what I thought was going on was genuinely unsettling but still a fun realization; although I obviously don't know everything because I didn't see what happened immediately before the player is graced with Norman Reedus' beautifully grossly mug. I'm also not sure what to make of the bloody talking bag in the garage after respawning the post-white screen.
I don't think that I can come away saying that I've now played P.T. for all of the reasons I mentioned way up there at the top, but I can say that I've played through the majority of Unreal PT, which might be all that will ever be available until Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro are able to wrestle their vision away from Konami's copyright lawyers. Who knows. Either way, this was a fun emulated port of a delisted playable teaser for a game that was canceled nine years ago because someone's ego was purportedly bruised.
In the last month or so, I'd gotten back into The Elder Scrolls Online after finding out that it was working well enough on the Steam Deck to warrant a purchase when it was on sale. During that time, I was playing in Vvardenfell, part of the Morrowind DLC, but then I accidentally started a quest that turned into what was originally the starting quest in Cold Harbor. Following the journey through Cold Harbor, I found my character deposited in Bleakrock Isle since I had chosen to be part of the Ebonheart Pact, a location I had not revisited since I first explored this area nigh on 10 years ago when I created my first character.
"Northpoint Nocturn" is one of the songs that plays in Bleakrock Isle. Being in that location, among snow-covered hills, with this music playing brought back heaps of nostalgia and good feelings all around as snow fell outside of the Bleakrock Trading Hall. There was just something about this serene music with the mountains, the snow, and the forested hills and it being cold outside here in the real world makes me yearn for just over a month from now when I'll be in the snow-covered high desert of central Oregon and with any luck, sitting on a comfy couch drinking something hot and playing ESO while occasionally looking out at a snowy expanse of fir and juniper.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Sancticide - Demo 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.]
Sancticide is kinda strange and I'm not sure how to feel about it or the message that I might have interpreted from only playing the demo. You can watch the whole of the demo which is up on our YouTube channel here.
The story here, as far as I was able to gather from the 1.3 playthroughs I did, was that you're a guy in a post-apocalyptic, potentially post-rapture world that happened some years before the start of the game, and you're making your way through an area killing groups of bandits/sinners and the occasional apparition. The story location is not made clear, although it's somewhere with exposed magma chambers, although that could have been a result of the apocalypse/rapture, but the developers, Red Square Games, are a Polish studio so it could just as well be somewhere in the Polish countryside. You play as a guy dressed like a cross between a Romanesque Centurian Soldier, and a modern military soldier-man, with maybe a bit of zealot priest thrown in for good measure.
In the demo, your character wakes up after something potentially traumatic happened, possibly tumbling down the cliff face? But there is a singular goal upon realizing where he is, and that's to search the campsite and kill all of the sinners. Like, I want to know what this campsite is all about. Are these refugees, fleeing from an oppressive religious society? Are they an organized group that is raping and pillaging their way through southern Poland? In typical video game fashion, nearly everyone we come across as we slaughter our way through the camp looks like they're either on patrol or patiently waiting for an attack to come from somewhere, meaning there isn't really any sign of civilian life that I noticed.
The setting itself is a mixed bag, literally. As mentioned, there is supposed to have been some event that did something big to the world population, which is why you are a holy solider guy running around with a gladius, or whatever sword-like weapon you find along the way, but you also have the option of a machine gun in contextual situations. There isn't a whole lot in the way of modern civilization that you see apart from broken down or derelict vehicles, bags of cement lying around, and dozens of lit candles atop a broken washing machine. Oh, and several enemies/sinners do carry firearms. And then on top of all that, there is a fantastical element as your character has Witcher-like magical abilities that are only hinted at in the demo, like a sonic push-like ability that drains from your magic (faith?) meter. There are also several goblin/ghoul-like creatures and literal ghost-like shades that talk smack at you. Maybe it's because this is a demo, but it felt like there wasn't much time to question what was going on or why you were doing what it was that you were doing, except searching the campsite and killing sinners.
I don't know if the demo ended prematurely for me because I took too much damage in a group fight, or if it was scripted to end, but I ended up nearly killed, and then you're saved by a fellow Sin Collector (as is what your savior calls you and himself), who then presumably kills the remainder of the sinners and takes you, via cutscene stills to what I assume to be is a Sin Collector stronghold ala Kaer Morhen. The demo however ends with you spawning into a rotunda where you can spar against several collections of enemies until you want to end the demo. I'll get back to this rotunda battle in a bit because it's intrinsically linked to my next bit.
The controls in this game were something, and I should also point out that the game ran between 12-20 frames-per-second on the Steam Deck at both medium and high graphical settings. The camera controls and sensitivity left something to be desired as I often found that I could never rotate the camera as fast as I wanted it to, especially in close-quarter combat with multiple enemies. The group of ghosts, the ghouls, the final battle, and the rotunda battle all felt hampered because I could not get the camera to move around as fast as I wanted. There was also no lock-on option in combat, which combined with a slow rotation speed did not help the feel of combat. Lastly, there was no dodge or roll option, or at least none that was either intuitive or made known to me. I'm not saying that every one-on-one (or thereabouts) third-person adventure game needs to have a dodge/roll option and I recognize that Dark Souls has trained me well in this regard, but combat really felt like it was missing a dodge/roll action. Yes, there was a parry button that seemed to be the combat-related skill wall that I never quite mastered, and I never learned if you're able to parry projectiles, because those bloody ghoul creatures and whatever it was that they were throwing nearly took me out of the game.
So the end of the demo consisted of a sparring battle arena where you could select what type of enemies and how many you wanted to fight in this specific rotunda; I genuinely don't know what else to call it. I started off fighting what I knew in numbers I could handle, but eventually, I pitted myself against the maximum number of Proselytes (there being 10 of them). But hey, I had a reticle-less assault rifle, so how hard could they really be? I think I managed to kill one, take the helmets off of a couple, and maimed a few before I was literally gutted. I didn't actually mind the combination of using either a sword or an assault rifle interchangeably during combat and in the right circumstances and setting, it probably could have been a lot of fun outside of the sparring arena.
So that's where I stand on Sancticide, which if you're not sure by the time you're at the end of this article, then you're in the same boat as I am. If the game implemented at the very least lock-on targeting during combat (as if I know how easy/difficult that is to implement in a video game) and some type of dodge mechanic, then I would likely enjoy the combat a lot more than I did in the demo. I'm sure that there is a lot more to the story and what is going on than what is in this 20-minute demo and I would be very surprised if the demo is how the game actually started. I need to know more about these sinners before I allow myself the pleasure of gutting them with a three-thousand-year-old sword.
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