HROT

One thing I'm surprised I didn't question as I was playing it was "What the fuck does Hrot even mean" and apparently its Czech for "point" or "spike".  Thanks Google

HROT is a first person shooter that came out in 2023 although looking at I wouldn't blame you for thinking it came out 1996.  Its a fast paced boomer shooter thats wearing its Quake influence so hard that the developer may as well be kicking down your down with a giant "I FUCKING LOVE QUAKE" neon sign draped around his neck while he plays a Nine Inch Nails album at full volume directly into your eardrums.  That's not a bad thing though, its not like iD are making oldschool Quake games anymore so its nice to get some fresh nostalgia bombs from time to time.  Another game that it reminds me of is Chasm: The Rift, but I've not played that so I'm not sure if it actually resembles that game in any significant way outside of the visuals.  I've just seen a review of it via a Civvie11 video on YouTube.  What is obvious is that it's made by people who are passionate about boomshoot history so either way if you're craving some real old-school style shit, HROT is a good place to go.  

HROT has 3 episodes and 24 maps (plus some secret ones) where you shoot your way through what I think is 1980s Czechoslovakia.  Despite the "realistic" setting of the game, the actual presentation is quite fantastical.  The first few enemies are dudes in gasmasks with guns and grenade launchers but quickly turns into you fighting floating heads, zombies, weird newt looking things and those statues from Dr Who.  Bosses also include things such as gorilla ornaments on carnival rides that come to life, sentient pommel horses and the floating heads of politicians.  If you were worried the grey brown environments were going to be devoid of any personality then you'd be quite wrong.  The art direction is following the Quake brown style but you're never sure what weird thing is waiting around the next corner.  One minute you're in a sewer shooting dudes with shotguns, next minute you're in a courtyard desperately hopping away from a horse in a gas mask while zombies in wheel chairs obliterate your HP.  There are also a ton of funny little interactables in a few of the stages which includes the standard FPS mounted turrets but also fully functional keyboards and little LCD games.

One thing that annoys me about the general presentation of HROT is that I felt a lot of it went over my head.  There are nods and winks to all this Czech art and literature scattered throughout the game, I think, and because I'm not privvy to basically any of it as a nerdy British man who grew up in the 90s, some of the charm is lost on a player like me.  For example there's a level in episode 3, the first one, that feels like it comes right out of left field.  It's called War with the Newts and it seems maybe a bit lol so randum to an ignorant player like myself but it turns out to be based on famous novel of the same name that I've never heard of but now want to read.  I forget how I even stumbled on this information after playing, maybe in the wiki or something.  It's not a huge knock against the game though, it's just I have no idea where to even begin educating myself with Czech history in order to get all the little details the game has to over.   

One other fun thing the game does is that upon completion of each chapter the game gives you an actual cooking recipe to try.  The first one you get for the completion of Episode 1 is Beef Stroganoff which I actually tried making.  It turned out pretty well, was good for a couple of dinners

 The second recipe is for Cauliflower Brains which I'm not going to bother trying and the third is for "eggs in aspic" and honestly it sounds like something that makes me want to vom.  Regardless of my picky tastes though, its cool that such a feature is included.  

HROT is great and you should play it.  A fantastic Quake-like that shouldn't be missed by anyone even remotely interested in FPS's.  Shoot some guys, repel the invasion, learn to cook, simulate a clock when you're finished.  What's not to love?

You Aren't Deep, You're An Idiot

 

A long ass time ago I bought a huge bundle of games from Itch.io that was to support charity efforts for that thing that happened with George Floyed all those years ago.  It was called the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality which is a good and noble cause to fight for but I'll be honest with you chief, I just wanted the cheap copy of Celeste because the Switch version fucking sucks thanks to Joycons being awful.  Still, if Nintendo making shit controllers put some coins in the pocket of a worthy cause, I suppose thats a net positive to the world at large.  Aside from Celeste though, this pack came with hundreds of other little indie games and I have recently taken it upon myself to beat or at least try all of them.  Not a huge undertaking in actuality because the majority of the games are tiny indie experiences but some of the things in this bundle are so bad that despite getting them for nearly 0 currency I feel ripped off 

KIDS simply describes itself as "a game of crowds" on its Steam page but it's being sneaky there because KIDS isn't a game at all.  It's a weird non-game, and I'm refusing to call it an art piece or an experience either, that seems to be designed purely to inflict boredom on whoevers playing it.  The Itch page is a little more honest with its content referring to it as an "interactive animation" which is certainly more accurate.  It's the kind of thing that you might see playing in a dusty corner of an unpopular art exhibition where people might saunter by, click the mouse on the kiosk once or twice, go "what the fuck is this crap?" and then move on.  

The program involves a bunch of humanoid figures running around, falling into holes and being pushed either up or down the screen by a sphincter along with a few more things but those are the big ones.  The "game" part of this whole thing is that you have to either click or run your mouse along the humanoid figures in order to make the little animations happen.  It runs through these scenes are few times and then it ends.  There's nothing really to get about this title, you just watch the little animation play out for 30 minutes and then leave unsatisfied and wondering why you bothered.  

I'm not completely against the idea of weird art games with very little "game" in them like this one.  An example of one I think is good is The Stanley Parable which isn't much of a game by itself but its still making a funny point about games thats interesting to play through.  I know a lot of people use the term "walking simulator" as a derogatory genre tag for interactive fiction with an almost 100% focus on story and visuals but I don't vibe with the idea of that being a bad thing on base principles.  Kids on the other hand is the worst of the worst in this genre because its visuals are dogwater and its not absolutely nothing to say about anything.  

My first thought when playing was that it was trying to make some kind of point about the harms of blindly following the status quo but as the animation went on and it proceeded to repeat itself numerous times that interpretation melted away and instead I was left with "oh its just low rate shit made by an asshole tricking idiots out of 3.39 GPB"  The kind of game that a pseudo intellectual will tell you is some kind of profound experience but will then struggle to tell you anything about it when pressed.  

If you have played KIDS and you somehow got something out of it other than boredom and frustration I would love to hear from you either in a comment on in my stream chat or something.  I'm fully convinced that there is no way to enjoy this thing unless you're about 15 years old and you think vague blobs that represent children falling into a black hole is saying something valuable about society or something. I hate this thing, I want my time back and I want my nearly 0 dollars for buying it as part of a huge bundle back.  My knowledge of its existance makes my standard of living noticably worse

2026 To-Play list for July

 I had to post it here because its too big for discord 

Thank you

House of Sayuri

 I watch a lot of stuff on Netflix as a result of having kids and needing to commute to work and as a result of this I end up watching a lot of weird shit.  House of Sayuri was advertised to me at the login screen and being a bit of a sucker for Japanese horror I felt like I had to check it out.  I thought I was getting a serious horror movie but instead I got one of the weirdest films I've ever seen and I'm not sure if its supposed to be a comedy or not.  Spoilers for a aggressively 4/10 movie lie ahead. 

The movie starts out with a family having dinner and there's one extremely hikikomi member that the mother tries to coax out to eat with the rest of them.  This pisses off the hiki and causes her to exit her room with a baseball and go to town on them.  It then cuts to another family who have bought the house as they move in.  The family consists of the parents, 2 boys, a daughter and the grandparents, things seem nice at first but things very quickly start to get ghost-fucky.  You can see where this is going right?  The daughter ends up getting possessed and smashing the younger brothers face into a wall as the inciting incident.  After a decent amount of spooky ghost shit, it all culminates in all but the eldest son and the grandmother being dead as the possessed daughter kills a bunch of them and then stabs herself in the neck with a kitchen knife.  I'm obviously being pretty wishy-washy with the details but the point I'm trying to make here is that up to the family getting killed, Sayuri is playing itself as a pretty straight faced horror movie but then the film just does a tonal shift so insane that I actually might have got a case of actual whiplash from it.  

The grandmother in this family up to the mass murder was characterised as a doddery old lady, probably with dementia, not really being able to do anything for herself and spends most of the early scenes getting distracted by the obvious ghost shit that no one else can see.  At the end of the scene where the possessed sister stabs herself, the ghost shit somehow pulls her violently out of her dementia ridden elderly-ness and she becomes a turbo badass and she becomes a sort of weird mentor to the eldest son as they train to resist and maybe even beat the ghost thats haunting their new home.  This manifests in the story as basically working out, eating well and telling the ghost to literally just fuck off whenever it turns up.  Like it feeds on fear and mental anguish or something so if you just tell it to take a hike when it starts being spooky its got no choice but to just leave.  Pennywise from Temu, I guess, since it doesn't shapeshift and can't hurt you otherwise.  This entire mid-movie sequence is presented as a comedy, with the grandma being an extremely over the top, larger than life woman who slaps the elder son around like a sort of loving drill seargent into not being scared of actual ghosts.  

While all this is going on, the grandma is also investigating the cause of the haunting as aside from not wanting to move out of the new house, she also wants revenge for her dead family.  This is where the movie takes yet another tonal shift as the final scene gets weirdly dark out of nowhere after the entire second act being so comical.  It turns out that the hikikomori in the opening scene, the titular Sayuri, was sexually abused by her father and after she died at the hands of her family she became a ghost.  The grandmas plan here is to bring Sayuri's family back to the house and offer them up to the ghost so she can banish it.  The ghost kills the family that caused the haunting, the granda gets to watch them die, win-win.  Although none of this works and what we get is a surreal scene where the grandma turns into a slasher killer, at one point killing a dude by shoving a crowbar up his ass and then the ghost is beaten by the eldest son who does what I can only describe as "mild anime shit".

It's an absolutely insane movie and I can't work out who its for.  There's some decent horror stuff in the first act but the tonal shift at the half-way point spoils it for anyone who was enjoying the movie that way.  I also can't see dark-comedy or comedy-horror fans enjoying it because the comedy isn't very good.  You get a light chuckle out of the grandmas awakening and a little guffaw the first time the ghost gets told to fuck off but after that its just sort of dull.  But then it takes its third big shift where it gets all heavy with its subject matter and the characters your supposed to be rooting for suddenly become just kind of cruel and weird.  Maybe there's something I'm just not getting about it but to me it feels like House of Sayuri was directed by a guy who just had no real idea of what he wanted to make.  Like he was in the middle of making a horror movie but then just woke up one morning like "Oh! actually I want to make a comedy now!" but instead of scrapping the horror film he just kept it and slapped his weird comedy plot on the end of it.  

I don't think I could seriously suggest that anyone go out of their way to watch House of Sayuri but I can maybe see it having a place at a drunk bad-movie night.  If you've got a room full of drunk friends and you all just want to gawp at some insane bullshit then maybe it has some value but otherwise, don't be fooled by the slick poster and just skip this crap.

I Have A Gambling Issue

 

Slot machines are absolute dogshit and I hate them

Let me take you back to the year 2010, when I had come to Japan for the first time as an exchange student on my Japanese language course.  While at the university I met a girl who had a fairly deep interest in slot machines.  I saw her once sitting in the communal study space reading a magazine and when I asked her what she was reading it turned out to be a strategy guide (?) for a recently published Evangelion themed slot machine.  The magazine outlined how the machine was played along with how to trigger its various modes and even had these big ass diagrams of the reels.  After a short conversation about it I tagged along with her to the local Pachislot place where I gave it a try for myself.  I got 5000 yens worth of tokens, took a few spins of the machine and within about 20 minutes all my money had gone.  I wasn't expecting to win and I wasn't expecting to play for a significantly long amount of time but I was expecting to at least get a bit more than 20 fucking minutes.  In that moment I vowed never to play slots again and left the place.  

But the truth is I don't actually hate slot machines, I hate losing large sums of money in small amounts of time so when you tell me that I can play fakey rougelike video game slots with no risk to my families financial situation I'm fucking all in on that one.  

Cloverpit on its surface is a very simple game.  You are locked in a small, somewhat Saw-esque room, with a mini slot machine and an ATM.  The ATM tells you that you have to pay it a certain amount of coins within a certain amount of rounds or you get ejected into the abyss below.  If you pay the coins then your debt goes up and you do it again until you either win a key from the game master or the debt gets too high to clear and you fall to your doom.  That by itself would only be fun for a few tries but Cloverpit mixes things up by giving you trinkets that can modify your luck or modify the value of things on the machine greatly and now you get the true addicting quality of the game.  Not only are you pulling the literal slot machine but you are also pulling the trinket machine and when you get that pefect mix of items and circumstances that make one value on the reels super high and then you manage to finesse your way into an insane jackpot and that rush is basically unmatched.  It gives the game a real "just one more run" quality where a failed run can be frustrating but then "if only I had gotten <trinket> that time" and so you play again hoping to get your ideal setup.  Couple that with an additional phone mechanic where every round a mysterious caller gives you a chance to change things like the value of things in the machine or give you free shots at rerolling trinkets and all the moving parts make for a truly compelling experience.  

On top of all that Cloverpit offers a number of challenges to keep you spinning for hours and hours.  The game has a number of endings that can be achieved by fulfilling a number of conditions that amount to the gambling equivalent of self-harm and the game reaches Kaiji levels of fever pitch when you have these conditions active.  Not only that but you can also activate a number of "memory cards" which are like special challenge modes that make you rethink your approach to the machine and your trinkets.

There's just no better feeling in the world than when you're behind on tokens, its the last few spins of your final round, you have a high value mark on the machine but you just cant get it to come out.  Then you hit the lever, your luck trinkets all pop at once, the reels line up and the machine goes apeshit as your high value marking hits a jackpot, you go from guaranteed death to two more rounds of safety instantly, absolute euphoria.  Thank god these developers only made a fakey video game slot machine because if you hired them to make a real one then there might be a lot more people filing for bankruptcy in the world. 

BUT THATS NOT ALL 

 Scratch cards were also a thing I quite enjoyed in my student days.  I'd grab one whenever I did my grocery shopping and just the act of winning a fiver would get me giddy for the whole day.  So when I saw an incremental game based around doing scratch cards I had to buy it right away.  

In Scritchy Scratchy you are trying to avoid your shitty dish washing job by winning at scratch cards.  If it was just that it would be kind of bullshit but there are upgrades for you to buy that allow you to manipulate your luck and win more consistently.  From there you buy more expensive cards that have higher payouts to increse your luck to repeat this cycle seemingly ad-infinitum.  Eventually you are granted the ability to buy a "final ticket".  You scratch it, lose and it causes you to die.  

From here you get another upgrade system that allows you to manipulate your luck and payouts even further and you keep scratching cards and unlocking more stuff until eventually you win that final ticket and I will not spoil in this post.  It's a simple little incremental game with a theme that appeals very specifically to my vices that also doesn't overstay its welcome and has the good sense to roll credits just as its getting obnoxious.  A lesson that a game like Cookie Clicker could really benefit from.  If potentially life ruining bits of cardboard appeal to you as much as they appeal to me but you don't actually want to financially cripple yourself, Scritchy Scratchy is a game that you should grab off Steam ASAP.  

The reason I say I have a gambling "issue" rather than a gambling "problem" is because, thankfully, my weird urge to gamble can be completely satiated by games like this.  I think I owe a debt of gratitude to things like Cloverpit, Scritchy Scratchy and the Yakuza series casino (to name one example) for allowing me to indulge in the thrill of the game without any of the real consequences that would send me down a potentially very dark path.  Even if you aren't weirdly tempted by the casino lifestyle like I am though, these two games are very good and you should grab them anyway 

LETS GO GAMBLING

The Awful Kirby Game

 

I quite like a bit of Kirby from time to time.  I wouldn't call myself a die-hard fan of the franchise or anything but I do tend to have a good time with the little guy when I do fire up a game of his every now and again.  The games are baby-easy, clearly by design and are therefore good for when I just want to kick back and stomp all over something for a few hours.  So when I decided to play Amazing Mirror in my quest to explore the GBA library this year on my to-do list I thought it was going to be a nice easy time and instead I got a deeply frustrating slog that felt like pulling teeth.

The premise of Amazing mirror is simple.  There's a big mirror and bits of it have been scattered to the corners of the world and you have to go reasssemble them so you can hop inside and go suck off the big bad guy until he dies.  For some reason this splitting of the mirror has also resulting in a splitting of the Kirby and so you are joined by 3 AI buddies that will hop around and do basically nothing for the duration of the playthrough.  I think the idea is that you are supposed to link cable up and then you all branch off and explore separately until someone finds something of note and then you use an in game phone item to summon each other to that location.  This is 2026 though, so no one owns the game and even if they did, no one owns a fucking link cable and therefore we're left with some deeply frustrating semi open world exploration that only serves to take the classic, fun Kirby formula and make it deeply frustating as it wastes your time every other room.

Let's make one thing very clear here, Amazing Mirror isn't annoying because of its core gameplay.  It's still the same baby-easy Kirby game full of braindead, haphazardly placed enemies that pose basically no threat and even if you somehow do die to something the game showers with you so many one ups that it's actually impossible for any player over the age of 3 to game over.  What makes this game so annoying is the navigation of its world and levels.  Unlike basically every other Kirby game, Amazing Mirror has a more open world that you can explore.  The hub is this big sprawling zone that connects a number of areas and within those areas there are multiple routes you can take.  The problem with this is that only one of those routes will lead to the boss which will net you a mirror shard.  The other routes will often lead you to a "goal" but purplexingly the "goal" at the end of these routes is not the goal of the game.  The goal just gives you a shitty mini game where you ride a star up a screen and then watch Kirby do his stupid little dance.  Sometimes these screens will give you 7000 one ups, sometimes they just give you health.  Why anyone would give a shit about reaching these goals is beyond me because they seem to serve no purpose whatsoever.  Maybe if this were a real video game with some teeth and one ups were a precious resource that needed to be stocked up on I'd understand but its fucking Kirby.

The unused multiplayer mechanic when doing a solo game actually trivializes any potential challenge entirely because the Kirby clones can be utilized to break every boss over your knee and leave them in a bloody pool on the ground.  Using the shoulder buttons you can use a phone to call the CPU companions to your side in order to help you fight any given enemy but not only that, when they arrive the CPU will just hand you a bunch of free healing as well.  So even if there is a boss in this game that you would somehow struggle with, as soon as things start to look a little grim you just hit the call button and then 3 more of you, probably fully powered up with copy abilities, jump in, heal you to full and then start laying on some extreme DPS.  I like Kirby for being easy but this is just taking the piss.

Maybe if you and some friends have this game and a link cable then I can see the appeal.  A lot of the navigation frustration could potentially be worked around by having 4 of you exploring different paths all at once and playing with friends is often just a nice time even if you're playing trash like this.  For the solo-players and emulation users out there though, just skip Amazing mirror because by yourself its just depressing.  Put this shit in the trash and just play Nightmare in Dreamland instead. 

The Games Industry Makes Me Sad

 

Let me just put it out there from the jump that this is not going to be a post bitching about the state of games themselves.  There is a lot to be said about the state of releases in an industry that's swamped year in-year out with remakes and sequels, an industry whos "best" game of the previous year just yoinked the plot of a PS1 game, the mechanics of a SNES game and the UI of a PS5 game smushed them together and made them French.  There's a discussion to be had there but that's not what I'm on about here.

I want to look back a little bit, to when I was a naive young boy.  A time before widespread use of the internet (my age is showing, I know, shut up) when most of the things I'd hear about games came from rare snippets on TV or magazines bought from the local supermarket.  One topic that always fascinated me when it came up was when development teams would get talked about, specifically Japanese ones.  Offices filled with people passionately bashing away at computers to make the latest and greatest games.  I remember hearing specifically, sometime around the Dreamcast era, that Japanese developers would quite often stay late at the office working on their projects, sometimes sleeping under their desks and then just waking up to resume work right away.  "Wow! That's so cool, these guys are so passionate about making games, I wanna do that, I wanna be like them" my young, idiot-ass thought at the time.  The sad reality of it though is that working like that sucks ass, even if its something your passionate about.  You may recall around the time of The Last of Us 2 coming out about the discourse around crunch culture, people working insanely long hours and burning out or suffering various mental and phsyical ailments as a result.  My dreams of developing games professionally got crushed by the staff at my high school because of my lack of general ability in maths was too much of a wall to overcome, according to them, but it was saddening to grow up and discover that the reality is not that these people are sleeping under desks and missing their commutes due to passion, but due to necessity and weird unwilling company loyalty, in a lot of cases.  Not a situation I would ever let myself fall into 

So my attention shifted, I may lack the skills to dev but I certainly have the skills to play games and write about them.  Having opinions on the media and reporting on industry happenings was something that a younger me rather liked the idea of.  But then, once again, this aspiration was mostly crushed by the reality of what being in games-media spaces is like.  An industry full of people who have no idea what they are talking about, writing bullshit in order to push magazine sales or, in the modern day, get ad revenue clicks.  A field where you aren't expected to have a deep understand or any real experience with a game before you review it, but where you play it for as short a time as humanly possible so that you can get a review up in time for release in order to drive traffic.  Not having any real opinions of your own but brown nosing indie developers and large publishers so that whatever outfit your writing for can recieve various perks such as early releases or even funding.  It sounds like a fucking miserable experience and judging from the joyless, skilless assholes that make up the majority of games media and games writing, I think if I had entered that side of the industry I would have left the mortal plane considerably earlier than intended.

So then I got older, I studied Japanese and became fluent and so the first thing I thought to maybe dabble in was game translation.  Well that turned out to be dogshit as well.  I started by doing a little freelancing, a few jobs for what mobile visual novels that I found on a website called Upwork.  The pay was low but it was a start, a foot on the ladder.  I figured if I kept plinking away at it then maybe I'd build a bit of a repuation, a bit of a portfolio and I could work my way up into higher profile things.  But then I got one job where the guy I was emailing back and forth with ended up just ghosting me after the job was complete and I didn't get paid.  I'm not working for free, so I took to looking for a salaried position somewhere and while I found some things I could qualify for, the salaries for these jobs are bullshit.  At the time, I wanted to get into translation as a way of escaping the English teaching trap a lot of gajin in Japan find themselves in, but the salaries for any positions I found usually only matched or were lower than the school I was working at.  Translating stuff is way harder than singing the alphabet to 3 year olds so I didn't really feel like adding the extra stress for basically no extra money, fuck that shit.  When my options were getting ripped off or extra stress for no reward I just bit the teaching bullet until I eventually got into translation and interpreting for an automotive company.  Not what I want to be doing per se but getting to use my Japanese and earning a real salary is nicer than having the field of education drain my soul

 All is not lost though.  Thankfully we live in an age where doing things by yourself is not only possible, but with a bit of luck and a bit of skill can even be profitable.  Working for a big game studio making things at the behest of investors and crunching so hard I never see my family sounds like shit, but engines and tutorials are avaliable and I can dev in my free time.  Thanks to services like Steam and Itch there's even avenues to put it out there.  The enthusiast press may be full of metrics driven idiots who couldn't tell a 3DO apart from a Sega Saturn but the mass adoption of social media and YouTube means it's extremely easy to just write your own shit and publish it to your own spaces and, once again, with a little luck even turn that into a living.  Translation is a bit harder to think positively on but at least I get to do it for real money even if its not about games.  A shame because the state of the average JP to EN translation for video games is actually embarassing, I'd like to do something about it, but without the coin behind it I'm happy to just play in the original text

So if the industry is making you as sad as it makes me on occasion, don't give up, just ignore it and get out there anyway.  Let me know about your indie projects so I can continue to avoid all this bullshit too.