Recent reviews by DEVIL HYENA GIRL

Two things!!

Really pointlessly resets all your progress if you ever ♥♥♥♥ up. Idk man, we got over this gameplay in the 90s.

Discovering in the course of this game that i find escape room games rather trite.

What was originally a fascinating meditation on loneliness and boredom dismantles itself and sabotages its own premise by turning it instead into an optimization game about maxing your home comfort so time passes faster. I unfortunately lost any motivation to play it once i discovered you could accelerate time to move at many more seconds-per-second.

Yet another video game which is a victim of remembering that it is a video game.

No Man's Sky drives me insane in a particular way which no other game really has in a long while. It has two viciously opposed things it is trying to accomplish, in a slapdash way that really feels like it is just continuously adding stuff without thought.

I am playing this in the year 2023, when the game has been out for a while. It has been patched numerous times, with all sorts of content. And every single piece of that content feels like it was made for Gamers™. I don't know what I am but I don't feel like I'm the core demographic here, because every one of these things feels like a superfluous feature that obscures what must've been a hauntingly pensive game.

No Man's Sky is also one of the bleakest capitalist games I've ever played. In it, you pilot spaceships which require no more attention than mining some resources, with the ultimate goal of finding more planets to visit, to carve giant holes and canyons out with your mining laser, so you may reap more rare materials and treasures to sell to an abstract space market. Plants are treated by this game with equal care and diligence to stones. A gorgeous tree that has evolved over a hundred thousand years is carbon, and maybe oxygen! Loads of delicious carbon. You carve it down and destroy it, not even letting it be wood, not even letting it be something to shape with your hands, but evaporating its form and reducing it to a basic molecule.

And for what? So you can do this a hundred more times? In dozens of more systems full of strange personality-vacant aliens with the same mysteriously vapid dialogue? So you can "discover" planets covered in settlements and crashed ships and aliens and you never can walk more than 500 meters without finding some remnant of civilization?

What scant environmental storytelling I can pick describes that the sentinels wandering around may be the remnant of some sort of fascist apocalyptic war. What then is this resource extraction hell we now exist in? Is all of No Man's Sky in some kind of purgatory? They added pirates and pirate raids recently, and they are the most boring flavorless call-to-action unnecessary gameplay I've experienced all year.

You follow leads after some entity named Artemis, slowly figuring out that they've crashed on some strange foreign planet. They describe it being covered in darkeness or something, and being utterly alone. How I wish I empathized at all. Can you imagine the weight this would have if I wasn't assaulted with a hundred meaningless NPCs before finding my way to finally speaking with Artemis? Imagine if the fascist Sentinels and idle fauna were the only signs of life except this one distress call, and finally after a dozen hours we connect our radios and talk, and they tell me how lonely they are, and how they feel so lost. How much resonance, how much solidarity we would feel!

But instead I am caught feeling that such an exchange must be an error of some degree. Some sort of remnant of the old game. It is impossible to fly to another planet before passing a dozen ships. Artemis cannot be truly so lost.

I was minding my business once when some pirates started attacking a base I was nearby. The game encouraged me to intervene. Why though? I found myself struck with the snarkiest thought: It's called No Man's Sky, but the way they're carrying on - I don't know, must be their sky!

No Man's Sky is so terrified of letting you feel alone, and I imagine that's because gamers yelled at them about it. And that's a damn shame, because when I landed on my second planet and discovered a poison mushroom planet full of giant worms that filled the sky, I did feel awe for a second. And then the game directed me to scan, and pointed out all the fun ore deposits and things for me to pillage, and the feeling was gone.

It's definitely somebody's sky. But not mine.

Asylum is, first and foremost, a love letter to a genre of fiction which doesn't need love letters.

It is secondly an amazing technical accomplishment in the realm of modern pre-rendered video games, optimizing for minimal system specs to make an accessible play experience that can likely run on a Windows 7 PC with no issue. It is an achievement of technical art, with some wonderful environmental design and an immense amount of care and attention put into making the environment feel real.

It is unfortunate that in the lengthly development time it never once stopped to pay attention to the surrounding dialogue of these sorts of stories, to learn from their pitfalls, or attempt to do better. But more than being offensive (which it ultimately is, despite its strong start), it is shoddily, hastily written.

There is a point 2/3 of the way through the game where a character simply hands you a key, which unlocks a room that contains a more important key and a video document. That video is the first we see and hear about an occult artifact. The room which the second more-important key opens contains a lengthly expository document which introduces the idea of some lovecraftian Entity. This leads us on an exploration where, eventually, we find a cult room with another lengthly, expository document, where the entity's relation to ancient peoples is explained. These three elements are all, in totality, that connects our journey to the final confrontation with the (admittedly well-designed) lovecraftian Old One. After which we leave the Asylum, maiming an innocent women on the way out for seemingly no reason, and endingn with a reveal that we were the "high risk patient" we've had to deal with twice priorly (in somewhat offensive ways).

Oh dear lord, the horror, that we may have been the "crazy" one all along.

If my sarcasm is not apparent, let me digress. In 2013, the video game "Outlast" was released, one of the most offensive regressive video games depicting "insanity" that I have ever seen. There are a handful of games which I would give zero stars, because I believe the world is legitimately worse-off for them existing: Outlast, Hatred, Outlast 2, and the entire Postal series. (If you need an explanation on the last one, look inside yourself and fix your heart.) Outlast has placed the bar so far low when it comes to asylum settings that it is literally on the floor. You just have to not trip on it.

Asylum catches its toe and stumbles, but doesn't trip on it. It is offensive primarily in how it treats the protagonist's sanity, the secondary character Lenny (who is sort of a generic amalgam of untreated OCD ailments), and the "high risk patient" - who is just a catch-all "insane violent behaviour" character, including with a random pacification by harp music for no explained reason. But these are all rather incidental gestures at trying to write "insane" characters without understanding much about insanity. The eugenicist practice of mental asylums is not particularly commented on, and the game attempts to be sympathetic... and then decides to double back and trips on the bar on the floor at the end, landing face-first where it started.

I do not know what I was supposed to get from the encounter with the old one, and the subsequent reveal that we are the high risk patient. I suppose all the other characters were in our head? Except for the receptionist, who we have maimed for no reason (other than i suppose to make sure every woman in the game leaves permanently injured - hm...).

But every plot line introduced early in the game, every element of abuse and malpractice that the game somewhat compellingly lingers on early-on... it becomes meaningless in this ending. The doctors horribly abused their patients to mine a tunnel to find an Old One, and then... they were right to make sure they only used "insane" people to figure out it's ♥♥♥♥, because that stopped it from escaping? And then we, finally, another "insane" person, let it free and take it with us? The world would be better off were we confined to a cell?

I was left with the distinct feeling that the start end ending of this game were written seperately, and they tried to write towards the middle, and never found a way to weave it together. The jarring expository documents in the middle, the way it drops so many threads from the beginning, and leaves such an ambiguous (and violent) ending feel like a writing style that instead of taking a decade to cook, took a decade to spread. But it's a feast where everything is undercooked, overcooked, or flavorless. And when I stood up from the table I felt empty.

The chasey monster at the end isn't very difficult but unfortunately does bring the game down a little bit. Would have been more tense without it.

I think this was very good maybe?

Cute art but interface is barebones and unresponsive.

finally fish are afraid of me