Ocie, 2024/03/24

Quite a while ago now I played the ARCADEA demo on stream with my good friend Purea patel... Im only writing this reveiw(?) so much later because Ive just uploaded the vod.

To get things started, ARCADEA Is an upcoming RPGmaker game in which you take control of Maisie, a mute girl on a quest to find her brother Jas. To do this, we must go through the world of Arcadia. It should be noted that Arcadia here does not refer to the Greek province, but instead refers to one of the interesting phenomena that can be found here: you see, In everyone's dreams lies an Arcade machine which represents their innermost psyche or something. It seems that we can go into these arcade machines for... reasons. Something to do with a cat? Here's the problem with writing a review of sorts from memory months after I've played something, A lot of the exactitudes of the game story have become hazy in my mind. For instance, I remember there was a talking cat who acted slightly sinisterly and seemed to be important somehow... The only other thing I remember about him is that we made him Australian for some reason. A lot of my recollection is like this, so from now on ill just mention the stuff that's stuck with me the most about the game.

Firstly, I must mention the art here, especially the character portraits. It's very good, I feel like all the main characters have very distinct designs, they're all vaguely colour coded in these nice lighter colours which both makes every character easy to tell apart which also giving them a nice sense of cohesion. It's all very cute, and this carries over to the level art, which also has pleasing pallets whilst keeping a good sense of variety between zones. Secondly, I must mention the minigames: they are of paramount importance in a game literally structured around arcade machines, and they most certainly do not disappoint. Even this demo has quite a few varied little gameplay segments, and it honestly does better in them than even some other extremely well produced or popular RPGmaker games like Pocket mirror, which relies a bit too heavily on variations of the chase sequence. Of course ARCADEA isn't exempt from having one or two chasers, close to the end there's a chase sequence against a paintbrush monster thing... but at least there is a mechanic there where you can leave bait for the monster to stall it a little. The other games are a bit more interesting though, for instance there is a puzzle in which you have to stand on a certain spot and then line up a piece of paper to reveal a symbol that tells you what direction to go next. It's a bit like that one forest sequence from Metal Gear, except in Metal Gear, the devs just left you to flounder until you got out. There's also one or two quick time button presses that I was very bad at... but it's also an interesting change of pace from other games I've played

Last thing I'd want to mention here is that in one scene you are put in a greenhouse and told to draw one of a few plants highlighted in the room, except there was also a random set of vines highlighted that had nothing to do with this, and I was very disappointed when I couldn't try to select the random set of vines over all the pretty flowers to draw. Anyway, all in all I had a very good time playing ARCADEA, and I'm excited for the full release. I would highly suggest that you play the game for yourself, you can download it here.

After we finished that demo on stream, me and Purea still had a fair amount of energy left, so we decided to look at the other game that the ARCADEA dev has worked on, A Wave Of Lights (AWOL). It's a cute little visual novel about a shut in girl meeting an alien girl and then, like, being gay for two hours. I've not much to say on the actual game itself since it's relatively short, It's just well written and the art is also cute. I will say that, uhh, I made some choices on the stream's end that might have impacted the drama of it a tad... When we played it we decided to voice one character each and whilst Purea gave a pretty neutrally toned voice to the main character, I heard that the other character was an alien and like... I can only decide the voice I went with as somewhere between Skeletor and a Dalek, because alien. It was really something going into the more dramatic or serious scenes with the characters opening up to each other and whatnot, where Purea was playing it 100% straight, and I was doing the silliest goddamed voice I have ever attempted.

to close this out, I should say that the Dev for Arcadia is named Aishin, and you can find them at their Tumblr here. Whilst Aishin was the artist for AWOL, it seems that the writer and lead dev listed was Tabby Wright, who you can find here. AWOL can be downloaded from here, and finally you can find the VoD for my stream here

Ocie, 2024/02/23

Well, I have severely underutalised this blog havent I... its been a combination of factors, I think im just not good at coming up with regular text content. And so far when i did come up with some i always thought "but i should fix the website first". and then I procrastinated on fixing the website... The older version was functional but I wasnt sure on it aesthetically and it had image/text sizig problems even on desktop. But I have now re-vamped the website, practically re-doing it from the ground up over the course of a day. I should be posting content more regularly now than... once every three months... so thats a good! yay!

Ocie, 2023/12/07

A few months ago I made myself a webpage on Spacehey, a website that tries to revive the old Myspace experience from its peak.

I tried to get into the whole thing but Ive realised I just couldnt... Lack of community or feed features ala Tumblr made it really hard to keep up with any of my friends (having to navigate two seperate buttons to get to my blog subscriptions was, annoying...)

past that there was also the issues with noone actually using spacehey, most people seemed to use spacehey for like a week as a novelty and then drop off of the face of the earth. Felt kinda pointless being in a ghost town.

Therefore I have decided to renovate this website and move my Macro Blogging escapades here! [so fun!].

I have completely redone this page and plan to add more in the future. I have also moved my two good Spacehey posts from that website to here.

I really like the concept of spacehey and wish it the best, I just personally could't stick with it.

Kindest regards - Ocie

Ocie, 2023/08/??

I played Yume Nikki last week, I think it was pretty good, but it does some things I am confused by. I also don't understand why it's so popular.

I really didn't like the game at first. It seemed like a completely inane walking simulator with no reason to play.

It did not help that the first world I entered was by far Is the ugliest and most pointeless feeling world. It appears as a forest with a dark floor and a scrolling Aztec image underneath it. In most of the other worlds, the floor and walls feel much more coherent. The difference between the bright, endlessly repeating, trees, and the dark floor really makes it feel like the dev just put a bunch of random stuff in a room in RPG maker.

I think if I wasn't playing this on stream, I would have quit the game. But since I was, I kept going. I found the rest of it pretty enjoyable. It's a collect-a-thon going through various realms. Again, I wouldn't have enjoyed it as much off stream. Because I had two people telling me what to do to find everything, without that It would have taken twice as long to find even one third of the game. The game seems needlessly obtuse, with puzzles like "you have to sleep on this one bed whilst you are a snowman, and it only works a fifth of the time" too many things seem left up to random chance. If I wasn't told something was there I would have given up, or if I didn't know something was somewhere, I could see someone spending hours trying random combinations of abilities on every object in the game.

At the very end of the game I felt rather good about it, I had a chill time just looking at the scenery. Then the MC kills herself.

I was, well, confused. It felt tonally dissonant, completely unexpected. Like I was just vibing, was I supposed to think the MC was depressed?

Overall, I enjoyed the game, but I don't understand why it was so big. It feels like something anyone could have thrown together, just put a bunch of funky looking assets together in some rooms and add some portals between them. This game doesn't even have Dialogue, so you don't need to write anything.

People might say that the 'story' is deep, but it's only deep insofar as a game like Five nights at Freddy's is. It somehow feels like it was made specifically to be popular with the game theorists, even though it was released in 2004. Its story, if any is there, seems to only be enjoyable by people who spend hours counting the amount of pixels in each scene to find a secret code or something. Not a story that's meant to be too present to anyone just, playing the game.

All of my feelings might just be because this game is, well, antiquated. Everything it does has now been done better in a billion other games. Yes anyone can make a 'Yume Nikki' but if they released that today it would feel underwhelming, or it would feel obviously like a clone. In that sense, Even though Yume Nikki would be so simple to put together, you can't make a Yume Nikki ever again.

Sorry If that review felt a bit overly negative, like I said, I enjoyed my time with this game. Its just that the parts I enjoy are much easier to get across that why i didnt enjoy some other parts.

Thanks for reading:

Kindest Regards -- Fluffy

Ocie, 2023/08/??

I just played 'pocket mirror' the other night and I found it quite disappointing... like it is a very well put together game, but narratively it feels incomplete. As if I don't understand the world at all.

Now, major spoilers for the game here:

The thing is, I think I do have a pretty good understanding of what was happening in the game, but it's all just so... underwhelming. Each of the characters are different emanations of MC's personality, they are all after the pocket mirror, which is a metaphor for MC's self. They want to completely take her over.

Enjel is especially disappointing because throughout the whole game it feels like she is the only one who will talk to us on our level, the only one to really take us seriously as a person. Fleeta is a horrid child who seems to only care for her own fun, Harpae is extremely controlling and seems to constantly baby us like we can't take care of ourselves. And Lissette Just does an extremely edgy joker impression the whole time we're with her.

Enjel is solidly the only character I actually liked (besides the pumpkins) throughout the whole game. So I was 100% on board with following her throughout her section. Then, in the penultimate room of the whole game we get to find out 'Hey Enjel was actually manipulating you the whole time, she was created by this magical meme-lord to mess with you, lol, lmao,' Then after the most infuriating chase scene of all time Enjel dies and the game just up and ends! YAY!

I just feel like I went through six hours of nonsense to understand virtually nothing, and what there is to understand just feels disappointing and raw.

Thanks for reading,

Kindest regards -- Fluffysheep