Aliens: Infestation (DS)

We’re in the pipe, five by five.

Aliens: Infestation sounds like the name of a mid-at-best fanfic set in the Aliens universe. The subtitle itself is just lazy and a bit cliché, kind of like having the subtitle Resurrection, Requiem, Rebirth, Armageddon, Apocalypse… The list goes on, though plenty of Rs in there. That opening line hurts me a little bit, deep down, because I had an idea of writing an Aliens fanfic, with the subtitle Infestation back when I was about 18 or 19, the best I could come up with at the time was an opening draft which I quite liked. It opened with a colony’s log, stating that things were not going well. Emergency lockdown procedures had been activated, communications array is damaged, and fires had broken out in numerous sectors. The number of colonists sitting in the low 20s, before dropping by a couple of digits. It all gives the feelings of the aftermath of a disaster and it being an Aliens fanfic, you better believe it was a Xenomorph related disaster. We then jump back two weeks, and that was where the draft ended. I just couldn’t figure out at the time how I was going to go from A to B. That’s strictly speaking not true, the route was going to be Weyland Yutani doing something stupid, as they are prone to do and using the colony as a test bed of sorts, maybe via the means of a controlled incident. I wasn’t terribly original. This being said, I can’t be 100% sure what the original plan was, in fact, I had buried this memory deep underneath my “excellent working memory” of games. I should note that my memory is pretty shocking at the best of times, but I can probably tell you all the secrets in Episode 1 of Ultimate Doom. So, make of that what you will.

Sadly, there isn’t too much of a digression this time before we get into the game in question. There is only so many times I can talk about my previous traumas that have been inflicted on me by the Aliens franchise and how I am weirdly drawn to these titles because I enjoy the adrenaline rush of being scared out of my mind. What I will say about Aliens: Infestation is that it was the last physical DS game I bought brand new. Released in September 2011, approximately 6 months after the release of the 3DS in the UK. I can’t remember how I came about this game, I must have caught wind of a 2D action platformer for Aliens, which seemingly came out the blue, following the flop that was Aliens: Colonial Marines. Perhaps when I was younger my finger was significantly more on the pulse of upcoming games. Nowadays I am so firmly under a rock, but this is quite a cosy rock of nostalgia and discovery. Aliens: Infestation came out at a time when the expectations for a new Aliens game were absolutely rock bottom, you need to understand that Infestation came out 3 years before Alien Isolation did.

Developed by WayForward, a company who with a rather mixed history of releases. Probably what catapulted them to particular repute was Shantae, which I must admit I don’t have much of a history with. Other than that, they had a tranche of licensed video games based off cartoon properties, including Justice League, Spongebob, Shrek and even American Dragon: Jake Long (I had honestly forgotten that was a thing, but seeing that name brings back some oddly vivid images). It should be noted that WayForward have done some absolutely amazing games, past and present. Besides Shantae, games like Bloodstained and River City Girls immediately come to mind. Perhaps at the time of release, the news of it being developed by WayForward wasn’t the most exciting news, but I can imagine bringing it up now would definitely get some people looking back with renewed interest. Based off some of WayForward’s catalogue, it shouldn’t be too surprising that their approach to Aliens was to make a MetroidVania of sorts. I say of sorts, because on reflection I would say that this game hits the bare minimum requirements of being a MetroidVania, but I would probably file this more under an action/platformer with hints of MetroidVania.  

Part of the reason why I am hesitant to call this game a MetroidVania is more around the structure of the game, being divided into 5 missions, with missions 1, 3, and 5 taking place on the game’s main map, the Sulaco. Oh yes, that Sulaco, the one from Aliens. If you are having flashbacks to Aliens: Colonial Marines, I hear you but trust me on this one. Every time you return to the Sulaco you can explore a little deeper, but there is something about this game flow that doesn’t quite feel true to the MetroidVania styling. Mission 2 takes place on LV-426, as if the atmospheric processor exploding and leaving a vapor cloud the size of Nebraska wasn’t going to leave part of that planet being a barren wasteland. Okay, that is unfair, I don’t believe the LV-426 section of the game was set at Hadley’s Hope, but at an unspecified military outpost. It is, however, within driving distance of a crashed ship, presumably the one from Alien. I can’t imagine Hadley’s Hope was too far away from that site either. Also, I don’t know how big Nebraska is, but I imagine it is one of the bigger states. Not Texas big, obviously. Mission 4 takes place on Phobos, the Mars moon. Man, if it isn’t demonic invasion, it is Weyland Utani and Xenomorphs, give Phobos a break!

So, let’s backtrack a little bit, back to Mission 1 and get the plot in motion. The USCM aboard the USS Sephora, find the USS Sulaco adrift in space, a life form is detected on the ship and they send over some marines to find and recover that life form. Yes, the astute of you may think, this is awfully similar to Colonial Marines! Something I remember catching on my playthroughs of this game, but don’t worry, as far as I can tell, Corporal Hicks is still dead. Upon boarding the Sulaco, you are introduced to your playable characters, yes this game has playable characters! We have Cameron, I presume named after Aliens Director, James Cameron, a gruff and tough but seemingly fair leader. Whistler, a private and clearly incredibly green around the gills. There is Johnston, who is the games equivalent of Vazques, and Paulson who… Umm… I don’t actually know anything about him. The game has an initial sequence where these characters interact, but after that, all dialogue is between the character you are playing as and Patrick Steele, you’re acting commander in chief. Still, what I will say, that opening bit of dialogue between those four characters was better characterisation than we got throughout the whole of Colonial Marines. These four characters, effectively, act as extra lives and the game features a perma-death system where if a character falls in combat they are either dead or having been taken to a hive location where they can be rescued. Though, I can’t say for certain if they are a ticking time bomb after you rescue them, as I never really explored that, opting to play the game as death-less as possible. Should a marine fall in combat, you can find other marines around the various maps who will join up with you if you have a team of less than 4 marines. Any marine found will be added to the marine dossier in the game’s Extras menu, which gives you a detailed profile on each character. Depending on who you are playing as, I imagine there is a bit of variation in the dialogue, so theoretically, there is a potential for replayability here.

So, we spend the first few minutes of the game, exploring a deserted Sulaco, trying to locate a datacentre to download the ship’s schematics. The opening of the game does a great job of building the tension as you are alone, but don’t feel it. There is also a jump scare moment as a dramatic string plays and a cat falls from the ceiling. This happens a few times over the course of the game, which seems unnecessary after the first instance. You’ll crawl through some vents and encounter some Xenomorph hive space, and eventually a dead body of someone from a third-party paramilitary contractor, shortly afterwards you will encounter some automatons, and blast your through them with your trusty pulse rifle. This Pulse Rifle holds 95 bullets in its magazine. Weird choice, the digital display goes up to 99, and that has been a staple of Alien games for the longest time. You also have grenades in your underbarrel launcher, which makes me absurdly happy, it’s the details I like and giving the Pulse Rifle some justice is always nice. Eventually, as you explore, you’ll get yourself a motion tracker, which… Why didn’t we have this to begin with? I mean, we’re doing a search and rescue mission, you’d think that going in equipped with a motion sensor would be a given? Budget cuts, I swear. After we get the motion tracker, we are given a location on the map to investigate, and this is where we encounter our first Xenomorph, a rather nasty looking warrior harassing some woman. This encounter is a bit like a mini-boss, this Xenomorph is a lot tougher than any standard enemy you will be encountering from now on. But after it is defeated, the gloves come off and Xenomorphs will start ambushing you in rooms that were previously empty. This is where your motion tracker is vital, on your map, it will highlight enemies in rooms, even if they are waiting in ambush. It’s less of a motion tracker and more like a lifeform finder.

 

 

It isn’t too long before we encounter our first boss fight, and the first time you do this encounter you will probably get absolutely wrecked. As you fall deeper into hive space, we encounter, what appears to be a Queen. The Queen will chase you around, attacking you with claws, bites and a tail attack, you have to shoot her in the crown portion of her head to do damage (It flashes green when damaged). The easiest way to do this is to stand on one of the low platforms in the room and be near the edge of it and blast away at her, with any luck you can stun lock her and drop her after a couple of clips. This is a common thing you will encounter with the bosses in this game, they are surprisingly tanky. After the Queen is defeated, you’ll find the woman again and then you’ll move from the Sulaco to a mission on LV-426. As mentioned previously, it is a bit of a weird element of the game flow, most MetroidVanias take place on contiguous maps, Aliens: Infestation doesn’t, and in my opinion it somewhat hampers the experience a little bit. The sections on LV-426 and Phobos being disconnected means that when you are in those areas you can explore everything there is to offer in those locations, and it also means that exploring the Sulaco isn’t worth doing too much until you reach the chapter 5. That’s not entirely true, but the majority of goodies to find on the Sulaco are locked behind late game items.

Whilst we are on LV-426, we will find a new weapon, the Shotgun, which is okay, I guess. Never been a huge fan of shotguns in Alien games, close encounters with Xenomorphs are not a good time, what with the teeth, claws and not forgetting the acid blood. With a little bit of exploration you will also find weapon upgrade kits, each weapon in the game can be boosted to +3, though I wouldn’t be able to tell you what that actually means in terms of damage output. From here, I don’t want to get into too much of the nitty gritty of the story and game flow because we have kind of covered everything within the first mission and going into the second mission. Something that is a little disappointing with Aliens: Infestation is beyond the weapon upgrade kits, and the odd additional Marine, there is little reason to go off the beaten path or explore all that thoroughly. There are no additional hidden extras to find, which I think is a bit of a missed opportunity, even the Smartgun, the BFG of the Aliens universe isn’t hidden and there is little reason to not use that weapon once it becomes available.

The game itself isn’t terribly long, which can be seen as a good thing. Unlike a game like Metroid, where you obtain abilities that make the exploration a bit more interesting, opening up alternative routes and also secret ones, every item in Aliens: Infestation is just a different flavour of key, meaning that the gameplay itself doesn’t actually change, fighting enemies doesn’t really change too much and neither do the exploration options. Sure, your usual upgrade avenues like a double jump are probably not applicable in this setting. So, with that in mind, I am somewhat torn. I really enjoyed playing the game, but the way it is, would I want it to be any longer than it actually is? Perhaps if the entire game was set on LV-426 or Phobos, and you go between sprawling maps, a bit like how Portrait of Ruin or Order of Ecclesia did its world, discovering different Weyland Utani research bases that have different breeds of Xenomorphs. I think the game played a little too safe with the enemies, Aliens as a franchise has a lot of potential with variants on the Xenomorph. The game does introduce a new Xenomorph variant, which I believe is based off a gorilla, but beyond that you spend most of your time fighting Drones and Warriors. It’s a bit of a shame, but it is what it is.

I may sound overwhelmingly negative towards Aliens: Infestation, which I would admit is a bit unfair to it. I think in hindsight it is easy to point out the flaws and shortcomings of the game, and in doing so I am, sadly, glossing over the successes. Perhaps it is because I have been viewing this game through the lens of more traditional MetroidVanias, which sets expectations of gameplay, and I would highly encourage anyone else who picks this up to not go on with those kinds of pre-conceived notions. Aliens: Infestation is best interpreted as a straight up action game, to a certain extent I would argue it is quite similar to the SNES Alien 3. Each level is a mini-maze of a map with multiple missions on it, though SNES Alien 3 is a little more open in the order you approach the missions. The perma-death system and recruitable marines are an innovative approach to the archaic lives system, and the fact they can add a bit of variety to the dialogue in the game is a nice bonus. I think it is also important to say that Aliens: Infestation is fun to play, which is a factor that does supersede a lot of my criticisms. No game is without its flaws, and I have always been of the opinion that if you have to get incredibly minor and inconsequential with the flaws, it just shows how much you really enjoy the game. You find faults because you care. Sometimes, I admit, I care a little too much, and whenever Alien games are concerned, that is definitely the case. 

Coca-Cola Kid (GameGear)

 

Coke fuelled adventure to rescue your teacher!

 

Before we had Pepsi Man, we had Coca-Cola Kid. Well, I say we did, Coca-Cola Kid was apparently a Japanese mascot for Coca-Cola. I say apparently because I have done a couple of cursory searches and not coming up with as much as I was hoping, just more information and reviews about the game. So perhaps, if he was indeed a mascot, it was an incredibly short-lived thing or just existed for the purpose of advertising via the means of a Game Gear game. But, who is the Coca-Cola Kid? You may find yourself asking, well, it isn’t a reference to the 1985 Australian romantic comedy The Coca-Cola Kid.

Based on “The Americas, Baby” and “The Electrical Experience” by Frank Moorhouse, this Coca-Cola Kid is a marketing executive who is trying to understand why a small Australian town is resisting the urge to consume coke. It turns out they all drink a locally brewed soft drink made by an old man. During the course of the movie, our Coca-Cola Kid, learns the errors of his ways and the part he plays in BIG COLA, and I assume he falls in love with the old man, and gives up his high paying job to live a quaint and quiet life… Hang on, I’ve been watching way too many Hallmark movies with the wife. Though that synopsis sounds exactly like one of the many dozens of films we have watched together. Regardless, I feel I should probably watch this movie at some point, just because it all sounds incredibly silly, and based on that plot, is it supposed to be an advertisement for Coca-Cola or is it a warning about beverage giants? I also must question the Wikipedia entry on this film, as it mentions “Humorous subplots involving the office manager’s violent ex-husband”, hold the god damn phone for one moment. Humourous and violent partners really don’t belong in the same sentence. It was the 1980s… A different time. A time before Pepsi Man.

 

Let’s fast forward a decade, it is 1994, only five years away now, and we see the release of the Japanese exclusive Sassou Shounen Eiyuuden Coca-Cola Kid. Now, my Japanese is rusty and translating Japanese can be an absolute pain in the butt, admittedly the only word I knew for certain was Shounen being boy. Sassou can be translated as dashing, or gallant, that first meaning will be important down the line. Eiyuuden seems like a truncation of Eiyuudensetsu, for heroic tale. So for a translation of the full title, we could go with “Tale of the young dashing hero”, which was the Google Translate approved version, I’m more partial to something like “Dashing Boy’s Hero Tale”, though I suppose there is no possessive particle being Shounen and Eiyuuden, so that probably wouldn’t work. “Heroic Tale of the Gallant Boy?” I’m getting way too caught up on a comfy translation of what is possibly seen as a subtitle to the game. What can I say, I find language fun!

Anyway, moving past the title, let’s talk about Coca-Cola kid himself, named Koki (Or Cokey in the fan translation). Not sure why they didn’t go with Koka, possibly as that would sound too similar to the product itself and because Koki sounds cuter, more child-like. I promise the language hat is coming off now. Also, going forward we will refer to the character as Cokey to fit with the fan translation. When we see Cokey on the title screen of the game, he flies in on a skateboard, circling a Coca-Cola logo, it was the 90s, of course he is into skateboarding! He appears to be wearing a large white overshirt with a yellow t-shirt underneath, white shoes and a yellow cap, which he wears backwards. This character design really is some kind of condensed concept of what a cool kid would look like in the 90s according to nearly every media source going. I imagine he drops some absolute sick slang and sees himself as pretty rad.

 

Certified bad-assery aside, we actually have a cutscene before we hit the title screen, which sets the plot in motion for the game. It’s an ordinary day at school, Ms Sakurako, which for some reason I really struggled to read during my Let’s Play of this game, is approached by Mr Iwayama whom I assume is another teacher. However, he throws off his disguise, gets a mohawk and knocks out Ms Sakurako with, what I assume is a gas bomb of sorts. Mr Iwayama proceeds to kidnap Ms Sakurako for reasons, honestly, I have no idea why any of this is happening because at no point are we provided a motive for this. Typically there is more detail in the instruction manual, older games love to have significantly more in-depth story there, for obvious reasons, old games older action games were light on story to use game space for… Well… Action. Anyway, Cokey overhears Ms Sakurako’s scream and embarks on his adventure to rescue her, because this is clearly not a matter for the police, but for a child with a clear coke addiction. Coca-Cola addiction that is, obviously. Is this happening during school, or has school ended for the day? The questions are mounting.

Following that opening, and the title screen we jump straight into the game, Cokey rides onto the screen as the game tells us we are in the Downtown stages and we’re good to go. The game plays like a pretty straightforward platformer, we are trying to get from the left to the right, jumping with one button and attacking with another. In the Downtown area we have kickboxers and robotic birds as our adversaries. Trying to deliver jump kicks to the birds seems to be quite wonky, the game’s hitboxes are a little whimsical at times. So, something I thought as I was playing through the first few stages, the game allows you to pick up lots of momentum and has ramps and different routes through the level. It all feels very much like a Sonic game, and much to my surprise when I looked into this I learnt the game was developed by a company called Aspect. Aspect have a handful of games in their library, two of them are Sonic 2 and Sonic Chaos for Game Gear. I feel this helps contextualise some of the design choices in this game, and this goes beyond the momentum mechanics and alternative routes. The game structure is the same as Gamr Gear Sonic, with 3 stages per world, the 3^rd stage being a dedicated boss stage. There is one more thing that convinces me that this game is essentially a Sonic game.

Cokey has a dash attack.

I did say the word “dashing” in the translated title would make sense and come into play! By holding down on the D-Pad, and pressing the jump button, Cokey will power-up like some kind of Dragonball Z character and releasing down will send him shoulder barging his way forward at high speed, hitting enemies, destructible items, and going down slopes keeps the dash active allowing you to move across the stage at quite high speeds. Jumping during a dash will you into a long jump, allowing you to clear large gaps and probably overshoot the platforms you want to land on. This is a common issue I have with games that have speed implemented into it, a lot of the time there is also precise platforming and the two things don’t mesh well, for obvious reasons. Alongside these moves, Cokey has an additional mobility move, and that is wall jumping. Wall jumps are done in the same way as New Super Mario Brothers, there is no timing involving, coming into contact with a wall will have Cokey slide down it slowly and you can jump off whenever you please. With the dash attacks, walls jumps and long jumps in hand, this game does open the opportunity for quite impressive speed runs as you fly across the screen.

So, besides the moves, you also get a few different pickups, two of which seem to fully disappear from levels by the 3^rd world, a lot happens in the 3^rd world, we’ll get to that after this. A lot of the time, you will find either coins, coke in two varieties disposable cup and glass bottle (Classy) and additional one-ups, and some areas can make you pretty flushed with these items. Along the straightforward route of stage 3-1 you can get 2 one-ups in a row, and these items respawn when you die, so, that’s an infinite one-up trick just waiting for you. You can also get large silver coins. Coins are used at the end of the world, and they can be used at a vending machine to either buy a continue, buy a health upgrade, or buy an elusive Coke disc, an item that provides Cokey with not only a projectile attack, but if he takes damage whilst he has a Coke disc, he doesn’t lose health but he does lose the disc. It’s… Not very good, truth be told, odds are when you enter a new world you will probably take damage early on and lose it and never get a chance to use the power-up. I was able to find a Coke disc in stage 1-1 in a hidden area, and perhaps there are more of them throughout the game’s 10 non-boss stages, but I never found them. The last power-up that needs to be talked about, just because it is just so bad. Remember that Cokey was is portrayed as a potential radical, rebellious sort, one that likes to skateboard? The skateboard appears as a power-up in the game in the first two worlds and makes you invincible, moves at a moderate speed and accelerates greatly as it hits slopes. Sounds great, but here is the rub, colliding with boxes, or other destructible terrain elements will cause you to lose the skateboard, and a number of times, these skateboards are placed pretty close to something that will cause you to immediately dismount it. It all feels like a functionally useless power-up, even more so when dashing and dash jumping is a much faster means to get through a level.

Despite being, essentially, an advertising game, Coca-Cola Kid becomes surprisingly light on the marketing. Sure, the first world, Downtown, has you flying by several stores with large Coke banners, but once we get to the Ruins, the third world any and all advertising is gone, it would have been cool to have the level have some run downs remnants of Coca-Cola billboards, maybe some broken vending machines, etc. But, no, heck the Ruins levels also barely have any health pick-ups from what I saw, and there is this one enemy who will be the bane of your existence in these stages. After that, Cokey heads to a Steel Mill, which really gives me Metropolis Zone vibes, before we arrive at our final destination, the Disco. This surely would have been a peak location to have Coca-Cola advertising, y’know, bring it all home, remind people who have been Coca-Cola starved for a whole two worlds to remind them who commissioned this game (I assume they did). There is something Coca-Cola signs in the Steel Mill and Disco, but I had to replay the stages and actually pay attention to the background to notice them. That probably says more about me!

So, after jumping, dashing, kicking, skateboarding and generally just bad-assing your way your through all the stages, beating the bad guys and rescuing your teacher, she thanks you with a massive hug. It must be quite a tight hug as Cokey expresses that he is struggling to breathe against the teacher’s chest, before falling to the floor, unconscious or dead, it is hard to tell how badly the boy was suffocated by his teacher’s bosom. Roll credits. Well, that was weird. Mostly just the ending. The overall game is quite enjoyable, though it does suffer from similar issues I have with Sonic games in general. Sonic games want to put an emphasis on speed, however, visibility of upcoming danger is very limited, the skateboard epitomises this perfectly, with some of them only a few meters away from something that will knock you off them. Sure, you may say that the speed element is more for people who know the stages well and it is a show of skill to blast through them. The game is short enough that is it isn’t the hardest thing to commit levels to my short-term memory to make it appear I am competent at speedrunning this game.

It is a shame that this was only released in Japan, though it was also a Game Gear game, I can't say for certain how well the Game Gear did internationally, perhaps it wouldn't have done that well. Overall, the game is quite fun, when you are not being harassed and bullied by certain enemies or failing at some of the games awkward platforming challenges. For a game that I feel only exists as a further extension of Coca-Cola’s on-going dominance of hearts, minds, screens and just anything they could try to slap their logo on, it is a fun little game to play through that doesn’t leave a bad taste in your mouth, unlike other advertising games.

I did a full Long Play on my channel, available here:

https://youtu.be/J9kF7Q5SG74

Alien Trilogy - PS1

I admire it’s purity… Unclouded by conscience or remorse…

So, all things considered, I decided that I wanted to give Alien Trilogy a play. Alien Trilogy is a first-person shooter seeing Ripley trying to liberate LV-426 from Weyland-Utani and an infestation of Xenomorphs. The game is divided into three acts, each act taking inspiration from one of the three movies, hence Trilogy being in the title. The first act is in the colony of LV-426 from Aliens, the second act takes place in a prison on the planet and features the “Dog” Alien from Alien 3, and the final act is on what is dubbed the “Bone ship” which refers to the crashed spaceship found in Alien. All acts take a lot of inspiration from the settings of their respective films, featuring locations that feel very relatable to the source material. 

 

At the start of each stage, you will be presented a text blurb detailing a little about the area you are entering and a vaguely defined mission, that vaguely defined mission is incredibly important, and we will get to that in a moment. Upon leaving the starting elevator “safe room”, you will be bombarded by the atmosphere that this game is presenting. Dark foreboding corridors, oppressive music and just an overwhelming sense of dread. Perhaps that is just me, because this is like something out of the reoccurring nightmares I have surrounding Xenomorphs. Despite working with USCM, Ripley enters the colony with just a pistol, a pistol that makes the Doom pistol feel like a decent side-arm. Sure, the pistol can deal with the face huggers in one or two shots and only if they are coming at you one at a time. Anything bigger than a face hugger and you’ll be wanting something a little beefier. Graciously, in this game, if a face hugger jumps on you, it will not kill you outright, a pixellated mess of a face hugger will occupy most of your screen and chip away 5 health from you each time they latch on. It should be noted that after they have done their business your vision will clear, and the face hugger will die.

Besides your pistol, you are also equipped with a motion tracker that is in the bottom right corner of your screen, and it provides a 360 degree sweep and functions as your most vital tool in staying alive, though it only picks up enemies that are moving, so any enemies who are waiting in ambush around corners won’t get picked up until they start moving towards you. Within the first mission, it isn’t long until you get your shotgun, yes please! I played enough Doom, I know how useful a shotgun could be, especially as most enemies in this game will be rushing towards you allowing you to greet them with a load of lead into their bodies. Your first encounter with a Warrior type xenomorph will probably induce far more panic than you were anticipating. Firstly, Warriors move fast and slightly erratically, so trying to hit them isn’t the easiest. Secondly, depending on difficulty, it might take anywhere between 3 to 5 blasts from your shotgun to drop a Warrior. That’s a ridiculous amount of firepower for what will be a relatively common enemy in this game. Finally, the amount of damage they can do, I believe, is about 10-15 points of damage, which early game is very painful. If your sense of dread isn’t peaking, you are made of tough stuff. Ammo in the game feels weirdly plentiful and rather scarce at the same time, admittedly, it took me a while to learn there are some small boxes and lockers I could destroy in the first few levels that had a tendency to drop more health and ammo, but I was also playing the game on Xenomania difficulty, which causes enemies to respawn, a bit like Doom’s Nightmare difficulty, but I will get into that a bit further down the line.

So, now that the game thinks you are appropriately acclimatised, the LV-426 stages begin to ramp up in the number of enemies, especially the Warriors, occasionally dropping them on you in pairs or more, which makes for an immediately bad time at least until you get more firepower. Let’s take a step back and talk a little about the missions in the game because when you clear a stage, you will get a rating on how many kills you got, secrets found and mission completed, all expressed as a percentage, the objectively worst way to present game stats. During the loading screen, you will be given a mission for the stage, in the case of the first stage it is clearing out the explosive barrels, later missions include destroying Alien eggs, collecting ID tags from captive colonists, turning on lights or unlocking doors. To beat a stage, you need to accomplish a certain amount of the objective for that stage. Failing to do so will mean you will have to re-do the stage until you accomplish the threshold for each act. The threshold of mission completion increases between acts, with the first act only requiring 25% of the mission objective to be complete, up to a total of 45% in act 3. This adds a little more complexity to what could have been a linear experience and does encourage you to explore levels. Another incentive for clearing as much of a stage as possible, every now and again, you will do a bonus level where the aim is to restock your ammo and armour.

I should probably talk a little bit about health and armour in this game. You start with a base 100 health, located all over the place in the game, you can find dermpatches, that function a little bit like the health bonuses from Doom. They boost your health above 100 by 1 point for everyone you find. This can be nice, but like Doom’s health bonuses it isn’t a permanent boost. More importantly is how armour works in this game, armour functions like a secondary health bar. Your health won’t deplete until your armour is reduced to 0. That’s not strictly true. Face Huggers that latch onto you bypass armour. Armour comes in two flavours, acid vests, that give you 100 points of armour and bodysuits that give you 200 points of armour. A good strategy for this game is trying to ride your current armour until the next pickup, meaning your health will go mainly unscathed throughout your playthrough. Another bonus of the armour is that it removes knockback from taking damage, this can be useful when dealing with the corporate enemies who shoot at you and can potentially cause knockback to inconvenience you. Corporate enemies are a bit of a boon in this game, firstly, defeating them can drop ammo and grenades, secondly even though they have pulse rifles and smart guns, the amount of damage they do is minimal. It’s a weird point of imbalance that a soldier with a pulse rifle does 1 damage per shot, whilst a chest burster can bite you for about 5 or 6 damage.

Another important item in your arsenal are grenades! Well, grenades and seismic charges. Besides using grenades as a useful side arm, that can kill any enemy in the game with a direct hit, they are vital tools to beating this game. You can use them to destroy certain walls, and at times destroying these walls is vital to finishing a level. Destructible items and walls in the game sound like they could be a frustrating experience, causing you to throw explosives at random walls in the hopes of uncovering secrets. Thankfully, the game is generous enough to make it easy enough to find walls that can be destroyed. As you go through a level, you will be slowly filling out an auto map that can be viewed by pausing the game, you can also find an auto-mapper, which displays most of the map for a level. When you look at the map, blue pixels on it show things that can be destroyed, whether it be boxes, lockers, or walls. This makes finding secrets and mandatory items or hidden passages a lot less stressful.

So, eventually, you will get yourself a Pulse Rifle, this will be your workhorse weapon for this game, and it is at this point I should talk about a quirk in the game that will save you ammo. Every time you hit an enemy, they will go through a pain animation, this pain animation provides them with invincibility frames, so whilst it might be tempting to just go full auto on your Pulse Rifle and Smart Gun to deal with your enemies you will waste ammo during this process, tapping the fire button on these weapons fires a short burst or 3 shots. By peppering enemies with short, concentrated bursts, you will kill things reasonably quickly. Tapping the fire button is a very efficient way to use the flamethrower as well, as you can burn through flamer insanely fast, and only have a couple of kills to your rampage. Killing the queens at the end of each act also benefit from these short bursts of bullets. Queens are ridiculously easy to kill, between stun locking them with well-timed bursts of bullets and the fact they move slower than most enemies mean you can run circles around them. It is a little disappointing how easy all three Queen fights are.

So, now that I have stopped bouncing from point to point as they come to mind, let’s continue our adventure. We’ve killed our first Queen, and moving from “section 1 to section 2”, this is where things get… Weird. Section 2 is based off Alien 3, being set in a Prison that seem to be located not too far away from Hadley’s Hope. We are introduced to the “Dog” Strain alien here, named as such because in the movie, the face hugger got a poor doggo to act as host. I’m more used to calling these Xenomorphs “Runners”, but that was because I used to play Alien vs Predator Extinction on the classic Xbox. Anyway, immediately when you encounter your first batch of Dog strain aliens, you’ll notice how much slower and weaker they are compared to the Warriors. Due to this, the whole second act feels way more comfortable than the first. Sure, I am misleading you a little bit, the first Dog aliens you encounter are juvenile ones, adult ones come in a bit later, but by the time they turn up, you’re armed to the teeth, potentially with a Smart Gun and gunning them down isn’t too challenging. It’s a weird quirk I have noticed with the Alien games I have played in the last year. Alien 3 on Genesis had a strangely easy final stretch, with a ball-busting opening act. 

 

So, when I did my run of this game, I decided in my infinite wisdom I would do it on Xenomania difficulty. It terms of enemy number, I believe it is the same as the difficulty below, Raging Terror… Because naming things Easy, Normal and Hard doesn’t have any flavour. Xenomania does have enemies respawn, now unlike Doom’s Nightmare difficulty where respawning enemies are on a timer after they are killed, in Alien Trilogy enemies will respawn if you move a certain distance away from their dead body. So, levels that involve backtracking or getting lost can lead to you respawning dead warriors and burning through your ammo. So, the first act of this game was ridiculously challenging as there was one time I was down to just my pistol, and it takes way too many bullets to put a stop to a Warrior who is barrelling towards you. Respawning also impacts the corporate soldiers as well, theoretically meaning it is possible to farm ammo drops from them. It isn’t a guarantee that they will drop ammo, but typically I found that I was coming out with a net positive on ammo in most cases when I was forcing soldiers to respawn. Though I wouldn’t rely on this, as forcing them to respawn may cause more enemies to respawn than you want to, and late into the final act the amount of corporate soldiers is incredibly low. Though, something that can help with Xenomania is that for an enemy to respawn, the game requires a dead body, using a direct hit from a grenade or seismic charge will not leave a body, therefore you can stop certain enemies from respawning.

I should note that my run on this game was also done with RetroAchievements in mind. Hence the Xenomania difficulty, but another thing that is really strange in this game. You’ll probably notice this when you play the game on Raging Terror or Acid Reign (Normal and Easy respectively), that when you beat a stage you are not getting 100% kills. This is because, for whatever reason, the threshold to get 100% kills doesn’t seem possible on those difficulties and it relies on you playing the game on Xenomania to get full clears on each stage. It’s quite bizarre, and incredibly frustrating, as I had to do two full playthroughs of this game to ensure I picked up those achievements.

So, minor RetroAchievements digression aside, chances are you’d be playing this just to experience and playthrough the game, and I will say that this is possibly one of the best Alien based games ever made. It captures the essence of what would make for a good Alien shooter, there are a couple of levels that are infuriatingly dark and even though you can find night vision googles or a shoulder lamp to help you navigate these areas, they only last about 30 seconds or so. Keep in mind that the warrior Xenomorph is also black, thankfully we have the motion tracker to help keep you alive. This is the kind of game that could really benefit from a modern remaster, as one of the criticisms at the time was that the Xenos themselves didn’t look good despite using some exciting motion capture technology at the time.

Sailor Moon: La Luna Splende (Nintendo DS)

 In the name of the moon, where did this come from?!

So, I have absolutely zero authority to talk about anything Sailor Moon. I feel it is important to preface the open with this statement, out of truthfulness and honesty. My history with Sailor Moon as a series began when I was a kid, I remember seeing episodes of it on satellite TV, as I was clearly one of the privileged few. It was actually my younger brother who was watching it, he couldn’t have been much older than 4 at the time. I have a memory of my initial reaction being quite incredulous, he was watching a girl’s show, society had clearly trained me well to perpetuate patriarchal viewpoints. On reflection, I do feel great shame in this, being an ignorant child is an excuse that only takes me so far. At the time, however, I may have even told him that this was a cartoon for girls, but he didn’t care or pay me any attention, he was always the more progressive of the three of us boys. Alternatively, just like I was a dumb, 10-year-old child, he was a dumb younger child and didn’t care what he was watching. I wish my memory was better at times, I’d love to dissect what happened next or even the thought processes at the time. It might have been a few days or weeks later, but at some point, I sat down with him and watched an episode. Perhaps multiple episodes. I can’t say for certain how many episodes I watched in total of the DIC dub of Sailor Moon, but I had clearly taken in enough for it to leave a reasonable imprint on me. Despite this, I had never really followed up too much on the show or media, even when I entered my full-blown weeb era. Perhaps this was because my springboard at that point was Love Hina and Azumanga Daioh, romantic comedies and slice of life are, and remain, my bread and butter when it comes to Anime and Manga. 

 

I say I never followed up too much, when I learnt about emulation from friends at school, I was lucky enough to acquire a hand-me-down laptop from my Dad. It was an old Windows 95 machine, but it was just enough to get 16-bit games emulating on it (perhaps poorly). I went to a known, totally “100% trusted and safe”, site for ROMs at the time and I remember finding the Sailor Moon RPG, Sailor Moon Another Story, translated from the French version and I played that for a couple of hours. Back then I wasn’t particularly good at finishing what I started, which is still true to this day but I am getting better at it. The game itself was enjoyable from memory, it is probably exactly what you want from a Sailor Moon RPG. From there, I was always one to clock Sailor Moon stuff whenever I saw it, but I always kept the series just beyond arms reach. I am not sure why I did this, and I am sure some psychiatrists could have a field day with my thoughts and behaviours. I am reminded of the line from “The Goes Wrong Show”, where one of the characters, Dennis, is described as “Medically Fascinating”. That’s a phrase the Wife and I use to describe me quite often. So, despite years since then, with my peak-weeb phase, my time spent studying Japanese and being, possibly problematically, a typically white boi with an interest in Japan. My actual knowledge and experience with Sailor Moon had not progressed any further. So, with this all in mind, shall we talk about a Sailor Moon game?

 

Sailor Moon La Luna Splende is, in my opinion, an absolute anomaly. Developed by Open Sesame, a Japanese developer who I had initially struggled to find much information on. I was fortunate enough to find a GameFAQs entry for the developer with a list of games they had developed. Most of these were games exclusively for the Japanese market, with the odd game here or there for North America, like Reel Fishing II and III. On GameFAQs’ list they state that Sailor Moon La Luna Splende was released in March 2011, about two weeks after the Japanese release date for the 3DS. This late release date into the DS’ life is important, and I will swing back to that later. I haven’t actually mentioned why this game is such an anomaly, and that is because it was only released in Europe, specifically, it was an Italian release. I would love to understand more about this, how this game came into being and why was it the first and last Sailor Moon game after a massive drought of games?

During the 16-Bit era, there was a plethora of Sailor Moon games, at least 9 of them on the Super Nintendo alone, these came in a variety of different genres. Beat-em-ups, puzzle games, 1v1 fighting games, and a JRPG (As referenced earlier). Incidentally, of all these types of games, it seems that the 1v1 fighting games were the most prolific, with fighting games extending into the next generation with PS1 and Sega Saturn fighting games. I’ve always that quite the curious choice, particularly as these fighting games tend to focus on the Sailor Senshi fighting each other, perhaps for strange story reasons, fighting games love to have weird stories to justify everything going on. I would be awfully remiss if I did not acknowledge that there were numerous educational or edutainment games in the mix as well, in fact there is possibly more of these kinds of games than there were of the fighting games. By 1998, there were 20 Sailor Moon video games, mostly, in the Japanese market. It is a few more years after this point, 2001, that the Sailor Moon games go quiet. Which, actually, shouldn’t be too surprising. The Manga and Anime had finished their run in 1997, and there wasn’t a new series until Sailor Moon Crystal in 2014, three years after Sailor Moon Le Luna Splende’s release. There is a logic to stop doing games as the Manga and Anime stop and the series slowly leaves the mainstream, being replaced by other similar or more popular shows.

That’s exactly what I would be thinking if the series had almost never left popular consciousness. Are you aware of the Live Action show from 2003, or the years of Sailor Moon stage shows? To a certain extent I almost feel like a live action adaptation of Sailor Moon was a given, due to the popularity of it, and as for stage shows, well, slight digression, but we are so far from the actual original topic I feel no shame in taking us on an additional detour. When I was studying abroad in Japan, some of my friends took me to a theme park, in part because there was a Hatsune Miku event happening there and they knew I had fallen into the Vocaloid pit, I was able to purchase a really nice Senbonzakura shirt at the time, shame it doesn’t fit me anymore and god knows where it is now. But whilst I was there, we also watched a stage show of Kamen Rider, which I won’t lie, I didn’t understand a single word of, but the stage craft and choreography was absolutely top notch. Stellar content and I was enthralled. The point being, I am not surprised that Sailor Moon stage shows were, not only a thing, but ran from 1993 up to 2005, which were produced by Bandai, and then picked up again, being produced by Nelke Planning from 2013 onwards. I should note that there are elements of this that don’t come as a surprise, but when I was scrolling down the Wikipedia article on the Sailor Moon Musicals, I did have a moment where I had to ask myself, when does this all end?!

 

So, I somewhat reiterate my earlier question, why was there this massive drought of Sailor Moon games? That I can’t answer and anything else I say on the matter would be purely speculation on a subject I know even less about than I do on Sailor Moon itself. It does make the release window of Sailor Moon La Luna Splende even more baffling though, that it is in the middle of the period of time where Sailor Moon was “absent” in terms of new media. At this point I refuse to accept that it had ever disappeared or become diminished from public consciousness. A Sailor Moon game released during 2005 and 2013 would not have done badly, is what I am trying to suggest and assume. So, shall we finally talk about La Luna Splende? This feels like the longest time I have ever spent rambling about other areas tangentially connected to a game I have talked about. Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon was a long ramble about mechanics, but was still relevant to the game in question. The last 1,500 words here, god knows what is going on there.

Sailor Moon La Luna Splende is a puzzle platformer game for the DS. The title itself is apparently based off the 2^nd season of the anime in Italy, though the characters and events are more grounded in the 1^st season. I was actually quite excited to start this game, and I did have to have a bit of a think about the DS’ capabilities as I have spent so much time in the last two years playing older games that I forget that the DS is capable of reasonable music and video quality. Luminous Arc was a DS game that features an animated introduction with a vocal song and featured voice acting throughout the game. I bring this up because I wanted to set a bar that could be expected and, as if anticipating something, I lowered that bar ever so slightly. After all, I was not expecting Moonlight Densetsu to come out of the speaker. If anything, this got a different kind of anticipation brewing, perhaps the Italian opening for Sailor Moon? That would be rather novel, wouldn’t it? So, after a quick initialisation screen, developer and publisher screens, it jumps straight into the title screen of the game. Is that it? The music on the title screen may be something from the series, I can’t confirm, but this was not a good sign. “Disappointment is an understatement” would be a cliché to say, it feels like a missed opportunity, and I don’t know enough about licensing fees for games, perhaps the developers could get the name and characters, but other elements would have cost significantly more.

Starting the game, you have a choice between the adventure mode and images. I assumed images would be a form of CG gallery, but images is a very tacked on mode where you can create and save “custom” images utilising a variety of stickers. These stickers are collectible in adventure mode and is the only part of the game that utilises the touch screen. This is somewhat reminiscent of those parts of those activity packs you would find on PC. I should note that a DS game that under utilises or doesn’t use the touch screen should not be taken as a red flag. New Super Mario Bros uses the touch screen for the main game very sparingly, providing you that additional item slot that you can tap in to switch power-ups. Though that game also featured a collection of mini-games that were all touch screen focussed. Sailor Moon’s implementation almost feels bottom of the barrel, the kind of thing I imagine someone would do if they had just learnt that the game there were developing for the GBA was going to be either have a dual release on the GBA and DS, or that the development was shifting to the DS after spending the last 8 months as a GBA game and a looming deadline. This is when I remember, that this game came out in 2011. The last published GBA game was in 2008, and I have reason to believe this game probably started development in 2010. I feel like I am falling down some kind of rabbit hole and flinching at my own shadow.

So, let’s finally talk about the game, I apologise this does all come across as a whole load padding, but I want you to understand the mental journey I undertook since completing this game. Going into the Story mode we are presented with an introduction that utilises a static screenshot of Sailor Moon’s friend Naru, laying in a bed at the nurse’s office at school. She has apparently collapsed at school and not woken up. Dialogue is delivered in small little cut outs of images of the various characters, credit where it is due, they is a number of different images used to convey emotions of the lines being delivered, even if a few of them are just Sailor Moon and Mars jabbing at each other. Luna explains that Naru seems to have been put in this state by Youma, and that Sailor Moon and her companions will need to unite their hearts so they can enter Naru’s dream world to save her. With the premise out of the way, you are given the first world you can enter, the Flower Garden, upon selecting the world you also get to pick which of the 5 Sailor Senshi you want to play as. Having character choice in games is always nice. Interestingly, on the character select screen, you can only scroll through them in one direction, so if you decide, I want to play as Sailor Mercury after scrolling to Mars, you can’t scroll backwards, you must cycle through all the other characters again. A decision had to be made to have it work that way. After you select a character you are, and I hesitate to say it this way, treated to that character’s transformations sequence, from the anime, with one screen displaying their transformation phrase and the 2^nd screen playing a rather crunchy looking video clip. The music used is possibly something from the original soundtrack, though it doesn’t feel like the appropriate music to play for the transformation sequences. If this wasn't the correct music, there was an opportunity here and I don’t know for what reasons these music or voicelines were not incorporated, perhaps cart size limitations? DS roms range from 8MB to 512MB, so if you did skimp on the cart size, I can see there being limiting factors. The lack of an all bells and whistles opening is becoming more apparent.

Before we start playing, we are given a quick overview of the game controls and some mechanics. We can jump, drop down through certain platforms, we have a projectile attack and we can push blocks, either by walking into them or shooting them. Walking into them will move them along a tile at a time and shooting them will push them until they can go no further. On the top screen, there is a number of squares, 20 for the Flower Garden, this functions as a map for the world. In 10 of those squares you can see blue crystals. At the bottom of these squares is a tally showing how many of those blue crystals you have collected. A square is also highlighted in blue shows you which square you are currently starting in, and a little border around the square highlights which square you occupy. As you go through into new squares, you will see what squares they branch into. Now, depending on which Sailor Senshi you select will define which square you start in, and what areas you can access. From there, you need to gather what crystals you can and make your way to the world exit. This sounds pretty cool, but I should note that all Senshi play the same, and the only limiting factor blocking off certain areas and items are blocks that only a specific Senshi can destroy. For example, Sailor Moon can destroy yellow moon blocks. What this ultimately means is that for each world you play through, you will be going through several of the same rooms and puzzles multiple times. This probably wouldn’t be too bad, but if you are playing this, the first thing you may notice is how slow certain things are. Moving platforms and even your character move at the speed of dozing sloth. Tedious repetition doesn’t bother me too much, I am a Musou game fan, but slow-moving tedium is teeth extracting levels of pain.

So, after you have cleared a world with one character and collected a number of crystals you are expected to do the same with each and every character until you get all 10 crystals. After you have acquired them all, you are taken to the a story event and a boss fight against Lord Kunzite (Or Kaspar in the Italian version), our reoccurring boss encounter for this game. The boss fights are all simple affairs, though, execution is once again a little questionable. You spend some time dodging some projectiles, attacking Kunzite when he stops attacking for a moment to dramatically swish his cape. After you have hit him once, you switch to another Sailor Senshi and repeat the process another 4 times. Once for each character. Once you deal the last hit, a video clip of that Sailor Senshi’s signature attack will play, once again, in silence, and the battle will be over. Play the next story beat and unlock the next world, in which you repeat the structure of collecting 10 crystals by utilising all five characters, to fight Kunzite to then unlock the final world. Wait. Final world? Yes, there is only three worlds in total. Now, something I will admit, with each new world, a new element is introduced, in the second world, there are explosive blocks, and in the final world there is a lance “enemy” that you can bait into stabbing into nearby walls and use it as a platform. It adds some extra dimensions to it all and means that the game doesn’t get too stale, I guess. Another thing to note is that each subsequent world is slightly larger than the previous one, meaning more rooms to traverse, though the final world doesn’t have as much repetition to it, graciously.

So, with all that, you can understand there a fair amount to feel a bit meh about when it comes to Sailor Moon La Luna Splende. But. I’m struggling. Mostly with some of the puzzles, and that is not a lie. Typically, when you enter a room, you’ll pause the game to allow you to scout out the map, and try to figure out what you are supposed to do, and there will be times when you say to yourself, “What do they expect from me here” and you’ll reset the room in frustration as you box yourself in once again. There are times that this is not the easiest game in the world, it does provide some level of challenge, or perhaps I have severely underestimated my acumen when it comes to puzzle solving. You are not just solving puzzles to traverse the rooms and get crystals, there are also treasure chests that pose additional levels of challenge and consideration, though admittedly, all these contain are the stickers used for the Image mode, and the only reason I went out of my way to collect them all was because someone within the RetroAchievements community created achievements for this game. That’s also why I know this game exists.

There is something about all this that feels low effort, almost a bit of a cash grab. If this was released as a budget game, I probably wouldn’t be terribly offended, though I cannot say for certain what the cost of this game was on release. The thing is, and this is what really bothers me. Sailor Moon was undergoing an international revival around this time, my knowledge of how prolific Anime was in western culture around this time is slightly skewed, I know major chain bookstores were heavily expanding their Manga sections around this the late 2000s, so maybe this all makes sense. But for Sailor Moon in particular, it was decided that Italy would be the place to start this revival, in 2010. A game tied into this revival makes sense. Pokemon proved that a multi-media onslaught works quite well, saturating the space with media and merchandise. With a series like Sailor Moon, this also strikes me as a bit of a no-brainer. You’d be capturing a new generation as well as hitting at nostalgia for my generation. But with the overall quality of this game, it feels like the attempt was doomed to fail, whilst I admit the game itself was challenging enough, more could have been done and it could be little things. Adding in voice lines and Music from the Anime would go a long way here. Ultimately, the entire package feels like a game that had been canned at some point, and then they slapped a Sailor Moon coat of paint on it, shipping it out with minimal effort.

I can’t remember if there was an actual revival of Sailor Moon around the early 2010s, but the introduction of Sailor Moon Crystal in 2014 and the Netflix Movies Sailor Moon Eternal and Cosmos in 2021 and 2023 respectively, the re-release of the original Manga and special editions, say that Sailor Moon has re-injected herself into the public consciousness, domestically and internationally. So, I suppose the next real question is, why have there not been any new Sailor Moon games since?

 

... Iru! (PS1)

 As if school wasn’t a horror enough…

 

…Iru! Is a Japanese first-person horror adventure game released in 1998 for the PS1. That’s a quirk of the English language, isn’t it? “first-person horror adventure game”, you wouldn’t say “adventure first-person horror” or “first-person adventure horror”, it doesn’t read right. It’s like how a big green dragon is fine, but a green big dragon doesn’t sound natural. But hey, now I am getting distracted by the minutiae of the English language. So, let’s get further sidetracked by Japanese language! …Iru! does have a translation available, which I am grateful for, as my Japanese is incredibly rusty these days. Of note, even the title was translated to “… They’re here,” which, contextually, works quite well as a translation; it has an ominous “They live” vibe. 

So, language digressions aside, let’s talk about the game. …Iru! is a horror adventure game set in a high school, because schools themselves are terrifying places, even more so at night. Our protagonist, Inaba, is helping set up his classroom for the upcoming culture festival, which, based on what we see in the classroom, appears to be a Takoyaki stand. He wakes up after an ominous dream involving a young girl being chased into a chapel, who gives us an ominous warning that something bad might be going down, and when the moon vanishes, everything will go to hell. Having seemingly fallen asleep on the floor, he is chastised by his classmate, Yuma, and you get back to trying to get the room finished for tomorrow’s festival. At this point, we get to get a feel for the controls of …Iru! and it works, it feels a bit floaty and cumbersome, but for the time it was probably quite a normal way to play a first-person perspective on the PlayStation 1. We do get dedicated strafe buttons, which is always something I like to have (it makes performing SR40 possible, wait, that’s Doom), but we also have the L2 and R2 buttons adjust your Y-Axis, and even after playing the game for about 6 hours I still find this a little unintuitive and press the wrong buttons.

The starting act of the game sets up the ebb and flow of the game much better than I was expecting and also gives us a decent amount of time with some of the NPCs, we get to know about how Hirose is a caricature of a fat person, Hikawa is an awful person, Ms Houjo is suspicious and that not everything is as it seems. The entire set-up feels a bit like a slasher film from the 80s, a group of characters are disconnected from the outside world, and we get a chance to dislike them before something inevitably bad happens to them. What I meant by the ebb and flow of the game, without prior knowledge, you’ll be bumbling about trying to find out which NPC you need to talk to or what event you need to stumble in on. Sometimes you are given a bit of a steer, but I felt myself frequently just running around, hoping to encounter some dialogue or be given an item that would help me progress. Eventually, we get into the meat and potatoes of everything, as tension slowly starts to bubble, the school experiences a power cut, and you know that is when everything will hit the fan.

 

So, I don’t want to get too much into the story, as I think it is something best experienced, either through playing it yourself or through a rather comprehensive Let’s Play (Not a shameless plug at all!). I should note that you it would also be good to go in blind, even if the bumbling about can be a little frustrating and can make things seem a little disjointed, but the game is relatively short, even if my first playthrough did clock in at about 4 hours, my second one was probably closer to 2. …Iru! features two core routes, and you can seemingly jump back and forth on them a little bit. I assume that depending on which route you were prominently on will make a minor difference to the ending, of which there are strictly speaking four of them: a bad ending, two worst endings and a true ending. Seeing as the bad ending and true ending are effectively the same regardless of which route you take, your mileage on replaying this game might be limited. Personally, I really enjoyed my 2^nd run of this game as the events I encountered were very different and put a different vibe to one of the characters. That being said, I think my first run had me bounce between the routes a little bit, which probably didn’t help with laying out the cleanest narrative, but there were still some clear plot points to follow regardless of this. Ultimately, though, the story is pretty good, there is enough intrigue to keep you going and featuring some predictable twists and turns if you are familiar with the tropes of the genre.

 

Being trendy before its time or more likely taking inspiration from games like Clock Tower, …Iru! leaves you defenceless and has you hiding from would-be, killers and utilising some basic puzzle solving to overcome obstacles. “Chases” are scripted, so they happen at set times in the story and the solution is typically quite simple; in fact, the game will indicate when you interact with things if you can use them to hide “in a pinch”. Unlike Clock Tower, however, when you are being chased, you will automatically go to a nearby room where you can hide, which means there are several mentioned “in a pinch” hiding places you won’t use. I mean, truth be told, Clock Tower’s chases are also scripted, to a certain extent, you just have a bit more freedom in where you choose to hide. This means that outside of these story beats, you are, by and large, safe from danger whilst exploring, even though, theoretically, there are things out there stalking the corridors. This being said, the relative safety that you have could be contrasted with a game like “White Day: A Labyrinth named School”, which has stealth elements that can prove to be frustrating as you constantly go back and forth to hiding places to avoid capture/death. I think the illusion of danger that there is something about wandering the corridors keeps you on an appropriate amount of edge, at least for that first playthrough.

 

Something I haven’t touched on, is the overall presentation of the game. In my opinion, this game looks fantastic. Now admittedly, I play pretty much all my Retro Games via emulation,, and I am not tech-savvy enough to know what is going on to make old games probably look better than they would have on official hardware, on an old CRT, plugged in with composite cables. What I can say about the game, though, is that I like the aesthetic. PS1 horror is an aesthetic that seems to be widely loved; this is evident by the number of indie games that utilise this style. Character models look decent to me, and whilst some of them do look a little derpy at times, and the less we say about Hirose’s walk cycle, the better. Sometimes, finding items can be a little challenging at times; things like keys tend to have a little glint that shows up in the darkness, but some other items can elude you at times. Another part of the game’s presentation I want to touch on is how there are plenty of unnecessary spaces ranges from bathrooms, locker rooms, classrooms, and plenty of locked doors that remain locked throughout the game. Half of those locations do not even have events that take place in them. I actually quite like this, the game world of …Iru! feels, by and large, like it could be a familiar space, a real place, a real high school somewhere in Japan with a layout that feels out of someone’s childhood. The basketball hoop on the roof terrace by the observatory is probably the only thing that came across as wildly out of place, beyond the more obvious, sinister things.

Personally, I found a lot to enjoy here, the atmosphere that …Iru! Captures is quite solid; the mystery and the intrigue kept my attention throughout, though I must admit, there was a plot point I had totally forgotten about by the end of the game, but by that point I was more concerned about the perils the final act had introduced. The puzzles in the game aren’t too complicated, you won’t have to reach for the moon for the logic to solve them, you won’t be picking up hundreds of items to shove into your inventory, and there is only one item in the game that is “useless”. The music can be a little grating at times, but that is because I spent way too long trying to figure out where I was going and listening to the same loop over and over again. The opening act can be a little slow, and depending on the kind of person you are, you might find this incredibly frustrating, or you might be like me and find yourself getting a little sucked into the mild dramas of some of the characters. It was unfair to say that the opening act gives you reason to dislike the characters; there are only a couple of them who come across as terrible people who deserve comeuppance. If you enjoy slower-paced horror experiences, like Clock Tower, I genuinely believe you will have a good time with this, definitely a game to crack out in the evening and sit there in a dark room to play!

My let's play of ....Iru! Is available here.

https://youtu.be/I-9z9S-iBzY