wow, I know FromSoft had other bright games at the time but I’m picturing this next to their normal gloomy, chunky aesthetic the same way Ice-Pick Lodge’s Cargo! The Quest for Gravity relates to Pathologic
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i guess every studio needs its FLCL right next to their evangelion, to stay sane, or rather, keep being insane(ly good at what they are doing).
ACFA feels a bit like Maiken Breakthrough Gurren Lagann to me, where you get the feeling while consuming/engaging/watching/playing it, that it’s a peak of its medium, in widely differing ways, janky in some aspect, sure, but standing strong in its genre:
Focussing on one aspect that defines their genre, and running with it in a top-notch manner that no other contender in this medium did: Speed in ACFA, scale in MBGL.
Both play with this idea on a canvas that sets the stage for something great, to such an extent that it takes a while to be able to step back from it, and enjoy the piece of art that the whole piece of work creates, be it worldbuilding, plot, characters, art direction, score, and even their place in a line of works that both studios put out makes them stand out as something different, if not special.
Kinda like, you don’t have to be a fan of a prototype sportscar, but
you can acknowledge what they are doing when comparing it to a roadcar.
tl;dr-version Psalm 4, FA:
ACFA truly is a gem that is worth being experienced once, agreed.
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oh also since it hasn’t been mentioned yet kuon is an alltime horror game
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I don’t think I’ve heard an argument for it beyond a latecomer to Fatal Frame-style Japanese horror, how do you see it?
Similarly, I’d love to hear about Echo Night because I had high hopes but got very little interesting texture out of the three hours I put in.
Wanted to say, i really like how you put this. I played a bit of Shadow Tower recently, and i was fascinated by all the little tweaks made that differentiate the game from King’s Field 1-3. Those games are obviously terrific but they’re also loose and uhh, squishy? as opposed to crunchy. I love KF2 but there are long stretches of that game of wandering around, doing this very simple combat, trying to figure out where to go next. It’s a strangely satisfying tedium, but still kinda tedious
Shadow Tower takes the fundamentals — first person combat, stamina system, exploring mazes and humping all the walls to see if they’re hiding secret skeletons — and hones em into something approaching crunch. The window for landing strikes is a lot more demanding, so you have to get closer to enemies, usually meaning you have to put yourself more in danger (a throughline in all From action games seems to be “how can we disincentivize circle strafing” lol). The extremely punishing durability mechanic forces you to play more carefully than you can in KF, where you can get pretty sloppy once you have consistent access to healing. Then the atmosphere just embraces the simplicity of the mechanics and the low draw distance of the PSX, turning it into a very focused dungeon crawler. It is a game revolving entirely around finding and fighting weird monsters in dark corridors and it fucking excels at that. (oh and the monsters rule, anyone who hasn’t played should look up the Shadow Tower bestiary and look at some of those beautiful weirdos)
There’s a similar amount of tweaking/refinement going on around a shared set of mechanics in Souls/borne, but i’ll save those words for another post since those games get talked about enough as it is
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I did not care much for the first Shadow tower but Abyss is great and doesn’t seem connected to the first at all (you can use early 20th-century guns). It’s the last of the King’s Field-era of From (barring some budget PSP KF spinoffs) and it strikes a good learning curve.
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personally i adore the first shadow tower (best video game ever created) but the second one was anathema and i still haven’t played it. massive let down in terms of atmosphere (too many NPCs!!! too much exposition!!!), though it felt good to play from a mechanical perspective
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who else was actually able to play through Deracine?
i’ve been struggling to come up with a good answer for the former. my attachment might be a little insubstantial; it certainly lacks the formal intricacy of siren or resident evil, and it definitely doesn’t pioneer anything for the genre, but its rhythm/texture/cycle structure/environments are so compelling and intoxicating and i find myself thinking about it all the time. really great sound design too. also you can play an antiquated ancient japanese version of backgammon in it if you find the pieces in the different routes.
echo night i can’t necessarily vouch for, i’ve enjoyed what i’ve seen of the second game in the series in particular, and i appreciate the consistently oblique treatment of narrative and story information (the third game also looks potentially interesting, though i don’t know much about it). i brought it up in my original post mostly because déraciné’s narrative and mechanics feel directly inspired by the echo night series’ adventure game conceit of projecting through time to solve problems and retrieve items to help spirits to move on (except this time you’re the spirit helping humans, of course).
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This is an excellent reason to like a game, which exist as much as spaces and gardens as they do narratives and mechanics.
Maybe this is the thread to talk about Shadowgate 64 and the very specific wind-blasted medieval environment I like so much, so very similar to the mood of King’s Field but far less dangerous and much more livable.
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king’s field 5 should have an area that looks like this:
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I like Abyss in terms of aesthetics but it feels very much like Shadow Tower PSX with the edges sanded down. It’s not as spiky and uninviting as the original. Like, objectively I think it’s a more polished game and can see no reason not to enjoy it but I totally get how someone can love the original and feel like the sequel lost what made the original tick.
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oh yes i’m really curious about shadowgate 64! a few friends really love it but i’ve never gotten a chance to try, i should overcome my n64 aversion and give it a shot because it seems just my speed. btw i’m still quite interested to hear those chromehounds and lost kingdoms thoughts you mentioned earlier in the thread if you’re still interested in sharing, since those are two that haven’t really caught my attention much 
also really curious if anyone itt stans steel battalion, which i’m totally fascinated by abstractly
i still think chromehounds is the coolest online game ever made. i was 100% dedicated to the online mode from the time it came out until the time they shut the servers down. it was like someone made an armored core version of the persistent online campaign stuff i used to do in mechwarrior 4 in the mid-2000s and i’ve never felt more pandered to in my life
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I loved making a one shot cannon mech in chromehounds, where its entire torso was just hitscan high damage sniper rifles or lasers or something but it can only fire like once a minute without destroying itself.
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No other game has even come close to the exhilarating feeling of scouting around enemy positions and trying to sneak your way back to the edge of the last communication tower your team captured’s radius so you can relay spotting information to artillery crews. I think people don’t really talk about how badly Xbox Live party chat becoming a thing crippled Chromehounds. An entire tactical layer of the game became completely irrelevant.
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Shadowgate 64 is a very specific fogged-over depressive medieval look that I’m really into. I don’t have good ways to describe it but I think the recent Dungeon Synth scene is going for the same thing - a knowing naivete, wrapped in a somber tone?
In fact, the soundtrack could totally pass for it:
And poking around, it looks like it’s been taken up by the scene, even:
It’s not difficult or challenging and it peters out in the back third but it is dim and rotting and I like being there.
Some off-tv screenshots from playing it through in my last period of unemployment:
You’re a weak, small person, kidnapped into a dying castle town to be sacrificed by a wizard. But there are only a handful of people here; any threat from this cult is forgotten by the rest of the world, just like you are. You spend your time poking around what used to be a college that dissipated because everyone seemingly lost interest in magic. The people that live in the town either murder you on sight or look past you when they talk to you.
In the end, you save the world, but leave with the distinct impression that nobody will know, and if they did, they wouldn’t care
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ahhh those church and outside areas look so good… it is more than enough to enjoy being somewhere dim and rotting without much trouble. also happy to hear it has a dungeon synth-adjacent ost, king’s field 4’s is great in that vein too. i would very much like to play a game that sounds like this:
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getting the same feeling looking at these screenshots I did when you randomly started up baroque in front of me and my brain just started melting
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next time i’m in seattle (one day…) we gotta do a baroque sesh
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