The Adventure of Cookie and Cream
When I first started this game with my wife, I thought this will be fun! look how cute they are! One hour later, the game generated so much anxious energy that our power cut out. My wife has never been able to pick up the game since.
You see, underneath its cartoon exterior, this is still a FromSoftware creation. Kota Hoshino even worked on the soundtrack! Man, that guy had a pretty big year in 2000. When the title music came on, my wife said “this is too aggressive. Why do I get the sense that the game wants to hurt me?” Soon, she would have her answer.
We jumped in the first stage and started talking to chickens and crows. They said some really obvious stuff like “Press X to jump” or whatever so we stopped talking to them. This was a mistake, but we didn’t know it yet. When we finished the first stage, we were given a D grade. “That’s bullshit. We did way better than that.” “Well, now that we know the controls, we’ll get a better score in the next one.” For the second stage, we got an E. I don’t know what that means because I live in America but I assume it’s worse. We felt personally attacked.
Flying objects kept harassing us and eating up our time. Jumps across streams of water kept missing by just this much. Our bunnies struggled to grab the levers when we told them to. It started to become Too Much. However, we triumphed over the first boss. Then we entered Music World.
It’s here that we snapped. We banged the drums, tooted the horns, and dodged the bells, but always found ourselves running out of time. We couldn’t keep doing this. Then the power went out and we really couldn’t keep doing this. I consider the power outage to be divine intervention. If it hadn’t happened, who knows what levels of depravity we would have sunken into.
But it’s important to work through anxiety sometimes and that’s why I tried to play by myself, holding the reins of Cookie and Cream. It is much, much harder to do things alone. That’s a life lesson. You can carry that with you for the rest of your life.