Operation Backlog Completion 2026

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Marginalia

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  9 Responses »  Tagged with:
Oct 092024
 

The next spooky game I decided to play is a short horror game called Marginalia, and after my mixed feelings about Monday’s game you can imagine my horror when the game began by a parked car on a desolate road.

But despite that immediate sense of similarity, it doesn’t have much in common with Desolate Roads at all.

Marginalia is walking sim in its purest form. Although I’ve tagged it as an adventure game here, there are no puzzles or items you need to interact with, nothing but walking in search of the next landmark. Moreover, the story is narrated to you, which makes it feel more like a short story using a game format to build atmosphere.

Fortunately, the story is interesting enough that it works. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it has enough of a hook – a man vanishing in search of a mysterious place called Kestlebrook, and the narrator’s search for him while learning about Kestlebrook from his notes – that I wanted to continue on to hear each new part.

Unfortunately, the world is too big for this sort of experience to feel rewarding. Everything more or less looks the same, so if you get off track, it’s difficult to orient yourself. The major landmarks are lampposts that you can see from a distance, but once you reach one, it can be a while before you see the next – enough that if you get going in the wrong direction by mistake, you could be wandering for a long time.

(It happened to me. I missed the direction I was supposed to head in and walked for about ten minutes with nothing happening before I decided to restart. This is another one of those games with no saves.)

There are also secret landmarks that add an additional layer to the story, but the nature of the map makes exploration feel so unrewarding that I didn’t feel it was worth seeking them out, as much as I would have wanted to.

Marginalia is a short game that takes under an hour to complete, and even if there isn’t much interaction, it’s a nice little horror story that I enjoyed. However, a smaller game world with clearer landmarks would have gone a long way toward making it a more enjoyable experience.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  12 Responses »  Tagged with: , , ,
Oct 042024
 

It had to come up, right?

Back when Emio was first teased, most of us thought it would be a new horror game from Nintendo.

It turned out to actually be a dark new entry in the Famicom Detective Club series, which was a pleasant surprise to me after I’d played the Famicom Detective Club remakes just this past May and wished the series would continue.

We discussed it a few times leading up to launch, but not since the full game has come out. So let’s talk about Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club.

I would not actually call Emio a horror game or even a horror visual novel, despite the expectations when it was first teased. It’s very much a mystery, albeit one with dark and disturbing elements, and I’d even say most of it has less tension than the first two games in the series. However, when I say most of it, that’s very important to why we’re still talking about it today.

Now, I wrote a full review of Emio over at MonsterVine, so be sure to check that out for my thoughts on the game as a whole.

Instead of repeating all my thoughts here, I’ll just say that I definitely recommend Emio as long as you don’t mind a strangely-paced story that feels like it saves almost everything for the very end. That end does make it worthwhile, but it left me wishing some of the reveals had been woven through the earlier parts of the game too. Meanwhile, as I’d hoped from the demo, the new function of the “think” command to give a hint means you’re much less likely to get caught in a loop of trying every action without knowing what to do, so it feels like the most player-friendly game in the series. There are also a lot of fun optional scenes, like I mentioned in my review.

Getting back to the matter of Emio as a horror game and the fact that most of it is not, that ties into my comment on the unusual pacing. The final segment of Emio gets much darker, delves into some very disturbing scenes, and earns its M rating right there.

I would say the final part of Emio is basically a short horror story in its own right.

I have a theory about why they handled the game this way – that last part is so much darker than the rest of the series that I think they wanted to keep the bulk of the game more in line with the previous ones – but it does make it an odd experience.

In short, Emio – The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club is a great choice to play in October, but mainly for the payoff at the end.

Could We Get Ace Attorney News This Sunday?

 Video games  5 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Sep 272024
 

Is it finally happening?

Edit: They have confirmed it is in fact not happening.

Yesterday was Capcom’s TGS show, and it was basically just a quick overview of their recently-released games (including the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection) followed by a ton of Monster Hunter Wilds information.

But near the end of the presentation, after talking about their current sales, they moved on to “an announcement from the Ace Attorney series,” and I had a moment of shock realizing we might actually be getting a new game announced at TGS after all. Instead, they announced a “product introduction trailer” for September 29.

Now, the way it’s described, it sounds like it could just be an overview of the series to let everyone know what games are available and how to play them.

But if that’s all it is, this is a very strange way to do it.

Why would you announce and schedule a simple overview video instead of showing it at the end of the TGS show? It’s also been announced that it will go live on September 28 at 11 PM PT / September 29 at 2 AM ET. That means this video is premiering at the same time in all regions. For regular videos, they have no problem uploading a Japanese video first and then an English trailer hours later.

Moreover, don’t forget how Dragon’s Dogma 2 was announced. Fans’ hopes were crushed when Capcom’s 2022 showcase brought up Dragon’s Dogma only to announce a “10 Years of Dragon’s Dogma” video instead of a sequel, but then the video a few days later ended with Dragon’s Dogma 2 being announced.

It feels like this means something.

Now, I remember the “unmissable” TGS showcase. I remember the Ace Attorney social media accounts changing their profile pictures. I remember the out-of-context Earth screenshot. Yes, I remember all the times we’ve gotten our hopes up for no reason, but that’s not going to stop me from doing it again.

What will be announced this Sunday? Will it be the long-awaited Ace Attorney 7? The Great Ace Attorney Investigations to explain the mysterious misplaced Van Zieks captions? A new anime? Or will there be no announcement at all and it’s simply a scheduled series overview trailer?

I know what I’m hoping for, but what do you think?

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