Category: Player Number

Ed Note: I generally consider Gametrodon to be fairly low-key, easy reading. Because of the content of the game in this review, that is not the case this week. Horses contains content many people will likely find offensive, shocking, and that some people may find triggering. I suggest reading the quoted content warning below before reading the rest of this review.

I’m going to save us some time here. Horses is a somewhat graphic and discomforting experience, but to me felt devoid of any real greater purpose or meaning. I don’t recommend it, even from a “experience uncomfortable art” perspective, as it’s not novel enough to deserve that.

Sometimes games are hard to write about because it’s difficult to find a good place to start. Horses on the other hand, sits on the other side of this. There are too many good places to start.

That said, after a little bit of thought, I think the only good place for me to start is the relevant part of the game’s content warning.

This game contains scenes of physical violence, psychological abuse, gory imagery (mutilation, blood), depictions of slavery, physical and psychological torture, domestic abuse, sexual assault, suicide, and misogyny. The inclusion of these elements is intended to depict and characterize a fictional world and its fictional inhabitants. The presence of these elements is not an endorsement of them, nor do they reflect the beliefs or values of the creators. … Character dialogue also includes references to psychological trauma that may be upsetting, especially for those who may have had similar experiences in their pasts. Player discretion is advised. If you feel uncomfortable or upset while playing, please consider stepping away and reaching out to someone you trust.

Ed Note: I have omitted a small part of the content warning that is not relevant to this review.

If you are uncomfortable with these topics in the content of an interactive media experience, this may not be the review for you. I don’t intend to discuss every aspect of the aforementioned content in this review, but some of it will be discussed.

Cool. Elephant number one dealt with. Now let’s talk briefly about elephant number two.

Steam and Epic Store Bans

The reason I even heard of Horses at all—and the reason I decided to play it— was because the game has been banned off Steam and the Epic Store.

After playing the game, my verdict is probably something like this: the game is disturbing and contains material that is only appropriate for adults.

It is also less sexually explicit in many ways than other games I’ve played on Steam. Where it is explicit, it’s hard to imagine it being for the purpose of sexual gratification.

The game isn’t pornography.

Second elephant addressed. Let’s talk about the actual game.

Horses

The first thing that happened in Horses, after accepting a very lengthy trigger warning screen, was that I couldn’t move forward, used a rock to jump past
an invisible wall, and immediately clipped out of bounds.

There’s no jump key, so my odds of getting back in bounds seemed slim.

After a bit, however, I manage to get back onto a track, and find myself face to face with the “horses” for the first time, chained together, and clipping through a fence.

I have to imagine this is not the intended experience.

It is still deeply uncomfortable.

After a few more minutes of failing to get back to the happy path, I started a new game.

Intermission 1

One of my favorite manga series of all time is Beastars. It has a horribly written ending, but 80% of the series or so is incredibly good. At least to me, it spoke accurately to some conflicted internal feelings I was having at the time.

These feelings were mostly around kink and sex. The version of sex education I got growing up was decent, but perhaps not all encompassing on some topics. I got what I’ll term as mechanically accurate information: “Use a condom. Vaginal sex gets you pregnant. Sex can feel really good. Get tested for STI’s. Make sure there’s consent.” It’s all well and good, but what it doesn’t do is give you any context for anything else.

For example, what if you enjoy inflicting pain? What if hurting people, something you’ve been told is wrong your entire life, sexually excites you?

In that case, what you need is someone to sit down and walk you through the general concepts of paraphilias, the nature of sexual development, the complexity of sexuality, and perhaps an overview of things like safe-words, the idea of “Safe, Sane, Consensual,” and other kink basics.

If you don’t get that, then you can very, very quickly end up hating yourself and seeing yourself as a future sexual predator who deserves to die. It is not a good place to be.

Beastars is the only piece of media that I’ve ever read that really felt like it captured that confused desire of wanting something that you hate yourself for wanting.

Of course, when I show the series to other people, they tend to bounce off it. That weird sense of relief—knowing that someone else has also felt this set of specific uncomfortable emotions—doesn’t exist for them.

Their life has had a set of difficult and complex challenges, but they didn’t have this one.

So Beastars doesn’t resonate.

Life Around The Farm

Horses is a fairly short game. It isn’t the most interactive game either. A large portion of the game is closest to a walking simulator. There are a few chores, but they’re incredibly simple, and consist of clicking the thing, clicking the other thing, and then clicking to put the first thing back. There’s also a single puzzle which I felt was quite poorly designed.

Instead, the game mostly consists of set pieces. Specifically, set pieces about being a farm hand on a farm with slaves.

Except… not quite.

The primary problem I have with Horses is the problem my friends had with Beastars: I don’t know what this game is trying to say.

Is it a statement about the treatment of farm animals? I don’t think so. We’re told explicitly by one NPC that everyone knows that the slaves in horse masks aren’t really horses. It’s never explained exactly what they are, but it’s implied that they’re social undesirables. In one case, we learn that a couple was caught having sex in the woods, and then turned into “horses.” They are absolutely human beings.

Well, maybe it’s a statement about slavery; about human chattel? I don’t think it’s that either. The horses in the story are only used for manual labor briefly, and only in a few instances. They seem to be mostly kept around simply as a way to deal with undesirables.

Additionally, its made very clear that the process of turning someone into a “horse” is at least a bit supernatural, which for me takes away from what should be the mundane horror of slavery. You don’t need science or magic to strip someone’s humanity.

There are also several elements of the presentation that are a bit too dreamlike for me believe this is the case.

Maybe it’s a game about the dangers of complicity to inhumanity? Except… it doesn’t feel like that either! I played through as a good little bootlicker, smiling enthusiastically at each assault and violation of human dignity I was present for, and I still got what felt like a “good ending” instead of perhaps, the bullet I my actions would have deserved.

On the other hand, it often felt like I was forced into the role of a bystander. There was no chance offered to degrade or uplift. No choice to become an enthusiastic participant in dehumanization, or to pick up the axe out back, and solve the problem I was confronted with quickly and efficiently.

In real life when I fail— when I don’t contribute to the solution of problems I claim to abhor—I’m at least left with a sense of quiet shame. I could donate the contents of my bank account to ACLU. I could spend more, and buy clothes that aren’t practically made by slaves. I could speak louder for the causes I say I care about. None of those would change the world, but at least I could try.

In Horses, that choice is made for me. There’s no ability turn the brand on the brander. Instead, I’m just a passenger as I sear flesh with initials. I’m a bystander for rape, castration and assault.

Intermission 2

I’m not really a horror person, be that games, movies, etc. I just don’t get it. I’ve had people explain to me that often in horror, the “monster” is just an already present danger made manifest, given fangs, a knife, or whatever else it needs to do its job.

I know I’m not a horror person, because I’m struggling to even think of an example to give. The only thing that comes to mind is the [REDACTED] in Jordan Peele’s movie “Nope” as a stand-in for the dangers of chasing wealth and fame at any cost.

Perhaps that all makes me very badly equipped to look at a piece of work like this.

One theme in Horses that I haven’t touched on at all is religion. I don’t quite know what to make of it.

It’s possible that this is what Horses is actually about, or at least intended to be about. Something about religious guilt; feeling forced to obey a specific upbringing or the nature of relationships. There’s a lot of what I would consider Christian symbology including something that feels like a crucifixion.

If Horses is about religion, it didn’t click or land for me.

Overall Thoughts

I don’t have particularly strong feelings about Horses. I don’t think it’s very good, or very bad. Just deeply disturbing, and a bit buggy.

I don’t recommend it.

“But!” I hear you saying. “You just wrote an incredibly long review of the game! Surely that means it had some impact on you, and that’s indicative of its success as a piece of interactive fiction!”

To which I respond: “Not really.” Horses is using a set of absolutely brutal themes and elements. F0rcing the player to witness sexual assault, human branding, slavery and suicide is going to provoke a reaction. A bad chef that tosses 50 pounds of jalapeno peppers into a dish is going to make something spicy, regardless of the quality of that final product.

If this game hadn’t been banned, I wouldn’t have bought it. At best, it’s a disturbing piece of media that plays out like a dreamy fugue state. At worst, it’s an agency-free walking simulator with no real statement.

It’s $5 on GoG.

Post-Script: I wrote this review last year, the day Horses came out, and at the time, decided against putting it up on the site. I was in the middle of promoting Card City Critters, and quite bluntly, Horses didn’t match the tone I wanted to have on the blog at the time.

I don’t think Horses is a very good game. It has minimal gameplay, I found the story to generally be dull, and in the weeks since I played it, I haven’t really thought about it at all. For a game built around shocking the player, it had very little impact on me personally. There are campfire stories that have greater staying power with me than Horses and its parade of human violation.

There are movies that show worse. There are books that show worse. Hell, there are plenty of games that show FAR worse. Horses is perhaps only novel in that it isn’t explicit pornography, and is coated in a black and white film grain. All games are art, but Horses isn’t a piece of art that’s worth your time.

Welcome to the first post of the year. Let’s talk about Angeline Era.

I was going to say that Angeline Era describes itself as a 3D action platformer, but technically it doesn’t do that. In this thread here, the developers describe it as a “Light-Story Action-Adventure VLASRPGEG.” They also note that it has bumpslash combat, which should not be confused with a bump-combat game.

Yes, that is a lot of text. No, I don’t quite understand it either. In fact, there’s a lot of things I don’t understand about Angeline Era, so it’s probably best to do some groundwork. Let’s lay out the things I do understand, the things I don’t understand, and a mistake I made very early on while playing.

First of all: the mistake.

I chose to play Angeline Era on Inferno difficultly. I did this for a few reasons. When I play a game, I want to have the “intended” experience—as close as possible to what the designer wants me to experience. I usually assume the harder difficulty is, the more the game will force me to truly engage with systems, choices, and designs. My second reason is that I’m used to weird indie games being too easy, and too short, so I figured clicking up the difficulty a bit (while still being below the highest) would be fine.

And on this second reason, I was wrong. I was incredibly wrong. Greek hero levels of hubris here.

I think comparisons to From Software games are overblown when discussing or writing about games, but I cannot think of another game that has gives me the same sort of emotional response that I had to many sections of Angeline Era as Bloodborne. When I describe sections of Angeline Era as exhausting or draining, it’s probably because of my choice to play on Inferno.

Enough caveats, let’s talk about the game for a bit.

Gameplay and Narrative

Angeline Era starts out fairly simple. It stays that way for about 30 seconds.

It’s 1950-something, you play as Tets Kinoshta, and you’ve been called by angels to come to the country of Era for… some reason. On the way there, your ship is attacked by the fae, and about 30 seconds into the game, it’s time for the first boss: a set of laser-shooting fish. You defeat them, a few things happen, and a little while later you’re introduced to the angel Arkas, who tells you that they were the one who called you to Era.

The reason?

So you can collect the Bicornes: the only way to get into the damaged angel spaceship, repair it, and allow the angels to return to their true form as beings that can shimmer throughout the universe.

If you find yourself overwhelmed at this point: don’t worry. I felt the same way, and after 20 more hours of gameplay, I can confidently say that I am still confused. More on that later.

Regardless, it’s shortly after this that the game opens up for what will be the majority of the experience. The loop goes something like this:

1. Explore the overworld, looking for weird or unusual spots.

2. When you find one, go over and search it.

3. If it is a secret, play a little dungeon crawl minigame sort of thing. Beat that to unlock a level.

4. Depending on the type of level, play through it and collect a Scale at the end.

5. Finally, beating levels unlocks and adds path to the overworld. (Note the bridge and gap in the trees!)

Rinse and repeat!

Or, if you’re me, do the following. (Click to expand)

Find the level. Try. Fail. Try again. Fail again. Try a third game. Get a bit farther, and get killed by something that seems impossible to beat. Quit the level, and look for other levels. Find one. Discover it’s somehow worse. Jump back to the first level. Lose until the moment something finally clicks. Get further than you have before. Die to an enemy doing something you weren’t paying attention to. Rage quit for the day. Come back the next day and beat it in 20 minutes.

The majority of my time in Era, though, was spent on combat. So let’s talk about the combat system.

Many of Angeline Era’s mechanics work pretty similar to other games with top-down 3d combat. Tets can be moved around with a control stick and perform a double jump to get over enemies or cross gaps. What makes Angeline Era different is how it handles attacks, because there is no attack button. Instead, whenever Tets bumps into an enemy with his sword, he’ll automatically slash at them.

This is the core of Angeline Era’s combat, the bumpslash if you will. It does a few very important things, but the first one is that as the player, you cannot actually control when Tets attacks. If you get pushed into a corner by enemies, you’ll lash out whether you want to or not. And you might not want to, because each time Tets makes an attack, there’s a decent amount of knockback in the other direction. Knockback that might send you into a pit, spikes, or get you stuck in a corner.

The other big part of combat is your gun. Due to the low poly nature of the game, I can’t quite tell what type of gun it is. Maybe it’s a magic gun! It does refill its bullets each time you hit something. Maybe it’s a cursed gun. It can only ever shoot towards the top of the screen. This is actually less annoying than you might think.

I did find in my play-through that I didn’t use the gun much until I got an upgrade that let me use it as a short range shotgun, allowing the next connected round every five seconds or so to be used as an AOE blast.

Of course, combat only matters in combination with enemies. And while Angeline Era has what feels like a low number of enemy models, it doesn’t have a particularly low number of enemy types. Multiple enemies in the game share the same character model, but behave differently. Here’s two examples.

The black fae beatledog is one of the game’s most basic enemies. When you kill it, it explodes damaging you and other enemies nearby. However, its actual behavior is pretty variable. Off the top of my head, I think I’ve seen it used as a patrolling enemy, an enemy that rushes at the player, and an enemy that actively tries to run away from the player.

A better example might be the weird purple cat mosquito fae. Sometimes they’re turrets, sitting in one location, spinning in a circle and shooting at you whenever you cross their line of vision. Other times they actively move around, avoiding the player while firing.

Most enemies are like this, with a set of different behaviors that add more variety then you might expect.

Many of the levels in Angeline Era are combat levels, consisting of a set of rooms populated with enemies, and you need to defeat a certain number of them or a certain group of them to advance to the next room.

In harder levels, I found myself trying to solve the levels like a puzzle more than fight through them.

Is there a grace period where enemies aren’t moving as I enter? Try to find one enemy to a clip of ammo into and quickly kill.

Are there spikes, and a slightly elevated location? Rush over, jump up high, and let the randomly rolling enemies kill themselves on the hazards.

Is there cheese? Is there a trick? What’s the minimum number of enemies I actually need to beat to progress?

As I got further and further, I found myself increasingly exhausted by the process of exploring the island of Era.

Intermission – Art and Cultural Context

I’m of the opinion that for me to understand art, I need to exist at least in part in the culture that created it. Let me give a few examples of situations where that hasn’t been the case for me:

Let’s start with Amazing Cultivation Simulator. This game expects you to have a strong understanding of the tropes and nature of a Wuxia-based setting in order to parse it whatsoever. As it turned out, there were a fair number of folks I knew who actually were familiar with this stuff, either because they came from a cultural background with these stories, or just really liked 10,000 chapter web novels. As I wasn’t, I had to consult with these people to understand why I kept getting my guys killed with bad Feng Shui.

Another, slightly more abstract example can be found in Sanda, a manga series by Beastars author Paru Itagaki. On its face, this is a series about a kid who can turn into a super buff version of Santa Claus. Under that, though, I think it might actually be a series about queer awakenings, the way that youth is overvalued by adults, the population crisis in Japan, and trying to hold on to past days. Do I understand any of those messages? Absolutely not, because I don’t have an ounce of the context really needed to parse them on any meaningful level. I’m aware that Japan has a rapidly declining population, but trying to comment on it as someone who has no real understanding of the culture would be an act of grand hubris.

Finally, there was Land of the Lustrous. Even if I told you the premise, it wouldn’t be useful because the actual themes and mechanics of the series instead seem to be playing around with the nature of various Buddhist beliefs. At least I think so! Again, I don’t entirely know what I’m looking at.

Now, you might have noticed that in all of this I’ve been careful to avoid the words “weird” or “alien” as descriptors of these works. And that’s because I’m not convinced that they are. Even if they are weird, I don’t think I’m positioned to apply the label. Looking in at another culture, at its traditions and at its stories, we—the outsiders—are the aliens. Just because something doesn’t connect with us doesn’t make it inhumanly alien; just a part of humanity we haven’t experienced, and something that might be a casual part of everyday life for someone. They’re bad labels. I’m happy to call something like Homestuck, or Undertale, or Athenian Rhapsody weird because I know where they’re coming from, and from that place they are unusual!

Okay, so what does any of this have to do with Angeline Era?

Well, I might be an idiot.

I have spent an large amount of my playtime through Angeline Era wondering if I’m just an idiot, for a variety of reasons. Some are gameplay-related. There were at least two bosses I just completely failed to understand how to fight.

In one case, I was stuck flailing until a friend made an observation that let me beat it. In another, I spent at least two hours failing miserably until I finally pieced together how I was actually supposed to defeat it.

There are also the levels that just felt far too long to beat.

Most of all though, there’s been the narrative.

Angeline Era’s narrative feels like it’s managed through a series of “short story” style experiences. You, as Tets, are not the primary mover and shaker in these experiences. Instead, you arrive late in the story, after things have drawn towards a conclusion. The process of obtaining each Bicorne is the process of stepping through one of these short stories; a narrative about characters who are not you, and often not even hugely interested in you.

These stories on the whole are pretty grim. I’ve included a brief smattering below, but please be aware these are spoilers.

Click here for story arc spoilers

-A girl kidnapped by the fae at birth and swapped with a changeling returns to her human mother, but grows jealous of her changeling sister and begins robbing people. The townsfolk blame her changeling sister who is run out of town, while you proceed to fight and kill her, followed by murdering the fae family who had raised her as a sort of weird pet, and that she had locked in the basement.
-A “not-quite-dream” sequence involving what might just be a plan to control the entire human race via mind control juice! Or maybe it’s a hallucinogenic vision.
-A woman marries an angel who got involved with her only for her property. The angel digs too greedily and too deep, finds some sort of ancient being, is sacrificed to it by his wife, who then continues to feed other people into its maw.
-An angel scientist, upset by the fact that angels can’t reproduce, creates an unholy abomination clone of an angel that stands two stories tall in a mockery of the concept of life.

Oh, and while we’re at it, lets get the big one out of the way.

MAJOR STORY SPOILERS

Angels aren’t angels! They’re a sort of semi-parasitic alien, one possibly controlled by their crashed space-ship in a sort of hive mind that parasitized Tets, and seems to have been at the start of trying to take over the world when their ship got blasted into oblivion. It didn’t crash, it was blown up by someone they were trying to mind control!

Now, what I’ll say about all of these things is that they don’t quite feel connected. Everything I’ve put in the text boxes above took me 24-ish hours of playtime to get through. They’re like a set of vignettes, each discomforting in its own right, but none of them felt like they were contributing to a greater narrative more than they were contributing to a tone. The same is true of all the characters, NPCs, and other interactions.

Angeline Era has made me feel deeply out of place both with its gameplay and narrative, and sometimes, in the ways they overlap. Mechanically, the game’s bosses kicked my ass so badly and so many times in a row, in a way that I haven’t been on the receiving end of except for games like Silksong.

See this red gauge under the health bar? It fills up as you attack enemies. I’ve played 26 hours of this game, and I have no idea what it does or means. I’ve even made new save files and replayed through the game’s opening section to see if I missed a tutorial, or a section where it is introduced, but if I did, I still haven’t found it.

There are parts of Angeline Era that are fantastic. Certain sections of the game are incredibly fun. At one point the game turns into a sort of mining/exploration mini-game. There’s one song I’ve played on repeat while writing this.

But there’s also a sense of extreme exhaustion. Of bosses that feel borderline unfair, and in one case, slightly bugged. Of exploration that’s draining instead of exciting.

Most games feel like escape rooms. Angeline Era feels like hiking up a mountain to a run-down car park, or a closed ski resort during the summer. The gaming trope of every investigation you do being rewarded with a treasure, or secrets, or lore simply isn’t there. Sometimes a coke can in a parking lot doesn’t tell of a mystery of the universe, it just tells of someone who doesn’t throw out their trash.

But fundamentally, I can’t tell if this is the experience I’m supposed to be having, or if I took that coke can, spun it around three times, and tossed it into a river, a mystical genie would come out.

I can’t tell if Angeline Era is at times intentionally abrasive, strange and unusual, or if I’m just fucking idiot who can’t observe or uncover its secrets, or understand its mechanics.

And this brings me to my big confession.

The Big Reveal

When I wrote most of this, I had not beaten the game. I thought I was about to! I had collected all the Bicornes. There was a big boss fight.

Then! A grand twist! A big reveal! A second boss fight, in a way that felt like it was the final moment of the game, like it would all end here. This one was a bit more exhausting but I beat it.

And then the game just sort of kept going. A third boss fight, one that didn’t quite make sense to me in context, and still doesn’t make sense to me now. Also, it took longer than the first two.

Some even more confusing plot developments.

Then there was a weird and incredibly unfun minigame.

Then another unfun mini-game.

Then a third awful mini-game. It legitimately might be intentional that this part sucks so much. It would be a really clever bit of telling a story through mechanics. Still, it sucks.

Anyway, after finally working up the energy to play through it, I did beat the rest of the game. And I’m now ready to give some final thoughts.

Final thoughts

From a gameplay standpoint, I mostly like Angeline Era. There are quite a few things I’m sure I missed in my play-through, but the bumpslash combat feels good, and the individual levels work well. I can’t say the same for all of the exploration. There are plenty of points I found it purely frustrating, and there are some sections in the end game where it really feels like the game just stopped thinking about the experience it was providing.

From a story standpoint though. From a story standpoint, by the end of everything, the game feels like a fever dream.

FINAL STORY SPOILERS AND THOUGHTS

I don’t get the story. I don’t think I like the story. In fact, I might straight up loathe it.

I use the phrase fever dream because it feels like a selection of set pieces that are completely unconnected from each other, especially in the finale.

Everything feels uncomfortably rushed. Characters are examined and developed far more in the last 3 hours than the first 25, and their characterization just feels off. While I was exploring Era, I didn’t get a great sense of who Tets was a character, but in the finale sections of the game, we get TOLD that he’s a recovering veteran of World War 2 who might have become an alcoholic, ignored his father, and chased after his own beliefs. This is followed by him being in an abusive relationship (as the victim) with a magical Fae, followed by one of his Fae children being killed as his abusive wife is kidnapped by her brother for… reasons. Maybe they were explained and I didn’t understand them?

Again. Fever dream.

The nature of video games and stories is that you have a lot more time and different tools to tell stories with, and I feel like the plot beats that Angeline Era is trying deliver on could have worked for me. Tets doesn’t control or act like a deadbeat son with PTSD using religion as a shield to avoid addressing his trauma throughout the game, so finding out that’s what he’s supposed to be is a bit of a moment of whiplash.

And I don’t think you can ignore any of that! Angeline Era kept me involved because of its narrative, and seeing how it concluded… I feel bummed. I want to like this game more than I do. I want to recommend it to other people.

Angeline Era is an unusual game unlike many other things I’ve played. If you like hard games, and are good at them, maybe give it a shot. If you want to understand a world I couldn’t, find secrets I didn’t, and experience something deeply different from a lot of other video games, it might be for you.

But I don’t think it was for me.