Games like Unpacking are a genre in themselves these days: games where you don’t just focus on decorating, but on taking things out of boxes. This is better than putting things in boxes, the worst part of moving, and it also brings an element of surprise to setting up a room. Unpacking-like game Hozy came out this week, adding another twist to the formula in that before you can spend hours arranging little tchotchkes, you need to clean the space up first.

There’s a light narrative to Hozy about coming back to your hometown, with small bits of text and character portraits telling you vague things about the diorama-like settings you have to fix up. Your sister’s first apartment is piled high with trash; a sprawling penthouse tended to by a lonely robot vacuum was the abode of someone who “couldn’t buy happiness.” All this gives a little bit of context and emotion to the spaces, and can guide the way you set up the place. 

But before you can do any of that you have to tidy up. This usually involves clicking trash to put it in a bin, dragging a mop across a dirty floor or a squeegee over the windows, or painting the walls from limited colors. In some levels you need to rip up and lay flooring, sweep up leaves from outdoor spaces, or saw boards to make them even. You do this with tiny in-world tools that can sometimes be floaty or imprecise, but it’s always a clever, enjoyable way to engage with the space and start thinking about its potential.

Once a space is ready, boxes appear. You can guess the size of items that might be in them from their shape, opening the door to a little bit of strategy. When I played Hozy’s demo back in February I had a tendency to just pull everything out and heap it up until there was no room to put anything anywhere, but this time around I went through things one box at a time, sometimes going back to rearrange stuff if a new item felt like it should be in a certain spot. Items range from big stuff like chairs, tables, and rugs (there are a lot of rugs in this game, which really got me thinking about my own life choices vis-a-vis being anti-rug), to paintings and statues, to the tiniest teacups or little bits of decor. A level is complete once you’ve unpacked everything and put it somewhere, but you have unlimited time to rearrange things into the exact configuration you want, and there’s a photo mode to commemorate your creations.

I was impressed with just how much stuff you can fill Hozy’s spaces with; I can’t remember ever seeing the same chair or painting or even little item from one level to another. Sometimes I clashed against this–you’d think the rich penthouse owner would have furniture that matches–but in other levels it gave a sense of character to the space, like the mismatched chairs of a pharmacy-turned-cafe. And the stuff tells the story of a space too: paintbrushes and palettes for an artist’s studio, or two walkie-talkies for some kids’ treehouse. In the latter example, I tried to give each kid a little narrative through my items, throwing shoes willy-nilly around one kid’s bed while neatly lining them up for the other to try to capture two very different people sharing a small space.

If you don’t like something in a level, you can drop it off the side to put it away, which lets you exert a little control over the story-through-stuff of a space. The artist had a series of Halloween pumpkins I found ugly and didn’t want to use, while in the musician’s apartment I kept pulling out a series of cat toys shaped like rats that eventually won me over in their sheer volume. A lot of the items weren’t things I’d personally decorate a space with, or clashed with my vision for a musician’s home or young person’s lofted flat, but when combined with Hozy’s simple narrative, it felt like I was making a space for specific people, instead of designing a place of my own.  

Also, as I pointed out in the newsletter I wrote about the game's demo, the menu rules:

Hozy is a chill little game to tinker with, even if the tidying can sometimes feel a bit clumsy. I always feel a little weird playing decorating games when my real-life house is a mess (looking for a place for a bike in one of Hozy’s levels made me feel guilty about how all my bike and camping stuff is just piled in the corners in my bedroom in a way that screams “single man who lives alone”), but it was a nice way to unwind after a long day, and to imagine the lives of other people through where they keep their stuff.

Finally, a nesting game that gets the lighting right

It’s your job to make that isometric house an isometric home

MothershipZoë Hannah

Despite being endlessly overworked, I love a good job simulator. Recent games like Power Wash Simulator 2 and Schedule 1 give me the satisfaction of a day of tasks without having to make spreadsheets or learn about tax structures, being unexpectedly relaxing for games that mimic work, the least relaxing part of being alive. Lately I’ve been playing 90s video store simulator Retro Rewind, which has all the things I love about these kinds of games with the added bonus of hideous old-school carpeting.

Retro Rewind came out earlier this month on Steam. You play as the owner of a small video store in a surprisingly upscale-looking mini mall near a fancy market and an ice cream store. You start with a small space that you can customize a bit, changing the carpet and the color of the walls. The bulk of your day is spent renting people VHS tapes: stocking the shelves, checking people out, dealing with reserved videos and late fees, and sometimes rewinding tapes with a machine I totally forgot existed until I saw it in the game.

I never struggled to get customers into the shop, and in fact often found myself a little overwhelmed. Like Schedule 1, everything you do is very manual–to check people out, you have to scan each video, take their money, and physically count out the correct change. Things can get hectic, especially if a day is busy due to a local event like a harvest festival or the weekend, but it’s never too much. Sometimes I ran out of videos and had to rush to the returns shelf to scan new videos in so there’d be something for people to rent, or dash to the back room to answer the phone or help a customer find the video they were looking for, all while people impatiently lined up with money in hand. As a nerd, I really wanted to keep all my videos organized by genre–action, horror, drama–but that plan quickly fell to the wayside in favor of just keeping videos on the shelves. You get some time before an in-game day starts to set the store up, refill your snack shelf, or order new videos, but each of my days ended in a bit of an exhausted rush.

Videos have weird, largely nonsensical titles, but unlike Tiny Bookshop, you don’t need to know that much about them to recommend them to customers. Besides their genre, some have tags indicating they’re old or that critics find them notably good or bad, and this is enough to recommend them. New releases will be particularly popular (and also come with a cardboard standee to decorate your store with), so you’ll want to make sure you stock enough to meet the demand. Certain genres will be popular on certain days–sci-fi during a meteor shower, horror during Friday the 13th (as well as something else weird I don’t want to spoil because it was so charming)–so you’ll want to have them ready for those days too. Twice a week you can go out back to a bootlegger, who in addition to knockoff videos can sell you adult films.

As you level up, you unlock new movie genres or the ability to repair your slushee and popcorn machines, and can use your earnings to upgrade the size and layout of your store. I just hired my first employee, who’s already been a big help dealing with the returns so I can run around a little less. I’m still in the game’s early stages, but I don’t think I’ll want to outsource everything to employees; at the least, I’d miss all the lovely beeps and dings that accompany my daily tasks.

Retro Rewind obviously wants to lean on 90s nostalgia, though from what I’ve seen that’s mostly consigned to the decor and the fact that you’re dealing with VHS tapes. There was definitely something nice about having to go to a literal video store, only able to choose what was physically available and finding new favorites by browsing the shelves. (My hometown had a small store in a strip mall, with what I can now see was a surprisingly robust queer section that they never stopped me renting from.) The game feels contained, grounded in physical space in a way both movies and work don’t these days. You can’t automate things; each video needs to be dealt with as an object, checked in or rewound and carried to a shelf to be put away. The business layer doesn’t get too complicated, letting you focus on your routine in a way that’s soothing even when there’s a lot to do. There’s none of the stress of owning a business, or the pressure of working retail for a bad manager–just the satisfying repetition of seeing the store through each day.

Having a manageable day at work might be Retro Rewind’s biggest fantasy, but it’s a nice one: customers who don’t get too pushy, a handful of little tasks to do, and lots of buttons and levers and sound effects to accompany you. It’s a throwback to the days before rising streamer prices and AI upscaling, a little oasis within the oasis that is video games. I don’t have a lot of nostalgia for the 90s broadly, but I’ll take a chill day at work any time. 

The Person Saving The Media You Love Is You - Aftermath

If you wanna archive a VHS tape right, you gotta do it yourself. VHS-Decode and LD-Decode are the future of tape and laserdisc archiving.

AftermathChris Person

VICTORVILLE, Calif. — Last week, a group of physical media activists from the Discord server Against The Stream announced the rescue of “The Cursed Video Tape,” a VHS cassette with the ability to summon a murderous Japanese spirit seven days after viewing.

“We saved it just in time,” said Amir Bey, the group’s admin, who also sells zines in the parking lot of his father’s delicatessen. “It’s not on Netflix, it’s not on Hulu, and if we hadn’t rescued it from that professional degaussing facility run by a blind Coptic monk, it’d be lost media forever. We did it, fellow analog enthusiasts!” 

Members of Against The Stream were alerted to the tape’s impending destruction by a cryptic telephone call placed by a ghost. The cassette, a long staple of lost media icebergs, features a poorly shot montage of clichéd images, including wriggling maggots, a three-legged goat, and a horse’s eyeball. 

“The film’s a bit of a letdown,” said Cynthia Tanaka, a moderator of Against The Stream. “Frankly, it’s just Un Chien Andalou with a bigger budget and less to say, to quote my Letterboxd. Nevertheless, I do think you should watch it… ideally within the next six days, eight hours and twelve minutes.” 

The tape runs under two minutes, but can run longer if a Japanese onryō spirit shambles menacingly towards the viewer. While the news delighted physical media fans worldwide, not everyone was pleased by the tape’s recovery.

“Dangerous films like this don’t belong in our VCRs, our homes or our nation,” said Gary Strydom, owner of conservative TikTok production company FreedomLab. “If a child watched this, they’d be exposed to forced diversity, victim fetishization, eastern philosophy… Plus, the tape literally destroys your TV. I called CostCo, the two-year replacement doesn’t cover little girls crawling out your screen.”  

At press time, the ghost of the murdered girl trapped on the tape announced a sequel, The Cursed Video Tape 2: Next Stop, Tinseltown.

The post ‘The Ring’ Tape Saved From Destruction by Physical Media Activists appeared first on Palette Swap.

It was the sixth level of Super Meat Boy 3D that made me take pause. It took me nine attempts to get through it while I breezed through each of the previous five levels in a single run. In retrospect, nine tries isn’t very many and the level didn’t take me very long, but despite thinking I had finished the majority of the tutorial levels, the spike in difficulty made me realize that I was still in it. Super Meat Boy 3D was easing me in to teach me a crucial lesson: you are going to die. A lot.

Super Meat Boy 3D is a game about being beaten into submission. Each level is a gauntlet of 3D platforming packed to the brim with spinning buzzsaws, incinerating lasers, and metal spike traps — obstacles that kill you instantly if you so much as brush against them. The game starts in classic fashion with Dr. Fetus, a fetus-piloted mech suit, kidnapping Meat Boy’s girlfriend, Bandage Girl, and it’s up to you to launch yourself over, under, through, and around the flames and blades and acid vats to save the girl and live happily ever after. At the end of each level, you chase the pair down before Bandage Girl is inevitably ripped away from you the second you reach her. The end screen for each level is a different vignete of Meat Boy having his teeth kicked in by Dr. Fetus as he pulls Bandage Girl away from him. The message here is clear: Even when you’re winning, you’re still going to take a beating.

What I find compelling about finishing a level in Super Meat Boy 3D, however, is that after Dr. Fetus grabs Bandage Girl and you see your final run time, you watch a playback of your path to the end featuring each and every attempt you made to get there. All at once, you watch nine or ten or 20 or 50 different Meat Boys attempting to run the level as all but one get grounded into a red paste, falling short of the goal.

It’s fun to watch all of your past failures play out, especially if it was a particularly tough level, but there’s something kind of inspiring about seeing a manifestation of your endurance visualized on screen. Even at it’s most frustrating (and trust me, Super Meat Boy 3D can certainly be frustrating) being reminded of your effort feels like the only bit of hope you can have in a game as punishing as this. It never feels like it at the time when you’re on attempt number 14 of figuring out the exact angle you need to jump past a laser gate, but watching it all play back made me feel like I was actually learning something with each failure. Like each run that ended in a frustrating and quick death was a lesson I needed to learn to clear the hurdles each level threw at me.

What I like most about the platforming in Super Meat Boy 3D is the sheer number of platforms that are completely optional. In your first attempt through a level, you might try jumping on every surface available to you as you chart your path to the end. However, as you get more comfortable navigating the level’s various pitfalls, you start to realize that you can skip entire sections. It makes each level feel fluid and like you’re outsmarting the game at times by breaking apart the critical path. It’s especially fun to watch in the playback at the end of each level since you can see how much time you save once you start taking major shortcuts when compared to previous runs where you were following the critical path.

Those moments of platforming genius are what keep the core of Super Meat Boy 3D feeling fresh and alive, as you search each level for the skip that catapults you to the end. That said, the boss encounters at the end of each world drag the experience down since they each require specific platforming solutions without any flexibility. It feels like most of the levels of the game are teaching you to think outside of the box and find ways around various platforming hurdles, but the second you start a boss fight, you end up having to wait around as the boss slowly breaks apart the level or performs their prescripted attack sequence that you have to dodge.

Super Meat Boy 3D feels like it’s encouraging you to whip past the parts of each level that you’ve already mastered so you can get to the next part that you’re trying to figure out, but with how slow the boss battles go, they’re something of a drag on the breakneck pacing.

As much as I like challenging games, there is a difference between challenge and bullshit — a difference that certain levels of Super Meat Boy 3D could stand to learn. I don’t mind retrying a level over and over and over again while I work on solving its platforming puzzles, but there were some puzzles so challenging that left me scratching my head saying “surely, there’s another way, right?” Sometimes the answer is “yes” which leads to that incredible feeling of outsmarting the game using my platforming skills, but often the answer is a flat out “no.” This isn’t an inherent problem if learning those various sections felt like they were relying on precision that I didn’t quite master yet, but with relative frequency, there are some sections that are a complete crapshoot.

It’s all well and good to learn from your mistakes by following the blood trail that Meat Boy leaves behind with each attempt, but sometimes there’s nothing to learn from the level that increases your platforming skillset.

Despite my complaining, I do think that there are more good levels in Super Meat Boy 3D than bad. I haven’t played them all yet (there’s an entire second half of the game called the Dark World that’s full of challenge levels only unlocked by clearing certain par times from each Light World level,) but I did find a lot of joy in the levels that had me beaten to a pulp as I said to myself “okay, just a few more tries, I’m so close.”

There are a handful of small things about Super Meat Boy 3D that I found irritating like it’s crude Newgrounds-style humor and generic soundtrack that feels like what I would call “Guitar Center-core,” but those are relatively small complaints. The humor is about as prevelent as the game’s main narrative (which is to say, hardly at all) and it’s easy enough to turn down the music in the settings and put something else on in your headphones that doesn’t grate the nerves.

Super Meat Boy 3D isn’t Shakespeare — it’s main antagonist is named Dr. Fetus, afterall — but I found its platforming puzzles to be largely solid across the board and I was impressed by its adherence to the idea that the game will happily beat you down, but the way back up from that is through perserverence. Perserverence that it’s happy to show you that you posses by watching your level replays.

NEW YORK CITY — In a move that has been called everything from “tone-deaf” to “obvious trolling”, Rolling Stone magazine revealed that their Top 250 Songs of the 21st Century only included two covers of the iconic Megalovania from Toby Fox’s groundbreaking 2015 masterpiece Undertale.

“There were a lot of factors to consider,” muttered the questionably credentialed Martin Andonuts, editor and list curator for Rolling Stone. “Chart performance, for example. And meme survivability. Notice there are no covers of Guile’s Theme this time around. Obviously there’s a wide range of covers we could have picked, but we felt that including ChordAndBoard’s ‘Megalovania [8 String Doom Requiem Mix]’ as well as Pentatonix’s memorable, if slightly questionable, holiday acapella cover appropriately paid respect to this enduring creation.”

The eternally graceful Toby Fox, creator of Undertale, took to Bluesky to voice his appreciation for the recognition.

“What an incredible decade Undertale has had! Just to be considered for the list is an honor” beamed the practically perfect Fox, composer of each of Undertale‘s 101 instant classic tracks. “The last 25 years have been incredible for music, I’m so glad to be a part of it.” Fox humbly neglected to mention how Megalovania has over 51,000 covers on YouTube when compared to Missy Elliot’s “Get Ur Freak On”, the top song on the list, which has at most probably dozens.

Pop Culture historian and frequent VH1 talking head Gina Varik was less charitable about its inclusion in the very important list.

“While no one would say that Megalovania hasn’t been hugely influential in today’s musical landscape, you have to look outside the melody. For one thing, it’s not even a required battle. Are we to believe someone in Pentatonix completed a Genocide run? How about the voters? Do they even know who Sans is? Secondly, Rolling Stone also has an entire other list of Top 150 Most Iconic Boss Battle Theme Covers that one of these two entries could have been better suited for. If you ask me, this is Jethro Tull winning Best Metal Album all over again.” 

At press time, Rolling Stone decided to take the reaction in stride, announcing it will release a companion list next month titled ‘Top 10 Songs That Might Play When You Fight Sans’.

The post Only Two Megalovania Covers Make Rolling Stones Top 250 Songs of the 21st Century appeared first on Palette Swap.

I am madly in love with Esoteric Ebb, for all kinds of reasons (the writing! the world!), but the thing that just keeps slapping me in the face, every time I enter a room or run across a courtyard, is how good it all looks.

In Esoteric Ebb, Men Talk To Men About Manhood, And That’s A Good Thing

It does not shy away from the things many of us are always thinking about when we interact with others, like, “Who are you voting for?” and “What does being a man mean to you?”

AftermathZoë Hannah

This is a beautiful video game. And it's beautiful in such an understated, impressive way; there's no shock and awe here, no blinding effects or dazzling lighting. You just play the game for a few hours then slowly realise that Esoteric Ebb is a triumph of design, a game absolutely crammed with the work of good artists doing cool and economical stuff.

The character illustrations are great, the world is somehow both a hark back to 90s RPGs while also looking crisp and modern, and the map is one of the best I've ever seen in a video game. I could go on and on, but seeing as I love it all so much, and run a semi-regular feature looking at the art of video games, I figured it'd be more useful for all of you to have the artists do some talking instead.

Oscar Westberg did a lot on this game, from character design to character art to the icons and illustrations of your equipment. "When [creator] Christoffer [Bodegård] approached me, he had already done quite a bit of work on the game himself", Westberg says. "His mood board for the game’s visuals included a couple of artists working with line art and colour, including many of my drawings! So my personal style was a natural evolution of what Christoffer had already done. My first work for Esoteric Ebb was a character drawing, which I did in my style, and Christoffer felt that it was perfect for the game."

"When we worked on character designs he’d give me a description of the character;  personality, job, species etc. Other than that I often had quite free rein to come up with a design. I’d do several ideas and iterations which we’d discuss together. The same was true for items in the game, though Gibbet Games came up with a couple of ideas too. Before starting to work on Esoteric Ebb, I had created and published a book on fantasy items, and later an illustrated journal-style fantasy adventure book. Both of these circulated around the team as stylistic inspiration as well."

"In terms of visual style, I’ve been inspired a lot by comics and manga I grew up reading",  Westberg says. "Such as Tintin, Moebius, Naruto and Akira. And for design I’ve looked at museum photographs of historical armor and relics, and fantasy live action role-play events. I really enjoy making designs that would make sense and be comfortable to use. I mix different real-world armor parts and clothes to create something functional, but that still looks new, fantastical and cool."

While Westberg was responsible for much of the game's character and illustration work, a huge part of Esoteric Ebb's visuals--like its 3D models and environments--were handled by Gibbet Games (full credit list here).

"Most of the time we got blockout areas that were mostly very simple, with just an idea for the area" Gibbet's Jonathan Nilsson tells Aftermath. "Then we started to work on the area, and Chris would tell us some of the lore for each place. But when we added stuff or made changes he would also make changes in the game (and the lore) so it was a really fun and creative project."

"Instead of having a very rigid idea, he was really open for new ideas and also incorporated the new ideas in the game", Nilsson adds. "In these videos you will see the process of the creation of the game's areas, from the blockout to final version."

Maybe my favourite part of the whole game, though, is the map screen. It's not a fancy map; it doesn't rotate or give you precise directions. It's just a regular map that you can look at, work out where you are and try to get your bearings from there. But it's a gorgeous map, and something that just kinda happened.

"The in-game journal maps were something that was added in the last month or so of the project", Nilsson says. "Chris took the line art we did and inverted it to create the maps. It looked really cool, but it wasn't something we planned for when we started."

'Showcase' is a feature highlighting the work of artists in and around the video game industry. You can see more, for stuff like Homeworld 3, Blue Eye Samurai and beyond, here:

MORE SHOWCASE FEATURES