Inside: Recursive Ruin, Suits: A Business RPG, Nier: Automata

Recursive Ruin
Puzzle/Walking Sim

A puzzle game where the game world recurses infinitely, and you must exploit this to solve puzzles by e.g. throwing cubes between layers of recursion. It is also an introspective narrative about an artist struggling with depression, and never the two shall meet. The experience ends up feeling like an art film that’s regularly interrupted by puzzle segments, or vice versa. The puzzle segments don’t have anything to do with the framing narrative, at least as far as I can tell, and the framing narrative itself is incredibly simple and underwhelming. It’s basically just several hours of “This guy is depressed,” but it doesn’t really go anywhere with it. The recursion mechanic was interesting but, as a consequence of the split in focus, the game is pretty short and so doesn’t make a lot of use out of it.

Suits: A Business RPG
RPG

This was an astoundingly vapid and empty game. I’d say it reminds me of low-effort Flash games from the aughts, but honestly I think that would be an insult to them. At least they had a modicum of originality. This game is just a string of dumb dadaist non-jokes (plus a lot of “jokes” that consist entirely of “We made a reference!”) interspersed by generic RPG Maker gameplay that consists of “press Attack to win”. I have no idea what the developers were even trying to do, and even more baffled why this has so many positive reviews. I refunded it despite it costing less than a dollar, because I literally don’t want to give these hacks a single cent.

I have to say, I think at a certain point these corporate chic parodies reinforce corporatism more than they criticize it. Capitalism is not a force of nature that does things for no reason, but capitalists are very invested in making you believe it is because that makes it harder to question. Regurgitating that propaganda, even satirically, is doing their work for them. (I’m reminded of Disco Elysium, which in fact made this exact point, because despite also being an absurdist dark comedy it uses anti-capitalism as a genuine belief instead of an aesthetic.)

Nier: Automata
Action RPG

In the distant post-apocalyptic future, ridiculously human anthroids (misnamed as “androids” because writers continue to not know what “andro-” means) fight alien robots. We’re told the robots aren’t sapient, but actually they are, and they killed their alien creators because they were boring, but they’re obsessed with imitating humanity because humans are so cool and interesting. They do this mainly by turning themselves into ridiculously exaggerated heterosexual caricatures of nuclear family. Also, the “androids” are sexy anime ladies who show you a panty flash every time they do a backflip. (There are also shirtless bishonen robots, in fairness.) You then have to beat the game twice before the actual plot begins.

The story is basically the epitome of pretentiousness. The writer has claimed in interviews he was trying to tackle Deep Themes and apparently there are tons of philosophical references in the game, but the result is just shallow and incoherent. Look, we made a video game about killing things but then we said killing is wrong! Makes you think, huh??? No, you’re just a pretentious twit. (This also came out 3 years after UnderTale, so you’re a bit late to that party, buddy.)

As an action RPG, it is incredibly mediocre. It’s mostly just button-mashing and once you get the auto-heal chip, it’s basically impossible to lose.