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  • Posted 8 October 2025 by Natalie

    Playing Resident Evil 3: Nemesis[1] and once again mourning the total absence of tank controls from the modern design palette. They're not for everything but they work so well for horror where having imperfect control over movement brings that feeling of fumbling around and panicking, and where giving the designer tight control of the camera provides so much juice. When you're walking down a hall and you can't see what's ahead of you it's scary!


    1. Four years ago, having never played a single game from either of the classic survival horror series, I decided to inaugurate myself a little October tradition: every year I play a Resident Evil or a Silent Hill, alternating series, from the oldest forward. This is, of course, a Resident Evil year. ↩︎

    1. resident evil

  • Hades II Has a Legibility Problem

    Posted 4 October 2025 by Natalie

    This post contains mechanical spoilers and boss names for Hades II.

    I wasn't just hoping to like Hades II, I was fully expecting to. I generally think there are two possible failure states to a sequel to a game like Hades where much of the fun is encounter and build design that can be expanded on almost indefinitely: either it turns out to be more of the same, which may be a bit uninspiring but can't be too bad if I liked the original (think Dark Souls III); or it takes the game in a wildly different direction that doesn't quite work, which may not be as fun as such but is almost always interesting (think Tears of the Kingdom). And at first it looked like Hades II was going to be more of the same, and I was content with that. But the more I played, the more it seemed to have an issue at the heart of its combat that just wasn't there in the original.

    The game has a legibility problem, and not just in terms of the density and chaos of on-screen interactions (although that certainly doesn't help). This problem is structural: it pervades the game's design sensibilities. Whether it's a consequence of the game's wildly popular early access period or a result of the studio's anxiety about their first-ever sequel to their only massive hit, it pushes the player into a mode of play that's less fun and more frustrating. Legibility isn't just about being able to keep track of what's going on, it has far-reaching consequences for what types of play are safe in practice and thus which builds are viable. In a game whose primary mechanical driver is the joy of assembling new and interesting builds, that's critical.

    Some of this springs from the new boss design philosophy in Hades II. In the original, bosses were generally built around melee attacks that did damage in some hitbox around the boss and ranged attacks that flew outwards from the boss. There were occasional situations—most notably when fighting Theseus after vanquishing Asterius—where large AOEs[1] appeared that the player had to avoid, but these were very much the exception. The result is fights that are focused on the player establishing a rhythm where they dive in, hit the boss, position themselves to evade the boss's next attack, and repeat.

    With the exception of some minibosses and Hecate (the first true boss), Hades II doesn't work this way. Bosses in the sequel are much more focused on two types of attacks that rarely appeared in the original: AOEs that are telegraphed by regions of the arena turning red usually independently of the boss's positions, and "waves" of damage that the player is expected to avoid using the invulnerability frames. When melee attacks do appear they tend to come out very quickly and often have their own AOEs, while ranged attacks come in one of two flavors: they're either very fast (often…

    1. game design
    2. hades

  • Posted 28 September 2025 by Natalie

    I'm sorry I stole your credit card number and used it to buy nine different erotic novelizations of Twelve Angry Men. I promise it won't happen again for at least a couple months depending on how long these take to read


    1. Posted 26 September 2025 by Natalie

      Zagreus, after finally meeting Melionë: ...and this is my boyfriend, Thanatos! Well, now he's my boyfriend, he used to be my nemesis
      Melinoë: your what

      1. hades

    2. Posted 20 September 2025 by Natalie

      in a better world, Hornet Silksong would be a woman who loves her pet dog so much her partner gets jealous. but instead she lives in a world where every god specifically chooses to make all dogs rabid

      1. hollow knight

    3. Posted 20 September 2025 by Natalie

      nex3 BACKER
      reviewed Hollow Knight: Silksong
      ★★★★★ Completed on Windows PC
      This is an impressive follow-up to Hollow Knight not just in that it's another very good game (absolutely not a guarantee from a developer with only one game under their belt, no matter how successful that game was), but in that it understands deeply what makes a game effective specifically as a sequel. It's a checkerboard of expectations met and subverted: the core logic of the combat and feel of movement is essentially the same, but the single most powerful tool in HK1—the downward aerial "pogo" attack—is dramatically harder to use. Even early game bosses often do 2 masks of damage, but Hornet can heal three masks at a time. The familiar spell mechanic is back (renamed "skills" but otherwise identical) but it's augmented with equippable weapons that use a totally new economy.

      The result is a game that presents the player, from the moment they first try platforming with the new diagonal aerial attack, with a potent cocktail of familiarity and challenge. This proved too much for players who expected their skill at HK1 to automatically make them excellent at Silksong, but it's excellent design. A new game should challenge old players, and when those challenges subvert the best play patterns in the first game, they increase the challenge more for experienced players than they do for players who (perhaps boldly) pick up Silksong as their first entry in the series. Silksong demands that the player adapt to new styles of movement and resource economies, but at its heart it's still a game about careful positioning and weaponized acrobatics.

      So, is it hard? Not really. For all the hullabaloo on release about how difficult Silksong is, the main difference between its main quest bosses and Hollow Knight's are that the early-game bosses are somewhat harder, which is about what one would expect from a sequel. Once you get past the first few intro bosses, you end up at around the level of HK1 bosses in similar positions like Mantis Lords, Soul Master, and of course our very own Hornet. Even the optional bosses are mostly pretty straightforward, with only a couple exceptions. The mandatory platforming is a little more difficult across the board than HK1, in part because of the less forgiving pogo and a larger suite of movement mechanics, but there's no single sequence mandatory or optional that comes close to the sustained difficulty of Path of Pain. If anything, I wish there were a bit more difficulty in the game, and I'm hoping the DLC will provide that.

      What people are complaining about, when it comes down to it, is that the game demands they break out of their comfort zone. And it makes some sense! The most diehard Hollow Knight players have been building their mental model of what being good at Hollow Knight entails unhindered for eight years. Every Hollow Knight DLC introduced new challenges that tested the same skills but harder. Silksong asks for more, or at least for a reframing of the way players think about the game.

      Nowhere is this clearer than in the removal of the Shade Cloak, and with it the elimination of almost any form of invulnerability-frame evasion in the game. By volume, this wasn't a huge part of the base game—it's an ability you only get in the postgame, so the bulk of the fights you face won't involve it at all. But the postgame fights and many of the DLC fights, which is to say generally the most difficult fights in the game, are built with the expectation that you'll be able to occasionally dodge right through an attack. Silksong has no such expectation, and I think that's tremendously to its credit even as it drives experienced Hollow Knight players mad.

      Removing the expectation that players can regularly dodge through the attacks of postgame bosses makes the design and play of those fights vastly more interesting. Dodging attacks through careful positioning brings all the game's movement mechanics to bear in fights, and is what makes the marriage of platforming and action combat so successful. Combined with the substantial wider diversity of directionality in Silksong's attacks relative to the base game, it gives fights the potential to be very deep puzzles about how to most effectively deal damage without taking it. This is all inherent in Hollow Knight as well, but the Shade Cloak offered a safety valve for players to avoid engaging with it in exactly the fights where it was most compelling. Silksong is richer for its absence, and I think this particularly speaks to Team Cherry's maturing understanding of what's effective about their own design.
      Reviewed on Sep 20, 2025
      1. nat reviews
      2. hollow knight

    4. Power, Skill, and Silksong

      Posted 18 September 2025 by Natalie

      While this blog post does contain specific mechanical spoilers about Hollow Knight: Silksong, they're only at the very end, clearly marked, and hidden by default. Most of the post is spoiler-free.

      Many games, video and otherwise, are structured in a way that presents the player with both challenges tools they can use to address those challenges. In video games specifically, much hay is made online of the challenges themselves: everyone talks about Ornstein and Smough, Absolute Radiance, or Balteus. But to the player in the moment, the shape of the tools they use determines as much or more about their actual experience.

      Tools aren't just in-game items. They're anything that aids the player or allows them to engage with the game, from their character's stats to movement mechanics to the very concept of "make your character not be where the attack is". In sports, the players themselves are the most important tools. In chess, the pieces are tools but so are rules castling and stalemates. It's an intentionally broad term to discuss a broad set of game structures.

      These tools are not only the ultimate determiner of how difficult the challenge is[1], a well-designed arsenal gives players the opportunity to sculpt their experience, creating a mode of play that fits both the needs of the challenge at hand and their own personal preference. Often players end up self-sorting into two rough camps: those who choose one set of tools (a "build") and stick with it for every challenge and so experience challenges that may be easy for others as very difficult when the tools they've chosen don't line up well, and those who see each challenge as an opportunity to puzzle out the exact optimal set of tools and so take down the challenge as easily as possible. I myself fall into either camp depending on the specific context[2].

      One of the first thing a player will ask when choosing which tools to use is, "what's the most powerful?" And in some cases the answer to this is straightforward. In Dark Souls, the Straight Sword Hilt is certainly among the weakest weapons you can use by any objective measure. But in many cases the answer is unclear. There is no consensus "best" weapon in Dark Souls nor its successors, because what "power" even means depends on the player's play style, their goals, and to a substantial degree, their skill.

      Defining Skill

      I want to take a moment here to clarify what I mean by "skill", at least for the purposes of this post. I don't really want to get into the weeds discussing video game difficulty here and now, but I do think that discourse has made it difficult to mention skill as a concept without raising everyone's hackles and bringing in a bunch of extra baggage. So I'll try to be explicit about how I'm using the term here.

      I'm not talking about skill as in some sort of innate talent at video…

      1. game design
      2. hollow knight

    5. Posted 16 September 2025 by Natalie

      imo if I have the presence of mind to grab my phone and photograph something cool in my dream I should be allowed to keep that photograph upon waking up


      1. Posted 15 September 2025 by Natalie

        Something bad is happening to me. I'm undergoing a terrible transformation that I will never be able to reverse, no matter how I try. A curse is falling upon me and it may well ruin my life. I'm beginning to perceive the difference between 1080p and 4K video


        1. Posted 15 September 2025 by Natalie

          Liz, trying to eat ice cream while fully prone in bed: No. Bleh. Wah!
          Me: You might wanna sit up for that
          Liz: No! I'm not a coward! I might be stupid but I'm not a coward

          1. i love my wife
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        Copyright Natalie Weizenbaum