middens
ive read that people who enjoy this game call it off 2 or off open world edition so that set the standards pretty high and i cant say it fails to meet them. middens is an rpgmaker rpg where you play as some guy called the nomad who picks up a gun that says kill people or it wont let you play the game so you go around someones collage art they made on lsd and do. thats basically the entire game. you can do other rpgmaker stuff like talking to people or whatever. this game is just boring and im not talking normal levels of boring here because the game is intentionally boring to try to prove some entry level philosophical point about nihilism so this game is boring and stupid at the same time. a true successor to offs legacy.
you play middens by walking around said lsd collage the game calls as the abyss talking to stuff and shooting things with the talking gun to enter rpg combat. nobody says anything important and entertaining because the entire point of the game is to murderize the stuff out of everything although the game likes to pretend that theres an option not to. so you walk around this boring ass abyss world that is interesting to look at for 3 minutes then isnt because its basically just background and you dont ever delve into the why or what of this stuff in any meaningful way. so yeah you walk around being bored as forget not killing things because the obviously evil gun told me to kill things and i was like forget you i wont do what you tell me until you seriously get so bored of walking around this game mechanic wasteland unsuccessfully looking for anything at all to do until you finally just forgetin snap and murder something and then nothing happens. there is zero feedback for murdering anything until you get 30 kills so you dont actually know if killing things does anything at all. thankfully while i was streaming someone actually told me how to beat the game otherwise i would be wandering around bored as stuff for potentially hours because the rpg combat is boring enough for me to not want to initiate combat with anything. oh but it gets worse.
alright so you know how games are like supposed to be fun and not boring and stuff well guess what all of the previous boring stuff is actually intentionally boring. yeah im not even joking. the game seriously goes out and uses this boring bullstuff to make a point about how life itself is boring bullstuff that we all get away from and how you are a bad person for killing these stupid things in this stupid ass game because you were bored like no stuff i was bored the game was so loving boring and i already know im playing games because i would be bored if i wasnt and no i dont care about ending the lives of a bunch of pixels who existed to repeat one random and irrelevant line every time i talked to them. this game would be deep if i was 13. actually it wouldnt because i would be playing halo instead of this stuff. this is the worst kind of art possible in an art game because the art now rules over the direction the game goes and it goes into boringville for some reason. like why. why would you do this. the gun basically tells you if youre bored you should kill yourself and thats basically its motivation for being a talking murdering gun thing. i think thats pretty cool motivation for an insane gun thing but its not fun for the game to actually bore you into killing yourself which you have to do to proceed after you kill 30 things. like for real the game lets you kill yourself if you are bored and want to move on so i did as soon as i got the option so i guess the game made its point.
the rpg combat is boring as hell and seems to be a port of offs combat into the standard rpgmaker system of taking turns to attack. like for real the similarities are uncanny. you got this guy called the nomad who looks mildly out of place with the setting hes in going around with three orb like things that all have a rpg archetype of damage dealer, healer, and debuffer beating up strange creature things in an attempt to purify wherever you are at. the game thankfully avoids the pitfalls of random encounters and a stupid ass attack timer that takes forever to fill but sucks richard in many other ways. you see, instead of having a handicap slow attack timer you have to summon your orb things into battle because they dont start in battle for some reason which takes 3 turns and you have to do this because if they arent in battle when you win they dont level up and will fall drastically behind. battles are easy as piss and once you get over the initial low level hurdle you can murderize everything. how battles actually go down is also incredibly similar to off but in an entirely different way. there is a relatively low mana pool for every character and save points that regen mana so you would have to intelligently use your spells except all enemies are hp sponges and your orb things have full mana every time you summon them so you really just spam the best spells until you win. again. riveting. do this 30 times to win. there is only ever a problem when nomad runs out of mana because he needs it to summon people so when you do you forget around looking for a save point to regen since you have to initiate 99% of fights.
that brings around the world itself which is boring as forget to explore. you forget around walking everywhere observing the art of every room for 3 seconds before getting bored because there is 0 interaction with the player and the environment. you just kill things and talk to things that dont say anything interesting ever. the map merely serves to house killable objects. plus the objects talking is dumb because you have this whack ass map and then all you have is a bunch of photoshop abortions discussing perfectly normal topics no one cares about. i didnt mention this before but they never say anything surreal ever. so yeah the entire game is just searching for things to kill or save points. there arent even any shops or anything. you pick up worm things from the ground and they serve as consumables except i never had to use any of them because i would just kill everything normally. like really theres nothing. i mean thats the point of the game that nothing is fun and everything sucks so kill yourself. do it come on.
the art is actually really good though which surprised me. i enjoyed all of the environments and the lsd art collage thing would work better if the game didnt actually suck richard. like imagine a game that was good with this art style it would be great. stream chat came up with the idea for a metal slug clone that will never happen. anyway yeah it looks cool. not shown from the screenshot is all of the enemies who have their own art collage things that all looked like old medical book photos shopped together. the art for the gun in cinematics is probably the best of the entire game and is really good. i think yume nikki was the only game that utilized a surreal art style thing right though which is a shame. the picture actually doesnt do a lot of justice to how the game looks but you shouldnt play it to find out how it really looks because it sucks.
similar to off the music is pretty good but nothing spectacular but often feels out of place with the dark and mildly freaky art thats everywhere. its not a detracting thing though since you dont ever feel immersed in the world anyway which is not something to be happy about. the sound effects are alright and nothing stands out except for the battle winning chime whistle thing which sounds weird as forget but good.
i think i already did a proper outline of the story when discussing why the game sucks a lot so i guess ill do what i found the most disappointing characterization. the game gives you a talking gun that is telling you to kill people and you barely ever talk to it what the forget. its a talking gun telling you to kill people. the parts of dialogue that actually happen are pretty interesting except they so rarely happen that they help no one enjoy this stupid game. also for some reason the gun uses emoticons. i understand that the writer may be trying to pull some ha ha self realization that you are in the video game thing but it doesnt work when its implied the gun is speaking because it has a mouth. how does it verbally do emoticons. does it do it like microsoft sam does or what. its dumb but the parts without emoticons are good. too bad its in this stuffty game.
to wrap up its basically off but better since its shorter and looks better. dont play it. i think it lasts like 2 hours but maybe more if you ever figure out the stupid grindy murder stuff gimmick thats dumb. forget this game for real.
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