Stellaris, the strategic space opera simulator. A very complex review

Space. The Final Frontier. In a Galaxy Far, Far Away. Where in the Grim Darkness of the Far Future, the Spice must Flow. You get the idea. Science fiction is a staple of modern entertainment, because there's something fun about speculating how a spacefaring society with technology so advanced it might as well be magic would function, with or without alien life forms. But have you ever thought to yourself, "Gee, I sure would love a needlessly complex strategy game about creating my own sci fi civilization and exploring the cosmos while reenacting my favorite sci fi stories!" Well do I have the game for you.

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Enter Stellaris. Released in 2016, this sci-fi strategy game was developed and published by Paradox Interactive, with the console port being made by Tantalus Media. This is one of the many Grand Strategy games that Paradox specializes in, though the concept of this game is in my opinion an easier sell. Most of Paradox's games are historical fiction, taking place in alternate versions of the distant past. Crusader Kings, for example, is set in Medieval Times, while Hearts of Iron takes place during the World Wars. Stellaris is the odd duck out, taking place in a completely fictional time period, starting roughly 200 years into the future. As such, there's a lot more room for creativity, at least in theory, since you are not bound by historical accuracy. Instead, the goal of Stellaris was to be a love letter to all things science fiction and as such, there are plenty of references to other sci-fi stories sprinkled in all throughout the game.

To be a man in a 2200+ year old society is to live among untold trillions. It is a time to seek out new civilizations and boldly go where no one has gone before. But most importantly, it's the perfect setup for a space opera. And that's basically the entire story of Stellaris. Well, sort of. A big part of this game's appeal is that it features an Emergent Narrative. What that means is that after creating your own civilization (which I will call Empires for the sake of brevity) the story is dictated almost entirely by randomized events and how you choose to deal with them. As well as how you choose to deal with any over Empire that you encounter on your travels. It's a very free-form approach to storytelling, and the result is that it's rare for two or more playthroughs to play out the same way. Though there are a few standard beats. Every civilization starts off isolated and alone in the galaxy, slowly expanding until they contact alien life. Intergalactic superpowers fight, trade and form alliances as the number of unclaimed star systems begins to dwindle and borders begin to take shape. And all civilizations have to deal with a universal threat towards the end that puts the whole galaxy in danger. What happens in between these points is more or less randomized.

But where do you begin with this game? You start at Empire Creation. While you can play as about 20 or so premade Empires, the real core of this game comes from designing your own aliens. Or your own version of Humanity's Future, if you like that sort of thing. And I am letting you know now that this game is DENSE. Paradox games are infamous for their steep learning curves and numerous complexities. And Stellaris is no different. While the tutorial that starts once the campaign begins does help with teaching the player the bare minimum, this is a game that will take more than a little while to get used to. Especially if you prefer more fast-paced, action focused games. This doesn't make Stellaris a bad game, not in the slightest. But its gameplay is meant for a very specific audience, the kind that enjoys solving problems with brains rather than brawn. And the kind of audience that doesn't mind looking up guides on the Internet just to make sense of the convoluted information this game can sometimes throw at you. While I do like games that require you to think and plan ahead like Fire Emblem and X-COM, nothing I have played or reviewed here before has quite as many moving parts as Stellaris. And from what I hear, the rest of Paradox's catalogue boasts a similar level of complexity.

Okay, let's breakdown Empire Creation, since all the important choices start here. Your Empire can be customized in a multitude of ways. Most of it is cosmetic stuff like picking an animated portrait that will represent your aliens/future-humans in some menu screens, or what biome your home planet is, or even designing your own flag. But there are mechanical decisions to be made here, like choosing Authorities and Origins. Authorities are the type of government your civilization uses, whether that be an Imperial Dynasty where the role of leadership is passed down from parent to child in a single family across the generations, or a Democracy where the the leaders are chosen by popularity votes at regular intervals. Origins are basically your Empire's backstory, giving you some nice lore and roleplay potential while also simultaneously changing how the game starts. Some Origins offer really strong bonuses, others exist to add an extra challenge to the campaign to push your management and strategy skills to their limits. For example, the Mechanist Origin allows your Empire to start the game with eight fully operational robots as well as a factory to build even more. The Doomsday Origin will make your home planet explode after 35 (in-game) years, so you have to find a new planet for your people to live on before then or risk your species going completely extinct. But most importantly, there's an option to write/type out a custom biography. This has no effect on gameplay but as an aspiring writer, being able to write custom biographies for fictional civilizations is something that makes me very, very happy.

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But the three most important things to worry about are Traits, Ethics, and Civics. Traits are biological strengths and weaknesses your aliens/future-humans have that make them better or worse at certain tasks. Things like enhanced upper body strength, fast learning minds that can invent new tech sooner than everyone else, or extended lifespans to live longer. However, not all Traits are beneficial. Some might make your citizens have a hard time reproducing, others might make them prone to riots. So I know what you're thinking. "Why would I ever pick Negative Traits!?" Well, you see, every Trait is assigned a point value. Positive Traits cost points while Negative Traits give more points to work with. The idea is that you're supposed to pick one or two weaknesses that you think you can live with so you have enough points to unlock the Positive Traits that you actually want. If you are smart about it, you can turn your weaknesses into a net positive.

Ethics are the next main decision and this will greatly determine the "vibe" of your Empire. Ethics are the moral and societal values that your Empire respects and practices. Ethics come in two variants, Moderate and Fanatic. Much like Traits, they will grant bonuses like increased fire rate for weapons or being able to hire extra diplomats, but they also come with downsides like restricting who or what you can wage war with or restricting your ability to build robots. Normally, you can pick any three Ethics of your choosing so long as they do not contradict each other. For example, your Empire can be Militaristic, Spiritual, and Egalitarian because those Ethics do not contradict each other. But your Empire cannot be both Militaristic and Pacifistic since those two Ethics are opposite to each other. Fanatic Ethics are even stronger than their Moderate counterparts, but you can only pick one Fanatic Ethic and one Moderate Ethic at a time. Fanatic Ethics are basically exaggerated versions of their Moderate counterparts, with everything that Ethic represents being cranked up to eleven. For example, a moderately Pacifist Empire will only fight in war to overthrow tyrannical regimes and replace them with something more humane and ethical. A Fanatically Pacifist Empire won't fight in wars at all. The other Fanatic Ethics follow this pattern of being a more exaggerated version of the Moderate counterpart. But again, the benefits of being Fanatic makes the Empire far stronger at whatever they are Fanatic about. Fanatic Militarist Empires have a whopping 30% fire rate upgrade compared to the Moderate version's 10% as an example. Basically, by making a Fanatic Empire, you are sacrificing the versatility of a third Ethic in exchange for greater specialization. Both are valid ways to play. But I do prefer making Fanatic Empires, but that's because I like seeing big numbers get even bigger.

Finally, Civics. Civics are more specialized bonuses that become available based on which Ethics you chose. These also help form the "vibe" of your Empire. While there are some Civics are available to all Empire types, all of the fun Civics are locked behind certain Ethic combos. For example, the Citizen Service Civic requires your Empire to be both Militaristic and Egalitarian, and it allows you to (potentially) build up a bigger navy than everyone else. The Inward Perfection Civic meanwhile requires you to be both Xenophobic and Pacifistic, and it basically cuts you off from the rest of the galaxy while GREATLY boosting the growth of your Empire's economy and population. The other Civics have similar restrictions and similar benefits. You can pick any combination of two Civics that you want as long as you meet the requirements for both. And finally, you can mix and match Traits, Ethics, and Civics for some very powerful or very wacky combos. Like a democratic society of future-human monks with the Inward Perfection and Agrarian Idle Civics, who are so obsessed with preserving the environment that they developed Traits like Communal and Conservationist that allow them to use even less resources for their day-to-day lives. Or a society of hyper-intelligent but physically weak Fanatically Materialist space rats who use the Technocracy and Meritocratic Civics to not only build robots to do all the hard work for them, but structure their entire society around science and knowledge. Or a group of strong and industrial but unruly and stubborn space dragons who are so Fanatically Militarist they took the Citizen Service Civic and Distinguished Admiralty Civic specifically to make the most dangerous navy the galaxy has ever seen. These three are but a taste of the kind of spacefaring civilization that you can make once you learn how everything works.

Okay, so you got your Empire ready and raring to go. Now we can get to the actual gameplay. Stellaris is a fairly hands-off game. You interact with your Empire mostly through a variety of menus. Because unlike every other game, you are controlling AN ENTIRE CIVILIZATION, not just one character. Because of that, you see everything happen at the macro scale. Time is measured in days, months, and years while mere minutes pass in real life. You spend a good chunk of your time just checking an intergalactic map and watching out for meaningful changes like expanding borders or reports of hostile activity. You can zoom in to individual star systems to see your ships and planets in more detail, but you can't get any closer to the action than that. You can give orders to your fleets and ships, and order construction of various facilities on any planets you own. Planets are quite possibly the most valuable resource in the game. Without a planet to build on, you have nothing to work with. The main challenge of Stellaris revolves are the classic Four Ex's of Paradox games. Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate. If you are not doing any of those four things you are, to be blunt, playing the game wrong. You must send out Science Ships to Explore uncharted star systems and survey desirable planets before building on them. You must use your resources to Expand your reach and grow your power. You must Exploit any natural resources you find so you can continue Exploring and Expanding. And if anything gets in your way, you must Exterminate the threat before it can cause any lasting damage to your Empire. All Paradox games, regardless of setting or time period, live and die by the Four Ex's.

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Like I said earlier, there are random events that will change the history of your Empire. Maybe your citizens will track down a temple idolizing a long-forgotten god which causes a spiritual awakening among the people. Maybe your science team discovers an ancient, hyper-advanced ancestor and they invent new technology by reverse-engineering the relics left by their forebears. Maybe your king/queen/president got in contact with a Lovecraftian monstrosity that promises unfathomable power in exchange for servitude. All these are a few examples of the random events that can occur in your playthrough. But because of this, how enjoyable your playthrough's story will be is a coin flip. Either you get just the right combination of random events to make a space opera so epic it would get George Lucas and Gene Rodenberry themselves to nod in approval, or you might get eaten by a Devouring Swarm before your Empire has a chance to do anything cool. It depends both on luck and what difficulty you are playing on. And credit where credit's due, Stellaris has dozens of ways of customizing the game in its options, including no less than seven main difficulty options. That said, the difficulty does not dictate where rival Empires start on the intergalactic map, nor does it dictate how aggressive they are. Instead, all difficulty does is determine what kind of economic bonuses an enemy Empire gets at the start of a campaign. An NPC Empire will never attack or antagonize you if your military is equal to or stronger than theirs. Because of this, even Pacifistic Empires still benefit from having a a well-built navy even if they don't plan on using it. The mere presence of a navy will deter would be enemies from attacking. Additionally, you can negotiate with other Empires and form alliances and peace treaties with them.

But rival Empires are not the only dangers in the galaxy. So let's talk about the Crisis Events. Crisis Events are special events that only happen once the campaign reaches certain years. You can change which years it happens in the options menu, but once a campaign starts, the Crisis Years are locked in and cannot be changed unless you start a new campaign from scratch. Anyway, when a Crisis Event occurs, a violently hostile alien will appear somewhere in the galaxy and attack all Empires indiscriminately. What kind of alien is random by default, though again, you can pick something specific from the options menu. These range from space pirate clans banding together to tear down galactic society at large, to living bioweapons that devour all who stand in their path, to a classic Terminator style AI uprising. Crisis Events are incredibly strong, and they exist as a "stress test" for your Empire. If your Empire can survive the Crisis Events, your Empire can survive anything. In fact, there's an entire difficulty slider that exists for no reason than to increase or decrease the power of the Crisis Events. At max strength, Crisis Events can become over 25 times more powerful than normal. If you wish to defeat a 25x Crisis Event, you need nothing short of a perfectly optimized Empire and a foolproof plan that you spent the whole campaign carefully laying out. Anything less will result in failure. Of course, you could turn the Crisis strength down to give your less-than-perfect Empire a fighting chance.

There are also Fallen Empires. Fallen Empires are special Empires that start the game in control of a small area in the galaxy, usually about only five or six star systems. But they also start the campaign with a comically overpowered navy that will curb stomp anyone who angers the Fallen. The Fallen themselves are all themed around the main Ethics. Unlike Crisis Events, who only appear later on in a campaign, the Fallen are present from day one. The only reason the Fallen don't immediately wipe out the other Empires is because they literally cannot expand their borders outside their starting zone. Nor can they replace any casualties should they encounter the rare opponent that can wound them. At least, not until the Fallen Awaken. When a Fallen Empire Awakens, they will start rapidly expanding their borders in all directions and reinforcing their already fearsome fleets. Depending on their Ethics, the Awakened will either give a chance to join them as a vassal state willingly or wipe your Empire off the star charts. The good news is that a Fallen Empire can only Awaken in very rare circumstances. Like if a Crisis Event happens and the Fallen haven't Awakened already, they will Awaken to go fight the Crisis. If there are multiple Fallen Empires in the same galaxy with opposing Ethics, a special event called the War In Heaven will occur where both Empires Awaken at the same time and all the "normal" Empires have to either pick a side in the War or risk getting caught in the cross fire. While it is possible to fight off both sides of the War In Heaven as a neutral party, it is a difficult undertaking, perhaps even more so than fending off a Crisis Event. Again, good planning and optimization is required to survive the War In Heaven.

But how does one defeat such powerful foes? Well you need a strong navy. While ground battles exist in Stellaris, they don't happen anywhere nearly as often as space battles do. And to be honest, the ground battles are probably the weakest part of the game, since it's a fairly barebones system (at the time of writing) that can be easily avoided. And going back to the Four Ex's, you use the resources you Exploited to build warships so you can Exterminate your enemies so you can continue to Explore and Expand in peace. At the start of the campaign the only combat-capable ship type you can build is the humble Corvette. All ships can be outfitted with various weapons such as plasma cannons, railguns, flamethrowers and even deployable drone fighters. But you have to invent that technology before you can use it, so initially your Empire's Corvettes are all armed with nothing more than dinky little lasers. You invent new tech by having a named Scientist lead a research project, with the research options being randomized (noticing a trend?). Research progresses automatically unless the Scientist leading the research project dies, in which case you need to hire a new Scientist to continue the research. 

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Once research is finished, your Empire can now use the newly invented tech to give your warships a much needed power boost, and that Scientist can be given a new project to work on in the meantime. While all the different weapons provide unique strategies and fighting styles, generally speaking, you can win most battles by having either bigger guns or more ships than your opponent. This ties in to Fleet Power, a little number that conveniently shows at a glance the combined power of every warship in that fleet. Unless the enemy has built a fleet designed entirely to counter yours, if your Fleet Power is a bigger number you will win the battle. It's probably the simplest thing in this very complicated game. And while it is true that your Fleet Power will gradually lower as your ships take damage and suffer casualties, you can easily repair and replace damaged and destroyed ships so long as you are not in combat. And while it might be tempting to pour all of your resources into your naval fleets the first chance you get, this is actually a bad idea because you have to balance your economy and not drive yourself bankrupt by overinvesting. Instead, you want to build your navy up over time. Like, once every in-game year (roughly equal to ten real life minutes) you can get away with adding three or four ships to your navy. Three or four dozen ships a year is an unrealistic goal, at least with how the in-game economy works.

But you cannot just attack any other Empire without some kind of cause. This is the Casus Belli system. Basically, if you want to go to war with another Empire, you need to give a reason why. The reason also changes the win condition and end result. For example, Liberation Wars are fought to change a rival Empire's Ethics to match the winner's, thus turning them into a potential ally, while Domination Wars are fought to expand the winner's borders by forcibly taking control of the losing Empire's star systems.  The only time you don't need a Casus Belli to wage war is if you have a Civic that lets you ignore the whole system like Devouring Swarm or Fanatical Purifiers. Or if the opponent in question is a Crisis Event or the War In Heaven. Or if your opponent has one of the aforementioned Civics that ignore Casus Bellis. But anyway, once the war starts, you are free to invade your enemies' territory and attack their ships and stations. There is a timer system called War Exhaustion that mostly exists so you can't keep the war going forever. Basically, as both you and the rival Empire take casualties, War Exhaustion for both sides builds up. Once it reaches a certain threshold, you can either settle for a truce or claim absolute victory, based on how well you did in the war. The only criticism I have of the War Exhaustion system is that makes evasive, hit-and-run style navies far more powerful than defensive "stand your ground!" style navies. Because War Exhaustion doesn't build up when you or your enemies retreat from battle, only when your ships and stations are completely destroyed. 

But speaking of planets and economy, let's talk resources. Resources come in five basic varieties. Food, Minerals, Energy, Alloys and Consumer Goods. Food is self-explanatory. It's the stuff to keep your Empire from starving. Energy is both electricity and money. Everything has a monthly upkeep cost of at least one point of Energy, so you need to keep this somewhat high so you don't go bankrupt. Minerals are raw materials for construction. Minerals can be converted into any other resource, and most early construction projects require a few hundred of them on hand. This is probably the most common resource in the game. Alloys are refined metals, needed to build space ships, space stations and (eventually) robots. This is the rarest and most valuable resource. Consumer Goods are luxury products for civilians. Things like books, movies, video games, sports cars, and cell phones. Things that they technically don't need but provide entertainment. This is probably the least useful resource unless you explicitly plan on playing a merchant style Empire that resolves everything with trade deals as opposed to violence (which is a valid way to play the game). Because Consumer Goods only really exists to keep your citizens happy. And happy citizens won't want to start a rebellion to overthrow you. So even though they aren't as important as the other four, it's still worth investing into Consumer Goods. But no matter what, you need to find a habitable planet to build facilities to produce these resources. Farms for Food, Power Plants for Energy, Mines for Minerals, etc. Once you decide what to build, it is again, automatic. Only this time you don't need to have a named character lead the project. You can hire a Governor to watch over that planet (or several planets at once), and while they might speed up the process, they aren't required. Governors mostly exist to provide boosts for the entire planet so long as they remain in office. These boosts are themed around the Governor's personality. Like a Governor with a strong sense of justice will reduce crime on any planet under his jurisdiction while a Governor with a love for agriculture will increase Food production for any Farms on that planet.

There are also advanced resources like Dark Matter and Exotic Gases that are so volatile that your Empire needs to invent new tech just to be able to collect or produce them in the first place. These advanced resources aren't as essential to your Empire's development, but they do let you build bigger and more dangerous weapons, which makes your warships better combatants, which lets you Exterminate your enemies and so and so forth. You should understand how everything comes back to the Four Ex's by now. Anyway, one last important resource are Pops. Pops is the catch all term for any citizen living in your Empire, although I heard somewhere that one Pop is supposed to represent hundreds of people as one unit, because you know, macro scale space game. Pops are needed to work all the jobs to produce every resource mentioned earlier. Pops also have their own needs. They need Food to not starve, they are paid in Energy, and they indulge in Consumer Goods. They also need Housing to rest at night and Amenities to keep them happy. If their needs are not met they might start a rebellion. Which means setting some resources aside to tend to your people's needs, which is yet another reason why overinvesting in your navy is a bad idea. Because if you pour all of your resources into the navy, you won't have anything left to tend to your people. It's all about finding that economic balance.

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The final two "resources" we need to talk about are Influence and Unity. Which are more like concepts that build up over time than something physical but that's neither here nor there. Influence is a measure of your political sway. You can spend Influence to Expand your borders by claiming to be the legal owner of a star system. You can spend Influence to give your entire Empire temporary power boosts called Edicts (which do things like boost resource production or shorten construction time). And you can spend Influence doing manipulative, politician type shenanigans. But how do you get Influence? Much like in real life, sci-fi civilizations are not one dimensional clichés, at least when written well. There will almost always be smaller political Factions within your Empire who embody the main Ethics. While the first Factions to appear in your Empire will be the ones whose Ethics are already supported, if the campaign goes on long enough you'll have at least one Faction per Ethic. Making the Factions happy by legalizing their desired policies will earn you Influence. Displeasing the Factions by outlawing their desired policies will halt your Influence gain, though to my knowledge they can't take it away forcibly. At least, I've never seen Influence go into the negatives before, and I put well over 100 hours into this game across four different campaigns. But no matter what, as long as you have more satisfied Factions than displeased Factions, you can still get Influence.

Unity represents your Empire's cultural development and how, well, united your people are. This resource builds up automatically at all times, never going down under any circumstances. Once it reaches a threshold, you will be allowed to unlock a Tradition, which are basically the Influence Edicts but substantially stronger and once chosen, a Tradition will work for the entire rest of the campaign. The Traditions are divided into sets of five all built around a theme. Domination, Expansion, Harmony, Diplomacy, Supremacy and Discovery. If you unlock every Tradition in a set you unlock an Ascension. Ascensions are upgrades that are even stronger than Traditions, though you can only have up to eight per campaign. And when I say that Ascensions are strong, I mean they are ABSURD. These include things like becoming so advanced at robotics your Empire's species uploads their souls into robotic shells so they can live forever, meaning your Scientists and Governors will never die again. Or your Empire's leaders declaring themselves to be the Guardians of the Galaxy, thus making all of your Empire's weaponry deal double damage against Crisis Events. But this brings us to my biggest complaint with Stellaris, and it's something that Paradox and Tantalus have acknowledged themselves, so this is a pretty big deal.

There are two words that will strike fear into the hearts of any seasoned Stellaris fan; Xeno Compatibility. This Ascension right here is responsible for a lot of behind the scenes technical difficulties. What Xeno Compatibility does is it allows your Empire's species to become able to mate and reproduce with any other alien species, thus creating hybrid citizens. Which at first glance doesn't sound that bad, especially for the Mass Effect crowd. The problem here is that the game doesn't put a hard "stop" on how far Xeno Compatibility goes, so it can very easily create hybrids of hybrids, and then make hybrids out of those hybrids, ad infinitum. The result is that the game literally cannot keep up with the infinite hybrids being created by a Xeno Compatible Empire, resulting in frame rate drops or even crashes. This got so bad that in a free update, Paradox added a feature to the options menu that straight up disables Xeno Compatibility and prevents it from even showing up in the Ascension list. Honestly, what I would have done, speaking as someone who never made a video game before but knows how challenging the experience can be, is simply make Xeno Compatibility a massive permanent boost to Pop reproduction speed. Like 50% or even 100%. Just have the hybrid stuff be flavor text. I feel like that one change would make Xeno Compatibility actually usable while still allowing for "hybrids" in your Empire.

And now that I got my gripes with Xeno Compatibility out of the way, let's talk DLC. The other thing Paradox games are known is a ludicrous amount of post-launch support. For better and for worse, most of the post-launch support tends to be in the form of paid expansions that cost additional money (between $5 to $20). And again, Stellaris is no different. At the time of writing there are 12 main expansions that radically alter the game by adding new Civics, new Origins, new structures and ship types, new space creature bosses called Leviathans that your navy can fight, and a bunch of other things you would expect from you average space opera. And also a ton of cosmetic DLC adding new portraits to customize the appearance of your aliens. Is the DLC worth buying? Maybe. I'm not in charge of how you spend your money. But me personally, cosmetic DLC doesn't excite me personally, since I would rather have an expansion that completely transforms the experience than a new look that feels the same to play. That being said, the only DLC that I going to tell you to pick up, if you choose to get this game, is Utopia (which allows you to build giant space stations called Megastructures as well as the option to make your Empire's species a Tyranid/Zerg style hive mind) and Leviathans (which adds the aforementioned bosses). Without those two DLC packs, playing Stellaris feels like playing the demo of a game and not the full experience. Keep in mind that the version I played was just the Deluxe Edition, which comes with Utopia, Leviathans and the Plantoids portrait pack for no extra cost. I don't have any of the other expansions. 

But trust me, Stellaris with the DLC packs is a completely different beast from the vanilla experience. The Apocalypse pack adds the ability to build the Colossus, which is literally just your Empire's own version of the Death Star from Star Wars. Federations has an overhauled diplomacy system that lets you rule the galaxy with the power of friendship and Jolly Cooperation, and allows you do a lot more with peaceful alliances. Nemesis lets you choose to literally Become the Crisis and become a threat to the galaxy so dangerous all of the Empires in the galaxy (including the actual Crisis Events) will team up to stop your evil plans. Synthetic Dawn adds in a metric boat load of content for robot lovers, including the option to make your Empire start as a species of completely mechanical androids. Toxoids is a nice middle ground between a cosmetic pack (adding some poison and pollution themed portraits) while also adding thematically appropriate game content like two new Origins and a ton of toxin-themed Civics and Traits. Megacorps allows you to turn your Empire into what can best be described as Space Amazon and lets you build major businesses on any planet in the galaxy, if it belongs to another Empire entirely. This is both the best and worst thing about Stellaris. The fact that the game is still receiving post-launch support eight years later is impressive. But at the same time, buying absolutely every DLC available is akin to buying a whole new game entirely. So if you are gaming on a budget, only buy the DLC if it has something that you genuinely feel would make the whole game better. I personally consider the portrait packs to be fairly anticlimactic, since most of the changes are mostly cosmetic. The more recent portrait packs have made an effort to include more mechanical changes like new Traits, Origins and Civics, so there's that.

The final gameplay thing that is important to note is that Stellaris does have an optional multiplayer mode, with up to 32 players can each take control of an Empire and meddle in strategies and alliances far more nuanced than what can be done in single-player. In this game mode, real people effectively replace all the NPC Empires. And very generously, only the host of the server needs to own a DLC pack for it to function. As long as the host owns something like Utopia or Federations or Apocalypse or any of the other DLC packs, any other player on that server can access the content those expansions have for free. This is, in a way, the closest thing Stellaris has to a "Try Before you Buy" system. So once again, the power of friendship and Jolly Cooperation can save the day. Or at least, a few dollars from your wallet. I haven't messed with multiplayer that much myself.

In terms of presentation, Stellaris is good for what it's trying to do. This game is, as stated many times, played on a macro scale. You will never get a close look at your cities or citizens. Your named leaders are portrayed by 2D portraits with one or two simple looping animations. But the stars and planets themselves look good. Every time you get a report of a random event, you also get some nice artwork that provides a visual aid, and the artwork is generally pretty good. The different alien portraits are all divided into different taxonomies, like Mammals and Avians. Most of the portraits generally have a good variety to them. There are some portraits that are literally just anthropomorphic animals like foxes or geckos, or humans with a weird thing on their head. But then you have some that look truly alien, like an Avian that looks more like a feathered Christmas tree than an actual bird, or a Fungoid "parasite" that has attached itself to a different alien entirely. Even with just the base game, there's a lot of options for making almost any kind of alien you can imagine. Keep in mind, however, that most of the game is spent looking at the galactic map. And depending on how each Empire turns out in 

In terms of sound, again, the game is good for what it's trying to do. The music is good background noise, but I never felt like listening to the music by itself. The sound effects are better, with a set of recognizable beeps and tunes notifying of of anything noteworthy. There is almost no voice acting whatsoever, with the only voiced dialogue coming from the Advisor, a character that teaches you the basics during the tutorial, while also informing you of import events like war declarations or the completion of research projects. The default Advisor voice is basically a stereotypical British butler voice, with a robotic filter on top of it. The other Advisor voices are locked behind the Synthetic Dawn expansion as well as a few portrait packs such as Necroids and Toxoids. All of these voices are based on the main Ethics and Civics, with a few outliers like the Diplomat and Soldier voices not being based anything in particular. A few favorites of mine are the Cyberpunk, the Necroid, the Xenophile and the Technocrat. The Cyberpunk voice is a walking (or rather, talking) reference to Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk series, complete with using fictional slang words like "Preem" and "Frag." The Necroid voice sounds ethereal, sinister and oddly seductive. Which works well for Empires that are trying to be aesthetically creepy or menacing. The Xenophile voice sounds like she's just happy to be of service and is by far the friendliest voice available. The Technocrat voice sounds like a cold and pragmatic scientist willing to do anything he can to unlock the secrets of the universe, consequences be damned. Which works very well for a more morally questionable Empire that focuses primarily on technology. Also, the Technocrat has by far one of the coolest one-liners when you declare war on an opposing Empire. "We shall cure them of their ignorance." The delivery is, as the saying goes, peak cinema. 

So overall, Stellaris is a lot of fun once you learn how to play it properly. The hardest part is sticking with the game long enough to get to that point. Again, there's no shame in looking up guides and walkthroughs just to understand the many moving parts of a Paradox game. That being said, this game is heavily reliant on DLC expansion for most of its features. Stellaris by itself feels like a demo for another, better game without DLC. So if you want to get this game, do yourself a favor and get at least Utopia and Leviathans. Those two expansions add enough content to make the game worth playing at least once. The other DLCs add to the experience, yes, but they don't feel as important as those first two. So this game gets an unusual rating. Stellaris with no DLC gets a 3 out of 5 stars. It's competent, but rather bland due to a lack of actual content to engage with. But with DLC, Stellaris goes up to a 4 stars out of 5. It would be 5 stars if it weren't for the fact that buying every single DLC ever released would cost just as much money, possibly even more so than the game itself.  The good news is that Paradox often puts discounts and sales on some of the more popular expansions, such as Federations and Nemesis. But this is definitely one of those games where you need to spend more than the initial fee to get the full experience, and that can and will be a turn off for anyone trying to enjoy the video gaming hobby while on a budget. 

Stellaris is owned by Paradox Interactive. I have not created any of the images used in this review. Please support the original creators.

Katana Zero, psychedelic samurai action. A very chronological review

Honestly speaking, Katana Zero was a game I bought on a whim. It was only 15 dollars at the time, and a cyberpunk action game about a Feudal Era Samurai in a modern day urban setting? That's the kind of sales pitch that catches my attention. Because I like cyberpunk, I like samurai, and I like action games. This seems like the holy trinity of all my nerdy interests. Three hours later, and I finished what can best be described as a psychedelic thrill ride through a dystopian story that I sincerely wish was longer. So that's what we're reviewing today. Two quick warnings before we continue with the review. Firstly, I played the Nintendo Switch version of the game, so I will be using that console's controllers as a frame of reference when I discuss the controls. And secondly, Katana Zero is rated M for Mature. Because of violence. And profanity. And because the main character is canonically addicted to a fictional drug. Reader discretion is advised

Image found on Wikipedia.org

But what is Katana Zero exactly? Developed by Akiisoft and published by Devolver Digital back in 2019, Katana Zero is a game with a delightfully simplistic premise. You play as an amnesiac Samurai named Zero. Zero is tasked by a mysterious employer to go around the city of New Mecca and assassinate various "undesirable characters" for reasons unknown. Also, according to designer Justin Stander, the whole game is heavily inspired by neo-noir action movies such as Sin City and John Wick, with a little bit of AKIRA thrown in for good measure. So if you've seen those movies, you know exactly what kind of "vibe" that Katana Zero is going for. In between each mission, Zero visits a suspicious psychiatrist in an attempt to understand a reoccurring nightmare that plagues his mind whenever he sleeps. Said nightmare may or may not be a distorted recreation of an event from Zero's childhood that holds the key to his true identity. Things only get weirder from here.

Let's start at the gameplay. Katana Zero is a side scrolling action game built around two main mechanics; instant death and time manipulation. If you've ever heard the phrase "glass cannon" Zero is that concept turned into an actual character. Every hit, from bullets to punches, will kill him instantly. But the same is true for any enemies standing in Zero's way. All enemies die in one hit. From any source of damage. From slashing with a katana to throwing wine bottles. Even the act of opening a door will kill any bad guy standing on the other side. Because Zero doesn't so much as "open" doors as he does "kick the door down with enough force to break the hinges." Zero is armed with a katana (obviously) and any slash with it will kill anything within reach of the blade. You can also use the katana to deflect enemy bullets back at their source, which again, will instantly kill anyone shooting at you. And finally, Zero can pick up certain objects, such as glass bottles, and throw them with enough force to (you guessed it) instantly kill whatever gets hit by said projectile. Because everyone dies so quickly, levels are lightning fast and demand near perfect precision and speed. Every level is timed, but the timer is generous and I never ran out of time during any of the game's ten main levels. The real main challenge of the game comes from the fact that you cannot progress to the next room in a level until all the enemies in the current room have been defeated. But there is a trick Zero has that gives him a distinct advantage over his targets.

So here's a little bit of lore to provide context for the game mechanics. Zero is dependent on an experimental super steroid called Chronos. Chronos supercharges the body and the mind, to the point where Chronos users can straight up see the future with 100% accuracy. And in game mechanic terms, this is both the explanation for how Zero can retry failed levels and how Zero can pull off these superhuman stunts. Every failed attempt at a level is, canonically speaking, just a future vision Zero is having, warning him against an unforeseen danger. But more importantly, if you hold down the left bumper button, Zero can spend Chronos to slow down time, making it easier to react to enemy attacks and other such hazards. Chronos is limited and recharges slowly, so it is best to use this ability only when you have to. One thing I love about Katana Zero is that after every level you get a replay showing the exact route you took to complete the level. What's cool is that any Chronos related stunts you pulled are shown in real time, without the slow-motion effect that Chronos usually has. Because of that, Zero looks a lot more skilled and dangerous on replays than he does when you play as him directly. This is easily one of the best uses of both slow-motion and instant replays in a video game, at least in my opinion. 

Speaking of beating the game, my biggest criticism of Katana Zero is that the game is really short. It will take between 2 and 3 hours to beat on your first try. It's basically the length of the average action movie. I would not mind the shortness under normal circumstances. In fact, speaking as a guy who normally plays role playing games (which are 60-80 hours long on average), the fact that you can beat this game in less than a day would be a breath of fresh air. But without spoiling things too much, the ending of Katana Zero is far too abrupt for my liking. But almost as if to compensate for the shortness of the main campaign, you can unlock a speed run mode that lets you replay the whole game but with a little timer in the top right corner of the screen, as well different sword types that don't really change how the game is played (aside from minor stat adjustments like more range or faster slices) but these extra swords add some cosmetic novelty to future playthroughs. You can also unlock a Hard Mode by beating the game, which shuffles some hazards around and adds in additional enemies to each level.

On the subject of enemies, Katana Zero sports a surprisingly diverse roster of enemies to fight. While all of them die in one hit, how exactly you deal with each one varies. You have basic gangsters that throw slow and predictable punches, you have police officers armed with pistols and shotguns, and even automated turrets that you have to sneak around instead of confronting directly. Remembering what each enemy type does is vital to clearing the levels with a half-decent time. The only enemies who don't die in one hit are to the surprise of literally no one, the bosses. But to be fair, almost every boss has a story reason to be so durable. Most bosses in this game are actually other Chronos users/addicts, and since Chronos users can predict the future with 100% accuracy, when two or more of them fight, it's less a duel to the death and more a test of mental willpower to see who surrenders first after seeing an infinite amount of different futures and experiencing an infinite amount of potential future deaths. Mild spoilers here, but the only reason Zero can even beat the final boss in the first place is because said final boss literally gives up because the mental strain of seeing their future selves die so many times in a row was too much for them to handle.

Image found on steamdb.com

One last gameplay thing before we talk about the story in detail. Katana Zero has one of the most unique dialogue options I've ever seen. In between each level are "downtime" sections, where Zero is free to visit his psychiatrist or talk to his neighbors. And how quickly the player responds changes how Zero responds in conversation. Pick an option before the other person can finish talking, and Zero's dialogue sounds ruder and more aggressive. But if you wait long enough for the other person to finish speaking, then Zero sounds calmer and more level-headed. The options themselves don't really change the story in any obvious way, but they do give Zero a chance to express a bit more personality and charm than his profession normally allows him to. And because I don't have anywhere else to put the nightmare section, I want to talk about Zero's nightmares in more detail. With each night, the nightmare gets longer and more detailed, though it always ends before we can learn anything truly revolutionary about Zero's past. It always starts with a child (presumably a young Zero) playing catch with his sister and ends with a scientist (presumably Zero's parent or guardian) running into the room only to get shot from behind by a masked soldier. Without spoiling the meaning behind the nightmare too much, it's one of those things that makes more sense on a second playthrough than on the first.

Alright. Let's talk about Katana Zero's story because this game's narrative was one of the wildest narratives I've ever had the pleasure to experience. For obvious reasons, beware of spoilers from this point onwards. So first of all, the reason for Zero's assassinations. It's eventually revealed that all his targets, consisting primarily in seemingly unrelated celebrities and billionaires, were all involved in either the creation or the distribution of Chronos. The psychiatrist that Zero's been seeing is involved in some kind of government conspiracy, and has been not-so-subtly manipulating Zero's thoughts and memories to mold him into a compliant but highly effective killer. Chronos is also not only highly addictive (as drugs of this nature often are) but it is literally impossible for a Chronos user to "sober up." Why, you ask? Because the withdrawal symptoms are so intense that if a person who was dependent on Chronos doesn't have any in their bloodstream, they become trapped in their own mind and effectively become a vegetable to the outside world. The main villain of this game, a gangster named V, takes full advantage of these withdrawal symptoms and uses Chronos as a method of psychological torture.

While all of this is happening, Zero hears multiple news reports about a rogue samurai serial killer called "The Dragon" going on a rampage in the same part of town that Zero usually operates in. On a first playthrough, it's easy to assume that Zero is the Dragon and the news reports are just recapping things Zero already did prior to the events of the game. But as it turned out, the Dragon was a completely different person from Zero named Fifteen. 28 years ago, Zero and Fifteen were the result of the NULL program, an experiment to create psychic super soldiers. The experiment was almost successful, but then the psychic super soldiers started committing war crimes so horrible that government funding was pulled from the program. As it turned out, getting the public to support psychic superhumans with a known penchant for murdering civilians just for fun was in fact, a PR nightmare. So the NULL soldiers were cast aside and the program was shut down. Unfortunately, the Chronos didn't exactly go away. Now there was an entire underground criminal empire built around recreating Chronos and selling it on the black market. The NULL soldiers themselves turned to a life of crime in order to afford more Chronos, for without it they were as good as dead. And because of all this, Fifteen is motivated entirely by a desire for vengeance. Vengeance against both the criminals exploiting the drug trade for profit, and against the New Mecca government for turning the NULL soldiers into freaks of nature just to throw them away the instant they outlived their purpose.

Speaking of Fifteen, one of my favorite levels in the game actually has you play as him for a spell. Fifteen controls exactly the same as Zero, but with one key difference. Fifteen cannot pick up objects and throw them. But to compensate for the lack of throwing skills, Fifteen can perform a dash in any direction, and this dash attack will instantly kill anyone standing in between Fifteen's starting point and his destination. This dash attack is so fast that on the replay, it looks like Fifteen is straight up teleporting. This one ability makes it clear that Fifteen is much more powerful than Zero, and also looks like it came straight out of an Shonen battle anime. And I mean that as a complement. If Akiisoft and Devolver Digital ever make another Katana Zero game, I would love to see them bring back Fifteen, or at least his move set, because the fact that Fifteen is only playable in one level is almost a crime.

Image found on steamdb.com

While the Dragon is getting his revenge, Zero is still compliant with the assassination orders, but in between each mission he starts to befriend his neighbor's daughter, a small child known only as the Girl. The interactions and banter between Zero and the Girl are a rare moment of levity and wholesomeness in an otherwise very grim and serious game. Speaking of levity, there's also a hilarious gag early on where Zero infiltrates a hotel, and when the secretary asks about his unusual outfit, he can choose to pass his samurai garb off as either a bathrobe or as a cosplay of an anime character. The secretary turns out to be a massive nerd and starts fangirling at the thought of someone being a fellow anime fan. And Zero can double down on this charade and claim to be a "true connoisseur" of fine anime, and then claim that he's too much of a hipster to watch "mainstream" and "popular" anime. Zero is obviously making everything up as he goes along with this route, but the fact that the secretary is completely enthralled with every word he says is highly entertaining. Especially because I've seen people on the Internet unironically brag about enjoying obscure forms of media simply on the grounds that "obscure is good, popular is bad."

The final main story thing I want to talk about (before I talk about the ending) are Tragedy and Comedy. Tragedy and Comedy are two masked specters that haunt Zero's mind and are strongly implied to be figments of his imagination. Alternatively, they are real entities with some sort of supernatural influence on the world. Either way, Tragedy and Comedy are by far the strangest characters in the game. In fact, they are singlehandedly responsible for the all the weirdness that compelled me to call this game a "psychedelic" experience. They don't seem to be real, seeing as how only Zero seems to acknowledge their existence. But if they are real entities and not a figment of Zero's imagination, then they are clearly supernatural in nature. Because again, only Zero can see or hear them. There's even a scene where Zero is cornered by the police, and Tragedy and Comedy drop in out of nowhere in plain view of the entire police squad, but not a single officer so much as bats an eye at the sudden appearance of these specters. And I'm not sure about you, but if two masked men sudden appeared in between me and a rogue samurai, I would at least comment on it. They taunt Zero about his role as an assassin and push him to commit acts of larger scale violence. And there's even a "bad" ending where, at Tragedy and Comedy's prodding, Zero turns himself in to the police. This ending results in Zero being executed for the many crimes committed on behalf of his mysterious employers.

But you know how I said that this game's ending was abrupt? Well, let me explain why. So towards the end of the game, Zero has rediscovered his past as a NULL soldier. His relationship with the Psychiatrist has grown increasingly strained as Zero's "antics" attract unwanted attention from both the criminal underworld and from the New Mecca government. Zero is given one last mission; to infiltrate a bunker housing the last remnants of Chronos development. Zero's orders are simple; Leave. No. Survivors. For most of the bunker level he carves a bloodied path through all sorts of security. He even manages to slay a fellow Chronos user named Head Hunter and destroys the machines needed to make more Chronos. The only problem he ran into was that the bunker was testing Chronos on homeless children. Because of Zero's time with the Girl, along with dormant memories of the past springing back into his mind, he has a change of heart and flees the scene without killing any of the kids. 

The Psychiatrist is furious that Zero didn't "finish the job" and threatens to terminate Zero's contract, thus cutting him off from his weekly Chronos doses. At this point, Zero's fractured mind finally snaps and he tries to kill the Psychiatrist. If you met the requirements for the secret bonus boss (done by being as rude as possible to the Psychiatrist and disobeying his orders whenever possible), you get a boss fight against a Chronos-enhanced mutant version of the Psychiatrist. If you don't meet the requirements, Zero just kills the Psychiatrist automatically in a fit of rage. Either way, Zero breaks into the Psychiatrist's personal Chronos stash and injects as much of it into himself as he can. Meanwhile, the player is treated to one last flash back showing the nightmare in full detail. And the big reveal that I said makes more sense in hindsight is that the kid in the nightmare wasn't actually Zero. Turns out he was the masked soldier that shot the scientist and that Zero himself was one of the "problematic" NULL soldiers who committed various war crimes. The nightmares were a result of a guilty conscience mixed with some PTSD from the New Meccan War that happened 28 years before the events of the game. After this, Zero returns to his apartment, only to find that the Girl is nowhere to be found. When Zero asks his neighbors about the Girl's disappearance, they express confusion and bafflement at the idea of a little Girl living in the complex, strongly implying that the Girl was just a figment of Zero's imagination. And then the game just ends right there. It drops two bombshell revelations about our protagonist back-to-back and then says "later, nerds." It does give a "To be continued..." message at the end of the credits, and out of all the games I played this is the one that most deserves a sequel. Because there's still a lot of unresolved plot threads in this game. You never get to confront Fifteen after his introduction. And you never get to learn anything about Snow, the mysterious lady samurai that V works for. Never has an ending in a video game demanded a sequel as strongly as Katana Zero.

In terms of presentation, Katana Zero can be best described with one word. Stylish. The game is portrayed in a pixel-art style, and the pixel-art is some of the best in the industry. Every animation is fluid and full of expression, and each level is distinct both in terms of layout and in terms of aesthetic. From night clubs, to hotels, to movie studios, Zero's missions take him to a wide variety of locales all throughout New Mecca. Expect a lot of neon from this game. Because it's still a cyberpunk game and a staple of the genre is neon lights all over the place. There's no voice acting whatsoever, but the dialogue (delivered through speech bubbles) is just as snappy and expressive as the animations. And going back to the whole "how quickly you respond determines how you respond" thing, a nice detail in dialogue is that if Zero interrupts the other speaker before they finish talking, the speech bubble above their head physically shatters into a million pieces, further emphasized with a glass breaking sound effect. And the music is superb. Katana Zero's soundtrack, composed and performed by Bill Kiley and LudoWic, is mostly synth wave and techno music, though there are some classical songs mixed in for good measure (mostly for the scenes with the Psychiatrist). And the soundtrack is diegetic, meaning (almost) every song exists in-universe. Every level starts with Zero putting on a song on his MP3 player, and every level ends when Zero turns the music off.

Overall, for a game that I went into with hardly any expectations, I was pleasantly surprised by its quality. It is frustratingly short and could easily have at least two more levels to tie up some loose story threads. But if my biggest criticism of a game is "I wanted more of it" is that really a bad thing? The combat is fast, the narrative is engaging, and this game has a wonderfully stylish semi-retro aesthetic. Katana Zero has also joined the likes of Devil May Cry, Hollow Knight and UNDERTALE/deltarune in the great collection of "games with soundtracks that sound better than 90% of all songs on the radio." I give Katana Zero 4 stars out of 5. The only thing keeping it from a 5 star rating is again, the abruptness of the ending. But if Akiisoft and Devolver Digital make a DLC pack or a sequel that retroactively ties up those loose story threads and gives this game a satisfactory conclusion, I would gladly change the rating from 4 stars to 5.

Katana Zero is owned by Akiisoft and Devolver Digital. None of the screenshots used here belong to me. Please support the original creators.

Elden Ring, the game that got me to love the Souls Borne series. A very maidenless review.

 This is my third review of a Souls Borne game. I have already reviewed Sekiro and Bloodborne before this game, and I plan to one day review the entire franchise. But here's a funny story you might not know. None of these games were my first Souls Borne game. That "honor" goes to Dark Souls II. And in hindsight, starting with II was probably a mistake, since that game is needlessly oppressive and counterintuitive. As such, I never finished it, but I might replay it again for the purpose of reviewing the whole franchise. But anyway, I bounced off the series for years after trying and failing to complete Dark Souls II. Then I picked up Elden Ring, and that game was so good that not only did I replay the game again as soon as the credits rolled, but it won me over and converted me into a "real" Souls Borne fan. I started tracking down the other games because I liked Elden Ring so much and wanted more games in that style. So here's a heavily biased review of a game that I will openly admit is one of my favorite pieces of media ever. Quick content warning. Elden Ring is rated M for Mature by the ESRB and thus is intended for audiences 17 years old or older. Mostly because of violence. And freaky monster designs. And a subplot where the protagonist gets married to a weird witch lady.

Image found on Wikipedia.org

So what exactly is Elden Ring? It's a medieval fantasy action roleplaying game inspired by Norse and Celtic Mythology that was developed by From Software and published by Bandai Namco, with the story and lore being co-written by Hidetaka Miyazaki (the creator of the Souls Borne series) and George R.R. Martin, of Game of Thrones fame. The game would release on February 24th, 2022 and became an overnight success. Not only was it the best selling Bandai Namco-published game ever made, it was the second best selling game of that year, being second only to Call of Duty 2: Modern Warfare. Which is impressive, since From Software have spent much of their history being a fairly niche developer. It also has a DLC expansion pack planned for release this coming June (at the time of writing), titled The Shadow of the Erdtree. 

And now I have to tell you about the story in this game. Something you need to understand about From Software is that they don't tell their stories with traditional cinematics. Sure, cinematics exist, but mostly to hype up certain bosses and show how much of a threat they are. Most of the story is told through details in the environment, optional conversations with the few friendly faces you'll meet on your adventure, and reading the descriptions of collectible items. This vagueness was deliberate by design. One of Miyazaki's quirks as a writer is that he loves seeing people come up with theories and pool their knowledge together into a cohesive narrative, and his stories are meant to be vague and mysterious for this exact reason. And even though Martin's involvement was a big part of the prerelease marketing, the game feels less like a 50/50 split between his style and Miyazaki's style, and more like a 70/30 split in Miyazaki's favor. Granted, Elden Ring is somewhat more straightforward in its narrative than previous Souls Borne games. I didn't do any additional research on the lore during my first playthrough and felt like I had a good enough understanding of what was going on.

So here's a basic summary of the lore. In the world of Elden Ring, there is an island nation called the Lands Between. The Lands Between were ruled by a Goddess named Marika the Eternal, who was given divine power by an artefact called the Elden Ring. The Elden Ring was a gift from an even more powerful god called the Greater Will, in exchange for Marika's loyalty and servitude. Marika birthed several children who, while not gods in and of themselves, are still incredibly powerful and have the potential to ascend to godhood in certain circumstances. These kids are called the Demigods. Eventually Marika got tired of being the Greater Will's poster girl so she smashed the Elden Ring and faked her death. And then her kids started a civil war to fill the power vacuum. Fast forward five thousand years later, and the Lands Between are a post-apocalyptic shell of their former glory. Monstrous dragons burn down villages, undead zombies and skeletons attack roaming travelers and a supernatural disease called the Scarlet Rot is spreading through the land like a plague.

You play as a Foul Tarnished, an undead super soldier brought back to life by Marika's Grace and given a task. Track down the scattered remains of the Elden Ring, repair it and claim the throne of the Next Elden Lord. You are not the only Tarnished on this quest, however. In fact there are potentially hundreds of Tarnished running around. But only one of them can be Elden Lord. So any alliance between Tarnished is temporary at best. And in typical From Software fashion, not even ten minutes after waking up your Tarnished gets thrown into a boss fight that you are supposed to lose. Though you do get a cool sword if you beat it on your first try. After that scripted loss, you wake up in a cave and can go through an optional tutorial that teaches you the controls and basic game mechanics. Said tutorial ends with a boss fight against the Soldier of Godrick, which is a much more reasonable "first boss" than the actual first boss. Granted, the Soldier of Godrick is just a slightly buffed version of the basic undead wretches you've been fighting in the tutorial, so he isn't meant to be too hard.

Image found on RPGFan.com

Elden Ring has a pretty robust character creator, and I am a sucker for a good character creator. You can customize the hair, facial features, body type, gender and more. But more importantly, the game has a bunch of Classes. One thing I love about this game is that there are a ton of different ways to customize your fighting style. Do you want to swing the biggest and heaviest swords imaginable? You can do that. Do you want to run in and unleash a flurry of lightning fast stabs and slices with a pair of daggers? You can do that. Do you want to cast magic spells and shoot laser beams? You can do that. But keep in mind that nothing in this game is class-locked. As long as you meet the minimal stat requirements to use a weapon or cast a spell, you can use it. Even if you start the game as a Hero (a bulky juggernaut who excels with Strength focused weapons but struggles with spellcasting), you can learn magic spells if you put a few upgrades into Intelligence. 

The stats all do more or less what you expect them to. Strength makes the big heavy weapons better, Dexterity makes the fast smaller weapons better. Vigor gives you more health and defense, Endurance gives you more stamina (letting you jump and dodge more frequently) and carry heavier items on you. Intelligence and Faith are both your "magical" stats, with the former making star-themed sorcery better and the latter improving holy incantations. Mind gives you a bigger Focus meter, thus letting you cast more spells before needing to recharge. And finally, Arcane is a weird stat. It makes enemies drop items upon defeating them more frequently, and boosts the power of status effects like Poison, Frostbite and Bleeding. Practically speaking, Arcane is a stat that can be safely ignored if you don't plan on using status effects, since it offers no other benefits to combat. But status effect builds are comically strong. During my second run of the game, I played a Faith/Arcane hybrid character that tore through the game far faster than my original sorcery character did.

The classes mostly exist as a foundation to build off of instead of a railroad you must follow for the whole game. That being said, they do determine what kind of weapons and armor you start the game with, if anything. And it's generally better to specialize than to generalize. A pure Strength build will generally outperform a Strength/Dexterity hybrid. There are exceptions of course. The aforementioned Faith/Arcane build I made was almost comically strong. And the only reason I made that build was because I wanted to make a "dragon" themed character and all the "dragon" themed spells are designed to work with both Faith and Arcane equally. And also in typical From Software tradition, one of the classes, simply called the Wretch, starts with literally nothing more than a wooden stick and a loincloth. The Wretch's only redeeming quality is that it starts with a 10 in every stat, meaning if you can't make up your mind on what to play, the Wretch offers a perfect blank slate that can be easily molded into any play style you want once you find some real weapons and armor. Miyazaki himself has gone on record saying that playing as the Wretch is the closest thing the game has to a hard mode, so maybe don't play Wretch during your first playthrough unless you are very confident in your skills or you don't mind a rougher start.

Elden Ring controls more or less how you expect a Souls Borne to play. I played the game on PS4 and will be using that console's controller as a frame of reference. But anyway, you use the right and left bumper/trigger buttons to attack with whatever weapon is held in your character's left hand and right hand, respectively. The circle button is your dodge, the square button lets you use consumable items like potions or throwing knives. If you have a shield in hand, you can use it to block and parry enemy attacks. You collect a universal currency called Runes that can be used to purchase upgrades for your character, such as increased stats or better quality weapons and armor. All unspent Runes are dropped if you die and must be manually recollected on your next life. All of this is standard stuff. What's new to this game is the ability to JUMP. No, really, this is the first Souls Borne game with an actual jump button. While there was technically a jump in the previous games, it was clumsy, awkward and only worked if you had enough room for a running start. Now, the jump action is tied to a single button and feels actually good to use. You can also attack while jumping. And jump attacks are surprisingly strong. In fact, speed runners who are better at this game than I am discovered that the fastest way for Strength builds to defeat enemies is by doing jump attacks repeatedly. But back on the subject of new mechanics, there's a new technique called a Guard Counter. Basically, if you hit the heavy attack button right after blocking, it charges the normally slow heavy attack instantly.  You can also ride around on a magical steed called Torrent, who is not only much faster than the Tarnished but can also double jump. Torrent cannot be brought indoors, sadly, but he does make navigating the outdoors much easier. And the final new thing are Spirit Ashes. Spirit Ashes are magic spells can be cast once per boss battle that summons a ghostly version of certain monsters and warriors, who will assist you in battle automatically. Spirit Ashes are a nice option to have if you've been struggling against a boss and need just that extra bit of Jolly Cooperation to finish it off. Of course, regular multiplayer co-op is still a thing.

After the tutorial ends you are dumped into the Lands Between properly. You are free to explore wherever and however you want. The amount of freedom and exploration in Elden Ring is simply staggering. A lot of people say that Elden Ring is the most "beginner friendly" Souls Borne game. That is technically true. Not because From Software added an "easy mode" or toned down the enemies and bosses. In fact even the basic enemies can obliterate you if you're not careful. But because there's so much freedom in the open world, if you ever get stuck on a boss, all you have to do is go somewhere else and come back later once you get some upgrades under your belt. The previous games were a lot more linear in their level design, meaning if you got stuck on a boss, you had no real choice besides trying to brute force your way to victory. And if you know where to look, you can find some really powerful weapons long before the first "real" boss.

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Speaking of bosses, this game has a lot of bosses. In fact, at 168 named boss monsters, it has the most number of bosses of any Souls Borne game ever. Funnily enough, out of those bosses, only 12 of them are required to actually finish the game. The rest are optional, but usually reward you with a powerful weapon or spell upon defeat. The only thing I can say negatively about is that most of the non-plot-relevant bosses are recycled at multiple points in the game (meaning you fight them more than once). Some more than others. But considering that Elden Ring is supposed to be From Software's "biggest" game, the world being so huge and packed with details means that the only real way to fill out the game world would be to recycle content. But the good news is that all of the Demigods (sans Godrick) are unique and only fought once. And honestly, the Demigods feel like they have the most amount of polish and effort put into them. They all get an intro cinematic hyping them up. They all are fully voiced and surprisingly chatty, with some of them taunting the Tarnished mid-battle. And of course, they are (generally speaking) the most challenging bosses in the game. 

On the subject of challenge, Elden Ring's difficulty is a little bit all over the place. Back when the game first came out, no one could agree if it was the easiest Souls Borne, or if it was the hardest. The answer is yes. Yes, it is the hardest. But also yes, it is the easiest. That sounds like an obtuse non answer and well, it is, but hear me out. You remember when I said that the game offers tons of different options for developing a unique fighting style? Not all builds are created equally. Elden Ring has 308 different weapons to collect and 171 different magic spells to learn. And generally speaking, 10% of those weapons and spells are so weak that using them is for all intents and purposes, handicapping yourself. 50% are just good enough to get you through the game, though you might struggle against certain enemies. And the rest are so comically powerful that they turn even the toughest battles into a cakewalk. And those comically powerful weapons can potentially be accessed as soon as you leave the tutorial area. The only thing consistent about the game's difficulty is that there is a huge spike in enemy damage in the final two regions of the game, the Mountaintop of the Giants and Crumbling Farum Azula. The enemies and bosses here do so much damage that you need at least 40 points into Vigor just to survive more than one attack. To put that into perspective, the previous games in the series could be beaten with 25 Vigor or less, and any more than that was the defensive equivalent of overkill. 

EDITOR'S NOTE: The most offensive example of Elden Ring's weird difficulty balancing is a boss called Malenia, the Blade of Miquella. She is by far the hardest boss in the game, putting up more of a fight than even the final boss. Her attack patterns and movement are so fast they push Elden Ring's combat to the absolute limit. She honestly feels like she belongs in a different, much faster game than Elden Ring. This is on top of being able to "steal" health from you with every successful slash from her katana. This is a boss that essentially forces you to go the whole fight without getting hit once, because that's the only way to stop her from healing. Even blocked attacks will still heal her. And that's not even mentioning how she has two full health bars AND she adds a poisonous Scarlet Rot effect to her attacks once her first health bar is emptied. Before you jump to conclusions and assume I'm singling her out because I have a "skill issue" or need to "git gud" let me just say this. Malenia took me 13 tries to beat. Every other boss took 2 or 3 tries each. This was with a sorcery build I had planned ahead of time specifically to counter her. My criticisms of Malenia aren't because she's a hard fight. It's that she runs counter to the rest of the game's design, punishing defensive melee builds that rely on blocks and parries for defense and demanding that the player plays this one specific duel to absolute perfection, because anything less than perfect will result in failure. Thankfully, Malenia is an optional boss and the only rewards for beating her are the bragging rights and a replica of her katana. I think my opinion of Elden Ring would sour if she was mandatory.

Ironically, the hardest challenge in the whole game doesn't even come from its bosses or from its exploration. It comes from the side quests. All throughout the Lands Between you can meet various characters that are also traveling on their own adventures. You can choose to help them with their problems, but a lot of the side quests are so cryptic and obscure that you need a walkthrough on hand just to do them properly. And not helping matters is that if you defeat certain bosses before starting the side quests, the characters associated with might just peace out and move to a different location or even leave the game world entirely, thus preventing you from finishing that character's quest. To add insult to injury, there is no way to check which side quests you've found or finished within the game itself. You just have to hope your memory is good enough to revisit past areas. And even if you find the right characters in the right spot, the solution to their problem can be borderline esoteric. Take Boc the Seamster for example. Towards the end of his side quest, he expresses concern for his unsightly appearance and asks the Tarnished if they know of any way to "make him beautiful." There are two ways to end this quest. The simplest solution is to tell him to go visit a sorceress named Rennala of the Full Moon, who possesses the power of rebirth. Only problem is that Rennala still hasn't perfected her rebirth spell yet, so Boc's "beautiful" new body dies just a few minutes afterword. You would think that simply telling Boc that he's beautiful enough as is would persuade him to stay where he is, but no. You need to travel to a completely different region, grab an item called a Prattling Pate, come back to Boc and use that item to tell him that he's beautiful. There is no indication that such an item even exists, much less where to find it. The other side quests work similarly to Boc's. The simple solution will nine times out of ten get the character killed off (or worse) and the only way to save them is to try something weird and out of the box. There is only one side quest that breaks this rule.

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Oh boy, it's time to talk about Ranni the Witch. This character is quite the fan favorite, thanks to a memorable design, distinct Welsh accent and being the only "friendly" demigod. I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't a Ranni fan, myself. She also has the only quest where doing things out of the "intended" order won't ruin it. In fact, the only real way to fail Ranni's quest is to attack her deliberately. The best thing about Ranni is that she straight up tells you where you need to go and what you need to do to complete the quest. Ranni wants to find a special dagger in an underground city and tells you where to go to find said dagger. Ranni wants the demigod Radahn destroyed as part of her plans, and she tells you to go find Radahn and kill him. Her quest is the only one that is this straightforward. Of course, the beautiful simplicity of her quest isn't the only reason why I like Ranni. The other reason is that her lore is fascinating. She was one of the demigods responsible for turning the Lands Between into a nightmare hellscape. Despite being responsible for many of the horrors that the Tarnished encounters, she has a genuine desire to overthrow the gods and give humanity true, absolute freedom. The third reason I like Ranni is the simple fact that her quest ends with her and the Tarnished getting married. And there's a whole alternate ending, heavily implied to be the best ending, that is rewarded for going through with said marriage. Ranni even gives you the Moonlight Greatsword, which is literally From Software's mascot that they put in every game they work on, as a wedding gift. Out of all the games I have played in my life, Elden Ring is the only one to have an actual marriage in it. Granted, it's a political marriage and Ranni makes it clear her main reason for marrying the Tarnished is because she needs a loyal spouse in order to ascend to godhood. Because marriages in this setting aren't just a romantic ceremony. They are a ritual meant to unlock the true power of the divine. But without context, the idea that Elden Ring's best ending requires you to get married is oddly amusing.

In terms of presentation, Elden Ring is by far the most colorful Souls Borne game. This isn't to say that it's all sunshine and rainbows. Just that it leans more into the "fantasy" side of the phrase "dark fantasy." The monster designs are about what you expect from From Software. Lots of horrifying monstrosities with limbs coming out of places they do not belong. In fact, there's a general motif of hands and arms in the character designs. A lot of characters either have more arms than a normal human, or they have something weird going on with the arms they do have. Just to give a few examples, Ranni has four arms tucked into her robe, Godrick the Golden has two dozen arms erupting out of his back, and Rykard fights with a sword made of bloodied arms. And of course, the main mascot boss of this game, Malenia the Blade of Miquella, has only one natural arm. Her right arm has been replaced with a golden prosthetic that has a retractable sword attached to the wrist. The only bad thing about Elden Ring's aesthetic is that it can at times look a bit too similar to the Dark Souls trilogy. I kind of wish it leaned harder into the Nordic Viking/Celtic Mythology vibes, which are present in things like the Erdtree being modeled after Yggdrasil the World Tree and Malenia's helmet resembling those worn by Valkyries, but the Nordic/Celtic influence is nowhere near as obvious as say, Bloodborne's Victorian vibe or Sekiro's Feudal Japanese aesthetic.

But on a more positive note, we got Legacy Dungeons. Legacy Dungeons are special locations scattered around the open world. These areas are designed to resemble the level design from older Souls Borne games. Not only are they gorgeous to look at, the Legacy Dungeons are by far the most complex areas to navigate, with lots of winding paths that loop back in on themselves, hidden shortcuts and traps. The Legacy Dungeons are a true highlight of Elden Ring's art style, with a personal favorite of mine being Raya Lucaria Academy. It's a giant school for witchcraft and wizardry magic users that rests underneath the pale blue light of an magically conjured night sky, complete with a full moon looming overhead. You work your way up the schoolrooms and past a debate parlor, fighting and/or running past scholarly sorcerers and living puppet soldiers. You eventually reach the tallest point in the school, the Grand Library, where Rennala resides. 

Another Legacy Dungeon I love is Leyndell the Golden Capital. It is exactly what it sounds like; The capital city of the Lands Between. It is far fancier and more upkept than the rest of the world, looking almost serene compared to the hellscape outside its fortified walls. The roofs of the buildings are golden, the streets are lined with golden bricks, even the enemies here fight with golden weaponry. Also, there's a petrified corpse of a dragon so large that it functions as a platform/bridge you can walk on. And some people who are much smarter than me did some measurements and found this corpse dragon (named in the lore as Gransax) is more then 4 times the size of the Dragon God, a boss from the very first Souls Borne game, Demon's Souls. Keep in mind that the Dragon God was the biggest monster From Software ever created and they have yet to make a living  monster that large ever again. One shudders to think what kind of boss battle a dragon of that size could be like. Maybe that's one of the DLC bosses; a dragon as large as Gransax, but actually alive.

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In terms of sound design, music and voice acting, it's all good. The monstrous roars of the various beasts in the Lands Between are disturbing, and the sound of clashing blades is crisp. The music is about what you expect from From Software. Lots of intimidating orchestra with vaguely Latin sounding lyrics. The music only really kicks in when you discover a boss, though there is some ambience in safe zones like the Roundtable Hold or the Volcano Manor. My personal favorite in the whole soundtrack is the Godskin Nobles' theme. It can best be described as "evil Catholic choir music." Which, considering that the Godskin Nobles are a cult that collects the skin of demigods and fashions clothes out of said skin, is weirdly fitting in a morbid way. And since the Godskin Nobles are fought multiple times, you get to hear their theme music more than once. The Ancestor Spirit is another boss with a good theme. It has really pretty and tranquil music, which sounds almost out of place for a battle with an otherworldly animal spirit.

The voice acting is some of the best in the series. One detail I like about the game is that all of the demigods are ancient (being 5,000 years old or older), and as such they all speak in old-timey Shakespearean English (with a lot of "thee" and "thou" and "thy") to show just how old they are compared to the regular mortals, who speak in modern English. Elden Ring is probably the most quotable game in From Software's catalogue. There's a lot of good quotes in this game. You have funny quotes like the White Masked Varre saying "Unfortunately, it appears you are maidenless" at the start of the game. But then you have incredible one-liners like Godfrey saying "I have given thee courtesy enough!" or Malenia saying "You will witness true horror..." I think my favorite piece of voice acting is when you confront Morgott, the Last of all Kings. The scene starts with him walking down a flight of stairs while listing off each and every demigod responsible for the millennia of warfare and violence that has plagued the Lands Between. With each name, the anger in his tired old voice grows and grows. Eventually he explodes with this line; "Willful traitors, all! Thy kind art all of a piece! War lords, emboldened by the flames of ambition! So have it writ upon thy meagre grave... Felled, by King Morgott! The Last of All Kings!" It's a beautifully written and voice-acted speech that conveys all the pent up rage and frustration Morgott feels about his fellow demigods, and how he believes that the Tarnished will become just as bad as Marika if they become Elden Lord. Morgott isn't an antagonist because he's evil. He's an antagonist because he's scared that the Tarnished will repeat his mother's mistakes and has taken great effort to prevent such a scenario from occurring. Morgott's my favorite boss in this whole game, both because he is fun to fight and because I enjoy the lore and narrative surrounding him.

My only complaint on the voice acting has less to do with acting itself and more to do with the translation. You see, From Software is a Japanese company. That means that Japanese is their native language. Obviously. But there's a bit of translation error. And normally, translation errors do happen in From Software games, but they are usually minor and inconsequential details that don't affect the experience. This game's translation error completely changes Ranni's speech at the end of the game, should you go through with her marriage and allow her to become the Goddess of the Full Moon. In English she says that she plans to "bring forth a chill night, of fear and loneliness, without the need to feel ever again." In Japanese she says that plans to "take the chill night far away from here, as I walk the path of fear and loneliness." The former sounds like she is causing another doomsday. The latter sounds like she is sacrificing herself for the betterment of humanity. This is not the fault of Ranni's voice actress, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, but is a little "whoopsies" in the translation. Side note, I really love the sound of Ranni's voice. She could read a phone book out loud and make it sound interesting.

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Overall, Elden Ring is a great jumping on point for anyone new to the Souls Borne series. Is it perfect? No. I still wish that side quests were easier to keep track of, and the game is a bit too similar to Dark Souls aesthetically for my liking. But it's by far the most beginner friendly game in the franchise. And I'm thankful that this game showed me how fun Souls Borne games could be. If you have heard of From Software's work but were scared off by their infamous difficulty, this game, while not being easy per se, is far more accessible than its predecessors. It's definitely one of the better "open world" games out there. I give Elden Ring five stars out of five.

Elden Ring is the property of Bandai Namco and From Software. None of the screenshots featured here were created by me. Please support the original creators.

The Five Nights at Freddy's movie was pretty neat. A very robotic review.

So when I reviewed the Five Nights at Freddy's Core Collection bundle, I said I wanted to wait until I watched the movie before reviewing that. Well, I watched it. And I want to talk about it, because as the title of this post implies, it was pretty neat. This post exists primarily as a sequel of sorts to the Core Collection review. As such, I won't cover the lore of the franchise as extensively here as I did there. And Five Nights at Freddy's is a horror franchise that was built on a foundation of deep lore. So if you want more information on the games that this movie is based on, go read that post instead.

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Here's a very simplified recap of the series for those who need a quick refresher. Five Nights at Freddy's, often called FN@F for short, is a horror game franchise created entirely by one guy named Scott Cawthon. Despite working on budget consisting of shoe strings and paper clips, Scott's quirky little horror series exploded seemingly overnight in terms of popularity, and he become a prominent figure in the world of independent video game developers. Basically, the series revolves around a Chuck E Cheese's style pizzeria that is home to a crew of haunted animatronic performers. A movie based on the games was announced all the way back in 2015 as part of a collaboration between Scott and horror movie studio Blumhouse, but the script went through multiple rewrites before Scott and director Emma Tammi settled on a script they actually liked some time in 2021. The movie would finally release on October 26th of 2023.

Our story follows the life of Mike Schmidt (played by Josh Hutcherson), a down-on-his-luck security guard trying his best to provide for his younger sister Abby (played by Piper Rubio) and solve the mysterious disappearance of his brother Garrett. Following an incident where he violently attacked a man that he mistook for a child predator, Mike is fired from his old job. With his Aunt Jane (played by Mary Stuart Masterson) trying to take custody of Abby away, Mike is desperate to prove he can be a functional member of society and actually hold a job. So he takes the next job that becomes available to him regardless of how sketchy it sounds. Which means he gets a job working the night shift at Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria, the aforementioned Chuck E Cheese's style restaurant. On top of this, Mike's dreams when he sleeps become increasingly weird. Granted, this is deliberate on Mike's part. He is purposely using lucid dream theory (which is a real thing, by the way) to recreate the past and figure out what happened to Garrett. Though, considering this is a Five Nights at Freddy's story, anyone with even a surface level understanding of the lore can guess what happened to him long before the truth is revealed. But most importantly, the animatronic performers start moving by themselves, without any external assistance.

Oh, and Vanessa is here too. Vanessa (played by Elizabeth Lail) is a mysterious police officer that knows an uncomfortable amount of the Pizzeria's history. I'm not going to sugarcoat it, the main reason Vanessa is here is to explain the lore to newcomers. She tells Mike about the Missing Children Incident, in which at least five kids died inside the Pizzeria while Fazbear Entertainment (the Pizzeria's parent company) covered up said deaths and hid them from the public. She reveals the true nature of the animatronics, which are haunted by the ghosts of the dead kids. She tells him about the Spring Lock suits, which are failed prototypes for robot-costume hybrids that can either be worn like a suit or controlled remotely. She even name drops William Afton, the big bad final boss villain of the whole franchise. Literally every bad thing that happens in FN@F can be traced back to William Afton. Which is why the reveal of what happened to Garrett is not surprising in the slightest for people familiar with the lore.

Image from https://freddy-fazbears-pizza.fandom.com/wiki/Five_Nights_at_Freddy%27s_(Film)/Gallery

But now I want to tell you about the best thing in the whole movie, the animatronics themselves. Every monster here is a real animatronic built and operated by the lovely people from Jim Henson's Creature Shop. While they did use human actors for some scenes that were too complex for normal animatronics, the costuming is so good that I genuinely can't tell the difference. All four of the main monsters look like they stepped right out of the games. Most impressive is Foxy the Pirate Fox. He has by far the most complex design due to his exposed robotic innards, and the Foxy animatronic was so intricate that they needed no less than seven people working together just to make it move around (one for the face, one for the neck, one for each arm, one for each leg, and one to make the whole rig lean forward or backward as needed). Honestly, even if you don't care about the lore or the franchise as a whole, the movie is worth watching just for the animatronics. They are a true spectacle to behold. I do wish they gave the animatronics the pitch-black eyes with the pin-prick white pupils instead of the red eyes they used, since it would look both scarier and more lore accurate, but that is a minor nitpick.

The second best thing about this movie is that it is a real love letter not just to the games, but the fans of said games. There are a lot of references and inside jokes that only make sense to people familiar with the series. And there's some really deep cut references here. Just to give a few examples, there's a scene where Aunt Jane and her gang visit a diner called Sparky's. Sparky was the name of a unused animatronic that was rumored to haunt certain copies of the first game. Scott had to clarify that Sparky wasn't real and that the whole thing was a urban myth that spiraled out of control. Another example, when Mike finds the dead bodies of said gang in the backstage, they've been shoved into costumes based on various monsters from the sequel games and even the spin-off lore novels, such as Shadow Freddy, Eleanora the Doll and Fetch the Dog. But I want to draw attention to two of my favorite references. During the end credits, the movie plays an electropop song simply called The Five Nights at Freddy's Song. This song was a fan-made project made by a band called The Living Tombstone. Evidently, Scott heard the song and loved it so much he decided to make it the official theme song of the whole franchise (with Living Tombstone's permission, of course). And seeing fan-made stuff get a seal of approval from the original creator is always going to be awesome.

The other references I want to talk about extensively happen in that same diner scene described earlier. While coming up with a plan to ruin Mike's life, Aunt Jane is pestered by an overly eager waiter played by Matthew "Mat Pat" Patrick. Mat Pat was the main host of a YouTube channel called Game Theory, which was a web show devoted to solving the biggest mysteries in video game history. Mat Pat has made dozens of videos trying to solve the lore of this series, and has become synonymous with the franchise as a whole. And his character somehow manages to find a way to sneak in the phrase "That's just a Theory!" in casual conversation, a catchphrase that Mat Pat says at least once per video. There's another scene where Abby is riding in a taxi with Golden Freddy, and the taxi driver is played by Cory "CoryxKenshin" Williams, who made humorous play throughs for all the FN@F games. Both Mat Pat and CoryxKenshin are commonly cited as major reasons the franchise got as popular as it did, since these two individuals provided the first game with a lot of Internet publicity. Is the average viewer going to understand who these people are or why they are a big deal? No. Not in the slightest. But again, for people who are involved in the online fan community for this series, these cameos and inside jokes are a pleasant surprise.

Image from imdb.com

The third best thing about the movie is the main villain, William Afton. Spoilers abound for this section. William Afton is played by Matthew Lillard (best known for being the voice of Shaggy from Scooby Do). Afton is first introduced as Steve Raglan, a career consular that not-so-subtly pushes Mike to take the job at the Pizzeria. The reveal that Steve was actually Afton the whole time would have been shocking, had it not been for the fact that Blumhouse spoiled their own twist with the casting. They didn't even bother to pretend that Lillard wasn't playing William Afton. Which means that anyone who knows the lore or paid attention to the casting can guess that the job consular is probably evil. This isn't a bad thing per se, because once William Afton reveals his true nature, he puts on a delightfully hammy performance as a villain. Lillard was clearly having fun being the "bad guy" for once. And honestly, the most quotable parts of the movie come from William Afton. Seriously. Afton yelling things like "SYMMETRY, MY FRIEND!" and "YOU ROTTEN LITTLE BEASTS!" is stuck in my head like an ear worm. And unlike the other characters, William's Spring Trap persona isn't an animatronic. That's a proper costume meant to be worn by a human actor. And apparently, Lillard couldn't see out of the Spring Trap mask, so for all of the scenes where he wore the mask, he was quite literally acting blind. Which I got to imagine must've been an awkward experience, but it was worth it, since William Afton's portrayal here is a major highlight of the movie.

If I had to say anything negative about the movie, I didn't really find the movie that scary. Granted, I'm a long time FN@F fan and I think I've become desensitized to all of Scott's tricks and jump scares. I've mostly stuck around for the lore and monster designs. But a common saying you'll hear about the games is that Five Nights at Freddy's is a "baby's first" horror game. And to put things bluntly, this movie is a "baby's first" horror movie. The violence here is surprisingly tame, especially when compared to other horror movies. The animatronics almost never kill anyone on screen, because the camera conveniently looks away right before the killing blow lands. Or we see only the aftermath of said kills. Don't get me wrong, this movie can be creepy and atmospheric. That's another thing the movie does well. The vibes of the Pizzeria itself are perfect. The issue is that the movie feels like it's holding itself back. Like it has the potential to get super gory and gross but it's really trying not to lose that PG-13 rating so it tones itself down enough to be technically family friendly. Like the goriest thing in the movie is when one of Aunt Jane's gangsters gets the upper half of her body bit off by Freddy, but the bite and remains are framed in shadow to not show any of the grisly details. So the lack of violence leaves me conflicted.  On one hand, I could probably show this movie to my parents and have them not think I'm a masochistic freak for liking something spooky and weird. On the other hand, if you come looking for a thrill, you'll probably not find it here. It's a fairly "safe" movie, all things considered.

I think the biggest divide on your enjoyment of the movie is your view of the table-fort scene. For context, about halfway through the movie, Abby discovers that she can communicate with the ghosts haunting the animatronics through drawings, and being a 10 year old girl, she uses this newfound power to befriend the animatronics and play games with them. This culminates in her roping in Mike and Vanessa into helping the animatronics build a "fortress" out of tables and party supplies. Depending on your perspective, this is either cute and wholesome or cheesy and lame. I'm of the former opinion, myself. Why, you ask? The animatronics are haunted by the ghosts of children. One of the "rules" the ghosts follow is that will not under any circumstances bring deliberate harm to living children. The only reason the animatronics are hostile in the first place is because they hate all adults on principal, and with the only exceptions being the fourth game and the tenth game, every game has you playing as a "grown-up" employee of Fazbear Entertainment. And even then, there's a lore explanation why the Nightmares from FN@F 4 and the Glam Rocks from FN@F: Security Breach are suddenly attacking a child. The former are the physical manifestation of a coma victim's dying dreams (and thus aren't "real"), the latter are being hacked and controlled by a virus. So the ghost kids using their new mechanical bodies to act like kids is lore accurate.

Image from https://freddy-fazbears-pizza.fandom.com/wiki/Five_Nights_at_Freddy%27s_(Film)/Gallery

So let's answer the biggest question. Is this a good jumping on point for people who are new to Five Nights at Freddy's? Not really, no. This movie carries itself with a "by the fans, for the fans" mentality. It's goal isn't to convince newcomers to invest themselves in the rest of the series, but more so to give long time fans (like me) the cinematic experience they've been waiting literal years for. It does attempt to be newcomer friendly, with things like Vanessa explaining the lore and trying to have a somewhat straightforward narrative compared to the deliberately vague "figure it out yourself!" plot of the games. But there's that signature brand of Scott Cawthon weirdness, like how the drawings work or how the ghost kids can interact/harm Mike directly in his dreams Freddy Krueger style. And indeed, looking at other people's reviews of the FN@F movie, people who are already fans tend to rate the movie more highly than people jumping in for the first time. So I'll give two different ratings, just this once. It's an easy four stars out of five for people who already like Five Nights at Freddy's, but is probably closer to a 3 stars out of five for people who aren't already fans of it. There's enough effort and production quality to prevent the movie from going any lower than that. But again, already being a fan of the series does improve the enjoyment factor.

Five Nights at Freddy's is the property of Scott Cawthon, Steel Wool Studios, Blumhouse and Universal Pictures. None of the images shown here belong to me. Please support the official release.