Tag Archives: 2012

GOOD KID MAAD CITY

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good kid, m.A.A.d. City
Kendrick Lamar
2012

I wrote about good kid, m.A.A.d. city back in 2013 on my old blogspot – I gave it a 4/5, and the details beyond that are lost to time. Instead, what I remember is the first time my brother put Kendrick Lamar on in the car, playing “m.A.A.d. city” and “Swimming Pools (Drank)” for me, to which I said, “Jesus Christ, this guy has the worst voice I’ve ever heard, turn this shit off!” In the twelve years since, Kendrick hasn’t stopped doing voices and making silly noises – if anything, he became one of the first to break out of the very 00s conception of “great rap” as smooth, clean, always sounding cool and in-character with his willingness to scream, gasp, try on accents, use voice filters, and so on. I still think it was probably a bad first impression.

Kendrick’s rapping over a collection of great beats, largely by producers who hadn’t yet released a more iconic beat than the one which shows up on GKMC. He veers between beats which emphasize a jazzy, soulful vibe (like on “Sherane” or “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst”), beats which capture the more recent trap-adjacent gang beats (like “Backseat Freestyle” or “m.A.A.d. city,”) and beats which lean into pop production (like “Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe” and “Swimming Pools (Drank).” He’s synthesizing twenty years of history in an album and only introducing explicit nostalgia once or twice – nothing hits harder than the almost parodic beat switch on “m.A.A.d. city,” a full-blown g-funk pastiche that highlights how much he’s avoided that exact sound while telling this Compton gang story.

GKMC occupies an interesting space in Kendrick’s discography – it’s his first unquestioned masterpiece, an album that has only grown in esteem since its release, and yet it’s also been overshadowed by his follow-up To Pimp A Butterfly, pretty inarguably the most acclaimed rap album of the 2010s. That album is Kendrick’s great poetic project, centered on a spoken word poem eventually placed in conversation with archival recordings of Tupac. He’d win the Pulitzer for the next album, DAMN., which balances ambitious structural poetry and intense political commentary with radio friendly pop.

By contrast, GKMC is much more cinematic in its structure. It relies heavily on skits which tell a pretty clear narrative story, albeit a nonlinear one, about a young Kendrick going out with gang-affiliated friends and getting involved in gang violence. After the narrative concludes on “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst,” there’s a coda in “Real” and a sort of pop credits song in “Compton.” The album has a few explicit story songs – two of the first are “Sherane A.K.A. Master Splinter’s Daughter” and “The Art of Peer Pressure,” which highlight the album’s ability to use specificity rather than the abstract to bring forward thematic depth. This is hardly new, but there are times the album is trying to gesture at the universal or existential, and these moments often grab less than just the story of Kendrick meeting a girl.

Almost nobody in rap has a more detailed collection of Genius pages than Kendrick Lamar, so I won’t do the work of dissecting the thematic range of this album. To be honest, that also isn’t a huge part of the album’s appeal to me. Kendrick has ascended to a top shelf rapper with GKMC, but compared to where he’s heading, he still too often gets caught up in showing off, making refrains of wordy, somewhat obvious images. The criticisms of Kendrick as self-appointed martyr have to start here, at least by the verse ending line “I was straight tweakin’, the next weekend we broke even/I made allegiance that made a promise to see you bleedin’/You know the reasons, but still I’ll never know my life/Kendrick a.k.a. “Compton’s Human Sacrifice,” on “m.A.A.d. City” – but they should probably start earlier, too. At some level, Kendrick doesn’t have his balance of subtext down yet, and focusing too much on this album’s thematic depth has always set it at odds with how I think it’s best enjoyed.

Kendrick Lamar at Bonnaroo, 2013

The fact is that no matter how wordy the choruses get to be, he has already mastered the sonics of lyricism. His choice of words on paper is occasionally precocious – but in the ear, it flows so smoothly. He creates rhythms and grooves in the flow other rappers can’t come close to matching. This is the masterstroke of fan favorite “Money Trees,” which is simultaneously a recap of the four previous tracks, a song which skates through all their thematic concerns with confidence, and yet never feels redundant or overstuffed because it’s just pure pleasure. He’s playful on this song without having to lean into a stunt or high concept, and while the high concept of a song like “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” obviously captures the critical opinion, there’s a reason a song like this became such a fan favorite.

Now. That’s not to say I don’t love “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst.” This song combines every strength Kendrick’s taken advantage of throughout the album. The first half of the song uses the specificity of story songs to bring out an incredibly well-observed series of grievances and reflections. Three verses from three perspectives reflect on the battle between wanting to be taken seriously and remembered vs. the insecurity and threat being captured offers. Maybe none are better than Keisha’s sister’s verse, where she lays into Kendrick for the judgmental, inexperienced verses of his mixtape/studio debut section.80, frustrated with Kendrick trying to profit off her late sister’s life and projecting his own judgments on her. Kendrick reuses that structure on “Reincarnated” on GNX, Kendrick’s newest album and maybe his most purely pleasurable album thus far. “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” has two beats that are as strong as any on the album, and these stories continue to offer the same control of voice that keeps Kendrick’s verses sonically textured and rhythmically complex. It is, without much contest, the most ambitious song on the album, and it shines.

Kendrick has remained rap’s greatest storyteller, both on and off the mic. His victory in the war on Drake came from his ability to control the narrative, even as people rightfully question his willingness to continue to work with abusive men as credibly dangerous. He’s walked this narrative of the rap poet laureate along the way, but for many people, what he lost after good kid maad city was his ability to just also make fun, accessible music, writing more for critics and intellectuals than for the streets he purports to write about. I feel like GNX is a full circle moment for that reason, eschewing the cinematic storytelling of good kid maad city and focusing fully on delivering great songs, some of them just silly and fun, some of them more emotionally resonant. I love Pulitzer Prize Winner Kendrick Lamar, but I can’t imagine fans of this album aren’t glad it finally feels like he’s home again.

KEY TRACKS: “Money Trees,” “m.A.A.d. city,” “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst”
CATALOG CHOICE: To Pimp a Butterfly, GNX
NEXT STOP: Alligator Bites Never Heal, Doechii
AFTER THAT: The ArchAndroid, Janelle Monae

SPELUNKY

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SPELUNKY
Mossmouth
2012

As much as I believe in the infinite potential of video games, the emotional range and experimental play I’ve seen in the medium, I will betray all those values for the belief in running around as a funny little guy. For the past decade, I’ve pretty faithfully answered “What’s your favorite video game?” with the HD version of Spelunky. The first time I played the shareware version of Spelunky was the night before the HD version dropped in 2012 – I played until sunrise, when the HD game released, bought it, and then played for another two hours before falling asleep. It was the Fourth of July.

In Spelunky, you play as a little explorer who runs and jumps sort of like Mario. You explore short levels and collect useful items (like extra bombs, spiky boots, a jetpack!) and treasure while dodging creatures and traps. It’s all very Indiana Jones, complete with your primary weapon being a whip, and fighting off snakes and spiders feeds later into yetis and man-eating plants. Every time you play, the levels are randomly generated using the best random level generation algorithm I’ve ever seen. They combine small, familiar handcrafted elements with enough care that every game feels unique and yet still thoughtful and intentional with each experience.

The randomness is partly so rewarding because the game is so damn hard. To beat a standard game of Spelunky, you only need to complete sixteen levels, each with a loose time limit of two minutes and thirty seconds before an unkillable lethal ghost will chase you out of them. For your first hundred plays, you might not make it out of the first four-level zone, the caves. It’s not that Spelunky is unfair – once you learn the game’s rules, you can almost always tell when you’re at risk of taking a hit. But the margin for error is just so slim, with only four hearts of health and (without a lot of game knowledge) the inability to gain more than one heart back per level. You will blow yourself up, jump into arrow traps, walk into bats, throw a pot under your feet and run into the snake inside it expecting gold.

One of the funniest things about Spelunky is a good death. You have so much direct control of your character in Spelunky, and so deaths always feel like something you’ve done. The game’s physics engine has such clear rules that you’ll find yourself shot by an arrow, bounced around the level by its momentum, falling into a pond with piranhas and being eaten alive. The game keeps a camera on your corpse even on the Game Over screen summarizing your run, fully aware that a good death only motivates the player more. This same spirit is at the heart of the love for games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring. Rather than being frustrated at the end of a good run, you simply have to laugh.

I have to admit that for my favorite game of all time, I think it’s pretty ugly. The game’s visual language is incredibly legible, with pretty instant recognition of every creature or trap the game throws at you. But it’s a hodgepodge of adventure movie pastiche, with giant scorpions and a big evil Anubis and thoughtless visual references to tiki, Hinduism, and tribal cultures. I love Spelunky – Spelunky could be better. I still appreciate that it’s colorful and easy to read, but I can imagine a version of this game that didn’t play in an intentionally retrograde milieu.

A dangerous moment in the Ice Caves, death likely on the horizon.

Retrograde doesn’t apply to all retro, though – the game’s soundtrack by Eirik Surhke is one of my all-time favorites. Its heavy use of the Yamaha DX7 creates a direct throughline to the Sega Genesis Yamaha YM2612 soundchip, iconic for its warm bouncy bass. However, using a proper DX7 gives the game a sonic clarity a lot of those high compression Genesis games lacked – it allows the game to sound like the best version of a contemporary to Streets of Rage or Sonic the Hedgehog. The compositions vary wildly between midtempo jazz, vibey synth soundscapes, and the intense prog anxiety of Jungle B. The fact that I still admire a lot of this music after so much playtime speaks to its generally high quality.

In 2020, Mossmouth released Spelunky 2, a lovingly made game I’ve never been able to connect to. Something about the game language and aesthetic went beyond my relationship to Spelunky. It feels to me like a game designed for speedrunners and challenge runners of the original game. I never became that player – even with all my time spent playing Spelunky, I still only eke out a win one in every three or four plays, and that’s satisfying enough for me. Part of my relationship with games will probably always be reaching the top 15% or so of the player population and never progressing to the point where I need to conquer the absolute peak of mastery to prove myself. I like the stage where I’m being resourceful, scrappy. The first Spelunky has kept me on my toes for over a decade. I hope that feeling never ends.

RHYTHM HEAVEN FEVER

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RHYTHM HEAVEN FEVER
Nintendo SPD
2012
Wii

I love rhythm games, and I think it’s fascinating the way they create challenging gameplay. For most listeners, music is not inherently interesting because it’s hard to perform. Yngwie Malmsteen is not a more popular guitarist than Jack White – Art Tatum isn’t inherently more beloved than Dave Brubeck. Games based on pop music run into this problem pretty fast, with the highest difficulties basically always being occupied by blast beat metal or hardcore techno. The ceiling is a combination of speed and variable notes that make for a pretty niche listening experience. At some point, it represents difficulty for difficulty’s sake. Guitar rhythm games require being able to powerslide and fingerpick through borderline illegible solos – dance rhythm games have so many notes flying at the screen their order has to be memorized in slow motion.

Nintendo’s Rhythm Heaven franchise is pretty notoriously difficult despite stripping out a lot of that complexity. In Rhythm Heaven Fever, the franchise’s best game before the pivot to “greatest hits” collections from the first three games, there are only two commands. You either press the A button, or you press the A and B button at the same time. The speed also never gets especially high, either, largely set around 130 BPM. Where Rhythm Heaven Fever derives its difficulty is precision – the game requires on-beat hits without the sloppiness of some more forgiving rhythm games, and its pass/fail criteria can create brick walls if you’re really struggling to get the rhythm down.

The music itself is just delightful, veering wildly in genre from city pop to bossa nova to hard rock. Because the difficulty is only tied to the rhythm itself, the game’s later stages are able to vary far more in terms of genre, with the game’s later levels including hip-hop, 80s power pop, video game chiptunes, hard rock – it’s much more feasible to play with an interesting rhythmic challenge in a typical genre than to introduce difficult notation.

The game pairs every minigame with a unique, fantastical cartoon that the music is soundtracking. The mascot monkeys that appear here and there throughout the game might be playing golf or operating a watch – Karate Joe needs to land his punches on beat to keep in shape – a cat and dog are keeping a badminton volley going while piloting biplanes. The visuals are absurd, full of jokes and color, and are themselves such an aesthetic treat for playing well. Sometimes they can be so engaging that it’s actually better to just close your eyes and feel the music, but learning the visual cues can also help mark your place in the song itself.

At a time when the odd side of Nintendo’s magic has somewhat waned in favor of iterative sequels and huge, complex games like Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, a game as simple as Rhythm Heaven Fever seems especially far away. Nintendo has chosen to grow alongside its players, creating experiences that are deeply appealing to people who either already intimately know how deep video games can be or who have a child’s time to learn. Even getting into a game of Mario Kart 8 requires building a vehicle, one that has stats, and engaging with that system without attention can result in creating a kart that’s no fun to play. I admire Rhythm Heaven Fever because it takes only two or three sentences to explain the controls you’ll use throughout, and each individual rhythm game contains tutorials to ensure the player knows how to interact before beginning. And yet, without any fear, Rhythm Heaven Fever also throws those players directly into the deep end, demanding that internal metronome be more precise than a lot of the rock legends of the 60s and 70s. It’s a wonderful dynamic that creates a sense of humor in play, matched by the cartooning you see on screen. It’s Nintendo embracing absurdity, and I hope it’s not the last we see of those funky monkeys.

FEZ

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FEZ
Polytron
2012
All platforms

Fez is the first video game I had to start keeping a notebook to complete. On the surface, Fez is a classic pixel art puzzle platformer with a twist – all of its 2D environments actually exist in 3D, and by hitting the controller triggers, you can rotate the world to another perspective and see a new part of the level. The primary action is jumping around collecting golden cubes (or, for extra challenge, the purple anti-cubes.) Collect all of them and ascend into the monolithic hypercube for a light show akin to Beyond the Infinite from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The world of Fez is a brightly colored collection of floating islands, the primary sensibility being comic. In the town where your avatar Gomez lives, his neighbors largely deny the presence of a third dimension, living a life unaware of a world beyond home (the door is on the back of the 3D island.) There is a factory zone where little billboards in some sort of cube language are accompanied by portraits of Gomez’s Doughboy-like kinsmen. Little pixel frogs ribbit and little pixel gulls caw. The animals, little machines, and bouncy mushrooms are all animated with the kind of charm that rewards attention to small details.

But whatever is Beyond the Infinite is encroaching on this world. Breaking into the third dimension seems to have broken something – as you continue to explore, more and more of the world crumbles into what seem to be black holes, tears in the fabric of reality that Gomez can disappear into. (The game is very forgiving with respawns, finding whatever solid ground you last set foot on and quickly depositing Gomez back to where he can stand passively.) The majority of the sense of peril in this game stems from the early career score by John Carpenter synth descendant Disasterpeace (It Follows, Mini Metro, Under the Silver Lake.) Some tracks are peaceful, others majestic, others energizing – but when he aims for horror, the sense of dread that envelops everything still chills me.

Math class.

After the credits, Fez loops back into a “new game plus” that offers a new first-person perspective and new rewards for earning all 32 golden cubes and all 32 anti-cubes. Doing so involves ascending into Fez’s true difficulty. Fez is not, at its core, a puzzle platformer. The game transcends into a game about archeology. It involves looking for ciphers and decoding ancient language. It involves reading ancient star maps to understand how ancestors looked to the stars. It involves, well, taking notes. The obvious comparison point for games critics in 2012 was Myst. But I haven’t played more than a half hour of Myst – when indie games center on this kind of meta-puzzle, like the brilliant Outer Wilds or this year’s Animal Well, I compare them to Fez.

There is something so immensely rewarding to me about this kind of language game. I’m bad at learning languages in real life – I think in English. I recognize our language’s many, many faults and confusions, but it is the system I understand. While Fez does have a literal language cipher (one that conforms to English directly) it also offers other, less linguistic symbols. Fez doesn’t just challenge the player to solve puzzles – it challenges the player to learn How To Learn. It invites you into a game world with very limited information, gives you everything you need to solve it and hands you the reins to pursue as much knowledge as you care to collect.

The maddening thing about a cipher game is that it is a one-and-done experience. I cannot un-ring the bell. Walking through Fez’s world, the solutions that were once obscure and required meticulous attention to detail are immediately obvious. Being in Fez’s game world is pleasant, listening to Disasterpeace’s score. Some of its platforming challenges are rewarding in the same way replaying a Mario game can be. There are moments of knowing I’ve solved something before but not remembering the exact solution. I used to consider Fez the greatest game I’d ever played. Not being able to recapture that experience will sort of always crystallize it as the best game I played when I was 20 years old.

Fez was a five year passion project, and one of the early examples of a breakout indie game. Unfortunately, Fez ended up being the end of a sentence for its developers rather than the beginning. Even before release, lead designer Phil Fish was considered by entitled gamers to be a blowhard who would never release his game. Then, Fez came out and was extremely buggy, resulting in dismissal from would-be fans (the game works great now.) And then Fish became one of the few male voices standing up to #GamerGate’s bigotry, eventually resulting in him exiting the game industry. Fish will likely never make a game again. The spirit of Fez lives on, but how quickly we silence our own luminaries.

Key Text Introduction: Style Savvy Trendsetters

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May be an image of one or more people, footwear and text that says 'Approx. Budget $1,500.00 I really want to get into edgy fashion. No. 00230 StageDive Biker Jacket Left 1 $588.00 Total $918.00 Outfit'

Fashion is rarely the subject of a game. Now, fashion, wardrobe choices, character editors, those are a massive part of many RPGs, sims, and minigames within larger genre titles, but fashion itself is rarely the focus a game drives itself on. Style Savvy Trendsetters, the second in the Style Savvy series, keeps that focus centered – the next entry, Style Savvy Styling Star, branches out into the pop idol industry in an attempt to give the game a clearer sense of direction. Trendsetters instead uses this more freeform milieu to create a setting for the game’s real focus – spiritual fulfillment and relationship building. When I look at people comparing the franchise’s entries, there’s a strong contingent who never were satisfied with the next two titles. Unfortunately, I never played them myself, probably for the same reasons this game was ignored by so many in the first place.

The core gameplay of Style Savvy: Trendsetters, the outfit designer, is fairly simple. You collect clothing for your shop, and then work with customers to find outfits that work with their needs in terms of budget and style. Each clothing item or accessory is separated by where on the body it is worn (there are three layers for shirts, for example, separated into whether they function as a base layer or as outerwear.) As you select items on the touch screen, they populate onto a mannequin on the top, building the outfit as it tallies the sale total against the customer’s budget. When you’ve assembled your suggestion, the customer will decide whether or not to make the purchase. Rinse, repeat, make cute outfits, meet new people.

Your stylist, a self-created avatar, is hired on as the assistant at a local women’s clothing boutique. A few days into your job, the shop’s owner decides to pass control of the store to you – having gone through the tutorial of assembling outfits, you’ll now be responsible for selecting the store’s stock and style, keeping up with current fashion trends, hiring new assistants, and directly assisting customers with selecting new clothes that meet their needs. The day-to-day operation ends up serving as a fairly satisfying shop management simulation, where sales feel personalized and more detailed than just setting a price on an item and letting the day pass. Clothing recommendations require keeping in mind elements of style and seasonal weather, which give you reasons to sell more than “the most profitable” items in your shop – and every customer will keep what you sell them, so you want to try your best to only sell things you actually think look good!

May be an image of standing and text

This structure ends up providing a drip feed for new story content, most of it focused on your relationships with your customers or fellow workers throughout the city at local cafes, makeup shops, and so on. But inklings drip in about your shop’s former owner trying to become a superstar fashion Some number of weeks into building relationships, creating aesthetics, and exploring the city for social opportunities, you’ll gain the ability to select and outfit men’s clothing at your boutique as well, and eventually enter your boutique into fashion competitions in an effort to expand your store’s brand.

How many weeks? Well, I honestly don’t remember. There…isn’t a lot of writing about Style Savvy Trendsetters on the internet. A handful of reviews exist from the time of release – one of the five on MetaCritic is print only, and another links out to a site that no longer has reviews whatsoever. There’s only one in-depth customer list on GameFAQS – and zero walkthroughs, clothing lists, or competition guides. I remembered that Leigh Alexander used to tweet about the game – I’m fairly confident that’s how I originally found out about it! – but I can’t find anything in my searches now. This lack of guidance ends up leaving the discoveries of the game feeling even more special, more intimate. Style Savvy: Trendsetters might be one of gaming’s best kept secrets. If so, I’m glad I get the chance to share it with you.

May be a cartoon of 1 person, standing and text

Let’s walk through a short play session, maybe twenty minutes or so. I’ll boot up my file on the third copy of this game I’ve bought over the years, which I’m probably about three hours into playing.

In my shop right now, I have Shea, my assistant. Per the game’s tooltip, “She’s a bit of a scatterbrain but works hard to make up for it.” I like her updo and denim vest, but the black-and-creme striped top she wears under it doesn’t quite line with the buttons – I have an option to change her outfit, so I suggest a different striped top, this one pale cyan and white, with a small blue bow at the collar. She thanks me for the suggestion, and I move back on to my customers.

First, there’s Guinevere, a serious-looking woman in a black blazer and knee-length straight skirt. Checking the tooltip, “she has asthma but is training every day for a half marathon.” This isn’t her first visit – she has a budget today of $300. Checking in on my other customers, I have a first timer in a cute soft outfit and glasses (“She slathers on the sunblock because her skin is so sensitive”) and India (“She’s a waitress at the cafe and has a serious thing for dinosaurs.”) I take too long deciding and find out for the first time that each game day is processing on a timer – it’s not about how many customers you choose to help, but how long you take. Now the pressure is on. It’s now nighttime, and my customers have changed over!I’ll help this next first-timer. There’s now a customer with long dark blue hair and blue polka-dot dress. She has a budget of $800, so we’re picking her quickly. Her name is Wren: “Listen up! I have some great news for this city! There’s going to be a new makeup studio opening near here! Everyone around here is going to be so gorgeous! Once it’s open, you’ll be able to buy makeup there!” Makeup is highlighted in yellow – a new feature is being added to the game. Wren asks me for a feminine skirt as her first purchase – let’s help her out.

The game opens directly to the skirts menu – it doesn’t highlight which skirts are “feminine,” though. To discover that, you either need to know your wholesaler and styles, or you can use the menu to highlight all the feminine items in stock at your store. Feminine in this game means “adult, but not formal.” It’s a style I’d affiliate with business casual. Noticing her leather brown vest, I pick out a brown fluted-hem skirt from Marzipan Sky. It’s well within her budget, so I’ll ask her to try it on rather than take a look first – it’s a double-down mechanic, going all in rather than offering choices.

That feeling of putting on a new piece of clothing you love – you see it in your customers every time. They receive these suggestions as an opportunity for a Sailor Moon style transformation sequence – they are empowered to be their best selves in the clothing you’ve selected. “I decided on a whim to try it on, and I was blown away! It’s perfect for me! This look is just what I was going for! So sophisticated!” She isn’t buying anything else today, but sometimes these sales will lead to customers asking for an entire new outfit. You’ll see them in clothes they’ve bought from you going forward, mixed and matched with what they already own.

May be an anime-style image of text

Eventually, as a player, you come to know these keywords, these wholesalers, and, yes, these customers. They’ve written hundreds of customers, and compared with Animal Crossing, there’s a lot less shared dialogue between them than you might expect. Combine that with the number of events available in the game at an ever-expanding list of locales, and you end up with hundreds of hours you can spend long after your shop is 100% solvent.

What makes that gameplay so appealing is how much of the writing is geared toward people who actually behave, well, like people. Some of them have mundane problems, like a lack of self confidence, or job dissatisfaction, or a history of dismissing their ex-girlfriends’ love for dressing well. Those relationships reflect something very real, which is the way putting effort into your own appearance can make you realize your own self-worth, or how valuable putting effort into something you care about might be. Other characters are bubbly and fun from the jump, and their conversations tend toward being like easier, occasionally more superficial friendships.

In addition, I have to say, it’s a blast to play a game where the clothes actually look good. I always love to notice details like the button-work on a cardigan, the stitching on a pair of pants, the little accent stripes on a scarf. All of it suits the game’s character models well, who look very much like classical fashion school hand-drawn models, the sort you might see in traditional design drawing. I like the music too – catchy, easy-going music, mostly jazzy, a little bit elevator-y at times. But I spend a lot of time with the game with the music off, mostly because it is such an easy pick-up-and-play title.

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There are obvious limitations to this game’s appeal. While I think the game does a decent job presenting racially diverse customers to the player, there is absolutely no body diversity – everyone is shaped like Taylor Swift or Andrew Garfield, reinforcing a monopoly of the thin and slender in fashion that many of its players won’t see themselves in. For a game with a fairly thoughtful approach to how strange and wonderful people can be in the city, there’s also not any explicit queer representation within the game, which is something I’d like to see them approach in a sequel. And, for all that great clothing can do for a person, the game frames that clothing in a sort of utopian capitalism, with no real concern given to where clothing comes from beyond “a warehouse wholesaler” and “a smartly selected boutique”, leaving it fairly unconcerned with any serious consumerist critique.

Still, I love this fantasy. I love living in a world where I think about expression. I love playing in a world where problems are easily solved. I love looking at clothes, and looking at those clothes on people who are nice and who I want to dress. Maybe someday there will be the Style Savvy clone that Stardew Valleys the original and builds even more into a queer utopia. When it does, I will remember this game.

You can expect me to write about this one again someday, now that you’ve been introduced.

Style Savvy Trendsetters is only available on the Nintendo 3DS, and currently sells at $39.99 digitally in the US. You can also find the game for significantly cheaper as a physical copy on online storefronts. The game is localized as New Style Boutique in the PAL region, and Wagamama Fashion: Girls Mode Yokubari Sengen! in Japan.