i play freeware games

i didnt make notes in december sorry - _ - 05/01

so november/december were quite hard for me and while i played a couple games i didn't. uh. record them. looked through my firefox history for itch.io to write the below retrospective. properly

i played a lot of hempuli's recent output - babataire and babataire ex, mamono mower and cavern sweeper. they're all good. nice to have a version of cluj that doesnt need me to load up the zachtronics solitaire collection. i got really good at cavern sweeper, that one's fantastic

i played sylvie lime at the recommendation of a few strangers on the internet who seemed smart and who sold it quite well. i really, REALLY disliked it! i thought it controlled badly - buttons and physics did not match what i felt like i was inputting - the map layout was incomprehensible and the secrets too obscure, and the bosses far too hard. felt like when people misremember how difficult and obtuse nes games were. i played fucking simon's quest this month too and that turned out to be a FAR kinder game in terms of guidance towards its progress and secrets than this. i liked the visuals and items though and applaud its playfulness and unique approach. i really tried hard to like it - i think i closed and opened it about 7 times, and looked up the developers to see if i was missing something about their intent or style.

it... made me think a lot about Difficulty and Accessibility and how that relates to current discourse around, like, souls games.
in the menu, there were options to turn off the physics, and add multijumps, and i had to use every accessibility option to make the game feel even vaguely playable to me - and, despite that being an OPTION, an intentional act on the part of the developers, i felt strongly that i... did not want to play a game that had to gut itself so thoroughly to make it palatable to me? although i understood i wasn't going against the developer's intent by utilizing these options (and thought about why i even cared about their intent), i was still too cognizant of the fact the world was created with those movement mechanics i despised in mind. and, like, i feel that in a small, nes-like game, moving through the world is almost the only verb available to appreciate the game with. regardless of whether or not it was offered to me by the developers, what would i actually even be getting out of just out of boundsing myself to the next tileset? a huge part of and possibly the primary appeal of an audiovisually simple but mechanically difficult game is taming and mastering it. appreciate there is dialogue and plot in this game, but it wasn't offered to me within the first two bosses, so i had nothing to want out of continuing.
in the end, i decided that if i took the easy way out, offered or otherwise, i would be getting such a neutered experience that i wondered: why even go through the trouble of experiencing it myself? why not just watch a longplay?