i've VERY recently found that one of my favorite setups to a video game is 'hey, congrats, you're hired for a new job!' hsh absolutely nails the delights of sitting in a little cubicle and answering phone calls, which i think is a simple and ideal job. the sort of puzzle solving gameplay hsh provides is perfect for my brain - you're presented with a description of someone's called in issue, and you're tasked with sending a little information kit to send to them, which ranges from... mice, ants, big slugs, little guys who clean (and turn into fucked up dudes who fucking GET you if you displease them), plants, not plants(?), the cellar wizard who moves in and makes your basement wet... it goes on!

i don't really want to spoil all of the phone calls and the funny guys in this game, but i think a lot of the attention to detail is fun! being the GAMER that i am i hardly ever really failed and if i ever did it was over fairly inconsequential things, but whenever you fail and give a caller the incorrect information, you get a call back that says that you were wrong, pretty much. since they were always inconsequential stuff on my end, i never really got any except like 2, but failing when it comes to ACTIVELY dangerous and malicious entities are CRAZY. you get to hear people just straight up getting mauled if you fail and it's serious... or just get called and yelled at that they didn't fix the mice in their house.

on THAT note, the voice acting for this game can be... like, extremely hit or miss. some of the voice acting is STELLAR, with may's call (which's details i won't spoil) proving to be ACTIVELY upsetting and stomach turning. i also DEARLY adore our beloved supervisor carol, especially as her role progresses during the story, but... i will say, a few of the calls feel either very underwhelming when it comes to the pressing matter at hand, or otherwise just feels very much like a forced 'i am 20 something and i am trying to imitate and old person', but what can you do? i do think for sure that the good voice acting outweighs the bad by a lot.

my only like... actual gripe with the game beyond that is that the game is very short! i do think that the 15$ price tag is pretty fair considering this is a small dev project, and considering that the presentation and quality of the game itself is VERY good, but it can easily be finished in a roughly 3 hour game session. in a perfect world i would like a little more crumbs...

HOWEVER, my general takeaway is that this game fucking rules. if you're a bit :/ about the price tag, definitely catch this game when it's on sale (if you buy it and then refund it after finishing despite liking it i will GET you). i'm definitely very interested in seeing more from this dev, especially if they decide to do any work in this setting!

... ON THAT NOTE, literally right as i'm about to finish up this review, they just released 1. an endless mode which i will add an addendum to this review on once i get the chance to play it, and 2. the steam page for their next game, please insert disk, which from the couple screenshots ALRIGHT delights me. ANYWAYS.

check out the game here, and if you decide to grab it good luck at your first shift!
our eyes rest soundly upon thee!

[05/31/2024] EDIT: played the endless mode! pretty fun :) had a small bug towards launch but it's neat. it adds a timer that starts ticking down faster as you go further in so you better bet you know your entries like the back of your hand or you WILL get caught out. good times!

picayune dreams is one of those games that kind of draws you in by a fun premise and artstyle before spiralling into a deep video game obsession that attaches onto you like a parasite for a month and will leave you thinking about it for a very long time afterwards. i'm writing this review fairly late from my actual time in playing this game, but WOW YEAH i can remember a lot of my adoration for this game very clearly. between the stellar art style and the way the game draws you in, this game is unbelievably fun.

picayune dreams is a perfectly struck balance between a bullet hell game like touhou and a bullet heaven game like vampire survivors. you play as an amnesiac android name cyl, wearing a cybernetic suit that refuses to let her die, reviving her every single time she falls in battle so that she may complete a nebulous 'mission' which she doesn't remember. you're left scrambling to defeat hordes of enemies with your limited arsenal of weapons you get at the beginning, moving up as you unlock new and better weaponry from 'struggling to get past the first boss' to 'actively ripping your way through hordes of enemies without even really thinking', all towards the goal of completing your nebulous mission. as you defeat each boss you unlock their 'memory drive', bringing you into a strange, dreamlike sequence reminiscent of narratively driven rpgmaker games, which reveal the story of the game and the true nature of your goal.

the gameplay itself you'll probably somewhat understand if you play vampire survivors. you automatically shoot bullets, and you're in charge of pointing and directing a lot of the shots. as you gather experience from defeating enemies, you get experience, and getting enough allows you to choose an item from a pool of items you unlock as you play. UNLIKE vampire survivors, those monsters got teeth!!! different kinds of enemies have different little caveats to them that differentiate them from the others. one moves very quickly in your direction but has very low health, one is slow but tanky and barely recieves knockback, one will shoot bullets at you, one will shoot bullets at you but faster this time (this guy sucks)... the list goes on! additionally, you have legitimate boss fights with proper patterns, which really force you to get better at dodging. thankfully, i think picayune very nicely racks up the difficulty for these, and as you keep attempting run after run, you eventually do manage to climb over the tougher obstacles they put in front of you. the upgrade arsenal is a real nice help too! there's a bunch of different kinds of weapons and accessories you can play around with. flamethrower is my best friend :)

on that note, can i mention that the design choice for weapon descriptions is crazy? to figure out what a weapon does in game before you pick it, you have to decipher psuedo-code that tells you what exactly the weapon does. while i definitely get that can be frustrating for some people and might be a negative point, i am filled with nothing but joyful wonder at this concept. can you guess what this means?



you eventually can choose to enter harder areas to take advantage of the higher enemy spawns for experience, but have to deal with the caveats of stage rules - sometimes, an undying horrific force will follow you around the stage, sometimes enemies are faster but so are your bullets, sometimes enemies are infected with parasites that emerge and attack you when you kill their host... it goes on! you get statues at some point as well, each one giving different effects. you can gamble your black holes, which destroy all bullets and normal enemies it makes contact with, in exchange for other items, increase your stats but increase your curse, which spawns more enemies and sometimes spawns harder enemies, or cure the curse you've accumulated. it adds for some nice rng to each run, giving a nice amount of variety ingame through what levels you choose to enter and what statues you prioritize

i'm not very well versed in bullet hell games and i tend to struggle a lot with them, and i very much did struggle when i first started playing picayune dreams roughly around the beginning of march. but by the time i finished i wound up pretty confident in my abilities and have only really gotten better at the game since then. i've been off and on attempting a slow and steady climb towards the true ending (which this game has by the way), and yeah, it's still as great as i remember it! even if you're otherwise intimidated by the bullet hell genre, i highly recommend giving it a shot (it has a demo!)

i'd also LOVE to give a shout out to the accessability options this game has in lowering the transparency of weapons - god, they really burn my eyes once you get enough weapons that you are crunching mobs down into dust before they can even hope to get close to you. thank you guys so much :')

the game itself is made by a very small team of people - those being stepford, andyland, and milkypossum, with their publisher being 2 left thumbs. you probably know the former two from their other game they're currently working on, endacopia! (and if you don't you should definitely check that one out while you're here, though it's not done at time of writing!) you can see the bleedover in artstyle between the two games, and god andyland's art really makes the creativity of the designs stand out - not only in cyl herself, but the bosses and enemy design too! check out some of these guys i like :)



i think almost UNDENIABLY that a gigantic charm point of the game is its soundtrack, composed by the incredibly skilled artist milkypossum. between some of the calmer ambient tracks that play reprises of the boss's themes during the slower-paced story based segments, to the increased pace of the music in early waves with a trance-like soundtrack that still keeps you on your toes, to the more chaotic energy of the boss tracks that perfectly suppliment your scramble to avoid the bullet hell that each one of them impose. and god, the final boss tracks. GOD the final boss tracks... i almost don't want to post any of the songs in the soundtrack because it feels like a genuine crime to spoil even the smallest part of it, but if it can hook you in any further than i've already tried to, please check out the first boss's theme, ultraviolet!



i've talked a lot already, and i think i've said everything i want to say about the game! it's really got everything! roguelike elements, a short but very stellar story, lots of goals to climb towards even after beating the game the first time, daily missions, secret bosses (try exploding a gambler's statue!), and even MORE updates on the way with 1.0.1.0! i have nothing but love and affection for this game, and the best part of all is that the game is ONLY 4.99$ USD !!! my only real complaint is a lack of lategame content, which is being worked on in that new update anyways!

if anything i've said has interested you, please grab picayune dreams whenever you get a chance! your mission is crucial to us all! do not forget that you mu
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the cool thing about writing these reviews is i can do whatever i want with them which means if i want to write these reviews terribly out of order i can! it also means that i get to talk to you about whatever i want and not really care about however i want to structure it, or just make it abhorrently long and then make the next review relatively short if i want to. if you want to hear if i'd recommend it, yes. absolutely yes. if you don't care about seeing my full opinion, go to steam right now this instant and buy this game. thank you!

for everyone ELSE, hi! what's up! let's talk about skating!

i grew up in THE Holy Grounds of skating when i was a kid, you know, the city where tony hawk came from? while i was a bit late for the golden age of skating down here, the waves left behind from that legacy have been sticking around ever since. i'd watch kids struggle to land harder and harder tricks, sometimes fall on their ass, and get right back up again. there was a mini skate park right next to my middle school. lots of my friends biked or boarded to get anywhere - and though my parents were wayyy too overprotective to let me get into it, i felt a deep love for the sport itself that bled over from my friends into me. it's hard to say that skating hasn't made an impact on me in some form - fuck, i'm sure it's hard for anyone who grew up around where i lived to say that skating didn't make an impact on us in general.

for the people who's parents were too nervous for their kids to skate, or for the people who wanted to shred that shit without breaking something when they fumbled, in came a whole damn genre of video game specifically to cater to a growing population of fanatics for the deep craze skating brought to society. i had a veritable backlog of these sorts of games to rip into when i got into gaming, though i don't think any particular game stuck out to me as much as...

come on, you can't get through a review about this video game without talking about it's biggest inspirtation. let's talk about jet set radio real quick!



jet set radio was one of those video games i discovered on the internet during my weird little romps through the internet, categorizing it into a subsection of video game in my mind of 'video games that i don't really see people talk about but i thought were cool', alongside klonoa and NiGHTS, and didn't end up taking a look into it for a hot minute because i was busy with checking out the other games (expect something about klonoa later this year on that note!) through a perfectly legal console and NOT an emulator that my dad helped me install to show me video games he'd think i'd like as a kid, like spyro: year of the dragon and donkey kong 64. the aesthetic style of every goddamn second of that game stands out to every person who's ever played that game, and it probably will until the end of time. it's standout unique soundtrack was the result of sega taking a gamble, bringing in a small-time composer in their company who'd only been working for two years prior: a little known artist named hideki naganuma.



god fucking damn. hideki's breakout piece of music defined so many influences in upcoming inspirations of all sorts of different artists. his use of samples in strange, disjointed ways serve as a fantastic companion to his many musical tracks. voices chant alongside industrial grinding sounds, odd clips of english spliced together that only vaguely resemble spoken words play over a relaxed guitar, and cheerful salsa music carries a bright tune while the weirdest collection of samples you've heard in your life play together while you focus really, really hard on a level and don't really register what in the world is happening in this track until afterwards. naganuma's work has influenced COUNTLESS modern artists who play in sampling work, with a lot of people even deliberately creating a music style taking a spin on his own sample-heavy work. and it rules!!! and they all rule !!!!

the pure aesthetic legacy of jet set radio has lived on throughout the years as well. a lot of people hold a LOT of fondness for the cell shaded artstyle of the game, especially the fun character design. people hold lots of fond memories of skating around the streets of tokyo-to and tagging cars, cityscapes - hell, even other people. it's hard not to long for this game's entire artistic style to completely lock in as standout, stylish, and unique even by modern standards. while i, personally, think the movement and camera felt really jank then and feels a billion times more jank now, this doesn't really change the fact that this game is deeply loved, and even with my gripes, i hold a lot of love for it, too.

unfortunately, sega... just kind of didn't really make video games of a lot of their older, DEEPLY beloved franchises. i guess they're doing it now, but they're a bit late to the plate. that's not to say they didn't remember them - quite the contrary! you'll find beat in a gigantic chunk of sega games with crossover items/skins, and they still sell merch of the series, but we haven't had a jet set radio game since it's sequel, future, in 2002 - 22 years prior to the date of writing!! a lot of people were scrambling for a fix that this game left them itching for - something that let them return to that nostalgia they had years ago, and at the point in time brc started brewing, pretty much everyone had lost hope that sega was ever going to do it.

so, if sega wasn't gonna be the ones to do it...

enter team reptile. one of my favorite indie studios in the modern era, team reptile is a dutch studio who's previous works included megabyte punch, a beat em up where you customize your own robotic character with parts, and lethal league, a game that i can only best describe as a 'fighting game but there's rock paper scissors types of mindgames and also you fight with the fastest dodgeball on planet earth'. i played a lot of lethal league blaze on release since i already played a lot of the original lethal league on release (hello fellow doombox players), and was very eagerly awaiting team reptile's next excursion. another lethal league game? something in the same setting, maybe? i was looking for a fresh take on a strange society i've found an adoration for. i know, playing lethal league blaze for the story is crazy of me.

imagine my surprise when team reptile dropped THE freshest video game trailer i've seen in my life.



and now that i finally managed to get around to playing it? gotta say. i'm not gonna fucking forget about this video game for as long as i live!
the movement in this game feels GOOD AS HELL. while walking normally only really gets you so far, the movement in riding and grinding on rails gives you countless minor freedoms of movement mid-trick that feel excellent. you can use your boost in the air or on the ground while on board to do a trick that gives you more points, with the ground one giving you a little more time to recover in case you fumble and fall and need to get back on a rail or a signboard to keep your combo up. leaning into edges give a boost of movement that keep you moving quickly, and all of these little things make tricking feel great, and subsequently, make losing that combo feel DEVASTATING. nothing hurts me more on planet earth that having a super high combo on a map and fucking it all up because of something stupidly risky i did. conversely, riding the high of getting that high score and finally getting that high-score achievement per-map feels SO good.

there's some criticism to be had with the tricking system of this game - it's a little limiting in the amount of tricks you do, but imo it kind of gets outweighed by your score not really being attached to just your tricks, but your multiplier as well. besides, you have more options beyond JUST rail tricks. if you wanna slide for awhile before doing a sick jump back into a manual, you can, or you can focus on a segment with a lot of hard edges to lean into them and get a higher score multiplier rather than focus entirely on the tricks you're doing. you've got tricks you can do midair, on ground, etc. and the big, open nature of maps leaves you with lots of places to get that score multiplier up, which often means when you're focusing on getting combos with absurdly high scores, your real goal isn't gonna be only 'how many tricks can i get in?' it's also gonna be 'how do i efficiently get some fresh tricks into this combo i got going while i'm headed from one area to another to get more into my multiplier?' i get that can be a big detriment, but this game isn't JUST about the riding!

it's also about the fucking graffiti, baby !!!

graffiti pieces you throw up onto designated spots aren't picked from a pool or character based - when you start to tag a spot, you enter a brief freeze frame where you're presented with blinking lights, indicating the beginning of a pattern. every single art piece has a unique pattern - if you memorize a pattern, or just open the phone menu to look at the pattern as you start tagging, you can pretty much put down any tag you want at any point in time. i did it to memorize my favorite tag, mostly since red's design rules.

the sheer VARIETY in art here too means that you're definitely gonna find a couple standout pieces that stick in your brain. hell, i know i did. you unlock more designs as you go on, usually by collecting them throughout a level, and some of them are wedged in secret spots. i also REALLY adore the touch of getting the tags for the enemy crews too in the post game, which is super fun :) every single artist is credited on their individual piece on the graffiti menu, and it's really neat seeing all of the varied works from all sorts of different people. it ruels!

IT'S ALSO ABOUT THE... The Combat... aw man, the combat. brc is a stellar game in pretty much every regard EXCEPT the combat. i know why it's here - jsr had the cops coming after you, why not do it again? why not Also be able to beat up these dudes by cartwheeling into them? it Sounds sick conceptually, but in practice, the combat feels relatively clunky when it comes to the vast majority of enemies in the game. if i can help it, im just ignoring them and skating around about it. the formula is a bit simple in that combat begins in the second half of a stage after you've gotten more comfortable with it and its movement, which i do appreciate, and at some point after that a boss triggers which you need to handle.
except, at... one point, genuinely, i didn't realize i was actually in a boss fight and thought they were just introing new enemy units and just kept... skating ... ?? while being sniped at? i don't know, man. i literally ignore these guys that hard.

it genuinely, more than anything, feels like a lack of depth. im sure that you CAN make combat in a game like this feel good as hell, but the way it was implemented feels very unresponsive. you kinda just hit buttons until the cops explode. there's no real dodge, it's just kinda punch em until they fall over, sometimes they shoot at you, it's kinda... whatever? i think incorporating some more beat em' up elements with like more attacks or something would've helped a bit. idk. in it's current state it just feels a bit underbaked and kind of added in as more of an afterthought.
i will say though, combat with the bigger enemies DOES feel better. im specifically talking about these fuck off massive mech tanks, but the only reason why is, genuinely, because you're NOT just beating the shit out of them as you would the other enemies ingame, but you're actually engaging with skating + graffiti mechanics while clambering up them. it's a really nice difference compared to the vast majority of other enemies in the game.



thankfully, beyond combat i do think brc is a BANGER. some people don't feel very strongly about the story, and that's fine. it does have some small things to say but it's nothing especially earth-shattering, and you can feel the twists approaching. though, honestly, i did like it quite a bit despite that and i don't mind a story where you know what the twist is as it's coming since it makes all the little hints that point to it more interesting. though, if you just want to skate nd shit, you can easily just skip through it if you want to? but i like it and that's what matters, it's fun and doesn't let go of the smallest details it sets up :)

HERE WE GO... this is the part where i talk about the soundtrack, and GOD damn is it a crazy soundtrack. we've got THREE hideki naganuma tracks in here with DA PEOPLE being my favorite (bias), alongside a bunch of other crazy good artists. i LOVE kilowatt's entries especially with scraped on the way out for the dream levels in this game (19 year old song btw!!!), 2 mello's entry with i wanna kno also goes crazy too and the album it's a part of, sounds of tokyo-to future, is UNBELIEVABLY good. please go look at chainsaw funk it rules. proux's funk express is really good too, i love BXTREME's agua, and watchyaback! by wev is really damn good too. genuinely, if you have no interest in playing the game, i HIGHLY suggest checking out all of the musicians who worked on this game, because wow the variety in tracks here and just how GOOD they are is unbelievably crazy. in fact, here's just a yt playlist with the soundtrack. go crazy. for me, ok? :)

i think brc comes from a place of a lot of love for its inspiration, its artists, and graffiti as a whole. i think there's something to be said about taking inspiration vs just ripping a game, but brc is NOT trying to be jet set radio wholeheartedly. yes, the gameplay is very similar, and yes it is very clearly trying to emulate something like it, but brc is doing more than just trying to be jet set radio 3. i think on a very surface level it's easy to kind of dismiss the game as a ripoff rather than inspired, but between a lot of the gameplay tweaks just generally making it less of a pain than jsr (sorry i'm a little bit of a hater with jsr's gameplay), the music taking a different direction, major parts of the story, this game feels... a lot more down to earth than jsr is? of course it's fantastical, obviously, but i feel that a lot of the points it drives home feels a lot more personal to me.

graffiti is illegal. CRAZY statement to make. who could've forseen that. jsr and brc both know this very well and make it very clear that this is an art form that is detested by the police, desperately, as it's a sign of deliquency from the youth and is something of a poison to them. vandalism is a crime. it's something i heard a lot - but graffiti physically cannot exist without the society construed around it. one where 'good, legal street art' is something attainable only by the privledged who have a wide portfolio of art with the means and ability to create that art in a setting where they aren't persecuted. but what about the kids who get inspired by that art? what about the black and mexican artists who don't have anything except that spray can? those who don't have the money to spend on hundreds of dollars worth of canvases, of paint, of brushes and tools and all sorts of things you don't get access to when your parents are both working minimum wage?

however you might feel about graffiti in the real world, these writers exist as a product of the society we live in, where urban sprawl has dominated a lot of the lives of people, to the point where some cities feel more like concrete monoliths than living spaces to people. graffiti exists because of these places - a statement of someone crying out that they're here, they're making art and living in the same city you do, and they'll make that art whether or not society is willing to accomate them into them. it's an outcry that they're writing when they cannot write here, a clear defiance of the laws that define the cans and cannots. its a statement shared by a lot of different people, all shared when you spot a wall in the underpass absolutely adorned in tags over tags over tags. it is 'here we are, as artists, sharing that we are alive in this world together, and we are finding our own place within it in spite of everything making us insignificant in it'.

there's a particularly good piece of writing in the story, where a character decides to defy law and society alike, claiming the entire city as 'all city' by complete crushing force, a lofty goal of becoming THE artist of new amsterdam. during this exchange, one line really kind of just says my thoughts on the matter of graffiti in the real world. it sounds kind of weird and hypocritical to say that a crime shouldn't always be persecuted. after all, the label of a 'crime' exists purely in the best interest of society - so they say, anyways. but how much of a crime is art? sure, whatever, people write slurs and crass things and draw dicks and insult people with graffiti. fucking of course they do, people do that in all other forms of art as it is. but people also create fantastic works of art that get painted over and are lost forever. artists fucking die over this. pieces by dead artists get lost forever. but this doesn't stop people from pursuing their medium at all, a lot of people still create this art in complete spite of the society that says that this art is not an art that is sanctioned by the government, in spite of it being 'temporary'.

there are artists out there who will always make art. there are writers who will do anything in their power to let their voices be heard by someone, anyone at all, even if it's someone riding a bus through an underpass. they'll always exist. they cannot, will not, all and unianimously without question be persecuted for their desire to create. but as long as graffiti is seen as vandalism, it will always be a crime. but isn't that part of the thrill of it all? isn't that a part of what makes this medium so alluring to people, what makes it so exciting to see a really well done art piece? at the end of the day, graffiti is illegal, but really, i think...



BUY BRC. ALL CITY KINGS.