Playing: YIIK Made Me Think

uh y2k a postmodern rpg or simply yeek does it need any introduction um what the hell was that tell me what the hell is going on what is all this about what does it happen this is insane what is a soul survivor did you guys see that what the hell are the frank and popo doing here that phone call was surely one of the strangest i've ever received and no i couldn't hear the music yeah probably it's a 2019 rpg possibly post modern inspired by earthbound final fantasy paper mario and surrealist japanese literature it has abnormal characters strange enemies mini game based battles elisa lam's death reality bending puzzles and irreverent humor to those who are unfamiliar that contrast of inspirations may sound appealing or appalling well for me y2k was one of the most unique interesting and thoroughly unenjoyable experiences i've had with a game and a novel to those who've watched clips know the egregiously annoying bits and have maybe seen a critique or two it may seem like an easy game to tear a new one well yes and no it's so consistently poor in so many ways that i could probably just write an unstructured laundry list of grievances and i doubt many would fault me if that's all this video was but i've had to restart this script a lot putting yeek into words has been tricky and not just because of how many words it's given me like many of my other videos it will be on the longer end so timestamps and such are in the description if you don't want to watch all of this in one go it will be here when you've got time and i think too much geek at once can be unhealthy my experience with y2k didn't start when i opened the game and they didn't end when i closed it the confused mess of a reception it got was fascinating it rapidly grew in jokes around it tidbits of dialogue so awkward that they could be quoted endlessly entire mishandled scenes to be shocked by the title itself became yeek which drove home just how bungled it all was it's rare for me to watch a lot of reviews and read articles on one title both amateur and mainstream but i was enthralled by how it seemed everyone who played yeek was walking away with at least one new grievance anyone could look at yeek agree with others over its many issues but still have something unique which annoyed them the most critical were the people who thought they had ye pegged meanwhile the more positive takes were giving it the benefit of the doubt or trying to place it in some larger context but few could bring themselves to say they liked it when i played yeek for myself it wasn't alone me and noonan played through the entire thing together our time was spent mostly annoyed at the game and steadily more at each other's throats as we try to claw something out of it so this is like a metaphorical fight isn't it oh it speeds up around there it gets dodgy i don't know man our feelings quickly split he saw it as a game meant to disorient and mean nothing by design drawing the player into questioning meaningless minutiae before throwing it away or contradicting established ideas in an attempt to deliberately irritate i argued it was a bad game acting in earnest and had to mean something however ill explained over the course of our time playing i got worn down while nunum got more assured i was trying to keep the story in mind so that i could prove it was trying even consulting a screenshot lp between play sessions thanks tim rod for your incredible patience in transcribing yeek playing yeek felt like geek was playing me right back trying to understand what yeek wants to say was like bashing my head against a brick wall i'm glad i had someone else there to argue with rather than just the game alone as credits rolled i was thoroughly sick of yeek i didn't beat it it beat me this video isn't even here to pull back the win it's just explaining how a time wizard magic tens of hours away and continues to do so since i have thought about yeek a lot since finishing it i wondered how i'd eventually approach it and when i opened the footage to start note-taking months after finishing it and well months before this video is finished i thought i had called off but within minutes of reading dialogue that frustration resurfaced like it had never left that fire was still burning in me between that and the developers promising since january to release a combat patch that overhauls the battle system which i figured i'd wait on in the sake of fairness this video has taken a long long time and simply put i have no idea if we will ever see that combat overhaul and i'm not waiting on it any longer on september 9th i finish my narration i cut the flubs i find i tidy it up a little and i head to bed planning to start editing yeek the next day i wake up and it's not just a combat update anymore it's we'll see we'll see yeek you got to exist like this for nearly two years i'm talking about the game i played i'm talking about what i played not the future my feelings on y2k are a lot like y2k they're over long frustratingly complicated and at times contradictory i have two reads of what yeek means both readings are backed up by events and themes in the story but they are sort of exclusive because one denies meaning while the other infers it i agree that the game is bad it's a story so poorly told that bothering to claw meaning out of it is just not worthwhile but i see a lot of people bring up things that i see as misinterpretations to berate the game unfairly considering how much rope it already gives people that's really something your side as the elevator began to shake vibrating despite all of that this video is not a defense it's more that i've turned up with a different stick to be a dead horse this also isn't me claiming to be some genius who solved yeek this isn't me being the final word on the game if this video somehow makes you want to play geek for yourself you can spend your time arguing with me as well as the game as i had with noonam and that might make it a more interesting experience and lastly most tragically i can't judge yeek for being self-indulgent because well that's exactly what my videos are but seeing as that's the case i'm gonna judge it anyway so you might think i've said enough and we're good to go but slow down there cowboy this is the 90s sort of the pacing's on dial up first off marlene explains the title the developers are in on y2k looking like yeek and i suppose if people liked this game then calling it that would have been endearing didn't quite work out that way but i get it yik is memorable and easy to spread with white uk you're sending your game to the arse end of google not to mention we're going to learn this game has actually little to do with the y2k bug or surrounding hysteria it is about an apocalypse at the turn of the millennium sure but it's a hollow reference so for the younger people watching the good news is you're not going to learn anything we then have to enter a few names and pick agenda this stuff won't come up until late game and i doubt we'll appreciate it when it does this part is an odd tone setter you may look at it and think oh so it's letting us know it's like earthbound it really isn't this questionnaire's vibe is distinct from the rest of the game which i find to be a small blessing since it isn't charming to begin with if it is establishing anything it's that if yet can say something in one text box it will do it in five and fill them to bursting while most of the jokes aren't original or clever this is what kills the comedy dead with purely textual comedy you really have to weigh your words one too many can turn a joke from comical to clumsy and yeek is never off by just one word each gag winds up stumbling over its own self-assured hilarity on the way to a plop line yeah i can't call these punch lines there is no punch when you're this loquacious i mean a doll fud at best and you come off like a tryhard who uses words like loquacious there's really no mix like desperation and unwarranted confidence to get people laughing with you by the time it asks about the final friend the description is so wordy and overly specific it's as if it's been intentionally building to this bit all along but the rest of the game is even more long-winded most titles ratchet up the difficulty as they go along but yike ups the wordiness is this a joke or is this slowly turning up the heat purposeful or not when either the title is weirdly bloated maybe it's meant as a warning anyhow when all is said and done this was about as fun as a tax return and half as well written but well yeet now knows our names gladly let's go the game opens on april 4th 1999. we're alex eggleston a liberal arts major who just graduated college after a semester too many returning home to a town that really likes the last game act made i had no idea what adult life held for me but it was optimistic hmm i sort of doubt this is our home because as we'll learn no one would be happy to have alex back but we can indeed enter and inhabit the joint this kit has also decided to sit on our lawn and make a game spanning joke about zines our mother can't be here to greet us but she did leave a grocery list not even home five minutes and she's already barking orders in me she erected a bloody sign for you alex well i'll get around to that for now i want to know about his home life and while we do get the idea that alex's family is fractured we don't get much that we couldn't see with our eyes no alex we were just told what to do i don't feel much thought was put into these little dialogues they often come across contradictory to the story itself and the fact it's happening this early on just makes it look like nobody's paying attention i get that this fridge dialogue is meant to push further that alex is a shiftless ingrate but to put it in this way is just strange it's like these two bits of dialogue don't fit together about the only detail i like is tied to alex's record player he knows that it's from his dad it doesn't say it outright but the fact his dad is referenced in a detached way and never seen gives this dialogue a bittersweet tinge that you get to unpack for yourself while also giving alex's appreciation of vinyl some context or maybe he hates his dad and his damn records i don't know the rest of the house is pretty useless and that won't change we look at our mum's underwear nick 20 to give to zine guy and outside things aren't much better the issue of a lot of dialogues is that they don't really change over the course of the game to reflect changes in the story or the world they often seem written to not relate to anything but still wind up jarring at a certain point in the story alex's mother loses her job but this woman never moves or says anything different why yes i just got home from college and have been gone for years but i'll put in a word with the sister i never see this guy gets a whole year off work i'd be less grumpy besides that it's some scattered short extremely weak gags since the npc dialogue is static it's surprising how it still manages to tread on the toes of the story i also think yeeg would have specifically benefited from the chat of progressing and changing over the course of the narrative the fact that it doesn't feels like a missed opportunity and winds up hurting things we head off in search of those groceries and things get worse alex runs into this cat and starts banging on about it in great detail which turns into imagining his life with the bloody thing the cat sees what he assumes is his script and nabs it alex gives chase and winds up in a strange otherworldly factory hotel filled with monsters weird landscapes and puzzles along with a talking panda that can help solve them it's me panda it's here he runs into semi pack and some awkward dialogue happens great another person i'll leave if you want i don't want to talk to you leave if you like [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] it turns out the cat belongs to her sammy says this is her home and she doesn't know what elevators are before getting in an elevator with us to leave which she does alex is left befuddled but still erect there's a lot to unpack here this first dungeon is a gauntlet alex narrates everything you could take all the ventilation in the world jam it together and it still wouldn't be half as long-winded as this [ __ ] he adds so much fluff to every scene often just repeating what we can see he's meant to be an unreliable narrator and the script wants to sneak false details and alex's shitty speculation past the listener and it does so through sheer volume now this has an obvious side effect it gets tiring not even just sorting what's fictional fiction from fictional fact but even just passively listening to the dialogue begins to wear me down now a mystery will have misdirection that's fine i get that alex is a moronic blowhard and i should take everything he says with a grain of salt but man that's enough sodium for a [ __ ] heart attack the parts with the panda and sammy add another layer it's not just when he's alone very long dialogues will play out before alex's narration kicks in which rarely does more than just repeat what was said from alex's perspective elevator i don't know what that is what an elevator is i've been looking for my cat ali have you seen her so the stupid thing was a girl i don't know who that is my cat just looks like dolly herself i doubted she'd know her 20th century spanish cattle and surrealist painters all that well either i love the moment we get panda the game treats it like our first tool but we've already met alex panda gives us a tutorial on how he's used you can press circle to summon me alex repeats it then the game asks if i'd like the tutorial repeated aren't you calling yourself a post-modern rpg i mean your audience is presumably rpg fans hopefully not first-timers why am i getting such a hand-holdy tutorial and zero trust when it comes to one of the most stock abilities you can have and with sami yeah if you can do something in five text boxes it'll do it for 10 and alex will recap for 20. i reflected on her words girl containing story started thought at the time fabrication of samuel was homeless we found refuge in her cat and still i could tell i was missing something she was much more energetic than any homeless girl i'd ever known to what i was missing is that her hobby is what my hobby staring off into space and screwing up your face as if to say what's going on inside my head is really important so just let me think it's at this point this behavior should be reined in point made maybe alex can start catching himself monologuing and stopping to show that you know maybe sammy had an actual effect on him but no it continues for the rest of the game uncommented on it's clear reading the developers logs that the writer andrew allenson is a voracious reader a lot of the entries on yeek's writing go more into his experiences and thoughts with novels than they do with game stories he particularly notes the colorless sakura tazaki as the template for yik structure inspired particularly by it's you're [ __ ] with me it's concise storytelling later entries cite wind-up bird chronicle along with authors pinchon and wallace as inspiration for the writing alex's tendency to narrate events as though in a novel is also spoken about in the casting process another one of andrew's writing blogs notes that alex is meant to be a jerk but still likable which is interesting i want to make a game about a guy who's like a piece of [ __ ] unlikable character who by the end of the game has to transform people people get it in a novel but gamers aren't you know well hey that blog also said people can change and so can tunes that aside what's clear is they put a lot of ingredients into alex but it results in no clear flavor whatsoever and there's a bigger issue everybody else in yeek is also absurdly verbose it's not even a trait that makes alex really stand out it's just that since we see the world through his eyes there is naturally a lot more of him literally long story short is that andrew put the novelization of yeek within yeek a pro's modern rpg i'm sure you can see the problem again literally video games are an audio visual medium this is an rpg with models maps music and text boxes you have different tools to convey the story audio cues camera shots voice acting sprites text timing yeep neglects and doesn't use the tools its medium provides not so much because it's doing a pastiche as much as it is because it's taking the piss i know the cat has a strange mustache i know it's strange that sammy doesn't know what an elevator is explaining what we're seeing is padding the runtime and for what we are inside a room we can tell from the decorations on the wall that it is a female's room it's taking me out of this world why try to infer extrapolate or invest myself if alex is just going to tell me exactly what cues i should be noticing you want to be a book but you're just showing a total lack of spine i do love this old entry which notes the plan is to get the player dungeon diving within five minutes of hitting start yeah plans definitely changed you spend five minutes with crow cat and [ __ ] each before you're doing anything the shame of it is removing or toning down alex's narration would cost the story nothing yeek genuinely has subtle beats that can be rewarding to pick up on i think i second guess all of them since the writing is so often grating and so often just so much that i don't see cleverness or subtlety with respect but suspicion if a person goes at a dartboard with a shotgun it's not the same when they hit a bullseye you don't need text for subtext subbing subtext for text takes a toll on texture and substance plus now knowing alex was supposed to be irritating according to what was convenient for andrew to say at the time there are better ways to communicate this than by attempting to give your audience stockholm syndrome honestly him saying that a literary audience would get alex is just insulting two mediums at once i think they get what game has got that he's a flaccid prick alex isn't interesting or well novel and games are not novels games have different strengths and drawbacks than pros and vice versa i'm not saying games going for a novelistic structure can't work but yeek doesn't leverage the strengths of either medium it just wants to be a goddamn book too much i do have to raise the idea that alex's often incorrect ramblings could be intended to contrast the imagination and interpretation a reader can have with a novel against the more set in stone elements of an audio-visual medium if that was part of the reason for doing this then it's just overly flowery and doesn't pay off in any significant way and speaking of books or in pro woman's case from them that's an excerpt lifted directly from murakami's novel after dark this apparent theft led to some backlash again andrew had an explanation at the ready saying that it was indeed deliberate homage alex was unable to process what he was experiencing and so his brain filtered it through a novel he's a fan of so you know perfectly sensible alex who was scared out of his wits in april 1999 started reciting the 2004 novel he's a fan of before getting pulled into a mystery from 2013. what's daft is that this may not be total [ __ ] i mean the specifics are but the rationale isn't there is precedent for this explanation that we've seen you just have no good reason to spot it you can't blame people for being suspicious especially from a studio that has been caught plagiarizing in the past and well you can't buy two brothers anymore which makes the amount of references and reverence in yeek all the more surreal they've got a bloody statue of the main character and his wife in the town fountain which hey maybe they look up to plagiarists really it means yeek isn't so much a shrine as it is a mausoleum but before we move on let's have a quote from andrew i'm not murakami and i would never pretend to be him so to a lot of people they won't necessarily see the influence at the end sammy is taken as alex is frozen in fear and as he exits the factory alone the calm night wind of springtime seemed to contrast the inner workings of my brain he goes for over a minute on this [ __ ] after everything that's happened just shut the [ __ ] up for a moment worse is if you exit the screen you have to sit in black while alex finishes up only for the mood to instantly be shattered by confused by the images spinning inside my head and [Music] this narration is so cack-handed it made me think about something i'd never really noticed in games writing before characters really have to explain what they're doing and why without assuming player actions for alex to brazenly narrate i was moving on autopilot back towards my home while i'm trying to open a chest and already tired of hearing him it creates a strange demand to work with the writer to not break the already flimsy narrative it goes hand in hand with putting its medium blending aspirations over good design sense there's just such an incongruity already on display in the writing the art the gameplay and the tone that all comes together in a kaleidoscope of crap oh hey alex the arcade opens tomorrow well that'll take your mind off things then when we do get home i'm greeted by this prompt and i have to wonder is yeet knowingly taking the piss [ __ ] forgot the groceries i tossed my things on the floor and made my way to the couch my mother a 49 year old short red-headed woman was an information systems programmer analyst for pacific chime wow i mean i was making a joke but that's just as asinine i get alex is trying to ignore what just happened but there is some whiplash you have mail we get sent a video and this would probably be a joke about long download times and alex being able to go off on a monologue if that wasn't you know exactly what he'd do all the time anyway i love tim rod in his screenshot lp using historical president to give alex faster download times and remove [ __ ] like this as though that would help i just have to wait for it to finish downloading when the file had finished downloading it's all for nothing anyway because somehow this download leads to a forum page of embedded images this is where it becomes clear that yeek was inspired by the elisa lam case but her death is only half the story andrew allenson and i swear i'm not trying to pick on him he just comes up a lot in this story was enthralled by the case the game wasn't so much inspired by her death as it was his experiences on forums trying to piece it together with others through that he became fascinated with writing a story about internet sleuths uncovering a big mystery i'm on a message board here are all these people we're all trying to figure out what happened what if i made a game where the main cast was obsessed with a similar story and explore the types of people who sort of put off growing up and getting real jobs and all they do is play internet detective all day so i'm eagerly awaiting geeky where alex takes on the boston bombing jokes aside i find it a fascinating starting point it's a premise with potential and yik will get tired of it moments after that potential starts taking form but whether or not this explanation makes yeek more or less off-putting and by how much is up to you a lot of stories are drawn from the author's experiences and from real world events a lot of crime fiction is built on actual case files so i'm not condemning the practice it all comes down to execution and yeaks is baffling we have a character who is a lot like his author who is on a romantic crash course of a character who is a lot like a real dead person so alex needs to go to bed and andrew needs a cold shower [Music] so is this what a college graduate does spend hundreds of thousands of his mother's hard-earned money to lounge around all day oh god it's the most annoying character in the game you may say no snake that's alex and i say yeah that is alex the panda is alex debating with himself now alex wanker that he is is already a master of debating with himself he hardly needs a toy to do it more alex berates alex and alex would feel guilty if he doesn't at least go back and try to find sammy so bang there's our motivation headed back to the factory hotel remember when i said there was precedent for alex narrating after dark to himself yeah that's panda see this brings me to an issue of yeak's world building it's all well and good to say you want reality to be shattered within five minutes of hitting start doubly so if you can actually pull it off but you sort of need a reality to be broken first yeek uses a real world to give it a head start on that front but assumes too much the moment i'm off the bus in yeek i'm assaulted by a clash of art styles alex's run cycle is made to be sprite-like there's gamey [ __ ] like a giant welcome sign on our lawn and we're in a town that's inhabited by plot lines instead of people i feel less grounded in frankton than i do here yeek may be consistently [ __ ] but this [ __ ] is at least consistent before the plot starts i can leave town and get attacked by a monster to the south is a village of monster hunters this should all be walled off until we hit plot to help the illusion that things have gone from ordinary to extraordinary when a cat seems to intentionally beckon us to a haunted house filled with ghosts but it's not until we're on the far end of the place that alex starts registering weird things that's happening it comes off like only now are things getting bizarre since otherwise this all seems like a natural extension of a world where monsters roam the countryside it's especially jarring because he's after a grocery list he can't just wait for a new one phone mum or just put on his big boy pants and buy some groceries he's risking a lot for a note he probably won't even read and i get that this is all supposed to come off as quirky but it's also incredibly flimsy and inciting incident when yeet then turns around and reveals it's all meant to be taken at face value so when i run into a talking stuffed panda i'm very sorry that i didn't pick up that it's just alex's subconscious talking back to him it's not like he isn't already plush with narration without it the game claims to be inspired by earthbound as a shorthand for weirdness it also wants to have the slow burn of a murakami novel the intrigue of real world conspiracies and the breezy pace of a modern sorry post-modern game and because it wants all of this at once it can't adequately service any of it the rhythms are all over the joint this isn't really the taxity kind of song this is that sort of thing i'm sorry everyone we're this far in and only now am i getting out of the first dungeon i'm saving combat for later and it's not even that the opening is especially bad in comparison to the rest of the game i'm sorry to say it will actually get worse case in point alex you grew a beard this here is michael alex's memories of him are hazy but he recalls the two being friends despite their age difference he was a good kid a bit younger than me usually worth a laugh or two what have you been up to just took the sats that's about it the two poke fun at each other before the topic turns to ownism the website we were downloaded to last night which michael happened to have a hand in making www.onisum1999.com jesus michael did you stop yourself short of saying http as well this gets them talking about sammy after that went up everyone on the forum started acting strange like a sort of darkness had come over the website alex proceeding with caution and well getting really bloody creepy says he thinks he was in the same elevator in which sammy disappeared michael in turn gets creepier and the two join forces to go back and investigate after michael gets his new camera and you may find this hard to believe but this is where the breezy pace we know and love dies heading into town alex freaks out about the arcade we saw last night they opened it about three weeks ago uh rpg games are seriously the best chrono trigger luffy 2 secret of mana those games are like the holy grail of my youth we get dragged into the arcade for some panning shots i think the girl behind the register is pissed that she missed free week's pay then we go and grab michael's new camera cameras are michael's weapon vinyls or alex's so most characters have distinct shops and well i guess it adds character but more than that it adds loading screens the two head back to the factory hotel where they come face to face with a strange being i've been scared before everyone has but those past memories of fright were nothing compared to what we had just experienced alex you saw three of them yesterday [Music] we're thrown into an unwinnable battle and the two have to run for their lives what the hell was that what the hell is going on what what we need to get your photos developed this thing is digital baby appropriate because in the next scene the story won't develop either good god there are five chapters michael goes and grabs a transfer cable alex stands outside feeling sad that he legged it sans sammy again and then back at alex's we get michael's entire backstory dumped on us i was talking to my cousin about this recently the lifelong implications of seeing something actually undeniably supernatural he has a six-year-old daughter apparently she told my cousin that when she looked into the mirror she was smiling but that she knew she wasn't smiling kids say weird [ __ ] so he's been interested in the occult from an early age and runs a forum dedicated to discussing it yeah that works why are you telling me i'm alex i spent a few weekends learning html and before i knew it as 1999 had over 15 000 hits each week alex reveals he was actually there when sammy was taken and the photos are uploaded to ownism and what do we learn from this but more people wanted to believe than not that people believed them which clearly wasn't helpful as a fader black skips us two weeks into the future it's april 19th 1999 our heroes haven't died of pulmonary embolism and have just accepted there's an unkillable god entity five minutes down the road they get a pm about a girl who can tear holes in realities and they decide to investigate which is just in time really ownism is going to have its minds elsewhere tomorrow we head back to the arcade the two creep on vela which leads into another unwinnable fight albeit one we can't run away from afterwards the two explain why they're here so she asks if she can go and see the pictures do you recognize the location from these photos that's behind the old grocery store obviously you've been there before yeah can i get some directions we're famished what really happened here is the old frankton map had a grocery to be behind but they changed that and now there's only one grocery in the entire state and throughout the entire game it never opens maybe mum was just trying to get rid of us and well less importantly but if you check on ism which you totally can that's not the grocery that's right in front of the a card what's funny is yika's actually been taking it easy on us up until now this conversation marks the first real winding road we have to deal with it just throws endless asides in minutia at you and gets really lost on the way to where it needs to go this will become the norm and i'll cut the [ __ ] afterwards but let me give you an example of conversation in yeek now that alex has other party members to deal with vella explains that she weaponizes sound to harm or heal things ownism is explained in detail for about the third time within the hour alex and michael reintroduced themselves then the game is nice enough to skip over repeating the plot since it repeated the plot to michael twice already with various degrees of accuracy and length but to make up for us missing this riveting tale that we were there for we instead hear about vela reacting to it bella just looked into my eyes and never reacted something felt familiar about her but not in the i've met her sort of way something deeper i dated a girl in college who was a women and gender studies major she said that she believes our soulmates were cut from the same section of that initial piece of matter this isn't quite foreshadowing it's alex's erection for sammy casting a shadow like a plot sundial this past crackpot girlfriend gets five text boxes alex explains velar explaining the entities then vela explains the entities that's unique yeek you're bringing new angles to tell don't show that's the thing with people isn't it you could show them all the mysteries of the universe but if they're distracted by the human element of the tale they'll shift all of their attention there touche but i'm not done talking about andrew a short time ago i entered into a dark place both physically and metaphysically villa explains her own fear of the entities and alex asks her to explain what metaphysically meant and rather than saying she doesn't want to talk about it she bangs on about the definition of the word well isn't that clever you snarky [ __ ] alex calls her out on this and vela then does what she should have done in the first place and just said she's uncomfortable talking about the metaphysical do you mean to imply that you've found a way to exist inside of a metaphysical space that you enough alex then asks how she got so tough so she gives him a phone number to access the metaphysical space of the mind dungeon and tells him to give her a ring if they run into anything metaphysical just [ __ ] you want her in the party geek i get it why are you so awkward about yourself [ __ ] okay so all this conversation needed to do was introduce vela and the mind dungeon it managed to barely do a little bit of both amongst so much padding yeah i'm truncating [ __ ] from now on because this is just how yeek operates the conversations are like the jokes they trip over themselves and the point gets lost along the way this is why i don't blame people for not getting a big picture idea of yeek why i don't really blame people who have wildly different interpretations and most of all why i don't really blame people who just want to quote the funny dumb lines of dialogue and move on since yeek is always burying the lead through its own inability to stay on topic and it just doesn't have the charisma to pull it off it's all very hipster in that you know it can't be seen taking anything seriously and it's just a competition for the characters to out [ __ ] each other it's a race to the bottom yik is going for eccentric stream of consciousness like conversations but it lacks the charm to make it worth the very long while and it doesn't nail the tone since this all comes off as far too rehearsed to have a believable heir to it plot details and character beats struggle to be heard or stand out amongst all the rambling and some rambling is fine there's no perfect ratio on this for good writing but yeek isn't even in the ballpark of a good answer okay this was all too many words to say this game has too many words so to bring this section home let's talk about kojima i like kojima but he's also guilty of this [ __ ] over long conversations right from the sides and filled with exposition three what is it let me take off my glasses but i like him here's where his style works kojima's stories are message driven each game explores a bunch of ideas before ending on a big thematic statement genes deciding our fate information control the transient nature of conflict all bundled alongside an enjoyable spy fiction romp if you miss the point of a metal gear game or don't take any meaning away from it you can still have a good time when kojima goes off on a side there's an earnestness to it he's fascinated by a topic and wants to explore it he hasn't stopped the story because i'm too cool to be straight forward these asides serve to give a better understanding of the world and characters in their context the topics raised tend to warrant discussion they have a purpose of educating the viewer and equipping them to better understand the literal aspects surrounding whatever themes are being presented i grew up on the battlefield conflict and victory were my parents this dialogue hardly sounds natural but within milk is solid it's believable it informs the over-the-top melodramatic setting and gives everything a great sense of conviction and purpose and then and here's the big one here's the justifier during a scene kojima remembers to advance the plot even if only a little this is all still indulgent but kojima at least puts in the work to earn it plus you know some [ __ ] is reserved for codec calls and cassette tapes you remember pre-ripped jeans these come off as cheap imitations of that idea where characters ramble about loosely philosophical [ __ ] with nothing to actually say on a topic it's just diluting the actual story so alex and michael endeavour to hit level five find something interesting on ownism and use that to rope vela back into this mess just going to see if you figured it out it's your best childhood friend i think losing my religion by ariana just became a big hit nope that means grinding battles and cashing the experience in in the mine dungeon you know this visual really sums up the yik experience i know i'm talking about leveling before combat so let me say this first for most of the run time leveling up felt like it was achieving very little statistical gains were impossible to feel and for the length of time leveling takes well it's all very much in line with everything else so far isn't it here's how it goes you enter a hallway each door has a number over it you set which stat you want then you enter the door to lock it in do that for every door then talk to the crow it takes tens of seconds and far more button presses than necessary to achieve [ __ ] nothing cashing in level ups after a dungeon takes minutes at a time and this isn't because i need a lot of time to think it's because the gameplay-based method of leveling artificially slows me down in a way a menu would not i did discover you can set everything then ask the crow to quote choose for you and it won't change your picks and that saves a bunch of darth vader blacks and frankly you're fine just letting marlene pick for you even then it's still slow and doesn't feel good leveling should feel like a payoff this feels like submitting a report for the wildlife you killed as you descend deeper into the mind dungeon marlene the librarian and other characters arise to tell you something i think it's about alex's dad [ __ ] off i'll have to admit this is one area in the game where i was just skipping dialogue i could not bring myself to care yeek attempts or at least pretend to have a message of self-improvement and ironically awareness the mind dungeon stands to represent these with its mind imagery and literal descent into the subconscious putting level ups or downs in this context is cool aesthetically but everything about the execution is miserable and marlene is one insufferable character too many every time i'm in the mind dungeon i am already resentful because of how slow it all is i want to be doing anything else so this is the worst time to throw story at me i don't know about you but i feel stronger i think you can see my biceps now hell yeah the two check owners and men have received another message this time from a guy in wind town whose sister also disappeared under odd circumstances that's interesting enough to bother velha about yeah probably not bad well don't sound too excited vela bites and the group sets off to win town and we sat on the bus with dylan began to talk she seemed almost happy to see us i can tell as we make a steady clip for windtown and the camera clips for a seat vela gives us what little there is on sammy semi sammy park was a 23 year old korean american the police have no leads are you korean do i look korean vaguely ethnic we're in the shadow of the erection again alex mentions they should go chat with the woman who reported sami missing but things are about to take a turn my sami can sammy in the newspaper may have looked the same there was a difference there i could feel it man i sure love that i'm piloting this [ __ ] to sammy in windtown we get some odd insight into the group hey look we're in chicago did you just laugh the party dynamics in yik are undercooked at best and this gets weirder as more members join despite all that happens and how little time they really do spend together the story treats them as friends right off the bat because in rpgs party members are friends i mean that's not true of all rpgs probably not even true of most of them but it feels like yeet gets held back by a weird assumption that it then plays to hobbling these characters along the way we then have to ask around to find the missing girl and her brother and back to the slow side of the pacing everyone in wind town is holding out on us so let's talk about the combat it's garbage a turn-based battle system where each and every attack and defense is achieved via much-maligned mini-games the biggest problem is this if these mini-games didn't exist the battle system would still function and battles would still be sluggish a lot of encounters are drag out brawls with barely any strategy to employ weaknesses and status effects are in short supply and not worth the hassle the handful of bonus abilities you get will all be weighed up on their damage potential and for much of the game it's a low figure is why it just devolves into using alex's lp toss it has a low pp cost and does damage comparable too or even better than his standard attack if you only land one hit and it does it to enemy groups so i just do this move over and over again because it's faster and puts less emphasis on me to do well i was pumping strength as much as i could to get these battles over with sooner but it took until late game for it to feel like min maxing was really doing anything all of the consumables are percentage based and cheap i just sold every full hill i got and grabbed 50 pieces since the damage output on both sides is so low that i was never in such a dire situation as to need a full heal quickly there are no decisive moments or unique enemies who can put you on the ropes it gets even easier when we get a character later in the game with an ability to apply an item to the whole party i was basically never in danger again so it's slow and unengaging and with the mini-games we now have a 5-20 second stop gap in between the many many attacks that have to be made to win battles the gimmick loses its luster quick as it multiplies the length of battles many times over to justify their inclusion these mini-games for their length should feel decisive if i do a big combo of alex's record i should expect big numbers like i really put the hurt on but no it's just one attack of many if i'm having to dodge enemy attacks maybe it should feel like i'm on a knife's edge but no they have such low damage that i just started mashing through these since the only thing yeet can't exhaust is my consumables i hated every enemy that had a group attack not just because it made the combat even slower but group attacks for whatever reason had the most difficult and complex dodge bar dodging as one character one press dodging has multiple characters three presses each yeah that adds up [Music] [Music] here's the worst part the mini games at least on the attacking end they're concealing a [ __ ] dice roll while rare enemies can still evade a successful mini game and the damage while it's within a bracket based on performance is still randomized and never particularly impressive the difference between one hit with lp toss and 30 is marginal at best so if you're doing slow mini games maybe make the combat take a handful of turns and make those turns mean something i feel my focus dying fight by fight in the endless repetition but it keeps demanding more focus so i can continue it's not easy enough that i just get to stomp through but it's not biting enough that it keeps the adrenaline going it's finely tuned terrible it's tiring it's insidious [Music] and that's really the word for wind town not only is everyone giving us the run around but they're all boss fights i was tired of the combat by the end of the first dungeon but sick of it before the second that said i am going to give this place a compliment before we get to the meat of it it has a well-established atmosphere and identity that's consistently presented and sets you up for the story beats that happen here between the sad music downbeat atmosphere and horribly broken people windtown quickly and successfully sells itself as a miserable place an air of death and decay is pervasive which brings me to the god-awful graveyard gags where the allensons put themselves next to iwata who i guess plans to be buried here in 16 years hey fun fact frankton was the birthplace of kenneth lay where's his grave he died in 2006. he's beating your water here andrew now this was meant as a nice gesture but it's placed in a town that's filled with [ __ ] and the other graves are all off the wall jokes if you wanted to commemorate iwata it would have been more respectful if you just had him alive and somewhere nice probably like hey the next town has a [ __ ] beach and it has mario flags besides all that it does raise some intrigue this town is so miserable that before i even met the person i'm here for i do feel bad for them that person is rory manser and yeah he feels of this place acting quite cagey and distrustful around the group no i mean what are your screen names that's how i know all of you so that'll be more beneficial and when we ask him questions he dodges them and starts selling us an overly elaborate account of his sister's disappearance which means we get ran through town while he goes on craig's disconnected rants about the human soul i think we all have a set number of days to be in our bodies eventually rory leads us to the sewers believing his sister's soul to be down here by this point velaz worked out what's probably going on and despite her apprehension decides it's best rory faces the truth okay no this will be fine which leads to us coming face to face with another entity oh rory you are so wrong rory believes this is the soul of his sister carrie and that we can in some way help her but velar explains what we're seeing and well i'll try this here is a soul survivor rory's sister actually killed herself due to bullying at school she is irrecoverably dead and in his grief rory almost disconnected his soul from his body and slipped into the soul space but he pulled himself back so this is rory but it's not in another reality a separate rory went through with it the soul space is dangerous and it warped them into this before the entity wound up here bella can you please explain what's going on here she's trying alex it's just convoluted while dragged down by the philosophy lesson and alex is yelling there is a good character beat here carried out with awful dialogue and taking too long but hey vela had previously also in too many words made it apparent that she doesn't like discussing this stuff but she puts aside her own discomfort to help rory in a way that only she can while trying to give us oh no i think it's a golden alpaca damn it we need to run [Music] [Applause] really feel myself vibrating with motion here so i was just very nice to win town too nice it's actually so astoundingly awful that in my bid to understand yeek i've come to a conclusion this is where yeek for the first time shows its hand people take yik for a clumsy game and it is i also think it's malicious rory dragged us here gave us a big run around and then we learned he's hurting his sister killed herself and during this big emotional beat for him and vela the tone is shattered by a golden alpaca lemonade it's hard to guess what this is meant to accomplish a misguided attempt at lightening the mood poorly breaking up the story with some gameplay just plain [ __ ] up [Music] i take it as intentional meant to confuse and frustrate the entire game's been spinning our wheels all windtown is doing is slashing the tyres it's wasting the character's time in universe and using its mechanics and structure to waste the player's time in turn and to an exhausting degree i'm okay with the rory stuff him lying to you is foreshadowed heavily hey i invented lying on the internet so no need to warn me so a player can get what his deal is and know there's something off in a story supposedly about people on forums solving mysteries it makes sense they would run into someone using the case for their own ends rory may be doing a bad thing but he just wants his sister back and the weird [ __ ] on ownism gave him false hope so that's a complex and cool beat well done but here's what [ __ ] with you we can visit carrie mance's grave revealing that she is already long dead we can't act on this knowledge we have to play along when we speak to this girl the camera is even heavily angled against carrie's headstone and hey the one time the camera is adding to the story it's because yeek is letting you see the wasted hour ahead perhaps we should have arrived as this grave is being dug with the gravedigger blocking the inscription when we head back to windtown later we can then see that this is indeed carrie's grave this isn't subtle i'm sure most people would peg what's going on but it does less harm to our false sense of agency and uses the world to deliver a plot that's moving but you know this is me supposing yeek wants to be good like a sensible person the gameplay structure of wind town is as drawn out as possible obviously there's the boss rush where we have to fight everybody in town revving up the plot engine so it can drive us into a wall rory then drags the player across town again rooted in a way that starts you at your objective and leads you away ensuring you have to do a whole lap of the town meanwhile the sky has become strange and overworldly drawing the player into questioning things and setting a strange scene no one even alludes to it it's meaningless i should be thankful that they let something sit but since alex has gone on tangents for far less i find it suspect this is how yeag beats you down it gets you expecting words it keeps you on edge this is right i think i can do it here you get two abilities in the dungeon an obstacle clearer look it's this whole bitter miniature then in the next room we get an obstacle clearer funny there's no puzzle to these things just menu fiddling and more time down the drain in the end after this slow laborious build up where we're getting our first insights into the metaphysics not only are they overly elaborate yet sort of flat but alex keeps dragging you away from the explanation to yell bella what the hell is going on hello will you tell me what the hell is going on what is all this about so if a player does care at this point they're caught between trying to unpack this [ __ ] while being invested in an emotional moment and all the while alex keeps interrupting both you've had so much time wasted already but hey maybe the tone's intact and there it goes a slow laborious boss fight where soul survivors the crux of the previous scene are turned into jokes you need to destroy in an awful mini-game turn after turn because if you don't they get eaten by an alpaca man to power him up this boss fight is feeding off of rory's grief for a gimmick that's an unbelievable way to undercut yourself until this segment i've been taking yeek at face value as i would any other game i cover but i don't believe it's the story acting in good faith it's wasting time so often in so many ways and for a moment it feels like it pulls back the curtain and says yeah you're being [ __ ] with [Music] i'll end by saying i know i'm making a bold claim and it's one that's awkward to move on from if this game's intentionally a time waster then coming out head-on is just playing into its hands how can you fight something like that for now i'm just going to keep going because after all i can't be totally certain that this is the case the main character's a hipster and so is the game he's in what the hell was that thing why did we have to kill it and what is going on i've been sitting here for 30 minutes following the golden alpaca vela may as well just say so before i was so rudely interrupted because she just goes right back to explaining the magic system we get the tidbit that there can only be one physical soul per reality one alex one rory one sammy and so on this is more or less the rule that all future twists in the game hinge on and this is frustrating because it's obeyed and broken in near equal measure which totals its significance velar also explains that entities are above petty desires they don't really act so it's unlikely they kidnapped sammy it's probably that sammy has just left reality of her own accord and is totally gone my 12 year old sister killed herself she died right here no one cares about your sister right now we almost just died ourselves so everyone starts yelling at alex for his inconsiderate outburst even though yeah they nearly all did just die and probably wouldn't be in the most rational state of mind and then this happens why did you just say that to rory there is not one not two but three methods by which alex [ __ ] talks to himself we have three narrative tools all doing the exact same thing this is fulfilling exactly the same purpose panda does it just takes longer and it means we're no longer safe outside of alex's room giving you the benefit of the doubt it wants to gamify alex's racing thoughts having to walk between the many variations of himself as he pinballs between conflicting emotions i'll demonstrate this in one line of dialogue that can replace it almost died though i mean i'm sorry yeah it's daft as hell but so is this [ __ ] mine took only a few [ __ ] seconds this whole segment is a jumbled mess on top of everything else to jump back to just after defeating the alpaca first we get all that exposition we cut to this robot crackling to life then it leaps roughly a week into the future so alex can say he hasn't talked to anyone since wind town and narrate how sad he is the following week or so my mood was strangely languid and serene i hadn't spoken with michael vela or rory in almost eight days i listened to cassette tapes of old music andrew allenson andrew allenson andrew allenson as i listened to the soaring string as in strangely syncopated bass line of symphony 7 and e flat by andrew allenson then it jumps back to explain why which before we get out of the sewers takes us through this puzzle dungeon then in the jump back after yelling at rory it goes into alex's mind and then back out to here the cut forward just muddies the scene by giving it a needless framing device i'm not sure why the narrative thread gets knotted up for a moment it's as though apropos of nothing yeek decides to make the scene play like a mind racing frantically even though it never acknowledges this or goes for this type of framing ever again it's just bizarre and i suppose in a way it does vaguely work for yeek in an absurdly indulgent sort of way it's still frustrating unearned and out of place but [ __ ] it there's no other way to end this part than with the shocking reveal that ye did actually have an editor at least according to andrew this is seriously the last time i hang out with people i met on the internet hold that fort rory makes his exit as the group remains pissed dude he was obviously just hurting i'm gonna go figure some things out i'll be in touch when i do in the meantime try not to be such a jerk to your friends hey that kid isn't my friend everyone yells the universe doesn't revolve around alex and on that depressing i guess bombshell we jump those eight days or a week or whatever into the future two strange things happen here first the reveal that sammy has totally gone barely seems to register alex knows it but doesn't believe it this doesn't so much knock the plot for six as much as it knocks the plot for six more hours of run time worse is the owners of 1999's importance and the promise of internet sleux greatly diminishes and the plot moves to other means of moving things forward it's funny how a shift in focus can feel so haphazard after all the bug roll that's happened but it really does yik can yet do less this is all fine and [ __ ] but it doesn't bring my sister back this is especially frustrating since what just happened with rory feels like a turning point of this fred this could be where alex and michael realize they need to wisen up pick their leads better or hell maybe just trust that they know better than ownism at this point they've gone deeper maybe they could start gradually abandoning the forum as it dawns on them it's more bad than good i'm okay with ownism's importance shrinking as the story goes on in fact i wish this was an actual topic of discussion but it just sort of fades from relevance and it takes a certain character along with it ownism continues to exist for lip service but what exactly did it contribute when it was relevant two private messages when we were written into a corner and one interesting observation which is that people on the internet lie well great really bring in the heat you can actually browse owners them it's a bit crap the writing here is much the same as everywhere else contradictory drivel filled with unlikable bell ends but since it's based on a web forum andrew's writing is really in its element plus it's the game's source of side quests and besides the fact i don't want to help these people this is a cute way to frame the extra content like the npcs it doesn't update much to reflect what's going on throughout the adventure it's mostly just michael making vague and asinine posts once in a while it has the potential to be a cool diegetic way to log the story for the player if things weren't so long-winded and there was text to spare we could have michael and later other party members posting threads asking if anyone knows anything about the factory about entities and so on get some insight into them in turn other people post things which may be helpful but maybe baseless assumptions or maybe they just start making up their own version of events which could further reflect the vacuous and self-serving nature of places like this a theme which is possibly in the game but yeek is unsure if it wants it to be in this way the player has a log of the overly convoluted events of the plot and yet gets to actually say something about its subject matter the way andrew speaks of his time investigating elisa lam it comes off like he's describing a hole he had to pull himself out of so i figured that's something he would want to reflect in the story that you can wind up getting too deep into web conspiracies but the forum like anything else is just kind of there besides this yeek had free scripts the cutscene script the world dialogue and ownism the cutscene script was finished first with the other two written thereafter but these two later scripts feel like they have little clue what happens in the story like they only exist on cliff notes they don't play off or reflect back on the plot instead feeling written in isolation which creates a setting that feels disjointed with ownism largely forgotten about what was at the start one of the narrative's biggest pillars or if not a pillar a crutch to keep the plot hobbling on has now been kicked out by its own offer this takes us into a bold new form of storytelling where nothing happens for a couple hours and you can faintly hear an identity crisis alex's mom loses her job which causes alex to [ __ ] and moan when she asks him to put his degree to use this is the scene that gets across that alex is a spoiled brat which should remove the need for numerous monologues to that effect we go and get rejected from free stores and this is never brought up again this reinforces once again pretty heavily what we already know about alex that he's a naive brat who puts his own selfish desires above those close to him it's tedious but his story being told in gameplay we're made to be doubly frustrated with alex since we had to drag his ass around before he himself makes it all for nothing i don't actually mind games making me feel negative emotions if it's in service to something engaging and worthwhile here's the trouble yik just attempted to make a point about something by wasting our time which shows a frankly stunning lack of self-awareness this is assuming it's not intentionally wasting our time at all times in which case this is just par for the course it then totally kneecaps this shortly afterwards in a conversation with vella alex patronisingly tells her to leave work to come with him and she rightfully points out his pig-headedness yeah i got it wait alex i'm sorry i shouldn't have snapped like that then apologizes for rightfully blowing up so the time was wasted then it wastes your time by making the time wasted pointless i wanted to make a game about a guy who's like a piece of [ __ ] unlikable character who by the end of the game has to transform look i guess we're really trying to push alex being a [ __ ] all the way but don't have to party just roll over if you want to make a point about him having to change now sure vela then does lightly reprimand him but trust me it's for [ __ ] naught so after the job hunt by the slack [ __ ] yeek remembers the robot so late in the night an entity leads alex up to an old radio station and gives him a record slave for the mystical ultima lp legend interesting cover there and alex works out it wants him to find the vinyl and broadcast it when we go wrote michael into this hi is michael home there is no michael lives here only oh you must want the house next door michael has inexplicably changed houses lousy foreshadowing you can't even make a house a home alex has a freak out and michael's mom says he's sick unable to find the lp at the frankton music store he decides to check in with vella she demands that we stop hunting for it genuinely distressed so alex is gonna keep hunting for it outside we run into michael and he's perfectly fine oh yeah the two joined forces and while we're in windtown we're dragged over to check on rory something strange then happens there are a handful of choices around rory it sticks out like a sore thumb since everything else in yeek is predetermined or pointless but with rory you can get him to kill himself the reason i spoil that so casually is because all this does is change a few lines of dialogue [Music] either way rory rejoins the story and comes along for the ride and i mean the ride as yet now makes us sit through a bus ride a train ride a meal and another bus ride totaling 15 minutes of dialogue that starts off introducing rory i'm a scene kid with a dead sister and with that done it just keeps going on about nothing as we fruitlessly go from store to store it's excruciating we're eventually brought to flag town where we meet the siblings claudio and chandra claudio goes on ownism and he saw the slave despite what just happened what i said about ownism is still true they don't have the record but he knows someone who might and decides to take us to this old guy who lives in the mountains who might have a copy this takes us through a cave dungeon not much new to say about this beyond the frankly disgusting amount it drags us over hurt tiles to progress i'm glad i can kick rory out of the lineup since he's the worst party member i've ever had as opposed to attacking rory can elect a party member that he'll step in to take damage for he can then swap his health and pp numbers to take more damage claudio actually does noticeable damage and chandra's aforementioned spread-out mobility means you never need in combat again for a measly 2pp you can make a restorative four times as efficient it invalidates rory the same way the story invalidates michael up top we meet mark mark sponsored the bring him home concert for my cousin who fought in the gulf war that was long before you could even walk hell i was a kid then is chandra meant to be 11 years old he doesn't have the record but looking at the cover he knows who made it ah yes the mystical ultima lp legend by vella wilde did you say vela wilde we got the record an hour and a half ago that time has now been wasted and mark who for the record might actually be the most smarmy [ __ ] in the game he doesn't give this information up easily we have to sit through 10 minutes of him talking about tea and metal before this reveal i had a partner a very good man that's great mark we'll never see you again you know i think alex is illiterate genuinely this guy can't read each plot point hinges on this a grocery list a headstone and now worst of all a record slave let's show that sleeve again it [ __ ] has him on it how does that not pick the interest of someone as self-absorbed as him it's not even a matter of arrogance anyone would immediately want to know who the hell did this then sue them for money by now the moral of yeak seems to be reading [ __ ] saves your life i'm amazed alex hasn't killed himself missing a high voltage sign before he even got to college i am wondering if alex repeatedly missing obvious clues overlooking things and getting into danger chasing bad leads is a commentary on this form of amateur internet manhunt if that's what yeek wants to communicate it's taking a pretty subversive route to genuinely waste your [ __ ] time this is especially bad when it seems to be the only trick it has in its playbook let's look at the strange juxtaposition this chapter has now created both the job hunt and getting the record were wastes of time but alex did actually make a roundabout form of progress towards the record and got a hell of a lot more money indulging in his paranormal [ __ ] now i know money is a gameplay element but besides that he also got two new people going along with him this feels like the opposite of the message you're going for now to be an arrogant piece of [ __ ] if i was writing yeek i'd have alex get a job in this part he'd turn up once or twice but lose it pretty damn quick skipping shifts to indulging his hunt for sammy alex not getting a job basically takes the fall off of him it makes what this part is going for fall flat he tried but it didn't work out and hey that clears his schedule for tracking down sammy he should try succeed and squander it for his [ __ ] whims which would make this bit with vela bite a little bit more she needs a job and this [ __ ] really doesn't i took the piss on how it feels like andrew flipped his story on alex but playing yeek i buy that at some point intent truly changed and alex is meant to serve as a warning i refuse to believe someone could [ __ ] up likable this bad but it feels soft it doesn't communicate well and this is because yeek is limp now back to the record alex really isn't the only one at fault claudio says he saw the cover is he not going to ask any follow-up questions about the [ __ ] standing in front of him jesus christ i just realized this is a [ __ ] version of what neuro did the difference is i'd have beaten euro 15 hours earlier and walked away feeling like i got more out of it outside yeet goes for a victory lap and has alex re-explain the plot to claudio and chandra i met sammy park i had followed a cat into an old factory a bit odd as sole survivors vela the sole survivor she said that these beings have soul space rory and rory then i found out that that radio tower didn't expect you to believe me the two understand rory's pain having lost a younger brother a long time ago this gets heated i had a kid brother you know he went missing in 1985. no one really ever investigated it sure they looked around for him and for a week they had a task force you act like they even tried a four-year-old black kid goes missing in a [ __ ] neighborhood and you think they really tried and look it's all well and good for yeag's white writer to try and score some points along the way and it would probably come across better if a white girl didn't die earlier and the police didn't care then and let me tell you something that will make this guilt trip lose a lot of impact this is setting up yeak's one and only punch line don't you think it's weird that a young woman goes missing in your town and only people talking about it are some weirdo kids on the internet you guys get off on it in a way don't you [Music] easy now okay okay okay let's go find this record you guys are coming along awesome regrettable move claudio the gang then goes back to the arcade alex makes a bad apology to vella and the plot makes her okay with doing the very thing she asked alex not to poor oh michael rory new friends hey new friends he then asked to go into vella's mind dungeon to get the record in the one time i'm on board with rory he asks how alex knows the records in her head the game says shut the [ __ ] up i'm also on board with this because it led to less words vela's dungeon is perhaps the best in the game it explores vela's past for environmental cues and implication and her musical nature is explored thoroughly through the dungeon's design to get the record we have to go to various corners of her mind and gather parts of her together to form a band with more instruments being added to the backing track as we clear dungeon segments it's all centered around the stage sammy's in here for whatever reason besides that i've worked out why she looks so mad all the time she mixed up which game she's just a cameo in with the introduction of the skateboard we even start doing some puzzles again though it must be said i really dislike yeak's puzzles each puzzle room is built to be as spacious as possible and i get this is partly to obscure solutions and force you to try and hold the space in mind but it also means there's just ages of trekking across rooms to test things out let's talk about music it's a mixed bag there's a handful of tracks i like besides the one composed by toby fox [Music] but during play i noticed something strange the music i disliked i wasn't just thinking wow this music's bad i was often finding myself telling the music to shut the [ __ ] up i feel like too many composers try to sound like uematsu i don't blame them for imitating the final fantasy soundtracks i've done it i made a career out of it but lately i've been craving my own voice well you found it still there are some genuinely good tracks in amongst [Music] the theme for alex communicates his character better than the game does [Music] acoustic instruments tell us he's a hipster and the beeps and boops tell us he's a dork [Music] the voices in the background steadily rise to demonstrate his growing importance but this isn't dignified chanting it's a pompous idiot becoming more important than he realizes or deserves this track is used for motifs in the mind dungeon and for later reveals nice subtle hints that connect alex to concepts and other characters but that's not just getting ahead of myself that's getting out of the game if you just take yeek on its own andrew communicates better through music than english you'd think this track would be 10 minutes long and have two minutes of random scar and a spoken word bit from a murakami novel but no this music communicates a clear story in good time the variety of battle music is one aspect that helps with how long and repetitive battles are but it's a real crap shoot when i find a majority of the music grating plus there's an annoying incongruity when the game asks me to tackle rhythmic minigames while the soundtrack doesn't quite play along by putting the band together we're able to find the lp deep in the recesses of vella's mind dungeon but before it's broadcast the group gets together to listen to it themselves that bad huh yeah the reception makes velar run off alex goes after her and it's halloween now wasn't it spring earlier today don't get me wrong i feel like i've lost months of my life but this isn't right this section of the story is where metaphysical rules and mystical [ __ ] just gets dumped on us in big dollops most of it meaningless twaddle meant to send the viewer in circles on that note villa's backstory she got cheated on in another reality and wound up hopping to ours a year ago besides the usual eye rolling wordiness this story is delivered like a creepypasta where the author uses absurdly precise measurements it was may 22nd 1996 at 302 am may 22nd of 1997 at 302 pm until 302 am it was may 22nd 1201 pm it's hilariously distracting like every time vella said she had to check her watch oh 302 am crippling depression bella could you tell me where half a year went besides down the drain anyway then we get a choice to try and kiss her putting aside the foreshadowing in alex's pants the crew heads up to a radio tower for everyone time is measured differently clearly play us off [Music] [Applause] [Music] witness this powers up the accenture 2000 who immediately establishes her power level by taking out some entities this would look cool if it wasn't yeek and the vision of this conks alex and velar out it was the woman made of plastic that i've been dreaming about she was stuck in the van but we need to find her outside rory asks a life or death question yeah you're right sorry the next morning alex reflects on his unexplainable connection to this android feeling like he's known her for a long time how could a woman made a plastic be loved so much by a real flesh and blood human that's not an honor hole i want to go down alex there's a ton of last second foreshadowing in a painfully dragged out conversation about velar's reality and the nature of death i had this dream and in this dream i was loved unconditionally sounds like a dream so who was she was it sammy park no i don't think so maybe it was maybe it was you maybe it was the android in the van maybe it was all three of you as one being meanwhile rory found the van in a bunch of pictures on ownism so in the end i guess it's good to get into conspiracy forums wait shouldn't michael have been the one to do that [Music] you have died i'd say i don't get yek's party but there's nothing to get they're dull on their own and don't bring out anything interesting in each other michael was well not interesting but useful at the start since he knew more than alex about the paranormal then vela comes along and just plain knows more than him that's uh workable i mean he still has ownism no way that's not important anymore and we're trusting information from [ __ ] rory now so what's the point of michael he's redundant all he does is step in to take pot shots i don't think he even wants to be here he's bored vela should either be his worst nightmare or holy grail this is someone who's hopped realities but besides this one moment i can't recall them ever really interacting speaking of every beat involving her has alex doing the exact opposite of what she asks then her rolling over and going along with it which totally undermines how she's introduced as capable and headstrong rory just has no good reason to want to keep hanging out with us at all claudio and chandra are nice aside from when michael cracks jokes or when veler and rory get annoyed by alex moments before he's forgiven everyone just vaguely gets on and that's boring i think the party shouldn't be held together by this barely believable boring friendship but instead by friction and obligation which is pretty much there just never brought up chandra is really interesting and tragic in this regard in the party's shared theme of responding to grief she doesn't really remember her twin brother it's a grief that's foisted on her that she can't truly connect to she feels more bad about claudio who has not only been unable to move on but is now getting roped into hunting for semi-pack then in every scene thereafter this trait just doesn't exist which leaves her with nothing where'd that conflict go michael and vela should be butting heads michael has spent ages on his forum then vela rolls in with her experiences which contradict what people have told him this is a way to give michael some actual character and things to talk about plus a reason for vella to explain the paranormal in smaller doses throughout the plot rather than in two giant goes they should bicker and argue over how these things work no that's not right that isn't how this works meanwhile alex just uses both of them to go after sammy now this would make alex more unlikable and the thing is alex's problem was never that he's unlikable him being unlikable is the point of his character the problem is that he's boring there's nothing in him an audience would want to watch making him more clearly driven and manipulative would make him more defined and as such make it easier to demonstrate him changing alex shouldn't even act interested in the paranormal outside of how it can get sammy back you acted like this was connected to sammy messing with forces he doesn't care to understand not as a bumbling idiot but a headstrong one this would make his relentless pursuit of sammy more believable even as it's made clearer to him that she's definitely gone michael should be encouraging alex just so he can follow along and have [ __ ] to post on ownism about fulfilling his own selfish whims velar at first feels something of her own connection to sami as someone else who jumped realities albeit a bit more willingly and comes along out of her own sense of obligation and well that would shatter a bit with her revelations over where sammy went but hold with me a second rory could then be driven by a misguided attempt to make up for the alpaca incident and fill the void with these people maybe the others shouldn't even invite him along he just comes this may sound like a worse reason to hang out with the party and admittedly it is but at least it's self-motivated and gives the character an angle vela then sees rory rolling with the group and thinks oh god no and now sticks around because she feels the need to keep an eye on him around [ __ ] she was the one who walked him through his trauma in wind town she opened up for his sake sammy's gone and this kid isn't in the best place either that's part of my problem with yeek the party barely interacts with each other it all goes through alex and his dynamic with everyone is very samey and bland it may sound like i'm just trying to make the party more miserable but that is not the intent i just want them to actually act i want most of the [ __ ] words cut out and replaced with the characters actually having character and for that they need an actual motivation and actionable interpersonal hooks yeek acts like vague grief should be enough to hold people together when really that should be what makes them meet before being set aside for something that actually builds upon it claudio and chandra lost their little brother in circumstances similar to sammy and well just actually use that [ __ ] chandra talked about there's a nice melancholy dynamic to play on here squandered like every other character the older brother old enough to harbor that pain and the twin was too young to really experience it besides this claudio is older a bit wiser unerringly friendly able to de-escalate situations maybe he could actually start trying to smooth over the group's beef and get them getting along better but instead of capitalizing on any of this instead he's the butt of otaku jokes that don't really fit the time period meanwhile just speaking personally claudio is my favorite character since he's at least passionate about anything yeek is going for a cast of quirky damaged characters brought together by fate but their common ground is flimsy as you meet party members they drop their story on you in a solid chunk before just going along with whatever alex does the fact yek then insists that everyone likes each other is dull it only leaves their most superficial elements up for exploration they just come off as barely human with the [ __ ] they let slide give them some fight let them actually express themselves maybe they could actually develop this way i get that asking for character development in yeek is like asking if a stone could spare a little blood but hey i'm an optimist the next part sucks you have to go and look at ownism which gives you the van locations but if you head to them they won't exist we can't see them until we go and gather the party by talking to everyone and bombing a ride off claudio it could not be signposted worse it took a while to find the bloody party would you guess chandra is by the frankton fountain no you wouldn't because there's nothing to her character all i know is she works in flag town so i went there a good game wouldn't make me cross the whole map but yek would but it doesn't i can't trust it i just i haven't then in a moment of restraint that must have taken every fiber of axe being you can find the van on your first go and skip a ton of fluff holy crap isn't that it can uh anyone pick a lock here yeah wouldn't it be hilarious if like if i could like out of this ragtag band of misfit friends the black guy could pick the lock and and don't pretend you didn't think it so to answer your racist ass question i cannot pick a lock well at least not a car lock i went through a sherlock holm phase and learned to pick basic locks you know antique locks egyptian wooden pin locks awarded lock rfid locks if i had the right equipment but definitely not a car lock so just to clarify you we chase a bunch of mole rats and uncover that the robot is being driven around by soul survivors and vel is confused as she explained earlier sole survivors are beyond any real needs and just exist vel is questioning it so the player won't because it won't be answered alex enters the van and is immediately pulled elsewhere by now the game has gone so far up its own ask that this is the loading screen and the dungeon ahead is another late stage piling on a plot but here's something fun around this point the combat starts to break the strength stat and lp toss just start messing up leading to alex doing hundreds and eventually thousands of damage per turn i haven't even been grinding hell i've been avoiding fights where i can and my stat allocation has been haphazard at best i just waltzed into this but it makes you more tolerable so i'll take it i am the ascension 2000 my consciousness is natural but my physical form is man-made i exist in all realities simultaneously you have the pleasure of making the acquaintance of a miss sunny park i was there i am semi and summing is me when one soul leaves a reality another can freely enter the only requirement necessary is having some relation to the departing soul whether it's being a parallel version of the departing or having an emotional connection to the departing when sunny left your reality i entered i am the ascension 2000 i am sammy park i am bella wilde well i said i wouldn't but down i go essentia further explains this strange solipsistic multiverse as we meet parallel versions of vela a similar story plays out across dimensions velar is mostly an asian woman with [ __ ] tasted men they fall for that universe as alex who uses them and runs off leaving them suicidal this somehow makes rory the villa of our reality but you can't kiss him and leave him it's one or the other yeah you can try and kiss rory you gave me that my music you're saying i'm the [ __ ] that used vela and i'd buy alex using any opportunity to mope but man this whole dungeon's theme of a person's capacity for cruelty is so meandering and juvenile this stupid bloody rageface comic has a more nuanced take than the mountain of words thrown at us here i can't believe i'm capable of such a thing good news alex you're not you've got no game souls don't have to match up in appearance gender or time period there's just one of you in each reality that's as similar as needs be for dramatic convenience every vella is totally different but alex seems to just be instantly recognizable to this japanese guy this is not a lifetime i can recall the norm say my life is what you're looking at is another absurdly roundabout bit of foreshadowing and he has used this same trick before but like the one soul rule it's [ __ ] with it a lot of deaf imagery follows with alex needing to sacrifice himself to progress you know i'm more shocked by alex having no reaction to this than the scene itself still let's just go on trusting accenture why not as this dungeon goes on i start feeling like he doesn't even really have a story what it has is a collection of info dumps and justifications for the story it wants to be telling whenever i feel like i'm approaching understanding or meaning a single line of throwaway dribble will obfuscate whatever i thought was being said random crap happens that doesn't have any purpose but to send the player in circles yik just says whatever the hell it feels like safe in the knowledge that there may be another line of dialogue elsewhere that excuses it at the end accenture takes alex back to his own mind dungeon and opens a hall of parallel lives that we're not allowed to look at something about speeding through alex's mind feels wrong if this was really alex there should be a conveyor belt moving us backwards at all times at the end of the hall we get one last brim reveal alex's worst quality destruction eventually and alex brings every reality to its end and at the turn of the millennium ours is to follow this is inevitable and there's no fighting it another alex will descend and snuff us out essentia then makes an offer that alex and his friends commit soul suicide and escape before the impending doom but alex decides they'll stand and fight it pleases me that you want to fight for something i know this isn't your usual way together we can attempt to fight the spender of realities you think you're making it into the party lineup back in reality we had apparently been missing for a few days and no one but our mum seemed to care which is probably the most telling move the party has made so far she's got a new job that lets her combo a whole bunch of title drops why two cake why two cake y2k y2k ah mum it's pronounced yike an act can pat themselves on the back for a job well done well time to tell everyone i'm back rory committed suicide well [ __ ] uh uh sorry to ruin the good news but i'm back we went to his funeral last night where the hell were you you were there when i disappeared when i was gone when i reappeared when villa meets accenture she doesn't question that this robot is apparently also her when she was the one who explained how this whole physical soul [ __ ] works and i guess she just takes it that robots don't count but it doesn't matter she's up for dying for the course i've explored the soul space and i've seen the beginnings of destruction to many realities have you forgot which one of you is the robot go and find each one of your friends individually the good news is yik recognized that michael was finished as a character hours ago so they've reinvented him so michael explored his soul space and experienced his parallel lives in all of this he learned he's michael i want to train in the mind dungeon to be ready to fight this thing when it comes for us you down dude you gave me hope again for brought a sense of adventure back in my life that i thought it vanished with my little brother claudio we did one and a half things together i borrowed your car and drove rory to suicide but if you're happy to be here with the apocalypse incoming a calendar system is added you may be thinking this is a lot like persona 3 and yeek certainly does seeing this just lifted the ending wholesale well the bad news is you're both wrong and opening the door for persona comparisons this wide doesn't do yeek any favors they should have nixed it our goal is to die swole and each day we have three options hang out with friends dealing with a cut scene for a free level up go outside and explore with a certain number of battles or clearing a side quest ending the day or enter the mine dungeon which yeah buy time there's just not enough to even do there's such a small number of these friend events that they can be exhausted long before the end i cleared all but one side quest with time to spare and that was after i got bored of just walking back and forth through alex's door to burn time this section should have set friend events to certain days and just toss in some new late-game side content to fill time as it is yik is constructed in a way where you can exhaust most of the content that would pad this half-baked month out long before you get here and it's not even close to filling it out if you left it for now and this is all ignoring the better option of just cutting it thematically yeek has half of one of persona 4's big themes of confronting the uncomfortable aspects of yourself but not the more important part about putting the work in to improve or forgive those parts of yourself with who you want to be alex has spent a lot of a game aware of and begrudging his flaws but all he has done is cathartic self-flagellation more realistic maybe makes for a good story not without the narrative understanding that this is what it's doing and acting on it it's like eek is never certain where character development should begin and keeps putting it off which makes the whole message and a result in persona inspiration astoundingly ironic andrew is aware of the persona franchise and it feels like a bigger influence than earthbound at the end of the day honestly he should have been looking at persona 3 for party dynamics there is a dysfunctional group that starts coming together after a good deal of friction but really yeek is more like a netflix adaptation of persona 4 where no one on the production staff really cared about the source material the original message is paired down and it just feels clumsy and like it wants to be something else but can't really be its own thing so don't act like i'm some anime character don't worry fella i won't you're coming up short and this is all alongside the fact that while these themes are present the game itself is indulging in two of alex's big flaws it's greedy and shallow throwing whatever it wants into the mix without consideration for whether it benefits the overall experience and this isn't just in the writing but in the mechanics the mini games the mind dungeon a lot of the puzzle solving tools and now this calendar it's all unrefined it asks you to play with toys for far longer than they're engaging so it's only natural i start trying to find shortcuts this doesn't help the story either in what i can only guess is an attempt to heighten a sense of impending doom it just winds up making it feel further off as i keep slamming a door on myself as the month comes to a close multiple scenes start pulling back the curtain michael has a freak out since he feels he's the only one who's been noticing that reality is starting to shift alex doesn't ask him about moving house and honestly it's a little distracting that this breakdown is accompanied by yeak's best visual gag let's have a quick game to spot the difference just ignore the cuts and the color of the text boxes hey you want to hear the really funny part when i went and lived all of my parallel lives i was him i was on a computer talking to me now tell me how the hell can a computer connect to a chat room that something is screwed up here guys hey you wanna hear the really funny part when i went and lived all of my parallel lives i was him i was on a computer talking to me now tell me how the hell can a computer connect to a chat room that isn't another reality something is screwed up here guys don't worry michael i'm noticing okay why the hell haven't any of you asked why the entities were driving the android around bella you said it yourself soul survivors do not kidnap people wait hang on what just happened did you just finish your 18 hour break from relevance you were awake when she said that tomorrow we can sort this out they will not sort this out tomorrow the game is really not subtle that we shouldn't trust accenture and i just realized it's alex doing it again he's not reading things panda more or less spells it out didn't michael move away when he was 10 didn't they move to canada when his dad got that publishing deal didn't you and michael have a falling out at some point alex jumped realities and you know this starts fine michael moved away and alex forgot that perhaps from the grief of losing this bundle of charm those weird phone calls we keep getting well that's old universe michael taunting us for some reason which hey means alex's dick and michael being a dick are both limp foreshadowing but he's just now realizing he hasn't seen his dad you don't have a dad which well there's a lot to unpack there my dad worked for pacific chime not my mom my mother a 49 year old short red-headed woman was an information systems programmer analyst for pacific chime and come to think of it the whole town's different which leaves us with two possibilities one is that they didn't rewrite this dialogue from when they changed the frankton map since it doesn't even remotely describe the area and you know this is possible but we've got more evidence for option two alex is the dumbest [ __ ] alive hey where'd this forest come from says the man who missed the woods for the town [ __ ] alex taking extra semesters to finish college never mind illiteracy never mind that spoilers accenture is lying to us i think he's struggling with object permanence it's a criticism cop-out but honestly the fact i even have to question this is telling making alex an oblivious [ __ ] has been hammered home and it sure is convenient but it's getting ridiculous it's also implied that we may have hopped realities at a couple more points along the way or that reality is just deteriorating so hard that we're getting displaced in time and space so that time skip maybe we jump realities so that arcade opening weeks earlier maybe we jump realities so plagiarizing a book from the future who boy are my legs tired jumping through these legal hoops and the realities they come with this is why i said the world dialogue should change over time if reality is changing maybe changes should be reflected in the world maybe people besides michael should have swapped houses from time to time maybe new dialogue and a sense of place getting distorted would benefit an attentive player and make it clear that this is what you're going for hell i've got a play for you right here yeek on that calendar system a moment ago occasionally skip a day or two draw no attention to it just [ __ ] with people under the hood in ways that are kind of playful yeek isn't a big budget aaa studio game so i'm not asking for big changes i'm asking for them to pay attention and use what they have it's awfully interesting how out of the infinite realities we always land where god hit copy and paste i'm not sure what happened to the alex we've replaced if that's what's happened here but i'm sure he had it coming i better go and find whatever new rory has slipped in and tell him his sister already left the building in a well-written story this would be the slam dunk everything's building towards where a bunch of gaps can now be filled in by the player as they head into the finale and i'll give yeet credit the more i think about it there are a lot of little things clicking like the double barrel of that guy approaching the dartboard the timing of this couldn't be funnier it's like the first dungeon all over again but now it's been a whole year of weird [ __ ] but 12 hours before the finish line alex thinks for five seconds and goes hang on this is bollocks as a hipster may throw up irony as a defense mechanism to ward off criticism yeek has erected a multi-planar hipster barrier on the entire story any inconsistency in the plotting now has blanket coverage because whoops i slipped and cracked my ass on another reality whoops the only person who knows the whole story is being selective with the truth which parts well [ __ ] off and [ __ ] you on the 31st the crew sets off to spend their final day in new york city i actually quite like this graphical change i'm not sure why but i took it as alex being so stressed out about reality ending that he's just processing it this way how funny is that it's actually just that reality is on the fritz so i got it wrong both times would you like me to clear some things up we get her version of events proto michael was deemed too interesting and kicked out for a carbon copy of the old one bella and sami are the same but accenture took the place of sammy when she left and hang on a second that doesn't even begin to make sense plus vella arrived here a year ago but sammy only left recently and there's one soul per universe so that just doesn't work but accenture is vella and sammy but she's here and she's probably lying to us so they're probably not related at all and that's the only way it could work and god damn it it lines up i'll admit it's wrong of me to be annoyed when geek doesn't [ __ ] something up it's like god damn it i was gonna hold this against you but i gotta concede yeak you got one over on me this being the case however it's pretty [ __ ] sleazy to put sammy and essentia in vela's mind dungeon it's cheeky to give velar and sammy the same minigame to imply connection it's low to have vela also get knocked out when the accenture's woken up like i said there's just so much something will line up and be contradicted elsewhere yeek is spitballing and there's actually a pretty big line between a red herring and out and out lying to your audience also apparently there's copies of the party in every reality and they near enough always wind up together or something and since reality had started breaking at whatever point some time ago these lock came in they're not native to this reality but we are so did we swap realities or not who [ __ ] cares there's probably more lines in here somewhere that support or deny that claim and i'm repeating an explanation that obviously doesn't matter i hadn't found this strange it was also obvious from the start this wasn't my reality mine dungeons cats with mustaches beautiful women who come in and out of my life mysterious pan-dimensional androids this wasn't my life of course something had to be wrong i had sensed it all along but i was so intrigued by the fun mystery of it all fun fun fun fun fun fun fun fun after a day in new york as midnight approaches the group arrives in times square what the hell is that when i said rory dying just changes a few lines of dialogue well there you go they forgot to account for his absence but hey maybe reality's breaking right guys i mean the game even kicked proto michael out and replaced him with regular michael isn't that alex's face holy [ __ ] everyone this is it prepare you michael you're back i never left oh no wait oh no he's gone again [Music] but hey maybe reality is breaking right guys a friend of mine had repeated soft blocks on this boss it took them an hour to whittle through since it could just bug out at any point but hey maybe reality is brave it's not really a final battle it's more a vinyl battle [Music] lp toss give your final words to me [Music] i rock the meteor [ __ ] in a single turn which makes the alex comic throw a fit these characters are dead they're arcs left unfinished with no resolution accenture jumps in to save alex and sure why not not quite the full house set anymore [ __ ] up man you [ __ ] up everyone died with nothing else to do alex surrenders himself to the soul space but not before i [ __ ] you not a four minute long monologue over black screen well that's just character progress right there at the beginning he could only go for a minute is this the power of the mind dungeon is the content fresh oh no it's just more self-flagellation you'd think with nothing to do alex could work on his routine but he's got no new material you're now face to face with god you can ask him any question and all you can ask is what's for dinner maybe acknowledging your mistakes makes you not a little [ __ ] my mistake was thinking that video games are art huh we then find ourselves floating out in space panda [ __ ] off and i guess since it's the year 2000 we can do a castaway reference what the hell am i going to do out here all alone alex hell am i supposed to know what to do i'm only a stuffed panda [Music] hey hey you'll come back i don't care if you're enjoying i need after a giant time trying to navigate the void we come to an island of other alex's hey we don't all look alike well none of us have ever seen it through to the end before you're the first i believe usually we leave our body when she comes to get us these lot gave up the moment essential warn them of the coming destruction so unlike us they save their mates anyway are you ready for yeak's one punch line [Music] you know i had a dream last night in my dream i saw my brother but my brother was you cute little kid grew up to be an ugly ginger like yourself well this is awkward alex then witnesses a group of bad alexes going off to wreck another reality and decides to follow and as he does so he starts fracturing losing pieces of himself and in a bid to retain his memory he winds up in the darkest room of the game it's a long linear corridor you need to backtrack across multiple times to progress it's likely staggered so the big musical piece can play out in full a musical piece that feels off [Music] i am dreaming the game has stripped us of our money and items so we need to grab cash head back for keys then trek to the next chest and alex gets to see his friends taken from him once again the game does forget to take your equipment so if you sell it you can just get out of here i want to talk about reception to alex i think it's pretty clear by now that i don't care for the character i think he's both undercooked and ham-fisted when they went for annoying but likeable but unlikable they sort of buggered the balance but that's less important than this if you're writing a story with the pretense of having a message or a moral lesson which i'm going to assume is what's happening because the story has felt like a [ __ ] sales seminar so far then likeable or unlikable is less important than communicating a fort or opening a dialogue which alex fails to do and i doubt it's for lack of trying but in this chapter lies the big misunderstanding with alex that i want to tackle and yes i'm going to bat for yeet for a moment the early game has characters yelling at alex that he isn't the most important person in the universe well lo and behold he sort of is i've seen this treated like a mistake in the writing or that this is the story trying to justify his behavior since him being important absolves his wrongdoing i don't agree with that more so i'd say it's a juvenile way to look at it and it's definitely not what yeek is going for yeek is a postmodern title and i think it approaches that moniker in some non-hacky ways it's not just wearing it as a lazy excuse to do whatever the hell it wants it would do that anyway in a traditional story the power of friendship triumphs in this alex's resolve led everyone to what we learn was a totally avoidable oblivion in a traditional romance two characters flaws will cause them to clash but they'll ultimately become better people for one another in this alex is a possibly pan-dimensional playboy who has led multiple women to spiritual suicide his two-timing destructive nature is represented by how he lusts after sammy but can still try and pursue velo rory and accenture and we indirectly kill all three in a traditional story the implicit importance of the protagonist is an often unstated fact of the world and if they are destined for heroism they'll come to prove themselves worthy of it yik has made alex important and acknowledged this but it never acts like this absolves him of wrongdoing as a matter of fact this ending is rubbing his own lack of responsibility in his face his importance is presented as a negative a cruel cosmic joke that a person so dense actually has a gravitational pull but no gravitas importance has not translated to correctness or automatic moral high ground it's just that alex is the [ __ ] of the cosmos sorry everyone just because we hear alex is in a force doesn't mean we're meant to agree with them when i was playing through it and by the way the playthrough is on commentary com so you can see me in the moment i hated alex and this framing so much that i spitefully rejected everything presented to me i angled plot beats to see them in the worst possible light which leads to treating yeek as though it sees alex as being in the right which is unfair because up until maybe the last few seconds if that it really doesn't does this mean i'm saying that yeek is in the end clever and this was all worthwhile absolutely not it's still an overlong tedious mess which sometimes lines up if you forgive tiny lines of dialogue spoken several hours apart hidden within brambles of bollocks yeek is rarely complex but always complicated it's beating you over the head with its messages by way of a donkey punch alex's cardboard and the fact that within 25 hours he's managed to bumble into being slightly interesting in three ways does not make for a good use of time after reliving the deaths of his former enablers alex comes face to face with a planet as yet untouched and decides to do what no other alex not even your eye has ever done before an idea is forming completely human genius and kind intentioned idea something that no other version of me would do before you answer i want to thank you for listening to my long story i'm afraid that this reality will soon end he breaks the fourth wall asking us our universe is alex to gather our universe's party and join him to put a stop to this destruction while he's going on i want to briefly touch on this blog post on postmodernism where andrew links to a list of postmodern characteristics i think he messed up and mistook this for a checklist and not a guideline irony check pastiche well i think you more just wrote a bad novel while the worst game was happening but sure check intertextuality is it there or is it legally distinct plagiarism ah sod it check i also gotta survive on fair use meta fiction and temporal distortion well it's certainly an opening to write an inconsistent narrative check historiographic meta fiction and faction well i'm sure elisa lam appreciates it check plus it let you do nothing with y2k in a game called y2k oh wait look millennium bugs well give yourselves another pat on the back paranoia i certainly don't trust yeek check maximalism well you said you wanted to be concise but you've said a lot of things check magical realism ah you tried we can cut realism but i don't want to say yik is magical time wizard or not but sure check and now finally participation this is what yeek thinks of you and your mates i'm not going to lie we don't really contribute anything you know with lp toss and all we just get to watch alex kill some of his worst aspects which does a decent job concealing that female alex doesn't have a unique voice [Music] yeah that's what i'm calling a female alex or phallics which you know that works i think it's pretty lazy to represent personal growth by having us kill our personal demons but we're what five minutes from endgame the group sets off and alex runs into the specter of sammy this moment where she apologizes is awful it is a moment of actually demonstrated personal growth for alex he simply hugs her and lets her head home but giving her part in his manipulation no words spoken he just keeps going and i'm sorry if this isn't a very analytical way to put it but it's [ __ ] and i'll trust you to fill in the gaps as to why we finally come face to face with proto-alex and ascension 995 and they give us the 4-1-1 i'm really surprised to see you here i'm glad you made it this far oh man you poor poor guy it turns out accenture 2000 on behalf of 995 was lying through her teeth in a weird overly elaborate scheme to get an alex to come here proto alex alex and accenture are all the same soul alex is the strong part and accenture needs us to break the connection so she can take over so this makes about 20 different bloody ways alex is talking to himself you sure there's no room for panda in here that said i actually like this twist now i'm sitting and listening to it most twists have made me go oh but this one has made me go oh since it did actually just pay off a bunch of [ __ ] with alex talking to himself it didn't excuse the length and i think this line here the division of our soul isn't exactly natural i'm pretty confident that line just exists to excuse accenture being in the same universe as alex i mean it's either that or it was never true and the game just spent text box after text box drilling in [ __ ] and i can't even discount that it's done it the ascension dungeon was the game lying to us for nearly three consecutive hours the plot has had to bend its own rules to get us here which does speak to the shoddy balled up construction of yeak's fiction but you've at least paid it off i think it's a character study of a manipulative idiot who only listens to himself i guess even to aspects of himself he's unaware of i suppose that perhaps led to a spiral of manipulating his own idiot self and his friends leading them all to oblivion in an unwitting quest to destroy himself so he can conceivably take over himself oh hey dad it could also mean it was alex as in accenture using sami as many already per chance had against alex which possibly gives the whole story a beautiful cruel irony in how sami was used and tossed aside in our reality this story played out again but with a tragic spin it all might have come together rest in peace elisa lam [Music] so let's follow up with a boss fight that's genius in how awful it is you can't win we got pulled into this reality for nothing you're meant to take out the two glass pillows within a couple of turns and then get insta-killed but lp toss breaks the fight making the boss forget their instant kill move and instead just do basic attacks so now i have to wait to be whittled down yeek is just so genius it got me comfortable with the lp toss and then it just turned it against me now yeek was never going to have a final test of skill or game knowledge but of patience i can think of no finale more fitting [Music] you have died do you feel it do you feel that tingling after losing we're sent to a colorful dimension and come face to face with roy the hero of two brothers he gives alex a pep talk that's utterly pathetic on a meta level saying he knows what it is to disappoint friends family and fans before saying others worked hard to stop him from finishing his quest but alex will succeed where he failed before sending alex back to fight once again and we'll keep losing over and over again there's simply no winning here we have to take control from alex and go throw the now open switches and you know what you gotta love it in this ending that has been building towards alex taking responsibility for himself in the end he can't even do it it's handed off to you and he takes responsibility for [ __ ] nothing if you think this is the right thing to do i'll follow your lead on three that's the only thing keeping this division permanent do not unplug us we will be whole again don't do it don't unplug when this is done it will merge all realities killing all but one alex and hey when you do it you're not dead bored maybe but alive so that's actually kind of funny in the end the game was all leading up to one final plop line and congratulations it's us the true alex yeek hasn't just broken the fourth wall it reached through it and branded us as its property participation check and mate yeek's ending it's the rest of our lives typically for playing i don't actually do a great deal of research perhaps it's laziness but i tend to prefer keeping things to what the game itself can tell me the end product is what matters most it's what most people will experience not the interview a few days later where you [ __ ] and moan and explain your reasoning for why things were the way they were it's not to say research isn't valuable it absolutely is but i prefer taking a title purely on what it can communicate but this ending is awful i had to go digging i had to find out what the story was really trying to get across and putting it together slowly there's there's just a lot of puzzle pieces that don't neatly go together yik has managed to [ __ ] things up in such a fascinating way it has crafted a narrative where its own depth is unfalsifiable is it there oh [ __ ] possibly the barrels are empty and the bloke is stepping away from the arky the board's on the floor and eric bristow's dead ye could not only beaten me i walked back into the ring and now you're here with me in this mixed metaphor worthy of the game it's nice to meet you fellow alex before i move on to the other endings i'm going to revisit yeek with two readings i've come to we'll start with the crazier one everyone i've explained this to said i sound mental which you know wasn't great especially because the video used to open with this idea spicy said i came off way too strong and i'm glad he did trying to start from here had me trapped for months and well after all these words all this thought where i was making myself tackle yeek from a karma angle and yes i at times sounded heated but that was the karma angle i think i've worked through most of my aggression i'm a lot less inclined towards this read now it's just too petty but i'm going to present it because i think it still has merit if at the least because you made me feel this way for a long time the wind town section was in service of this interpretation that i no longer hold to and right up until now i just felt so much stronger about getting here but now i just don't have this bitterness in me anyhow to talk about this first reading i have to start with the muddiest misunderstanding levied at yeek people think that alex is an awful insert a stand-in for andrew allenson and i've brought up andrew time and again in this video since if there's a story more contradictory than yeaks it's yek's development it's clear there is a lot of author in the lead but alex is not an awful avatar not intentionally anyway alex is actually a player surrogate not just at the end alex is you from moment one i still stand by the player's surrogate part of this that's not even subtext by the end with that in mind yeek does have a message and the message is [ __ ] you yeek is a game that hates you and it wants that feeling to be mutual but let me ask myself some questions so i can frame this argument so you're saying that yeek achieved what it set out to do barely if a soldier in the trenches shot themselves in the foot they want to be sent home not praised for accuracy its player antagonism didn't have anywhere near the desired effect owing to its dire presentation not getting people onto its wavelength through alex yeek wanted people to see something of themselves in him and go into a feedback loop of self-loathing brought on by it this would take a good deal of empathy on the part of the writing to achieve the issue came from being too unlikable and alex ii to find a character for others to want to tie themselves to if it did make that link i doubt it would last regardless this is because yeak's loathing doesn't come from a constructive place yeek isn't showing tough love through alex's flaws it's instead a 25-hour long directionless crazed run but there is method to this madness if you're meant to hate yeek why did andrew allenson get mad about his reception on the dick show i don't feel it contradicts me yeek is a game built on barely disguised spite i've got to assume the man didn't like the fire he started even good artists who understand how people respond to things can be annoyed when people take the wrong message away it's not inhuman to dislike being misunderstood let alone feeling like people hate you by proxy of a character they think is a self-insert the guy was clearly mad at the time and despite all of this yeek is still clearly a very personal project for the allenson siblings are you suggesting yeek is deeper than it was given credit for i'm actually suggesting the opposite that it's shallow by design now there is a bit more than just [ __ ] you in there but pretensions of depth are just that pretentions they're to trip you up if you start trying to think too hard about it in this case yeak's time wasting which i explored in wind town takes on a much more sinister meaning and yek's overall shoddy construction starts showing a callous consistency yeek has two writing tricks one is to make everything take too long two is to make sure nothing goes anywhere reaches a meaningful answer or if it does contradict it elsewhere it draws the player down dead ends never giving you anything satisfying intellectually or emotionally the reason these tricks hide under the surface is down to the fact it never stops employing them ever i'm not even talking about back to back examples of this are overlapping you get jerked around as you get jerked around do you really think y2k could have something to do with sami's disappearance no the other reason these tricks stay hidden is because yeek hides them in plain sight you see the more surface level examples of it while it's pulling the same trick under the hood the player looks at the world for alex's eyes but can see what he can't the answers that would save you both hours of time and this is done with just enough plausible deniability yeek can deny it's wasting your time after all it's in alex's character and we're alex and alex is us and we cannot do different in accenture's dungeon the game more or less spells out alex's feelings of guilt for the actions of other alex's and hey we are alex beings of destruction this guilt is implied to be ours as well since without fail each and every alex is on some level bad yeet comes off as absurdly disingenuous and near enough everything it claims to be inspired by or is ostensibly about nostalgia the 90s the millennium bug hipsters music the occult self-improvement the afterlife most disgustingly elisa lam it uses imagery and hollow references with nothing to ever say about the nature of any of these things it's there to appeal to the shallow alex that yik takes you for we fight the worst aspects of ourself our sleeves our laziness our pretension our perversion and right at the climax we meet roy protagonist of two brothers a game which axe shows an uncomfortable amount of reverence for two brothers failed for very public reasons well they would be public if anyone knew about it the game is a glitchy mess few who bought it could clear it and now no one can buy it the people who stopped roy from finishing his journey were not the people bashing the game but roy's own authors they stole music then took the game down to remake it in unity it's in talking to him that yeek reveals the source of its spite a failure most of the audience wouldn't even recognize then emboldened by words that deny reality you have to submit to failure anyway the only way to hit end credits is to attempt a roundabout form of metaphysical suicide but by yeek's own writing irreparably ties alex to you the game may as well end with a pop-up saying do you agree alex is you yes no with no just keeping you in place that's an incentive to try the boss fight as much as possible right you spend an entire game in the grips of a manipulative idiot who drags others along on dangerous wastes of time who forces others to indulge in his self-serving guilt and ultimately marches a bunch of people he asks you to invest in to their deaths then at the very end it will only let you leave with an admission of guilt so yeah a bit heavy as i said way at the beginning my thoughts were ever shifting perhaps i'm making this video not just because i promised i would but to finally get these brain worms and spite out of me my journey in understanding yeek has been more interesting and perilous than the game itself which is arrogant to say but [ __ ] it let's talk about two brothers for a moment owing to the magic of keysight so i managed to snag a copy and you know what [Music] it's not good but in some regards it's better than yeek i didn't finish it because it's glitchy and boring but there are some interesting parallels between the two titles first up here's what i like the game is presented in monochrome reminiscent of a gameboy screen unlike yeek there is purpose to the presentation it opens with that roy bloke out on an expedition with his wife well that's only half the truth really it opened with it not loading the [Music] foreground [Music] the two of them are killed by a fish monster and roy finds himself in a dimension filled with color he's blown away by it but at the same time he's terrified and trying to find his wife when he runs into a cosmic guide he doesn't have any of his questions answered and his return to life it's at this point i joked to myself that we're going to cut back to him trying to find these colors not giving a [ __ ] about his dead wife and that's exactly what happened but the joke was on me because two brothers was going somewhere with it as roy meets other characters and starts his journey it becomes clear that the man is in denial and has thrown himself into his work in an effort to ignore his own grief it's hardly original but it's something the dialogue isn't great the emphasis on the scientific community and science is beyond stilted and it's still a little verbose this line here was so hilariously clunky i had to stop and just appreciate it for a while so unlike yeek when this game attempts drama and flops it's at the least amusing you know how five nights at freddy's came about because people said scott corfin's models looked really weird and he embraced their artificiality i think andrew attempted the same thing with his dialogue by making all of his characters fake as [ __ ] but to far less success regardless of that these dialogues are a lot snappier and i did get the feeling that there were things being left unsaid for me to pick up on about the characters motivations and their history it gives you details but is confident enough to let them sit from time to time or otherwise just say what it needs to and move on and move on like alex roy is also unlikable he's got little regard for his own life he's putting himself and his brother in mortal peril and comes off a little unhinged and selfish here's how he's unlike alex he's at least a little compelling he's a little sympathetic his motives can be clearly gathered without being outright stated he's got as alex would say the french would say a raison d'etre both games explore existential ideas and deal with the topic of loss but in the two hours of two brothers i played roy had presented a more nuanced believable if stock take on grief than any character in yeek had done in its 20-hour plus run time if nothing else this is proof that andrew can write a character and stop himself from indulging his every thought i mean maybe he [ __ ] it up as he goes along i don't know the restrained minimalist presentation gave less words for him to make a mess with unlike yeek which uses sprite-like animations to jarring effect the playfulness of bringing color to a monochromatic world actually benefits what two brothers is going for and while very on the nose it complements the theme of grief over losing a loved one the downsides are far more numerous but i'll keep them relevant to what we see in yeek moments after the death of roy's wife in a heartfelt dialogue with an innkeeper who knows about the danger roy is walking into we meet a character who makes a fourth breaking joke about colours making a game kiddy and that's the tip of the iceberg the npc jokes are still numerous and are far more grating than in yeek yeak's irreverent world is admittedly annoying but it's far more clear from the off alex's goal is a purely self-motivated one the issues of everybody else have no bearing on our journey in two brothers the world is presented as mystical dangerous and sort of downbeat our goal is to bring colour to it i don't want these bastards having color most everyone we run into outside of the first room is needlessly awful or exist just to make really strange gags like the mind dungeon put a gameplay spin on levelling two brothers has us jump into and navigate our backpack in place of a menu which only makes a basic function take longer and feel far less involved once again it's putting a spin on a menu without realizing why menus tend to be the go-to the gameplay is slow it often fails to communicate objectives and the tools we need to use to overcome them this is especially bad where puzzles are concerned the brothers as gameplay and level designers repeatedly struggle with conveying information with both games i start getting an idea of where the interests of the developers lie through their shared elements irreverent if ill-fitting rpg humor ruminations on the afterlife spins on gameplay and menu usage which feel more like attempts to be different than a product of good sense and gameplay intertextuality why then does akk have such a love for this first release with only two games under its belt they're already going for a mythology to form around their characters which is utterly perplexing especially seeing as a few people know about two brothers b few people are going to learn about two brothers and c the few who do do not like two brothers now yeek as an idea pre-dates twin bros during yeak's development stolen music was discovered in a couple of siblings perhaps it's the bugginess perhaps it's the negative reception perhaps it's the presence of stolen music whatever it was it led to them taking down couple kyodai and announcing they'll be remaking it in unity as chromaforce later for release in 2016. i think that's around the same time yeek's first ending was rewritten and we'll talk about the original ending shortly as of this writing chroma 4 is still not out still i think the failure of two brothers hasn't been denied just willfully misinterpreted by its own creators and a lot of bitterness runs through yeek but i'd like to talk about my second more charitable interpretation of yeek built on the first it posits that yik probably doesn't hate you but it definitely doesn't respect you yeek wants to explore the relationship between an audience and a text a relationship on which it takes a dim view seeing it as shallow selfish and transient alex once again acting as a player surrogate is unsympathetic and manipulative he treats those around him as though they exist purely for his own whims with anything that gets in the way of his desires treated with disinterest or scorn the few instances of sympathy from alex such as with claudio and chandra's missing brother are at best empty gestures alex acts shocked to indulge in that catharsis before instantly pivoting back to what he wants dragging those two along with him alex doesn't really care and he posits that well neither do you their problems exist for you to feel bad at just you know don't interrupt me and of course they won't get in the way because after this their agency is stripped from them and they exist purely for you they're coming on the player's wild ride we learn of alex's in other realities who selfishly do what they want then through willful force or in action send that universe to destruction these are the movies books and games the player has already consumed sucking what they want from them before putting them away an analogy for ending that reality there's never a real reason given for alex's destruction he just does it for kicks before moving on this is why i find alex attempting to kiss everyone but leading rory to suicide to be the most dramatically appropriate telling of yeek even outside of this interpretation it reflects that self-centeredness right back at the player in this light alex is griping but lack of actual personal growth is bemoaning the player for even being here this isn't progress this is dangerous pointless catharsis just as alex is chasing a girl who he doesn't actually know and doesn't really exist in our reality the player is doing the same but by proxy with the reveal at the end that this was all orchestrated by accenture and that she's another aspect of alex it frames the entire conflict around the player this was never about sammy this was never about the party or about saving the world this was always about us sammy may apologize before the ending and that's the payoff yik assumes we want but then the next room reveals how naive her apology was essential wasn't just lying to us she was saying what she thought we wanted to hear to get us where she who is also us wanted which is well pretty funny actually considering how boring it was yeah i want four straight minutes of tedious exposition before i can enter the info dump dungeon that keeps me going there is a universe where you got your dick wet tell me what to do the point is it's all about being tricked it's false motivation that yik argues we give to ourselves we would never really act selflessly roy's message to the player promises of a victory waiting below but there isn't one it's just another game that has to end you interface with the soul space via a gaming device i have many things to tell you and very little time my my name is kale i come from a universe parallel to yours my world needs your help you're the only one who can save us i succeeded in opening a breach between my world and yours through your computer you can enter our world and help us the game hasn't brought you any closer to a colorful nirvana just another hollow finale something else to check off the list and as the credits roll all that's left is you go say it again you're alex the most important being in the universe and ultimately it's downfall yik posits that the audience is selfish by default their empathy inauthentic treating worlds and characters as only existing for them even when they may tell themselves otherwise it says we can never actually hold a dialogue with fiction we can only ever monologue the shoddy construction of the world the unfinished character arcs the metaphysics which lead off into nowhere the contradictions these might not be intentional but they aid this understanding of yeek after all a player will just take away whatever the hell they want from it why should it need to add up as i'm writing this i'm just now hit by the strange joke i've played on myself my frustration at having no clear takeaway on the game has led to me making one where the only takeaway is that we never really take away anything regardless from this perspective this is the only way heat could end is what i'd say if there weren't three more endings do you feel it yik's secret ending is a strange beast existing to preemptively belittle those who won't like how the game pivots away from ownism alex finding sammy and him getting a job it gives you a happy ending but it does it with disdain just before the party leaves for new york you can check ownism and find a post from bpa or brian allenson suggesting that sammy is still out there somewhere lo and behold you find her behind the tree out front she finds it funny how much time alex has wasted when she's been right here and by the way she loves us this makes alex so angry he steals claudio's car and books it for knn the place where sammy worked at this point the game starts calling alex by your name it's speaking directly to you and by the way you're now an intern at this news office you perform a series of poorly coded and awkwardly explained fetch quests for the boss supposing he died you find rory's ghost in a dead people closet and he says his death wasn't your fault after a bunch of running back and forth your boss is fired you disintegrate a secretary and now you can head further upstairs you're forced to speak with a bunch of cut content before returning to where you first found sammy she confirms that accenture is a fake this leads you back to the elevator where sammy says that if you leave reality won't end somehow everyone will live but you'll never be able to return if you enter the lift the game refers to alex entering the lift and then you're there [ __ ] it and it ends with him and sammy embracing this ending is wrong to me there's daggers in smiles here it plays itself cheery but i know a psycho when i see one every aspect of it is condescending towards the player sneering at them they wouldn't let me make a happy ending it's a common motif throughout which is a strange comment to make for a studio that has no expectations on it just like the two brothers pandering it assumes an image and identity and gets prickly when it's challenged the boring half-broken fetch quest that spin you in circles devoid of meaning rory saying his death isn't your fault yeah you not alex even though both narratively and mechanically it has to be plus sammy being alive and telling you the universe doesn't end if you leave with her defies the story's own rules so explicitly that taking the happy ending is taking a poison chalice this ending is a sly underhanded insult to those who think he could end in any way but the other one the third ending to talk about is the original cut ending but some context is necessary for its removal and hopefully this should explain some other aspects of this whole story the development of yeek was not easy it was long and arduous the development posts i've been referring to they're from late 2014 into early 2015. yik came out four years after these just after yeek received the money that ensured it would go ahead the allinson's mother was diagnosed with cancer the brothers found a studio within a short drive from home so they could be at her side at a moment's notice but as her condition worsened production moved into their living room they work day in day out with her there and no matter what yik became or what it stands to be it's a game that represents their final times with her i will admit to feeling cruel whenever i think about this in regards to writing this video i have my misgivings about andrew i definitely don't like his game but that's besides the point losing family friends and loved ones is a horrible experience and i'm [ __ ] on something that would have to be extremely meaningful to all involved that holds such connection and significance it's why i do feel sort of wrong in using his appearance on the dick show at points yeah yeah i've taken the piss out of him but yeah no [ __ ] the guy is angry people are stirring up controversies over things that weren't meant a bunch of people not only hate your main character they think he's based on you and this game is tied to the last few months you spent with your mother i'd be a hell of a lot madder than him all considered while they were away in seattle demoing the game she took a fall that she ultimately did not recover from and following her passing the game sat for a few months while they recovered when the brothers returned to yik they found it no longer represented them so they rewrote roughly a quarter of it including a total rewrite of the ending with the intent to sand off its edges make it less cynical and more humanistic but we're still not ready to talk about the cut ending because we have to talk about a cut opening first where we played as accenture the game used to open on a tutorial as her which got the axe for dragging the pace down and yes something got cut from yeek for that opening on accenture shouldn't have been cut a tutorial is her maybe but opening on her doing anything would have made the second act shift in focus from sammy to her feel more deliberate her being playable would have made a more lasting impression than some odd cutscenes that pop up apropos of nothing along with raising the question of how is she doing what she's doing the reveal that accenture had been gaslighting alex all along would hit harder if we were made an unwitting accomplice in our own manipulation it would help the big reveal that her and alex are the same person feel less like a last second edition to throw in a big twist the idea was clearly planned ahead but in the moment experiencing the story for the first time it doesn't land it rings hollow and while we're on a playable accenture i'm going to make a bit of a leap do you remember this room in its song [Music] i think this track was meant for a segment with accenture it's her theme it speaks at length about a machine being loved in dreams and marlene who accenture is using as her darli in that cut tutorial what's more important is that this song should be very familiar if we just listen to alex's theme [Music] hmm this says they're the same but different so much better alex's uses acoustic instruments whistling and mocking chanting showing him as an aimless human essentia's is more synthetic it has lyrics telling a story portraying her as more cold and focused she was always the one who knew what was going on while i'm here you ever think about how their attack minigames are basically the same thing that's a neat detail sorry i'm talking about a cut opening let's fast forward 20 hours i think the divergence point happened sometime after planet alex or at least that's an aspect that remained in both writings in this ending alex has come to learn that ascension was trying to fight the source of destruction proto-alex she has duped many versions of him into following her to their deaths and he was nearly brought here to his execution imagery for this ending still exists in the game in accenture's dungeon no less it still makes some sense with what we got but it's a lot weaker but alex realizes what accenture is fighting sees her desperation and decides to go and help of his own free will fully aware of the danger and deception this is already more meaningful alex is showing a genuine capacity for forgiveness that is just tossed into the other ending with a far less meaningful character it felt vaguely sickening to put it that way but there we go essentia gets a more sympathetic showing here as well she doesn't really want to harm alex but figures he's the only one who can stop himself so time and again she drags him to his death in the hopes of averting disaster and sparing what remains but this alex doesn't care he's brought you along and is committed to ending this cycle okay enough of the talk let's get down the kick of this thing's ass enough of the talking says alex that just cements this as the better ending that line alone and kick its ass they do they win in this one essentia dumb struck by their victory tries to explain herself how she hurt alex and those he cared about but alex actually says not to think about that right now he turns down needless words and endeavors to head to a new reality one without a parallel version of him become a better person find his friends again and help people [Music] maybe with a little more caution the game ends with him thanking the player not just for helping him but for doing it without being asked so i'm going to say and yes i feel like a bastard for doing this but what cynicism here needed to be sanded off an ending where alex repeatedly demonstrates growth acting not just of his own initiative but truly selflessly where he comes to understand the pain of the one who hurt him and work to help them and not just them but to stop this pain from reaching people he'll never even know and in the end learn not to beg and plead for explanations but to just maturely accept what is i mean sami is still dead as are alex's friends and there is a sort of naive disregard for all of that there's also an argument to be made that maybe this guy just really isn't worthy of redemption although this is just not enough for all the [ __ ] that came to pass it definitely aggrandizes this [ __ ] a bit much with accenture genuinely caring for him rather than alex being an unwitting lab rat all along but this is still leagues more pleasant than what replaced it the change feels more like a product of retreating into grief than anything else so who was it stopping you from writing a happy ending exactly there used to be one here and not just happier but more meaningful i have to back off a little here i've experienced loss and not just that funny webcomic by that crazy guy just coming at this change with that in mind it feels odd to even explain the changes as an addition of humanity when it's so much bleaker than an ending filled with compassion forgiveness and moving on with lessons learned the fourth and final ending present is another secret one one that was hyped as being unfindable by data mining and indeed data miners can't find it because it's not in the game oh the puzzle elements that would supposedly let you access the ending are there but they have zero functionality they just claim to be operable plus the entire ending is made up of areas and assets that don't exist in the game's files if you've watched yeak's trailers however you've seen some of them so where is this ending well it's on youtube on a barely disguised developer account so in this ending alex once again takes the car but this time drives the party to a lighthouse this is visible on the map but inaccessible in standard play in there you find accenture's tutorial and it is kinda boring but he fights through it and arrives in another reality's frankton it's in this frankton he finds the center in wilfred some cryptic [ __ ] is exchanged and alex ultimately follows the two out of time and reality this is where it gets very strange alex has clearly been through the events of yeek right up until the end more than once alex has traveled through time and multiple realities pursuing another path the boss fight has alex and the still living original party as timrod puts it you can tell the developers playing this because they know not to use lp toss and just end the fight instantly [Music] with a center and wilfred defeated alex is blown away that he managed to beat them this time but the party is confused by what just happened alex admits he's not sure what's going on but decides to instead say he's been an idiot being in a room that exists outside of space and time the party decides to depart heading back to before the events of yeet began to prevent any of this from coming to pass and i will say in all of the accusations of plagiarism i never expected that yeek would steal the ending of sonico6 but well here we are alex got the [ __ ] groceries all right so what's going on here well frankly i think it's another insult to the player one of a different stripe from the other secret ending and it comes from this small exchange chandra asks what would happen if they went to new york and alex says it's too horrible to say he's experienced that ending and wouldn't dare burden the party with knowing what happened this is the alex you'll never be this is the one who made the right choice saved his friends and got everyone their happy ending this ending not existing in the game is key because it says you can never do this you will always be the alex who went to new york who had to compromise this alex is not you never really met you and doesn't need you and on the whole this ending is incredibly haphazard intentionally vague throws up questions only to swap them away the first secret ending treats the idea of happiness as a joke this one just doesn't care either way sure be happy whatever you didn't really listen to a word i said did you as it ends alex thanks you you being link a developer of yeek the one who uploaded an ending that's out of reach this closure is denied this year doesn't end severing the link [ __ ] i i didn't mean that a lot of things in yeek are revealed to be wastes of time rory the job hunt the record hunt accenture these are the standout examples but it culminates in a month grinding for a boss fight that is unwinnable and this ending adds so much insult to injury without this ending that month grinding is a valiant effort they failed but they tried this ending takes that silver lining away it was not only pointless it was wasteful because there was a solution that the player never saw which is because it isn't there but the insult stands now to go into full bore insanity we have to talk about music one last time the track is called puzzle pieces you've heard some of it already and you probably don't want to hear more but here are some choice [Music] by the lyrics there's a path i'll take with so much at stake just try to understand this is not a mistake [Music] it seems innocent that i just can't shake the feeling that this track is mocking the player taunting them for already having gone down the wrong path and leaning on their inability to do right and well what's that chanting as we enter the lighthouse it's [ __ ] puzzle pieces it's [ __ ] puzzle pieces this ending does aid my second reading however seeing as unlike in the game proper way you have to take alex away with you since you played as him this unplayable ending keeps the player and alex separate you didn't truly experience this ending it's vicarious and it's not for you and you don't take alex with you it keeps you separate because you're not truly the audience not this alex we can't be this alex we're the ones who are meant to switch the game off wow it's [ __ ] over it's done i've finished talking about the bloody thing every ending i think it's fair to say i don't much like yeek but in spite of its tedium it might be one of the most fascinating and genuinely absurd games i've ever played it's clearly an auto work what's unclear is how many of its flaws come from antipathy misguided choices or ambition that gets in the way of a clear head it's a game that's obviously beating you over the head with its themes but it's also damn near unreadable and it's unclear to the point that it's unclear if that's by design or by fumbled writing it feels like a game that puts being unique and postmodern above being insightful and engaging while treating the school of fort not as the result of a story told in methods employed but as a checklist that has to be worked towards alex is a character that is at once endlessly discussable owing to just how much he's meant to get across and how much he bloody well spouts but is also interminably boring shallow and detestable yet these are all part and parcel aspects of his character yeek is so knotted up so poorly told so confusing that when i think i see something clever or thoughtful i'm not inclined to be happy that the story is doing something i panic because if i go to bat for it i always feel like there has to be something elsewhere in the story that will inevitably tear it away if yeek is genuinely clever at points it's so untrustworthy i could never be sure it's so unlikable i don't want to trust it and has so much bile that i don't want to like it i have to fight my instincts to give it props when i see something good and i'm aware of how unfair that is if yeek is a title that's acting in earnest that has a story a theme a message to convey and wants people to enjoy its systems and gameplay or just you know just give people a good time at the end of the day it's a failure it gets so excited about just how much it thinks it has to talk about that it never winds up saying anything it speeds through its ideas and dashes all of them against the rocks never giving anything time to grow and develop it sits on characters for too long and abandons character arcs and plot beats in service of its worst quality alex if yeek is a title that's meant to be a stab at the player antagonistic in nature it's still a failure and a rather pitiable one at that one that can't even be hated right in its antipathy it fails to communicate anything and just looks crazed and spiteful viewer antagonistic works tend not to be very popular and aren't terribly common what yeek wants people to feel bad over is as unclear as anything else i've been harsh on the allenson siblings and the team and especially andrew and i do think that man has a capacity for [ __ ] but i also think he has the capacity to tell a good story when he's not being his own worst enemy there are nice little details and ideas in yeek i think they just never coalesce and take form but given another shot and some refinement i think a good game is well within acts reach the ambition and imagination is certainly there they just get out of hand so that's that we'll have something fun next time something where i don't drive myself to madness let's try and focus on cool games that want us to enjoy life for a little bit with these rpgs videos have been bigger but slower to come lately so i do appreciate everybody's patience i want to thank nunem spicy emily hot cider tujo and the many other poor unfortunate souls who had to hear me ramble about yeek and be the poor recipients of whatever my latest revelation was over the months writing this thing their input and questioning helped so much with me putting my thoughts into any coherent order at least as coherent as this is i've got to say you guys are the real michaels velas rory's claudia your aid was really essential all yeah they're gonna [ __ ] beat the [ __ ] out of me one day there are plenty of other great videos on yeek out there that i'll link to in the description if you want to go further down this rabbit hole since hey going down rabbit holes is good obviously we've got running shine's excellent review game dog's free part breakdown trying to place yeek in relation to earthbound likes jack saint's own struggle for meaning with yeek uric salad bars hero you're supposed to hate video takes a particular interest in alex's worst qualities combat lobster compiled a video showing off yeak's cut content where what's left of the old ending is viewable i want to once again shout out tim rod's screenshot lp of yeek which has been invaluable for this video for letting me cross-reference parts of yeek far faster than i could have done in video form and for writing an entertaining and incredibly insightful lp screenshot lps are a dying art and i used to love to read this stuff so an extra thanks just for carrying the torch if you want to support me please spread this video around i hope it's evident that i've put a lot of time and effort into this bugger if you want to support me more directly i have a patreon and for one-off donations a co-fi supporters on patreon get access to a patreon-only discord just dm me for an invite on there at any tier you get access to that and join the lovely people scrolling past at three dollars you get access to my notes scripts and research materials and at five dollars you get access to after videos where i answer viewer questions about the game i just covered and go over things that didn't make it into the video that's it have a good night everybody i hope this video was entertaining and informative and i'll see you next time you

Channel: Tehsnakerer

Views: 400,021

Rating: 4.9441624 out of 5

Keywords: YIIK, playing yiik, yiik review, tehsnakerer, yiik analysis, yiik ost, yiik battle theme, yiik final boss, yiik story, yiik critique, yiik cringe, yiik creator, yiik a postmodern rpg, yiik a postmodern rpg review, yiik a postmodern rpg gameplay, yiik gameplay, yiik walkthrough, yiik game, y2k, y2k game, y2k gameplay, YIIK update, yiik patch, yiik combat patch, yiik alex, YIIK dialogue, yiik: a postmodern rpg, two brothers review, ackk studios, yiik plagiarism

Id: VR1SibNH-lA

Length: 157min 21sec (9441 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/APeacefulWarrior]

YIIK comes so close to legitimately being a "so bad it's good" game, except that the combat is so tedious and annoying that it ruins any chance of ironic fun. It's honestly kind of rare to see a developer, even an indie, swing so hard for the fences but completely whiff it.