Judero
I'm a pretty big fan of Jack Spooner, but I also come at this acknowledging that his strengths aren't really in making fun games. Judero is his attempt at making a more conventional game as opposed to his usual glorified walking sims with maybe a light gameplay element here or there. This game I do think displays some talent for game design but I feel it's a case of Spooner being more interested in his quirky aesthetic and thematic vision than he is the depth of his gameplay and enjoyment of this game really boils down to how much you can stomach that.
That said I do think the conceit of his aesthetic vision is fascinating. Everything you see in game being handmade is done on the reasoning that the material you see in gameplay is something that's tangible rather than abstract. What produces the imagery of gaming is not something consumers can actually grasp, it's all code designed through abstract means to produce something that looks tangible. The fact what he produced that's actually physically tangible plays into his broader conceit about where our cultural myth originate from values and the context we live in, with an ending that suggests that an amalgamation of myth and values form the coherency of culture. Aesthetically I think this lands because it leads to a sense rugged imperfection that this game needs to sell this. That how we formed culture and myth comes from a place before we properly polished art. That we had to make art from pragmatic limitations, that people sculpting these things don't have the means to create some modern "perfection" but still achieve something visually appealing along certain cultural sensibilities. It's "ugly" by the modern standard, but it's fascinating in that it's also something that requires more effort to achieve than the standard procedure for creating digital art in the modern age. There's an interesting statement in how creating "good" art has been streamlined by modern technology and practices that are less hands on are becoming passe. This isn't the first time Spooner has used clay for an aesthetic but I think the "ugliness" here was more intentional than, say, Dujanah in depicting its mythological bent where humanity has used "primitive" methods to express something grand.
What I like about Spooner is that he's able to convey a sense of interpersonal within extreme abstractions and often times the interpersonal functions as an bitter sweet tragedy. Beeswing was masteful in how it conveyed a sense of horror in childhood nostalgia, that things aren't as great when you begin to understand things from an adult perspective, yet your childhood is what causes you to care and hold attachment to these things and you can't completely divorce the two. In this game's case, there's also a sense of nostalgia at play but it's less personal and more of a cultural conscious type of thing. It's not interested in biting the heels of a collective experience in Spooner's usual blunt fashion as much as it is evaluting it in vague abstraction. Here he's evaluating myth and the context it exists in, often probing an abstract as to why myths comes to the conclusions that it does. Spooner is never really explicit about this nor does he come to any specific or strong conclusion on nature of mythology, but I do think the framing is fascinating in how it connects our understanding of myth and culture to such a broadness that it can be connected to so many specific things I'm not totally sure I properly wrapped my head around. This can include modern protest sentiment, the way we understand war, how it makes death become less significant, etc. There's a lot to chew on but...It's also kind of a detriment, I feel past Spooner projects at least culminated everything into an emotionally charged cartharsis and had stronger subplots that played into its broader theming. You don't really get any of that here as much as the game is alluding to its broader theming in the most abstract way and sometimes in a way that gets awkwardly soap boxy, but I feel that the abstraction at least leads you to be interested in the broader scope of its conceit.
The combat is pretty bad. Normal enemies don't really do anything aside from sort of ram into you and it's easy to just hitstun most of them to death. Aside from the rock in a few contextual instances, your abilities are also mostly worthless because the hitboxes on them are small and hard to read, keep you in place making you vulnerable, and don't even really do any damage or offer much in the way of utility. Enemy encounters are pretty lethargic, just a dump of ubiqutous enemy types on a flat area which you can dispatch easily with a bunch of basic attacks. Enemies rarely do enough damage for you to force caution either so encounters end up being pretty mindless. The most generous thing I can say about the moment to moment gameplay is that mapping and routing are at least given some level of complexity where you're exploring a map as opposed to running down a path and sometimes there's quirky "puzzles" you have to do but the solution is almost always immediately obvious and can be achieved with little friction.
Comparatively the bosses fare better. They're put into far smaller spaces and their abilities function to at least cover space and make you move a lot. However, I think they all suffer from one of two issues. They either have obvious and overly long vulnerability states or rely on boring contextual gimmicks to damage them when fighting them more conventionally would be more interesting. I also think a lot of them just don't do as much damage as they should to really threaten you because you can get away with tanking too many hits.
I list this as not recommended because I know for a fact this is the type of game that would throw off a lot of people. Its gameplay is very boring and I think it runs into the issue that it disservices Spooner's work in a way. His usual walking sim accentuates his strengths by having you interact with his weird style and personality at your own pace, whereas here it's often demanding you engage with its VERY boring mechanics. I was usually wanting to just engage with town NPCs and trying to piece together the relevance of everything said to its broader scope, but most of the game isn't this. I'd also argue that this results in a lot of concessions being made, where the aesthetic had to become functionally pragmatic than visually resonant in a way other Spooner projects didn't. When everything has to have motion to engage you in the gameplay then it leaves less room to just make something that's fascinating to look at just on its scale and narrative coherence. That's not to say this isn't well crafted and doesn't have stunning setpieces, but I do there's a lot of areas that are kinda bland because they must service a gameplay function rather than serve a narrative function and that makes it a lot more boring to me compared to Spooner's other projects.
But you know, despite the hangups I come at this feeling it's a bad game that's very interesting. I think it has meat, but I also don't think the meat is ideally paced or presented and I wish there was a stronger pay off to all of this that really wow'd me like Spooner's other stuff. But when it comes to his ouvre, I still feel this is interesting in several ways. One in that it's much less grim about death compared to his past work. Perhaps even glib and celebratory about it. Another is that it wants to use actual gameplay mechanics for a vibe of some kind, even if it's not very good. This is a very interesting game I can't earnestly recommend, but also one I kinda want to because anything Jack Spooner makes is so fascinating to me.
That said I do think the conceit of his aesthetic vision is fascinating. Everything you see in game being handmade is done on the reasoning that the material you see in gameplay is something that's tangible rather than abstract. What produces the imagery of gaming is not something consumers can actually grasp, it's all code designed through abstract means to produce something that looks tangible. The fact what he produced that's actually physically tangible plays into his broader conceit about where our cultural myth originate from values and the context we live in, with an ending that suggests that an amalgamation of myth and values form the coherency of culture. Aesthetically I think this lands because it leads to a sense rugged imperfection that this game needs to sell this. That how we formed culture and myth comes from a place before we properly polished art. That we had to make art from pragmatic limitations, that people sculpting these things don't have the means to create some modern "perfection" but still achieve something visually appealing along certain cultural sensibilities. It's "ugly" by the modern standard, but it's fascinating in that it's also something that requires more effort to achieve than the standard procedure for creating digital art in the modern age. There's an interesting statement in how creating "good" art has been streamlined by modern technology and practices that are less hands on are becoming passe. This isn't the first time Spooner has used clay for an aesthetic but I think the "ugliness" here was more intentional than, say, Dujanah in depicting its mythological bent where humanity has used "primitive" methods to express something grand.
What I like about Spooner is that he's able to convey a sense of interpersonal within extreme abstractions and often times the interpersonal functions as an bitter sweet tragedy. Beeswing was masteful in how it conveyed a sense of horror in childhood nostalgia, that things aren't as great when you begin to understand things from an adult perspective, yet your childhood is what causes you to care and hold attachment to these things and you can't completely divorce the two. In this game's case, there's also a sense of nostalgia at play but it's less personal and more of a cultural conscious type of thing. It's not interested in biting the heels of a collective experience in Spooner's usual blunt fashion as much as it is evaluting it in vague abstraction. Here he's evaluating myth and the context it exists in, often probing an abstract as to why myths comes to the conclusions that it does. Spooner is never really explicit about this nor does he come to any specific or strong conclusion on nature of mythology, but I do think the framing is fascinating in how it connects our understanding of myth and culture to such a broadness that it can be connected to so many specific things I'm not totally sure I properly wrapped my head around. This can include modern protest sentiment, the way we understand war, how it makes death become less significant, etc. There's a lot to chew on but...It's also kind of a detriment, I feel past Spooner projects at least culminated everything into an emotionally charged cartharsis and had stronger subplots that played into its broader theming. You don't really get any of that here as much as the game is alluding to its broader theming in the most abstract way and sometimes in a way that gets awkwardly soap boxy, but I feel that the abstraction at least leads you to be interested in the broader scope of its conceit.
The combat is pretty bad. Normal enemies don't really do anything aside from sort of ram into you and it's easy to just hitstun most of them to death. Aside from the rock in a few contextual instances, your abilities are also mostly worthless because the hitboxes on them are small and hard to read, keep you in place making you vulnerable, and don't even really do any damage or offer much in the way of utility. Enemy encounters are pretty lethargic, just a dump of ubiqutous enemy types on a flat area which you can dispatch easily with a bunch of basic attacks. Enemies rarely do enough damage for you to force caution either so encounters end up being pretty mindless. The most generous thing I can say about the moment to moment gameplay is that mapping and routing are at least given some level of complexity where you're exploring a map as opposed to running down a path and sometimes there's quirky "puzzles" you have to do but the solution is almost always immediately obvious and can be achieved with little friction.
Comparatively the bosses fare better. They're put into far smaller spaces and their abilities function to at least cover space and make you move a lot. However, I think they all suffer from one of two issues. They either have obvious and overly long vulnerability states or rely on boring contextual gimmicks to damage them when fighting them more conventionally would be more interesting. I also think a lot of them just don't do as much damage as they should to really threaten you because you can get away with tanking too many hits.
I list this as not recommended because I know for a fact this is the type of game that would throw off a lot of people. Its gameplay is very boring and I think it runs into the issue that it disservices Spooner's work in a way. His usual walking sim accentuates his strengths by having you interact with his weird style and personality at your own pace, whereas here it's often demanding you engage with its VERY boring mechanics. I was usually wanting to just engage with town NPCs and trying to piece together the relevance of everything said to its broader scope, but most of the game isn't this. I'd also argue that this results in a lot of concessions being made, where the aesthetic had to become functionally pragmatic than visually resonant in a way other Spooner projects didn't. When everything has to have motion to engage you in the gameplay then it leaves less room to just make something that's fascinating to look at just on its scale and narrative coherence. That's not to say this isn't well crafted and doesn't have stunning setpieces, but I do there's a lot of areas that are kinda bland because they must service a gameplay function rather than serve a narrative function and that makes it a lot more boring to me compared to Spooner's other projects.
But you know, despite the hangups I come at this feeling it's a bad game that's very interesting. I think it has meat, but I also don't think the meat is ideally paced or presented and I wish there was a stronger pay off to all of this that really wow'd me like Spooner's other stuff. But when it comes to his ouvre, I still feel this is interesting in several ways. One in that it's much less grim about death compared to his past work. Perhaps even glib and celebratory about it. Another is that it wants to use actual gameplay mechanics for a vibe of some kind, even if it's not very good. This is a very interesting game I can't earnestly recommend, but also one I kinda want to because anything Jack Spooner makes is so fascinating to me.
Mini Review: I'm a pretty big fan of Jack Spooner, but I also come at this acknowledging that his strengths aren't really in making fun games. Judero is his attempt at making a more conventional game as opposed to his usual glorified walking sims with maybe a light gameplay element here or there. This game I do think displays some talent for game design but I feel it's a case of Spooner being more interested in his quirky aesthetic and thematic vision than...
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