ash's stash

the end is nigh: 8/10

THE ENDDDD IS NIGGHHHHH MY FRIEEEEND

currently playing: title screen - ridiculon (the end is nigh)

please note: this is a game i have reviewed multiple times! the prior versions of this review will be included below. enjoy!

full disclosure; i technically did have to use a modification to the game in order to get to the credits. i am clarifying this at the head of the review as to not rug pull in any way, however, i will also ask that you do consider what i cover with my justification below. thank you.

well, after two whole years of not wanting to touch it again with a barge pole, i have finally completed the main path of the end is nigh. if you have read my previous (outdated and cringe-inducing) review of this game (see bottom of the page!), then thanks. if not, i'll recount here; my main qualm with the game was with its overbearing difficulty spike upon reaching the future. not that the challenges themselves became any organically harder, not that they became these unobtainable goals in of themselves. no, the issue that i had was the lives system. i thought it was a complete betrayal of everything that the entire preceding game, and further, the meat boy duology, stood for. i believe that edmund's design (and i suppose by extension tyler's) is able to shine through its best and truly play to its strengths when you are faced with snack-sized little challenges that you can get through, maybe discover secrets in, and feel a great sense of achievement overcoming one level or screen. those screens will bust your fucking balls and they'll take some overcoming, but that's precisely what makes getting through one rewarding. a lives system, on a fundamental level, changes that dynamic, making it far more stressful and effectively meaning that you have to get through multiple of those challenges in a row with minimal mistakes, and should you make too many, you are booted straight back to the beginning of that section. i took umbrage with this sort of shift when it was the warp zones in super meat boy, largely 3-stage long diversions that gave you 3 lives to do it in. now, there is a scaling factor in the end is nigh, namely that you collect tumors to net you additional lives in this section. not that you'd know until its too late, it's barely telegraphed to you. but, that's supposed to be both incentive to collect the tumors and in turn, should provide you with "ample" lives to be able to get through. the only thing is, in accordance with that, instead of having to get through 3 stages in one sitting, you have to get through TWENTY. so whilst, sure, the humble 220-odd tumors i got from playing the game through initially would have been perfectly serviceable for three tough as fuck stages, that starts to dwindle a bit when it's twenty.

so you know what? my wife is privvy to modding this game. she's the reason i'm playing it after all, she's very deeply passionate about this game. and i so desperately wanted to love this game, because i adored - truly passionately loved the game up to this point. and when she revealed to me that there is a simple parameter in the .txt that dictates certain level properties that simply... turns off the lives, i was excited to hear it, and she eventually sent me the required files. and you know what? within that night - tonight, as of me writing - i got through. no issues.

so this got me to really pay attention to the levels, seeing as i could fully appreciate them now. there's a beauty to going through one last turbo-charged gauntlet of the first few worlds, seeing how you fucked literally everything in trying to make a friend. and you eventually get to where, in the main game, there was previously a split path, but instead its a hole straight down to a new final area. once you get through it, and confront your friend, there is a metroid adjacent self-destruct escape sequence. it's a six minute time limit to get back through the precision platforming of the preceding area, and... i fucked it up a great many times! so many times! i was on that shit for a solid few hours, really trying and trying and trying again... but unlike the lives, i didn't feel any rage towards it. i didn't feel that same degree of anxiety or stress. a timer vs a lives system is a world of difference to me. one of them asks you to hone your skills within a reasonable constraint whilst allowing theoretically infinite mistakes, so long as you can get through the challenge quickly enough despite them to eventually finish. (amusing side note - i originally thought that you had to talk at the NPC at the end to finish the game? don't make the mistake i did. you don't have to do that.) the lives, conversely, put a very finite and strict limit on the amount of mistakes that you can commit before nipping the challenge in the bud. and i think that's the difference; you can recover from mistakes during a time trial, because you're just racing against one set time, one number. with lives, you are constantly seeing that number tick down through your own miscalculations, and that is a crushingly frustrating experience in a precision platformer such as this. in other examples such as most mario games, they're effectively fuckin pointless because there just aren't sufficient obstacles to make you spend the lives to where you're just sat on the bloody things for no reason, which then makes having them as a reward feel empty. conversely, the end is nigh flies so far in the other direction for somebody of my skill level and, unfortunately, physical dexterity, to where no matter how many lives i obtain, i will still burn through them on the way there. it is a small mercy that they refill between worlds, but ultimately an insignificant one. i will still lose all of them attempting to get through the world after.

and i think that's my biggest problem. it punishes you whilst you are attempting to learn. it is an active detriment to the learning process because the most minor attempt to learn from a mistake is met with an immediate, additional ramification other than the one that the whole rest of the game has been operating off of - namely, that you can simply try again and it's fine. again, i believe that to be the crux of enjoyment in edmund's work. if super meat boy held the lives counter that it does in the warp zone to the entire game, it would be dogshit. like truly terrible wank on a hot moldy skillet that also smells a bit like piss. likewise, i can strongly say that the worst part of the end is nigh, by a country fucking mile, is this entirely arbitrary restriction that drags down it's latter half from the tough but fair precision platformer of the former half, down to outright just being a rage game. even that might be an unfair comparison because, excuse my facetiousness, at least cat mario knows to just show you a death counter and not actually use lives.

but! as i clarified, i had my dear wife remove that entirely arbitrary restriction, and i enjoyed the finale significantly more for it. this has led me to draw the conclusion that lives are an increasingly non-requirement to games like this. whether it be their ease making them little more than just another noise you hear, or their difficulty meaning that even the maximum amount is not enough to experiment enough with the obstacles you face. its an opinion that i have held and shouted from a great many rooftops even when i had first played this game, it being a spiteful forerunner of the ideology having formed in my mind. but now, the fact that i can come back, and clear the actual true challenging part of it - you know, the levels? - and say that the finale, sans lives, echoes the same tight, fair and fun design of the main game has only further calcified said theory. lives appear, to me, to be entirely transformative to how approachable and accessible a title is. something in the vein of crash 4 is fine, you know, a mode where you have a death counter vs a clearly outlined harder mode that has limited lives.

now, i must additionally clarify, before this is chalked up to nothing but a skill issue (although yeah, it still arguably may be) - i am physically disabled. i find it greatly stressful to perform overly precise acts, and in turn, the end is nigh demanding that i get things right within so many tries was a great source of truly mania-enducing frustration. one that caused me to previously decry this game.

let me level with you, reader. this game has grown to hold a significant presence in my life. it was one of the first games i intended to play solely for my wife because she enjoyed it, which itself got us closer. it is a game that has caused a great many discussions and conversations, both about it and just using it as a point of comparison. and now, it has served as not only credence to a claim of mine, but... also proof to myself that if i'm given the minor accessibility concessions that i need, i can more than make it through a challenge.

now, i've referenced that other review here, and i suppose to just make it not be required reading, i'll restate my opinions on the base game, as thus: this game is an incredibly fun, well-designed, tough-as-nails platformer from the same twisted mind that made you brave the hellscapes of super meat boy instead asking you to brave the apocalypse. ash controls distinctly from meat boy, but its absolutely for the better. ash controls like a fucking dream in this game. i have never felt a character be more one-to-one with my exact intentions when i make movements. this does in turn make every defeat feel just that little bit more crushing because you know that you're largely responsible for them, but at the same time, that is the exact kind of response i want in one of these games. having your character movement be slippery or too stiff or otherwise flawed in some capacity is grounds to write off a game entirely if the challenges are not competently designed around it. but that is far from the case with the end is nigh, you will be having ash's moveset pushed to the limits but it very acutely understands those limits, as well as the limits of what most people are willing to put up with. they'll certainly have you shaking your walking stick, but nothing to outright make you throw the bastard like a rickety harpoon through your monitor - lives system notwithstanding.

whilst i may have deep qualms with the lives, i have managed to get around that specific unneeded challenge, and have engaged with the level design, controls, enemies and obstacles afoot. this is the best a precision platformer of this ilk has ever controlled - shit, i'm fairly confident to say will ever control. sure, there's others with more expressive movement, that are flashier, that might even be more playable by the layman and able to be shattered by the dedicated. but i love the flow in this game. its a similar sort of flow to when you get a good run going in marble zone in sonic the hedgehog, or if you speedrun super mario bros. it feels great to keep moving fast in this game, which makes the improvement process feel even more rewarding than just simply having the intrinsic reward of "hooray more game". the music is another reward - ridiculon's work here, whilst of course not original compositions, are these wonderful arrangements of various classical pieces given new life through metal; similarly to how edmund's works themselves harken back to the classics of the NES and similar, and breathe new life into them by ratcheting up their difficulty, their bite - their metal, man. it's some amazing arrangements excluded from the game, too, my favorites going to the machine (flight of the bumblebee), ruin (in the hall of the mountain king) and acceptance, the escape sequence track (hungarian rhapsody). and to complete the trifecta, the visuals. what can i say to truly capture it, man? its a gorgeously grungy, dark, brooding mix of blacks, browns, deep reds, with the every so often glance at a true bright white to break up the darker tones. i love it. to compare it to anything, its almost like if meat boy received its own rebirth esque remake and then had the colors darkened and the contrasts turned up a fair bit more. there are sometimes issues where platforms blend in amidst the various darknesses. whether that's a source of frustration or a source of going "ohhh i'm fucking stupid and blind and a stupid blind dumbass" is entirely up to where you land as a person. me, personally, i fell more into the second camp, as these levels and your moveset are constructed in such a way that you will learn decently quickly what jumps you can and can't make, and subsequently should likely set your mind right on looking elsewhere. at a standstill, the locales are beautiful, but what i cannot sing the praises of enough are the animations. each little enemy is brimming with its own little slice of personality, whether they be little ravenous fish, a big scary chain chomp-esque bastard, little bouncy lazy skulls, quick-moving ash-seeking worm thingies, you name it. each of them, despite largely sharing a color palette, are each able to stand out from one another. and ash himself... oh my god. part two of the glaze for the flow is chalked up entirely to how fluidly ash is animated; you feel your movements melt into one another and make it feel smooth as butter when you see it reflected in how freeform his little blobulous self is. it really goes a long way in aiding the gamefeel, and i love the aesthetics a lot because of this.

were the lives system not there, this would be a full 10, and i am fully earnest when i say that. the two points docked are because of its presence, and the fact that i had to have a modification made by my wife for the game in order to remove it and subsequently beat the game for accessibility reasons due to it being an antiquated and ultimately overbearingly frustrating and limiting design choice - one im sure that wasn't made out of malice, but to evoke the influences of yesteryear that it is so clearly deeply respectful of. were it entirely optional, however, this would be an easily universal recommendation because outside of that one blemish, this game is as close as it gets to true perfection in exchange for the perfection that it asks of you, and the reward in dopamine you get for completing its challenges is nothing short of euphoric. a truly amazing game. if you've the stomach, or the ability to decompile and edit some text files, i cannot tell you enough to give it a go.

site exclusive! ash's name...?

yes, my taking of the name 'ash' is a relatively recent one, and it is directly correlated to this game. it has come to mean so much to me, regardless of my larger critical opinion on it, due to the bond that me and my dear wife have shared over it in many ways, as highlighted above. in fact, it meant so much to me that as i was manic, getting through the last section of the (normal) ending of the game, i exclaimed to my wife "i can't wait to beat this shit and i'm taking the name ash. i am stealing this fucker's name" as a tongue-in-cheek softlaunch... an hour and a half later, as i sat on the title screen, we had a soft talk about it, and now here i am - ash! if you think that origin's good, just wait until you hear about literally every other name we ever chose for ourselves as a complete system. which is worse? naming yourself after a ps1 game, or taking a name from a youtuber that you had on idly whilst fronting for the first time