Platinum #689: Ginger - Beyond the Crystal     Difficulty: 4.5/10 Playtime: 20-25 hours   HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE THIS GAME SINCE I BEGAN TO PLAY IT. THERE ARE 378.44 MILLION EZPZ TRASH PLATINUM GAMES IN THE PLAYSTATION STORE. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENCODED INTO EVERY SINGLE KILOBYTE THAT COMPRISE THEM, IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR THIS GAME AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT. FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.   ...So yeah, this is basically one of the worst game experiences I've had... maybe ever? I've played scads of objectively worse games, but as a picosecond-by-torturous-picosecond experience, rarely has frivolous digital entertainment, socalled, come across so consistently mind-breakingly tedious and enragingly broken at the same time. You might suggest it may be for the best that this Year of the Backlog (I've written this word so many times over the past week that it's lost any semblance of meaning, and my mind can only parse it as the name of an Uruk or something) should start out at the unsurpassable nadir of such an unpredictable endeavour... but then, I could also do without these stains on my fractured soul that will remain forevermore.   Now, I hear you ask... what is a Ginger: Beyond the Crystal? Well, in the most tenuous sense of the definition at best, I guess you might say it's what your average BanjoKazooieDarkCloud3DWorldalike would be like, if all you had to go on were descriptions from Helen Keller, and you were forced to program it using an upside down keyboard with a... okay, you know something? I think all this overblown hyperbole borne of temporary psychosis might well defeat its own purpose, as by those outlandish standards, it's actually a pretty capable little game... and that's more credit than I will ever extend to it. Besides which, it might also lessen the impact of its more factual flaws that I am about elucidate upon your personage.   In an ideal world, a game like this might have passed for just another shamelessly unoriginal triple derivativeburger with extra blandcestershire sauce in a sea of them--grist for the mill--but we're not that lucky. You see, this is one of the worst optimized console games ever released. Each and every godforsaken time an asset is loaded (maybe only 99.999999999% of the time on a good day), the game skips a few frames--an event henceforth referred to as "Gingering"--while retaining your control input. This means, of course, you might easily walk off a cliff or into an enemy's attack through no fault of your own... apart from whatever errant brain wave caused you to spend your money and time on this game, of course.   Hell, if you're really lucky, Gingering will occur just as you jump, causing the physics to really get thrown out of wack, and more than likely sending you careening through the already unreliable vertice work at the drop of a hat. This fatal flaw, combined with the game's penchant for precision platforming, ensures that you will experience something akin to 3.7 seconds of enjoyable gameplay per hour, in-between those inevitable endless barrages of curses you will unleash upon the developers... oh, and if this somewhat misanthropic behaviour gives you pause, just remember that said developers can't possibly have conceived of this as anything but an act of pure hatred directed towards the human race. The alternative would be... no, let's not think about it.   This is, of course, combined with a copious clusterfuck of caveats that will fuck you over even on a platform on which it might actually run decently. First of all, hitboxes and collision detection are borderline nonexistent. Trying to attack enemies by way of punch punchy punchpunch may damage them... but they're more likely to miss and ensure you're the one the record shows will take the blows. Dash attacks are similarly a crapshoot. Ground pounds are the only borderline reliable forms of attack... and even that seems to be only because the attack animation consists of 93.7% invincibility frames, probably the only beneficiary bit of bad programming in this shitshow. Unforgiving and frankly unnecessary falling damage--from such low heights that wouldn't even cause Kevin Nash's quads to tear--abound, even in the hub worlds.   Oh, and speaking of hubs... you'll be doing yourself a disservice if you decide to free villagers from their crystal prison (don't that sound like a Led Zeppelin lyric), as more onscreen characters results in an even lower framerate, which--you guessed it--results in even more needless death by Gingering. Oh, and did I mention there's a super-strict speed run trophy? You don't have to be one of them there mathemathologists or whatever to figure that crappy game design + time limits = Hell.    And lastly, a turgid god tier shit sundae such as this needs a particularly stupendous rancid cherry on top, and Badland Games know nothing if not how to please... believing I was a mere half hour of so for claiming victory over this most fearsome quarry and thus poised to resign it to the garbage dump of my mind forevermore, the game pulled its last and most abhorrent trick... a trophy refused to pop, forcing me to replay the game just to do some brainless troll sphincter fetch quests it deigned not to properly spawn the first time.   Usually, at a point like this, I'd just take the loss and leave it as a chore for another day. But I'd never reached a point like this, and I'll be damned if I let this foetid monstrosity prove the primus motor of just one more nanoangstrom of tachyoneural cranial activity, so fuck it! ...Just to be safe, because you just never know with a game like this, I decided to do this wholly unnecessary second playthrough in one session, in offline mode, with regular USB backup saves... practically everything short of buying a Mylar blanket, drawing a circle of salt, and sacrificing the bezoar of a karakul sheep to Eldritch gods under a waxing moon during a Venusian retrogradal shift.   Oh, did I say "last trick?" Well, naturally that didn't quite do it either. Yes, those much-beloved trophies that only pop when you restart the game just had to make their grand return for a game as uniquely terrible as this. 'Twas written in the stars. And just as a final kiss-off into the air, the platinum just had to take an inordinate amount of time to sync, giving me some lovely PTSD flashbacks to that time when Arise fucked up my ability to sync, forcing me to delete my original PS4 user profile to fix it. Years of therapy, down the drain... thanks a lot.   Ultimately, from one human being to another, I implore you: please do not buy this game. Developers this almost parodically devoid of any hint of talent, imagination, or skill, do not deserve to be compensated or motivated to continue unleashing their wickedness upon the world. You stand a bigger chance of actually currying favour with vague metaphysical forces by supporting Breakthrough Games, than you do ever deriving any significant sense of joy or fulfillment from this most unholy of abominations. Heed well my warning, or your soul too will be irrevocably Gingered, as was mine. I can take some solace in knowing I can at least dedicate the tattered remains of my life to serving as humanity's lone Guardian against this insensate evil. This is my story...     Final Score: I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream/10