This is rambly, and more just a series of thoughts thrown together without much structure. I needed to record my heart's sentiment to words, even if this essay fails to build itself safely around a single point. These are my feelings as I've worked them out.

I think the important thing to come away with is that I like La-Mulana. I don't think I've ever played any game like it before. It is a game where every bit of progress felt, for a brief margin in time, world changing. However, that progress merely widened the scope of confusion so much that every session made me feel like I've accomplished nothing. Every day I'd close the game and go to work miserable with what I had done, dreading my return to the ruins in a few days. Almost every second on stream I feel like I was projecting a pathetic spirit: the handiwork of this game.

But I do quite like the game.

I do not think I played this under ideal circumstances, giving myself about 4 hours a week on average, across 17 sessions, playing about a total of 53 hours across 2 months. This is while maintaining a 40 hour a week job, personal and household chores, making many changes in my life, and enduring a few physical ailments. Lots of excuses, but that's mostly because I feel this game would have been amazing over a summer vacation. I can easily imagine playing 3-4 hours a session or longer depending on how progress was unfolding, then stopping and going to a menial labor job where ideas can percolate in your mind so that you have things to pursue upon your return. All with nothing else requiring the precious mental bandwidth this game demanded.

At the same time, there are two major differences about playing it now. One, I don't think a younger me would have the willpower to not look up guidance or just give up if I found myself coming against a wall long enough. Two, I had my darling girlfriend along for the ride the entire time, watching me hawkishly and learning my fallible tendencies and dispensing gentle guidance on things I should have already known.

To get it out of the way, it is incredibly special to have played this with Aya holding my hand. Knowing that she understands my weaknesses so well to counteract them, and to communicate so excellently just what I need to hear to nudge me along is incredibly special and makes me feel even more loved. But I have endless forums to express my passions for her, so I'll stick to the subject.

"Why did every boss suck?" I asked myself this at the end of the game. I feel like every time I encountered a bit of frustration, I'd be told "this is an annoying boss", which was like every boss except the final one, which I was told but did not experience. At that point it is no longer an accident, I'm certain the bosses were expertly crafted to be frustrating. Everything feels precisely strict. The margin between your attack and the boss's body feels razor thin – and nearly every time you're to jump into that position, an act that offers no method of correction once you've left the ground. Add to this some aggressive bullet-patterns that some bosses have that chip away at your life so that every intentional engagement leads with your patience as battered as your HP bar.

I think there's a very fine line in crafting a boss fight where finishing grants the feeling of accomplishment about it versus simply being glad it's over. To make matters worse I think I'm the type of person who more easily feels the latter. It feels like the damage doled out on you and your total HP size is very intentional. Very often it feels like you're lost in the haze of action, unsure if a hit is going to kill you at low HP or if you'll squeeze by with enough for one more counterattack. For me, since that was hard to track, I simply didn't track it. I either got killed or I cleared it, except in the case of one boss where she does her big-damage impossible-to-dodge attack repeatedly when she's down to her last gasps. The margin of victory was never a consideration, which does make progress hard to track incremental progress beyond phase changes. Eventually bosses were slain, and I'm not sure what I managed to do differently than last time besides getting a little luckier. I got better at the fight, not that I would give myself that credit.

The puzzle design is impeachable, there's nothing bad I can say about it. I felt completely lost most times, absurdly smart any time I figured anything out, madly frustrated whenever something relied on a keen eye for observation, which I don't have and did not train. The only time I ever felt like the game betrayed me was when I didn't know you could show Xelpud equipped items, and even then I probably just forgot after being told. A personal failing of mine was not manually transcribing all my tablet scans, which made it quite difficult to back reference at the necessary times, but my reasoning for that was not wanting to stop the stream to type out and catalog everything with the limited time I had left, I tried to make every moment matter. In the future, I will just stop and stroke the keys.

My memory is quite bad. There's a lot of this game that felt like it was the water hitting my duck's-ass-of-a-brain and failing to permeate through in any way. Given the long stretch of time that I played the game for, I feel like I've forgotten more about La-Mulana than I ever actually learned. I did puzzle things together by myself at times. Even if it feels simple, like the Nebra Sky Disk, I figured that out. I should have more pride in my accomplishments, though I barely remember them. Maybe it's just the breadth of this game's secrets is so large that I felt like I was weakly chipping away at a boulder and felt myself surprised when suddenly it was just a little stone in hand, and the chips laid around me I couldn't interpret with any value. It's funny how that reflects my experiences with the combat challenges.

It's fascinating that I feel like this game is so incompatible with me and yet still I liked it. Admittedly I do enjoy exploration based action games, I enjoy games that are obtuse and mysterious. On its face, I should like La-Mulana without reserve or hesitation. It should be no surprise that I'm glowing with praise for it. It made me miserable every day I played it. It sapped my spirit so painfully, at one point in the final stretch I had tears of defeat in my eye that I had to wipe away, that it broke my brain so bad I was eating salad with my fingers just to ground myself to a tactile reality. It is not a game I would describe as ‘for the masochistic', nor in reflection do I think too many of its demands were cruel. It was all just so much and I felt every moment of it wear at me as I wore at the ruin's many secrets.

I wish I could do it all over again, admittedly with better circumstances. I think that's the core of my conflict, the difference between how I experienced this game in the here and now and my idealized experience that could never have been. I want that, rather than to have never experienced it at all. But much like all the previous loves of my life, I have experienced this game for all the pain it brought me, with a disposition to make the pleasures seem so miniscule.

Just as I look back at the past romances of my life, I stare at this adventure to look at the gaps that let light through it, so that the next one I'm a stronger woman for. There's more confounding video games out there. There is just La-Mulana 2. My spirit has endured and been steeled, my processes will be more prepared and thorough. But with all that, I overlook the shadow it cast upon me, the gestalt of the entire thing that brought me joy, the intricate details become lost in the contrast.

It is unexpected that in playing this game, reflecting upon it, I'm confronting this specific aspect of myself.

I don't think this game has changed me in some grand and important way, but to affect any change at all is certainly something rare for a video game to experience, nothing to say of this self-reflection. I don't think a game has had a profound effect on me with so much of what struck me is the interaction rather than the plot. I often think about Final Fantasy 7 as a game I despised playing but was happy to have seen all the way through due to the story. Instead, I guess, in this sense I have to give this game my highest honor, a comparison to my long time favorite game: Snake Eater. I'm not sure I feel as strongly about La-Mulana as I do Snake Eater, I'm not sure I can ever return to the ruins as I love to return to Tselionoyarsk, but time will only tell.

I hated playing La-Mulana. I'm happy I played La-Mulana. It is a special game.