#...transition if we will even /mildly/ dislike aspects of transition

[uncanny-tranny]

Trans people who are medically transitioning: It is okay if you don't like all aspects of medical transition. You are allowed to complain about the aspects of transition you don't like, and it isn't a sign you shouldn't be transitioning. We all have aspects of transition we do and don't like, and it is neutral at worst to express that. While there are ways to circumvent certain aspects of transition, that doesn't mean you have to like it.

You are trans enough <3

[first-impressions-gaming]

League Of Enthusiastic Losers

Developed & Published by yookond.

Release Date 2021

Tested on Xbox Series X

MSRP 11,99 USD

Have you ever thought that you could or would die of boredom and ennui? Well, good for you, you can do that trying to enjoy this game. Let’s get into it.

LoeL is a side-scrolling game, promising a short and compact sincere experience centred around two close friends, Volodya and Vitya, who are respectively an author and a handyman and going through hardships. 

The game kicks off…awkwardly to put it mildly, as soon as you press a button the menu closes and the game starts without any kind of transition, even the main menu background music does not change, the same track keeps playing. From the get-go this was the first aspect I felt something was off.

The first main sequence we are in is a party, we interact with half a dozen characters, and the whole sequence falls flat, obviously the protagonists are acquainted with those characters, yet the conversations we hold are not only meaningless but also strangely crammed up, as if much longer dialogues were written at first but got cut after, therefore interactions lack weight that should be present for us to feel included in what’s going on, basically. After the dialogues end, I just forget what we even talked about, or who they were.

The title was certainly developed within a tight budget, it has zero voiceover and the soundtrack feels off, there is this track when the protagonists arrive to a party after rescuing a dog, and the bass of the track is so unnecessarily loud that it hurts your ears even at low volume, I had to lower the volume to 20% or so, even then the volume of bass was pretty in front compared to other instruments and vocal, without a doubt the sound engineers should have gone over the tracks and checked the tracks for one more time.

Another point I desire to highlight is scene transitions, they are so abrupt and they are poorly designed (if I can even call them designs), for example we go to the tram stop, the tram approaches, we hop on, we move our tram pass to the reader that pops up on the screen, the scene ends right there so suddenly that it made me question “who would design this and think this is a well-executed sequence?” What I am getting at is that, that scene does not amount to anything, it is there just to be there, it does not live up to the experience of hopping on a tram and travelling. There is not even a scene on a tram with us looking outside the window, or having a convo with another fellow traveller etc. This game opened my eyes to the importance of well-made transitions because the experience can only exist if these transitions carry any weight, in other words, you can provide same ingredients to ten different people and they will cook and serve ten different meals in return, you will like some of them, and dislike some of them even though same ingredients are used, the reason is that, the method and the technique used are not the same, ergo, the execution will be different. 

Even controls are not checked or tested in some scenes. The game instructs us to press the RB button to place shelves on the wall, however the correct button is RT. I really doubt this game was tested that thoroughly.

I wish I had had more patience to play the game a bit longer, yet again I knew that I couldn’t spare one more minute to bear it, trying to find a joyful aspect or mechanic of this game resembles to trying to grasp of a tree branch when you are clearly sinking in a swamp, knowing and accepting that the attempt is futile.