I think I’m done with expecting things from summations, or rather, from explications of quality derived from experientialist assessment, in video games criticism. Time and time again, I hear someone or some article wax languidly on the pertaining of an ur-secret amalgamation to any game’s individual alchemy that renders a feeling of unique golden sublimity within software; washes of copper green roof tiling flaked away on the controller, colonnades, or keyboard - an unstiffening from historical input that has become a coral encrusted cloister of routine, religiously cycling through 1-1s or Dust 2s in place of rapture - that reveal the lithe and heavenly joisted, divinely scaffolded, intelligently designed liquid azure which creates the game of life under the crackling veins of half real, half gone painted cages. I hear this proselytising, from street corners and from the corners of the internet, and I rush to play Control because of The Ashtray Maze, or Titanfall 2 because of Effect and Cause, or Mankind Divided because of Prague. I sit in a pew, plug in for 6 hours to wait for that divine spark to reach me, and then once I pass through the sizzling whizz and shimmer of the Roman Candle’s burst, I am left like Eve and Adam and Michaelangelo: somehow apart, despite appearances, from that touch that seemed prevalent to others and made for us all. Maybe it’s beautiful, or maybe poorly restored, but it’s nevertheless the heavenly host hosted online.
That’s AAA gaming’s trick: made for everybody, delivered to every screen, and connected to the lower level of consciousness while being treated as nutrition came naturally intuited when really it is just ubiquitously conditioned. Nothing is challenging in a way that isn’t minute finger pushups, nor satisfying in a way that isn’t a set of exercises coming to their final repetition and mirror shewn form perfection: the rote exercise of wrapping templated interaction in the sheen of revolutionary systems design or narrative design is as shallow as wearing newly coloured shorts to assume a different degree of squat. And look, that all sounds very negative, but it’s not like this isn’t something which wasn’t built to be as it is: all mass market art has aimed for the middle, and much of the most commonly recognised masterpieces of art are these middle brow, carb and salt heavy, mass product ventures. These are movies like It’s A Wonderful Life or The Godfather, ballets like The Nutcracker or Sleeping Beauty, musicals like West Side Story and Les Mis, or games like RE4 and The Witcher 3: all are meant to hit low, hit hard, and connect broadly to get through on second base. Sometimes they are surprise home runs or go straight to the pitcher, but they are designed to get on base, that’s all.
The fact that everyone seemingly knows this, that we are being catered to in a way that explicitly shows that publishers (perhaps more so than devs, but probably not always) want to barely hold aloft the vessel of gaming above the watermark, is what brings me to finally recusing myself of any sort of stocking up expectation from the experiential praise AAA games get on release and in summation come December. Journalists and essayists who monthly extoll virtues and vices, cardinal sins and heavenly virtues, about the ur-tentpole delivering on expectations of not even property but on fulfilment of artistic attenuation, on the promise that the foundational inlay of profit generating internal ecology to the game is finally cohabitant, even dominated by, the accessorised partitioning (post the fact) of accessible humanity within the work do so with the knowledge of the vapid state of AAA games; the lack of identity, depth, or of empathy proffered overtly in these games weekly is met with such drastic extensions of one’s own powers of humanity that studios like Blizzard or Bethesda feel confident in offering flavourless mulch with the expectation that all necessary characterisation of their simulation will be filled in by the player. This has occurred for nearly every AAA game, from one source or another, since the turn towards prestige in the late aughts - all assumptions of character, pathos, or wit are now somehow granted to anything with enough fidelity to create a world which may hold its players seat of human courage, but can only, at best, render its own simulacra of such stillborn.
I’m not saying that any significant majority of the critical writing done on games from the AAA sphere of the medium is bad or dishonest, particularly not that writing which is able to articulate the sphere itself and why these highly sucralose rich products both work and appeal to wide demographics (I think William Hughes from the A.V. Club walks this line frequently with great aplomb), but I do think there is something regrettable about taking a primarily kinaesthetic experience like those listed above and transmuting both pathos and one’s seal of quality because the player was able to map on emotional strife and a conquering of such onto that experiential hurdle, all without the extension in return of the mechanics in the game to a actual thematic purpose, a la Spec Ops. Games should be able to render a language and introspection of quality which engages forcefully with the mechanical and interactive qualities inherent to it, not through sidelong implants of emotional turpitude perpendicularly inseminated, but head on and with appropriate function. Because the games listed above are not what we can, comparatively, call good due to their storytelling nor for their pathos, but most executively for their play, they are failing, in their minor ways, because they offer canvases for spreads of emotion and theme as such but ask the player to BYOB instead of providing nourishment on its own wonderful layout. As works in games ‘mature’, comparisons inflected within by AAA games own referential quality to media articles that are meant to inspire maturity and gravitas in comparison (looking at you MGS V with all that Moby Dick shit), the comparative nature of criticism must develop so as to draw out the cumulative quality, not reflect our own natures of complexity onto the games we play.
FINALLY, that brings me to Returnal. Embarrassingly, I’ve just put a good deal of personal opinion into what is supposed to be my overview of a game, mostly in reaction to a select few critics that I read both in anticipation for the game and in afterward help for the locution of my feelings Returnal elicited, but if this seems unsatisfying as appendix to read, let that contribute to my point. Returnal loops back into my point above as this: the game’s poorly mechanised roguelike structure, with the rote and underbaked narrative pinning its death and restart shuttle running, seems to surround a legitimately compelling, but obviously goofy and gamified play (which is to say gamified with hitboxes and gun mods and what else goes into the play, not the metaphorical layer of hell Selene puts over herself to justify the play. I hope it doesn’t need to be said, but when justifying your player character’s constructs of play within a narrative, herein the eternal penitence Selene’s delusions and guilt force on her through the play metaphor, the play metaphor needs to be justified yet again to the player; we engage in the play, not the delusion, so a further layer above needs to be accessible to us and not Selene.), but fails to, except for under highly specific circumstances, draw any useful or poignant meaning from the interactions between action and strictly narrative text.
The roguelike structure itself is probably the most significant issue in creating a playspace which goes through the gestation of a pregnant theme, despite it also being the aspect of Returnal’s design to note on how all the meta systems - gun stats, artefacts, consumables, parasites, etc. - to those most baked into the looping, which is to say the physics of Selene and her basic abilities to point, shoot, run, and jump; without the roguelike structure, the nature of almost everything that serves to progress play becomes utterly useless cruft, as well as functionless as iterating material to reconfigure and force usage. The roguelike structure is a monkey’s paw wish for game devs, one which allows for as broad as can be desired a system space: if a dev wants to add in 80 different interacting possible arms of their game, they can be assured that more, if not all, of those arms will be interacted with more consistently in a roguelike than in a strictly linear or open world game, simply because sometimes that mechanic will be all the player has on a run. The enormous, hugely hindering, flaw to this is that the mechanic, regardless of its name, function, art, or anything else above the game’s spreadsheet, is reduced to its function alone. When death is the truest end state of a mechanics use case, and as death is the functioning, one could argue insoluble, end state of videogame pathos, then all that is baked into giving the mechanics centred in a roguelike is lost. The ur-roguelike, Isaac, is so inculcated with this that oftentimes common parlance in its community denotes an item name in the lingua franca with its description, not its actual item label. Returnal seeks to bake around this nut with the narrative including a death inclusive meaning, as well as later on, the personal hell narrative. But this then doubles down on the foibles of roguelike structure. Not only is the genre so cemented with its expectations now, but if the player never or infrequently dies, as was my experience, then not only is the value of the typified roguelike mechanical arm stripped of its narrative weight due to the lack of death repetition (something which doesn’t happen so much with a game like Isaac, given that that game draws its narrative weight and iconography from emotions and recognition excited external to play), but also its mechanical weight as well. I never got to experiment with the roguelike possibilities, nor feel the true hell of unstable and chaotic ground, because I died to Phrike once, then steam rolled through the game with only two more deaths total, rendering both sources to possibly draw meaning from inert and barren.
There is also the general issue with the design of the consistent mechanics as well, not just in their nebulously justifiable narrative utility as Selene’s specific hell that is traumatically brought into being, but more specifically herein with how they mesh in the second to second play. There’s no getting past the readability of the levels, which inexplicably were seemingly designed to match the appearances of enemies in such a way as to give them complete camouflage in whatever environment they spawn in (enemies with tendrils are surrounded by anemone like plants, square and concrete enemies are ensconced in a brutalist architecture, etc.). This is an issue which feels like it shouldn’t have gotten past testing both for failing its lack of functioning for immediate play but also for the aggressiveness with which so many lit and moving textures tank performance, but also feels like it should have failed at the start of the project for how generally plain and common the designs are. Nothing really feels, in Returnal, like a unique and specific design, which if it were a pure narrative-free experience wouldn’t be anywhere near the issue it is, but for a highly localised and psychologically terrifying experience, one would hope that the tribulations faced would themselves reveal more about Selene as a character (and yes, they do later on, but in as equally a basic and unthought out way as the generic designs of the earlier, more rote sci-fi, way). The arena rooms themselves are frankly underbaked as well, not just in the too lacking of variety inset within the rotation of them to each zone - maybe 10-15 total per environment - but in how little they seem to complicate and excite possibilities of the mechanical base that is available to an everyday version of Selene in the game. Selene is, in fact, a very fun character to move around and shoot with. Actually, a brief slew of praise for Returnal, because I had a lot of fun playing through it, despite all that I’ve said above
- The amount of interesting cost/benefit choices offered up is incredible: on a minute to minute basis, the player is getting consistent possibilities for pain and pleasure that could knock the run into next gear (although if we’re being honest, unless you’re upping protection or damage, it isn’t usually worth any downside) or knock Selene on her ass. The pain/pleasure dichotomy is so powerful that it feels more of a promise on the Cenobites in Hellraiser than any of those movies ever did.
- Jane Elizabeth Perry’s VO for Selene, almost totally done in isolation of any other characters to draw reaction from, impresses more than any other AAA game’s performances from the last few years. It is a treat, and despite the bungling of the system narrative in my playthrough, carries weight across the entire play as something with genuine pathos.
- As above stated, the movement and shooting never feels anything less than incredible. So much weight is included and accounted for in every action - the shotgun nearly rips its barrel apart with every blast, the pylons screech with searing wounds, and Selene lands so coolly with earth shattering descents that I felt my knees give out with every impact. Kinaesthetic masterclass.
Anyways, all this praise is situated in rooms that don’t really need you to engage with any of the excellent bits, because tight concentric circle strafes will get the job done every time.
To bring this back to the beginning, I am nothing if not disappointed by Returnal. It’s not a bad game but it was talked about badly; the praise for its themes are dependent on highly specific play experiences, as well as on bringing an enormous amount of self implication to any given read that comes across as highly thought of the game. The trials of its design were underlaid in the frenzy that came in discussing the polish a AAA game brought to the already highly tuned roguelike formula, a formula which more suits the indie sphere which honed it to shining. This unfortunate discussion cycle damned my experience with the game, which I suppose was burdened in the concert I played it with my own naivete in expecting depth from a game released for $80. Really, you get what you pay for.
That’s AAA gaming’s trick: made for everybody, delivered to every screen, and connected to the lower level of consciousness while being treated as nutrition came naturally intuited when really it is just ubiquitously conditioned. Nothing is challenging in a way that isn’t minute finger pushups, nor satisfying in a way that isn’t a set of exercises coming to their final repetition and mirror shewn form perfection: the rote exercise of wrapping templated interaction in the sheen of revolutionary systems design or narrative design is as shallow as wearing newly coloured shorts to assume a different degree of squat. And look, that all sounds very negative, but it’s not like this isn’t something which wasn’t built to be as it is: all mass market art has aimed for the middle, and much of the most commonly recognised masterpieces of art are these middle brow, carb and salt heavy, mass product ventures. These are movies like It’s A Wonderful Life or The Godfather, ballets like The Nutcracker or Sleeping Beauty, musicals like West Side Story and Les Mis, or games like RE4 and The Witcher 3: all are meant to hit low, hit hard, and connect broadly to get through on second base. Sometimes they are surprise home runs or go straight to the pitcher, but they are designed to get on base, that’s all.
The fact that everyone seemingly knows this, that we are being catered to in a way that explicitly shows that publishers (perhaps more so than devs, but probably not always) want to barely hold aloft the vessel of gaming above the watermark, is what brings me to finally recusing myself of any sort of stocking up expectation from the experiential praise AAA games get on release and in summation come December. Journalists and essayists who monthly extoll virtues and vices, cardinal sins and heavenly virtues, about the ur-tentpole delivering on expectations of not even property but on fulfilment of artistic attenuation, on the promise that the foundational inlay of profit generating internal ecology to the game is finally cohabitant, even dominated by, the accessorised partitioning (post the fact) of accessible humanity within the work do so with the knowledge of the vapid state of AAA games; the lack of identity, depth, or of empathy proffered overtly in these games weekly is met with such drastic extensions of one’s own powers of humanity that studios like Blizzard or Bethesda feel confident in offering flavourless mulch with the expectation that all necessary characterisation of their simulation will be filled in by the player. This has occurred for nearly every AAA game, from one source or another, since the turn towards prestige in the late aughts - all assumptions of character, pathos, or wit are now somehow granted to anything with enough fidelity to create a world which may hold its players seat of human courage, but can only, at best, render its own simulacra of such stillborn.
I’m not saying that any significant majority of the critical writing done on games from the AAA sphere of the medium is bad or dishonest, particularly not that writing which is able to articulate the sphere itself and why these highly sucralose rich products both work and appeal to wide demographics (I think William Hughes from the A.V. Club walks this line frequently with great aplomb), but I do think there is something regrettable about taking a primarily kinaesthetic experience like those listed above and transmuting both pathos and one’s seal of quality because the player was able to map on emotional strife and a conquering of such onto that experiential hurdle, all without the extension in return of the mechanics in the game to a actual thematic purpose, a la Spec Ops. Games should be able to render a language and introspection of quality which engages forcefully with the mechanical and interactive qualities inherent to it, not through sidelong implants of emotional turpitude perpendicularly inseminated, but head on and with appropriate function. Because the games listed above are not what we can, comparatively, call good due to their storytelling nor for their pathos, but most executively for their play, they are failing, in their minor ways, because they offer canvases for spreads of emotion and theme as such but ask the player to BYOB instead of providing nourishment on its own wonderful layout. As works in games ‘mature’, comparisons inflected within by AAA games own referential quality to media articles that are meant to inspire maturity and gravitas in comparison (looking at you MGS V with all that Moby Dick shit), the comparative nature of criticism must develop so as to draw out the cumulative quality, not reflect our own natures of complexity onto the games we play.
FINALLY, that brings me to Returnal. Embarrassingly, I’ve just put a good deal of personal opinion into what is supposed to be my overview of a game, mostly in reaction to a select few critics that I read both in anticipation for the game and in afterward help for the locution of my feelings Returnal elicited, but if this seems unsatisfying as appendix to read, let that contribute to my point. Returnal loops back into my point above as this: the game’s poorly mechanised roguelike structure, with the rote and underbaked narrative pinning its death and restart shuttle running, seems to surround a legitimately compelling, but obviously goofy and gamified play (which is to say gamified with hitboxes and gun mods and what else goes into the play, not the metaphorical layer of hell Selene puts over herself to justify the play. I hope it doesn’t need to be said, but when justifying your player character’s constructs of play within a narrative, herein the eternal penitence Selene’s delusions and guilt force on her through the play metaphor, the play metaphor needs to be justified yet again to the player; we engage in the play, not the delusion, so a further layer above needs to be accessible to us and not Selene.), but fails to, except for under highly specific circumstances, draw any useful or poignant meaning from the interactions between action and strictly narrative text.
The roguelike structure itself is probably the most significant issue in creating a playspace which goes through the gestation of a pregnant theme, despite it also being the aspect of Returnal’s design to note on how all the meta systems - gun stats, artefacts, consumables, parasites, etc. - to those most baked into the looping, which is to say the physics of Selene and her basic abilities to point, shoot, run, and jump; without the roguelike structure, the nature of almost everything that serves to progress play becomes utterly useless cruft, as well as functionless as iterating material to reconfigure and force usage. The roguelike structure is a monkey’s paw wish for game devs, one which allows for as broad as can be desired a system space: if a dev wants to add in 80 different interacting possible arms of their game, they can be assured that more, if not all, of those arms will be interacted with more consistently in a roguelike than in a strictly linear or open world game, simply because sometimes that mechanic will be all the player has on a run. The enormous, hugely hindering, flaw to this is that the mechanic, regardless of its name, function, art, or anything else above the game’s spreadsheet, is reduced to its function alone. When death is the truest end state of a mechanics use case, and as death is the functioning, one could argue insoluble, end state of videogame pathos, then all that is baked into giving the mechanics centred in a roguelike is lost. The ur-roguelike, Isaac, is so inculcated with this that oftentimes common parlance in its community denotes an item name in the lingua franca with its description, not its actual item label. Returnal seeks to bake around this nut with the narrative including a death inclusive meaning, as well as later on, the personal hell narrative. But this then doubles down on the foibles of roguelike structure. Not only is the genre so cemented with its expectations now, but if the player never or infrequently dies, as was my experience, then not only is the value of the typified roguelike mechanical arm stripped of its narrative weight due to the lack of death repetition (something which doesn’t happen so much with a game like Isaac, given that that game draws its narrative weight and iconography from emotions and recognition excited external to play), but also its mechanical weight as well. I never got to experiment with the roguelike possibilities, nor feel the true hell of unstable and chaotic ground, because I died to Phrike once, then steam rolled through the game with only two more deaths total, rendering both sources to possibly draw meaning from inert and barren.
There is also the general issue with the design of the consistent mechanics as well, not just in their nebulously justifiable narrative utility as Selene’s specific hell that is traumatically brought into being, but more specifically herein with how they mesh in the second to second play. There’s no getting past the readability of the levels, which inexplicably were seemingly designed to match the appearances of enemies in such a way as to give them complete camouflage in whatever environment they spawn in (enemies with tendrils are surrounded by anemone like plants, square and concrete enemies are ensconced in a brutalist architecture, etc.). This is an issue which feels like it shouldn’t have gotten past testing both for failing its lack of functioning for immediate play but also for the aggressiveness with which so many lit and moving textures tank performance, but also feels like it should have failed at the start of the project for how generally plain and common the designs are. Nothing really feels, in Returnal, like a unique and specific design, which if it were a pure narrative-free experience wouldn’t be anywhere near the issue it is, but for a highly localised and psychologically terrifying experience, one would hope that the tribulations faced would themselves reveal more about Selene as a character (and yes, they do later on, but in as equally a basic and unthought out way as the generic designs of the earlier, more rote sci-fi, way). The arena rooms themselves are frankly underbaked as well, not just in the too lacking of variety inset within the rotation of them to each zone - maybe 10-15 total per environment - but in how little they seem to complicate and excite possibilities of the mechanical base that is available to an everyday version of Selene in the game. Selene is, in fact, a very fun character to move around and shoot with. Actually, a brief slew of praise for Returnal, because I had a lot of fun playing through it, despite all that I’ve said above
- The amount of interesting cost/benefit choices offered up is incredible: on a minute to minute basis, the player is getting consistent possibilities for pain and pleasure that could knock the run into next gear (although if we’re being honest, unless you’re upping protection or damage, it isn’t usually worth any downside) or knock Selene on her ass. The pain/pleasure dichotomy is so powerful that it feels more of a promise on the Cenobites in Hellraiser than any of those movies ever did.
- Jane Elizabeth Perry’s VO for Selene, almost totally done in isolation of any other characters to draw reaction from, impresses more than any other AAA game’s performances from the last few years. It is a treat, and despite the bungling of the system narrative in my playthrough, carries weight across the entire play as something with genuine pathos.
- As above stated, the movement and shooting never feels anything less than incredible. So much weight is included and accounted for in every action - the shotgun nearly rips its barrel apart with every blast, the pylons screech with searing wounds, and Selene lands so coolly with earth shattering descents that I felt my knees give out with every impact. Kinaesthetic masterclass.
Anyways, all this praise is situated in rooms that don’t really need you to engage with any of the excellent bits, because tight concentric circle strafes will get the job done every time.
To bring this back to the beginning, I am nothing if not disappointed by Returnal. It’s not a bad game but it was talked about badly; the praise for its themes are dependent on highly specific play experiences, as well as on bringing an enormous amount of self implication to any given read that comes across as highly thought of the game. The trials of its design were underlaid in the frenzy that came in discussing the polish a AAA game brought to the already highly tuned roguelike formula, a formula which more suits the indie sphere which honed it to shining. This unfortunate discussion cycle damned my experience with the game, which I suppose was burdened in the concert I played it with my own naivete in expecting depth from a game released for $80. Really, you get what you pay for.