BeauTartep
2017
I love Tyler Colp for this:
per PC Gamer roasting beloved games, Colp says, "Nier: Automata is for weebs who haven't read a book or watched a movie. It's cliché sci-fi anime garbage that only feels like it means something because the music owns and Yoko Taro Googled "socialism". Nier: Replicant is a better game because it gives its characters space to be humans, which is pretty important in a game about what it means to be human."
per PC Gamer roasting beloved games, Colp says, "Nier: Automata is for weebs who haven't read a book or watched a movie. It's cliché sci-fi anime garbage that only feels like it means something because the music owns and Yoko Taro Googled "socialism". Nier: Replicant is a better game because it gives its characters space to be humans, which is pretty important in a game about what it means to be human."
1992
I don’t really have too much to say about Snatcher by itself, and what I do have to say about it is in relation to another game that I’ve been writing a “review” (read: book length essay) on for about 6 months, so I’ll put a few points below on small things I think about Snatcher:
- Game designers have really only recently, en masse, started to actually reckon on what their interplay of systems allowances and object interaction do to create meaning when colliding in an environment that exports the same ideas of commodification and exploitation that occur in reality. What a player is able to do when interacting with the environment in games runs a commentary on what the developers consent to as flavour or storytelling hutzpah, as well as what they consider viable as a character portrait through interaction of their cast. Explicitly what I’m saying is this - 2B climbing a ladder and the player being able to jam a camera up her ass shows what Takashi Taura thinks, or at least assents to agreeable commodification, about the function of looking in a game and the reasons for looking, at least in part, when in a game; similarly, Resident Evil 4 having Ashley (at least in her non fetishized outfits) demurely bunch her skirt when the player directs Leon’s gaze at her is lampshading the idea of the player’s impulses interacting with Leon and Ashley’s interactions. They both as games have hard programmed textual abilities to conform the reality of simulated approval, and physical law generated within a framework, of objectification that considers the objectification of real life women which has reinforced the desire to do these things in game, and have both fallen on sides of that being cosmically approved of by dint of manufacture. Kojima, for all his faults, seems to want to avoid this type of implicit approval. Kojima, because of his faults, apparently thought this type of system interaction should be made explicit instead, and so created a verb that lets you smell every woman in this game.
- For a game that is in no way original as it draws from its sources of inspiration - which in itself is charity towards the idea of inspiration; in would be no hyperbole to simply call Snatcher the lowest rent Blade Runner one can imagine - it’s a bit surprising to feel like the beats of the story are in themselves freeform developed from the minor tweaks of internal logic to the Snatcher reality of humanity that differs from Scott’s Los Angeles. While Kojima, deftly, doesn’t try to entangle his writing with any of the weight or gravitas of the existential inquiries that Decker and Batty are forced to consider, so the actual progression of character takes a backseat to the Dashiell Hammett style plotting that causes realisations instead of reckonings, he Kojima does have a path for his characters that mostly adhere to the differences of his cyberpunk future instead of the similarities it shares with the more foundational one. Whether or not this borderline Cold War propaganda fares better than it would have had it more openly cribbed the themes instead of the iconography is up to your take on how Hideo has handled weighty ideas in his career.
- I like shooting game. I think it makes sense within the world and allows for some actually quick gameplay in a game that is weighed down by looking and investigating everything 10x before allowing progression
- The sprite work is pretty marvellous; if they ever re-released this game, I would love to see most of the character models and backdrops kept the same in grandeur with only a bit more movement and texture added for parallax.
- Game designers have really only recently, en masse, started to actually reckon on what their interplay of systems allowances and object interaction do to create meaning when colliding in an environment that exports the same ideas of commodification and exploitation that occur in reality. What a player is able to do when interacting with the environment in games runs a commentary on what the developers consent to as flavour or storytelling hutzpah, as well as what they consider viable as a character portrait through interaction of their cast. Explicitly what I’m saying is this - 2B climbing a ladder and the player being able to jam a camera up her ass shows what Takashi Taura thinks, or at least assents to agreeable commodification, about the function of looking in a game and the reasons for looking, at least in part, when in a game; similarly, Resident Evil 4 having Ashley (at least in her non fetishized outfits) demurely bunch her skirt when the player directs Leon’s gaze at her is lampshading the idea of the player’s impulses interacting with Leon and Ashley’s interactions. They both as games have hard programmed textual abilities to conform the reality of simulated approval, and physical law generated within a framework, of objectification that considers the objectification of real life women which has reinforced the desire to do these things in game, and have both fallen on sides of that being cosmically approved of by dint of manufacture. Kojima, for all his faults, seems to want to avoid this type of implicit approval. Kojima, because of his faults, apparently thought this type of system interaction should be made explicit instead, and so created a verb that lets you smell every woman in this game.
- For a game that is in no way original as it draws from its sources of inspiration - which in itself is charity towards the idea of inspiration; in would be no hyperbole to simply call Snatcher the lowest rent Blade Runner one can imagine - it’s a bit surprising to feel like the beats of the story are in themselves freeform developed from the minor tweaks of internal logic to the Snatcher reality of humanity that differs from Scott’s Los Angeles. While Kojima, deftly, doesn’t try to entangle his writing with any of the weight or gravitas of the existential inquiries that Decker and Batty are forced to consider, so the actual progression of character takes a backseat to the Dashiell Hammett style plotting that causes realisations instead of reckonings, he Kojima does have a path for his characters that mostly adhere to the differences of his cyberpunk future instead of the similarities it shares with the more foundational one. Whether or not this borderline Cold War propaganda fares better than it would have had it more openly cribbed the themes instead of the iconography is up to your take on how Hideo has handled weighty ideas in his career.
- I like shooting game. I think it makes sense within the world and allows for some actually quick gameplay in a game that is weighed down by looking and investigating everything 10x before allowing progression
- The sprite work is pretty marvellous; if they ever re-released this game, I would love to see most of the character models and backdrops kept the same in grandeur with only a bit more movement and texture added for parallax.
2022
STOP THINKING ABOUT YOUR GAMES AS GIMMICK FIRST! GAMES ARE SYSTEMS, NOT PARTY TRICKS. THEY HAVE TO WORK WITH CONCERTED FORCE.
I'm so utterly exhausted with these indie teams thinking they've skirted the curve by coming up with a non-direct approach to game design because of their one tiny inversion to their genre's formula. Like, yes, it is better to put thought into your game's intellectual play, committing its expression to something expressively unique and utterable only within games - but if you design from an academic's abstract perspective first, as though your mechanics are the rosetta stone for dissecting why people gravitate towards any individual game, then you're sacrificing your art to the altar of skinner box games just the same as all the devs who sell out to work on live service trash. Games are play forward; the interaction is what translates the design to us, not the other way around. It is in transforming the play through nuance that the nuance sings - in Tunic, the combat being poorly implemented and simplistic does not shockingly transform when it becomes poorly implemented and complicated. The same with economy, the same with traversal, the same with puzzle design.
If you wouldn't want to to do it without the gimmick, then it isn't worth doing.
I'm so utterly exhausted with these indie teams thinking they've skirted the curve by coming up with a non-direct approach to game design because of their one tiny inversion to their genre's formula. Like, yes, it is better to put thought into your game's intellectual play, committing its expression to something expressively unique and utterable only within games - but if you design from an academic's abstract perspective first, as though your mechanics are the rosetta stone for dissecting why people gravitate towards any individual game, then you're sacrificing your art to the altar of skinner box games just the same as all the devs who sell out to work on live service trash. Games are play forward; the interaction is what translates the design to us, not the other way around. It is in transforming the play through nuance that the nuance sings - in Tunic, the combat being poorly implemented and simplistic does not shockingly transform when it becomes poorly implemented and complicated. The same with economy, the same with traversal, the same with puzzle design.
If you wouldn't want to to do it without the gimmick, then it isn't worth doing.
2023
An improvement in every area that the first game was weak in with only a few setbacks concerning the first game's strengths. Traversal has been expanded upon as well as ironed out, broadening the possible range of the platforming challenges that provide a quick and diverting compliment to the moderately sped up combat. Whereas in Blasphemous 1, platforming segments were not just monotonous and tedious to get through on a mechanical level, but they didn't toe the absolutely necessary line of 2D level design abstraction with worldly richness and sense of place. Most areas were navigable in a similar way, and that way was nearly always slightly aggravating and boring. In the sequel, areas have a more noticeable differentiation in architecture and transgressions of ingress, making for a varied and localisable pronouncement of site. With this, the finely tuned motorics of The Penitent One is complimented by a better expanded metroidvania toolset, creating more axes of incursion between the available elements of play; whereas in the first game, fight and flight were pretty grossly bisected, Blasphemous 2 anchors its platforming challenges in the tools honed with combat. While double jump, dash, and "grapple" (Metroid grapple i.e. only at specific point, but here with rings to grab onto) are all present, the major tools for both major gameplay modes, platforming and combat, are set within the weapons. With each of the 3 melee weapons, the player is given a new tool to experiment on many of the points of interaction within Blasphemous II's many varied systems: the rpg-lite progression paths born from each weapon elicits many interesting variations of play possibility, the traversal is more obviously built with the frictionless joy of metroidvania shuttle-running, and the combat sings with ebbs and flows that were not possible in the much simpler system of the first game.
Some minor regressions in terms of enemy design, many of which are carried over from the first game, and quest design, which, while archaic and obtuse in the first game, is dumbed down for a more simplistic collect-a-thon type of mode. The enemy that are carried over from the first game maintain the care of animation and attack variety, whereas the new enemies, while still deployed in interesting combat encounters throughout the entire experience, are less interesting to fight and to watch die (the first game got by with an incredible charm of gore: each enemy exploding in an ironic display of highly unique hubris when reposted). The dreamy and uncanny unknowability of ancient religion is also lost in the streamlined and gameified approach: I felt more at home in Blasphemous II, which kind of took away from the sublime terror and discomfort of the first game's religious theme. Religion in Blasphemous II is part of interesting world building, but it has less to be said about it when the second go around has finished - I feel about this messiah about as much as I do when thinking of Pantagruel: a far cry from the discomfort at sitting on Golgotha with Blasphemous I.
Overall, Blasphemous II improves over the first game, and is a better entry point for the games if you missed the first one in 2019. Going back to 1 from 2 would be difficult after the mechanical improvements, but so is reading Deuteronomy after the Gospels. There is a reason that the NLT is more popular than the KJV now.
Some minor regressions in terms of enemy design, many of which are carried over from the first game, and quest design, which, while archaic and obtuse in the first game, is dumbed down for a more simplistic collect-a-thon type of mode. The enemy that are carried over from the first game maintain the care of animation and attack variety, whereas the new enemies, while still deployed in interesting combat encounters throughout the entire experience, are less interesting to fight and to watch die (the first game got by with an incredible charm of gore: each enemy exploding in an ironic display of highly unique hubris when reposted). The dreamy and uncanny unknowability of ancient religion is also lost in the streamlined and gameified approach: I felt more at home in Blasphemous II, which kind of took away from the sublime terror and discomfort of the first game's religious theme. Religion in Blasphemous II is part of interesting world building, but it has less to be said about it when the second go around has finished - I feel about this messiah about as much as I do when thinking of Pantagruel: a far cry from the discomfort at sitting on Golgotha with Blasphemous I.
Overall, Blasphemous II improves over the first game, and is a better entry point for the games if you missed the first one in 2019. Going back to 1 from 2 would be difficult after the mechanical improvements, but so is reading Deuteronomy after the Gospels. There is a reason that the NLT is more popular than the KJV now.
2021
I've let too much time pass between playing this and writing my review, and I'm horrible about taking notes on my experience, so I won't try to articulate at any length something in depth. So in short:
It's a cute game that kind of feels like the generic version of the big studio "polished, well reviewed, might be nominated for but would never win GOTY" but on an indie scale. It offers no surprises whatsoever, is so pick up and play if you're familiar with isometric controls, has basically no difficulty in it at all, and has a few memeable moments of quaintness. It's so easy to consume that Death's Door could be administered via IV.
It's a cute game that kind of feels like the generic version of the big studio "polished, well reviewed, might be nominated for but would never win GOTY" but on an indie scale. It offers no surprises whatsoever, is so pick up and play if you're familiar with isometric controls, has basically no difficulty in it at all, and has a few memeable moments of quaintness. It's so easy to consume that Death's Door could be administered via IV.
2023
Despite the fact that System Shock 2 is probably my favourite FPS (dogshit ending and all), I’d never made a real concerted effort to go back and play the game that preceded it. I knew that much of what was to become become solidified in 0451 games originated in System Shock, but by the time I first encountered those elements in Bioshock, much of that piquantness had been watered down to a highly palatable bitterness, necessary for tent-pole games that hit several consoles simultaneously, from the highly acquired flavour of PC jank, when being able to play console or PC really meant a lot, of the Shock name-makers. Even going back and playing System Shock 2 a decade ago required one session of bouncing off and readjusting my expectations appropriately. So despite the immensely rewarding sense of place and possibility offered on that cold and hostile station, when I saw that what laid the track to get there was more archaic, more artifacted, more mystifying, and more unforthcoming, I thought that I could just play Dishonored instead.
When the remake for System Shock was announced though, I figured I could get the context without the homework; I would be able to cruise through The Citadel as The Hacker as easily as Alpha and Delta could through Rapture. NOPE! System Shock is a remake of the 1994, but it has not been remade. The environments are wonderfully updated without a beautiful voxel fidelity that feels foreign and tactile and industrial, and the interface is snappy and easy to navigate with the solidified 30 years of reinforced key-mapping schema and necessity - but, the design? The encounters? The puzzles? That’s all 1994 vintage, baby. At pretty regular intervals, I would do something by accident and wonder, “Jesus, they didn’t tutorialise that?” Nightdive made the call in their updating that Looking Glass’s original ideas still held water, irradiated though it might be, and that their job was to allow a new generation to see it, nothing more. And I think they were pretty spot on with this approach: the parts of System Shock 2 that are truly great, the level design, the environmental storytelling, the incidental characterisation, the unique and strangeness of how the game asks you to interact with it; that’s all here pretty much as fully formed as it was in System Shock 2. Maybe more so, if just because the face lift (and complete counter-intuitiveness to modern sensibilities in AAA shooters) allow for what was great about BOTH System Shock games to come through as clearly as it ever has been able to.
That said, the 90s ImSim jank is still pretty gritty, and your tolerance for slowly locomoting (with a pretty pitiful stamina reserve) through massive levels with barely any idea of which surface of The Citadel’s, like, 10 different spinning plates is about to serve you a big ol pile of Akira flesh is going to dictate how much of the game compels you. The combat, despite gluing me to the mouse and keyboard with high impact tension - each bullet smashing through me with the impact of most game’s artillery class weapons - is flatly complex, with a huge amount of lateral possibilities, but not much ability to upwardly advance in tactics. You can tell when peeking in and out of corners, taking your three shots and then waiting for the enemy to take theirs, that DOOM had come out only 10 months earlier than the original Shock, and was pretty much the only game in town for really interesting shooting. The guns in System Shock (2023) feel great, and they look amazing as models, but taking the Scorpion or the Railgun into combat won’t change your tactics: you'll be looting ammo and shooting that ammo, but that's about as complex as the gunplay can get. Also sorely missing from System Shock 2 is the progression path allowed (being that this system was innovated into the 0451 genre with that sequel so I understand it not being here, but, you know), making exploration a more exciting and integrated possibility than in either the original or the remake. Getting guns that pack more of a punch - and gadgets that drain your energy faster than should be legal for how useful they ultimately end up being - is not enough to curve the difficulty up the way they do; the game starts off far too easy, and it ends with demanding some pretty reprehensible quicksave tactics being necessary to save yourself from having to constantly hoof it back to the nearest floor with a decked out med chamber. The ultimately pretty static state of The Hacker removes a great deal of replayability, and I’d imagine that on a second go, knowing how little you need to scrounge up to get to the highest state of mechanical proficiency, it would be pretty easy to cut the playtime of the first go through of The Citadel into 1/4th of the initial time.
All that said: wow, they really did place a lot of emphasis across so many more nodes of play possibility back in the day, didn’t they? Obviously as fidelity has become of preeminent importance for roping in gen pop, the design teams of games have shrunk their respective share of modern developers - to get someone who only plays 2-3 AAA games a year, you kind of need them to feel generally warm about everything in front of them. But Nightdive got off pretty sweet without making that deal with the devil: the design was right there, it can all be technical personnel for the remake if that’s what they want. I think Looking Glass would be proud as heck if they made this game - and whoops! They did.
When the remake for System Shock was announced though, I figured I could get the context without the homework; I would be able to cruise through The Citadel as The Hacker as easily as Alpha and Delta could through Rapture. NOPE! System Shock is a remake of the 1994, but it has not been remade. The environments are wonderfully updated without a beautiful voxel fidelity that feels foreign and tactile and industrial, and the interface is snappy and easy to navigate with the solidified 30 years of reinforced key-mapping schema and necessity - but, the design? The encounters? The puzzles? That’s all 1994 vintage, baby. At pretty regular intervals, I would do something by accident and wonder, “Jesus, they didn’t tutorialise that?” Nightdive made the call in their updating that Looking Glass’s original ideas still held water, irradiated though it might be, and that their job was to allow a new generation to see it, nothing more. And I think they were pretty spot on with this approach: the parts of System Shock 2 that are truly great, the level design, the environmental storytelling, the incidental characterisation, the unique and strangeness of how the game asks you to interact with it; that’s all here pretty much as fully formed as it was in System Shock 2. Maybe more so, if just because the face lift (and complete counter-intuitiveness to modern sensibilities in AAA shooters) allow for what was great about BOTH System Shock games to come through as clearly as it ever has been able to.
That said, the 90s ImSim jank is still pretty gritty, and your tolerance for slowly locomoting (with a pretty pitiful stamina reserve) through massive levels with barely any idea of which surface of The Citadel’s, like, 10 different spinning plates is about to serve you a big ol pile of Akira flesh is going to dictate how much of the game compels you. The combat, despite gluing me to the mouse and keyboard with high impact tension - each bullet smashing through me with the impact of most game’s artillery class weapons - is flatly complex, with a huge amount of lateral possibilities, but not much ability to upwardly advance in tactics. You can tell when peeking in and out of corners, taking your three shots and then waiting for the enemy to take theirs, that DOOM had come out only 10 months earlier than the original Shock, and was pretty much the only game in town for really interesting shooting. The guns in System Shock (2023) feel great, and they look amazing as models, but taking the Scorpion or the Railgun into combat won’t change your tactics: you'll be looting ammo and shooting that ammo, but that's about as complex as the gunplay can get. Also sorely missing from System Shock 2 is the progression path allowed (being that this system was innovated into the 0451 genre with that sequel so I understand it not being here, but, you know), making exploration a more exciting and integrated possibility than in either the original or the remake. Getting guns that pack more of a punch - and gadgets that drain your energy faster than should be legal for how useful they ultimately end up being - is not enough to curve the difficulty up the way they do; the game starts off far too easy, and it ends with demanding some pretty reprehensible quicksave tactics being necessary to save yourself from having to constantly hoof it back to the nearest floor with a decked out med chamber. The ultimately pretty static state of The Hacker removes a great deal of replayability, and I’d imagine that on a second go, knowing how little you need to scrounge up to get to the highest state of mechanical proficiency, it would be pretty easy to cut the playtime of the first go through of The Citadel into 1/4th of the initial time.
All that said: wow, they really did place a lot of emphasis across so many more nodes of play possibility back in the day, didn’t they? Obviously as fidelity has become of preeminent importance for roping in gen pop, the design teams of games have shrunk their respective share of modern developers - to get someone who only plays 2-3 AAA games a year, you kind of need them to feel generally warm about everything in front of them. But Nightdive got off pretty sweet without making that deal with the devil: the design was right there, it can all be technical personnel for the remake if that’s what they want. I think Looking Glass would be proud as heck if they made this game - and whoops! They did.
Why is this narrated? The direction for performances flatten every spoken line, which in themselves offer no setting dynamism or effective characterisation, and collapse the individual voices of the game's cast into a single barely awake drone. The chase for seriousness is maddening with this understated read; every Finch is already a parody character, so aggrandised is their position in this world, keeping quarters as if they are consorts of many themed Ikea complete room renovations - a gross misunderstanding of art design, in my opinion: it contrasts the magical realism, or heightened reality, of the house's architecture and possible supernaturalia with an utterly mundane and ill-courted seeming interiored juvenilia of daily life. How at home are we meant to feel with the glowing house in the harbour when looking out of what is effectively a wizard's tower if the room is coated in kid's stickers and hunting gear? The script itself is barely more than descriptive, and is completely redundant to the game - if this had shipped nearly wordless, playing through each of the segments with no narration from Edith, it would have strung together a surreal but obvious link between a people whose downfalls seem tragic in the traditional sense. With the VO, and presentation for about half of the Finch fam, they all read as gullible, immaterial, or idiotic. Imagine reading Dubliners and instead of having described to you the rigour and depth of inner life extent to the city and human condition, everybody was a bit floaty and got hit by passing trains or choking on pheasant bones. UGH
Finally, games will get the respect they deserve
2023
I tend to not be into games specifically which bake into their outflowing charisma the aura of lovable idiosyncrasy; I can get behind movies with casts of oddballs and quirks, novels populated with surreality at home, comics askew with half remembered figments of characters, but games which can’t make a pure sentimental or quizzical experience of life as we see it caricatured, but also a mechanical coinciding parallel argument, more often than not ape the artificiality these idiosyncratic works try to point out in our everyday social mores. Because something like The 20th Century (2019) is largely spectacular, able to be interacted with as the farce of a dream that compounds into what he revere as history, it cuts through the rote activities that go into creating that spectacle not in contrast to our normalcies that it thumbs at, but because our social construct allows for intra-commentorial reinforcements of its own multiplicity (which is part of why true critique is so hard to maintain without becoming the obsequient second comer to the argument between status quo and mirrored parody). However, when games pronounce this mummery of displaced normalcy, artificialising the pretence of coordinated nature outcropped in our actions, it also must be coupled with the standardised explorative apparatus to function as that critique: dual sticks to transgress, A to interact, upgrades to signify achievements of the necessary progression. Due to this coupling of the obvious interaction model, because, except for the most radical of the avant-garde, there is also rote interaction along the borders of other art objects but in less conscious ways as holding a controller or managing inventories, the inclusive critique of normalcy (by which I mean anything other than a standardised reproduction of the conditions made up for requiring “normal life”) is more thoroughly adopted into the landscape of structural expression bent toward hegemony than is otherwise seen in things such as Dadaist poetry or free jazz.
That said, 24 Killers doesn’t fall into the Undertale ‘it is what it says it isn’t’ trap of these types of games, if only because it doesn’t set out as being so apart with as grand ambitions. It’s a modest game, if you don’t go for the truly bonkers total completion, that attempts to tell an unusual story of a parodic community, but it speaks less to the idea of community than it might if it were to flesh out more towards a true simulation. In most respects, it isn’t an anti-game or a subversive RPG or an adventure game about adventure games; it’s merely a little parable of why community is so regulated and normalised instead of how community is regulated and normalised: because people are pleasant and nice and it feels good to be pleasant and nice. It may be tedious to help a friend, but you do and then you have a coffee and sharpen their beak with a shell given to you by a gigantic fish that lives in a toxic sewer beside a living pile of shit.
That said, 24 Killers doesn’t fall into the Undertale ‘it is what it says it isn’t’ trap of these types of games, if only because it doesn’t set out as being so apart with as grand ambitions. It’s a modest game, if you don’t go for the truly bonkers total completion, that attempts to tell an unusual story of a parodic community, but it speaks less to the idea of community than it might if it were to flesh out more towards a true simulation. In most respects, it isn’t an anti-game or a subversive RPG or an adventure game about adventure games; it’s merely a little parable of why community is so regulated and normalised instead of how community is regulated and normalised: because people are pleasant and nice and it feels good to be pleasant and nice. It may be tedious to help a friend, but you do and then you have a coffee and sharpen their beak with a shell given to you by a gigantic fish that lives in a toxic sewer beside a living pile of shit.
2002
Fine enough for what it is but it suffers from issues that would not have arisen had they been less faithful to Super Metroid and the template established in 2D. Endless backtracking, movement powers that are disempowering when used to motivate vertical play without an easily utilised free look camera, enemy design that doesn't support combat progression or world hostility, lack of sense of place similarly due to a lesser ability to survey it. Weapons feel wet, Samus can barely dodge attacks, and the boss design is pretty atrocious. I get it was a biggish deal but we had better shooters, and better console shooters, that knew how to compliment their backtracking without exciting terrain traversal as a slog; Prime, unlike Super, as a world just isn't enlivened with multivariate incidence. But who knows, maybe there would be no Dark Souls 1 without it, so minor pass.
2023
I’m trying to make as concerted an effort as I can to playing games that are coming out or have come out in 2023, at least for the rest of 2023, so as to ideally engender an understanding less of the history of problems and proposed solutions to problems which have come and gone in the medium, which was a component part of my desire to go back and play historically, and instead try to see what problems are cropping up and which are being solved in modern games. Sometimes these problems are very ‘discourse-y’ things which have think-pieces written about them quarterly - skinner box design, representational and misrepresentational games casts, monetisation villainy - and sometimes the issues are personally developed, cropped, and curated by individual writers and designers. Think something like Bennett Foddy’s monologue in Getting Over It on the idea of art and asset design coinciding with how they interact with both aesthetic and mechanical purposes, or often cross purposes:
“For years now, people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of pre-fabricated objects; bought in a store and assembled into a world, and for the most part that hasn’t happened, because the objects in the stores are trash. I don’t mean that they look bad, or that they’re badly made- although a lot of them are- I mean they’re trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in the sink. Things are made to be consumed and used in a certain context, and once the moment is gone they transform into garbage. In the context of technology, those moments pass by in seconds.”
Or something like Anthony Zonaga and Marcus Carter’s observation that architecture and opportunity, devoid of implicit character interaction when antiseptically viewed, will shape how the idea of character interaction should be approached. On Dishonored’s use of this, they say:
“Where world-building is successful, game architecture will be an embodiment of the morals and values of the fictional people who inhabit it…Architecture in Dishonored works to shape the player’s ethical agency through their interactions and observations in Dunwall by providing motivation (or deterrence, depending on their moral code) to redeem the city and save the lives of the citizens of Dunwall.”
When looking at these miniature brands of concern, these observational ideas and objects which players (and designers, to a certain extent) can blankly transmute into wireframe without consciously sanding a game’s texture in the process, we can attempt to surmise what the gestating seeds of future problems in our modern environment may become in 10 years (such as how precise landing has remained a problem in 3D platformers since Mario 64 became the template for the genre instead of Jumping Flash, when, at the time, the focus was on level design and transmuted iconography) or bloom out seedlings that will ensnarl a cult like progression path that is commercially poison but which flowers into entire streams of indie design that in their turn and mulling find the next important step in the medium’s evolution.
To narrow the scope to Sludge Life, I think Terri Vellman is a game designer who is highly engaged with Foddy’s perception of what does and does not transmute component elements of games into trash as well as Dishonored’s morality in play by way of rooftops, windows, and apartment sizes. In Sludge Life and Sludge Life 2, there are no sites on the maps which are transitory or refutational to the central theses at work in the series, but there are also no boxes of immense and concentric meaning, no rooms or corridors which reveal the premise of the game - no Andrew Ryan’s Office or Virmire or Mountain Top Mom Phone Call. The use of the space is thematically pregnant, which in the eyes of the game is an ironic nullity because of the intense sense of refuse that pervades both games, and by cohering and relating to each other in intense ways that refuse to be backdropped (a refusal which is aided by how relatively mechanics light both SL games are - the tagging really is just a way of putting objective markers to locomote to without creating the overwhelming sense of gaminess that those things appear as in Fallout 4 or The Witcher 3.) Vellman creates an atmosphere about garbage that never becomes garbage. Relating all these things together with an intercommunal expression of the mood Sludge Life presents uncompromisingly I found that I felt less like I was playing a walking sim, or comedy game or whatever it might more on its face look like, and more like I was playing an immersive sim; for all we attribute our Deus Exes and Thiefs the slate name of ImSim because of the mechanical communication that exists between their systems, the real flag for me is how the world interacts and encounters the player. Of course being able to mine hop to the top of the Statue of Liberty is a great sign of what the game is as well, Deus Ex felt like an immersive sim to me not because of how you variably ascend its world and more because the world had incidence upon every route from its areas that all had interesting intercommunal expressions about the transcended nodes taken or not. Sludge Life similarly will express to the player, architecturally, the idea of being and having been just the same, if on a much smaller and less ambitious scale.
The ethos of Vellman’s aesthetic has not always been as sharpened as it is in Sludge Life and particularly Sludge Life 2. Heavy Bullets and High Hell both have the vibrancy and tone, but lack the intensity and pointedness with which the punk reference moves beyond the cool factor and reflexive cropping up. Sludge Life is the steering of Terri V’s irreverent scatalogy away from how Sade’s perverse anti-morality concerning the bodily transgression has predominated anything higher brow than Farrelly since the French Revolution, instead seeing shit, piss, vomit, and broken bones transform into a visible mass ego death born from succumbing to the sensuous distance we place between the giving into being containers of waste of human byproduct and our self conceptions of humans apart from our evacuating such. Sludge Life baulks at the idea of society as one beating heart, instead looking at the upper class as a massive set of lungs chain smoking, and the lower class as a irascible set of bowels endlessly being turned out. Humour and commentary are interweaved not by threads intricately gathered but by pugilistic transferences of sweat and blood - the refuse of Glug and Ciggy City push the marginalised into the titular sludge, which in turn manifests itself as a cult’s centre of adoration that is coaxed into rendering a Neo-Ciggy City a la Akira with a hyper-poisonous psilocybin mushroom. The gravity of this world of utter slime and filth is interspersed with every joke about the composite elements that would go into the making of that filth possible, including the best line of accidental poetry about a huge shit I’ve ever seen. The swings of subject matter and how Vellman handles the depths and heights can only play out so wonderfully in the architecture that houses it so well, and in spaces which allow that sort of communication in the proper aesthetic housing.
The music is great too!
“For years now, people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of pre-fabricated objects; bought in a store and assembled into a world, and for the most part that hasn’t happened, because the objects in the stores are trash. I don’t mean that they look bad, or that they’re badly made- although a lot of them are- I mean they’re trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in the sink. Things are made to be consumed and used in a certain context, and once the moment is gone they transform into garbage. In the context of technology, those moments pass by in seconds.”
Or something like Anthony Zonaga and Marcus Carter’s observation that architecture and opportunity, devoid of implicit character interaction when antiseptically viewed, will shape how the idea of character interaction should be approached. On Dishonored’s use of this, they say:
“Where world-building is successful, game architecture will be an embodiment of the morals and values of the fictional people who inhabit it…Architecture in Dishonored works to shape the player’s ethical agency through their interactions and observations in Dunwall by providing motivation (or deterrence, depending on their moral code) to redeem the city and save the lives of the citizens of Dunwall.”
When looking at these miniature brands of concern, these observational ideas and objects which players (and designers, to a certain extent) can blankly transmute into wireframe without consciously sanding a game’s texture in the process, we can attempt to surmise what the gestating seeds of future problems in our modern environment may become in 10 years (such as how precise landing has remained a problem in 3D platformers since Mario 64 became the template for the genre instead of Jumping Flash, when, at the time, the focus was on level design and transmuted iconography) or bloom out seedlings that will ensnarl a cult like progression path that is commercially poison but which flowers into entire streams of indie design that in their turn and mulling find the next important step in the medium’s evolution.
To narrow the scope to Sludge Life, I think Terri Vellman is a game designer who is highly engaged with Foddy’s perception of what does and does not transmute component elements of games into trash as well as Dishonored’s morality in play by way of rooftops, windows, and apartment sizes. In Sludge Life and Sludge Life 2, there are no sites on the maps which are transitory or refutational to the central theses at work in the series, but there are also no boxes of immense and concentric meaning, no rooms or corridors which reveal the premise of the game - no Andrew Ryan’s Office or Virmire or Mountain Top Mom Phone Call. The use of the space is thematically pregnant, which in the eyes of the game is an ironic nullity because of the intense sense of refuse that pervades both games, and by cohering and relating to each other in intense ways that refuse to be backdropped (a refusal which is aided by how relatively mechanics light both SL games are - the tagging really is just a way of putting objective markers to locomote to without creating the overwhelming sense of gaminess that those things appear as in Fallout 4 or The Witcher 3.) Vellman creates an atmosphere about garbage that never becomes garbage. Relating all these things together with an intercommunal expression of the mood Sludge Life presents uncompromisingly I found that I felt less like I was playing a walking sim, or comedy game or whatever it might more on its face look like, and more like I was playing an immersive sim; for all we attribute our Deus Exes and Thiefs the slate name of ImSim because of the mechanical communication that exists between their systems, the real flag for me is how the world interacts and encounters the player. Of course being able to mine hop to the top of the Statue of Liberty is a great sign of what the game is as well, Deus Ex felt like an immersive sim to me not because of how you variably ascend its world and more because the world had incidence upon every route from its areas that all had interesting intercommunal expressions about the transcended nodes taken or not. Sludge Life similarly will express to the player, architecturally, the idea of being and having been just the same, if on a much smaller and less ambitious scale.
The ethos of Vellman’s aesthetic has not always been as sharpened as it is in Sludge Life and particularly Sludge Life 2. Heavy Bullets and High Hell both have the vibrancy and tone, but lack the intensity and pointedness with which the punk reference moves beyond the cool factor and reflexive cropping up. Sludge Life is the steering of Terri V’s irreverent scatalogy away from how Sade’s perverse anti-morality concerning the bodily transgression has predominated anything higher brow than Farrelly since the French Revolution, instead seeing shit, piss, vomit, and broken bones transform into a visible mass ego death born from succumbing to the sensuous distance we place between the giving into being containers of waste of human byproduct and our self conceptions of humans apart from our evacuating such. Sludge Life baulks at the idea of society as one beating heart, instead looking at the upper class as a massive set of lungs chain smoking, and the lower class as a irascible set of bowels endlessly being turned out. Humour and commentary are interweaved not by threads intricately gathered but by pugilistic transferences of sweat and blood - the refuse of Glug and Ciggy City push the marginalised into the titular sludge, which in turn manifests itself as a cult’s centre of adoration that is coaxed into rendering a Neo-Ciggy City a la Akira with a hyper-poisonous psilocybin mushroom. The gravity of this world of utter slime and filth is interspersed with every joke about the composite elements that would go into the making of that filth possible, including the best line of accidental poetry about a huge shit I’ve ever seen. The swings of subject matter and how Vellman handles the depths and heights can only play out so wonderfully in the architecture that houses it so well, and in spaces which allow that sort of communication in the proper aesthetic housing.
The music is great too!
2022
Every six months or so it feels like we get a new ‘prestige’ roguelike that has aims to set itself amongst the, very heavily and only somewhat arbitrarily, entrenched canon composing the genre’s royalty: Isaac, Spelunky, Darkest Dungeon, etc. Once in a while a game does make it up to the endlessly listed and recommended (less to be admired than to be routinely ripped off and repainted) ‘best roguelikes of all time’, such as the comparatively recent entries Hades or Into The Breach, but on the whole, the rotation is pretty well stuck. So in this bi-annual cycle, we see a game generate initial buzz, show promising art (or more specifically, show highly dynamic sprite effects), enter into a well received period of early access; after some dozen articles heralding aplomb before release roll out the red carpet, the game comes out, gets fully wiki-ed, then dumped into the pool of soon to be Epic giveaways. General reviews are positive of course, and if it’s a real winner of a game, a somewhat active subreddit recycling the same stock image memes (as well as the compulsory poorly done game mascot tattoo) may bubble up with 1000 members, but in comparison to the promise of forever games offered in whole by the rotation of genre bests, the new contender is DOA.
Have a Nice Death is kind of the sugary sweet rush that these games-which-hang-dearly-to-the-2010s usually provide taken to the highest level. It has Dead Cells ‘meta’ progression in its arsenal, FTL style course charting, Gungeon room presetting and environment familiarity, Hades quick combat, and, of course, Isaac-like overpowering. Nearly every moment is ripped straight from the most dopamine saturated seconds of the games which have influenced it: from unlocking new weapons to watching the fantastic enemy animations stretch to opening secret rooms and finding run clinching heals, rarely can a second go by that doesn’t fully captivate the player in a way that overdrives the referenced feeling derived from the best of the genre. So much as a game can be a highlight reel (which hopefully is how I’ll feel come Last Call BBS), HaND plays the hits and plays them loud.
Being that, it coheres into well seasoned mush, going down so smooth that all the texture it borrows from better games feels like grit instead of substance. It’s hard to say if roguelikes are at a point in their period of preeminence that they have any more to comment on the genres which surround them, but so much now are the offerings of devs games which merely have things to say about other roguelikes; the nature of incest and commentary may be intertwined in the genre, I can’t say in this review, but the line is blurring regardless of whether or not it’s a technical architectural boundary or a policed DMZ. I think that there is an actual issue with upholding a canon of games to which all newcomers must compare, as if games must add being made a decade earlier to the things they have to be - beautiful, fun, touching, exciting, endlessly replayable, cheap - but that roguelikes were initially gesturing to the plasticity of systems boundaries in genres which had highly bound possibility spaces was something which those early roguelikes took as given, and which current roguelikes seem to take as poisoned well water.
So completely relieving was the cool air of Spelunky HD back in 2012, or Flash Isaac in 2011, to the tedium of level design which had become a sickening curative to actual mechanics mastery, a blight which saw platformers reduce themselves to being a game composed of knowing which turns to decelerate on, that it had to become an obvious manifesto for how designers could treat gamified spaces (and indeed, Spelunky the book is that manifesto). That all the games which we consider the GOATs of roguery were in some way reinterpreting the syntactical elements of the systems codified in older games is not merely a coincidence of their greatness but a necessary fact to those achievements.
HaND treats the slippery sandstone of roguelike structure as the structure upon which its entire house is built: if Gungeon or FTL are something like Minka built atop a marble foundation, then new roguelikes seem to be constructing Camelots on quicksand. Every enemy in HaND seems to be designed with the quantum reality of necessitating its existence wherever it shouldst be placed by the hand of RNJesus, such that they have no ingratiation to the environment nor to those enemies around them; they must be ready to plant their feet, but never roots, wherever they are so that they may be dispatched and engaged by the wide variety of weapons in the wide variety of rooms open to the player. It’s all jagged edge with no grip. Similarly, the RPG skill trees are all progression with no meaningful choice: one does not so much build a Reaper with an attuned eye to damage types or range preference or synergistic possibility, but instead is sent up a series of exponentially heightened stairways of damage output, defying the base play with continuous upscaling but without actual change in any way to how interaction works. It’s all Diablo numbers but without any representation of those numbers externally. Just the same is the architectural aesthetic; ever-shifting, always surprising, endlessly roiling out - never assuming a nature which is transgressed, inhabited, or repellant. Where we see Hades or Darkest Dungeon play through highly gamified yet enormously revealing spaces, we see HaND reduce itself to 90 degree run offs, damage zones, and absentee character situation.
The comparison to the betters is not to say that HaND does all these things worse than the better games in its genre, because in the second to second play, it holds up just as well in the hands to any of the best in the genre. It is to show that while it draws from the “shifting walls” of roguelikes for purpose in placing assets and mechanics into its works, to the obvious detriment of those elements substance, the previous games of import pulled those elements of meaning and freed them from the constraints of single use potentiality. FTL freed node based travel and weapons trading from min-maxing, allowing the danger of run ruining and steamrolling mechanics to play freely outside of scum-saving and narrative destruction. Hades freed hack and slashing deadly combat and character ingratiation from the dissonance of death and retry seen in straightforward narrative. Spelunky freed inert single use mechanics and level design from bloat in platformers pushed out in their yearly series to run free, anarchically, into total interaction between themselves and the player. HaND sees each of these elements, unrestrained from their inhibitions of origin, and unthinkingly grabs them and smashes them all together into its own highly calcified bounding box: they are all still wonderful in isolation, but in their original sources, they were never isolated.
Have a Nice Death is a fine game if you want to play it as you might a Super Mario 2 or 1001 Spikes. It will fill your few hours needed and wash down whatever leftover twitch reflexes keep rising to the back of your throat when playing untuned games less tightly controlled. But, it won’t enter any canons, change generally in evaluation, or be memorable next year or the year after that. And given that it was seemingly designed to do those three things moreso than it was designed to be a good game which stands on its own, it really can’t be called much more than a tepid failure.
Have a Nice Death is kind of the sugary sweet rush that these games-which-hang-dearly-to-the-2010s usually provide taken to the highest level. It has Dead Cells ‘meta’ progression in its arsenal, FTL style course charting, Gungeon room presetting and environment familiarity, Hades quick combat, and, of course, Isaac-like overpowering. Nearly every moment is ripped straight from the most dopamine saturated seconds of the games which have influenced it: from unlocking new weapons to watching the fantastic enemy animations stretch to opening secret rooms and finding run clinching heals, rarely can a second go by that doesn’t fully captivate the player in a way that overdrives the referenced feeling derived from the best of the genre. So much as a game can be a highlight reel (which hopefully is how I’ll feel come Last Call BBS), HaND plays the hits and plays them loud.
Being that, it coheres into well seasoned mush, going down so smooth that all the texture it borrows from better games feels like grit instead of substance. It’s hard to say if roguelikes are at a point in their period of preeminence that they have any more to comment on the genres which surround them, but so much now are the offerings of devs games which merely have things to say about other roguelikes; the nature of incest and commentary may be intertwined in the genre, I can’t say in this review, but the line is blurring regardless of whether or not it’s a technical architectural boundary or a policed DMZ. I think that there is an actual issue with upholding a canon of games to which all newcomers must compare, as if games must add being made a decade earlier to the things they have to be - beautiful, fun, touching, exciting, endlessly replayable, cheap - but that roguelikes were initially gesturing to the plasticity of systems boundaries in genres which had highly bound possibility spaces was something which those early roguelikes took as given, and which current roguelikes seem to take as poisoned well water.
So completely relieving was the cool air of Spelunky HD back in 2012, or Flash Isaac in 2011, to the tedium of level design which had become a sickening curative to actual mechanics mastery, a blight which saw platformers reduce themselves to being a game composed of knowing which turns to decelerate on, that it had to become an obvious manifesto for how designers could treat gamified spaces (and indeed, Spelunky the book is that manifesto). That all the games which we consider the GOATs of roguery were in some way reinterpreting the syntactical elements of the systems codified in older games is not merely a coincidence of their greatness but a necessary fact to those achievements.
HaND treats the slippery sandstone of roguelike structure as the structure upon which its entire house is built: if Gungeon or FTL are something like Minka built atop a marble foundation, then new roguelikes seem to be constructing Camelots on quicksand. Every enemy in HaND seems to be designed with the quantum reality of necessitating its existence wherever it shouldst be placed by the hand of RNJesus, such that they have no ingratiation to the environment nor to those enemies around them; they must be ready to plant their feet, but never roots, wherever they are so that they may be dispatched and engaged by the wide variety of weapons in the wide variety of rooms open to the player. It’s all jagged edge with no grip. Similarly, the RPG skill trees are all progression with no meaningful choice: one does not so much build a Reaper with an attuned eye to damage types or range preference or synergistic possibility, but instead is sent up a series of exponentially heightened stairways of damage output, defying the base play with continuous upscaling but without actual change in any way to how interaction works. It’s all Diablo numbers but without any representation of those numbers externally. Just the same is the architectural aesthetic; ever-shifting, always surprising, endlessly roiling out - never assuming a nature which is transgressed, inhabited, or repellant. Where we see Hades or Darkest Dungeon play through highly gamified yet enormously revealing spaces, we see HaND reduce itself to 90 degree run offs, damage zones, and absentee character situation.
The comparison to the betters is not to say that HaND does all these things worse than the better games in its genre, because in the second to second play, it holds up just as well in the hands to any of the best in the genre. It is to show that while it draws from the “shifting walls” of roguelikes for purpose in placing assets and mechanics into its works, to the obvious detriment of those elements substance, the previous games of import pulled those elements of meaning and freed them from the constraints of single use potentiality. FTL freed node based travel and weapons trading from min-maxing, allowing the danger of run ruining and steamrolling mechanics to play freely outside of scum-saving and narrative destruction. Hades freed hack and slashing deadly combat and character ingratiation from the dissonance of death and retry seen in straightforward narrative. Spelunky freed inert single use mechanics and level design from bloat in platformers pushed out in their yearly series to run free, anarchically, into total interaction between themselves and the player. HaND sees each of these elements, unrestrained from their inhibitions of origin, and unthinkingly grabs them and smashes them all together into its own highly calcified bounding box: they are all still wonderful in isolation, but in their original sources, they were never isolated.
Have a Nice Death is a fine game if you want to play it as you might a Super Mario 2 or 1001 Spikes. It will fill your few hours needed and wash down whatever leftover twitch reflexes keep rising to the back of your throat when playing untuned games less tightly controlled. But, it won’t enter any canons, change generally in evaluation, or be memorable next year or the year after that. And given that it was seemingly designed to do those three things moreso than it was designed to be a good game which stands on its own, it really can’t be called much more than a tepid failure.
2018
Slowly coming back to new games after taking a break for a few months.
What can I say? It's repetitious, trite, and thematically impoverished. But what else could one expect from a AAA game adapted from a billion dollar property designed, in the 21st century, to be a milquetoast 'everything to everyone' consumable? Not everything can be Across The Spider-verse.
What can I say? It's repetitious, trite, and thematically impoverished. But what else could one expect from a AAA game adapted from a billion dollar property designed, in the 21st century, to be a milquetoast 'everything to everyone' consumable? Not everything can be Across The Spider-verse.
2023
This review contains spoilers
Even though this review is already marked as containing spoilers, I want to make as clear as can be made clear that if you are at all interested in horror games, the ways mechanics intervene on mood and theme (particularly as direct input verbs, not context sensitive perversions of character ability), the afflictions of anxiety and isolation on our hyper-current age, or in how adventure game puzzle design could potentially progress in directions that are contiguous with old Lucas games but are not coded in their makeup as jokes, then play Homebody before reading any further. It is my GOTY so far, and more than any game I’ve played this year, it benefits from a complete naivete of any of the component parts making up the game. I was amazed at how touching and nuanced the game managed to be at progressive stages, angling from many different vantage points a direct line into the heart of its arguments, especially considering that it’s the second game from the Game Grumps; the quality of this game has changed my position on wanting to play any games from this studio to ‘because they made it’ from ‘despite that they made it’ in 6 hours of profoundly meaningful art. Please play Homebody.
Okay, where to begin? Because of how the game presents itself, being another in what may be the renaissance of PSX nostalgia or the pit of indie stagnation depending on your viewpoint (I love this graphical starting point for the record - I think the high fidelity rendering of ‘life-like’ models being pumped out right now marks the lowest valley of aesthetic norms or movement in the medium since the pre-NES era), the most immediate draw, or repellant, within the game is likely the visual style: depending on how invested you are in the revitalisation of low-poly environments and character models, the gorgeousness of Homebody’s aesthetic could be enough to compel you to play it on its own. While last year’s PSX horror darling, Signalis, hewed more closely to the grainy call sign of Silent Hill, drawing similarly on that game series’ greater penchant for expanding the scope of the horror in both a maximalist approach for game world density and a obscuration of the shape of the horror environment, rendering many of its threats in blur, shadow, and fog to foment an unknowability that buds into a madness of incomplete understanding, Homebody is much more aggressively skewed towards the early RE side of things: a more compact arena that demands returning endlessly to the same corridors of horror that you know to contain that which can very easily kill you, which will do so with complete actualisation, and which offers no possible escape to the safety of the unknown. Like in RE1, you are confined in a mansion that endlessly expands but never lets up its envelopment; the further you are able to probe away from the centre of your peril, the more you realise how isolated you are. This is the first place where the PSX style of design helps in lending thematic poignancy - the more generalised style of rendering, wherein something like a cardboard box, due to the limitations of possible complexity in creating the model, represents a platonic ideal, or something nearer to that ideal, than something which, by dint of characteristics like dents, marker, shipping labels, etc., has a greater degree of specific, and thus empathic, but not embodied, adornment to the scenario at play. By placing the player within a simulation of possible expression towards the average, when that average is skewed, the player has had the opportunity to invest themselves personally on, and appositionally to, the behalf of their being ingratiated to the player character. Similarly, the PSX low poly rendering lends a degree of unknowability in congress with the investment it engenders; the load which that can be anything to bear comfort can similarly be invested with discord and surreality by a simpler rearrangement of the surrounding contexts, becoming something which was the player’s tether to a reality which housed them and fostered them to a noose which repels and devours them. The excitement/volatility of simplistic and more iterable models allow for an ebb and flow of the gestalt presence that the game world entire takes on in Homebody: wherein a highly realised, in detail and description, world like that in RE4R can there be present anchors which are immediately tied to the place as it is and will be for the runtime of the game, it cannot as easily shift any in-game representation in a mirrored or perpendicular meaning. In Homebody, the fixtures of lights, the position of vases, the contents of bowls can all be manipulated and perverted along a broader axis of tonal affliction because of the broadness and generic qualities of their representation, which when manipulated by the volatile and horrific nature of the game as a surreal journey, are in turn invested with a personal veracity, not a pictorial trust.
And so then, what are these themes that are causing waves of return and away transgressions embedded in mundane household objects? There are a lot, surprisingly not in a sequence that might be expected if you were to map out the emotional intensity that each presents when typically seen in other media or in games, if these themes are ever represented in games at all: 21st Century entropy in adult friendships, existential guilt, the body as a unit of time outside our control, millennial’s arrested development as economic prospect, jealousy as a polished instrument, and more. Each are treated in their turn not as a series of escalating difficulties which our PC, Emily, is saddled with as her tribulations mount to greater show later triumphs, but are blows which one nurses in the state of belief that the pain we hold belongs in the body; each is not a product of actions or an unfairness dealt, but a return to the mean. For example: as Emily tours through the house time after time, the dialogue her friends have for her graduate from the slyly accusatory with a metre of forgiveness to varieties of carceral and caustic, glinting in accord with the the increasing violence that has occurred physically across the house, but also across the memories we are shown in flashback and reinhabitation. In Majora’s Mask, the perversion of the town as doom eternally comes is an excellent suffusion of mood to the game, but in Homebody, not only is the mood deepened with these changing knowns, but also the texture with which our understanding of Emily as a character inhabited by us, who, without spoiling anything, is strung along in many more ways than simply by a joy-con.
If you’ve read this far without playing the game, you probably don’t intend to or feel the need to dodge the spoilers, but I’ll give one more warning, because what I’m about to go into is the intercession of mechanical theme that really put my heart in my throat. If I’d known it was coming, I would have been sorely robbed of a wonderful experience.
Dialogue, and to a lesser extent, in-game prose, are often the bulk, or entire, carriages that run the weight and density of thematic fulfilment in games which attempt some kind of excursion of meaning beyond mechanical exercise (this is true to such a degree that critics will often assign about as much time discussing theme in reviews as is proportionate to the talkiness of games: Into the Breach gets reviews which are 90% mechanical critique, Torment gets reviews which are 90% thematic critique). While many games create useful metaphors out of play, such as this year’s Sludge Life 2 or the real kings of mainstream metaphorical mechanics, Silent Hills 1-3, many which go for a degree of weight in their “point” have either realised or conditioned to accept that the transliteration of theme to mechanics will merely be disentangled and translated back upon critical play; it is often the assumption that architecture, play, and design will bear the brunt of tone, whereas writing and narrative design will carry the core thrusts of theme. Homebody is no real renegade from this formula. Its mechanics are pretty thoroughly Resident Evil meets LucasArts, and when not playing revamped Towers of Hanoi, Emily is typically in conversation. They are not ‘usually’ carriers for potent discussions of the themes laid out above (although they are marvellous red herrings for them). But, the twist of this dialogue is not that it merely says things on the themes above, but it does things with them as well. When chosen dialogue in conversations is switched out for varying degrees of nonchalance, deflection, or obscuration, Homebody is commenting doubly on Emily as a character, as well as allowing Emily both a perverse form of quantum agency: she is ‘choosing’ her words and receiving characterisation from the player, rebutting that control by being an enigma outside of the player who will not merely say what we choose, and disallowed of that choice by the antagonism of the game. She, when externalising nothing through these brush offs, is showing with telling, making as clear in the game as she can her interpretation of the events and how they emotionally affect her, but is suffering from the most common anxiety I know amongst people my age: she can’t say what she means, literally. Not only does this quasi realisation of Emily become a complex and bubbling uncertainty, but it applies exponentially outward to the house in all its tabula rasa PSX glory: the plainness of texts refuted and contorted does a similar trick of unreality that Control does with its theming toward objects of power in how they lodestone iconography with cultural subconsciousness. Emily is not allowed to say what she needs to, instead being a platonic “Emily” - what if a fruit bowl could not be what it needs to be, instead eternally presenting as the platonic “fruit bowl”. This is the major horror in Homebody. This is how the culmination of its influences congregate on the work as a total completeness. The unassuming nature of the adventure game style puzzles take this quality on; the music as a contextual undercurrent takes this quality on; the undressing of the house as set and its characters as housesitters takes this quality on: it is a game that languishes in the un of everything which is normally itself - a being in self negation that can only relay meaning through what it is, yet seemingly is not.
My only quibbles with the game are those likely born from budgetary issues: the AI of the homunculus is quite simplistic and easily broken, which turns the death it leers at you from a thing which terrors to one which moves the game forward (as dying is actually a wonderful thing for showing the next artful and morose interlude in the narrative). It will often stupidly loiter when not given a clear and immediate objective, turning the game occasionally into a queue of getting somewhere you already are. Similarly, depending on how often you have died throughout the game, the interludes can begin to repeat at the last mark in the game. This is disappointing because it's the full thematic peak as well as the peak of tension; the repetition of elements shows a bit more gaminess than is desired when it feels like everything else is organically crashing down on you. For a real minor nitpick, whenever you transition screens, your forward direction resets to a new alignment with the surrounding and you’ll often turn right back down into the corridor or room you’ve left from. It’s not awful, but a very minor annoyance that is constant.
Good game!
Okay, where to begin? Because of how the game presents itself, being another in what may be the renaissance of PSX nostalgia or the pit of indie stagnation depending on your viewpoint (I love this graphical starting point for the record - I think the high fidelity rendering of ‘life-like’ models being pumped out right now marks the lowest valley of aesthetic norms or movement in the medium since the pre-NES era), the most immediate draw, or repellant, within the game is likely the visual style: depending on how invested you are in the revitalisation of low-poly environments and character models, the gorgeousness of Homebody’s aesthetic could be enough to compel you to play it on its own. While last year’s PSX horror darling, Signalis, hewed more closely to the grainy call sign of Silent Hill, drawing similarly on that game series’ greater penchant for expanding the scope of the horror in both a maximalist approach for game world density and a obscuration of the shape of the horror environment, rendering many of its threats in blur, shadow, and fog to foment an unknowability that buds into a madness of incomplete understanding, Homebody is much more aggressively skewed towards the early RE side of things: a more compact arena that demands returning endlessly to the same corridors of horror that you know to contain that which can very easily kill you, which will do so with complete actualisation, and which offers no possible escape to the safety of the unknown. Like in RE1, you are confined in a mansion that endlessly expands but never lets up its envelopment; the further you are able to probe away from the centre of your peril, the more you realise how isolated you are. This is the first place where the PSX style of design helps in lending thematic poignancy - the more generalised style of rendering, wherein something like a cardboard box, due to the limitations of possible complexity in creating the model, represents a platonic ideal, or something nearer to that ideal, than something which, by dint of characteristics like dents, marker, shipping labels, etc., has a greater degree of specific, and thus empathic, but not embodied, adornment to the scenario at play. By placing the player within a simulation of possible expression towards the average, when that average is skewed, the player has had the opportunity to invest themselves personally on, and appositionally to, the behalf of their being ingratiated to the player character. Similarly, the PSX low poly rendering lends a degree of unknowability in congress with the investment it engenders; the load which that can be anything to bear comfort can similarly be invested with discord and surreality by a simpler rearrangement of the surrounding contexts, becoming something which was the player’s tether to a reality which housed them and fostered them to a noose which repels and devours them. The excitement/volatility of simplistic and more iterable models allow for an ebb and flow of the gestalt presence that the game world entire takes on in Homebody: wherein a highly realised, in detail and description, world like that in RE4R can there be present anchors which are immediately tied to the place as it is and will be for the runtime of the game, it cannot as easily shift any in-game representation in a mirrored or perpendicular meaning. In Homebody, the fixtures of lights, the position of vases, the contents of bowls can all be manipulated and perverted along a broader axis of tonal affliction because of the broadness and generic qualities of their representation, which when manipulated by the volatile and horrific nature of the game as a surreal journey, are in turn invested with a personal veracity, not a pictorial trust.
And so then, what are these themes that are causing waves of return and away transgressions embedded in mundane household objects? There are a lot, surprisingly not in a sequence that might be expected if you were to map out the emotional intensity that each presents when typically seen in other media or in games, if these themes are ever represented in games at all: 21st Century entropy in adult friendships, existential guilt, the body as a unit of time outside our control, millennial’s arrested development as economic prospect, jealousy as a polished instrument, and more. Each are treated in their turn not as a series of escalating difficulties which our PC, Emily, is saddled with as her tribulations mount to greater show later triumphs, but are blows which one nurses in the state of belief that the pain we hold belongs in the body; each is not a product of actions or an unfairness dealt, but a return to the mean. For example: as Emily tours through the house time after time, the dialogue her friends have for her graduate from the slyly accusatory with a metre of forgiveness to varieties of carceral and caustic, glinting in accord with the the increasing violence that has occurred physically across the house, but also across the memories we are shown in flashback and reinhabitation. In Majora’s Mask, the perversion of the town as doom eternally comes is an excellent suffusion of mood to the game, but in Homebody, not only is the mood deepened with these changing knowns, but also the texture with which our understanding of Emily as a character inhabited by us, who, without spoiling anything, is strung along in many more ways than simply by a joy-con.
If you’ve read this far without playing the game, you probably don’t intend to or feel the need to dodge the spoilers, but I’ll give one more warning, because what I’m about to go into is the intercession of mechanical theme that really put my heart in my throat. If I’d known it was coming, I would have been sorely robbed of a wonderful experience.
Dialogue, and to a lesser extent, in-game prose, are often the bulk, or entire, carriages that run the weight and density of thematic fulfilment in games which attempt some kind of excursion of meaning beyond mechanical exercise (this is true to such a degree that critics will often assign about as much time discussing theme in reviews as is proportionate to the talkiness of games: Into the Breach gets reviews which are 90% mechanical critique, Torment gets reviews which are 90% thematic critique). While many games create useful metaphors out of play, such as this year’s Sludge Life 2 or the real kings of mainstream metaphorical mechanics, Silent Hills 1-3, many which go for a degree of weight in their “point” have either realised or conditioned to accept that the transliteration of theme to mechanics will merely be disentangled and translated back upon critical play; it is often the assumption that architecture, play, and design will bear the brunt of tone, whereas writing and narrative design will carry the core thrusts of theme. Homebody is no real renegade from this formula. Its mechanics are pretty thoroughly Resident Evil meets LucasArts, and when not playing revamped Towers of Hanoi, Emily is typically in conversation. They are not ‘usually’ carriers for potent discussions of the themes laid out above (although they are marvellous red herrings for them). But, the twist of this dialogue is not that it merely says things on the themes above, but it does things with them as well. When chosen dialogue in conversations is switched out for varying degrees of nonchalance, deflection, or obscuration, Homebody is commenting doubly on Emily as a character, as well as allowing Emily both a perverse form of quantum agency: she is ‘choosing’ her words and receiving characterisation from the player, rebutting that control by being an enigma outside of the player who will not merely say what we choose, and disallowed of that choice by the antagonism of the game. She, when externalising nothing through these brush offs, is showing with telling, making as clear in the game as she can her interpretation of the events and how they emotionally affect her, but is suffering from the most common anxiety I know amongst people my age: she can’t say what she means, literally. Not only does this quasi realisation of Emily become a complex and bubbling uncertainty, but it applies exponentially outward to the house in all its tabula rasa PSX glory: the plainness of texts refuted and contorted does a similar trick of unreality that Control does with its theming toward objects of power in how they lodestone iconography with cultural subconsciousness. Emily is not allowed to say what she needs to, instead being a platonic “Emily” - what if a fruit bowl could not be what it needs to be, instead eternally presenting as the platonic “fruit bowl”. This is the major horror in Homebody. This is how the culmination of its influences congregate on the work as a total completeness. The unassuming nature of the adventure game style puzzles take this quality on; the music as a contextual undercurrent takes this quality on; the undressing of the house as set and its characters as housesitters takes this quality on: it is a game that languishes in the un of everything which is normally itself - a being in self negation that can only relay meaning through what it is, yet seemingly is not.
My only quibbles with the game are those likely born from budgetary issues: the AI of the homunculus is quite simplistic and easily broken, which turns the death it leers at you from a thing which terrors to one which moves the game forward (as dying is actually a wonderful thing for showing the next artful and morose interlude in the narrative). It will often stupidly loiter when not given a clear and immediate objective, turning the game occasionally into a queue of getting somewhere you already are. Similarly, depending on how often you have died throughout the game, the interludes can begin to repeat at the last mark in the game. This is disappointing because it's the full thematic peak as well as the peak of tension; the repetition of elements shows a bit more gaminess than is desired when it feels like everything else is organically crashing down on you. For a real minor nitpick, whenever you transition screens, your forward direction resets to a new alignment with the surrounding and you’ll often turn right back down into the corridor or room you’ve left from. It’s not awful, but a very minor annoyance that is constant.
Good game!
2016
Anatomy is one of those cultural fetish objects that is written about by critics as a sort of Voight-Kampff test or Rubicon to cross. It falls within a style of art that appeals to interpretation and self expression through criticism: as in poetry we have analyses of Dickinson’s poorly scrawled letters or Sapho’s endlessly retranslated fragments; as in music we have this overturning and mirroring newly appearing in the music of Julius Eastman right now; as in film there are endless essays on the short and long works of Jonas Mekas or on the varying iterations of parlour tricks in Marienbad. In games, this type of fetish criticism tends to be more rare - cyclically there are discussions on IPs reverentially (the Dark Souls of whatever or the timeline of Zelda) but rarely does there crop up a game that pours out writing equally revealing of the game and the player/writer. Of course, nearly anybody who has chosen to do some writing on games has gone at too much length over a specific game niche to their own interests, but less often is there a game with an audience seemingly populated only by those who wish to espouse at length both the merits of the software and the experiences of play surrounding that .exe.
I won’t give into that impulse here, in any way moreso than is typical of my longwinded frothing, but I will try to at least see from where the bridge has been constructed in Anatomy and to where it ports traffic in its players. Something beyond its place and time (beyond the narcissistic indie prestige that comes with its makeup and distribution) resonates at a unique frequency for people, and just as much as it is worth investigating the game’s explicit texts and its audience, it is worth investigating Anatomy’s cultural presence presence. Just as in Dickinson, Eastman, and Mekas, the tension between alienation and opacity is not secluded in the face value of Anatomy: there is a read that dignifies the idea of the house as something which is present and obscured, enshrining the psychological force demanding the critical/diaristic writing that populates Anatomy’s cultural profile. That divide and union typifies this style of intensely isolated and cozied art: Eastman’s hammering minimalism unseats yet forcefully teaches his melodies violently; Dickinson’s ironclad form is belied by contrasting and incomplete metaphors built of the familiar; Mekas’ capture of comforting everyday life is reduced to truncated memory stylised outside the initial experience of it and further made partial in each recall; Anatomy sections its rooms with the inset knowledge of North American floorplan familiarity, and then betrays the player with endless trespassing transgressions across boundary. All of these are contrasting and codependent ideas which must be bridged by an emotional reaction to the art - founding an expanse which can only be commuted across by firmly planting descriptions of the experience which set off the audience member, which then demand a thorough extolling of that journey for the coordinated expectation of the journey’s destination to complete the thematic resonance. In Anatomy, the idea of the home is the horror but it is also the stakes. The player must identify with a primordial, and subconscious, ordination of sleep, sustenance, and security while equivocating to antagonistic ideals which are invading the subconscious via text denying any particularity towards a universal feeling of those fulfilled urges. I think this is why Anatomy impresses itself so much on its players: it strongly makes a case for its themes in as outspoken a manner as it can and directly counters them to the unspoken understanding most players have in costumed iconography making up the world. It’s this wonderful push and pull of where the site of resonance sits - it moves from the player inhabiting the home to the home consuming the player.
Outside of the text itself, Anatomy is also one of those prestige art objects which, as I said above, can be fetishised for its value of incompleteness. This is often the outside article which denotes the opposing ideals of insider and outsider art, but more importantly, differentiates insider and outsider audiences. The everything for everyone style of creation is the dominant form in all popular mediums - blockbusters like Avatar or Star Wars, thrillers from Stephen King or adventures from Brandon Sanderson, games like Assassin’s Creed or Halo: these are experiences which demand completion of their themes not from the place in the interfacer where those themes mine their iconographic substance, but from the collective consciousness informed by a heavily authored culture. Whether that is manichean ethics, broad antediluvian eco-populism, by numbers approaches of rudimentary logics initialising fictional systems and those fictions operating within them, or even mundanity of hyper familiar context sensitivities across an engine - all of these popular media require not an excitement of new and strange, often painful, mortal fuels within any individual’s capacity to care for what is being communicated, but instead scrap scaffolded by audience populism. Not that there is anything wrong with that on its face, especially when utilised for wrestling popular narratives away from dominant and harmful cultural forces (such as with Star Wars’ parodying 20th century American imperialism), but it typically leads to less acute extolling across any singular piece’s audience, such as is seen in Anatomy and its cultural cohorts. So why does Anatomy cause pens to burst from the palms of its players? Because suburban houses are scarier than the tombs in Tomb Raider, obviously.
I won’t give into that impulse here, in any way moreso than is typical of my longwinded frothing, but I will try to at least see from where the bridge has been constructed in Anatomy and to where it ports traffic in its players. Something beyond its place and time (beyond the narcissistic indie prestige that comes with its makeup and distribution) resonates at a unique frequency for people, and just as much as it is worth investigating the game’s explicit texts and its audience, it is worth investigating Anatomy’s cultural presence presence. Just as in Dickinson, Eastman, and Mekas, the tension between alienation and opacity is not secluded in the face value of Anatomy: there is a read that dignifies the idea of the house as something which is present and obscured, enshrining the psychological force demanding the critical/diaristic writing that populates Anatomy’s cultural profile. That divide and union typifies this style of intensely isolated and cozied art: Eastman’s hammering minimalism unseats yet forcefully teaches his melodies violently; Dickinson’s ironclad form is belied by contrasting and incomplete metaphors built of the familiar; Mekas’ capture of comforting everyday life is reduced to truncated memory stylised outside the initial experience of it and further made partial in each recall; Anatomy sections its rooms with the inset knowledge of North American floorplan familiarity, and then betrays the player with endless trespassing transgressions across boundary. All of these are contrasting and codependent ideas which must be bridged by an emotional reaction to the art - founding an expanse which can only be commuted across by firmly planting descriptions of the experience which set off the audience member, which then demand a thorough extolling of that journey for the coordinated expectation of the journey’s destination to complete the thematic resonance. In Anatomy, the idea of the home is the horror but it is also the stakes. The player must identify with a primordial, and subconscious, ordination of sleep, sustenance, and security while equivocating to antagonistic ideals which are invading the subconscious via text denying any particularity towards a universal feeling of those fulfilled urges. I think this is why Anatomy impresses itself so much on its players: it strongly makes a case for its themes in as outspoken a manner as it can and directly counters them to the unspoken understanding most players have in costumed iconography making up the world. It’s this wonderful push and pull of where the site of resonance sits - it moves from the player inhabiting the home to the home consuming the player.
Outside of the text itself, Anatomy is also one of those prestige art objects which, as I said above, can be fetishised for its value of incompleteness. This is often the outside article which denotes the opposing ideals of insider and outsider art, but more importantly, differentiates insider and outsider audiences. The everything for everyone style of creation is the dominant form in all popular mediums - blockbusters like Avatar or Star Wars, thrillers from Stephen King or adventures from Brandon Sanderson, games like Assassin’s Creed or Halo: these are experiences which demand completion of their themes not from the place in the interfacer where those themes mine their iconographic substance, but from the collective consciousness informed by a heavily authored culture. Whether that is manichean ethics, broad antediluvian eco-populism, by numbers approaches of rudimentary logics initialising fictional systems and those fictions operating within them, or even mundanity of hyper familiar context sensitivities across an engine - all of these popular media require not an excitement of new and strange, often painful, mortal fuels within any individual’s capacity to care for what is being communicated, but instead scrap scaffolded by audience populism. Not that there is anything wrong with that on its face, especially when utilised for wrestling popular narratives away from dominant and harmful cultural forces (such as with Star Wars’ parodying 20th century American imperialism), but it typically leads to less acute extolling across any singular piece’s audience, such as is seen in Anatomy and its cultural cohorts. So why does Anatomy cause pens to burst from the palms of its players? Because suburban houses are scarier than the tombs in Tomb Raider, obviously.