I think I’m done with expecting things from summations, or rather, from explications of quality derived from experientialist assessment, in video games criticism. Time and time again, I hear someone or some article wax languidly on the pertaining of an ur-secret amalgamation to any game’s individual alchemy that renders a feeling of unique golden sublimity within software; washes of copper green roof tiling flaked away on the controller, colonnades, or keyboard - an unstiffening from historical input that has become a coral encrusted cloister of routine, religiously cycling through 1-1s or Dust 2s in place of rapture - that reveal the lithe and heavenly joisted, divinely scaffolded, intelligently designed liquid azure which creates the game of life under the crackling veins of half real, half gone painted cages. I hear this proselytising, from street corners and from the corners of the internet, and I rush to play Control because of The Ashtray Maze, or Titanfall 2 because of Effect and Cause, or Mankind Divided because of Prague. I sit in a pew, plug in for 6 hours to wait for that divine spark to reach me, and then once I pass through the sizzling whizz and shimmer of the Roman Candle’s burst, I am left like Eve and Adam and Michaelangelo: somehow apart, despite appearances, from that touch that seemed prevalent to others and made for us all. Maybe it’s beautiful, or maybe poorly restored, but it’s nevertheless the heavenly host hosted online.

That’s AAA gaming’s trick: made for everybody, delivered to every screen, and connected to the lower level of consciousness while being treated as nutrition came naturally intuited when really it is just ubiquitously conditioned. Nothing is challenging in a way that isn’t minute finger pushups, nor satisfying in a way that isn’t a set of exercises coming to their final repetition and mirror shewn form perfection: the rote exercise of wrapping templated interaction in the sheen of revolutionary systems design or narrative design is as shallow as wearing newly coloured shorts to assume a different degree of squat. And look, that all sounds very negative, but it’s not like this isn’t something which wasn’t built to be as it is: all mass market art has aimed for the middle, and much of the most commonly recognised masterpieces of art are these middle brow, carb and salt heavy, mass product ventures. These are movies like It’s A Wonderful Life or The Godfather, ballets like The Nutcracker or Sleeping Beauty, musicals like West Side Story and Les Mis, or games like RE4 and The Witcher 3: all are meant to hit low, hit hard, and connect broadly to get through on second base. Sometimes they are surprise home runs or go straight to the pitcher, but they are designed to get on base, that’s all.

The fact that everyone seemingly knows this, that we are being catered to in a way that explicitly shows that publishers (perhaps more so than devs, but probably not always) want to barely hold aloft the vessel of gaming above the watermark, is what brings me to finally recusing myself of any sort of stocking up expectation from the experiential praise AAA games get on release and in summation come December. Journalists and essayists who monthly extoll virtues and vices, cardinal sins and heavenly virtues, about the ur-tentpole delivering on expectations of not even property but on fulfilment of artistic attenuation, on the promise that the foundational inlay of profit generating internal ecology to the game is finally cohabitant, even dominated by, the accessorised partitioning (post the fact) of accessible humanity within the work do so with the knowledge of the vapid state of AAA games; the lack of identity, depth, or of empathy proffered overtly in these games weekly is met with such drastic extensions of one’s own powers of humanity that studios like Blizzard or Bethesda feel confident in offering flavourless mulch with the expectation that all necessary characterisation of their simulation will be filled in by the player. This has occurred for nearly every AAA game, from one source or another, since the turn towards prestige in the late aughts - all assumptions of character, pathos, or wit are now somehow granted to anything with enough fidelity to create a world which may hold its players seat of human courage, but can only, at best, render its own simulacra of such stillborn.

I’m not saying that any significant majority of the critical writing done on games from the AAA sphere of the medium is bad or dishonest, particularly not that writing which is able to articulate the sphere itself and why these highly sucralose rich products both work and appeal to wide demographics (I think William Hughes from the A.V. Club walks this line frequently with great aplomb), but I do think there is something regrettable about taking a primarily kinaesthetic experience like those listed above and transmuting both pathos and one’s seal of quality because the player was able to map on emotional strife and a conquering of such onto that experiential hurdle, all without the extension in return of the mechanics in the game to a actual thematic purpose, a la Spec Ops. Games should be able to render a language and introspection of quality which engages forcefully with the mechanical and interactive qualities inherent to it, not through sidelong implants of emotional turpitude perpendicularly inseminated, but head on and with appropriate function. Because the games listed above are not what we can, comparatively, call good due to their storytelling nor for their pathos, but most executively for their play, they are failing, in their minor ways, because they offer canvases for spreads of emotion and theme as such but ask the player to BYOB instead of providing nourishment on its own wonderful layout. As works in games ‘mature’, comparisons inflected within by AAA games own referential quality to media articles that are meant to inspire maturity and gravitas in comparison (looking at you MGS V with all that Moby Dick shit), the comparative nature of criticism must develop so as to draw out the cumulative quality, not reflect our own natures of complexity onto the games we play.

FINALLY, that brings me to Returnal. Embarrassingly, I’ve just put a good deal of personal opinion into what is supposed to be my overview of a game, mostly in reaction to a select few critics that I read both in anticipation for the game and in afterward help for the locution of my feelings Returnal elicited, but if this seems unsatisfying as appendix to read, let that contribute to my point. Returnal loops back into my point above as this: the game’s poorly mechanised roguelike structure, with the rote and underbaked narrative pinning its death and restart shuttle running, seems to surround a legitimately compelling, but obviously goofy and gamified play (which is to say gamified with hitboxes and gun mods and what else goes into the play, not the metaphorical layer of hell Selene puts over herself to justify the play. I hope it doesn’t need to be said, but when justifying your player character’s constructs of play within a narrative, herein the eternal penitence Selene’s delusions and guilt force on her through the play metaphor, the play metaphor needs to be justified yet again to the player; we engage in the play, not the delusion, so a further layer above needs to be accessible to us and not Selene.), but fails to, except for under highly specific circumstances, draw any useful or poignant meaning from the interactions between action and strictly narrative text.

The roguelike structure itself is probably the most significant issue in creating a playspace which goes through the gestation of a pregnant theme, despite it also being the aspect of Returnal’s design to note on how all the meta systems - gun stats, artefacts, consumables, parasites, etc. - to those most baked into the looping, which is to say the physics of Selene and her basic abilities to point, shoot, run, and jump; without the roguelike structure, the nature of almost everything that serves to progress play becomes utterly useless cruft, as well as functionless as iterating material to reconfigure and force usage. The roguelike structure is a monkey’s paw wish for game devs, one which allows for as broad as can be desired a system space: if a dev wants to add in 80 different interacting possible arms of their game, they can be assured that more, if not all, of those arms will be interacted with more consistently in a roguelike than in a strictly linear or open world game, simply because sometimes that mechanic will be all the player has on a run. The enormous, hugely hindering, flaw to this is that the mechanic, regardless of its name, function, art, or anything else above the game’s spreadsheet, is reduced to its function alone. When death is the truest end state of a mechanics use case, and as death is the functioning, one could argue insoluble, end state of videogame pathos, then all that is baked into giving the mechanics centred in a roguelike is lost. The ur-roguelike, Isaac, is so inculcated with this that oftentimes common parlance in its community denotes an item name in the lingua franca with its description, not its actual item label. Returnal seeks to bake around this nut with the narrative including a death inclusive meaning, as well as later on, the personal hell narrative. But this then doubles down on the foibles of roguelike structure. Not only is the genre so cemented with its expectations now, but if the player never or infrequently dies, as was my experience, then not only is the value of the typified roguelike mechanical arm stripped of its narrative weight due to the lack of death repetition (something which doesn’t happen so much with a game like Isaac, given that that game draws its narrative weight and iconography from emotions and recognition excited external to play), but also its mechanical weight as well. I never got to experiment with the roguelike possibilities, nor feel the true hell of unstable and chaotic ground, because I died to Phrike once, then steam rolled through the game with only two more deaths total, rendering both sources to possibly draw meaning from inert and barren.

There is also the general issue with the design of the consistent mechanics as well, not just in their nebulously justifiable narrative utility as Selene’s specific hell that is traumatically brought into being, but more specifically herein with how they mesh in the second to second play. There’s no getting past the readability of the levels, which inexplicably were seemingly designed to match the appearances of enemies in such a way as to give them complete camouflage in whatever environment they spawn in (enemies with tendrils are surrounded by anemone like plants, square and concrete enemies are ensconced in a brutalist architecture, etc.). This is an issue which feels like it shouldn’t have gotten past testing both for failing its lack of functioning for immediate play but also for the aggressiveness with which so many lit and moving textures tank performance, but also feels like it should have failed at the start of the project for how generally plain and common the designs are. Nothing really feels, in Returnal, like a unique and specific design, which if it were a pure narrative-free experience wouldn’t be anywhere near the issue it is, but for a highly localised and psychologically terrifying experience, one would hope that the tribulations faced would themselves reveal more about Selene as a character (and yes, they do later on, but in as equally a basic and unthought out way as the generic designs of the earlier, more rote sci-fi, way). The arena rooms themselves are frankly underbaked as well, not just in the too lacking of variety inset within the rotation of them to each zone - maybe 10-15 total per environment - but in how little they seem to complicate and excite possibilities of the mechanical base that is available to an everyday version of Selene in the game. Selene is, in fact, a very fun character to move around and shoot with. Actually, a brief slew of praise for Returnal, because I had a lot of fun playing through it, despite all that I’ve said above

- The amount of interesting cost/benefit choices offered up is incredible: on a minute to minute basis, the player is getting consistent possibilities for pain and pleasure that could knock the run into next gear (although if we’re being honest, unless you’re upping protection or damage, it isn’t usually worth any downside) or knock Selene on her ass. The pain/pleasure dichotomy is so powerful that it feels more of a promise on the Cenobites in Hellraiser than any of those movies ever did.

- Jane Elizabeth Perry’s VO for Selene, almost totally done in isolation of any other characters to draw reaction from, impresses more than any other AAA game’s performances from the last few years. It is a treat, and despite the bungling of the system narrative in my playthrough, carries weight across the entire play as something with genuine pathos.

- As above stated, the movement and shooting never feels anything less than incredible. So much weight is included and accounted for in every action - the shotgun nearly rips its barrel apart with every blast, the pylons screech with searing wounds, and Selene lands so coolly with earth shattering descents that I felt my knees give out with every impact. Kinaesthetic masterclass.

Anyways, all this praise is situated in rooms that don’t really need you to engage with any of the excellent bits, because tight concentric circle strafes will get the job done every time.

To bring this back to the beginning, I am nothing if not disappointed by Returnal. It’s not a bad game but it was talked about badly; the praise for its themes are dependent on highly specific play experiences, as well as on bringing an enormous amount of self implication to any given read that comes across as highly thought of the game. The trials of its design were underlaid in the frenzy that came in discussing the polish a AAA game brought to the already highly tuned roguelike formula, a formula which more suits the indie sphere which honed it to shining. This unfortunate discussion cycle damned my experience with the game, which I suppose was burdened in the concert I played it with my own naivete in expecting depth from a game released for $80. Really, you get what you pay for.

It would be interesting to uncover a bit of research into which of the almost endless entry points players took when arriving at the Resident Evil series; having shambled along, slithered across, and dug through the subterranean of the highly varying video game landscapes that transpired between our modern era and the fossilised 1996, Resident Evil has encouraged a heterogeneous population within its fandom unseen in the fauna of most AAA IPs fence boundaries. From survival horror to action horror to horror action to straight action, all while keeping the comedy of everything very much alive; roping in first person, third person, multiplayer focused, score attack arcade modes, online asymmetrical multiplayer, squad tactics, and more. Players have come from Silent Hill, Call of Duty, Demon’s Souls, Monkey Island, and Myst: all of them feeling at home within the endless, and still expanding, boundaries of RE. Of course there are age demographic influences - I first came on the tracks with RE4 (maybe the most common entry point just due to proliferation and staying power) - but for a series so obsessed, and excellent in their handling with, architecture, I think it’s fair to commit to an assumption that there is a semi-solid and slick superstructure in our collective videogame metropolis that subtly funnels players from all burroughs into the heart of Racoon City.

Seeing the past in hindsight can kill a good historical idea; choosing to disallow agency to the contexts of a world we’ve moved on from, its actors somehow fated for what they will receive, from the calendar years coming and from our perspective apart, is a surefire way to deaden the creativity and stupidity of uniquely beautiful human experiences, that mess of a shambolic grease lair surely a wonder if there ever was one to visit at a gallery. But for a wee exercise, let’s compare briefly how different the RE of 2002 was to today. In 2022, Resident Evil is everything that was stated above: fps, tps, asymmetrical multiplayer, etc. It is a series content only with being an entire medium’s worth of investigative in-game actions purposed towards uncovering the various viruses and parasites infesting that version of reality. In 2002, RE was at a critical breaking point typified by having an ill-contentedness of being anything beyond that era’s definition of survival horror, despite the RE series itself essentially writing the guidebook for the still extremely young genre. The action slowly ramping up in RE3, the cast expanding in Code Veronica, the boundaries of play atrophying into something more elastic in Survivor; every step taken away from the template was seen as a germ of treason making insurgents of every model and verb within the expanding Resident Evil universe. That trepidation to move beyond might seem to some prudent and exacting of the formula which would allow instalments of spooky mansions puzzles through and twisted scientists foiled to visit the public once every few years. It might seem to others a cowardly and conditional respect the creators have for the evolving face of their creative ambitions and the respect their audience has for the team’s authorial flexing. I think what at that time, without inserting myself from 2022 into 2002, would have astounded both camps was the idea to revisit the land of bumper crop creepies after straying far afield and announcing, ‘that yield abundant wasn’t good enough.’

OK, mythologizing aside, Shinji Mikami and his team having returned to rebuild one of the holy sites of survival horror was one of the grandest gifts for gaming and its possibilities as an evolving medium. Not only was it a simultaneous affirmation of design as a flexile and permeable art that could erode lands, be boiled through different states, and shaped into sculptures, pillars, and tools, it was also a triumph for the ways in which video games can be seen as a oral art - a space in which traditions are lost in their matter but continuous in their evocation: one program dies as all ports and platform support fades away but further lives on in the designers acting like carrion angels with its corpse, feeding on morsels twenty years away. Returning to their own work, now past in generations which had rapidly evolved beyond the limitations it had been set behind, styles it had aped going from cool to gauche, dominance of market going from pulp to prestige, the team was able to use some alchemist’s stone in foiling copper to gold. The forgoing of tank controls alone is almost certainly the largest influence in why REmake lives on in a way that the original no longer can: that scheme concerned the limitations of the PS1 with moderate eloquence, and it was never as bad as it is now made out to be, but drop in and play will always mesh with an experiential medium far more elegantly than frictional stoppage. Very few emotions or tones in art can coalesce well with input frustration; it is very difficult to feel the tension of a zombie closing off an available passage when, open or not, the passage is a nightmare to cross with your available toolset. The broadening of system interaction is also marvellously managed - the introduction of Crimson Heads and their dispatch turns what was more or less a metroidvania without movement verbs making backtracking a delight instead of a chore, it takes that retreading aspect of that genre and survival horrors it: the backtracking is done out of desperation, fear, scarcity, and ratcheting risks popping up the mansion over - essentially turning the metroidvania unlocking ‘I can’t wait to go there’ into a survival horror ‘I have to get back there… or else.’

The general flavour of the updated and more professionally curated art assets and VO is up to preference when judging whether it trumps or fails the 1996 original, but it looks marvellous to me in a way the 96 game merely looked functional. The cinematic strength of both the moment to moment play as well as the cinematics speaks to a general trend set in both the indie sphere (such as the utter brilliance of 30 Flights editing making the narrative art) as well as the AAA sphere up to today (The Last of Us isn’t just calling back with zombies, you know). It’s association of characters with space, setting up tiny denouements of dramatic irony in every encounter Jill or Chris has with a zombie that the player may not see or the PC may not see; it’s rigorous cinematic counter-argument to the betrayals of Barry making a strong point against the moralistic ask of how big of a person can you really be when asked to step up; Wesker more or less looks like a god and rightly is treated like one: the entire shape of what we see is brilliant in every aspect (Lisa Trevor fancam incoming).

Nobody needs to be convinced to play this game 20 years later, they’re either already saddling up to visit the Spencer Mansion or they aren’t. It isn’t a must play game because no games are must play games. But if there is one game that linchpins early 3D gaming to modern 3D gaming, it’s RE4. But there’s no RE4 without REmake.

Games for me can fail in two ways: 1) They can be trite, obtusely defined, product oriented amalgams of mechanics that serve no practical, theoretical, or material definition of art (whether that be Kael's appreciable "trash" or Danto's atomic transfigurative, both are viable as an end goal) that play in an aptly metaphoric exercise for hiking in smog, or 2) they can suffer the pile up of disparities conceived well enough in isolation all colliding wondrously after being let loose to pursue a goal lofty and tremendous. Ubisoft open world games are nearly always the first, as is something like Dead Estate, and Fear and Hunger is, heart-achingly, of the second class.

Grotesqueness immediately feels pungent within the construction of a JRPG in a smoke pervasive that doesn't cloud or fog or fill up a room with stink in most other ordered mechanical genres; the slowness of every interaction, each step a choice and each choice is a boolean factorial that grows exponentially from each serially made prior, feeling less the acclimatizing integration of your action parameters than the more adjective laden verb sets of other games - shooters take place behind the gun, visual novels take place behind the text, walking sims take place off the path, and JRPGs take place in the menus. If the menu is optioned as attack evil monsters, run to save a village, and heal your good and loyal friends, excellent, a choice along moral lines is codified by systemic immutability. In Fear and Hunger, that immutability is formed around vileness that is without remorse or forgiveness in contextual granularity; you choose to desecrate corpses, commit sexual atrocities, profane the idea of equilibrium as we know it, all without the flexibility that excuses action in something situationally obscured by minor art and mechanical vagaries. Short and simple, you either are the type of player who is irredeemable systemically in this world in a way that Bioshock or Spec Ops did not allow for, or you are not, and if you are not, you are probably dead.

Death at that agentless squeamish impulse to not disabuse yourself of the empathetic rote exacerbations players have meta-texted their way into every game is not this games weakness. I was willing to play the game's gambit when I felt it was necessary to progress, and I did it over and over again and it always felt objectionably terrible. Death was a lesson in calcifying cruelty as a lens that people don't have to take but may be enticed to take should their hopes be purely selfish (there is a reason that the other PCs tell you to leave, and the reason is both impressionable selfishness on your part and their part), and repeatedly dying didn't bother me. What makes this game, for me, an abject failure is that recidivistically plunging my hands into the murk was offset by the lack of developer commitment to their greater strengths: primarily, death and horrible action are your markers of progression. Yet, the mechanical lesson after internalizing and continually working over those emotions is not throw your babes into the blaze, but run away after each turn of combat, and restart the campaign every time you load in until you randomly loot the containers with a high roll, and save before you do your coin tosses for the floor, and always take lockpicking not because you think genuinely that thievery and deprivation is your good for this world but because it's the gaudily correct mechanical progression interaction.

That's the problem with Fear and Hunger - its spreadsheet doesn't want to be placed underneath the organs and implements of a Bosch painting, and in games, mechanical framing
always
always
always
ALWAYS imposes itself first and last in the evaluation of thematic concerns.

Between this and Off Peak I have only started working my way through Cosmo D’s oeuvre, so I may view this game in a different light when it is more properly contextualised within the a more substantiated assessment of his project (and I’ll probably append a more graduated review onto this one for Betrayal once that roping back around occurs). Despite being relatively new to D however, I think, at least on 1½ playthroughs, the tenor of Cosmo D’s style is extremely vulnerable to the valuable plastic melodies RPG mechanics lend to the maintenance of orchestration and harmonic storage video game interactions (and particularly the anti realism of Cosmo D’s cityscapes) are intrinsically underscored by. I thought immediately after first rolling credits that the linearity and mostly inflexible shape of the narrative of Betrayal at Club Low ironically betrayed the RPG systems that were integrated and most commonly used not for enabling play styles or modes of aggressive progression but instead delivering context narrative - but on thinking about it for a while, I feel now that Cosmo D has worked a type of cubist portraiture that is inlaid through time as opposed to perspective: the RPG mechanics are not so much utilised for fleshing out the player as canvas subject but for shaping the subject canvas for player viewership. In simplest terms, if the typical role RPG mechanics take in games, say Fallouts 1 and 2 or Vampire: The Masquerade, is that of illuminating the what the boundaries are of the game world by way of empowering the player to make them, then Betrayal at Club Low’s mechanics work more as illuminating the game world via the role of PC for the player; instead of seeing a world tailored and navigated by choices made in your progression, the world is herein only lights up one of its fractal edges when investigated down a route of particular role, contrasting RPGs of broadening scope to this one of narrowing. In jerryrigging this restricted and somewhat obfuscated combination of mechanics, scope, and budget, Cosmo D makes an excellent case for disempowering play in the pursuit of more meaningful worlds and interactions. Of course there is more to be done, and whether or not chance in the form of die rolls is the best route for this type of play being best is certainly up to debate (even if that tension is tremendously fun in the moment to moment), in the refining and encountering prohibitive exploratory play beyond just this small game, but it is an interesting idea that sits far better once the session has ended than the facility and falseness other RPGs smoke around with after they have faded from sugary sensation.

As many on the internet in various obsessive communities, be those that are directed to videogames as we are as a user base on Backloggd or those in any group directed to TV or film or music, I was, but no longer am, Christian for a long part of my life. I was raised traditionally Mennonite with some Québécois Catholic thrown in from the paternal side; the worldview that formed my conscious ability to conceive of ethics, identity, metaphysics, and politics was derived firstly from those sources, holisms that wrapped up the world and all its gidgets in aphorisms and dictates. Even though I haven’t practised any form of Christian worship or devotion in a decade, the root of anything which would fall on the dichotomous structure of sinful or virtuous fruits in how I act on those things today. Sex, criticism, depression, ontology, epistemology: they are all consciously pursued by me now with an agnostic mind, but they are all unconsciously commented on by zealotry that informed the base colours and chemicals that have led to future complex makeups I engage with as an adult. What I can believe in now is not hermetically arrived at, but is in conversation with what I once believed, what was agreed upon with myself as possible to believe. Regardless of the pleasure or share of human capability I have with the world or with the world’s cast, I will inevitably have a pall of millenia’s old stricture bearing down on whatever I intercede with on this world-which-is-not-our-home.

Of course, this is no new sentiment, and was no new sentiment when it was uttered and seen practised in the bible. As I said, this is a disposition that is common on the cross continental internet, which as a platform is one of the only things other than Catholicism that has managed to touch every corner of the earth. There is very little, beyond religion, that is as universal in social constructs as falling out of religion. Despite this, there feels to be a bit of a dearth in media which engages with the melancholy or outright torment that one feels by having to constantly engage with the self-assessment that comes with negating one’s own internalised rule of decorum set about by a gestation of religious fervour: The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon is one prominent story, and there are some further examples which more examine the immediate falling out of faith, such as Unorthodox or possible readings of Pentiment or Women Talking. These are a few that I pulled off the top of my head, and while I’m sure there are more, I am surprised at how few are able to be spontaneously conjured. Here though, in that murky and raw inexpressible prevalence, is Lucah, which is so full to the brim with the bitterness and traumatic violence that is ushered out of having to reject one’s universal localising roots that it seems to loom larger than any indie game of its scale could normally expect.

Despite the rarity of seeing this phenomenon in modern fictions, this type of account is such a broad topic in part because of the uniquity of the details inherent within any individual’s account of the experience detailing their respective journey. It may be a semi-universal experience, but the emotional tribulations or catalytic elements encountering each other in the process are all respective to the individual who would be called upon to recount their experiences, which might read as implausible to their audience of similar experientialists, in a fiction. Whereas some leave the church because of merely ecclesiastical differences, taking on a new type of agnostic mysticism as guiding religious principles, others leave the church because of varied and systemic abuses sustained over the childhoods, adolescences, and adulthoods of generations. This second case matches the tone of Lucah but because of specific lacks to any personal experience, or investigations into any experience specifically that might relate to anything in common emotion other than petulance, the mood and iconography reads as incredibly trite. Without discounting melessthan3’s development team and their personal histories with organised religion, the lack of nuanced characterisation of Lucah’s cast (the mostly void character of Lucah themselves doesn’t really bother me given that being a well established trend in games overall and in the inspirations Lucah draws from specifically) give the spectacle and motivation of play within the game an enormously tacky quality of ignorant rebellion, something more akin to terrible 2000s atheism than to something like Diary of a Country Priest or Job’s suffering. Gladiatorial arenas populated by a fattened clergy that sexually get off on watching children rabidly bludgeon each other to death may be something which could horrifyingly come to light out of missionary practices in colonised countries, but without biographical relation to events or characterisation that seems drawn on and related to it as something which specifically, poignantly, underlines that as a source of trauma for Lucah, the entire scene comes across as tasteless and broad without insight or commentary (and of course it should go without saying that that must also be said well, not merely said). This all goes without saying that the world of Lucah is posited as a purgatorial afterlife, or at least an adjunct from the reality we would attach human experience to, which could be read as a commentary on how fucked up the afterlifes of Christian theology are (although any reading of modern theological understandings of Hell and Heaven thoroughly discount the type of medieval eternal suffering posited in ancient accounts and popular fiction; of course, Lucah, being a personal account as opposed to a ontological refutation, does not account for this, which renders the narrative even thinner) but without good writing or characterisation of the setting direly reads as horrific resignation to a suffering at the hands of evil church doers who are in fact correct about everything, from ethics down to where the sinners descend and what their roles in whatever afterlife they are sent to must be.

Unfortunately, the sparseness of characterisation that plagues the plotting and cast of Lucah extends to the combat mechanics, which in their way have some base satisfaction in their arrangement but suffer from a counteracting flaw that is created in the joining of the game’s major influences. The main thing I’ve heard in regards to the combat is that it is souls-like, and that the combat’s orientation is scaffolded like a metroidvania. I agree with both assessments but paint them as negative and contradictory herein; one of the excellent things about souls combat is that the toolbox is open from the beginning - you may exchange weapons and power up, but the combinations of possible attack methods are available from the get to the player. Soul level 1 with a broken straight sword is as valid an option to beat Gwyn as a level 10 chaos zweihander. The breadth of the combat is available to master and learn and is tuned to that player ability focused progression from the first hollow to the god of hollows. Metroidvanias on the other hand, are tuned so that the PC progresses in strength, and while you become more skilled as a player throughout the experience, and one reaches mastery as the game unfolds what is possible to do. The cat in Gato Roboto can’t save its owner because it hasn’t progressed enough to do so, and so the player is equally disempowered to do so.

The melding of these two styles of progression in Lucah then obviously presents a problem. The structure of the combat is built like souls but metes out what is possible in that playspace, through the RPG levelling system not just increasing stats but also giving new abilities to turn the possibilities of combat, like SOTY. This means that the early combat encounters are not only disempowering, and the later ones overpowered, but that Lucah’s combat is dull in its encounter design for 80% of the experience, something which the more level/enemy design progression of Souls never has to reckon with. Of course, there is also the unfortunate lack of enemy variety and non-existent level variety (in terms of actual affect to the combat held within, the variety of flavour is mediocre - not terrible, not great) hindering the experience, but the wrapping being poor is less harmful than the contents.

Overall, Lucah is a childish experience: the PC is growthless, the world is hostile without reason or an inclusively perverse justification, the amenities and relationships within seem to be built out of proximity and not actual affinity. Everything about it reads like a kindergarten story that has an edge of no emotional growth. I understand the trauma of stunted understandings born out a typically North American pitiful religion of retribution, but regardless of the sympathy one can have for such a work’s author, if the work is as lifeless and worthy of scorn as the religion which it paints as being so pitiless and ugly, than the world of Lucah seems to be made by a god no better than that which it accuses.

I was extremely excited to see this released unceremoniously, free of hype or expectation weighing down ankles to pitfalls of modern game discourse. Given the simplicity of West of Loathing's design, I thought that a genre switch with more of the same seasoning and core ingredients as before would be enough to carry this 'sequel', but unfortunately either the recipe worked despite itself with WoL or the team has lost their sense of taste. Nothing that worked in the first game really works here: the combat is fiddlier with less player expression, forcing builds to be simpler while also demanding more bland item use to simulate 'breadth' of combat; the writing is less cohesive around the Lovecraftian setting, causing both the sincere characterisation of its cast to be weakened (with nary a useful or interesting team member in sight) and the humour to hit weaker because its broadness accentuates less the setting or expectations of genre; the world design feels less like exploration is rewarded (which it wasn't really in WoL either, but the larger map evinced a world to be explored whereas SoL has hubs which must be Mass Effected through for story drips: a pain) and more like you're linearly being pushed from one non-cohesive beat to the next; the puzzle design, which was at times almost a joke itself in how difficult it was in WoL, is simplified to mush here - nothing is rewarding and every time I had to rub my two brain cells together for a fetch quest, it felt like a chore.

I wanted to love it, and I'll definitely be wary to see if WoL is worse in estimation after this has to be considered as where that game goes in hindsight, but the product is so bleh.

Has there been an uptick in our attenuation, culturally and individually, to the Icarus myth? Maybe this is one of the biases of living through a history of culture, one piled with objects more opulent, ever present, and referentially potent than at any time previously in its possibility amongst human states, as opposed to consuming that history but in the 21st century Icarus has seemed to draw more fascination and sunlight than had been, anecdotally, spotlighting his ascents and descents in the time between his first flight and now. As time has worn on, as time has allowed the delocalisation of centres of communication standing in for the varying world’s working class’s abilities to express sentiment and empathy between each other in a form and with functions not propped up by their non-elected representational nationalistic enterprises isolating them in hierarchical and interested speech, it seems as though evocation through myth has come to ground from its former place atop Mountains Olympus and Halls Valhalla. I’ve had it most obviously intended for me with Anne Carson’s mythical interpretations as well as the mythos interpreted and remade in Anders Nilsen’s Rage of Poseidon but clearly the trend is occurring heavily in games at the moment: God of War greatly pathologized it’s antagonistic forces with a humanism bred from systemic failures that occurred not in the grandiose melodramas of its earlier games, and Hades tenders from its pantheon a kind of postmodern conscientious empathy that occurs in our highly dialogic ecosystem with a form directly opposite to traditional mythic portrayals of the same characters. It seems like myth has been reorganised from a top down affair, seeing from which great heights may lend fall, to one that describes from the bottom a rebuke, whereupon that which falls leaves a mess and kills a friend.

The Icarus myth has been traditionally taught to be a display of one figure’s failure in recognising what constitutes hubristic reach and how behaviours can teach us our limits. Today, often without the name attached but with the wings stapled on just the same, we learn from Icarus what a small reach beyond one’s station will incur from that which our world revolves around. Citizen Sleeper has its beginning fawn like an Icarus who flew to the Sun and fell but on treacherous orbits breached was instead caught in a gravitational pull of something other than earth, where knowing what Daedelus wrought wasn’t attached to a spheres of gods but to that which was dominated over by their powers disattached. For their Sleeper, that wrought flight is not one of hubris expected by one out of their domain but of the thrust into the styx of which exploitations beget further exploitations entrusted to us in our purchased complicity (or more likely, what is societally enforced through however many propagandistic excesses are necessitated in our connections and expressions). In showing this fall, or rather flak shredding gravitational pull, CS in a lot of ways interstates the driving urge to develop a character from the outset of an RPG experience: entering your machinations at the where there has been a turning point in the remaking of a life, a chance which has become the driving force coinciding one’s becoming strange in the ways which announce value and type to systemic architectures.

This is the axis Citizen Sleeper ultimately fails itself and succeeds on. Thematically, it cannot allow the player character to become god emperor of the domains they plaster all eyesight aboard, indicating an examination of the mechanical emphases that place play subsidiary to narratives of specifically modern and potentially “eventual” complexity but no introspective complexity which devalues intentions of action with accessibility to action within the systems and within the narrative, backseating both into, at its most optimistic, making do with whatever you are given that day(often less do we see triumphs of the genre take this route, more frequently changing perspective of audience within these worlds of exponentiality from primary protagonist to ancillary protagonist a la Witcher 3). In play, this works for a while to an extraordinary degree - the first 3-4 hours are a taut balancing act between starving, being shot, wearing away into a carcass sprouting circuitry, and losing yourself amidst a sea of askers promising gifts without seeing those boons fessed. After that however, having reached the end of one or two quests and receiving the surprisingly large paydays squirrelled out from people ostensibly in the same situation as your PC, the tension is deflated entirely: you are never at a loss for good rolls, cash, and things to do, and by the final third you have presumably removed the target on your back as well. The mechanics which create scarcity, because of their function as a model for capitalism fucking people over, eventually lead you to become the 1% of your little world because that’s just how economics work when you are the most active agent with the greatest leniency to invest and divest. I don’t know what the devs could’ve done to really keep the boot down without making the game both far more complex as well as miserable, but their systems ironically fucked them over in ways totally unrelated to cash.

It’s unfortunate as well that at the end of things, with hordes of 6 die rolls and credits and mushrooms and corporate intel, your Sleeper is no different looking in their perspective and adaptability than when first starting the game. While there is a generously branching skill tree which can create preferences for activities on the station, there is no actual characterization to generally differentiate what these acts are informing in the state of play or narrative - you may be a mechanic by defect of muscle proclivity but you interact with the barkeeps in just the same dialogue as an artist or diplomat. There are options for dialogue, and of course the player will have characters for whom they invest the only scarce resource, interest, in, but they are choices in the vein of “hell yeah” and “that went well”. As well written and pursuant of depth Citizen Sleep is, make no mistake, the dice are not those found in Dicey Dungeons or Disco Elysium: it’s choose your own adventure visual novel territory.

Has Jump Over The Age flown too close to the sun? No, I don’t think so. You market the game however you can to try and proliferate it, and RPGs are big for a reason. A bit of slapdash game design, which does legitimately impart the feelings attempted for a while, on a worthwhile and well told narrative concerning highly prescient and necessary issues is still all that with just a bit extra. If they were a broader studio with a bigger budget, it’s easy to see that the final product would appear to us as a different spectre haunting not just the space above Europe but also any devs making +2% fire damage weapon skill trees. But this isn’t an RPG killer even if it is a killer little game.

I usually play just a few contemporary ‘zeitgeist-y’ AAA games a year - when in the weeds with indies, art games, and retro titles, it’s a bit easy to turn one’s back on the chorus of what actually funds the spotlight budget on the medium. As much as, for me, the beating heart of games is the romantic concert of those projects which question the context of interaction within defined systems interrogating thematic concern towards the ideas of choice, ill-portented rationality, gasping deprivation, and other hard to mention excitations of the spirit that can be considered less dangerously in the antiseptic environment of digital reproduction than the cruel world of necessary application, the reality of the games industry is that the actual viscous muscle which pushes through veins ichor are the massive, corrupt, lowest common denominator infatuated blockbuster title games. We can say in all seriousness that the games which matter most are the heartfelt, earnest, no ulterior motive itch.io micro-games about things like desperate backroom abortions, archival practices in the Middle East, or the history of an individual family’s cooking, but the titles which are the most congregated matter/makeup are the games about shooting, looting, and rooting for the US government. I say this with no happiness about the fact, but it is a fact - Nintendo or Bioware may not be the ones who push many, or any, envelopes these days, but they codify where the postage can be sent.

All that said, and that’s usually about the word count that can be dedicated in good faith to thematic discussions of any AAA game’s themes, Firaxis’ Midnight Suns brings enough polish, spectacle, and distillation to ideas that have percolated in the indie scene since their last major release. Slay the Spire, Into the Breach, and, I’ll say it, Ladykiller in a Bind, combine with an egregious amount of bloat (which is nonetheless compelling for longer than it has any right to be) to make one of the more exciting and accessible tactics games that has come out in the past few years. While it doesn’t have the depth of any of its influences, and certainly nowhere near the strategic complexity of previous Firaxis games, it does have some truly delightful pageantry that sets it uniquely, expensively, apart from the games it cribs.

Midnight Suns’ truest success comes in a small mechanical dictionary that appends itself to so many of the systems interlocking and rewarding overlapping play; if Into the Breach is the better three member team strategy game, Midnight Suns at least is the more verbose one. The many status effects and terms of ability may seem on their face like a minor part of strategic play, and indeed in other games with statuses like bleed, vulnerable, or frenzied do tend to backseat those effects to turn order and damage numbers. I think that, however, these small appended terms come into the major arm of MS’s strategic play precisely because of their second layer order of application to the major elements of both the base play and the mission play. The ‘set-up’ portion of the game, the interactions between heroes and exploration jaunts throughout the abbey grounds, reward with new collections of potions and item recipes that largely enforce a system interplay between the terms of application that the enemy hordes and your own heroes are tackling each other with. You are assembling your arsenal, as well as building relationships (in an albeit facile and kind of insultingly childlike way), throughout all the downtime periods of a play session, and with the ability to quickly launch a mission and complete it in 5-15 minutes, immediately reaping and bearing witness to the benefits of exploration and narrative play. It’s an integration of non-exclusively mechanical systems with the hard numbers play that Firaxis didn’t really engage with in any of the XCOM games, with an exception to the Chosen DLC for 2 that began a ramp up into what they do here in Midnight Suns.

Of course, the play with the heroes is the draw that makes the above order of mechanics work, and on that front, Firaxis still has excellent heads on their hydra. The different uses and mixes of their roster, including both in how it is made spectacle and how it works on the spreadsheet of the backend, really does nothing short of amaze when considered beside the simple and pandering superhero action of the last two decades that must have been heavy on the designer’s minds. What could have been a pathetic MCU smashup of variously strong people having minorly different HP and damage numbers is instead a varied and widely developed cast that all mix and match with enormous spread and possibility. Nico, Wolverine, Magik, Hulk; all play with each other and on their own in ways that offer totally different tactical assumptions and varying feelings of accomplishment when tackling goals. Say you are on a defeat all enemies mission - a real basic ‘knock-out’ order (whose idea was KOs anyways? as if being shattered into dust after flying through limbo only rendered one unconscious): maybe you take Captain America, Hunter, and Ghost Rider, leaving the battlefield strewn with enemies absolutely beaten to a pulp with massive damage crumblers after turtling up and prepping for turn one; maybe you take Doctor Strange, Scarlet Witch, and Magik, gathering all the enemies together with little moving plinks only to take them down with a flood of AoE spells that have been buffed with free play cards and heroic multipliers. Both of these squads ultimately end up doing pretty similar things - dealing damage and buffing - but the progression from deployment to departure by way of the different strengths and weaknesses of team composition legitimately do transcend the vague progression of number climbing that can plague turn-based team tactics.

Of course, as has been said elsewhere, the tactics are the highlight in a lowlight totalised experience. While there is more to agree with in this sentiment than not, and I say this as someone who’s primary access to art remains through novels, poetry, and theatre, I don’t think that the writing which is so criminally derided is pablum. There is definitely far too much of it, and the conversations don’t flow with the tone of the work as it reaches its third act; I wouldn’t say the self-consciousness of the heroes is asinine but it is childish when compared to the confidence that is displayed in the tactics portion of the game. Nevertheless, when considering the source, the dialogue is a worthwhile representative of the source the characters come from. I think so much of what people expect from superheroes is from the poisoned well of cinematic universe storytelling, but Midnight Suns clearly draws far more from the comics, for better or worse, than the movies, if it draws anything from the movies at all. The little hangouts are so Chris Claremont it hurts, and you just know that the plotting is more Walter Simonson or Kurt Busiek than Russo brothers - and over this is a sheen of Bendis that even the Ultimate universe didn’t shine with. Maybe people forgot that superhero stories are soap operas with tights and tanks, but Midnight Suns sure remembers.

The real problem with the game is that which I started with: it's a AAA whale game. There is too much here: between foraging, combat puzzles, making friends, deploying on side missions, researching, crafting, decorating, and petting cats and dogs, the game just has too many tasks over too long a campaign to both remain consistently engaging or competitively challenging. I played on Heroic 2, which I think is basically a very hard or hard mode - it’s 2 degrees above normal difficulty, and I was mowing through every encounter after maxing out the friendships of my heroes, collecting all the mushrooms, and opening all the money/gloss boxes around the grounds. In a less bloated game that had half the runtime, I would have bumped up the difficulty to engage more aggressively with the tactics, but after 40 hours of the same enemies and the same Hydra bombs, the tactics being harder would just be tedious and not engaging. If I’d been barely scraping by on 15 hours, the game could conceivably be called a masterpiece of economy and tension, but like Tony Stark, at the end of the game, the player has accumulated all the capital a small country of super people can generate, capital which can only be used to manipulate hot aliens and vampires into punching their problems away instead of thinking their way through them.

I know that many people stare directly into the face of survival game progression systems - passive income systems, market manipulation tactics, little woodchopping/pickaxing/fishing improvements - without flinching, but when I see grossly monolithic games composed of 1000s of intricately laddered scaling ‘hoe the ground faster so you can hoe the ground faster’ mechanics, I go mad. I think what others see as holy and that which I see as damning is a kind of mercurial thing which manifests depending on tolerance, or, maybe more scathingly, depending on whether one can see themselves as the operator of any of the many assembly belts that develop within these games, or as the sorry, oblivious until-too-late, thing being carried into the maws hungry at the end of the line. It may be a patience thing; it may be an attention thing; it may be a matter of whether you fall into the idea of games as a pursuit vs. leisure thing. If I am to diagnosis what it is in myself that retreats from survival automation games or their mechanics in migration, I would say that it falls under the purview, or compulsion, of endstate necessitation specific to my type of gaming psychographic: I need to see a conclusion which satisfies play theses, which fulfils themes offered, which sees the change occurred over the playthrough as something more than pure refinement and process evolution. It’s an embarrassing flaw in my critical ability, but I will never see, adequately, the merits of the design in something like Stardew or Factorio because what I am compelled by internally being intrinsically counter to the preeminent occupation of those games.

Now imagine those mechanics are taken out of their vacuums, allowed the possibility to repeat ad infinitum as is demanded by the genre, only to have them encroach an offer of cessation of play with a thematic completion derived from the greatest, in scope, possible expression of fully consuming oneness? That’s more my speed. Dredge’s scale is the work of balancing uneven juggling - on one hand, the climax of the game eludes to grander things than are possible to render within the scope of representation within play or plot (something which may have even failed to form for Lovecraft when he was pioneering the modern form of cosmic horror, encumbered as he was by human language, narrative, and their dual formulation, as well as the drawing of the horrors represented from petulant and embarrassing human fears rooted in bigotry), and on the other hand, the scale of the game’s economy is minute in comparison to genre stalwarts like Stardew, Terraria, or Don’t Starve, which seek to take up the world entire of their respective zealots. While it is possible in Dredge to endlessly fish, fill out logs, or find ever bigger translucent carps or wider vortices of collapsing squid, there is only, after filling the other human desires on the islands, the Sisyphean reason to do so: as a knowingly meaningless human task that is set before you - one which may or may not be pleasing to enact. Continue on in your little steamer, drop your little lines or nets, even use your little enchantments disdainfully bestowed to grease the works of your plaything tools; the ocean continues on forever and the fish replenish and the mongers of baubles and bass have depthless pockets, but as the smallness of the tasks become obvious, and as the painted picture of futility is realised with the boundaries of the map, the idea of something greater looms. Suddenly each act, acts which in games of pixelated chemistry seek to make the work of intricate paints on a vast canvas operate beauty on the macro and micro, the pigment and the impression, which fail to represent anything at all at their remove, become the little strokes of a paranoiding bedlamite - or should I say, they become the acts of a institutionalised person being shown how increasingly representational their scrawls are.

Fishing amidst the depths is a bit obviously crass, given how the Old Ones are so often made out in their tentacles and lanterned rows of teeth. Of course, cosmic horror is a crass thing told when we realise that, in its fiction, we are the scatological elements that must be cleansed to sanitise the upset order. Such is the obviousness of the metaphor and of the grotesqueries of Dredge, to its benefit: we are tilling the evershifting slosh, uncompromising and capricious, so foreign to our humanity (unlike that stolid earth, so thoroughly tamed), and realising the demands of its creatures and their dealings. Dredge shows the small ways we may transgress - bounties of ripe and succulent meats (nevertheless poisoning and changing the people with even the smallest doses of the ocean), detritus that adorns with broken rules of order by shining clearly, salvage that stupidly convinces some reinforcement despite its being born from pulling apart the already dashed - and makes a masterful journey of little tasks, even small victories against pain, which nonetheless arc towards the impossibility of being one in the monopneuma; the which of things that contains all that can be. It seems, to me, to be a small inkling that can be sewn into the designs of survival/base-building/resource farming games revealing what the actions of these games may be building, what may be behind those cages of chickens or bundles of wood. Were there less here to show the scope of those kinds of systems, it would feel too hollow a representation, something that is a mere fooling at comparative quality; if there were more than there is, it would fail to be dwarfed by the incomprehensible scope of its completion.

I’m trying to be a bit light on the details of play because Dredge gets by on mood as much as play. In the end, the gaminess of it all, which really only takes over the micro narratives and not the overarching plot nor the player actions, can show a few cracks in the facade that may or may not ruin the degree to which you might sympathise with the pathology of the player character’s ending state of mind. That all has to come at the pace of play, which comes with the pace of play elements revealed, which reinforce the obvious enough mood from the bareness of a game named “DREDGE”. If the idea of dredging, in every sense, makes enough hint in your twinging for annihilation, whether it be from you unto the trout population or from the great trout in the sky unto the earth, then hopefully this little creative writing blunder-about can sell you on the idea that the least character invested mechanical genre, a game type whose most beloved entry tries to package factory farming and diamond mining in the adornment of ‘escaping to and connecting with nature’, has managed to eloquently and succinctly package these mechanics into a narrative that demands them.

I usually find it quite simple to read out my plaudits and detractions for a game, being that the personal proof of experience, which isn’t to say objective fact but perspective solidified, is able to grasped by something so plain as, “the jumping mechanics feel bad to me because this repetitious action hadst be performed with this infelicitous navigation of physics, physical manipulation, and physical space, which sums herein endlessly to this reified proof.” There are always people who can, by their own personal experience, take those exact parts and make the claim opposite to yours, and sometimes with adequate persuasion and passion in turn reveal an underlying gratification that went uninvestigated in the personal play which led to the negative expression in the first place; I think this is, for many people, the experience of games such as Rain World or Loom (or Bioshock Infinite if one is to look at this process mirrored). This is a foible of design, but it’s quasi-state is part of what makes game design, and games criticism, such a delightful pairing in the medium: the experience is shown to be as interpretable as any classical text, yet has a greater breadth of variation than most static art objects. Sometimes designers produce things which are taken on their face as they are hoped; sometimes they are taken as done poorly the thing which the game rebuked is in itself rebuking; sometimes the game stumbles ass backward into a rebuke that is taken as sincere by players that the developer did poorly: the critical masses will accumulate, discourse, and try to win out all varying ‘proofs’ - and although there will never be a truth utterly determined in it, a great deal of beautiful things will be said, and a great deal of games will have promoted those beauteous statements with obvious stimuli.

The Sexy Brutale seems to me, and being such as it is, makes it difficult for me to read out my feelings with exactitude, a type of game which has that solidified perspective by design of the devs to be creating all components poorly to produce a poor thing so as to rebuke… the idea of logical deduction? Detection as a mechanic? Cohesive level design or play feel? It’s difficult to say; the murky sloppiness all comes across as very intentional, and the intentional outcome seems to be nothing less than arduous gawking at the stupidity of figuration, but that is so counter to the ideals of indie game development that it feels wrong to add it all up to pure pissantery from the devs to the players. Typically, or at least in the games which have come to rest at an upper register of indiedom, these smaller projects interpose a vision of an undug mechanical or thematic interaction that has glinted in the past mass excavations of AAA games, something which has hinted at complex degree but has only been used to forward a bland, unexamined platter of all flavours unsettled by mutual orgy between them. Such is this the tutorialising in Cultist Simulator, the scene to scene editing in 30 Flights, or the ‘difficulty’ in Getting Over It. What completely confuses me in The Sexy Brutale is its seeming garmenting of the syllogisms quietly supposed to systems of inquiry in games like Witcher 3 or L.A. Noire, which will proclaim detectives of the cast and the player but lead unto all discovery the play by way of checkmarks and button prompts. It brings this insulting brand of irrigation towards deductive fruiting, rightfully pointing out that for detection to be a game model, the player must be able to detect that which does not control their FOV, and instead of implementing a model of true P.I. playing, says “fuck it! why should any deduction be a trail of clues leading unto a discovery?” None of the murders solved herein are in any way characterised by intentions, by predilections of the character, nor by circumstances which they implicate themselves in unintentionally: they are instead rube goldberg contraptions that an askew painting starts and a rogue skewering magic routine ends. It has long been said that a good mystery will have its pieces laid out for the audience, and instead of assuming that those pieces should fit together into a picture of what occurred, the devs of Brutale thought they could just scatter those pieces across a mansion so that they might be assembled into a vorticist portrait of Sherlock’s member.

My other complaints are those which are obvious and presumably not contentious: the movement speed of the player is far too slow, the time travel mechanic is ridiculous and poorly implemented given how the devs lay out their world, the UI is counterintuitive to both typical conventions and the game’s own accommodations, and the horrible parody of cabaret from the 1920s is sickeningly uninvestigated (which I suppose reinforces the thumb up ass method of digging around) and kind of insulting in how its pastiche pays no homage whatsoever to the roots of how those aesthetics came to be, and how they ended up being ushered out by right wing populisms across the globe in the 30s, 40s, and 50s.

Not much to say about the second go around the pike. Gunfire Games fleshed out the strengths of their first game: the excellent differentiation between enemy types and the possibilities of their dispatch across arsenals, the sense of mood in each various environment, the ease with which play sessions begin and end by divvying up chunks of game with dungeons designed across many different axes of mechanical possibility, the teasing of 'oh that could be a really cool build' in the many different possibilities of player enterprise - all of these are largely improved and expanded upon to the benefit of the game. However, everything that hampered the design of the first game is magnified and blown up in the exact same proportion as the first because all of the failures of the first are directly tied to the successes. The complete anonymity of combat design is necessary for making replayability a factor; the breadth of archetypal builds denies any serious investment in the possibility of caring about your PC; the mood of the game is fleshed out with some of the most inane and extraneous exposition I've encountered in years; the 'that could work with a cool build' - ness of the loot tables makes much of the exploration worthless, and what's more, near impossible to flesh out accordingly to your playthrough as necessary items may not drop or be able to be found in your iteration of the world.

Ultimately, it's better and worse than the first game. If it were less of a systems task, and less self serious, it would be a fun game to pop in and out of, but it's a bit too much of a capital G game to fulfill that purpose for me.

Obviously inspired by Hollow Knight foremost in the design world of Metroidvanias, Haiku earns a good deal of the charm that its primary source of inspiration has peddled on for years while the hollowed out buggy fanbase stews waiting for Silksong. The world of Haiku spans a grand stretch that feels like it goes on infinitely in every direction with each area, each little biome taking on different aesthetic hues and enemy varieties just like in Hollownest. You hack and slash your way through infected enemies previously known to be docile while meeting pockets of quarantined robots with quaint and seemingly flippant goals considering the world's state. You've got chips that are charms, you've got dreamers who are primary programs, and you've got got a tram that's a train. But for every of Haiku's flourishes of grandeur that have been translated well from HK, there are matching fumbles of phrase fastly followed: the sword play fails to differentiate its animations enough depending on the directionality of the swing, so every attack feels less like you're a duelist in a swordfight and more like you're a pulsing hurt box; the enemies have no hurt animations, so even further the combat feels frigid and unengaging; the differing zones have aesthetic palette swaps but are built of much the same angles of incursion and are infested with barely differing types of enemies, making the world's aesthetic differences differentiating areas feel shallow; the upgrades are empowering for unlocking pathways but feel frustratingly simplistic in how they evolve gameplay (largely the grappling hook and dash which already allowed i-frames for dodging at the beginning of the game); the writing bounces off in style completely because of the lack of character differentiation and gratuity of nouns without verb or adjective included in what the player sees - it is descriptive of exclusively unseen and abstract events which cannot be sympathized with. All the little touches which makes Hollow Knight one of the greatest games of all time are completely absent in the xerox here.

It's still a cute little game, and the fact that they didn't copy the 40 hours of play Hollow Knight offers, instead wrapping at a svelte 7 or so for near 100% completion, makes it a much more pleasant experience. I would actually very much recommend it but only if you can deal with feeling like the lack of Silksong is far greater after completing Haiku than before.

Kind of weird that, even with companies like Dodge Roll naming themselves after movement mechanics, the general dungeon-crawler inspired indie mass hasn't really congregated that much around the simple delight of planar traversal in any of its various games that take Zelda's screen by screen transition template. There was bound to be a game that understands how purely distilled a game's desirability can be, unscientifically, of course, according to this metric, by how good it feels to crank up the PC's movement speed and race across a room, especially if you get to bob and weave around enemies while maintaining your hyper-sonic momentum. Disc Room feels like if you modded Isaac to spawn only trap rooms, start the player with 2.0 speed, acquire 5 Mini Mushes, and get wrapped in a cohesive and more generally pleasing skin.

There is a lot of scholarship on how games do or do not enforce defensive types of play, but Disc Room puts forth in its environmental interaction type a soft thesis that, maybe, defensive play is born out of offensive play being a counter-balance to a defensive moveset. In each Disc (filled) Room, having no ability to counteract the danger existentially, the player never has the opportunity to rest on hope for an exsanguination of the threats present by encamping in cowed ferocity; the only progressive path is that which hurdles play towards the requirements for long term survival, which herein is that which is defined by aggressively seeking the tidiest lack of death in immediacy.