I had never heard of this game before it went up for free snags on Epic’s 12 days this year, and it probably would’ve languished in the pit of promotion codes that the Fortnite booter hordes these days if I hadn’t been specifically looking for a 2D action game to play to help ease myself into 2023. Everybody has their own comfort genre, the typeof control mapping which feels prenaturally intuitive when sat down in their palms, and while I tend to critically enjoy and feel enriched by talky adventure style games foremost, it is 2D action platformers which really relax me into a play coma. Forged (I’m not defaulting to F.I.S.T.) is a strange metroidvania for the 2020s; we have games like Hollow Knight or Ori trying to push beyond the framework of SotN and Super Metroid, games like Environmental Station Alpha or Axiom Verge trying to revisit those classic texts, and games like Steamworld Dig or Unsighted which seek to outgrow the constraints of influence, but Forged is that rare breed which seeks to just be textbook. Nothing within the game has any mechanical statement towards uniquity in the genre, and indeed seems to want nothing more than to draw the attention of descriptive autopsy: pull the game apart and its guts will slowly fill out a map of the body. There is something satisfying about a game making its way to North America from another country, China in this case, that seems like it is not caught up in the _____ with ______ design that eats up a great deal of the mechanics first indie games market - a contentedly plodding, well placed, standard ingredient fare of family cooking.

That said, while it hits the spot when you need it, that doesn’t mean it tastes so great or sits too well. Rejecting innovation for time worn practices, or refusing to go to grow again a crop of unmixed yield, is perhaps a sign of knowing thyself well enough to stand in a crowd that most accepts you; it can also show that your game has no identity outside of being recognisable as being from that crowd. The modern metroidvania has shown itself to be one of the most fertile grounds for platformer innovation, sprouting games from its field with an alacrity that mechanical genres often are not allowed to promote within unmooring its newest game from the safety of comfortable definition. Metroidvanias can comfortably sort themselves if they have a world which can be newly traversed in shuttle runs as the player acquires transformative verbs. That’s basically the run of it: they don’t need to be 2D, platformer focused, hostile, combat inclusive, or even rendered with graphics or realised with physics. Provided there is some form of “get x to do y” with opportunities for “exercising x on y” across the playspace, then you can reasonably say that the game before you is a metroidvania. With such an allowance of genre specification, in a world in which sales really do come down to FAMILIAR THING - WITH X, there can be reasonably expected the reaction of feeling underwhelmingly whelmed. Forged hits every note of a score written in stone, but plays it like a midi track without dynamics, flourish, or improvisation.

The combat, while on its menu screen, may seem to have a grander degree of depth than your average Castlevania style jump and slash, what with all the Devil May Cry combo unlocking. But unfortunately, while the breadth of action on the player end of the does damage/takes damage equation is broad, the math always reduces to nil once your variables are plugged in. You cannot seamlessly string together combos, so you will always have your alpha strike bread and butter combo start and end with itself, which due to poor optimisation and lack of enemy behavioural variety, is the most likely follow up to the initial attack due to it being the best combination of damage and poise breaking. You cannot easily combine weapon combos across your arsenal either, despite tooltips saying otherwise, so unless you're hungry for less efficacious and monotonous variety, the grunt encounters will play the same ditty on repeat for 10-15 hours. The bosses fair a bit better, what with having different timed hit windows in between strikes for different combo strings, but suffer from two enormous counteracting fatal flaws: 1) their poise breaks inconsistently when attacked with the same strings, and can often hasten your hit windows by knocking them out of one animation, without staggering them, directly into another, and 2) they are terribly easy, so you’re unlikely to memorise any necessary patterns to use your non BnB combos. The game across the board is really quite easy, which is well and good for a first, breezy game of 2023, but not great for emphasising either player expression of the quality of your design.

The localisation is bad, but who cares? Localisations tend to be bad, and frankly, that they put one out at all, that’s fully voiced, is something that they didn’t have to do, and made the experience just that little bit more seamless. (and if you think the English one is bad, don’t even try the French). The premise is trite, childish, and yields itself like a bludgeon, but for most metroidvanias but the best, it’s seasoning more than any actual ingredient. The world design is conventional, but well rendered, diversifying in small ways the traversal and iconographic root to the general purpose of whichever place you’re in. There is little to glean from what is shown in the background, and I really question why devs still feel that there is any value in creating 3D rendered platformers because their models always look worse than sprites, so the experience really has to deliver everything it wants to say, outside of the confines of the Y7 age script, with what the player is directly dealing with in the foreground. Unfortunately, like the combat, the platforming is aggressively easy, if not insulting, so instead of keeping a nice firm eye on the PC’s interactions with the space they are within, you will keep your eyes glued to the peripheral bezels of your monitor to see whatever framework architecture will allow or disallow mindless progression.

This all sounds negative, but I cannot stress positively, to my dismay, that I enjoyed playing through Forged. It’s not very good, and I won’t recommend it when the class of its type is bursting, but it was what I needed for January. So idk, you probably have it for free; waste a few hours. It’s winter.

I am exhausted with Elden Ring.

Here is a game that, from announcement to release, gave every indication that FromSoft would produce as vast a game world as has ever been made, as rich with incident and care, as challenging, as weird, as colourfully indirect as a made maze in a Kandinsky; the tides rolled in on beaches docking millions set for sail expecting Carcosa, Atlantis, and El Dorado, and the wash could have lent their journeys as layaway meats for Leviathan and Davy Jones. And yet, the playership got what could charitably be called the most important game in a decade, one which culminated a discourse surging with antitheses between difficulty and invitation, open worlds and designed spaces, Western and Eastern design styles, Dark Souls-ification of auteur design and the Ubi-Soft Soylenting of AAA IPs. Elden Ring not only culminated the design ethos which had substantiated FromSoft’s output for longer than a third of it’s developer company’s lifespan but also may as well have finalised the general trending of all games to arrive since Rockstar made plays to become the medium’s premier developer with GTA3, wresting away ideas of dispassionate world design which models itself as player centric as opposed to ludically deifying. If the 2010s was a battleground for UI infection, side-quest motivational throttling, inexpressive play, and IP above all else marketing, then Elden Ring was The Battle of Beneventum capping the whole bloody affair.

Of course, given the game that Elden Ring is - overwhelming, unmanageable, gruelling, larger than life, a work so unruly that it has taken an incestuous and infighting community to unlock a half ‘s half of it - the Battle it has won now plays the same as The Battle of Beneventum: it is the, if not last then at least most definitive up until this moment, battle which shows to be Pyrrhic the campaign shape organzing AAA video game development since the 90s. Undeniably, Elden Ring has defined itself as a game which can achieve on expectations and motivations of enormous potential without riddling its successes full of caveated compromises; if that could be in doubt after the endless stream of flotsam articles articulating every single way that Elden Ring defiantly trends apart of the ‘standard conventions’ of modern game design, then the vitriol it has received from developers of other games for whom the culture decided were manufacturers of metastasized adjoiners to the growing cancer infecting anything within the budget worthy game sphere works as equally valuable contrary proof of the same. However, these advances showing off Elden Ring’s merit are exactly those which in turn dam its elevations in the space for considering games a still predominantly artistic form: its successes were squarely, unilaterally, won on the battlefield of soulless corporate design’s choosing. To put it as myopically as I see it, Elden Ring is the surrender to the industry’s perpetual play, open world games designed to elicit extrinsic motivation for ingratiating an audience, all love for which could have been elicited kept instead at a remove of novelty, completeness, or argumentation of game ‘fact’ over artistic ‘feeling’. I’ll put it harshly here because, while I enjoy the game, the merits have been praised endlessly elsewhere: it is vistas which do not delight in the construction of beauty for inhabitation towards a meaning or poetics of space but instead a world of battle arenas which disallow human expression or connection, which payout materials removed of contextual meaning, which adorn no love for simplicity in kind which connects the human spirit to mutual elements of our making, which can have no meaning as composite makeups of our choices to be better or worse than we have been, which engender no kindness or cruelty towards ourselves because of others or others because of ourselves, and which hold no lineage with the stubborn Soul furtively sputtering in the palm of a weakened and shamefully scorned mite on creation’s flank. In short, Elden Ring is the Dark Souls of removing meaning from our engagement with systems which can in concert with a human shibboleth and human community relay humanity by precluding our senses of freedom and ability: it is the Dark Souls of Pavlovian empathy.

A lot of big words signifying what? Are there many things which Elden Ring’s successes are composed of that were included in previous entries and formatted so as to mean and draw different conclusions from artistic evaluation than in Elden Ring? I would argue that the answer is emphatically yes to almost all comparisons drawn from every single game made in the modern FromSoft vein (including the similarly valuated, in my opinion, Dark Souls 3). I’ll try to make my points obvious by indicating the areas from which I draw the disparities between the trajectory’s starting points and motivations and whereupon they’ve been changed or have culminated in Elden Ring. This isn’t to say that the examples I mention specifically below are more exciting or fun to play, better designed, unique, or counter-cultural in our earlier games than in Elden Ring, merely that they are less doctored by the wrenched age they occurred in in comparison to those operators plucking at the cords and bunkers of Elden Ring’s 2022. Equally, it cannot be said that there are not forces which tremorously bombarded and indicated within those earlier FromSoft games with as much resoundingly complete ‘end of auteur’ era finality or some other overblown case to how dire things are as I or anyone else can make it sound (although those things, particularly as we back away from their containing game’s original release dates, oftentimes seem far less than threatening with hindsight allowing us into futures certain which show what did not come to pass). It’s hard to read anything that has proceeded above or which will follow below as a ‘soft’ criticism of Elden Ring. I have not meant to sound overly harsh or as if I thought the game as an abject failure; I like Elden Ring a good deal, enough to play it through twice and poke about with a third playthrough. What I think Elden Ring signifies for FromSoft and gaming criticism et al is much different than what I think of it as a singular entity, and I would like to be able to talk about Elden Ring (the game) and Elden Ring (the cultural artefact) distinctly for the sake of readership clarity as well as my own sanity. But to separate the two is to remove any possibility of using criticism as a tool for effecting our world as a response and proportionate creative tool as the art it assumes as its language - to use it in isolation is merely advertising. Most of the things that are meritorious in Elden Ring are expounded endlessly elsewhere - for my purposes, their obviousness allows them to go unspoken.

While there are more things that could be lacquered onto the following roll, I will limit the specificities to a few different component parallels between previous FromSoft games and Elden Ring.

Motivations implicated in the player when interacting in worlds with directional/linear traversals vs those in sandbox/open worlds: The unofficial tagline for Elden Ring has been written underneath the play community placard: Open World Dark Souls. Even though the progressibility for FromSoft games, with limited choke point exceptions, has offered non-linear progression paths (Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne tend most away from this typicality out of the set but their own holding least to the open traversiality with lack of obvious directions is the ‘exception’ which proves the rule), it’s fair to say the generality of Open World Dark Souls is less implying a nodal mission quality than it is the traversability and freedom of the world that has a, more often than not, compassed horizon as opposed to a plotted one. The freedom of movement in Elden Ring, as has been pointed out rightly for the wrong reasons by journalists and fans when making criticisms about Elden Ring’s Spartan UI, is a negative freedom momentously charge when directly contrasted by the freedoms allowed within Souls-like games as we have mostly come to know them with the FromSoft catalogue, but more specifically when contrasted by the freedoms motivating play within Sekiro and Demon’s Souls.

In philosophy, a positive freedom is one which allows the discovery of self action and purpose through action - freedom of religion, freedom of marriage, freedom from descriminations - and a negative freedom is one which disallows action to purposefully, incisively, or meaningfully be chosen by presenting choice wherein there is an operator denying the substance of the choice by its presentation - freedom to ‘choose’ your grocery options, freedom to work and ‘make a living’: they are the dichotomies of free will, one indicating the abilities human cognizance can realise when probing the boundaries of themselves and their society, and the the other countenancing the limits of transgression or excursion from the state of slavery to the state of freedom. What this distinction means in FromSoft’s Souls-catalogue is this: The freedom to choose a path, a weapon, a playstyle, etc. in the games prior to Elden Ring was lent various validation mechanisms that internal to the games system implied a correlation between the possibility of the playspace and the boundary reaching play of the player. For example, let’s pull a situation from Demon’s Souls: the player is using a melee build, successfully managing to fight and defeat bosses which have been able to be encountered and retreated from without obfuscation of golden path play. They encounter Old Hero, and after banging their head against the boss for a few tries, retreat to other spokes to try and grind or practice. Returning to 1-1, they find the Thief Ring and witness its affects; if they make the mental connection between the description and what they know of the boss from its behaviours and model, they find that the Thief Ring validates their utilising the world backward and forward with the toolset and knowledge instilled into them as a player. Maybe they were turned the wrong way towards grinding, but if they picked up the Thief Ring on their first pass, it wouldn’t have even occurred to them that Old Hero would be difficult or a challenge with a key. In short, the system which allows for the blocking of progress has at its limits a contingency for overcoming the blockage. Shorter in relay, in Sekiro the various difficulties of bosses are largely contingent on, yes, systems mastery, but also on the tools crafted for specific and, keeping in spirit with Shinobi history, unequal possibility space between the greater portioned action leniency given to the player than to the bosses.

In Elden Ring, let’s imagine another situation: the player, using a dexterity/intelligence build, upon leaving Limgrave goes to the gates of Stormveil to fight Margit (as most players do on their first playthrough). They get roundly smacked by him a few times, maybe a few dozen times, before leaving to, similar to their leaving Old Hero, grind or discover. They go Northeast to Caelid and get clobbered. They go to the Weeping Peninsula, fight through it to Caste Morne, which they find challenging but slightly less so than Margit, so they die their way through it to the Leonine Misbegotten. They fight it (and get a measly 3,800 runes) and it drops the Grafted Great Sword. Having earned maybe 5 levels going so far South, they return to Margit and die 20 more times before getting lucky with the AI and continuing on. Now of course, they could have found Margit’s Shackles if they’d found Patches if they’d found Murkwater Cave (and for transparency, I didn’t on my first playthrough) but unlike the Thief Ring, it works twice on Margit and only in his first, much easier, phase. This is the difference between the playspace Elden Ring and the other, less ‘open’, variations found in earlier releases: in those games, the paths of progression were meted out to afford and ensure that players were given all the boundary reaching toolsets to express themselves within the world; in Elden Ring, those tools are either denuded in pursuit making sure challenge is equal across players regardless of what freedoms they have been sewn or placed so that the freedoms allowed are those whose presences and possibilities are more surprising than their absences.

A much shorter point that leads from the previous is this: difficulty as a meaningful indicator of theme and tone. Elden Ring is in many ways the latest in a fed, growing, insatiable fire started by the marketing and anathematic to its time play of Dark Souls. Hidetaka Miyazaki, the directorial head of all the FromSoft games in this lineage excepting the vanilla version of Dark Souls 2, has stated that his intention of difficulty was to reinforce idea-forms of mountainous overcoming in how any given player can reference themself in relation to the FromSoft catalogue. Of course, as we see mimed micro in Elden Ring, the scaling of difficulty can grow not just with entries of reinforcing playstyle but also with echoing reinforcement of the industry’s understanding of the Souls combat style in the market. FromSoft can no longer satisfy themselves making an intra difficulty, or really, if they stuck to their stated aim, a play which reinforces achievement internally to the world, but has to move to an external fort of difficulty and, more importantly, impressing difficulty amongst Jedis Fallen, Niohs, Surges, and so on. Elden Ring’s enormous spike in difficulty following Leyndell is well documented elsewhere but I want to more specifically, and briefly, comment on how the difficulty can be contextualised amongst the other various elements of play: let’s put a scenario up against DS2. In Elden Ring, when first entering into the Mountaintop of the Giants, you come across a ruin like any other. It is inhabited by three Knights of Zamor, enemies who, regardless of your build, utterly smoke the tree trunk through in a way totally upscaled beyond any consideration from Leyndell, potentially an increase in damage and health of 300% over the average knight in the previous area. This difficulty is clearly meant to indicate crossing a precipice into a different kind of hostility than was previously understood or probed - but, why here? Why these enemies? Why to such an incredible degree? The player has fought boss versions of this enemy that go down in 1/10th the amount of hits, scaling even for damage inflation. The answer is Elden Ring, like every FromSoft game before, has to earn continual monikers of huge and difficult encumbrances, only now they have to come 15 times in a game - Ornstein and Smough at all points on the compass. By contrast, in DS2 the player exits Heide’s Tower of Flame and fights a dragon from an area not past discovered, like with the Knights of Zamor, but from far down the golden path, the Dragon Aerie. It is a reasonable spike in difficulty, and probably has more lacklustre design in both its arena and moveset than the Knights of Zamor. But, once defeated, the player doesn’t continue to climb a sharp and sheer cliff of difficulty endlessly skyrocketing. Instead, they fight The Old Dragonslayer, now too impotent to do what they did just outside the front door.

The difficulty tells a story both within the hands and in the game in FromSoft’s earlier works, whereas in Elden Ring, it merely tells on the devs.

There is more to be said but I don’t want to find out if there is a character limit on GG, so I’ll end with this: Elden Ring is FromSoft’s best realised world in a fictive sense; it has characters with more agency and intrigue and genuine pathos than any game in their catalogue which came before en masse (although Sekiro tells a more compelling story in the actual course of the game, whereas Elden Ring keeps its goods locked in the prior to start screen). It is gorgeously animated, the design of the creatures and world is consistently enthralling, strange, frightening, and funny. Its soundtrack is better than those of all the other Souls games combined. It, with its success, guaranteed in a small way the inevitability of Miyazaki being able to continue creating weird little fucked up dudes; if there is any miracle in 21st games, it is probably those fucked up little dudes. But, it is for better or worse, the last Souls game. They could go back to making more linear, more thoughtful, more ebbing and flowing, more mysterious, more just for me kinds of games - but they’ll be tarnished by the knowledge that they can always again bend the knee to Rockstar, Ubisoft, and Blizzard and every cycle of perpetual gaming that keeps the art a subject of commerce.

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.

Not to be cute or anything, but this really is one of the strangest games I’ve played this year. Not in terms of the affectations that it puts on, its aesthetic ambiguity/distance from the norm and that which it subverts, because as we’ve begun to see with nostalgic recreations/realisations of the impressionistic lenses we viewed older PSX and 1-bit graphical works with, the aesthetic plasticity that games manage to command coherency with is aggressively broad and getting broader every day; it’s strange for the fact of its singularly most remarkable strength being that it writes dialogue with a mostly consistent and interesting lens of euphonious first principles. Games writing, as commonly bemoaned for being subpar as it is uncritically and unsubstantially championed against other media’s language, is not known as broadly being something which draws new players to the medium nor what keeps players around. There are outliers, Torment, KRZ, Disco Elysium, but they prove the rule: games writers typically have an enormously difficult time putting scripts into their works which harness the broadness and depth of language commensurately with any media which has allotted spoken or written communication in their art. Canned dialogue, utilitarian conveyance from justification to justification, is the expectation that is most often held and only sometimes met. Despite this however, the macro writing of games, at a AAA level a bit more and at the indie level a bit less, actually works on a functional level which many American films and genre fiction novels fail to achieve (although it is indie games which more often prove the writing rule wrong well as being the game sphere who have more immediate goals of furthering design ideas entirely divorced from traditional narrative and dialogue, so while they are often less seen on 2nd base, it’s usually because they hit homers or aren’t at the stadium). The reasons for progressing through points A, B, and C on the way to Z are hit with decent grandeur. This is a function of editorial, mechanised production, but is nonetheless impressive enough to be noted, especially considering that games are meant to juggle narrative justification with a rote gameplay loop which, in its repetition, cannot be seen as a reliable force for development. This somewhat consistent proficiency of games generally is part of what makes Strangeland such an outlier: its macro-writing is horrible, worst in class pap that manages to sink below not only the high grade of adventure games, which alongside RPGs are usually the best examples for games writing at both the macro and micro level, but also down into and beyond the depths of rushed FPS campaigns and mobile puzzle games. But, the writing on a line to line level is legitimately tuned to the patter, rhythm, and musicality of speech seen in many good romantic and modern poets: often in Strangeland, a line sings with a macabre and tortured appetite such as those written by Dylan Thomas, Rimbaud, or Anne Sexton. The grand-scale editorial writing is largely nonfunctional as games writing, at its worst when functioning as the brilliant summarised “puzzles as plots” definition by Ian Danskin, but it never feels against the grain of what games writing should contain when placed within the context of its lovely prose, which is to say that they never feel migrated from a poetry collection or intimate film scene.

There are small other successes in Strangeland, certainly the pixel graphics are a secondary, if less spectacular, achievement. In failures though, the game is plentiful. The puzzle designs are both barren and simple, issuing for the Stranger a path which is easily tread, features no compelling thought, and is shorter than a good exercise outing should demand. At around 2-3 hours, Strangeland somehow finds time to make a weak impression across nearly all of its facets. But, the writing is so surprisingly well founded at the level of sentences that following the team is an easily justifiable and worthwhile endeavour.

Scourgebringer approaches game design with a scrupulous, or maybe an agnostic puritanism, distaste for elements that are non-combinatronic or against stream in their play matching. The entirety of the skill tree, navigated in the 20 second intervals taken between the game’s 10 minute runs, consists of quilting together elements, which already had interaction across several matrices, further and further into tighter and tighter knit. By the time Scourgebringer runs extend consistently into the final area, extending the initial dives of 2 minutes dashes to 15 minute sprints, every action, every element of the playspace, will engage the player with a mechanical statement that has another verb parenthetically communicated within it: your double jump keeps you off the ground, extending your ‘don’t touch the floor’ damage bonus for the room, which resets your dash, which has within it a smash reflection, which kills an enemy, increasing a different ‘enemies killed within getting hit’ damage bonus, which resets smash, jump, and dash in one button press. It is airtight; it is suffocating; it becomes very boring.

I don’t know exactly how the style of roguelike design became cemented as a map traversed by subsections of pre-laid out rooms, but I always assume that, even if there were games that used the formula previous to, Isaac is the game which any game made after Edmund McMillen’s maximalist manifesto takes as doctrine. There are variations: Gungeon’s “rooms” are environmental more elastic and rely on engagement with enemy patterns more than enemy placement; Nuclear Throne’s connective environment massiveness (comparatively) creates a truncated ebb and flow loop similar to something like Counter Strike’s shoot first or get fucked; Rogue Legacy designed for training exhaustion, trying to create a backdrop for swings of luck and disappointment, which could be denuded by good or bad play, but which really were meant highlight the more concrete elements of class, skills, and equipment - showing the variety the player could have at their disposal instead of what variety of minimally intelligent monster the game could muster. Isaac has such a wide centre that design elements from all three of the games just mentioned, and many more, are contained in some germ within its massive corridors of content, but similarly, all three above take the germ therein to raise and ripen. Scourgebringer, on the other hand, decided that the proper course of action was not to witness the fruit of further growth stifled by so much undergrowth but to prune away everything with thorns, scent, and colour into new shape. It is very manicured, and it looks interesting when driving by, but like any apple tree cut to appear like a dinosaur head, you can’t really enjoy what it’s meant to be with what it is. For every idea that Isaac has had which doesn’t figure in to every run at nearly every moment, Scourgebringer has eradicated it and shorn up the space which held it.

The most frustrating part of looking at how Isaac has been influential is that it seems most designers have some degree of criticism regarding its ‘messiness’. Seemingly, the idea of coins becoming useless later on, hearts being a pointless drop for half the characters, keys having an upper limit use case of about 4 for 95% of runs, and maybe a 10:1 ratio of items which actually excite an idea of playing post their acquisition, is something which designer’s don’t look kindly at. What, you don’t want to overfill your game to bursting over the course of 10 years? For essentially free? I get it - Isaac is unruly, and Edmund McMillen is not the most disciplined designer. Taking the most fun aspect of the most fun run possible in Isaac is a great pitch for branching off from the blueprint; leave out all the times you got a range up from the Bloat, and make it so The Forgotten can smack all projectiles back at the enemies while dashing through them with Dark Arts.

Look! I just designed every Scourgebringer run.

That’s the problem with trying to make a purely antiseptic roguelike: the messiness of the play, which ultimately is the basis of all roguelike games in the action vein, given that you sacrifice with the genre’s any emotional concreteness from encounter design within a significant architectural world, profundity of economy to character state, or explication of cosmology from item placement, is the pantry of the game, not the recipe. Isaac’s vast surplus of mechanics is not a gooey pot of negative mixtures which counteract the flavour they bring - they are the possible spices which can be added to enhance each other, often bringing out flavours and potentialities unrealisable without experimentation. Scourgebringer plays like it's the favourite food of someone who only like chicken nuggets, like it is for someone who only can consume one small and safe idea that cannot come into contact with anything challenging to the palate without tantrum.

This is baked into every facet of play: the room layouts are variations of surface to emphasise wall running without actually compromising the ability to wall run; the enemies are all variations of bullet hell enemies that emphasise tight dodging and parrying without actually offering any difference in possible strategic play; the items are all tightly engaged with the highly integrated mechanical verbset but they change the verbset not at all, essentially negating any use other than to bookmark the fact that you’ve been playing for X minutes.

Of course, to use the food analogy, chicken nuggets are tasty (or in my case, tofu nuggets). They are cheap, and they are easy to eat, and mostly everyone likes them at some time or another. So is Scourgebringer bad? Maybe it's bad for you? At least if it’s all you eat, but McDonalds doesn’t sell them because they're trying to create food art. Nuggets are for when you either are on the road to something more substantial and worthwhile, maybe on the highway from Pentiment to Skin Deep (plllllleeeeease release this year). If that’s the case, then enjoy a bit of deep fried hack n slash. But if nuggets are one’s entire diet? You might look a bit sweaty.

Writing about any sort of thematic implications of play or ludic tone that Neon White puts forward would, even if accurately restated and taken without malicious audience, kind of damn the game in the evaluation. The play, as anyone who has paid attention to the game at this point, has a perfect arrangement in matching facades of what the player thinks they are capable of, what the game demands of them, where they may fail to, and how high they can go; it works on all levels of engagement from just arriving at the finish line to calculating each jump and turn with geometry. But, the play is just that: a beautiful equation which is austere and elegant on the blackboard but more implacable as the chalk used to write it up there. And that’s just the play. The writing and narrative of the game, if anything in relation to the play, are an equation written up on the chalkboard with diagrams of conspiracy theory, dance steps, and Lamarckian prognoses of evolution; in short, it doesn’t add up and couldn’t add up due to there being nothing of cogency or interest or depth within the writing of the characters or their journeys. Jacob Geller called it delicious cringe in his review, I call it inedible.

I play so few survival games that my ability to assume the mindset required by them, the collect, craft, and concatenate some coral into a spaceship mindset, is pretty pitifully resistant to the fantasy that these games promote. Land on a distant planet or come to your stranding in an isolated wood, take a breath and assess, then assemble manifest destiny in the New West - or so, I think, is the arc which most survival games hope to promote: starve > don’t starve > fatten. Again, I don’t really play very many of these games. The essential quality that promotes exciting play, overcoming high level systems that when wrassled with lower level systems become themselves a new baseline, has always felt so much more like work for me than play. I understand the desire for progression paths, but the progress that really gets me going is usually at the accomplishment of player compulsion more so than systems achievement. Like, if I am to fashion an axe to lop down a tree or a pickaxe to open a cave network’s mouth, I would rather the tension of those tasks be something that is made interesting because I have to configure a triangular power relation between me, the obstacle, and my tool; the making into a ladder of these problems, something which can be overcome with fashioning a steel axe instead of a stone axe, has always felt repetitive and distancing to my action as a player within a world.

Just as a side note, this is what makes me more interested in games which automate the gathering and construction aspects of resource management/survival games, such as Infinifactory, because survival is framed as a logistical issue rather than a technological one.

All that said, Subnautica, for at least the first 2/3rds of its playtime, managed to mostly assuage the monotony I encounter in myself typically evoked by these games. Having the play transported from a purely terrestrial setting (as obviously my use of examples above show, there are only so many times, aka once, that punching down a tree to make campfires can maintain interest) to one that transgressed many layers of depth in an alien world with alien accessibilities fuels a necessary drive of play that feels more inhabited than is typical for survival games. There is a human curiosity evoked by Subnautica’s world that rarely comes across in most games, much less woods based survival games. There is also the general lack of vertical progression in the blueprint trees, favouring more broadly a lock and key horizontal progression; the matching of the radial compassing at first, followed later by expansion to the depths, with a toolset that requires new mechanics as opposed to better, or merely upgraded, tools keeps the game feeling fresh, and provides a different station of address as the plotting of the game progresses. This plotting of blueprint scavenging itself is uniquely interesting - the scarcity and abundance of individual coppers or corals is, with the mystery and horror of the depths and what goes on in them, impinged with a necessity that is not purely systemic, but actually expedites any nuisances of travel (of which there are a lot by the late game) with character motivation instead of just avatar motivation. Of course, there is along all of this the charm, and terror, of the design wrapping the acrobatics of underwater game design; each encounter a precious indication of the wonders of being there, and of the distance struck at how close you are to things which should never have been approached as such.

Nonetheless, and despite all the positive things I encountered in my playthrough, Subnautica didn’t convert me to this style of game. The traversal, by the end, was enormously tedious: the radar - not the radar in the Cyclops but the radar that develops in the player as they have to incorporate new elements of play in their mining shuttle runs, seeing the same things over and over until those things become white noise which is only penetrated by shinies and sharks - rarely blips with motes of interest after you really start depth diving, rendering the wonder of the world entirely moot by the time the plot necessities become full meals instead of aperitifs. The resolution of the mysteries is expectedly disappointing if not entirely unforeseen, and as that reveal is more laid out in front of the player, the motivation for progression regresses into typical survival game resource haranguing; after 15 hours, the ocean weeds and leviathans may as well be trees and bears for their familiarity. Unfortunately, alongside all of this, the radial traversal which is so rewarding out the gate becomes just frustrating as you take 5-10 minutes every 30 minutes just navigating your Sea Moth or Prawn suit back to your Cyclops and then back to your base, which itself is annoyingly necessary to the progression and hugely frustrating to shuttle run the required resource for constructing.

All said, Subnautica balances more positively than not, but I would have preferred a tip to more malevolent privation, making things worse and worse as the game went on leading into tragedy - an abundance of resources on the surface and nothing but horror and death and starvation and suffocation at the depths; if the game is going to try and capture some Lovecraftian monster design to evoke horror, why not make the pursuit of knowledge the ultimate downfall of the player? They may go as far into the depths as they like, but they can’t return the same. As it stands, it is just another fattening power fantasy about how cool it is to colonise but how shitty it is to colonise for a boss.

The description of 'it's like BotW but with the combat removed' seems to me a brokerage of the funds that we seem to take as an objective, inset currency in gaming without considering their confluence unnatural with the more intrinsically simulating mechanics broadly seen in games generally but open-world games specifically; why, with this understood by a mere moment's consideration, do we not call BotW Sable with combat added? Or Sable an open world exploration game and BotW an open world arcade game? The purity that is so often ascribed to Shigeru Miyamoto's transliteration of his adventuring as a child into the Zelda ethos is not critically understood as an impure alchemy when mixed with the necessary element of a combat loop to insure larger audience appeal by creating further petits win-states (or petits états de mort for the satisfaction angle if you prefer) to firmly emburden a tight gameplay loop. Now, BotW is probably a better game in my opinion than Sable, but I dislike the comparison of Sable as one of those '_______ but _______' games because it disengages with the critical element the community of critics and creators of other mediums have established as forms of representation and innervation in the engagement context we create with our art forms: that each climatological shift in a form is because of a new viewpoint observed by a style - so Sable being a combatless BotW is kind of frusturating, I guess.

So apparently this originally came out in 2021, but it seems like the 2.0 release is the build that most people have latched onto, and it’s also the only version of the game that I’ve personally played, so given that this release of the game came out only a few months ago, it is both extremely easy logistically and critically for me to say that Slice & Dice is my 2022 game of the year. When I think of games that I’m in the pocket for, I picture wordy, thematically cohesive and complex, highly symbolic, systems light experience; KRZ, Night in the Woods, 30 Flights, The Beginner’s Guide, Anatomy - these are the games which I feel most at home interacting with and criticising. I play a fair amount of games, but by far the bulk of my leisure time is spent reading, so games which cohere and lend themselves to the elements of a medium which I have more familiarity and breadth of discourse adeptness are typically those which glom onto my heart with the most saccharine binds. So in a year which saw released Citizen Sleeper, Norco, Immortality, Pentiment (which is what I’m playing now, and is likely either 2nd or tied for 1st GOTY with Slice & Dice), and Betrayal at Club Low, I’ve managed to surprise myself by loving most a game which has no narrative, no non-verb descriptive text, no thematic depth or presence at all, and which has roughly the tonal quality of an Advanced D&D source book cover. Somehow amongst roguelites, a genre with about as much narratological aversion that games like Chess can be read more deeply into, with its starling wireframe bulwarks of Slay the Spire, Isaac, Monster Train, Into the Breach, Spelunky, and Enter the Gungeon, Slice & Dice somehow manages to be more stripped back in all the elements of storytelling than the high college of its genre. But, like the best of the genre, narrative is external to the intricacy, elegance, scope, and interaction of the mechanical system underpinning the collated sprites and design of everything the player sees.

Strangely enough, the game that this feels most like, despite it’s mechanical log line reading more like Dicey Dungeons meets Baldur’s Gate, is Into the Breach. It’s a strange sibling, given this game’s wild swings in verb set with a massive item and play mode toybox against ItB’s narrow and infinitely deep scope, and only harder to investigate in comparison due to how completely reliant S&D is on RNG when ItB is basically devoid of randomness; the comparison, however, feels unavoidable for me. The presence of the undo button, allowing for aggressive simulation and deliberation of tactics, as well as the complete information and ability to negate through huge swaths of play canvas, combined with the combination of squad based play (which despite being turn-based gives immensely satisfying playfeel, ordering out offences and executing plans made on the fly feels about as great in the hand as speeding through a level without touching the ground in Downwell) make it a real cousin, perhaps the first true successor, to Subset’s masterful tactics outing. Whereas Into the Breach felt like playing with miniatures on a playmap despite the flavour painting it as Armored Core meets War of the Worlds, Slice & Dice feels like fighting through the Mines of Moria, despite being presented as a stack of cute as a button profile pics - there is a weight to the entire experience, probably modelled from the real physics dice, that makes the experience feel weighty and present in a fashion not really typical for games which lend themselves to envisioning as spreadsheets. It’s strange to say, but the pips denoting 5 damage rampage vs piddly 1 pip cantrips damage feels about as kinaesthetically diverse as any dex v strength weapons in Elden Ring.

The breadth and generosity of play is somewhat dumbfounding for a game at this pricepoint - the huge assortment of heroes, items, play modes, and enemies is overflowing with possibility, creating runs which hinge on any of 20 different mechanics with swings that feel momentous. Every turn can shake out as a scythe cutting down the enemy goblins in one turn or can lead to a total party wipe, all depending on how you decide to mete out your attacks in what order and with what keywords you apply. It’s an astounding achievement.

There is room to grow, although I don’t want to deign myself as able to judge what would be worth adding to such a nearly perfect game. All I can say is that with one further dimension of iteration, whether that would be a well written narrative campaign, spacing and environmental mechanics a la Divinity Original Sin, just more heroes and enemies, or something else entirely, Slice & Dice could easily become my favourite roguelite game of all time. It’s a marvellous game, one of a calibre which has only come along maybe 7-8 times in the last decade.

I want to engage with Immortality thematically, to work down into the meat of each video clip, seeing what was digested and what is doing that digestion, with scalpel and mirror to find the beating heart of the game. It’s rare for modern games to have a controlling idea that is 1) internally consistent, 2) multidimensionally explored both through a varied cast and through various eras of an idea’s relevance, and 3) often inarguably at odds with the play structure of the game. Immortality has a great deal to say about the types of fame that we’ve allowed to be normalised, cliched, reproached, and reappropriated for women through the many decades of entertainment’s objectifying them - a thematic ideal told with an eye towards the grander patriarchal systemic incentives, for both complicity in women and men, as well as in personal narratives that inherit those systemic templates but also incorporate the personal, the incidental, and the situational. Many games fail to meet one-dimensional characters, and fewer even reach a two-dimensionality that isn’t hinged on plot contrivances of betrayal; three-dimensionality is rarer still, and, outside of those monstrous gold-gulleted AAA titans of budget, are often enforced by a restricted range of characterisation tools incorporated by the devs, off-loading nearly all of that character writing onto text and the impressions of the player (not that there is anything wrong with that: Rayman doesn’t need complexity and God/Dog doesn’t need full 3D mocap performances with 5,000 lines of dialogue). Immortality has every air of success in terms of depth without developer blood, and rigour without that typical child-like simplification of games.

But what comes across when read coolly, found in an uncoordinated summing of the meanings found within it from a vantage point that considers its purpose apart from its art, is a far cry from extremities weaving clemency and blame with murder and medicine. The themes, the characters, the hazy idea of its storytelling are all high quality in production and execution; the conveyance of those remarkable qualities are hampered by a play that domes them off in resin, making amber brilliance of a dead and stagnant, unbreathing and untouchable, complex organism. The tactics of play has the player sit down to assume an ‘editorial’ position (here scare quoted because the actual editorial faculties assumed are really just a touch more expansive than the mindset appraised in watching a youtube playlist) over a proposed restoration of films made by the followed main character: an actress of mysterious historical renown. You go through the clips in the same dizzied manner as in Sam Barlow’s other games: piecemeal, undictated by paths not straight nor groomed. The play idea is fine, in theory. But in practice, it is so distant from the possibility of play empathy, it ends up shaming the entire game. In Her Story, the consonance of the narrative and the goal of the story resolution is remarkable. As you crawl through the police archival footage, you are investigating testimony of a suspect with the tools of your PC’s trade - there is a 1-1 translation from player to player character: literally not a single differentiation in what the story is made of and what can be done to make it. In Immortality, the understanding of your task ludically, which is compiling a restoration of an artist’s considerable and worthwhile tasks finished and promptly forgotten, is completely at odds with the actual evaluation of the footage itself. Instead of marvelling in the composition of the shots, the words placed in the actor’s mouths, the transformation from the informal (and maliciously mounted) direction to the completed and acted transgression of the act, or even the presence of those themes I mentioned above; these are all not engaged with as if we were watching a film that was worthy of historical recognition. What we see, what we play, is a moving eye spy game, with all the gravitas of the CD-ROM format those games were stuffed onto and then stuffed again into a cereal box. Taking the secret narrative seriously is laughable, and not just because of the hamfisted manner it is implemented to be found with by the spooooooky rumbles announcing it to the player through their controller, and following the obvious narrative is clinical because we don’t access art on screen through toggling speed dials - that’s why editing is often called the invisible art. Her Story had you legitimately investigating the possibility of a crime with the tools that allow us to see crime dissected. Immortality has you figuring out what haunts the commercials you surf through listlessly on a Saturday afternoon with your universal remote.

2023:
I'm leaving the below as my initial reaction to how I played the game two years ago, allowing the reality that the frustration I had at the design of the game when bouncing off it the first time was legitimate and would have kept me from ever replaying this game had not other circumstances intervened. That said, while I still think that the combat in NJ is mishandled, having now gone back and completed the game, the mood and atmosphere of Northern Journey is worth struggling through the friction of a badly implemented combat mechanic. There is real magic in this game, and while it can often feel like homework to see the wonderful things within, it is a valuable and unique experience.

2021:
Not rating because I didn't finish the game. The atmosphere is marvellous, the writing is opaque and off-putting with excellent malevolence, and the aesthetic design of the world and its inhabitants is brilliant. But the encounter design is worst in class, perhaps some of the foulest interaction mechanics I've seen in a few years. It takes many ideas from frightening, disempowering games, who in their explorations of mechanical tone took the ideas of horror gaming to new heights, without considering how they were less punishing in practice than in theory: in Northern Journey, enemies have no animations of attack, instead their bodies are hitboxes completely and they all leap at the player repeatedly for their attack cycle. If you graze a sheep, you take 1/6th your health - and you better hope not to graze anything because there are no i-frames after taking damage. Nearly every 3 minutes or so out of 90 minutes of play, I would go down from full health to 0 in less than 1 second due to my PC getting stuck on geometry (which enemies can't get stuck on for some reason; their pathing won't allow them to stop moving so they glitch over ledges) and touching a fly for literally less time than it took to hit the jump button and then touch the ground. And you'll be running a lot because the ammo is scarce, which is fine, and enemies have no leashes at all. And even that would be fine, I can deal with having entire herds or colonies chasing me through a swamp, that even kind of fits with the horror comedy of the game - but, for some inscrutable reason, the game requires enemy kill counts to exit to the next area on every area. WHY?! The combat is so achingly bad and so mindbogglingly included that it ruined entirely my experience. Not only that, but in a wild UNO reverse card from DOOM, the enemies move faster than the player's projectiles, so you can shoot an arrow at a sheep and have it dash under its arc to breathe on you and immediately end your game. Oh, and of course you can't save while in combat, which is more than half the game.

Coming right off of Stalker to this, which had the bland setting (compared to its source) with stellar combat, makes me wish this writer/artist had just grabbed somebody for a month or so with help in the designing the combat systems - they are profoundly horrible, literally some of the worst I've seen in a game not universally panned. Compare this to Resident Evil or Silent Hill, games with similar privation and awkward control - they allowed the player to jostle an enemy at the right time to get out of the way, and at least gave them more than 5 bullets (the ammo cap on your first actually useful weapon, and enemies have no drops at all and the first arena needs you to kill 45 to get through - seriously wtf) if they screwed up. In the original RE, it would take maybe 30 seconds to go from full health to dead, and that is considered hugely punishing in the genre.

If you think you can deal with truly horrendous play (and I'm talking 50 times the frustration of Pathologic) then the world and character design is wonderful and worth seeing. I couldn't struggle through it.

Roguelikes, after a decade of genre popularity increasing exponentially since the beginning of the 2010s with Isaac, Spelunky HD, and their ilk iterating and reiterating on various formulas of games previous thought to be necessarily designed within curves of play pacing and encounter editing, are no longer in the position of being possibly considered a fad genre. Other game genres, obviously less broad in their label (because really, roguelikes are linked by a mechanical binary state similarity rather than a generic coalition of traits, rather being decided as ‘roguelike’ depending on their lean in proc gen vs static design) with more intermingled and necessary signifiers of their family, that rose and fell alongside the roguelike have been evaluated with historical lenses that themselves are being re-evaluated; the roguelike, in comparison, still feels, despite being a genre that has had tentpole articles representing its type for more than 2 decades, as though it is in a stage of cultural gestation. Despite the deluge of titles released, academic inquiries published, and players hermited, the genre remains relatively untapped and under populated with all-time greats in both its game catalogue and its methodological concerns towards strong art statements. For me, one of the concerns foremost in obviousness of what is missing in both representation of greatness and methodology, is the equitable branching from tutorializing to incrementing game state. In practice, this would look like the point or area in which the game decidedly stops presenting new mechanics or contexts for its mechanics and instead begins to mete out the rewards of using those mechanics for the sake of expression, largely because systems mastery is the only metric of intrinsic progress within the actual play of most roguelikes. Spelunky is probably the only truly good example of this paid out in roguelikes, and this is likely due to its being, comparatively, extraordinarily spartan in its systems breadth yet hugely plungeable in depth (as well as Derek Yu being a genius, but who counts that these days). Even massive, indisputably influential and masterful examples of the genre, such as Slay the Spire or Isaac, fail to adequately demarcate where the player can expect the knowledge of mechanics to be funnelled into intra-systemic rewards or progress. It is not unusual to see reviews for any given roguelike stating something along the lines of, ‘it was too hard and after bashing my head against the wall, I gave up because I didn’t/couldn't do what I was asked and the game didn’t give me what I needed to progress’. Sometimes this is true and sometimes it isn’t but what matters is: if it feels like it’s true, it doesn’t matter if it’s true. The game can’t expect you to watch it change around you when it won’t help you change alongside it.

In Shovel Knight Dig, during my ~10 hours with it, I had several different moments of pause with each mechanic wherein I asked, “when should this become fun?” The answer, unfortunately dually because the production of the game is quite lovely external to its being interactive and because Yacht Club are a studio whose reliability with platforming and encounter design is remarkable regardless of what scale and budget you compare them to, was for me, never. This may be due to the fact that the digging, jumping, slashing, visiting town, catching items and upgrades, exploring, etc. are all poorly implemented and misaligned with each other (which is mostly true in the latter, and mostly conjecture in the former), but it is my read that the game was abandoned to the gulf between tutorializing and incrementing too early in development and is now stuck in a limbo of systems alienness without means of evolving it mechanically, evaluating it strategically, or intrinsically deriving any pleasure singularly from its presented actions. The town is woefully under equipped to make the meta progress worth caring about and the dungeons are gratuitous in their inability to conceptualise an excitement of play possibility that would feed into any town growth, if that was even a remote possibility. The upgrade variety ranges from necessary to useless, much like this year’s Dome Keeper, and because the entirety of Dig’s meaningful play occurs in the dungeon, it is almost unavoidable that you will find yourself 25 minutes into nearly every run realising that is doomed to failure, and that getting to that failure was horribly unfun (not that fun really factors into it: basically the highest state of euphoria in the game is diverting). The writing is fluff in a way that does not charm with the same care of anything in Treasure Trove; the ecology of the world doesn’t allow for characters in the way a curated play experience does (there is a reason why many roguelike players refer to high level play in their chosen games as ‘an exciting excel sheet’). If there is any overarching reason to the world and what Shovel Knight is doing in this stage of his saga, the game doesn’t allow the player to care nor does it care enough to expatriate itself to the rigours of play made by roguelikes as iterative story generators.

It hurts to see the first real commercial product from Yacht Club since they released Shovel Knight fail to this degree, especially since each campaign added for free onto that original game would be a GOTY contender in its own right had it been paid product, but Dig is not only bad, it’s obviously bad in a way that will be usable as case study for the genre.

So I haven’t played Dragonfall, which I’ve been lead to believe is the Shadowrun to really take in if you want the premier modern experience of the setting, and I from what I’ve heard, Hong Kong flies a bit more turbulently for people when they play it in the sequence of release. It’s possible that my general positivity on the game will be due in part to having it not fare in comparison to SR: DF, but I think if one’s approach to comparative criticism leads to sinking ships across the board, especially when two works are in sequence/concert and not in competition or replacement, then the process of arriving at one’s point is leaden. Hong Kong works as a series of barely associated concentric processes, feeding into each other with a good deal of success while having a bit of difficulty propping up each other. This appears in the obvious form of many economic elements within the game being nullified due to a, pretty egregiously, uninformed choice about playstyle at the beginning of the game; I played as an all the way sniper/shotgun street samurai, and with that choice, I rendered about 70% of the NPCs in the game’s hub useless. There is flavour to be had in the conversations players can dig into with these shopkeeps, but due to the narrative mechanics of the game having such a minor degree of overlap with the progression mechanics of the game, which are nearly exclusively delivered via combat or combat avoidance, the flavour of the game does little to promote itself outside of the immediate party members available for use in those combat parts of the game. Etiquette’s try to integrate dialogue into the game, but because of their simplistic binary status as efficacious promotions in at any moment - in contrast to say the roadway lead to lamppost approach of the non-combat dialogue possibilities in Torment, where you had to use the complete toolset of the game to carve open a path external to the obvious route so as to allow convincing to take place and cement that path’s alternative within dialogue - the dialogue merely becomes a displaced combat verb, one which is essentially a skill that reads ‘non-lethally dispatch all enemies’. It’s a shame that there is less necessity of the dialogue on the rest of the mechanics, which are, of course, themselves disassociated with the text portions of play in HK, because it’s typically well written and excellently edited prose. It doesn’t assume grandiosity that, if done poorly, can sink a game as quickly as elevate it, but remains squarely in the sphere of plainspoken pathos, the same kind of sparse and unpretentious dialogue and description you might find in the best kind of genre fiction: Le Guin’s Dispossessed or Ishiguro’s Green Giant. The world is degraded from the wild intermixing of elevated prose description of dreamlike strata intermingling a stream of consciousness dizziness; the world is a series of reticulated possibilities, and the style reflects that. There is depth to the characters and the setting, but they are debted to the effectiveness of the run, if only in presence and not in actual use.

The minute to minute XCOM-lite combat is about as stripped down as this system can get, and as has been stated by many reviewers, very easily stretched to absurd simplicity. By the time I was about 2/3rds of the way through the game, I was taking out 2-3 enemies per turn with only my PC, and the rest of the squad wasn’t shabbily either. There is satisfaction in the progression from cowering behind cover to beheading behemoths of corporate providence from 100m away with a sniper rifle, but at least in part because of the modality of play swapping back and forth, as well as the budget constraints on system’s design, it wears its welcome out pretty quickly. At a certain point, because the ceiling for all the various builds are low, and because of the constrained breadth of combat possibility, unlike that in XCOM or DOS2, it is hard not to see the various verbs reduce to differently coloured kill buttons. Luckily 20 hours keeps this from becoming a dragged out and woozy affair, allowing only just a bit too much revelry of the overpowered nature of play to stay on board, but nonetheless, it is something that for last 5 missions felt like a was tapping through to get back to talk to all my little boat babies.

I might add a bit more on this log once I play Dragonfall, just so that I can comment on how the system’s and setting are unique in their own ways, but as far as CRPGs go, in isolation, HK is a safe bet for fans of the genre.