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 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 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’m not sure what stage of Soulslike influence the current design sphere is in right now, what with Elden Ring’s entirely saturating the market with basically everything the genre’s playebase could want, be that the combat, storytelling, world design, player expressibility, or some combination therein. It’s possible that with FromSoft’s most recent outing that Soulslikes will go the way of Doom Clones and take what iteration the last decade of the type has gone through over the last decade and completely turn it on its head - what would the Deus Ex or Portal of Dark Souls even look like? However, that’s 2023; for a while, it seemed like the goal was less for games to take initial inspiration from FromSoft’s soft series and more to produce facsimiles of that style of game as quickly as possible with the serial numbers filed off. The obvious examples are the fast follows, Lords of the Fallen or The Surge, Nioh perhaps as a more successful variation or Salt and Sanctuary as one of the first “Darks but ____” games , but there were small enough changes made to many of this type that, while necessary to qualify their status as ‘clones’, they were worth relating back to Soulsborne games as something which was in a mutual conversation with Miyazaki’s ethos and not merely mimicking its expression.

Mortal Shell is certainly one of those games, and also certainly for the worse. It breaks off from the Souls conventions in many ways, but those ways are almost exclusively to the detriment of its systemic interactions and balance, leaving a mishmash of things which have the silhouette of Dark Souls (or really, more Demon’s Souls) without any of the refined features. If anything is unique in this game, it is a uniquity of extremity made from a childish lack of acknowledgment concerning blossomed restraint, utterly convinced that things are mature when they are simply more than they had been: Dark Souls was opaque, Mortal Shell is without form; Dark Souls was slow and methodical, Mortal Shell is leaden and finicky; Dark Souls was fantastical, Mortal Shell is maniacal. It is devoid of not simply new ideas, but of ideas at all, creating a mess of a game which promotes no excitement at progressing through any of its design axes - where Dark Souls had eureka moments of combat, building, exploration, storytelling, Mortal Shell is pages on pages of deluded beats admiring themselves for the semantic freedom, refusing to acknowledge that a sign which can mean anything means nothing, and if it is surrounded by shit, it is crowned the signatory of waste.

I realise that I was overly general in my summation, so here are just a few concrete examples of things which nip a player’s heels to bone over the course of a playthrough:

- Enemy attacks proc in regard to player proximity alone and calculate hits from that proximity, which I imagine was designed to increase use case for the hardening so that players might ostensibly have a longer period of reaction, but this proc does not consider terrain. What this means is if there is a slope between an enemy and the player, the enemy will begin an animation at the top of a slope, have the distant foreshortened because the decreased exponential distance between enemy and player, and warp to the player to compensate what the game thinks is the animation completing sooner due to proximity. Nearly every big enemy in the game has this behaviour. In every area, I would be about a 5 second run from a big bad type enemy who has begun an attack only to have them begin a sword swing that started at the maximal difference and ended .3 seconds later through my torso.

- The area design across every portion of the game world is 1) entirely a single primary colour with a minor highlight (and highlight here is roughly analogous to the way moles highlight skin), so differentiation and personality drawn from the disparate areas is nil, and 2) the architecture, both in terms of the plausibility of intelligent habitation in the world design and the traversable space afforded to the player in the level design, is laughable, literally worst in class, something that would be weakly made in Halo’s Forge mode. The game is without a map (because Dark Souls didn’t have a map, duh), and I cannot stress enough how frustrating navigating the game is when compared to, as it so desperately wants to be, Dark Souls’ masterclass in influencing navigation. The majority of the game will, even if you look at fan made maps, be spent running around in circles in a monotonously green forest fighting idiotically arranged enemy encampments, because bad level design begets bad encounter design, and the game will not reward that investment with either a systemic mastery of space nor a narrative understanding of the space’s purpose.

- Narratively speaking, of course, the game has mostly gaps which are meant to be filled; Souls never tells the story straight, so why would its imitators. The number I’ve seen thrown around for how much of the narrative is explicitly within the text of the Souls series, which here specifically does not include Bloodborne or Sekiro, is about 70%. That means that while the game can progress mostly with a majority understanding of the events imparted, major inferences must be made to complete the cycle in a player’s appraisal. Mortal Shell can’t really be described as 70% or 40% or any percent because the narrative is less a cohesive progression of events or thematic happenings and instead a boss rush with dialogue. The goals are insipid, the mummery of the PC is pointless when compared to Mortal Shell’s influences, and the flavour of the cast is unsalted and boiled. It promotes no discourse on the value of such a world with such inhabitants, and the goal of the game, when accomplished, has less textual or emotional bearing that “you played a great game”.

2022 is over; the GOTYs have been widely discussed, re-reeled, scheduled to be remade for 2027, doubled over in irrepressible initial praise and immediate vitriolic backlash - Elden Ring, God of War, 1001 Fortnites: here in January, they stand like Ozymandias before a sandstorm as the next New Year’s 1st comes 24 hours quicker every day. Further in the creases of the closed past year are the mites which were either praised in miniature or overlooked in grace; Signalis, Citizen Sleeper, Vampire Survivors, and the various other explosive indie-darlings that took their respective shelters in critical close-ups, let’s plays, sale prices, and at least one insufferable cultural neophyte’s, in grace before you, journal pages, but their smallness and comparatively miniature debt to market trends and hardware specs won’t keep them from wearing away under the beating sand of 2023, 24, 25, etc. Next year, everything that shone like gold in 2022 will be a humbled burnished bronze. The year after that, bronze will be a greening copper that seems less worthy to cover chapels housing gods and their pacts than was previously believed. On and on goes the cycle of games history that in 20 years, all of what feels momentous today will be scarred and ashen ruins; the scaffolding of a future which has rebuilt the past in retrograde and auburn.

Of course, ruins like these on a site like Backloggd are not inscrutable ancient labyrinths derived from partitioned alien design - they are sites themselves for a spatially derived historiographic practice, something like a map you unfold and step into. The winnowing away of time reveals the bones, beliefs, surgeries, births, burial signs of a past that has marginally garmented our present but was the progenitor of all present day genomes; it’s not just the DOOM to DOOM (2016) timeline, but the Catacomb 3-D to Neon White aqueduct.

In closer terms, what we see in future ruins here are the endless little foundations that run under well trod ground: Darklands to Wasteland to Fallout to New Vegas to Pillars of Eternity to Pentiment - the waters have run deep, shaping the hills, valleys, monument, and community settled above it today. Obsidian’s micro-team, led by Josh Sawyer, defined by his writing and Hannah Kennedy’s art, has produced, for my taste, the 2022 game of the year - they have, with their incisive and deep craft concerning this perfect niche, produced, in fact, the best game of the 2020s so far. It is a game that will extend out in perpetuity par excellence, filing in aura with regard to the lineage its writing and art direction take from Petronius, Bruegel, Eco, and Dürer; it takes its hyper-relevance to our current time and place by taking thematic sensitivities and beginning design principles from the mechanical arguments of games such as Night in the Woods and Kentucky Route Zero, as well as the sociological thoroughness seen in works such as Satantango and or The Green Knight; it reveals a deep, warmly academic respect by being a already fossilised and archived, splendorous and ruined, game that unabashedly lays in its own grave, being one of the only fictions in our medium, one of the only pieces of art made to mass release in the last 20 years, that takes place in our shared human history yet still promotes in us hope for a future we know to have already passed. It has quickly come to ruin, and unlike what has come to ruin so theatrically and agonisingly wrought in Darkest Dungeon, signalled by its infamous line wrung from the cycling death of those cursed grounds that feeds like a Dutch windmill grinding up the toil sweat out by centuries of peasants, Pentiment seems poised not to be a site of consistent archaeological investment, but the site of myth and folk-tale; the reception to Obsidian’s masterpiece was warm but it failed to appear on many GOTY lists and, from what I was able to find, topped none of them. Unlike other wordy winding works, your Torments, Discos Elysium, Citizens Sleeper even, the Early Modern murder micro-drama will not seemingly be poured over with the insight of scholarship forever. It will wind down time, seemingly, like Remus and Romulus and the wolves.

But I will never forget it, and here are a few of the reasons why:

Pentiment is the ultimate game in a branching thought I’d mulled over in 2022, a thought which has wormed through a great deal of the promising indie games that were lauded by critics and audiences alike last year that fell entirely flat for me: Stray, Tunic, Peglin, Shovel Knight Dig - these, while all having interesting design decisions guiding their creative goals, failed to create and populate a play environment that antiseptically made for exciting interaction. In all these games, the goal of play was a fun thing to conceptually head towards, but the verbs and feedback of using those verbs was tasking, arduous, leaden, and weak. Tunic’s uninvestigated combat intricacy, minimal animation depth, boring breadth of traversal option, and isometric simplicity (unlike Bastion’s or DOS2’s, which excite seeing what is around the next corner by leading the eye and rewarding with multiplicity the player’s exploration) made going from anywhere to anywhere, as well as encountering anything through that route, a hum that deafened the tidiness of its exploration loop. The play couldn’t support the play thesis, just as oftentimes in bad novels with philosophical aspirations (realised or not), bad characterisation or stunted prose can remove the possibility of a complete thematic denouement. For me, it was the same in many other games of 2022 which were heralded as excellent - and despite seeing no such announcement of a modally, and it is crass to describe this mode as such, ‘gimmick’ reliant mechanical frame in Pentiment, I found that it instigates a profoundly rich environment for its feedback loop of verb input/output. The thought which Pentiment completed was this: in Mario and Dark Souls and other masterpieces of the medium, swinging your club or jumping is simply exciting and rewarding within the action itself internally to do without any other intertextual interaction or goal necessitating the use of the game’s verbset to progress a completion. If that is the case, this exercise of verbs as good in themselves being the fundamental ideal for kinaesthetics, can more traditional forms of narrative development, herein specifically dialogue, be verbally pleasing in this same way? I’m not talking about dialogue being pleasing to the ear or well written from a perspective of not wasting words, I’m asking if it can be comparably intrinsic in its reward structure to talk to NPCs for no narrative or mechanical benefit, such as there is no mechanical benefit to hopping around the castle grounds in Mario 64, as executing kinaesthetically pleasing verbs in more mechanics focused games. In Pentiment alone thus far, for me, has this been proven as possible.

Being free of RPG mechanics, unlike most other dialogue heavy games, allows Pentiment’s non-narrative progression necessary text to be framed within a new light for evaluation as part of a mechanical experience. Contrasting this mechanically undriven approach with the mechanically invested Disco Elysium, which has similarly profound and primordial text (although Pentiment’s is nearly entirely with character voices, whereas DE’s is split between dialogue and descriptive text, so there is a greater elasticity to the veritability in DE, which works for that game whereas the naturalistic approach of Pentiment works better internally for itself), the RPG progression and quest system of it plays into the reward structure of engaging in dialogue with NPCs - that doesn’t mean it’s less rewarding to talk to people as Harry than as Andreas, but the nature of the pleasure and the reward felt by the player is of a fundamentally different quality. Pentiment’s lack of stat trees, alternate routes, or even ‘good’ and ‘bad’ outcomes to events inset an environment for Tassing’s cast to emerge as a budding garden of pleasurable filigrees to investigate or not: it makes no difference, these conversations, to meeting objectives or rolling credits, but instead informs the degree to which your Andreas felt inhabited, just as does the pleasure of jumping exactly off the edge vs within the precipice’s borders do in Celeste.. The characterisation of Andreas - logician, rapscallion, traveller of Italy, France, or elsewhere - entices these little discussions about taxes, carpentry, foreign customs, gossip into equal parts microstory and fleshing out of your ingratiation to your individual Andreas; everytime you say something about how Socratic such and such is or how you would woo them and theirs with what, you are completing a path to a summit with your allowed verbs in the same way that you might climb a mountain in BOTW: that is, just to see if you can. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything or do anything, but it creates as broad and as beautiful a fiction to step into that video games can afford by their tools - a formation of no less expressive verbiage than any mechanical interaction in more system’s heavy games. In comparison to Stray, which thinks that games are a narrative told with fancy lighting and context sensitivity, Pentiment is Donne next to someone who thinks poetry are words that rhyme.

I want to contrast this lightly with games which are seen as narrative/text heavy, such as Night in the Woods or typical visual novels: for the former, the player chosen associating of Andreas with specific locales, temperaments, and academic colleges allows for tutorialising which ramps up the complexity of interaction without attaching stakes to it, which Night in the Woods doesn’t do by shaping entirely Mae’s backstory and aptitudes (which works for that story), instead allowing all conversations to largely have one route which is made immaterial by non-conflicting conversation diverticula, and which will resolve in a set outcome regardless of player piloting. For visual novels, and I’m mostly unfamiliar with the genre so this is a generalisation, the non-essential conversation may not feed into a mechanical advantage or systemic interaction, but often does influence a mechanical tallying stat which coincides with extrinsic rewards of extra-PC character interaction. This is differentiable from Pentiment in 2 ways: 1) in Pentiment, you don’t have sex with anybody you talk to, so the pleasure of talking carries no ulterior sexual motivation, and 2) the reward for engaging in these conversations is primarily driven by the ability to express your player inhabitation by extending the game’s verbs for expression vs. progression. Just as the reward for beating a time in a racing game against a dev ghost is different from your own ghost, the reward structure and positive feeling of ingratiation is different between the dialogue system in Pentiment vs those found as standard in visual novels today.

Another major fixture of Pentiment’s success is its manufacture of a setting that displays no mechanical advantage, as contrasted by the mechanical advantages conferred by settings on games such as Red Dead Redemption, which allows for R*’s design preference for breadth in interaction stimulus as well as emphasis on travel as opposed to traversal, or Resident Evil, the mansion being both a thematic root for the minor chord of corrupt elites being villainous with hoarded wealth and jeopardised public safety as well as providing a comical expansion on the ridiculous affordances of immoral spending. Obviously the influences on Josh Sawyer, his background in history as well as fascination with all things, not to mention ability to speak, German, coordinated a desire to set a game in this space - and after Annaud’s “palimpsest” of The Name of the Rose, this fascination delivered what might be the only chance at a good ‘adaptation’ of Eco’s work. But whereas many other design leads will think play first when factorialising trends for progression and digression in their game’s setting, Sawyer and his team impugned the fictional world for divesting itself of cultured culture: whereas other games are built like playgrounds for referential but not really interdependent gamifying (again, see RDR2), Pentiment fosters a setting which forms a playground of contrasted and commentorial ideas that are often gestured at but not reflected on in games. Historical feminism, church/state governance (without demonising either), the role of marriage as communal coordination, the functions of early governmental bureaucracy, human rights, fashion and the signifiers of pre-capitalist class roles, and more and more and more yet than can be revealed in a review (I can’t even begin to discuss how much I love the treatment of capital T Taboo in this Early Modern setting - Mary Douglas would be so proud) - the devs have talked about their including mini-games to immerse the player interactively in the world while switching up the pace, but for my salt, the inclusion of these moments detailing a world that thinks with an era and mind different from our own is the real breaking up of play (not to discount the mini-games, as we’ll see below their purpose in my evaluation).

The moment, which thankfully comes early on so you can really whet your appetite for these cherished little strands of life in the 16th century, that I want to illustrate as a choice example is the detailing of women’s roles in life and art as acted out and discussed by Sister Illuminata and Andreas while tidying the Scriptorium of loose and unreturned texts to the Abbey’s library. As the books are carried over from the stations of the brothers to the locked door of the library (keeping the sisters within and the brothers, as well as peasants and Andreas, out), Andreas and Illuminata discuss the varying roles for men presented in the tales - knight, knave, and all in between - while the figures of women, ladies love and damsels, remain stagnated and ungraspable as true characters. Not only are the arguments presented by Illuminata well written, both in voice and in content, they are also preponderent on the lives of women in that time and, remarkably, even more specific to the lives of the daughters of those who have enough means to sponsor their children in convents. Illuminata’s perspective, which wonderfully contrasts with other feminisms of other women in Tassing and Kiersau, is both an entirely personal, non-prescriptive, drive towards analytical reads of her contrasted position to others in the convent, and more specifically, of the brothers who live beside the sisters in the abbey. Illuminata is not trying to rally or convert over the Christian villagers or Benedictines; her feminism, in accord and respect to the Early Modern reality of womanhood, has a degree of fatalism attached to the position (and what’s more, that perspective remains personal but changes over the course of the game as Illuminata’s position changes). However, you can decide how convinced Andreas is by Illuminata’s description of her life - it has minor bearing on the plot, and you can not only be either a chauvinist or accept this early feminism, but you can reject Illuminata’s analysis for an entirely different feminism, one which includes different elements of life in the 16th century from differently affected social positions. And ultimately, these choices are only incumbents of immersion in the world - a process of world building, a writing skill which has become both laughably and pathetically divorced from trying to form contiguous threads of social commentary and instruction with our own world. Sawyer’s and Kennedy’s flex is not only creating a multitudinous world which affords as broad a spectrum of perspectives as our own world, but one that bears actual relevance and contains commentary on our own little history.

This small corner of Pentiment’s writing is just one of many hollows which foster ideals, either lost (for good or ill) or progenitorial, to our modern era. Nearly every character will have as much or more to say on any particular subject that fixates them than they will disclose on suspicions regarding murder. Florian will go into length at the expansiveness of early European travel experiences, funnelled through the threshing of mercenary combat, which in him presupposes a kind of Nietzschean amor fati. With one of the best characters in the game, Vacslav, you receive nearly no actual plot acceleration at all, but instead have in depth discussions on combinatorial mystic practices of early Christian splintering, pulling theological ideas from Swedenborg, Weil, as well as Buddhist ideas and Kabbalistic strains. For every character, there are discussions on polite scruples, architectural wisdom, changing literacy, fashion, and political upheaval. Nothing is left unturned, and by tilling the soil so faithfully across its cast, Pentiment grows broader and higher than most any other game developed in a decade.

Small note that’s somewhat important herein as well - other well written games with a wide swathe of commentaries on non-plot necessary subjects tend to run the border on the Northern end of where ideas become practices. For example, Torment has a huge deal to say on the nature of regret, on loyalty, on making amends, on how beliefs are fomented, on how death is abstracted in modern life. These all enrich the world of the game, of the planes as entities which must be contended with in your roleplay, but unlike in Pentiment, they are in weaker reads merely abstracted and in stronger reads necessarily contrasted to our world. Pentiment demands a direct historical continuum, one which cannot ignore the modern world as the next of kin in the Mediaeval period dying at the beginning of the game, and as the next looming death of the birth of the Early Modern.

Something else which branches off from this devotion to diverticula is the legitimate development of a formal practice within games that doesn’t rely on any mechanical genre. Where in the 20th century many avant-garde movements found massive upheaval in what the constitutive structure of our various public art forms said about their content, both in the McLuhanian vein as well as the Steinian, games have not yet had a strong push towards developing ‘isms’ outside of micro-niches on itch.io - and those niches are mostly a combined one or two developers making games for each other without commentary on the formal expedition of that enterprise. We’ve seen 12 tone music develop, the language poets, endless film new waves, abstract expressionism, pop art in every medium on the planet, deconstructionism in anything that has been around for a fly’s life; games have innovated, but rarely under the auspices of reinvention, rejection, or preeminent perceived importance. Pentiment puts forth such a formal argument, demanding textual inferences that allot meaning to the conveyances of narrative writing and not just those events, dates, characters, and elements else within them.

I won’t try to house Pentiment within any cinematic, literary, or theatrical schools - media theorists already try too hard, in my opinion, to define with positive qualities their basis of evaluation by borrowing criteria for promoting obvious ‘excellence’ from allergic source (which in the worst examples come from ‘literary’ malapropism supplanted into games, movies, opera, or whatever else in an attempt to prove that something is ‘smart’ or ‘complex’, despite the obvious misapplication of terminology or device when stripped from the context which reflects its respective originating existence). I won’t try to define or create new terms to put on Pentiment which would seek to gerrymander past games or previous games into associations that were never intended; these groups of artists tended to group themselves, making art which reflected highly localised, referentially dense and obscure realities which the small Obsidian team may not have been aiming to tap into, and which I certainly have no outsider insight into as a passive observer to the game and its creation. All I can present is how I think Sawyer and Kennedy thought with a focus on structure which often goes under assumed in game design, particularly to what visual structure informs on when in concert with expressive allowances.

Briefly here, I’ll try to define what I view as the formalistic qualities in Pentiment, minorly contrast them with another formalistic work outside of video games, as well as point out how the different expression of similar facets would escape my definition in other games which contain component cousins. Firstly though, for clarity’s sake: formalism, extremely generally, is a broad umbrella term for art which tends to lean into the tools, perceived bounding constraints, expressionistic qualities, and any other content containing apparatuses that, while conveying narrative, are not narrative beats or content themselves. In books, this tends to be things like syntax, page layout, macro-structure, typeface, spelling, occasionally word-choice, and so on. In opera this tends to be things like the language that is being sung in, coherency between, and application of, costumes, integration of sets, instrumental balance and orchestra makeup, etc. In Pentiment, I view the formal qualities as primarily being, but not exclusively, the integration of non-standard input mini-games, the macro-pacing, the disparity between character art styles, the previously mentioned dialogue system, and the irresolutions of the first and second acts as denouncing stagnancy and demanding advancement. These elements taken individually all carry packages of narrative content, and indeed without them in this particular game, the narrative would not be conveyed through a satisfying or even complete arc. They are formal partly in implementation, and partly by way of noticing and labelling them as formal qualities in critique. That may seem ridiculous, but consider: part of the reason that formalistic qualities have had difficulty in rising within AAA games, or even moderately prominent indie games, is that games are nearly always developed to the point of a gestalt experience; the coordinating elements of development, put together by the vision of perhaps one person but reconciled by vastly disparate creative teams, are meant to seamlessly cohere into a vision which does not stutter, slip, or drawl in how it draws attention in the lack of similitude between competitive elements, such as descriptive item text to enemy stagger animations. This type of creation, while not unseen in the avant-garde works of the 20th century, is fairly uncommon in the formalistic works from which I draw comparison to Pentiment. One only needs to compare Paterson to Elden Ring or Einstein on the Beach to Hollow Knight to understand the difference. This gestalt development is decried more obviously in other formal works from other media because of the nature of their existential property: a disparately cohered Dadaist play, at a fundamental level, needs to adhere only to the laws of physics to be stageable (and in fact, Antonin Artaud’s “unstageable plays'', such as Jet of Blood, make light of these restraints) - a disparately cohered game from any ‘ism’ at a fundamental level is just a corrupted executable. Therefore it is the work of both developer and critic to uncover the formal elements and label them as such to convince further, more daring and considered, formalistic experimentation within the medium.

That all said, Pentiment’s formal qualities: the most contentious I put forth as exemplary is that of the mini-games within. These are, if taken at that definition alone, probably the most widely proliferated verb in modern games. In puzzle games, action games, RPGs, visual novels, adventure games, even some IF - if there is a mechanical thread to pull them together, it might be mini-games. Obviously, and this was the case stated by Sawyer in interviews explaining the modes of play within Pentiment, the inclusion of mini-games is to break up the main play of the game with a totally ancillary and perpendicular play experience. Hacking is everywhere in modern open world games, and rarely do you see the verbs of the main toolset allowed to players carry over into hacking (the only exception I can think of is Shadowrun: Hong Kong). At worst, these games are monotonous, but usually short, speed bumps that interrupt or slow down the flow of the main play; this is the case for Bioshock or Deus Ex: Human Revolution. At best, they are integrated into the main work as a textural, sometimes positively frictional, addition to the main conceits of their respective games - the hacking in Bioshock 2 is a star example of this, and Quadrilateral Cowboy makes the integration of hacking mini-games and anathematic play outside of that microcosm of play the entire thrust of its design. These run from tedious to terrific, but they have in common their inclusion being designed for content purposes, being components of designers encouraging the contained elements of the game to imply diversity of possibility within the playspace but not the vastness of possibility of games expression via contrasting extratextuality.

In Pentiment, while the mini-games do offer a new interactive element to the quite restricted playspace, if compared to other Obsidian games, they offer a grander expansion on the vision of possibility within the storytelling capabilities of the setting, an element of design which blurs the line between form and content, as well as the storytelling capabilities of juxtaposing verbs from those of an established set. Each of these mini-games foreground an experiential quality of newness, to the player obviously but more importantly, to Andreas, something which reinforces the strangeness and parallactic presence of an outsider in the village (a tact which gets inverted in act 3). Their respective play elements counteract the intuition of the main components of play, largely being restricted to time management, traversal, and conversation - each mini-game itself is a new verb, yes, as well as diverting, but are more importantly to the argument for formalistic transgressiveness in Pentiment, they are new ways of detailing important elements of the mystery within the possibility of the setting. Compare this to What Remains of Edith Finch: that game is entirely new verbs being presented within the various short stories of the Finch family members. However, the main verb of the game is walking from within a first person perspective and interacting with context sensitive button prompts. These are the exact same interaction elements that comprise the storytelling possibilities of the various stories - the lack of dissimilarity, of focus on the formal components of the storytelling, bleeds through the narrative elements of the game and blur all the contrasting experiences of what are very ostensibly different people (a point dully made by their Andersonian mono-interests). In fairness, the one standout story within Edith Finch, you know the one, does break up the play by introducing a new set of interactions to reinforce a different perspective, only to place play back within familiar controls at the concluding sequence of the epitaph so that the player may feel both narrative and mechanical sympathy more strongly.

For finding a beautiful cousinry, take Gloriana by Kevin Huizenga, which is for my salt the best formal work in 21st comics. The various juxtaposing elements of traditional comic form, from the bordering, gutters, qualities of ink, page layout, information allowed with thought balloons, even the actual shape of the book itself, tell a broader story about life in suburbia than any of the narrative components within that we would see traditionally make up narratives of Gen X adulthood. When Huizenga transitions from a panel of a bowl falling, across a gutter and page turn, we are not merely seeing the collapse of time, but the discontinuity of timeline, connection between husband and wife, ironic plausibility with the reader, and sequence of events as they have been built up; all done by using a formal element instead of a narrative conceit. Pentiment’s comparative usage of such wizardry can be seen in one of its mini-games, most prominently those which have Andreas traversing the maze at the centre of the narrative. Not only is it performing the traditional role of such diversions within games, but it is also informing us of the various possibilities of the skin allowing reality to breathe, shuddering and breaking at the embarrassment of history’s actors, of the possibilities of travel (something which, again, is alerted and transgressed in act 3 by changing progressions and accessibility paths). This is a move of formal storytelling, and one which could not be inferred by either any other medium nor traditional narrative construction.

I’ve gone on longer than I intended with this review. It’s rare that games have so much to say, so much possibility in what they can convey. It’s rare that games feel like you are being talked up to, asked to consider the variability of our relations with ourselves as players and as actors utilising time we are allowed to use this interactive medium as a valuable way of seeing the humanity in our existence. How often do you get to play a game that inspects and values the work of Aristotle, Aquinas, Avicenna, and Albrecht, only to go on and consider the player to be of the same species and collar of them.

I don’t really have closing remarks. Pentiment is one of the best games I’ve ever played, and while many people will not like it, much less love it as much as I do, I think it is a masterpiece of human storytelling and compassion. And also Ein Traum is one of Lingua Ignota’s best songs, I kind of wish she’d played it at her show in Montréal.

Why is this narrated? The direction for performances flatten every spoken line, which in themselves offer no setting dynamism or effective characterisation, and collapse the individual voices of the game's cast into a single barely awake drone. The chase for seriousness is maddening with this understated read; every Finch is already a parody character, so aggrandised is their position in this world, keeping quarters as if they are consorts of many themed Ikea complete room renovations - a gross misunderstanding of art design, in my opinion: it contrasts the magical realism, or heightened reality, of the house's architecture and possible supernaturalia with an utterly mundane and ill-courted seeming interiored juvenilia of daily life. How at home are we meant to feel with the glowing house in the harbour when looking out of what is effectively a wizard's tower if the room is coated in kid's stickers and hunting gear? The script itself is barely more than descriptive, and is completely redundant to the game - if this had shipped nearly wordless, playing through each of the segments with no narration from Edith, it would have strung together a surreal but obvious link between a people whose downfalls seem tragic in the traditional sense. With the VO, and presentation for about half of the Finch fam, they all read as gullible, immaterial, or idiotic. Imagine reading Dubliners and instead of having described to you the rigour and depth of inner life extent to the city and human condition, everybody was a bit floaty and got hit by passing trains or choking on pheasant bones. UGH

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.

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.

STOP THINKING ABOUT YOUR GAMES AS GIMMICK FIRST! GAMES ARE SYSTEMS, NOT PARTY TRICKS. THEY HAVE TO WORK WITH CONCERTED FORCE.

I'm so utterly exhausted with these indie teams thinking they've skirted the curve by coming up with a non-direct approach to game design because of their one tiny inversion to their genre's formula. Like, yes, it is better to put thought into your game's intellectual play, committing its expression to something expressively unique and utterable only within games - but if you design from an academic's abstract perspective first, as though your mechanics are the rosetta stone for dissecting why people gravitate towards any individual game, then you're sacrificing your art to the altar of skinner box games just the same as all the devs who sell out to work on live service trash. Games are play forward; the interaction is what translates the design to us, not the other way around. It is in transforming the play through nuance that the nuance sings - in Tunic, the combat being poorly implemented and simplistic does not shockingly transform when it becomes poorly implemented and complicated. The same with economy, the same with traversal, the same with puzzle design.

If you wouldn't want to to do it without the gimmick, then it isn't worth doing.

Not to sound like a parrot - or worse: a comparative bore - but Jumping Flash! really does promote a singular devotion to an alternate future which, unlike speculative fictions or realities magic, is exciting without valuating the differences between what we see in it vs. what we see in the later art that took none of its influence. It’s difficult to totally comprehend how different 3D platformers would be (or if that would even be the genre’s name had this game been the tree of fruit and mana at the centre of first gen polygon rendering’s garden) if Jumping Flash! were as culturally revered as Mario 64, but it’s fun to tread in buildings evincing how little of a blueprint was drawn up at the time of M64 and JF being new colleagues. Although the priorities differentiating the two on a second by second play analysis reveal hugely different design aspirations, what grabbed me most by my collars and frills was less what the differentiated attempts at features show and more what the acceptable losses in their respective plough plots bely. The two are not so different as to be any more the other’s opposite as one side of a coin is to its reverse but nonetheless, it’s exciting to think about. JF’s precision sacrifices expression, and M64 chose to go directly opposite, reinforcing the playground feel of childhood with the associated energised clumsiness of newly grown muscles. While they both abstracted level design, JF went for an extension of 2D platformer design - funnelling play through a series of challenges meted out to incur play stories as opposed to the verisimilitude of a travelled world; M64’s abstractions are indicative of an attempt to round out the character of the various kingdoms, the space’s differences of imposing challenge, and the abstractions imbed flavour to the wireframe of mechanics instead of honing that wireframe to its purpose. Of course the first person v third person perspective is the most significant difference: if first person had prevailed in being top seller, we might be calling the genre DoomJumpers or something akin. It’s not easy to totally quantify how this changes game feel from JF M64, as the idea of control, while comparable in object, is taken for different granted positions. If anything, I think JF probably can only be lumped into the genre post-hoc. If the designers believed they were making a statement for future game design, I think they would have attempted something more cohesively representative of what the strengths of their ideals forcefully communicated, and in that manifesting, they would have made a less fun game. So idk, Jumping Flash! is the bomb and also very weirdly out of time.

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.

Turgid writing that makes me think whoever put this to paper must hate Gerard Manley Hopkins. The play has an interesting conceit but fails to iterate or demand lateral thinking from the player as the verb set refuses to expand, offering rote trajectory paths and uninteresting, generic, and unoriginal environments to muddle the way through. Maybe there is a late game turn that recontextualises everything I have complaints over, but after about 2 hours, the molasses substrate the app is submerged within had me pushing my thumbsticks so hard to the right for lack of speed that I thought they might break.