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.

Fine enough for what it is but it suffers from issues that would not have arisen had they been less faithful to Super Metroid and the template established in 2D. Endless backtracking, movement powers that are disempowering when used to motivate vertical play without an easily utilised free look camera, enemy design that doesn't support combat progression or world hostility, lack of sense of place similarly due to a lesser ability to survey it. Weapons feel wet, Samus can barely dodge attacks, and the boss design is pretty atrocious. I get it was a biggish deal but we had better shooters, and better console shooters, that knew how to compliment their backtracking without exciting terrain traversal as a slog; Prime, unlike Super, as a world just isn't enlivened with multivariate incidence. But who knows, maybe there would be no Dark Souls 1 without it, so minor pass.

Just for the purpose of tangential, dare I say misdirecting, introduction to Bugsnax, I want to comment on something I read in a review for the game (sourced to lost memory - I don’t remember which writer or website produced/published the original I’m here paraphrasing): Bugsnax ‘the song’ became a cornice pigeoned for discussion on the game more memetic than the game’s trailer, press details, or development credentials were able to balloon to in comparison. This idea of estrangement between appendages operating asynchronous but tangential seems weirdly media illiterate in a world overflowing with advertisements which are known to be what substantiates entirely the experience of a product; to talk about the song was just the same as talking about the game’s details or other pre-play-eminences in as affirming of an experience as one’s taste sweet in the jaw with homey nostalgic Coca-Cola or one’s athletic dive down the street resplendent interiorally when clothed in Lululemon. The ephemera which affects for our experience as receivers the display of pulse is indistinguishable, and largely can be seen as a signal without a source independent, from that which is for it the producer/partner. So it’s a good thing the song goes off, because by itself it adds a half star to the review.

I didn’t know what to expect of Bugsnax going into it, skimming past the cover art and attenuating not at all, as is typical for my ‘hype’ intolerant frame, to details coming out, prior to my playing, from reviews and other sources of discussion on the game for information regarding the genre, tone, themes, aesthetics, or other component properties of the work. I expected something saccharin and purposefully childish for the affections of whatever emotional doleances could be brought to interaction between it and I, which was seen, of course, through, but that didn’t carry weight into my surprise at the completeness Bugsnax makes of its lineage with Slime Rancher. For a game which is meant to be, on some level, a marquee landmark for incursions breaking off, homonymically, of expected limitations of aesthetic purport which can be transgressed expressively but refuse to be usurped by ‘serious’ conceptions of form, its largeness of subversion comes most from the mechanical inception by the preceding Slime Rancher’s obviousness. Spoilers for the narrative subversions unveiled as the game progresses from the mid to late play (although frankly, if you couldn’t catch onto the horror of a game which complicates its satire of Colonial expeditionary assimilations/perpetuities of indomitable spirit and virtue by making the the explorers have 1) their contact with indigenous species be parastically relational on the part of the indigenous species, not the exploratory venture, being invasive 2) having the horrors of the assimilation manifest by taking on aspects of the met species and 3) having the metamorphosed ‘leader’ of the expedition exceed past the unconglomerated mass of things encountered, then I can’t say you aren’t just into that shit) but for a game which is developed almost as a hock to how far our cultural platitudes of cuteness exacerbated beyond natural possibility and horror transgressing all conception of inner and outer human tidiness can meet when the poles are stressed, for the purposes of not obviously flagging those two thing in the way animal mascots meta-textually to their source are made rugged, horrific, and realistic, the obviousness of its influence by Slime Rancher yet with none of the fluidity or simplicity of mechanic that game achieved is the only real subversion of expectation. I was inching through the tediousness of play and setting and character in the hopes that I would reach the moment in the game that exceed beyond a mobile game facade of knock off to Slime Rancher, and it never arrived - turning what was a rare feat of expressionistic resource gathering into a non intuitive and clunky puzzle game for which solutions matter not at all to the economy of the game.

Of course, that is part of the subversion of Bugsnax: a Slime Rancher-like that, instead of following through a period of isolation and downtroddenness by manipulating a land to your own enterprisal whims (the thematic failing of Slime Rancher), allows the player to enter into a space for which such a tycoon facilitation seems so easy and obvious to nurture into mass successive industrialisation that its materials are literally grown from the ground prepackaged, dusted with cheese, and uttering a catch phrase; though this fails due to the player being characterizes as less a perpetuator of the holistic crimes and as more of an observer implicated but not guilty of the hubris indicting the Snaxburgians. However, this perversion of that colonizing and harvesting ideal is belied in the play: every ‘prey’ is encountered with the rote mechanized capturing of their forms built into their nature, with no necessitated predatory behaviour formed on the behalf of the player. In Slime Rancher, there was at least a sense that corralling and manipulating the Slimes on the conveyor belt of industry was against the natural state of them. In Bugsnax, the puzzle piecing of capture and netting seems to be deigned (which can be explained as a ploy of the parasitic form of the threat, but mechanically that isn’t conveyed in either the ease with which the Snax come to the player nor the player’s supposed forfeiture of self to the Snax influence) by the order of the devs and, to a lesser extent, God. With no real obvious impression of the dynamic played between the Journalist and the Bugsnax, there is no justification of either the capture and the movement across the island, which is the greatest flaw of the game as an open world venture. We have utterly transcended the place in which any game which desires to be more than corridors cannot have movement which either a) feels appropriate consistently with the thematic and tonal elements of its design, a la Pathologic, or b) which is the primary point of enjoyment across the entirety of the game, a la Sunset Overdrive. Walking in Bugsnax is so consistently boring, so entirely devoid of interest (due to the non-functional economy of Bugsnax track and capture being anti-motivating to further exploration, a system which would be flagging if there was if there could be anything at all felt from the truly terrible character writing) that the simulational elements become obvious in a way that spells death for an open world game: you start to look for the corners after doorways and not for the routes which you’ve never taken before between A and B.

I wish Bugsnax were better - it didn’t really have the potential if this is what they wanted to do with it but I still wish that it weren’t so frustratingly obvious in its efforts. I love that the Snaxburg inhabitants are queer, that the player is supposed to be reassured after an arm is turned into a raspberry, that BUNGER BUNGER BUNGER BUNGER is a thing. But it’s just a bad game for the same reason Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a bad book and Banksy is a bad artist: they attempt pastiche and satire with the aesthetics of cynical cuteness trying to derive humanity from consumer researched and developed trash media, aka the parasitic Bugsnax of our culture.

I’ll fess up: I get on just well and hoopshod being a killjoy. While I approach my exaction from each novel expeditionary launch with the hope that I will find in any freshly graven book, album, film, walk-about-the-towers-of-my-town a legitimately profound, paradigm shifting encounter that restructures my understanding of art or life and how to live it (hopeful for such to an almost naive degree), I do not shrug the burdensome package saddling artistic impropriety that attempts underwhelmingly, weighted by any artist’s flagging ambitions or abilities taking in rankle the brushing of their work with gaudy baubles of shallow ephemera, to usher the aggravating notion that I should praise the deadening of our fierce human scar-tissue, repudiating all billable operations for the conscious reevaluation of consciousness.

Stray coming into being as an immediately memetic ideal of gaming (in a way that presents as, for the internet age, platonically formed to the critical mind inebriated with Schroedinger’s irony), something which is iconographically refutational of the major visual trends dominating photorealistic 3D rendered games without defrauding on the style as something unattainable to the indie domain, and perspectively invocated from a viewpoint which does not repossess the player’s real-world innate powerlessness for (even in “hard” games or “disempowered” games like Elden Ring or Alien: Isolation) an exchange towards defaulted and ceiling encumbered play joists. It is less of an absurd notion of fixation to play as a cat, see Night in the Woods/Skyrim/Sonic/Gato Roboto, than it is to play as a cat that is experientially empathetic; in trend for character, PCs are formatted to instill a sympathy of role-play with regards to tippling of the siphonable aspects of what is aped so that a specific tonic of drunkenness forms in the player off of whichever flavour is aped (and with cats, it’s usually unarmed damage +10). So for a game to say, “here, understand this cat’s world through eyes which conform only to what is feasible for a cat” is worth noting and maybe even accepting into study.

A outset which is conceptually strong though can in no way further stake equal thematic, idealistic, holistical, or creative strength in kind without a greater degree of post empathetic play rhetoric, and this is what Stray ultimately fails to achieve. It is a game which rests the concept of cat = player on the lifelike animations of its model, on the minor ‘nuisances’ of scratching, sleeping, knocking over of things, on the lack of inexplicable and grandiose desire from the outset to completion. Greater intent is placed on as sympathetically affecting empathy through the accoutrement of the emotion than in reinforcing the emotion on terms that are fundamentally instigated from the human element of the simulation first; as has been said, would the game be of interest were the PC not a cat/this is a game in which a cat accomplishes a human goal. What these criticisms detail is the disconnect between the dev desires to explore a concept (which is done well: no review fails to mention how you ‘feel’ like a cat, just as you feel like Batman or feel like you’re stranded on a hostile island in other games) while not equipping themselves, or not being able to do adequately in their writing boundaries, explore the themes or ideas presented in the mutualized presentations of post-corporate landfill and c a t. If this game was less satisfied with making sure tail twitches were cute to the player and more intent on discovering the elements of this world’s hostility towards its wildlife and hostility of presence, it would be a first step beyond the conceptual to the richly artistic.

Just a quick last word on this as well, because it doesn’t dovetail super well into my previous point, but world aesthetics, affective aesthetics. and effective aesthetics all work on different levels, something which this game really poorly navigates in my opinion. The bluntest way these differences in rendered form most often approximate is in architecture and texture wrapping, in order: borrowed or created floorplans from Gothic/neo-modern/corporate etc. architecture or costuming manufactured with relics of Mod/Punk/High-society etc.;walls which contain ambient world information or set dressing relegated to character information; accumulations of waist height ‘detritus’ mazing a floor plan of any given room or divet. Stray tried to insulate its world with mostly the first, but due to a lot of reasons stemming from its rigid exploration mechanics, poor straddling of ‘you are a cat but you need to go somewhere human’ conception of the world (can you imagine if the world design was formed similar to Little Nightmares? God, that would be lovely), and lack of true emotional depth from the complexity/desire of its cast, the world is largely populated with the last: effective aesthetics. It’s not that the world doesn’t look good or impressively rendered, it’s that it plays very well like a minimally viable product, or rather, like something which facilitates origin and destination based travel and facilitation between these two parts. In a world which is meant to be seen through a cat’s eyes, I would hope for a strangeness and aimlessness to be more obviously rendered in a world that is less air conditioners and more horribly frightening hot/cold window boxes.

Despite the richness of the game's updated 2D cell animation inspired graphics mixed with European BD inter title sequences, the overall product is hampered by the team's rigid adherence to the play possibilities of the original game; moving, attacking, platforming - all of these activities are betrayed by the expressiveness of the animation quality in how restricted and rigid they feel in comparison. If the devs had managed to flesh out the systemic interplay with their updated toolset, something which was inhibited in the original game and so created the poor premises that attract the misplaced reverence for the play available herein, then the game could be among some of the more delightful retro remakes of the last few years. As it stands, the play is a chore and is nostalgic for only a few minutes before becoming a tedious trek to see how languished the visual presentation is in showing off the game's best features.

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’m always a little bit concerned about my evaluations on games being informed first and foremost by kinesthetic ‘propaganda’, or rather that games designers catch me with a lovely aroma by fronting their dishes with the chemically enriched, sugary sweets of mechanics that, if nothing else, at swallows (or twitches) first and/or fondly remembered just feel good in the hands for myriad reasons departed from the efficacy or placement of those mechanics. The argument that Errant Signal makes when talking about Rage 2 resonates with me any time I boot up a game that requires a fast, kinesthetically engrossed type of play; there is a tendency, I think, in a lot of us playing games, for reasons due to the marketing, history, and time/life affordances of the medium, to think of these little programs as living disembodied in our fingers with rent paid to mind-body dualism first as pieces of art and cultural politic second, if at all. Trying to alert myself to what feels good in a game, or rather, what mechanism is approbating pleasure in the ideals of the game’s interaction set for me, often reveals a frightening, or possibly charming if you strive for reduction in design, miniaturization of the program's feigned culpability in the teamwork affected by its user and itself: with regards to the situation of play, this façade can be even smally erected with mere toggling of the just right physics shoving blocks into launch in a blank Unity model. That’s a bit foul of a reduction to bring an art form to, but in the same way euphony without substance can be intoned in poetry (and for some schools of poetry, is the most desirable and earnest form of substantiating the style an art; likewise, for some game critics and creators, playfeel is the foremost elevator of the form), much of what initially implicates our understanding of games can be moderated by the disassembling of the inhabitation we must extend to the program being worked through. In Children of Morta, the umbrage is that of a model forest casting long by bright incandescents lent glittering gewgaws, or rather it is able to be walked through if you shuffle amongst the shadow leaves but don’t expect the scent of pine, the comfort of lumber, the solitude of nature, or the neighbouring of wilds.

It’s less to say that in Children of Morta that the facsimile of thematic and iconographic decoration is superceded by play but more that CoM is another example of big name indies that try to elevate the ideals of storytelling without recusing their play of the power-fantastical standard of the AAA and ‘turn-your-brain-off’ entertainment that makes the games world more populous with hobbyists and less of those engaging preeminently as critical or artistic enshriners. There is no harm in that ideal, and certainly is necessary if the medium is to continue perpetuation, not even to mention that the ease of play in kinaesthetic forward games is just as valid as euphonic first poetry and erotic first ballet and melodic first music, but as I said first above, any game that is kinaesthetic foremost in its engagement while still retaining pretensions of thematic depth have to walk a much more careful line than those games which treat its mechanical interaction as extensions of the thematic core.

And, unfair as it is, if you’re trying to commute your tone through voice-over and text, it should probably be well-written and engaging.

While the obvious game to compare 20 Minutes to is Vampire Survivors, the most similar game in terms of design is, I think, Downwell. Obviously the colour palette of the two occupy the same neighbourhood, and even the design of the enemies (once you get past the first biome, and especially the boss and last biome, in Downwell) are markedly made with affinity. But, it's the consideration of the mechanics being multifaceted and multi-integrated that really links the two. I won't repeat the GMTK video about how Downwell's mechanics self reinforce, but a quick rundown of how 2MTD's gameplay does the same seems worthwhile:

Shooting can
a) damage enemies
b) apply status effects
c) trigger summons
d) heal the player

Running can
a) get you away from enemies
b) pick up experience
c) apply status effects
d) move your summons

Picking up XP can
a) increment your levels
b) reload your gun
c) apply status effects
d) refactor your bonuses to DPS

Killing enemies can
a) drop experience
b) spread status effects
c) trigger summons
d) trigger on death effects

Applying status can
a) kill enemies
b) heal the player
c) refactor DPS bonuses
d) improve mobility

And all that is not even taking into consideration the various domino effects of each character and gun, as well as the huge Rune selection. It's bonkers how interconnected the game is, how thoughtfully each mechanic is put in. Comparing it to Vampire Survivors is frankly wild considering how simple and solved that game is in its current state. Anyways, just wanted to make sure I wouldn't forget this little thought.

I very well understand the desire to love this game; games made with a perpendicular design ethos, especially when we judge them historically and with hindsight both considered in their reckoning, have a scrappy and unknowable quality which enliven the literal remarkability of their note, forcing all discussion to do away with obvious comparison and referential demarcation to their states of play, instead matching our experiences with a pure interactive discussion of the object and not with the object’s parallel ephemera. To talk about any shooter from the 90s is to talk about DOOM; to talk about any WRPG from the 2000s is to talk about Bioware; to talk about Another World we must use a different language - a wine dark mention of the sea - than we would to talk about Super Mario World, which would be to talk about platformers from the 2D era. The way AW used the ideas of what traversing a landscape environment was so fundamentally different than what the dominant idea of the genre in that era was, and still mostly remains as today even in the indie explosion era, denies the ability to examine it in familiar terms to our games criticism vernacular of the type. If that is a merit, then the game is hugely meritorious. But if that is a merit, a sky blotting grandeur even, it is the game’s sole merit, for even without qualifying it by the successes of other platformers, the game is an utter failure on all criteria we can bring to it in the comparative form.

These are the only words I will say about the play: It is a turgid, septic slog every step of the way, buried under clay spent decades in its forming since release, fossilizing whatever input it has, bandied with cardboard and string, that might have worked at the time (I should say I played the 20th anniversary version, a version that should never have been released without a massive overhaul of the game’s play); in the present, it now sits buried under concrete of such an under-thought, ill conceived, beautifully marvellous ineptitude of design for all actions allowed to the player that I can at this very impressionable moment of criticism come to believe that we have moved from monkeys at typewriters penning Hamlet to monkeys at Commodore 64s coding software. Even to walk, just pressing left or right on the D-Pad, rewards with such a tiresome animation, lifeless in feel or character expression and worthless in navigation of hard system puzzle solving and soft system world ingratiation, is something which in this lackless game is more taxing than most masochist quest drips, Pavlovian in their form and mongrel in their caricature of their player, of any modern Ubisoft game. That is the state of play. All higher actions of the game multiply this burden with their complexity entirely counter to how most games reward iteration internally.

About the art direction, specifically to the resources allotted to the 20th anniversary edition, I can hope only to god that all concepts that are constituent to the world are known solely to their creators as closed in their signifier/signified relationship, for their designs and functions representative of the most holistic reprisal of grand plagiarism from general sci-fi of the 20th century that I’ve ever seen - not a single asset or idea here is, less than meaningfully, not even shamefully, changed from their original source: Blade Runner, Zardoz, Total Recall, Fantastic Voyage, Alphaville, Star Trek; all are taken in full regalia for this unholy peopling of a sorry state blighting the idea of cognizance and collectivism.

The meat souring the meal, poisoning the stock from which it came, spreading an influenza from its smallest microbial spirit, is the design. I’ve tried my best to be as pungently vitriolic as I can be in this review, to hopefully relate how truly truly depthless the lows this piece of software cannot even sink finally to, and even so I don’t think I have the language to get across in opinionated criticism how stupefying every interaction and screen complex are. I can mention how there is not a single puzzle, if you can call something by so charitable an associative term when they are as far from our conception of puzzle as the human spirit is from a eukaryotic cell dividing, is worthwhile for its solving: death in scores, intuition damned from access, genre or reflex reliance entirely refuted from this realm all are the component, and sole, building blocks of the encounter and world design of Another World. As the mechanics are walking on trench foot long past saving, the design is compounded miles of trench for which the reward of traversing is amputation and bleeding out.

This game is so tremendously bad, almost unutterably worthless, that it makes me question all other media that I have associated with what I can rate on GG the lowest score. Every other game I’ve given ½ a star to is leagues better than this, and I hate those games. Nearly every movie on Letterboxd I’ve rated the same lowest score compares to this game as drinking from the fountain of eternal youth compares to the cursed eating the apple of Eden, and I’ve considered some of those movies as harmful to the idea of what a human is to be. Some of the worst books I have read in my life to completion are texts to devote lifelong study to in fair comparison to Another World. Another World is quite possibly the worst piece of media I have ever engaged with. And I like tough media. In fact, I love tough media: I love “À la recherche du temps perdu”, I love “Satantango”, I love “Pathologic”, I love “Litanies of Satan”. I can hack worthwhile media that tries to buck off all earnest riders up until the slam of the back cover. To be engaged with a difficult work is to savour the art as an act that, while even as it takes something from you so dear, you cannot allow yourself to think your own conception correct without that art in your life. Another World, by that metric, is not worth knowing exists, much less interacting with.

I’m surprised at the general ill acclaim this game has; surprise born both out of the quality I feel is inherent in the breadth of the game as well as the reach and size of the scorn against Vampyr, despite it being a AA game at largest and having very little penetrated the vitriolic spheres that hammer on the taller nails of any game with any features telling any story for any reason. Seeing the game somewhat consistently evaluated as a mediocre affair for reasons, other than bugginess, which I cannot comment on for fact that I never was even once a victim of a bug that I could notice or that impeded play, which either did not seem to me to be negative, or even worth special mention, or which even improved my experience is baffling. Vampyr is not a game taking enormous swings aiming for radical design home runs or strike outs but a game which tried to sand off the brusque and enormous open world RPG mechanics of the 2010s to modify and evaluate within their dialogue and management simulation, which itself was rudimentary for purposes of evening the play experience (likely due to various VO budgets and writing specificity). Vampyr is not a game which is tediously repetitive in impartation of necessity to continuance: the most obvious friction point for boredom is the combat (which I’ll get to), a system which purposefully delivers completely negligible XP and which can be bypassed with level 1 powers or mere running. I’m happy to admit that avoidance as such is in no way more fun than simply running through the 30 second brawls, but in almost every single instance of combat, Jonathan has already been running to and fro and avoiding the combat is more a continuance of whatever was already motivating the play at any given time. The writing, while spoken fast and loose with the period speech, is sufficient for the generic hamminess and melodrama, sacrificing neither character investment from the PC in his patients and city nor mutuality between NPCs and their world - to find this dialogue tedious would be to, I imagine, find the idea of Zola’s or Balzac’s or Dickens’ entire projects tedious, which is to say, the entirety of the thrust behind the social fiction of the 18-1900s. The art direction is no great shakes but as far as the Gothic Industrial Londons of the world go, I very much doubt that the board for their quality assurance would get in such up at arms over Vampyr’s setting and situations as to ensure that it is spoken of badly. All in all, while nothing herein flaunts magisterial brilliance, I find no qualms of enormous drudgery to be reputable to the experience I had with the game.

But, of course, I actually do know why people don’t very much love this game. The writing, while on an individual basis between interactors is legitimately compelling in a soap opera cum Hammerstein Horror kind of way, is axelled on a narrative arc compelling every interaction on the macro level toward a messy and unimaginative of its use of setting and character, telling a story which in no serious way confronts the life of London we have seen and bled in (and leeched off of), forgoing the ideals of a played, which are at best when found in both the menus detailing the failures of Jonathan to remain human in ways that matter and in the conversations of those who are unaware of the predilections forcing the good doctor along, and instead railroading instead the ideals of boss fight mandates. Of course this is made most obvious in the romance with Elisabeth: it was savvy of the devs to make this the fulcrum on which your ‘morality’ rests - it is a simple calculation on a single axis for which narry more than a day or two of work needs be put for its function to serve. However, obvious in the contra as well, is that many players are not investing the time in Elisabeth because she does not encourage any mechanical investment (which isn’t to say for XP or lore, but because after the first act, she cannot be operated within the machine of district politics or conversation confidencing, disallowing her from being engaged with using the actual format of the narrative: play).

The combat as well is deserving of some consternation expressed toward it. It has a modicum of depth that allows for both a more Bloodborne like aggression of rushing down and stagger-training as well as a more Dark Souls like defensive style of play that can be slowly played out both at short and medium range. There is build variety across the RPG skill tree that cannot possibly be climbed to all branches without killing a great deal of your citizens, something which most players will be discouraged from doing. The minute to minute combat engages in a visceral way; enemies have easily recognizable animations, as does Jonathan, the weapons feel legitimately dangerous and differently cut, and every power has the possibility to turn the edge. However, to need to specialize in a build, much less max out the tree, is so laughably unnecessary that the game’s insistence about the fastest way to level up if one is struggling seems to say exactly the opposite of its intended message. After hitting level 10, which happens about ⅕ of the way through the game, I didn’t once die and battered my way through every encounter with one of the first weapons I found in the game. I rarely felt the need to use my powers and only did so for the joy of seeing different animations, as the swing of a cudgel is far less vampiric that erupting pools of viscera. What I said earlier about running through enemy encounters was a suggestion at the barely necessary: to kill a level 30 enemy was a quick 3-second affair of two button taps.

Even so, with complaints to the game’s general doughiness acknowledged, I can’t help but be a bit sweet on it. It’s scrappy. It’s doe eyed. It made me want to watch a few vampire movies after finishing it to get more of the flavour, because that iron taste was put in my mouth by what would be called in another medium a great amateur cuisine. I have no ill will towards Vampyr, probably in part because I played the game for free on Epic. But even for $30, I would have been happy to been bitten.