YOU -- "But what if humanity keeps letting us down?"
STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "Nobody said that fulfilling the proletariat's historic role would be easy. It demands great faith with no promise of tangible reward. But that doesn't mean we can simply give up."
STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "I guess you can say we believe it *because* it's impossible. It's our way of saying we refuse to accept that the world has to remain... like this..."

---

A 2 week old fetid corpse hangs from a tree, a ghastly sight; a human life reduced to a macabre piñata for small children to pelt stones at in a twisted idea of entertainment. The children themselves, a hopped-up junkie and a nameless orphan respectively, both the result of a broken system that has unequivocally failed them. The district of Martinaise, pockmarked by the remnants of revolutionary war, abandoned by the world at large, it and its people subject to the pissing contests of petty government officials to see who is lumped with the task of looking after the place, the site of a months-long, on-the-brink-of-warfare labor dispute that's about to boil over with the lynching of a PMC soldier who was meant to "defuse" the situation. All of this, left to the hands of a suicidal, vice-riddled husk of a cop who can barely get his necktie down from the ceiling fan without potentially going into cardiac arrest. Disco Elysium is an undeniably depressing experience that isn't afraid to cover the messy spectrum of humanity, from insane race-realist phrenologists to meth-addled children to every kind of ghoulish bureaucrat under the sun. The district of Martinaise, as fictional as it is, is a place I've seen before, reflected in the streets, reflected in the people, reflected in the system; an undeniably full-faced look at the horrors faced by those below, and the resulting apathy expressed by those above.

---

SUGGESTION -- Brother, you should put me in front of a firing squad. I have no words for how I failed you.

---

Every aspect of Disco Elysium reflects its overall theme of "failure". Martinaise itself has been failed by the institutions meant to help it, abandoned by the powers that be, who only intervene when it looks like anyone is trying to enact change. NPCs can reminisce on days gone by, of the tragedies in their past, or of their cynical rebuke of the future. The various schools of political thought you can adopt and their representatives are mercilessly picked apart, from the Communists too entrenched in theory to take notice of the suffering around them, to the frankly pathetic fascists who use their prejudiced beliefs to shield themselves from their own flaws. Our protagonist is constantly haunted by his past and even starts the game recovering from his own self-destructive ways, and on a gameplay level, the way that our intrepid detective can fumble the bag in nearly every way imaginable and still be allowed to make progress in investigations and sidequests is commendable. Failure is so integral, so vital to Disco Elysium that it's not only an aspect deeply ingrained in its story, but also its very gameplay.

---

VOLITION [Easy: Success] -- No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it's still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You're still alive.

---

And yet, despite this cloying cynicism and acknowledgement of the ugliness of reality, Disco Elysium is magical because of the fact that it ultimately believes that there is a world worth fighting for in the end. It would be incredibly easy to be defeatist in the face of such constant, institutional and societal failure we are presented with in Revachol, to be ceaselessly apathetic in the face of your own overwhelming shortcomings, to fall back into the comfort of old vices instead of facing our problems head on. Still, Disco Elysium has that fire inside of it, an untapped hatred for fence-sitting, for passivity in the face of oppression and valuing the status quo over any meaningful change. Roll up your sleeves and fight for a better future.

---

RHETORIC -- "You've built it before, they've built it before. Hasn't really worked out yet, but neither has love -- should we just stop building love, too?"

---

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "In dark times, should the stars also go out?"

---

RHETORIC -- "Say one of these fascist or communist things or fuck off."

---

Disco Elysium believes in the people. It believes in humanity, no matter how messy our supposed paragons are, or how flawed our beliefs and values can be, or how cyclical we can be in the face of it all. In a city plagued by an inability to move on, Disco Elysium says that there is always a possibility of change. If two broke Communists and a junkie wino can defy the very laws of physics in a slummy apartment, no matter how briefly, with the power of their faith and co-operation; imagine what we could do as a group. As a city. As a species.

Disco Elysium says that the cup is half full. Even if we won't see the own fruits of our labor in our lifetimes, it still looks you in the eyes and says:

"The only promise it offers is that the future can be better than the past, if we're willing to work and fight and die for it," a conviction belted out by the youths of tomorrow.

"Un jour je serai de retour près de toi", written in bright burning letters across a market square.

"TRUE LOVE IS POSSIBLE/ONLY IN THE NEXT WORLD--FOR NEW PEOPLE/IT IS TOO LATE FOR US," painted on the side of an eight-story tenement.

"Disco Inferno...," a lone voice belted out through a boombox's speakers across a frost-bitten sea.

---

Gaming, like any other artistic medium, has its fair share of touchstone titles, its genre-defining Rosetta Stones that future games in the medium would pull their inspiration and influence from. While there's the obvious ones like Super Mario 64 for the 3D Platformer, or Devil May Cry for the Character Action Game, there's a good chance that if you've played any sci-fi horror game in the past 20 years, you can probably thank System Shock 2 for it's existence in some way. From the immersive sci-fi body horror of Dead Space, to the antagonistic GLaDOS from Portal, to the... Everything of Bioshock, there's a veritable web of connective threads and inspiration that can be weaved from near everything that this initial commercial flop of an immersive sim was pushing back in '99, and having finally played this game hot ("lukewarm" at best) off the heels of a Dead Space playthrough is a piece of serendipity that really helped put System Shock 2's massive influence into perspective as I journeyed through the halls of the Von Braun.

In a word, System Shock 2 is "tense." The Von Braun is this utterly immense location that's filled to the brim with murderous body horror alien beasts and not much else, where everything is an eternal postmortem that's told through the environment and the audio logs you find scattered amongst corpses. The dynamic stereo sound of The Many's minions growing in volume in your left earbud is the only warning you're going to get before a Hybrid with a shotgun runs down the hall to blast your face clean off, and never once over my entire playthrough did it fail to make me clam up with paranoia. The RPG elements and the relative stinginess of experience points mean that every point spent on a stat feels like a tradeoff of some kind, and you always feel lacking in some area even in the end-game (that damn hacking mini-game was going to be the end of me!) Even when I was armed to the teeth with a small armory in my back pocket; and the existence of a currency system alongside generous item vendors around every corner, System Shock 2 still makes you feel like every item counts when your gun jams during a vital encounter, or when you only ever find maybe 6 handgun bullets at a time on every 3rd corpse you stumble upon and scoring a single Medical Hypo is like hitting the jackpot.

While the pseudo-survival horror elements at play give System Shock 2 a lot of tension, it's also nicely counterbalanced by its presentation. Much like Dead Space would imitate years later, a lot of System Shock 2's gameplay elements are made to be diegetic, with level up stations being actual technology in the year 2114, alongside things like the currency being nanomachines that create the items you buy, or your first-person UI being a part of the cybernetic enhancements you've been augmented with. The cold, sleek sci-fi look of everything and the sharp, low-poly corners of the Von Braun make the ship feel unwelcoming and isolating in that sort of uncanny way, and getting jumpscared by 90s Breakcore while I was wandering the halls of MedSci and bashing a Hybrid over the head with a wrench was definitely a trip to say the least. Much has been said about gaming's premier cyber-MILF SHODAN, but it can't be understated how much charm the shaky, antagonistic dynamic between her and the player really adds to the experience. Having the main villain of the first game fall from grace and get betrayed by her own creations in a case of dramatic irony and getting forced into teeth-clenched teamwork with the human protagonist is an honestly genius maneuver, and the inherent humor of completing a mission only to get called a "pathetic insect" by the sentient Speak-N-Spell with a dominatrix streak never got old, and it's part in parcel of what gives System Shock 2 its unique, somewhat pulp-y identity that still stands out today.

Considering that much like our main character, I'm way late to the party in terms of playing System Shock 2 so many years after its ground-breaking release, I'm not really saying anything you haven't heard before, and that's always that case when you go through a game that frequently populates many "Greatest of All Time" lists. What I can at least say is that it is indeed, Pretty Good, and even if that's not exactly a ground-breaking revelation, I firmly believe that there's always value in rounding out your gaming experience with these sort of hallmark cultural touchstones. Happy holidays everyone!

In 2006, the first Silent Hill game was adapted into a feature film by French filmmaker Christopher Gans, and while it was an overall critical failure plagued by many of the same shortcomings that are seemingly inherent to the video game movie genre as a whole, what I found interesting was how many of the elements of the film seemed to foreshadow the eventual future of the franchise. The way the film utilized its source material was full of a passion for the series' style & sound, but failed to utilize any of the iconic iconography that it paraded around with any real substance; a frankly nonsensical and masturbatory worship of recognizable figures like Pyramid Head for audiences to point to and go "That's the thing from the one I like!", and a focus on the series' legacy instead of its influences that would lead to the cyclical repetition of the series' Greatest Hits without any thoughts for the future, and there is no better representation of this phenomena than Silent Hill: Homecoming.

Silent Hill: Homecoming is Silent Hill gone direct to video, a foreign pastiche akin to Spike Lee's "Oldboy" that's less 'psychological horror' and more 'creature feature', a story less interested in isolation and character studies and more in wisecracking black guys who go "Ah hell naaaah!" & "Shieeeeet!". It's a game more interested in letting our boot boy protagonist utilize his 'epic' military training to dodge roll & combo hordes of generic monsters rather than indulging in any feelings of powerlessness or vulnerability. It's a game that's afraid of ambiguity and subtlety, where the all-American hero has to cock his shotgun menacingly at monsters and walk into the sunset with his generic blonde love interest, where the abstract is downplayed for the concrete, so the main plot has to be about specific human error instead of any institutional trauma or individual failings. A game that can't bear to leave you alone, so humans are always a hair's breath away, whether it be the NPCs you're always encountering for cutscenes with dialogue wheel options to choose from, or the generic human cult members you face during the climax.

A story about a war veteran coming to Silent Hill was ripe with potential for symbolism and interesting stories to tell, and Homecoming does have its moments where its presentation almost reaches the heights of its predecessors, but in Homecoming's attempts to improve upon its foundations, it reveals it's true form: a vapid and misguided entry that doesn't have a single original idea in its bones. Unlike Team Silent's wide array of influences, stretching from Dostoevsky's "Crime & Punishment" to the art of Heironymous Bosch, Homecoming's only frame of reference is Silent Hill itself, a capitalistic ouroboros of concepts and ideas regurgitated wholesale to sell recognizability. Much of this game's imagery and backstory is lifted from the film, in a way that makes the whole experience feel like a game based on the film's mythos more than anything Team Silent established. Monsters like the Bubble Head Nurses and Pyramid Head are dolled up and wheeled out for the equivalent of a money shot, and even the plot itself is a simple retread of Silent Hill 2's in a misguided attempt to re-sell success, telling a story about grief & loss that's delivered in the language of a B-horror flick that's about as subtle as a brick to the dome.

But Homecoming's biggest failing is that even without the historic legacy of the Silent Hill brand dragging it down, it's just a fucking boring game. It's an utterly generic, buggy and tedious survival horror experience that's trapped in a Catch-22: A game that would never be published without the name of Silent Hill attached, but one who's greatest failings are due to being saddled with the legacy Silent Hill entails. A game trapped in a hell of its own creation made of Pyramid Head figurines and Bubble Head Nurse pin-up posters.