Let’s make a time loop game. First, we need to establish a mystery, something that’ll really play into the strength of the format, with something new to discover each loop. Since we at Arkane have mastered the magical assassin concept, we’ll blend the ideas, and have players discover how to assassinate a list of targets across a repeating day.

But how do we prevent players from just lucking into a solution, going to the right places and beating the game in two hours? Dishonored was already criticized for being short, and if even 1% of players beat the game in one run, we’ll never hear the end of it. So, we’ll have to force some repetition: necessary codes will be mutually-exclusive, so players will have to loop at least a few times before they’re able to unlock the ending. We’ll author a linear sequence of events that will guide the player and pace the experience.

What about players who don't like the repetition though? It won’t take long for people to get tired of repeatedly fetching their favorite weapons. To solve that, we could have players preserve their loadout between runs… but that would mean that we need to add a little more depth to it, so they don’t just gather everything once and stop caring. The weapons could have randomized bonuses like a looter-shooter, and collectible trinket buffs as well. Adding in character buffs and loot rarity would ensure that there’s always something new to find each run.

Of course, that will work well with the invasion-based multiplayer. Everyone will be fighting a unique opponent, which is great. We can also kill two birds with one stone by limiting the amount of powers players can equip at one time, further emphasizing unique approaches and making gunfights easy to follow. Speaking of limitations however, there will need to be some sacrifices in the realm of map design, since having a one-on-one fight across sprawling maps with load zones would be a nightmare, especially if hiding on rooftops and turning invisible is on the table. So, we won’t have events progress in real time, just in a single time-of-day per mission, because we won’t know how long those encounters may last. It also wouldn’t be good to lock weapons and buffs behind the multiplayer system, because that would let expert assassins steamroll new players. As a final failsafe, we’ll include an option to only play single player, in case it devolves into an invisible sniper camp fest.

Great. This design makes sense from front to back. We’ve walked through all the decisions and how they fit with all the others. We’ll have a time loop game where… players preserve everything from loop to loop, with no time pressure to navigate a linear sequence of events. We’ll prevent players from being bored with excessive repetition by… having them farm currency and random items. They’ll do that until they feel comfortable with tackling the big challenges and handling multiplayer invasions, because losing to an invader resets all the progress on your current loop. You’ll only ever do it when you’re not trying to focus on completing the story, since multiplayer has no benefits compared to isolating yourself in single player.

Hold on, how did this happen? We made decisions that made perfect sense; why is everything so wrong? Why do all our systems work against themselves? I guess it’s because we started with some good ideas, like the time loop assassin stuff and spy-versus-spy multiplayer invasions, but then immediately focused on how to sterilize those core concepts for people who aren’t interested. We made a time loop game and then removed all the time pressure! We took the magical powers and intricate maps we’re great at creating, and saddled them enough limitations to where they're worse than our old games! We made those sacrifices so the multiplayer would work, and then disincentivized engaging with it, killing the point and the playerbase in one shot! Next time we try this, we gotta keep it simple. Focus on what we think is cool and commit to it. Start from scratch. Ok.

Let’s make a time loop game.

pour one out for the mid-size developers; the hard-working designers cranking out licensed titles and budget IPs left and right before the HD era killed off small-team development and financial consolidation came back in vogue. the jank if you will, that lovely feeling of finding a solid 6 or 7 out of 10 with a couple kooky mechanics and a simple gameplay loop tucked away in your favorite console's library.

cavia may be one of the most prolific of these developers: their ouevre includes drakengard 1 and 2 (with d3 being handled by fellow jank purveyors access games), resident evil dead aim, gits:sac on ps2, beat down fists of vengeance, bullet witch, and nier... a truly stellar roster of B games. and in this sense, drakengard is a perfectly solid action title. in fact, I would call the dragon flying sections downright fun! it plays like a cross of ace combat's free-roam target-based objectives and flight control and panzer dragoon's targeting system, with some smart movement mechanics added in such as lateral dashes/dodges/blinks and 180 turnarounds. the enemy roster in these areas is solid as well, mixing more traditional flight combat fare such as oddly geometric aircraft with heat missiles with more magical fantasy elements such as flying reapers who can only be hit when they throw their scythes at you. just enough variety between missions to keep things interesting, and the bosses for this mode hit just right. in my mind even if an encounter is initially frustrating, as long as you can experiment and find the right tools to handle it I think it's a design success - ie the ending B boss whose air slices I found hard to reliably dodge until I began combining the lateral dodges with dashing at a different pitch angle.

the ground combat is a bit more of a hang-up overall, and it quickly becomes apparent that this mode is the more hastily constructed of the two. there's an inordinate amount of weapons with uncomfortably long grinds required and unique magic for each, a parry system that I almost never used, blocking and lateral rolls, and yet somehow in all of this they left out the right-stick camera control. very unfortunate! though given that it's a musou it's not difficult to adjust to using the minimap for guidance on enemy arrangement along with frequently using the center camera button. at the end of the day you can hew close to caim's default weapon with little trouble, and after you adjust it becomes as relaxing and mindless as any other musou. it helps that it has the extremely inspired ground/air hybrid levels, which allow you to lay waste to dozens of foes at once between handling magic-resistant enemies or trebuchets on foot.

if anything the biggest problem holding this game back is the mission structure. rarely do the designers muster anything more than waves of identical targets with the occasional twist such as "fight through a crevasse instead of an open field" or "we have some wizards here too" or possibly "explore this dungeon that is mostly just regular goons strewn throughout." it's a bit upsetting when they do go out on a limb and end up producing some of the lowest points in the game, such as the mission that requires you to take down a golem in a labyrinth of ravines - caim cannot mount angelus in the middle of the maze, so whenever he gets knocked off the dragon he must trek all the way back to the start to try again. these moments are mostly annoying rather than truly game-breaking, but it is disappointing that the game never elevates its scenario design, especially since missions can often run in the 15+ minute range unfortunately.

what also drags the missions down is that the story integration into each mission is rather poor. while there's evidently a large-scale war going on, you have no real present allies to fight beside, and the enemies have no dynamism beyond chasing you when you come within range. instead the plot points are parroted to you by off-screen characters represented as talking heads in a banner at the top of the screen. since caim and his party end up losing virtually every locale they defend to the empire, perhaps this conveys the futility of the conflict and the abject weakness of the union in face of the threat of the gods. at the same time, it left me feeling rather disconnected from the salient plot points when little what I do moves the plot forward; it often feels like these missions are just buffers between cutscenes.

if characters aren't babbling about off-screen events, they are often scolding caim for killing scores of people in an insatiable bloodlust driven by revenge. I went in with this knowledge and expected some cloying "you are the real bad guy" moral, but drakengard really surprised me with how it played with caim's character. he's potentially the best silent protagonist ever conceived: a man who literally let his sword do the talking, one who is so committed to violence that he willingly exorcises his voice in pursuit of absolute power. yet while verdehet pleads with him to spare his fellow man and angelus sneers at his animalistic instincts, neither can do much more than tsk tsk since they absolutely need caim whether he's a psychopath or not. the reality of their world is so deeply bathed in despair that the lives that caim takes are merely specks on top of the mountain of humanity's sin, totally and comprehensively meaningless. this ties in to the overarching flood-like narrative that the game pushes for, where the planet's most powerful force yearns to let the gods completely and utterly extinguish life in order to cleanse the world of its caked layers of immorality. in this setting, caim's actions are a form of idealism that proposes that perhaps humans can still change reality through sheer force of will, as angelus realizes when caim pushes her to reach new heights of power towards the end of the first ending. his actions directly convince her that perhaps humanity is worth saving and perserving after all... caim demonstrates a fascinating moral decay of the hero complex that manages to stubbornly save mankind from an extinction wrought by its own hand.

unfortunately much of the intrigue of the rest of the cast has been bowderlized in localization - even more unfortunately this is still present in the undub I played. how much this affects the story beyond pure shock value is up for debate, and I'm not sure I have an answer. whether leonard is any more compelling of a character without his nonce arc present for instance doesn't perhaps matter too much to the plot as a whole given that he does very little except make off-handed remarks of self-loathing (though his scenes towards the end are rather affecting and well done in CGI, which btw is pretty excellent throughout the game). arioch is just a vessel for female trauma with no characteristics beyond that, though given the cavalcade of woe already present the male cast is entirely unempathetic to her plight and seems to view her as a liability. out of all three of the side allies seere is easily the most interesting. his naivete and extreme need for validation stemming from his abusive mother's favoritism legitimately develops over the course of the game, to the point where he eventually accepts that true heroism requires tremendous sacrifice and is willing to accept the reality of his world. his bickering with angelus over the myths he's enraptured by is turned on his head as the world's grim recreation narrative is laid out for all to see, and thus to see him step into the shoes of those who came before is fulfilling. I also love the scene where he's trapped in the coliseum and caim comes in to slaughter an entire horde of "subhumans," to which angelus exhorts him for finally "learning how to save a life with [his] blade." truly great black comedy.

these characters don't make much of an appearance in the main story though, and if you play that first set of endings before going through the side content it will feel a little bare given the small cast. thankfully inuart is a satisfying secondary antagonist, one who's envious of caim's masculine strength over his own and seeks to exceed him and demonstrate sexual dominion to assert himself. his frenzy towards the end of the game as he plays directly into the hands of the cult of the watchers is a fulfilling downfall to witness, even if in the process (ending B) he manages to create an eldritch horror in the process thanks to his warped conception of mysticism stemming from the aforementioned web of myths humanity has woven for itself. those first three endings were all worth it on their own, and then the fourth one really blew things open and got me thinking more heavily about the narrative themes.

in fact, I nearly considered rating it higher, and then I played that final mission in ending D. what can I say? some people are just not very good game designers. I'll try to remember the fun I had with it prior at least... and to be clear, I didn't get ending E and instead just watched it on youtube. looks goofy!

In the middle of my friend's playthrough they were direly over encumbered, and trying to get up a hill. They had put a lot of their belongings in a crate, and had been pushing the crate inch by inch up this mountain road. Their eyes were drawn from the prize (a mound of loot-filled corpses at the top of the road), and as I warned them about moving too far, the box's physics slipped off the model and it slowly skidded back down the road to cries of anguish. That is the most I have ever enjoyed anything Bethesda ever made.

Idealistic and a semi-transcendentalist piece. Disliked the messaging and weird ideological conception - obviously rife with anti-vanguardist policy, but the conclusion cuts off it's nose to spite the face; fundamentally it re-inscribes the passivity of revolutionary liberalism back onto what it itself acknowledges as a violent process. It feels as if it cannot reckon with tools necessitated in a struggle, and is therefore always in a process of deferring responsibility/violence (both in alterity and futurity, to the other, to the space beyond). Caught in this contradiction - at once acknowledging the revolutionary nature of struggle and denying the struggle of revolution - it becomes a self effacing process; a bloodless revolution, a tenth of capitalism already killed - by what? what wounds were necessitated by such a process? The text cannot interrogate it - mysticising it into an ordinariness of mythical nature, a messianism that has already happened and yet is still to come - by whom? why not you, the nukes at your fingertips? In a certain sense, then, it forgets what cannot be forgotten - that which must be forgot in order for anything novel - the violence of forgetting that must be expelled and held. The ordinary is valourised without ever being encountered, the process left open, undetermined (idealised) and therefore endlessly critical, without any idea of what itself can do.
sorry this is gibberish. i just didn't like this very much.
the art is cute tho ^x^

goated game. soyjacked at the "line of flight" drop. you guys just don't fw adorno hard enough. crashed before i could see the end

seriously though, i do find myself kinda frustrated at concepts of post-irony/metamodernism/new sincerity or whatever. people are tired of "postmodernity" (something i have my own critiques of, even as i hate jameson for popularising the term but w/e) and feel we can simply move beyond, take a new step forwards, without really understanding what "postmodernism" tried to do; "postmodernism" becomes a mood, a vibe, an era, not anything actualised outside of a vague gesticulation. this game, however, is not a very good look at that. I just wish actually understanding foucault + derrida was required before you read fisher, because I think a look at the deployment of hyper-confessional and overwhelmingly sincere art of the 202X's would be interesting - something not really found here except as a handwave to thoughts and books picked up from crit theory 101.

"As for military or state violence, I feel like that’s the purest crystallization of a type of legalized murderlust. It’s so completely farcical in the way the stated purposes (defense, security, etc.) differ from the actual outcomes. It’s a libidinal death cult with a serious bureaucratic veneer. The scene that it sets for our everyday life interests me. It’s like an ever-present background radiation of evil." - Ville Kallio in an interview you can read Here

I wrote a sort of strange poem about this game Here you can read. This was during that period of time when a lot of people were doing reviews as poems and I thought they were mostly lyrical and quite bad because it was all based on rhyming or strict meters, which is totally fine. I've created a controversy around myself of being judgemental of other peoples writing, but if you're going to practice and even do it poorly, you might as well do it here. Especially with comments off so people don't bug you. The reason I was only ever annoyed with it to begin with was anger management issues as a result of binge drinking and also overusing the site too much at the time, both things I've gotten a lot better about. Recently about a week ago I finally came to terms to myself as somebody who has in a very real sense been battling alcohol addiction for a long time, admitted to myself and to my real life community I actually struggle with alcoholism, and slowly taking steps towards self betterment and eventual sobriety there. So I want to somberly apologize for the hostile and standoffish precedent I created around me in relationship to that here, even though we are a while out from the last time I stepped on anybodies toes here.

This may be a strange note to start a review of Cruelty Squad (2021) on, but its a necessary one for a few reasons. The first is that to give off the impression I'm a detached observer merely 'peering into' the text from above, as some figure of authority goes against one of the main things the text is actually 'about'. Several times the established person running an organization of authority in cruelty squad blurb at you, in funny memetic ways that illustrate to you that they do not actually have their shit together, and are using their social authority to disguise that fact.

"I've been getting really into "hell". Both as a mindset and as something to strive for in an organisational sense."

"I'm the most powerful person in this room. I control this situation. Everyone's dancing to my tune..."

"I have thousands of followers. They say im blacksuppositoried and debased."

Some of us that are in charge of something think exactly like this. Anybody who has run their own discord or had a 'social media presence' definitely has this 'toying' psychology baked in deep. Occasionally this 'decisionality' is thrust onto you, for instance by making a semi successful game, the creator of Cruelty Squad, Ville Kallio, has opened a portal for themselves they cant close. They are now the 'center' of something, and probably had some of these same issues in the physical art community of being a 'worship statue'. They even admitted to this in the interview I quoted at the beginning.

"Sacrificing your friends to develop your CEO mindset so you can finally ascend to primordial-financial godhood. I feel like these things have sort of leaked into my own life, as I had to start a business due to the success of the game. I was reading Goethe’s Faust and it made me feel like I’ve accidentally made some sort of infernal pact at some point during development, which resulted in all of this. "

Problem is, if you identify with this feeling too much, you start thinking of yourself as a 'moderator of thought' and begin to think in ways the prior quotes from the game show. We have to ask ourselves, how is this way of thinking any different from the weird misogynist Pick Up Artistry thinking that these people don't 'deserve' your glory and should actually bow down to you? How easily can we divorce the world of middle management from larger systems of violence? Rather than using this power as a pure commercial toolset, Ville in the discord server for the game made it incredibly clear that transphobia will not be tolerated. You have to frontload yourself like that or you do completely self isolate and go CEO mindset. I could theoretically ditch all my friends tomorrow into a toxic sludge pit, alienate myself and start working on my Grindset and get a bunch of people to worship my every word. Make one of those stupid fucking paid to use discords. Pimp my patreon out constantly. Treat my connections with people in terms of a career path and not just people I like. Sometimes people say I'm one of the best writers on here and it freaks me the fuck out. It freaks me out that I self gloating something to that effect a few times to. The internet normalized all of these more primal urges to Control the world of violence around you. It's fucked. I mean for instance if you use the internet long enough you stop referring to other people as people, you start calling them 'randoms'. It's ok to be mad at commenters and guess their IQ levels when they even slightly annoy you or get on your nerves. It's ok to get so angry with people for doing something you don't like and letting your friends hang them out to dry for it publicly. It's ok to antagonize people with kindness just because they were mean to you once. Look I got the damn comments off in here. That's not because I'm afraid of you, its because I'm afraid of myself dude. I've done all of this stuff before and seen others do it on here. It's embarrassing.

There's this frustrating issue in videogame discourse in which, in order to try and self justify our time to ourselves, we talk about games as 'cultural objects' rather than effective experiences that change our way of viewing things. Most of this is the result of the 'video essay' style catching off like commercial wildfire, and thus imparting some sense of commercial value to the idea that you can 'speak around' videogames as literary texts. I believe the other big result of that is that we all sort of learned from having to undo the 'videogames as vehicles to violence' argument for a long time (and sometimes still do) that, crucially the connection between play and real life behaviors is thin. Gamers went through this moment where they had to learn about cultivation theory as much as they could to ward this stuff off but the problem is that by doing that we sort of nullified ourselves from getting into any sort of public political wanting. This desire to absolutely affirm that a game cant cause real life violence caused us to neuter our own discourse before it could really grow. We are just passive soyjacks playing with blocks in the cornor. We fucking infantalized ourselves through self domestication.

So that's part of the problem. The other part then is to try and get away from this we dont talk about this art form as 'things we learned' partially because learning from art is cringe, learn from academic Journals you room temp IQ having freak. When we do interpret a game text, we will interpret both the front and the back to the point it spoils the magic for others. For instance every video I've seen on Cruelty Squad that takes the work seriously can't help themselves but 'compare' the endings and try to analyze a discreet meaning from them. The game is set up like an ARG where the further you slip in the weirder you learn the world is (for instance a creation myth people believe in that own homes is literally about owning a home). It makes sense, because we were all taught to do this as a book report in school and shit, but it doesn't always translate cleanly to games. Videogames are a continuous act function you experience and push through. It's not like a movie where you merely just 'watch'. There's a reason why one of the most enjoyed novels in game enthusiast (watch out with that term buddy, Gamergate will start knocking on your door) peoples favourite book is House of Leaves, its because its a book you physically travel through, have you fight with to keep reading. You have to hold it sideways, sometimes you have to warp a few pages backwards for a bit. Videogames as narratives, even continuous ones and simple, are more like Choose Your Own Adventure novels, and you so don't see people asking you to analyze those right.

So it ends up putting Cruelty Squad in this awkward and frusterating temporal space, where on the one hand you really want to dig into the niche leftism that Cruelty Squad is existing. Where it pokes fun at stuff like veganism being connected to purity culture issues for instance. But you can't do that without everyone being on the 'same page' about it first and so now you have to back up and address that problem first. The lore of Cruelty Squad being so dense that you want to see somebody break into the mechanics of the story and figure out who the 'real villian' of the mystery is. But since we cant really get into all that without looking psychotic and freaky we just gleefully poke at each other to make the first move. Yet, art isn't about a 'really good conversation' or solving the damn mystery for everyone though. Art is an experience that usually wants to tell you stuff and make you reshape your world a little. I didn't get the other endings of cruelty squad because I'm not that obsessed with the game in that way. The internet can slowly teach you that people like me are normies and shouldn't open their mouths until they 'really beat it'. I know about the fucking Nick Land and Bataille references ok, I read a bit of these people but we dont need to pose as philosophers or completionists to talk about art and the world.

Cruelty Squads level Androgen Assault made me rethink the way I consider the police and the fascism associated with it. None of the police talk to you, they instantly fight you, but you learn throughout that level that the place is a horrifying cult with people testing on each other and the prisoners to Absurd limits. This is blunt and flagrant, your briefing even says that Magnus, head of the narcotics department, is testing on people and making shit difficult for everyone. It's a hard and uncomfortable level. The hallways are way too long. Everyone is running in slow motion. It made me rethink about the police as basically a grooming organization for people lost in their early life. They slowly teach people to repress everything, be violent, and fuck peoples lives up. That doesn't happen overnight, and its only upheld by baking people in the culture of fear and adult bullying. I hate these macho pricks, but they aren't some 'visceral' decision, they are a chemical nightmare scenario. The building for a precinct in the town I live has a few different things.

1. A viewable office from the street: So I saw what the inside of one of these guys offices looks like and its very drab and depressing

2. A plaque on the side dedicated to a confederate doctor

3. A giant fucking face construction on the side of the building, very similar to The headquarters of Mussolini's Italian Fascist Party (1934)

I thought about that stuff as I was working with a fucking horrible hangover today. I saw a bald pig on my way home from work near the bus starting some scene. I know now that this is a lifestyle the mother fucker was tricked into, and I learned it from a game, non verbally. I still hate the dude and would resist him but he was 'constructed', he doesn't have some sort of primal genetic code that made him join the Cop Cult. He's not some sort of low T brainlet normie NPC like the internet tries to convince me of. Just as much as women aren't fucking 'femoids' or any of this greasy internet dungeon speak. A lot of the internet sort of teaches you to dehumanize people like this, and not see where the violence is coming from. It's something you have to sort of unlearn one day at a time. Cruelty Squad is willing to meet you there. Today I this all hit me and I realized I don't want to moderate my fucking friends and stepped down from running a discord as a big attention seeking thing. I can't run around with a chip on my shoulder like that. There's a lot of great levels in Cruelty Squad that reillustrate facts like this, home ownership, office culture, reconstructing a scene of violence and blithe anxiety in a new way. That's art. Thats life. That's why I reccomend this fucking game.

Everyday is actually a battle, but until I die I will actually wake up and fight that battle till I'm snuffed out for good.