Many years ago, Dara O’Briain did one of the only good standup routines about video games. Video games, O’Briain argued, are the only entertainment medium that actively tests the observer, withholding their content behind challenges of mentality and dexterity. Albums, television shows and films will carry on regardlessly from the moment you press play; sections of a book that prove hard to read can be flipped past; but challenging sections of a game have to be bested or even mastered in order to progress. Want to see what happens next in Dark Souls, but can’t beat the Capra Demon? Too bad. Heard that Through Time and Space is one of the best video game levels ever, but can’t grapple with The Witcher’s inventory management and combat systems? Tough shit.

While there’s an amusing honesty to the bit, it kinda belies an uncomfortable truth about video games - that the parts where you’re moving the joysticks are likely to be the only moments of intellectual stimulation that most video games have to offer, with cutscenes more or less functioning as rewarding soap opera spectacle. It’s hard to discuss this kind of thing without sounding like a wanker, but it’s just a fact that even prestigious “adult” game-fiction like The Last of Us or God of War still rarely stirs anything more than an acknowledging “huh” in the players who’ve deigned to step outside the cultural borders of electronic entertainment and other mainstream media. Games narratives still tend to rely on cinematic cutscenes to convey information and drama, and most of the time said information or metatext is barely worth parlaying to the player - $10 million spent on comic book writers telling us “man is the real monster” or “depression is bad”. At their very best, our prestige video games are still just doing replicas of better movies.

killer7 differentiates itself from this convention in a number of ways. It’s a game that makes no concessions for those who expect a linear, event-driven narrative, peppering weirdo pseudo-plot and thought throughout map layouts, door keys (ever thought about what the Soul Shells are?) and helpful hints from dudes in gimpsuits who are prone to taking left turns into Baudrillardian philosophy while directing you to the bathroom. Textual and subtextual ambiguity reigns supreme. The gameplay (on Medium, at least) is unlikely to challenge the player all that much - aside from a few head-scratcher puzzles, it’s more or less a case of walking from point of interest to point of interest to open doors and shoot zombies. And, in a strange inversion of the problem outlined above, it’s the cutscenes and character dialogues that will tax a player’s brain far harder than anything that involves clicking buttons.

I think killer7 is a work of profound ridiculousness. Or ridiculous profundity. Something like that, anyway - I’m not quite sure of the precise term I need here, but I think Suda and Mikami are pulling from the playbooks of guys like Thomas Pynchon and David Lynch with this game - keep throwing potentially meaningful ideas and images at the screen, both within and outwith the realm of the cutscene, and let the true ones stick - the viewer will be too busy grappling with the good to remember the bad. It’s a technique that surprisingly few games dabble in, despite the supernatural properties of the medium and the obnoxious, inhuman lengths that most games require a player to play for.

So what are the good images here? Well, I guess it’s a function of the temporal, political and personal preferences of the player. Like abstract paintings, surrealist movies and post-modern novels, killer7 is wholly open to interpretation through your own kaleidoscopic lens. Unlike most game narratives that more or less bluntly prescribe a story and some associated themes (if any at all), killer7, like most Suda games, seems content to spray blood against the walls and do some interactive Rorschach testing with your psyche. Sure, there’s talk of American-Japanese relations and terrorism and borders and killers and the valise of our personae, but there’s nothing proscriptive or particularly didactic here - it’s more or less a presentation of post-9/11 realities that the player is asked to order and interpret as they see fit; a balancing act of feelings versus facts in opposition with fictions. Hand in killer7, the companion book for killer7, even (deliberately?) contradicts the facts of its own reality within the first ten pages - as if to highlight how pointless an endeavour Making Sense of it All is, especially in our Fukuyama/Fisher-influenced End of Capitalist-Realist History-Present.

By complete coincidence, I played through this game in parallel with the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, and finished it on the same day she was convicted - so Target 03: Encounter (Part 2) - where the Killer 7 head to an Epstein-pre-Epstein prescient-simulacra of Little James Island to take out an organ trader and implied child molester - held particular relevancy to me. The Jeffrey Epstein case and its relevant co-conspiracies are probably the best examples of what I’m prattling on about above - get ten, twenty, or a hundred people in a room together, and you’ll probably get a hundred interpretations of what the inner sanctum of Epstein’s reality really was - a whole smoothie bar of blended facts, news, fake news, Facebook news, speculation, fiction, fact and fuck knows what else. killer7 is often lumped together with The Silver 2425 as part of the “Kill the Past” series, and I think this info-meld of history in the melting pot of public consciousness is one of the chief relationships the games have with each other. Ironic that games about removing the past would so thoroughly realise the future of our present.

How did Suda51 know that the word’s top players would conspire to send an assassin after a sanctioned private ally of the United States government, a living evil who trafficked young girls with both personal and ulterior purpose? And how did he know a global pandemic would (temporarily) return humanity to a road-faring race? As is often suggested with Suda51 (see also: The Silver Case, No More Heroes) he may be one of gaming’s top producers of prophetic works. “Prophetic media” has been in vogue since March 2020 - references to media-elite paedophile rings in mid-2000s Nickelodeon cartoons; references to coronavirus in mid-2010s K-Dramas; references to Tom Hanks getting sick in mid-1990s episodes of The Simpsons. Wow! How do they pull it off?! Well, as with killer7’s imagery, I think it may be down to volume of produce rather than accuracy of content. The Simpsons is able to predict so much shit correctly because every ‘incorrect’ prediction isn’t even recognised as a prediction until it comes close to resembling some form of the truth we want it to be. The same applies to the images that Grasshopper’s games create.

Is this the secret to making remarkable, meaningful art and cultural commentary? Just keep producing, producing, producing until your images become resonant by virtue of the typewriter-monkey principle? That’s maybe underselling what Grasshopper achieved here - the foundations killer7 are built upon are more or less rock-solid. The cel-shaded mono-colour aesthetic is timeless, and the chosen palette for each Target is fittingly eerie. The control system, while initially awkward, is ultimately a solid compromise for a game that distills a gameplay fusion between Mikami’s Resident Evil series and Suda’s Silver Case adventure games - and it feels even better on PC, where 90% of the game can be played with just the mouse.

Although often cited as unconventional, I think the gameplay style of killer7 is a fairly logical compromise for these two creators, who seem more concerned with tone poetry and 2000s-exploration than providing a compelling and practical gamefeel. Anyway, it’s sometimes more important that a game feels good in the brain than on the hands moving the controller. killer7 is a game that locks its content away inside your mind, with progress often being made many hours after you’ve stepped away from the console and allowed your third eye time to process the images your two eyes have seen. It’s all in your head.

Played as part of Rare Replay.

Ever read a book, watch a film or play a video game way too late and feel huge pangs of regret that it didn't reach you in a formative moment? Of course you have - you're on Backloggd. Like me, you probably spend half your adult life trying fill in the blanks of the childhood you really wanted to have.

Blast Corps is now one such game for me - it was a staple of my local video and game rental shop in the 90s, but it never made it home with me because I preferred real N64 classics like... uhhh... Nagano Winter Olympics '98 and South Park Rally. Gah!! Dang it! Why did I never pick this certified banger instead?! If I'd played this back in the day, I'd absolutely now be a guy who goes "...and don't forget Blast Corps!" any time someone recommends Nintendo 64 games.

Blast Corpse (I am 99% certain this is what I called it in 1998, much like my brother called the Formula 1 game for SNES F1: Grand Pricks) can be quite simply described as a really fucking good game of Action Figures. As far as I know, it's gotta be one of the first "toybox" games on the market - while there are objectives and tasks to undertake, the meat of the game is simply about driving machines around and wrecking shit without much forethought or reflection. It's like GMod gone wild, or those afternoon sessions of GTA: San Andreas where you just put all the cheats on and went on tank rampages. When it's running on all cylinders, the game kinda feels like one of those frantic Action Man adverts that used to get wedged straight down the middle of new episodes of Pokemon and Samurai Pizza Cats - time is running out, chaos keeps unfolding, and the only solution is more Big Cars with Big Rocket Launchers that do Big Explosions. It's the romance at the core of every little boy's heart.

My favourite level is the game has you driving a digger (straight) through Coronation Street until you find a mech suit that has the vertical height necessary to Mario 64 butt-slam a skyscraper. Butt-slamming the skyscraper clears the road for a runaway nuclear missile carrier, but watch out! The bridge over those train tracks hasn't been finished and the nuke is heading straight for it! Time to fly your mech suit over some mountains and hijack a flatbed train in the next town over that can be used as a platform! Phew! But now, how do you get back to your mech suit? Don't worry - that flatbed train was carrying a Ferrari! Nice... b-but wait! After flattening some more hospitals to make a path, there's now a rushing river up ahead! Shit!! Better fly your mech suit downstream and take over that Evergiven container ship to do a Suez manoeuvre so that there's something for the carrier to land on! How are you gonna get outta there in time, though?! Don't worry - Evel Knievel's car was onboard the ship! Hop in!! Vrrrroooooooooooommmm!!!! MISSION COMPLETE

Fuck yeah, man. Video games - a real good time.

Was drawn in by the hook of this being a postal worker simulator, only to be trojan-horsed into another Netflix-brained drama. A Life Is Strange-like that has you driving around a poorly-disguised and thoroughly-sterilised simulacrum of Twin Peaks (this was made by a Dutch dev team - why not show us NL's country life instead of leaning on a well-worn setting?).

You're relatively un-fussed by any of the day-to-day concerns that would no doubt come with delivering the post in a secure and timely manner, and there are so many missed opportunities for fun little gameplay pieces - the truck doesn't take damage, you can't break the speed limit, the parcels don't arrive late, you don't have to dodge dogs - any of these little things could have injected a small sprinkling of spice into it, but the game is only really interested in telling its story. I think I wanted it to be Shin Paperboy.

I get that it's nice, sure, and there are people who really do want a depressurised and bloodless GTA driving/walking game; but without anything really driving (lol) the experience, this is basically just a series of Walking Dead-style dialogue encounters split up with a cuddly coddling truck-driver experience. Nothing ever matters, which seems to kinda contradict the game's nascent notions of changing your life. Dialogue options only seem to be there to move the chatter along most of the time, and characters often react in the ways the developers wanted them to react, rather than the ways you hoped or expected they would. The different ending options are a perfect example of this, but as the game only really has its story going for it, I won't spoil the bizarre surprises here.

The romance options are exactly what we've all come to expect from indie games at this point - utterly toothless and sexless stuff that makes the 40-something main characters behave like preschoolers holding hands on a trip to the park. You can't have a single city gal discover her first kiss is now a huge sexy lumberjack and have it only lead to a nice hug. Come on now! It's about time one of these games played out with all the debauchery of a greasy pulp paperback like A Stranger In Her Bed or whatever.

My postman sometimes come up the stairs of our building mid-joint roll, banging crap metal out of his phone speakers and huffily hurling anything marked FRAGILE onto a rough approximation of our doorstep. Now that's the delivery guy game I wanna be playing. Lemme dropkick an Amazon parcel and shag some lonely lady after I break her windows with a Hello Fresh box.

That thud sound when your crossbow shot hit your opponent and they turn and look at you before they explode - chef's kiss - I had just moved to a hot country and decided to play computer games again having not played barely any in the 2000s - if anything to check out what this new online gaming was like - having grown up forced to play multiplayer in the same rooms with split screens here I was trying to fill my lack of friends in the new country and because I had to stay indoors with air-con - playing full screen with my long distance friends - we dabbled in modern warfare 2 which was my first game back - but a year later playing this game kinda confirmed I was back gaming and I was more settled - and it would all eventually lead to me playing battlefield 3 which was my everything - stepping stones