bouncing between this and Batman: Arkham Knight, for whatever bizarre torturous reason. watched my friend play a good chunk of it so i know the ending and some of the bigger story beats.

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having only played the intro (2 hours), i'm already fatigued by this game from the outset. this is going to sound like one of those insane VGDunkey screenshots from metacritic where people REEEEEE against nonsense, but this game just doesn't grab me. having played so many open-world action games with skill trees, with endless side quests and gating, i am too burned out to pick up another 25-hour version of the Ubisoft-esque formula.

the good: the swinging mechanics are excellent, the decision to make this more like SM2 with physics is the best decision. traversal feels excellent, is compelling in its own right, and has a high skill ceiling. compared to Batman AK, it's hard to go back to grapple and ~AAAA~ to glide quickly.

story is probably good, i'm just fatigued by the quippy dialogue 24/7, even if moment to moment writing is excellent. this is part of larger Marvel-fatigue personally, and probably why i am gravitating towards Batman's cynicism/urban-decay compared to "everything will be alright if you go to therapy and talk openly about your feelings" of Marvel's Spider-Man. it's very healthy instead of Bruce Wayne's "men will x instead of therapy" approach, but as a character study, there isn't a lot of tension within Peter Parker, although Miles does have some nice internal conflict.

graphically, game looks great, pushes PS5 to its limit, and is occasionally movie-like in its presentation. fun for people around to stop and watch large set pieces.

the bad: the combat, while the intro is comically easy even on "Spectacular" difficulty, is just too many systems layered on-top that feel disparate. a forced parry system that doesn't allow other options? while you are already dodging every bullet red icon around you? doesn't make any sense. its a video game system forced upon a character within a universe, because of existing metatextual experience from recent blockbusters (Elden Ring, Zelda). But in both of those games, you could dodge every attack, or you could dodge and it would put you in a position not as strong as a parry, but you could experiment and learn. here, it's just another MMO icon telling you to click a button. no learning, no thought process, just "move your thumb gamer." i would occasionally pick up the controller from my friend during a late-game fight and just felt like mashing jump/dodge/air juggle could protect you from getting hit and just waiting for skills to recharge to finish larger enemies, who still follow the same "sniper/heavy/trash mob" archetypes. i should probably adjust custom health to 50% because they take wayyyy to many punches when they just keep clown car-ing out of vans that show up later in the fight.

in batman AK, i find myself dying a lot more. especially on hard. your hits feel like they have more weight, but you are more of a glass cannon. and the stealth sections have way more dynamism to your style of play, compared to spider-man which does not feel good in the caves. spider-man is free flowing at its best, batman is best as a precision instrument.

(minor spoiler of character involvement below)

is this game worse than a 2015 game? no absolute not. this to me is probably a nice 3-3.5/5 game that you turn your mind off and enjoy. the comparison is more of a meme than anything and interesting thought experiment. what is compelling for me in comparing them is that Batman AK is reaching for the sky in presentation, ideas, etc.... while Spider-Man 2 is doing the slow Venom-esque/Kraven-esque consumption/iteration of ideas. slow and steady wins the race in selling AAA console-exclusives to move hardware. Sony is laughing themselves to the bank with this and Final Fantasy 16 compared to Microsoft's laughable laundry list of exclusives that fail to make a strong impact (until Hollow Knight Silksong releases).

i just can't justify spending the time when I still need to finish TOTK, BG3 (multiple campaigns), have a life outside gaming, and a job.

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.