Even after playing the two sequels first, I didn't realise until reflecting back on the whole experience as a whole after finally playing the first entry - perhaps now aided by a comfortable familiarity with the series' core design ethos in mind - how fundamentally these games are about infiltrating lavish, opulent hidden dens of power and using disguises to perform elaborate and cruelly entertaining assassinations because the rich and few - the very 1% - simply do not fear the rest of us. How easy it is to blend in to a crowd when from the elites' POV the working class have no identity. How they are merely their job,
that is all they see. And so then howa it's Agent 47's job to assume these various identities to enact striking acts of working class revenge against the most powerful (and always unabashedly evil). And yet despite all this, there's always more targets. The system never breaks or faults in finding its own ways to fill up the holes you left behind, because no matter what it's not just a few rogue evil doers wreaking havoc on the world - it is a capitalist, power hungry system that Agent 47, despite his best efforts, still cannot bring down.

Anyway, the Sapienza map ruled. Those Italian goons had sick fits and killing the dude disguised as a plague doctor while he watched vhs clips of his dead mum scored to some Italian pop song was dope af. The Paris fashion show also sick.

I bought Defunct for the Nintendo Switch shortly after purchasing the system. This is because for the first year or so of the Switch being out the Nintendo eShop sometimes had games go on-sale for 10 cents. Sometimes 1 cent. I didn't have a gaming computer yet, so I wasn't yet used to the overwhelming library of free games readily available to me via Steam, scouring the internet, or good ol' straight-up piracy emulation. Seeing a game sell for a penny blew my mind, and it was hard to pass up, so I snagged a good handful of penny-candy shovelware. Some of it is actually good.

I bring up Defunct specifically because it plays exactly like Zineth does, with its gravity-increasing speed-boosting terrain traversal across a wide, hilly space. As a playground, it feels good to move in, but there's not much going on in terms of making it interesting.

Meanwhile, Zineth is out here putting mini-games on the right side of the screen for you to play while you're riding walls and zooming around a desert.

It's bright, colorful, and feels excellent to play. The wall-riding part is a little jank, but it more than makes up for it with its sense of style.

Don't play Defunct, it sucks. Play Zineth instead. It's cool.