I played this game in full while a dear friend who loved it very much watched. She was the best part of the experience.

I think more people should just play tabletop games or write books or draw pictures instead of making video games with annoying mechanics that obscure the lovely creativity of individuals- individuals with a genuine desire for agency and resources to imagine something complete and total.

You might think "oh, but what I WANT to make is a video game."
I don't believe you! I believe your parents bought you video games as a kid because it entertained you, and you never read books or had a cigarette after a meaningful experience with sex. You haven't played music live or been to a good show on whatever your buddy let you sniff off their index. I think you'd love the rush monitors caving in your ear drums and making eyes at the guy across the bar who came in with a haircut you like and a shirt with your favorite band's logo. I think you'd like the feeling of drawing a brush in one last stroke along a canvas before finishing the best watercolor you've ever spent time on. I think you'd like a beer with you homie Dylan way more than this.

This shit debases you down to your most bare components, when developers are trying to do fucking behaviorism on you to trick you into playing with toys in a specific way. They dress it up in incredible art and genuinely singular themes and stylings, but you're still just some motherfucking sigma male white guy who kills with a sad style using a skill tree and epic weapons and powers or whatever the fuck.

Game made me feel like a rat in a maze, even when I did cool shit. The chaos mechanic is so ridiculous. Treated women very bad. I appreciated how unafraid the story was with you suspending your disbelief, very unconcerned with explaining itself to you.

Sell your computer, buy a bass, move to a dirty city, join a band, start drinking, play poker with a man who is very old, donate all your money to charity, reckon with death, and then die when it is your time.

I think I'm usually decently averse to the idea of remasters or director's cuts or things along those lines. I think more often than not that reskinning something that's already been worked on, building a recreation of something from scratch, or even just fucking re-releasing stuff is always profit motivated. I hate that shit.

Dusk HD isn't that. Because it's free. They just made it for the sake of making it. It's a free mod that completely dressed up one of the best shooters I've ever played; the blocky textures and silly models are replaced with other blocky textures and silly models. I don't think it makes the game any better or worse, really. Still runs just as smooth and it's still Dusk. As long as those things remain intact, Dusk and what it represents to me in terms of artistry and appreciation for a familiar form (they just released the SDK, and a full DDK is on the way,) is the coolest shit out there.