Subsonic steps bound off of idyllic tiles, a steadfast one-two sprint. Clasped tightly in his hand, divine intervention is executed by the thunderclap of .500 magnum, a heavenly send-off alternating between the gentle coaxing of automatic fire and the definitive blade of retribution. Closing in, denizens of hell launch bioluminescent bombardments, lethal brimstone sending you down a path 10,000 feet under. As if born to die, the demons are dispatched as quickly as they rise, beings materialized, analyzed, and pulverized within nanoseconds. Speed and focus become one, repetitions on idealized concepts pointing towards sublimity. Your holy arms holstered, your sanctified sword sheathed, you cast your sight upon diamond excellence, an eternity encapsulated in the blink of an eye. Now, beyond the safety of three-round bursts and lead ripostes, you see her.

Her heliotrope hues leave psychoactive cigarette burns; if true angels drive one to madness, her presence in Heaven is well established. Like sewing needles piercing taut eardrums, her voice spikes out, an aural trepanation. More lethal than chambered rounds and heavy ordinance, she implants in your brain the same innate fear that courses through you as you enter convention halls, the same fight-or-flight micropanic as the first step within a college’s Japanese Culture Club, for she is the eidolon of modern otakudom. When you breach the seal on Neon White’s world, what resides underneath isn’t the long-forgotten Y2K Japanimation mecca, but a puréed distillation of the wretched refuse of anime fandom, the Anitwitter and r/animemes congregation speaking in post-post-ironic references, where every man is either a razor-edged twink or a hulking himbo, and every woman either an e-girl yandere or a wannabe mommy-dom that covets humanized mediocrity. Buried under the pretense of being “by freaks, for freaks”, the reality of Neon White puts you in the nightmarish scenario of living through the dreams of the most typical of indie weeb softboys.

Such is the loop of Neon White: for every moment of precise platforming bliss, an hour of Young Thotticus making your amygdala fire on all cylinders, a century of watching history’s straightest couple verbally hate-fuck, an eon of remembering Tumblr-Sexy-Man-ified Junkrat saying “you were my Sasuke!”, an eternity of knowing that the core message of the game is that you have a moral imperative to forgive those who abused you in life, lest you literally go to Hell. Both sides of the equation, fraught and unstable, struggle to maintain a semblance of balance.

When Ben Esposito, Enemy of the People, claimed this project as a game “for freaks”, it masks the reality of what Neon White stands for. Decked in the style of the forums of yesteryear, Online Signature UI and Neocities buttons intact, with a heart beating to the 200bpm pulse of breakcore, the aestheticism of pre-Web 2.0 culture is broken by the asphyxiating smog of The Modern Anime Fan. Sincerity and passion die at the cross of venomous disingenuity, nailed down by ironic detachment and love in the key of “Waifu of the Month”. The work of Angel Matrix, the latest in rebrands of Esposito's predictable shtick, axes even the most optimistic of readings: Neon White is the new face of pretension, wearing the oh-so-relatable mask of an adored time for the sake of drawing attention, not out of love, nostalgia, or passion. Soullessness masquerading as soulful.

and someone please tell the writers that run-on sentences don’t read as like, relatable or quirky. It just looks bad. It’s like, your job to Make Text Read Good. come on.

Having the Scott Pilgrim guys and the co-developers of Streets of Rage 4 on the dock here meant this was never gonna be a failure, regardless of its status as a pretty ridiculous exercise in nostalgia for folks who are still wrapping their arms around a childhood long past expiry. Sometimes a shameless cash-in can also be a fantastic beat 'em up, and that's okay - the miracle of video games is that sometimes really good ones are created to promote some shitty movie.

Although based on the secret ooze that created Turtles in Time, you can feel the SOR4 in this from the moment you first grapple an enemy. We're back. Tribute Games and Dotemu have done a technically-marvelous job of taking that original arcade/SNES framework Konami developed and polishing its rough, unforgiving edges off with fairer, more thoughtful mechanics from other brawlers that folks know and love. This game isn't quite as mechnically dense or strict in the challenges it lays down in comparison to other 2D beat 'em ups, but that makes total sense because this also has to be a 90s reverie for people who just want to see Mikey eat pizza or hear a 67-year old man try to sound like a teenager again or listen to the boss themes Wu-Tang composed. And that's cool by me - I want more people to experience the joys of the genre.

Mechanically, I'd say this thing plays like the Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 to Streets of Rage 4's Street Fighter IV - you're allowed far more leeway with OTGs, wall bounces and cancels compared to the precision of Wood Oak City, which leads to tons of incredibly satisfying juggle pathways that can even integrate obstacles from the surrounding environment. For example, with Raphael you can jab-loop a dude, cancel the last hit into a dash, cancel the dash into a shoryuken, roll-cancel over to the other end of the room and wall-bound the sandbagging body back to you by lunge-kicking it with a roomba. It's mondo bodacious, and goes to show how fulfilling fighting/brawling video games can be when you let the player "power fantasy" themselves as a lean green fighting machine with lengthy, stylish, free-flowing combos. A great way to show people how fun beat 'em ups are.

Six-player more or less throws all of the above out of the window in favour of a pizza party game, which is totally cool and lot of fun too, even if you're like me and don't know who anyone on the screen aside from the Ninja Turtles is (I am the right age for this flavour of TMNT, but they were called the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles over here and my mum didn't like me watching violent things and/or buying little post-Reaganite/Thatcherite plastic frog guys). A great beat 'em up should exist both as a big bashing exercise and a Sifu-like pathway to combat mastery, and no doubt some wise old masters will come along and show us multi-character juggle combos in the months to come that are like, mega bonkers radical, dude. Despite being PvE experiences, great beat 'em ups always end up developing fighting game-like communities around them who all end up complaining about patch notes and balance changes - it just goes to show the passion a great entry in this genre can inspire.

Only finished it twice so far - once solo and once in a random party - but feel like this could comfortably be a game like Streets of Rage 4 where I end up beating it like 10 times on different difficulties with different characters because it's clear they put the work in, making every character their own game to learn and every stage on every difficulty its own challenge to understand. What I'm trying to say here is that you should play Streets of Rage 4. Cowabunga! This thing has the fuckin Nickelodeon logo at the start and it could be Game of the Year lmao

Wow, 2003 Capcom sure was a crock of shit wasn't it? This game, Mega Man X7, Dino Crisis 3, etc. It's absolutely amazing the company didn't go under after such an awful display, but I guess that's thanks to Viewtiful Joe.

DMC2 isn't a video game, it isn't an experience for you to get yourself immersed in, or to be thrilled by.

DMC2 is a void that swallows up all enjoyment and entertainment value and puts you in a place where you cannot escape, where you cannot experience anything of value or providence.

I may not have understood how exactly combos worked in DMC1, but you know, at least the gameplay was inherently satisfying. I still felt like I had to avoid attacks, utilize the unique abilities for my Devil Trigger, etc. That game had a crunch to its sound effects too, and music that got you in the mood to kill the hordes of enemies ahead.

DMC2 has none of this. DMC2 plays the game for you. Hold down the X button and watch as you participate in the waiting game. This is how 95% of encounters in this game can be handled. Why bother with swordplay when shooting the enemy can stagger and juggle them in the air indefinitely. This even applies to boss fights.

I just knew, the moment I popped into this game for the second time since I own it on my PC that I was going to feel absolutely drained. By the second half of the game I had begun to abandon the guns to try and give any form of life to this fucking game, but it didn't work. There is no way to make this game any less soulless than it is.

I think for me, the premiere moment of the game's shittiness came to me during this one part where you ride in a train. There are enemies in the train and you are expected to beat them while the train moves to its destination. I managed to beat them very swiftly, but still had to wait a solid 30 seconds for the the train to reach the other side. And in that moment, that's when it came to me:

DMC2 wastes your time.

You walk around in a bizarre amusement park watching extremely weird stuff and discovering odd, but extremely iconic, characters. There aren't actual puzzles, you just need to find out where to go before suffering an horrible death. You can switch between characters whenever you meet then and each one has fun unique dialogs and events, you can even read their thoughts and they are often hilarious. It's priceless.

The downside is that the game is too short, and unlike other short games that properly develop their stories and leave you feeling satisfied, it makes you wish for a lot more, at least I did. This deserved to be like 5 cds long.

Too bad the David Lynch tv series never happened either.

“Mademoiselle, your life will be a crazy carnival, filled with laughter, luck, and life’s lovely lunacies...”

Theresa Duncan and co.’s lens with which to see the beauty of the world. Meets children at their level with their curiosity and does not go any lower. Love love love the writing here (and the narration, thanks David!), giving children beautiful prose to study and understand as they piece together this world. That’s a didactic view of course, but sans that even, the world still feels so descriptively penned. Also, aggressively 90s with its fuzzy guitar, pig-latin jokes, and (oddly popular) pastiche of beatnik culture.

Warms my gnarled heart that Fugazi and Nation of Ulysses alumni embraced this project with the care needed. It shows, truly.

in the first dungeon of pillars of eternity, there's a moment that really stuck with me. you encounter a xaurip - a classic fantasy racism beastman that trades in aesthetics uncomfortably pulled from indigenous american stereotypes. it indicates that you go no further, that you do not follow it down a path into it's territory. there's no option to convince it to step aside and let you past: you either respect it's wishes, turn around and find another path, or you walk forward and kill it as an enemy. it's a moment with, i think genuine nuance, where the agency of the xaurip is respected, a moment that actually asks the player to respect the culture of this people or defy it, preventing them from taking a empowering middle road where they can do whatever they want if they have high enough numbers.

anyway, in the very next area you immediately encounter a bunch of them that attack on sight and that you have no recourse but to slaughter.

this moment is pillars of eternity in microcosm. on every level of it's construction, it is a game that feels simultaneously genuinely aware of the fraught nature of many of the images it is evoking and the things it is doing, aware of the stain left by games of this ilk in the past, and also resignedly committed to doing those things anyway without the brazen dumb confidence of a game like divinity: original sin 2. progressive and regressive, inventive and derivative, evolutionary and counter-evolutionary, pillars of eternity is the fascinating attempt to harken back to bioware's baldur's gate and the crpgs of it's era made by a game that doesn't wholly see the value in going back there.

i won't speculate on director je sawyer's intent any more than the man has directly said himself, as he has shown real discomfort towards people suggesting his opinions on certain games, but i know from my mercifully brief visits to the fascist haven that is the rpgcodex forums that sawyer is a quite strong critic of how the classic infinity engine games actually played, and despite my fondness for RPGs of that style, i find myself very much on his side. there's a reason these games struggle to find new fans that aren't just going to turn the games down to the lowest difficulty to sidestep most of the actual playing of it as much as possible: advanced dungeons and dragons is not, by any metric, an elegant or intuitive system at the best of times, and while real-time with pause was an elegant solution to just how long combat in d&d can go on for (larian's proud statements that BG3 has an authentic, turn-based translation of 5E rules should absolutely terrify any prospective players), it only raises the barrier to entry for those not already au fe with ad&d's eccentricities.

pillars of eternity feels utterly unique in that it is a real-time with pause CRPG based on rules that were designed for a video game, and not for a very different medium, and as a result it is...actually good and fun. the rules and statistics are far clearer, the resource game is far more sensical, and the pace of encounters is such that individual moves are less frequent but far more impactful, maintaining the weighty impact turns have in a traditional turn-based game at a speed far more under your own control. experientially, pillars of eternity feels closer to FF12 than it does baldur's gate, with a sliding scale of playstyles ranging from making each move with care and precision, to writing full AI scripts for each member of the party and letting battles play out automatically at hyperspeed.

when i play games in this genre, i usually keep the difficulty low and drop it even lower if i encounter friction. but with pillars, i kept the difficulty on normal the entire way through because I genuinely enjoyed the gameplay and tactical puzzles it presented. it helped me to see, for the first time, why someone might prefer rtwp over turn-based, and when i started a pillars of eternity 2 playthrough shortly after playing this, i decided to stick to real-time rather than playing the game's new turn-based mode, because i became genuinely enamoured with this system.

pillars of eternity is in the unique position of being a baldur's gate homage that doesn't feel like it holds any particular reverence or great love for baldur's gate, and makes good on that position by well and truly killing bg's darlings where the system design is concerned. this isn't exactly uncharted territory for obsidian: but despite it's progressive approach to it's combat, it feels much more burdened by it's legacy than either kotor 2 or neverwinter nights 2, neither as caustic as the former nor as quietly confident as the latter. it sits uncomfortably among many of the things it does, inherited and otherwise.

to demonstrate: this is, in many ways, a d&d-ass setting. it's a roughly-medieval setting in a temperate forested coastal region, and yet the dyrwood is not medieval france/britain like the sword coast is, it's far closer to colonial canada both in terms of regional politics and technology. you have humans, you have elves, you have dwarves, and things that are kinda like gnomes but with the serial numbers filed off, you have the godlike, which are a twist on the aasimar/tieflings of d&d, each with their own gygaxian race science bonuses to stats, but aside from the aforementioned fantasy racism with the beastmen, these fantasy races matter less in the actual story than national identities and cultures, which makes one question why the race science stuff is even here. even stepping into the mechanical dimension, most of the classes are reasonably interesting interpretations of classic stock d&d archetypes like fighter, wizard, paladin, etc, but the two unique classes, chanter and cipher, are so obviously the design highlights and work in a way that would be incredibly difficult in a tabletop game but are beautiful in a video game. they eagerly invite the question of what this game would look like if it wasn't obligated to include the d&d obligations within it.

while i can't speak for every member of the development team, i know that for je sawyer, pillars of eternity was not necessarily a game he wanted to make - at least not in the way that it ended up being made. elements like the traditional fantasy setting, the real-time with pause gameplay, and even the presence of elves, were all things that were there to fulfil the demands of a kickstarter promising a baldur's gate throwback from a company that had fallen on difficult times. these things that feel like obligations feel like that because they are obligations: concessions to appeal to expectations and desires forged by nostalgia for a game that obsidian didn't actually make. these aren't the only visible compromises that mark the game - "compromise" being perhaps a generous word to describe the game's obnoxious kickstarter scars - but it is this tug of war between the parts of itself that wish to remain within the walls of baldur's gate, and the parts that cry out for escape, that ultimately defines pillars of eternity.

while maddening dreams and an epidemic of children born without souls is what drives the plot of pillars of eternity, the story is really in the conversations between tradition and very colonialist notions of progress, and the very opinionated characters you converse with along the way. likeable characters will hold quietly conservative worldviews that feel natural for them, people will say the right things for the wrong reasons, or the wrong things for the right reasons. friendly characters will have beliefs that are extremely distasteful to you but are so deeply held that there is no way to use the power granted to you by being the player character to dissuade them from their belief system with a few honeyed words. this is not a game where each element works towards a clear thematic conclusion, one that confidently knows what is right and what is wrong when discussing the things it brings up. it is a messy world filled with ugliness and argument and contradiction, and no clear definitive statement on its themes. it has a perspective, but it is not one held with immense confidence. it is a perspective mired with doubts and second-guessing that feels very conscious and deliberate. in particular, the final hour of the game has a twist that recontextualises the nature of the setting, but it's noticeable just how much of the cast, both in this game and in the sequel. find this not to be a redefining moment of their lives, but simply something they have to let sit in their gut like a millstone. it lets them see with new light things they once valued, but they feel unable to simply cast those things aside.

i have a particular distaste for critiques in geek circles narrow their focus on what a work is saying to only the series or genre the work finds itself in, and ignoring whatever resonance it might have to the world outside the fiction, subconsciously because the author has little experience of that world. and yet, it's difficult to read pillars of eternity without looking at it's relationship to baldur's gate and it's ilk, especially given how it kickstarted (lol) the late 2010s CRPG revival that led to breakout hits like divinity: original sin 2 and disco elysium. it walks in the meadows of the past with an uneasy rhythm, constantly expressing it's discomfort with being there but never quite being able to find the way out. even at the end of the game, there is delightfully scarce resolution to the weighty philosophical questions raised by the final act - the immediate crisis dealt with, certainly, but the game ends on a world that has raised questions rather than answered them, and while you may have your own thoughts and perspectives, there is no great victory of ideologies to be found, no grand, world-defining choice about what to do with the wisdom of the past. it's a game that simply ends with you emerging back into a world that is materially largely unchanged but colored so different by the new perspective you have on it. it is a game that is deliriously inconclusive.

one could word that as a criticism - and indeed, a strict formalist lens would probably find it as such - but honestly, it's what i find delightful and resonant about pillars of eternity. i'm someone who thinks generally very poorly about d&d as a game, but my intermittently weekly d&d games with my friends that have been going on since the first lockdown have made some incredible memories, a world and story and cast that i find myself hugely invested in. despite my disdain for a lot of the recurring cliches and tropes of the genre, some of my favorite stories are fantasy stories. and despite my active distaste for a lot of the decisions pillars either makes or is stuck with, and indeed for some of the creative minds involved in it's production (chrs avellne's characters were substantially rewritten after his departure from obsidian to such an extent that neither he nor je sawyer recognize them as "his characters" but whoever was behind durance specifically is doing such a conscious avellone impression that i would be remiss not to note that his presence is certainly felt) i still enjoy it immensely regardless.

frequently, engagement with art is a negotiation with the parts about it that speak to us and the parts that fail to do so, where we may be able to excuse or enjoy parts that others find to sink the entire work for them, and it's unexpectedly moving to find a game that was so visibly having that conversation with itself as i played it, and rang so true for the relationship i have with the things that inspired it.

it's a game that embodies the sticky and troubling way all the games and stories of it's ilk sit in my mind and expresses them emotively through a story that, in fits and starts, writes quite powerfully on the unique pains and sensation of memory and tradition and progress. it's a game that feels all the more true, all the more real, for it's contradictions, compromises, and conversations capped off with trailing ellipses, leading down two roads to an uncertain future and a depressingly familiar past.

oh YO here we go here we fuckin GO BRO

this is it pack it the fuck up everybody they did it it only took them five tries to absolutely goddamn nail it.

At its core, The Final Scene is a game about how there is ultimately no way to escape becoming prey to the machine of capitalism.

But I guess I should set up the story before I unpack that. Nancy and her friend Maya are at the historic royal palladium theater in St. Louis so Maya can interview movie star Brady Armstrong, whose most recent film is about to premiere there before the theater is due to be sadly demolished in three days. Maya enters Brady’s dressing room, a scream is heard, and when Nancy breaks in, the room is empty. Nancy receives a threatening phone call from a disguised voice telling her that if the demolition isn’t cancelled then Maya will die, which gives Nancy a strict three day time limit to find her friend, who is almost certainly hidden somewhere in this old magician’s theater, or cancel the demolition. She’ll work to do both throughout the game, and is met with nothing but skepticism, competition, and outright hostility by a cavalcade of shitfuck assholes who are determined to twist a tragic crisis towards their own personal gain.

It’s a decidedly different tone for this series, and while I strongly enjoy the comfortable creepiness of past entries at their best, Her pulls off a frantic, sweaty energy here arguably better. Nancy, who is only able to be characterized through dialogue and voice performance, is written completely differently in this game – she’s frazzled, and caustic; much more prone to irritable jabs and frustrated outbursts. This is a desperate situation that fucking nobody is taking seriously but you and Lani Minella sells this urgency in Nancy really well.

There’s a general streamlining to the proceedings that goes along with this idea of urgency. The theater might be the smallest space of the series so far, maybe even smaller than the school areas of the first entry, Secrets Can Kill, and you definitely have to do the least amount of backtracking through secret areas that require puzzle-solves to access. Puzzles are also pretty light and breezy in general, which could be considered a criticism but I think is appropriate for the tone and speed of play in the game, and the heavier focus on characters and narrative. This one definitely leans more on shooing you from event flag to event flag, dialog to dialog over solving a grand puzzle or piecing together a historical narrative (that element is present but takes a decided back seat). Once again the identity of the culprit is extremely clear almost from the beginning but it’s fine here imo; the WHO of it all is almost taken for granted, barely played as a reveal at all. There are simply other things going on in this game that are more interesting and important, even with that character (whose identity I will be spoiling along with everything else in the game starting in the next paragraph – if you might be interested and you care about spoilers – play the game! It slaps!)

So, capitalism will kill us, and there’s no escape. Not for the people who are routinely crushed under the heels of the wealthy and powerful, and not even for the people at the top of the heap. We are all grist for the mill, and the wheel never stops turning.

Consider Nancy Drew. A young woman in a world that hates her for being. Nobody takes her seriously, nobody listens to her. Her friend is kidnapped almost literally in front of her eyes and the cops don’t care, they just explain to her all the reasons why the kidnapping probably wasn’t a kidnapping, okay then why it was a hoax, okay then why her theories as to what’s going on that have been investigated and substantiated with evidence are wrong and her friend probably isn’t being held in the building and there’s nothing to worry about. Every man she interacts with flirts with her, condescends to her, or manipulates her for information to further a personal agenda under a veneer of being trustworthy and “one of the good ones,” taking advantage of knowledge of a woman’s place in the world, in the power structure. “You can trust me, I’m [x].” Every time it’s a lie. The only other woman she encounters has given into the system. She is cruel and selfish and urges Nancy to be like her; it’s the only way to be free, or as close to free as you can be, when this is the world. Nancy hates her, but she’s not as different as she wants to believe, as the ending of this and every game attests to. Nancy acknowledges that everything is fucked, the cops are useless or complicit, the kidnapper was barely a criminal and probably needs help and sympathy more than anything else, the people who profited here are cruel and deserve worse. But hey, crime’s crime buddy, you gotta go to jail, and I gotta girlboss, and what are we gonna do not have cops? Not have rich people? Not have bribes? Not let them get away with it as long as the courts refuse to bring justice? Nancy doesn’t have answers. It doesn’t occur to her to think about these things. This is how They get us – by assimilating us into Them, or better yet raising us like that in the first place; just, a lesser version, if it can be helped.

Consider Joseph Hughes, the elderly caretaker of the Palladium, who acts like he’s resigned to pack his shit up and move out of state to live with family when the theater that he’s dedicated his entire life to is needlessly demolished, but who in reality has concocted a slapdash plan to kidnap brady armstrong from his dressing room and ransom him for the landmark’s safety. He’s a desperate person who panics and kidnaps Maya instead when she enters the room before brady does, and things spiral further and further out of control for him until he eventually resigns himself and Maya and at last Nancy to die along with the building that has become his life. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. He makes a point of treating Maya well throughout the ordeal – so well, in fact, that it’s stated during the ending monologue that she plans to testify on his behalf in court. He’s a good man with a righteous cause who plays by the rules and is stymied by a guy who has more money than him bribing the official system to destroy his entire life and getting away with it scot free. And as we so often see in real life, Joseph eventually turns on the other little people around him via combinations of desperation and misunderstandings until he’s made things bad enough that he feels he can’t take them back. This is how They get us - by making us turn on each other instead of on Them.

Consider Brady Armstrong. He is wealthy, powerful, and adored. He is revealed to be the only person known to have an ownership stake in the Palladium and therefore the mysterious person behind the demolition scheme. at the end of the game Nancy begs him not to signal the demolition to begin, she KNOWS that her friend is still in the building and she’s THIS close to proving it. At this point, we know that Brady has been bribing city hall officials to stop the theater from becoming a protected historical site. WE know that there’s a possibility of discovering the other owner if we have a little more time, but HE does not. In his eyes, he has absolutely nothing to lose by letting us look around for her, but he chooses instead to walk outside and begin the demolition, and knowingly accept the responsibility for Maya Nguyen’s death. This is how They all think. This is what it is to be wealthy. The luxury of not having to care about other people, and not having to face consequences for not caring (he doesn’t, either - Brady gets a happy ending). At the same time though, the reason brady wants to tear down the theater is because to him it is symbolic of his own existential dread; he is grossly aware of his own status as a product with a quickly diminishing shelf life. He worries about his wrinkles, his muscles, his rapidly receding hairline; he knows that when these qualities are gone he'll be discarded by the culture that supposedly adores him as easily as he discards the little people around him. Brady wants this theater gone because he looks at it and he sees an old, outdated husk of something that used to be. That he needs a place to break ground on a new business venture to secure his legacy and financial future is almost immaterial; he even admits that he could do it anywhere, which is what he does do at the end of the game when the theater is saved at the last minute.

Because of course it is. This isn’t fuckin full metal jacket guys it’s goddamn Nancy Drew colon The Final Scene from 2001, you bought it for like nine dollars in a cardboard sleeve at Walmart. Her Interactive did not intentionally make a scathing indictment of our entire social and economic world order, they just made a game set in it, starring a person whose values conform to its popular values, and unfortunately it’s really hard to do that WITHOUT making it come off as a scathing indictment. The game ends with the same cheery letter from Nancy to her dad, the same saccharine slideshow telling you what happened to all the characters, the same declaration that next time she’ll be off on another vacation in a fabulous locale without her boyfriend (does she LIKE Ned like are they gonna break up or what serious question when do they see each other). It’s just that this time the events were so stark and the resolution so upsetting that the feelings hang in the air long after the credits roll, suffocating, impossible to ignore.

We are all grist for the mill. The wheel never stops turning.

PREVIOUSLY: TREASURE IN THE ROYAL TOWER
NEXT TIME: SECRET OF THE SCARLET HAND

ALL NANCY DREW PIECES

Throwing in the towel on this one. I love a forgotten gem and No One Lives Forever is peak forgotten gem. 60s spy comedy that's been trapped in some ownership dispute for decades that no one is going to solve. No one's rising up to demand Sony figure out if they own The Operative, and no one's can afford to remake it in a new format.

Which is a shame, because I do think there's a lot of fertile ground here with some modern sensibilities. The jokes about foreign cultures and fat people are nauseatingly late 90s/early 00s and it bogs down the experience. But you can tell that the team's design decisions really excelled once they selected on a female protagonist. Cate Archer is flawed in her angry, reckless methods, but she's also hyper competent and underestimated in this 60s environment. The feminist angle is also a little dated, but it provides actual narrative intrigue that makes you reflect on Cate's motives a lot. She's a Scottish thief with no family trying to prove herself to a bunch of British assholes who are all too hopeful that she'll get killed during a mission and they can write her off. The villains are offering better pay and have women in leadership roles. Still, the end result is massive destruction for personal gain, so Cate's decision to stay on team Britain is intended to show some greater heroism and morality. Its not looking to be a revolutionary take about government and crime, even if it accidentally trips over those ideas. Bad guys are bad dissidents and traitors, good guys are good government workers. Etc.

Ultimately though, the gameplay is the real failure. The game is designed as a shooter first and a stealth game second. The end result is that the stealth kind doesn't... work? Run is the default and even crouching down doesn't do much to save you. This wouldn't be too much of a problem, but a required stealth mission becomes one of the most infuriating sections of the game. After taking about a month long break, I reapproached it and found myself running into the exact same problems. The combat's not particularly engaging and it all just kinda bleeds together. I'd love to see this remade with a greater emphasis on stealth options or even making combat more fun. Something to really push this game from an okay to a great.

But sometimes that's just not in the cards. Novel ideas get lost and buried and that's just the way it all crumbles.

Insane that we got one of the most empathetic and compassionate series of games towards people suffering from mental illness in the early 2000s and outside of indie games, nothing has come close since.

It'd be really funny that if Konami brought it back they'd hire the studio with games that are the complete opposite of that.

EDIT (Oct 20th 2022): if only you knew how bad things really were.

i'd wager there are many who try to undertake a more fair critical analysis when writing about this game. for the sake of transparency, let's just say i can't. this isn't about a stringent inability to separate art from the artist, this is about my inability to separate art from its era.
- it is emblematic of a dark period in capcoms oeuvre, in which they repeatedly made awful creative and financial decisions in an attempt to both maximize revenue and appeal to western markets
- it is easily one of the most repugnant, misogynistic games ive ever played; it possesses some of the worst writing ive ever seen in a game while still supposedly aspiring to shakespearean greatness. none of its musings on society ever come together nor can it be enjoyed as a charming romp when so little of its characterization is either endearing or palatable
- the calvacade of capital G Gamers who were thoroughly unimpressed by this title inspired a desperate and petty form of tribalism from the likes of varying industry figures that continues to resurface to this day...
- ...which, inadvertently, largely reminds of a kind of rampant xenophobia that existed in the seventh generation of games, a quiet dismissal of anything japanese in the medium and a refusal to engage with their works on sincere grounds (look no further than the original niers critical admonishment). ninja theory felt completely comfortable disparaging and blaspheming the original franchise that they now held the keys to in an era where inescapable indie 'beloveds' like jonathan blow and phil fish rallied to antagonize an entire country's output to the medium
- ninja theory had zero right to patronize or criticize, by the way, given that itsuno had to babysit them to teach them anything at all about proper enemy design, combat design, and so on and so forth. their action game couldn't even be considered average until the release of the special edition
- honestly think the games environments look like dogshit, considering it's the one thing everyone is unanimous in praise of. 2000s movie poster type bullshit

a stark reminder of an awful time to be a participant in the medium and the sole reason i refuse to be accessory to ninja theory in any financial capacity. sacrilege if im being real. hilarious that dmc5 reconciles with this games western sensibilities to often brilliant effect by comparison

This game is impressive in how it is one of the most soulless, industry plant-type creations I have ever bared witness to, but it is depressingly getting exactly what it wants in the longterm:
-Massive, influential YouTubers and content creators covering the game and giving it publicity it doesn't deserve
-Dronelike theorizing about nothing lore, with TWO videos by MatPat (where even he subtly decries the shady, scummy business practices of some of the people behind this game) regarding the same played-out bullshit story you can imagine
-And massive financial success from greedy, moneygrubbing marketing and merchandising.

The concept of this game being anything resembling "indie" has been entirely erased at this point.

This game is now the Warner Bros. of indie games. And it's genuinely depressing that a game like Five Nights at Freddy's that (while undeniably flawed) was a piece with so much genuine heart, passion, and drive to its creation ended up inspiring such a bland, but unfortunately successful DISASTER of a video game that ends up being just another "children's toys but with a dark twist" product to add to that homogenous glob of indie horror, all while reaping rewards it very much does not deserve.
Fuck this game.