i love suda51’s aesthetic to death, and he is truly showing his whole ass with this game as far as his influences/taste/proclivities are concerned - i too love pro wrestling and anime and punk rock and otaku shit, so this game really speaks to me on that level. i also respect and enjoy what the game is going for with its story and structure, i love the art style and i really enjoy the characters and general vibe of santa destroy.

but… this just feels like absolute shit to play. this is, in some ways, the point - suda and grasshopper are seeking to perform a meta-commentary on the tedium/repetition of playing games, which comes across fairly well.

the problem with this approach is the ‘spec ops: the line problem’: even though you’ve included something in your game with the intention of commenting on it, at the end of the day you’ve still included that thing in your game. with spec ops, that involves the game commenting on how awful the mass murder enacted by the ‘heroes’ of military shooters by having you do a whole lot of murder in a military shooter. here, suda and grasshopper have made a game that is frustrating and repetitive to play as a way of commenting on video games as a form, but it’s also still another frustrating, repetitive video game.