I doubted From Software. I will be the first to admit that, after the proverbial dreg heap that was Sekiro and the reminder of how stunningly mediocre Souls games can be with the Demon’s Souls remake, I came at Elden Ring with a healthy amount of caution. The irony is that I have a deep love for From Software when they’re firing on all cylinders. While I have always been weary of the fantasy genre and the often maligned “dark fantasy” label, the world of Dark Souls speaks to me. Although I have very little appreciation for the lore present in the series, I respect the uncompromising vision that the lore follows. As a vehicle for unforgettable visuals is where the lore shines, though. I doubt anyone who has played the Dark Souls series will forget things like Sen’s Fortress, flanked by a lush forest and standing ominously as a roadblock to a city bathed in light. The Dark Souls series is filled with displays of From Software flexing their visual design muscles, proving time and again that there is no other studio who can bring such horrifically beautiful creatures and worlds to life at such high frequency. Irithyll, Anor Londo, Duke’s Archives, Yharnam, Lothric, The Fishing Hamlet and I could name at least ten more locations from these games that all came out within the same decade that are among the most breathtaking areas in any game that I’ve played. The only lore that I need is that someone built these places, and that they are no place for the speck in this world that I’m playing as. Their size frequently dwarfs your player character, reinforcing the fact that this place is hostile to you, that despite any level of undeniable beauty that still remains, that you are not welcome here.

There is comfort to this fear of the great unknown though. I was recently introduced to the works of Thomas Moran during an art history class that I’ve been taking. Moran’s career was defined by his paintings of the Grand Canyon, and his experiences there were clearly a combination of awe and unease. See, Moran was in the company of an expedition that was mapping out the American west for an industry raring to exploit it for everything it is worth. It soon became evident to these explorers that this land was too important to be tilled by big business. This importance was not due to the mineral housed within the Grand Canyon’s fertile ground, but the sheer wonder that it inspired in them. Take a look at any of his paintings, and one can see exactly why they wanted to protect this land. It feels otherworldly, like a place that is too perfect and awe-inspiring to be a physical place on earth. That feeling would be founded in the truth, because the places Moran painted are not real. Moran painted composites of the Grand Canyon area. The places he painstakingly captured cannot be visited and looked upon with the same wonder you may have imagined he did. In a way, Moran’s paintings were “propaganda” for the conservationist cause. They captured a feeling rather than a specific time and place. This feeling, although it basks you in the light of beauty that is beyond the description of prose, is also tinged with the same unease that Anor Londo might evoke. Moran felt that to prove the pricelessness of the Grand Canyon, it was not only imperative that its indescribable wonder be on full display, but also its titanic hostility. Beauty can be overlooked in the name of profit, but it’s more difficult when the unknowable wilderness lies beyond. Pictured in his most famous painting are tiny figures representing the expedition, standing like ants at the precipice of a sheer drop. Any great gust of wind or tectonic shift could send them plummeting off into certain death. Beyond, on the horizon is a thunderous waterfall. It is fantastical and alluring, but god help you if you get caught in its uncaring flow. I want to be there, standing next to the explorers and even going out into the painted world, but at the same time I feel my fragility pang. From Software has distilled the essence of Moran’s paintings down to a concentrated formula. The worlds they create are three dimensional recreations of this feeling strung together in a barrelling journey toward more and more danger. They are anxiety filled trips to places that are constantly out to hurt you and make you feel true, unrelenting fear. The fear that all the progress you made through this world will suddenly be halted by something insurmountable. Something that has seen a thousand people like you, and disposed of them like any of the birds or unclothed zombies that you dash past. Despite the danger and confusion and seemingly endless unfair obstacles that these games are defined by, they hold some allure with us. We keep bashing our heads against these walls because they are walls that are splendid to look at.

Elden Ring is an embarrassment of beautiful walls. It feels like a scavenger hunt where around every corner a new Moran painting lies in wait. Breath of the Wild hid shrines around the world, but everyone knew that the real reward was the intrinsic joy of finding an abandoned temple embedded with sleeping guardians. It was scaling a mountain you’ve seen in the distance for the last five hours, reaching the top, and seeing that not only do dragons exist in this world, but there’s one right in front of you. Elden Ring is like Breath of the Wild if every shrine was replaced with a dragon at the top of a mountain. At every turn there is a mine filled with stone-skinned humanoids wholly concerned with stripping away the gem laden walls, or a ravine that ends in a climb through scaffolding and jutting cliffs with a magma spewing wyrm guarding its peak, or a castle just as intricate as the best Dark Souls levels taunting you with its grandeur. Everything here taunts you. Elephant sized wolves that can murder you in one fell swoop taunt you in the same way Moran taunted everyone who looked upon his paintings. It’s a dare that no matter how dangerous they can make something, we will always edge closer to it to get a better look at its grotesque beauty. It’s the dare that, my 10,000 souls be damned, you will platform through treacherous ramparts of a castle in disrepair to see what lies at the end. Elden Ring taunts me constantly, and its rewards are greater than 10,000 or 100,000 souls or runes or whatever they’re called now. All I know is that I should have never doubted From Software’s propensity to allure me with venomous curiosity.

Elden Ring, our next fromsoftware souls adventure. Out of all the sorts of games I play, “souls” games are what I’ve always been drawn to most. So naturally a game like Elden Ring would appeal to me, and appeal to me it has! A grand celebration of all the previous titles, echoes of past adventures all stirred into one delicious pot of content. But before I give my praise to the Elden Ring which despite being impressive af, it does bring along a major balancing issue post capital area. There is a decline starting from the mountaintop of giants area. Everything at this late-game point seems to have been doubled up, which created this sense of “artificial” difficulty. Enemies and bosses just have too much health in these endgame areas, while you also don’t do enough damage. And the damage you receive feels a bit much. The overworld dungeons start to feel samey, the bosses in these samey dungeons are repeats of old bosses or just added enemies, or the classic copy paste, two old bosses at the same time! Sure this isn’t really a big issue, but it does need to be said. I do understand that these big open world games need to do a bunch of this copy-paste stuff. I am conflicted with my opinion, because these issues are most certainly present, and they did soil a part of the game for me. But I do not want to ignore how amazing it was to receive a game like this. Universal praise, everyone online collectively playing and discussing, discovering together; it’s a blessing when we get a game such as this, the gaming community as a whole really feels involved. The world, the characters, the cutscenes, the epic boss battle music, the presentation, the awesome weapons, the beautiful armor sets, a great character creator, fun exploration, the voice acting, the dialogue, cryptic sentences accompanying mesmerizing scenery; yep it’s a fromsoftware game and there’s so much praise I want to give it, truly something special.

Unwieldy, genuinely frustrating and sometimes aimless without abandon, this is still one of the most ambitious and freshest takes on the Souls formula with a clear focus on the idea and allure of limitless power and strength, and how that colors over its world and its characters, but even through the player themselves, seeking through many of its vast amount spells and equipment, growing in immense might by the end. It's truly a genuine journey in a way perhaps most open world games lack, a true adventure in the player's own making.

The best part of Demon's Souls, to me, is the arcane and apathetic atmosphere the game is thick with throughout. The characters, the enemies, the bosses, they all are almost incomprehensible and the game hides most lore behind item descriptions, leading to an almost brain fog inducing state on the player. Demon's Souls on PS3 pulses very subtly with profound life as a developer and its world were very surely nearly wiped out. And all of that is gone here, replaced with pretty particle effects and a revamped artsyle that sucks out the utilitarian post-apocalyptica for Blizzard inspired, plasticine HOG WASH! Nothing has ever felt so cynical, truly.

On top of the thoroughly Fucked Up artsyle and ambiance, the game just sucks to play now. Nothing feels right, the signature heft to the combat feels featherweight. Hitting an enemy no longer registers properly, nor does being hit. FromSoft laid this shit all out for them, but Bluepoint apparently believes themselves above the original developers. The breaking point for me was Phalanx feeling less like the opening salvo of horrors-yet-to-come and more like any other unremarkable first boss in any number of recent, genreless "action rpg" mush games. The splotchy-squelching of Phalanx not feeling particularly ooey nor gooey made me drop the game. I was done, just such a blatant misunderstanding of the design of the fight. And the design there isn't even that great! He's a big ooze guy that goes blorsh when you hit him and somehow that's fucked beyond recognition. Hate to see what sacrilege was done to the other bosses, will do myself a favor and never touch it!

Bluepoint, hear me and hear me well, keep your paws off Metal Gear Solid or I will unleash plague upon ye!

Content Warning for Attempted Suicide, Terminal Illness, Death, and Chronic Illness

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It’s September 2011 and I’m seventeen years old when I try to kill myself. There are two ponds near my parent’s house. It’s like 4 AM. I like to be out this early. Nobody else is awake, and they won’t be for a while. It’s like the whole world belongs to me. I wander around between the neighborhoods, along the roads, and in the fields. In ten years these will be fresh real estate properties but today they’re still farmland. This hour and a half is the only time the anxiety quells. The real world never knows peace. There’s a dread that accompanies every action and every moment; living in that house, going to school, hanging out with my friends (are they my friends? They are but I won’t be able to understand that until I’m healthier). I’ll always have to go back home. I’ll never be able to articulate what’s happening to me. The pressure is too intense. I don’t plan it, but, the pond is right there, and it’s deep enough, and early enough that no one will hear me. Not having a plan is what saves my life. Turns out impromptu self-drownings are difficult to pull off when the water is still and not THAT deep. So, it doesn’t work, and I’m soaked, and grateful to get home and hide the evidence before my parents wake up, but I don’t feel BETTER. I feel despair, still. There’s no way out. I wish I could just climb up the stairwell, out of this. I wish I had the clarity to understand what was wrong with me.

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What do you even say about Silent Hill 2? To say that it’s one of the best video games ever made feels simultaneously obvious and like I’m underselling it, right? Fuckin, uhhhh, Resident Evil 2 is one of the best video games ever made. Ace Attorney 3 is one of the best games ever made. Come on! When we see people talk about old games that they like they’ll so often say stuff like “it holds up really well for its age” or some similar comment that implies that progress is the same as quality. This is, of course, nonsense. I wouldn’t say video games are better as a medium in 2021 than they were in 2001; on the whole and in the mainstream I would say they’re demonstrably worse in almost every way – how they look, how they sound, how they feel. Silent Hill 2 was a AAA game. What do we get now instead? Far Cry 6? The fuckin, THE MEDIUM? We’ve lost everything in pursuit of bad lighting and looking like a mediocre episode of whatever was popular on HBO three years ago. Silent Hill 2 looks great and sounds great and fuck you it plays great too it feels good and even the puzzles are MOSTLY FINE. MOSTLY. Listen I’m saying this is the all time best video game I’m not saying it fuckin ended world hunger.

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It’s October 2012, I’m nineteen and I’m sitting in a business communications class when I get the text confirmation that Sam’s brain tumor is back, again. It’s not the first time, and I know that there’s nothing left to do, he’s going to die. It’s fast, untreated. He’s one of my best friends, and the only person I know from home who went to the same college as me, but we live really far apart on a big urban campus and I haven’t seen him as much as I’d have liked to. Now he’s gonna spend the rest of his time with his family back home. When I see him next it’s at a hometown charity event for his family in December. He’s unrecognizable physically, and he can’t speak. The event is at our old catholic elementary school, in the gym, where in the years since we graduated they’ve painted a giant tiger on the wall. It’s the school mascot. I feel incredibly awkward around him and spend most of the time away with our other friends. I only speak to him briefly, and when I do it’s a stupid joke about the tiger mural. These will be my last words to him. I do know this will be the case, I think. Later that month I’ll be one of his pallbearers. I spend a lot of time angry and ashamed of myself for not being better to him, not knowing how to act or what to say. I’m about to drop out of school for reasons financial and related to my mental health.

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So what DO you say about Silent Hill 2? That it’s a masterpiece? That it’s the most well-conceived and executed video game ever made? That every detail of it dovetails into every other in a legitimately perfect cocktail story, presentation, and play? That the performances, cinematography, soundscape, all of it are untouchably top of their class? That when Mary reads the letter at the end I WEEP because it’s one of the best pieces of acting I’ve ever heard? That if I ever meet Troy Baker it’s ON SIGHT? These things are all true. We all know it. Everybody knows this. It’s Silent Hill 2.

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It’s August 2019, I’m twenty-five and I’ve just managed to graduate college in time to move to a new city with my partner as she enters her third year of medical school. That’s the year they kick you out of the classroom and you start going to the hospitals to do your real hands-on training month to month. I’m job hunting unsuccessfully and we’re living exclusively off her loans, when what seems at first like a pulled lower back muscle becomes a fruitless early morning ER trip (five hours, no results, not seen by a doctor) becomes an inability to get out of bed becomes a forced leave of absence. Without a diagnosis she can’t get disability accommodations. While on a leave of absence we can’t have her loans, and in fact we have to pay them back. We’re getting desperate, thousands of dollars in debt, and I take the first soul sucking job I can find. It takes almost a full year of visits to increasingly specialized physicians but eventually my partner is diagnosed with non radiographic axial spondyloarthritis, an extremely rare condition that culminates in the fusion of the spinal column. We can treat the pain, sort of, but it’s only a matter of time until it’s likely to evolve into a more serious condition, she’ll never have the strength or stamina she had before, and the treatment options are expensive and difficult. Her diagnosis doesn’t even officially exist as a recognized condition that people can have until September 2020.

Suddenly I am a caretaker and everything is different now. Obviously our mood is stressed from the financial dangers, but she’s in pain, terrible pain, constantly for months. She can’t sleep, she can’t eat. There’s nothing I can do. It’s exhausting to live like that. She’s depressed. On good days we try to walk outside but good days are few and far between, and grow fewer over time, and her body makes her pay for the walks. She’s on drugs, a lot of them. Do they help? It’s unclear. They don’t make her feel BETTER. Nobody knows what’s wrong with her. Her school thinks she’s faking, they’re trying to concoct ways to get her kicked out. She wants to die. It breaks my heart. She’s everything to me, all that there is. She has literally saved my life. And I can’t help her. But it’s exhausting for me too. I don’t want to admit this, not even privately, to myself. It is hard to be the person who is leaned on, especially when the person you love can’t give anything back. I’m tired. I’m not angry, and I don’t think I’m resentful. But I’m tired. I feel shame for thinking about it, for acknowledging it. I know it’s silly to feel the shame but it’s there. I do find a job eventually, thankfully, but it’s still a long time before we get a diagnosis, much less an effective treatment. Even after things settle somewhat, it’s a hard year. And there are hard times to come.

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Ever since I first played it as a teen, Silent Hill 2 is a game that has haunted me through life, like a memory. It struck a deep chord with me when I was too young for that to be fair, too young to identify why I could relate to these people and their ghosts. I used to think this was a special relationship that I had with the game, the way you kind of want to think you have these when you’re younger, but the older I get the more I recognize this as part of growing up. Silent Hill 2 doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve encountered situations in life that closely mirror that of the protagonist. I mean, Angela’s story resonates deeply with me despite little overlap in the specifics of our family traumas. Silent Hill 2 touches me – and most of us – so deeply, because it has such a keen understanding of what it feels like to be Going Through It. It is a game that knows what it is to grieve, to despair, to soak in the fog, and also, maybe, to feel a catharsis, if you’re lucky, and you do the work.

I’ve been Angela, parts of her. I’ve been Laura too. I’ve had more James in me than I would prefer. I suspect all of us have these people, these feelings in us, to some degree or another. We collect them as we get older. That’s just part of it. Silent Hill 2 isn’t a happy game, but it’s one that Gets It, and lets us explore those spaces in a safe and cathartic way. It does this about as well as any piece of media I’ve encountered, on top of being so excellent at all the cinematic and video game stuff. But that’s really what makes it what it is. The empathy, and the honesty. I think it’s beautiful.

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.

When "It Takes Two" literally has a better take on parent/child-relationships (that is still not... great) you probably wrent wrong somewhere in the writing process. The masculinism in this is absolutely horrible and Kratos' attitude doesn't really change. The game wants to convince you it did, but in the end, the only things that actually change are that a) Kratos speaks in a slightly softer voice now and b) he tells his son things about himself. Maybe that development will continue in the next entry - I really hope it does - but as it stands, it all kinda leads nowhere. Everything revolving about the ending battle is also quite miserable and weirdly confused in its theming - this game constructs the gendered identities of its characters in a way that's, honestly, quite toxic (that it doesn't deconstruct them is a given at this point).

oh yea the gameplay is fine, it's AAA, it's okay, you can play it and it sometimes seems like "a lot of fun". The game also sometimes seems like it's "needlessly drawn-out and full of systems that barely add anything to the core gameplay" but that one hasn't been fact-checked by the Game Award comitee so I'm gonna hold out on that judgement.

what does it mean to "feel like Spider-Man"? after all, that's the refrain we heard time and time again upon the release of Spider-Man for the PS4, and it's the question that I couldn't get out of my head every time I thought about this game.

looking at the mechanics of the game doesn't really answer that question for me, mostly because a shocking amount of the experience of this game is simply lifted wholesale from the Batman Arkham games with precious little alteration. the combat, the surprisingly present stealth sections that involve isolating a group of enemies with a chronic neck injury that prevents them from looking even slightly Up, "detective" segments that entirely involve looking for a yellow line to follow, even an omnipresent voice in your ear feeding you constant info, it's all as it was all the way back in 2009's Arkham Asylum, mostly unaltered. indeed, these games themselves were lauded at the time for "making you feel like Batman" but not nearly to the same hyperbolic memetic extent as marvel's sony's kevin feige's ike perlmutter's spider-man does for the ultimate arachnid-boy. generally speaking I would not consider Spider-Man and Batman to be characters that share an enormous deal in common outside of the very basic concept of fighting criminals in an urban environment, and in many ways there is an argument to be made that spider-man is batman's antithesis. and yet, somehow, essentially the same mechanics that created an experience that made you Feel Like Batman has made a great many people Feel Like Spider-Man.

the one meaningful mechanic which differentiates this from Arkham (though, maybe not as much as it perhaps should given the zip-to-point mechanic is again lifted completely wholesale from Arkham City) is the web-swinging, and it's a useful point in elucidating what the mechanical experience of this game does. web-swinging in this game is pleasing, stunningly well-animated, highly responsive, and also completely effortless. it's a struggle to even call it a mechanic: it is almost completely on auto-pilot, with nothing more involved than successive presses of R2 seeing Miles swing, leap, run on walls, the navigational experience of Spider-Man swinging through a painfully detailed recreation of Manhattan reduced to a single button. much like Assassin's Creed's automated free-running that clearly inspired the rhythms of play here, web swinging in this game looks fantastic - especially on a twitter clip captured with the patented SonyTM PlayStationTM ShareTM ButtonTM - but mechanically vacuous to the point of non-existence.

comparisons to Spider-Man 2's (the 2004 game, not this, the second instalment of the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise, nor the upcoming Marvel's Spider-Man 2, the third game in the Marvel's Spider-Man franchise) much lauded web swinging are passé, I know, but indulge me for just a moment: web-swinging in that game was beloved because it was a system. It had depth, it had a skill ceiling, it had moves that were difficult to pull off and a learning curve that required familiarity with the mechanic. it was enough to make a game in and of itself, and indeed it largely did because the rest of Spider-Man 2 ranges from unremarkable to poor. i don't know if i would go as far to say that this system "made me feel like spider-man" but it was, at the very least, a systemisation of this aspect of the character in such a way that it made for a compelling gameplay experience.

spider-man PS4 has none of this. it's mechanics are intentionally stripped down to the point that essentially the entire game is about pressing buttons at the right time in response to on-screen stimuli, and I know all video games can be boiled down to that, but Marvel's Spider-Man comes pre-boiled: the illusion it creates is so wafer thin that even a minute of thought reveals the 4K smoke and mirrors for what they really are. contrary to the appeals to the fraught concept of immersion the phrase "makes you feel like spider-man" evokes, I've scarcely felt more painfully aware that I am a person sitting on a sofa, holding a controller, than when playing this. when your entire game is frictionless, there's nothing to hang onto, either.

there is one sense in which the gameplay experience of Marvel's Miles Morales succeeds in capturing the spirit of the character, and that's in how his new powers frequently dissolve tension in the gameplay, with his invisibility offering you a fast charging get-out-of-jail-free card if you mess up the stealth (if being the operative word here) and the way almost every fight will end with an overpowered Venom Blast.

indeed, Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales often does feel like a Spider-Man comic, but rarely in ways I enjoy. After tremendous backlash from vocal fans at the time to "The Night Gwen Stacy Died" issue of Spider-Man, Stan Lee (who at this point was increasingly disconnected from the actual goings-on of the universe he helped create to the point that he only knew Gwen was dead when someone at a con asked if she would come back to life) decreed that Marvel Comics should avoid meaningful change, change that might alienate longtime fans or, more importantly, those who wished to turn marvel characters into lunchboxes and action figures and cartoons and movies, and instead only offer the illusion of change. while the obvious response to this is that Peter Parker could only be replaced by his clone, Ben Reily, for a short period of time before the gravity of the status quo would pull Peter Parker back into the starring role, it also had something of a side-effect, which is that as a universe where meaningful change is resisted and avoided, Marvel Comics as a whole has a reactionary and conservative worldview that gravitates towards it's baked-in assumptions and the presumed goodness of those assumptions.

in 2004's Civil War, Marvel Comics sided with the PATRIOT act. In 2008's Secret Invasion, Marvel Comics used evil religious extremist shapeshifting Skrulls who hide among us and could be friends, co-workers, countrymen plotting the destruction of earth as an analogy for islamic terrorism. In 2012's Avengers VS X-Men, five heroes empowered by a cosmic force change the world for the better, curing diseases, ending world hunger, only to have those changes be rejected as unnatural, and eventually are consumed by said cosmic power. In 2019's House of X/Powers of X, the X-Men founded a nationalistic ethnostate for mutants that is an explicit parallel for the apartheid state of Israel and sees this as a good thing.

Whatever form it may take, whatever illusions of change may, however briefly, be affected, Marvel Comics are bound to a reflection of our status quo that is essentially desirable, and a huge amount of Superhero comics are about reinforcing their own status quos as well as our own, with high-profile stories such as DC's Doomsday Clock ultimately being nothing more than desperate appeals to the supposed self-evident relevance and importance of the unchanging status of these characters. All of this does not even mention the aggressive copaganda of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, to the point where Captain Marvel was reproduced unaltered as propaganda for the US Air Force. Mainstream superheroes are always enforcers of the status quo, for good or for ill, but it's when the enforcement of that status quo comes up against depictions and discussions of the injustices of the real world that this becomes most uncomfortable.

There's a bit in this game, once you finish a side quest, where the camera pans up to a Black Lives Matter mural painted on the side of a building, and lingers there for just long enough to feel awkward. I don't object to the presence of this mural at all, but the direction decision here smacks as performative. It's not enough that the building is placed very prominently to ensure you can't miss it, but the game cranes itself to show you the image again, and the feeling of this can only really be described as the cinematography equivalent of "You know, I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could." It's desperate to demonstrate that it knows, it supports Black Lives Matter, but the functional reality of the rest of the game is aggressively at odds with what that movement is materially about.

I knew that the original 2018 Marvel's Spider-Man was in love with The Police but I can't describe how unprepared I still was for how aggressively conservative this game is. The story revolves around Miles Morales, while Peter Parker is on holiday to Generic Eastern Europeaistan, fighting against The Tinkerer and their evil plot to...destroy a product of an Evil Corporation that is giving people cancer. While at the eleventh hour they do contrive a reason why The Tinkerer's plan is #GoingTooFar, for most of the game there's actually no material reason for her to be in the wrong, and Miles Morales - and by extension, the game - is completely incapable of coming up with a single argument against her plan, simply resorting to "it's wrong! blowing things up is against the law!" or the classic "it's too risky! if even one person gets hurt that is too much!" said while Miles gives a Goon a severe concussion.

When I think of what Spider-Man means to me, what it is About, I think I'd describe it as the struggle to live up to an ideal of being our best selves, of always doing the right thing, in a world that makes that incredibly difficult to actually achieve, with our own personal failings and our endless conflicting responsibilities. In that sense, the Tinkerer, instrumentalized into meaningful action against an evil corporation by the death of a loved one, and struggling with how that affects her personal life and the relationships she has, is far more of a Spider-Man than Miles Morales in this game could ever be, given that his job is one of endless praise and assumed goodness facilitated by a hilarious uncritical depiction of the gig economy that sees the responsibility of Spider-Man morphed into a Deliveroo hustle grindset that always makes sure to respect Our Boys In Blue. How can something that loves the Police and hates direct action this much possibly claim to believe that Black Lives Matter?

In attempting to provide an "All-New, All-Different" up-to-date Spider-Man without making any effort to change the underlying assumptions it has about the world in which it lives, all this game does is expose how out of touch and outdated this whole concept is when the illusion of change fades away. Everything about this game is completely surface-level, all a well-presented illusion of Being Spider-Man that breaks the instant you think about it in any way, and you find yourself sitting your sofa, with your expensive toy for privileged people, pressing buttons to make the copaganda continue to play out in front of you.

I finished Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I had a perfectly ok time. I was rarely frustrated and occasionally found it charming and visually enthralling. I liked stuff with Miles' uncle. It also made me feel like everything about this style of game and this type of story had hit an evolutionary dead-end and had nowhere to go but running on the same treadmill, forever.

So, yes. It made me feel like Spider-ManTM.

was talking it over with a friend and we agreed that one of the smartest things this game does is to entirely elide questions of depiction and gratuitousness re: sexual assault and abuse by unfolding the violence almost entirely through threat, metaphor, and implication. the looming possibility is signalled by the very first interaction even, the encounter of our favorite skinny, vulnerable teenage girl Heather Mason with a bulking, growly strange man stalking her. the eventual unraveling of the "God" plotline obviously also scans as about sexual trauma, the violative experience of unwanted procreation without the explicit need for an assaulting figure (which of course ties into the parody of the Virgin Birth, again, not subtle but appreciated), and the central dynamic between Heather and men is defined by distrust, fear, and manipulation (the memo you read where even her benevolent father and blankfaced video game Good Dad Harry Mason confesses to wanting to murder Heather as a child is heartbreaking), while her relationship to the only other woman in the cast is defined by outright hostility engendered by their equally understandable if slightly manichean responses to unbelievable pain and suffering at the hands of a patriarchal and matriarchal figure, respectively. to really hammer it home the game pens you in to dark, cramped, filthy spaces right from the start, barely ever giving you an overworld to interact with: Heather Mason is not her father or James Sunderland, she's a 17 year old girl, railroaded through the terrifying world that the men of the series navigate more freely (this is also reflected in the games lack of traditional Silent Hill branching endings, at least on a first playthrough). maybe there's nothing interesting or new left to say about these games but i loved this so much i wanted to at least put something here to commemorate it

It's the definitive [good-design game-loop]. It is so [good-design game-loop] even I have finished it. Maybe also for the combat, which I thought was pretty nice and flashy.

I couldn't care less for the crafting, side missions, looting, collectathonics and similar gibberish, each moment I had to see an upgrade screen for my gear I was a step closer to quiting.

Really interesting when people say this is showing real maturity from the story, when it is the same shit from previous games, although this time more needlessly complicated. They have concepts and ideas, sure, but neither Kratos nor the gods know what they're doing at any moment, following the age-old journey of the "AAA-gymkhana-open-world-extravaganza", where parenting still means crushing the skull of your enemies to the pulp (so mature and a real departure from previous games!). The supremacist tantrum from Atreus in the middle without any repercussions is also super funny. Again, it seems better than previous games because the acting is good and Kratos now looks at his scars, like every Serious and Important story about damaged parents must do.

The game has some nice vistas and it is technologically pretty, but the whole long take gimmick is SO SO SO unnecessary and inconsequential that reads more as, again, some prestige self-seriousness than anything that could add to the energy of the scenes, cause some of them end up looking really fucking dull.

Writing this it seems it's fucking awful, but really I don't think is as bad as some in here put it, it is salvaged for the most part by the combat and by having a nice tight structure (although sometimes bloated) if you avoid any side stuff. However, thinking this is some sort of "big next step for Kratos" or "a mature game about complex relationships" is beyond me.

Also, is Freya, the only female character in the whole game, the only person that doesn't emote???

it is a really good joke, in retrospect, that james sunderland's silent hill is the easiest to deal with of any of them. even james' psychosexual torture purgatory coddles the crap out of him; at one point point in the midgame i had 11 health drinks, 14 first aid kits, and like 5 ampoules. i almost wanted to beg the game to stop giving me consumables, i felt nauseatingly overstuffed. things like that really sell this sadsack nega-wife guy shit as a grim spiritual joke rather than the heart of the narrative, which is centered in the peripheral cast. i won't say much about it because it's never worth spilling blood and tears on the page for games writing (to me) but angela is such a smartly written and well-understood character by the narrative (probably one of a handful of times mainstream games actually got "trauma" "right") and eddie's inferiority complex turned self loathing turned misanthropy turned paranoid violence hits a perfectttt balance between empathetic and uncomfortable. but enough said, there's nothing new to add here, really just another marker that i finished one of these games

edit: stray thought i wanted to write down so i don't forget it but it's funny that anyone could think downpour was trying anything new by addressing "the prison system" when this game literally has an extended sequence about prison as an occult torture maze built for exculpating authority structured by spatialized m.c. escher contortions of the logic of sin and absolution that runs laps around whatever ill-conceived green mile mike flanagan prestige tv shit was going on in that game

It's a game that's bare-bones the same way its fucked up world is bare-bones. At every corner lies the inheritance of life and history that passed without epiphany, and there is little to no deceit or irony regarding this. This is not a game known for its twists, but it is remarkable how quickly and subtly the desolation of the wasteland gives way to the possibility of exciting adventure, conspiracy, and political intrigue: so quickly do we have fun in the ruins. Even the good Fallout sequels impatiently and comprehensively embrace this frontier, and they are not necessarily worse for it. But there is something inimitably special about this first one, willing to impose the bones, ash, death, and dung of it all onto someone who hoped their little vault errand would turn into something bigger. At the height of its conspiracy, the edifice comes crashing down from the smallest, saddest revelation that like everything else small and sad about this game refuses dwelling. And so does the place you've called home.

Perhaps the greatest ending to a video game.

We are constantly swirling in the stew of misery, confusion and powerlessness of capital. Every conspirator answers to someone else infinitely until the end of time, and nobody's even sure what they're conspiring toward. Enter the survival horror masterpiece, Killer7.

Few games shock me to my core like this one does. Every design decision is on-point, to the extent that explaining the game's intricacies gives too much away. Somehow an on-rails Playstation 2 shooter is the most liquid and heart-pounding shooter I've ever played. Any enemy encounter can be trivial or heart-pounding depending on the layout of the area and configuration of enemies. The fact that Ulmeyda's town or the final school level aren't mentioned in the same breath as the Spencer Mansion or RCPD is a travesty. Especially so considering the sheer expressionistic brilliance of the levels herein and the enigmatic beauty of its characters.

Suda51 gets written off as "janky weird fun" and other nonsense pretty frequently, but it's only half true. Sure the games are weird but the weirdness, like Lynch's weirdness or any other auteur's weirdness, exists to further express the themes. Suda51's characters speak gibberish and dress like anime characters because they're forcing you further into a state of bewilderment and alienating you from the world just as much as the characters do. He's so constantly forced into the "ooooo quirky" mold that his later titles feel forced into doing, losing their thematic weight. Killer7's reception made Grasshopper the most exciting studio making games at the time and may also have sealed their fate.

All said, I am so thankful games like this exist. It's rare a game matches its gameplay's depth with real narrative depth that feels so tied to gaming, especially now as more and more major releases ape prestige television's episodic-but-not structure. Killer7 is a rare game that makes me rethink and reevaluate games as an artform, and truly speaks to how wonderful the medium is.