Disempowerment vs. control. Irrefutable proof that tension is a form of interweaving function. A dead langauge that can only be learned in the lost crypt of the dungeon. A mantra of compounding choices within acidic gait. That with nothing but blank walls and the ghosts of the past, it conjures up the path of salvation. And it is a walk in dissonant faith that must be earned: an arc that cannot exist without overcoming bitterness. The only game to truly understand what it means to be the devil as he yearns for heaven.

Sure. It’s hell. But it’s calculated hell. Cunning in all the right ways - wildly eccentric when it sees fit. The purpose is to navigate a prison built in our name, facilitating a peril of contrarian heft. Roe R Adams had assisted Ultima IV on a spiritual revolution, defining RPGs as more than mere numbers and combat, using the journey as a basis for moral exploration. The result of his work on Wizardry 4 was the audacious inversion of roles, with not only narrative implication but fundamental change to design. Out of the dungeon and into the light. We are ascending; we occupy the top row of the battle screen while the “heroes”' are on the bottom (like every other RPG); we fight with hordes of summoned monsters; and we have a choice of redemption or continued chaos on the surface. How rare was it to have a massive, pre-defined set of party members to choose from, let alone your foes who drove you mad in the first three scenarios. The kicker? If you sent your characters from the original scenarios to Sir-Tech, they would appear as wandering enemies for Werdna to fight. Yes, your battles are against the real adventuring parties of past players. The departed spirits of yesterday give chase.

There are five, wholly unique endings in this game, going beyond the traditional dichotomy of good or evil. All of this is running on the stock 64KB Apple II. These were the days when a bevy of sequels to established franchises were showing up and developers were truly eager to break new ground. Wizardry 4’s mission is clear, in that it's firmly designed for experienced players, but has an imbued sense of moral-purpose backing its foundation. Where the natural constraints of the dungeon crawler craft a devotional saga. Any notion of escape is tied to our willingness to suffer. The expression is defined through the challenge of genre convention — and there was perhaps no one more qualified for the task than Werdna, the first iconic RPG villain, who would smite you down without fail in the original game.

(Note: I won’t cover in depth that this was the first game to feature a monster party, a highly original (and controversial) concept for its development time. Megami Tensei did come out the same year, nor do I particularly care for firsts, and prefer to think of game design as a conceptual pool that many draw from).

Much like Wizardry 1, the main enemy of the game is the labyrinthine dungeon, fervently zapping away at your resources. Instead of plunging into the darkness and returning to town for purified air, we must navigate our god-given imprisonment as a means of repentance. But the air has been cut off. The war of attrition is fought in cycles, where the player doesn't create their own respite, but must uncover it for bare survival. It is within this dichotomy that the modal function of disempowerment and control is formed. Where autonomy has been stripped away from the player but will be acknowledged within coordinated tension. The only agency that exists is to trust the architecture. Respite is found through the pentagram system (think of these as safe-rooms), but you are either being flanked by hero groups or the mad king, who never ceases chase, moving in real-time (even during idle) and will kill you instantly if found. Can you make it to the next safe-room? The clock is always ticking. The dynamic is that the hero groups will play by your traditional map rules, but the mad king can usurp you at any time, forgoing the board entirely. Staying idle is not an option; it’s a game of continuous movement and tense decision making. We hang on to every last spell. Summoned monsters are your weaponry, but they drop like flies and are prone to fleeing at the hint of resistance. Wandering hero groups fight you as if it’s their last battle. In their world; we are the final boss; and act accordingly with no remorse. These enemy-types stay permanently dead until you save. Saving resets the mad king's position completely, making him non-threatening. (I will mention to be clear, you can save anywhere in this game, any square, safe or not. And you have enough time to explore, but just enough “push” that it’s imperative to stay moving). Which reprieve will you choose?

This well-crafted risk/reward dilemma places players in a constant state of tension, weighing the need for exploration (further knowledge), the quest for vital resources (spells and items), and the imperative for acute survival — by either rendering enemies dead (don’t save) or ending the mad king’s relentless pursuit (choose to save). This follows the design idea of a tactical-puzzle, in which each floor become a devout ritual of manic exploration and planned resources, in a lead to find the next safe-room. The pentagram is safe from all hostile forces and doubles as a utility hub for resources, such as a rotating cast of monsters and leveling up. Monsters act as the pragmatic puzzle pieces that fit the design as one. Finding out how they work for the situation at hand is paramount to survival, and knowledge of the previous three scenarios is rather valuable, if not essential. Like an enigma being constantly unraveled, the game sees fit to evolve, with monsters and riddles being in constant flux, changing every pentagram. The goal is to fully regain your powers, and believe me, there is no greater satisfaction than when you can finally teleport throughout the entire dungeon and blast the hero scum to smithereens with great demons at your side. The last barrier standing between you and freedom is the Cosmic Cube. If every previous floor has been a delicate challenge of abstract mapping concepts, this is the test that questions how attentive you’ve really been, by bringing all learned principles to the forefront and merging three floors into a quasi-connected "3D" level. (For anyone unfamiliar: Picture a simple 20x20 square grid. A 3D dungeon adds a third coordinate into the mix, meaning you get 20x20x3 and account for a multi-layered map that functions as one with ladders and teleports. A number of paths can reach the exit — making it a highly unique and non-linear puzzle).

By the end, the dungeon presents itself as a large-scale puzzle to solve, and you are able to find an item that sends the mad king to the permanent void, taking him out of the equation entirely. The game does all of this with a clear sense of intention. Playable inferno sure, but a truly bewitching uniqueness that few games can replicate.

Sweet Home rings closest to the design, in that it may have the outer layer of an RPG, but discerning the maze-like structure is more vital than any amount of leveling. Strategic planning is a requirement, with power being incrementally given through the pentagram system and items that play as a finite resource. Grinding is not possible (it is in Sweet Home to be fair, but caps early, and battles are risky, if you die that character is gone for good), so the design is deliberate, to be mapped and solved. Brute forcing your way through the game is far-fetched notion. Our understanding of these games is rather similar. They end up being known for only one thing (decomposing as banal trivia), instead of being assessed on their own terms, as a tense fusion of adventure and RPG design. It may be better described as a true survival RPG — and the game imparts this all too well with layered hostility that never quite settles.

There is an unfounded notion that Wizardry 4 is the hardest game ever made, brutally unfair, as if it can only be one thing. This serves to only strip away the creative authorship of the designer, in which we choose to solely engage via lens of shallow prescriptivism. At this point, are we actively engaging with the design, or a vague notion of what we think the work should be? (Yes, you’ve seen this before, for a game or any creative medium). Look. Wizardry 4 is a difficult game. But it isn’t the hardest game ever made; or even atypical of its era, that forged a path on a particular quality of play. The right to win was to be earned — not merely given away as an unequal transaction. Death was a rite of passage that tied together the designer’s ability to communicate game structure and understanding. This isn’t to downplay the challenge, but illustrate that it comes from a place of purposeful intent. The game in actuality is supremely balanced, juggling mechanical complexity on a floor-by-floor basis, and fair for a keen player who is willing to parse it’s deep-rooted design langauge. (That said, the thieves that constantly steal your key-items and run are extremely annoying. This I would have minimized, the only thing in the game I would outright change).

The myth of the first room is quite frankly, bullshit. For reference, you begin the game in a 2x2 dark room with a lone pentagram at your side and a hidden door on the wall. Now, think how unconventional the monster system was, how this room provides a completely safe environment, and teaches us about a secret-heavy game. Even more, the game relies on monster usage relating to the floor at hand, which is also taught here. By getting out of here: We know about secrets, we’ve understood how monsters function in a safe environment, and we’ve learned the importance of pentagrams. This is silent game design, routine for the time, and a rather good bout at that. But you need a priest, right?. Oh dear. Werdna is completely powerless. He is a sitting duck in the bowels of hell. Anyone who has played an RPG for 30 minutes knows that you need a healer on your team. This simple puzzle now ties logic into its teaching exercise and sets the tone for the game accordingly. Right away, we are given the baseline understanding to succeed – all with zero risk of death. Presenting friction to the player that allows them to learn the langauge. More than that, a construct of masking affordances within the external conceit of redemption. Polemic, sharp, acidic: it all makes sense for the supervillain. Again: an arc that cannot exist without overcoming bitterness. A sealed envelope was included with the game dubbed “solution to the first puzzle” that mocked anyone who couldn’t get past it and told them to give up, because the real challenge was coming. The most beautiful words an 80’s nerd can hear.

Sir-Tech marched forward with cunning depth at the inversion of the dungeon crawler: Taking skill check out of the equation with a dynamic risk/reward scheme and relying on expert-level logic as its preeminent philosophy. The inventive scenario design only served to further the goal, running contrary to all RPGs. It stands alone as this high-concept performance piece — made by the inmates for the asylum — read in silence as a maddening love letter to our earliest roots of gaming. The ghosts have come home to roost. In that sense, Wizardry 4 marks the end of the mainframe lineage. A long lost embodiment of what one subculture thought interactive software should be. They don’t make em’ like this anymore. Even attempting so would be futile.

Criminally misunderstood is my verdict. One that paints a stark contrast of ideas; out of the dungeon and into the light. A question of faith that must be earned, through the form of perilous redemption under deafening opposition. It took me over half a year to finish, toiling away at its secrets. At the end of it all, it really does feel like you have climbed the darkest mountain to salvation. I respect the hell out of this game. Video games do not dare to go here again.

Half-Life was the first game in which the programmer class articulated its own unique concerns: the hero-engineer, silently and in the face of constant disparagement, rights a disaster induced by the ignorance and careerist impatience of administration and bureaucracy.

Beyond introducing the FPS protagonist most likely to have commissioned a fursona, Half-Life's chief accomplishment is in breaking up the repetitiousness of the boomer shooter without sacrificing its essential character. The way in which Black Mesa fits together is well thought-through enough that I think of it almost as a setting in a Metroidvania, in spite of its extreme linearity. Implicit propaganda for light rail.

A few weeks ago, my friend casually posted that a Riven remake went up for sale. I'd somehow missed that two weeks before that, a Steam Fest was going on with a demo for Riven.

Three years ago, I saw the 2021 Myst remake was released. "That's cool," I thought, "but tell me when the Riven remake comes out." Five years ago, Cyan snapped up the Starry Expanse project. Excitement for that announcement was fueled by, fifteen years ago, a fan project mapping out some pieces of Riven in 3D. Neat, but nothing good ever really comes of these fan things - right?

Nineteen years ago, I played through Riven by myself on my beat-up iBook. It was beyond formative, clicking a little button in the back of my head. It kicked off a preoccupation for games with narrative that meshes beautifully into their mechanics, with the right writing and care for its player. Riven took an aesthetic and extended it into something MUCH more. I still find that there's a level of quiet, anthropological storytelling it uses in harmony with its gameplay which remains nearly unmatched, mostly untried. What could ever capture this feeling again?

Twenty five years ago, I visited my cousin's house. My family owned Myst, and I'd insist on playing it with my parents all the time; the disjointed setpieces and arcane playthings were fascinating to little preschooler me. But my cousin owned Riven: The Sequel to Myst, the sequel to Myst (, a joke I will immediately stop making). And every time visited him, I wanted to play Riven again. The game cemented itself into my psyche as blissful nostalgia, sparkling wonder to what could be in a video game. We'd only really get to the mag-lev or mine cart roller coaster section, never solving anything... But something about this experience really hit different, even compared to its prequel. Myst was otherworldly, but Riven felt like a place. It had internal logic, it had life, and it had purpose past ambience and set-dressing. There was a lot more movement around Riven going on in the FMVs; it felt less like a PowerPoint with narrative and much more like an environment. It's magic.

So - someone posts that a long-awaited moonshot remake of a game deeply ingrained into my head and my heart, started by people who grew up loving it and finished by Cyan themselves, is completed. It's in front of my hands to play, with no prior knowledge this was releasing today.

Miracles happen. It is the fastest impulse purchase of my life.

~~~

Most reviews here come down to being either a product review, an extension of our feelings imprinted by media, and/or comedy. I already dished out some snark, so let me bridge the other two: does the Riven remake recapture the magic of the original, and who should play it?

As much as I suggested people play the 1997 Riven (read: hold them at gunpoint), I had to give two big caveats. One, while it wasn't as egregious of an example of the esoteric adventure gaming era, it certainly was a child of it. It thankfully sidestepped many flaws of point-and-click fare inventory nonsense and pixel hunts, but its puzzles were sometimes obfuscated by questionably finicky design. And two it's beautiful, even today - but it's trapped in some very lossy 480p. (Upgrade to Quicktime 2.5!) Now we have a remake in Unreal 5, with full 3D exploration and puzzles reenvisioned in the 2020s. On some level, people who just cannot handle the crust and grain around the old games will not need to ask whether they should play the old one.

I'm a nostalgic beast and found some beauty between those compression artifacts. But I'm happy to find that this is an absolutely gorgeous recreation of the original game. I can't stress this enough. I played this in a mix of VR and pancake, and every moment walking through the islands felt wholly authentic to the original. The islands still feel and sound just as gripping, sucking you into their architecture, the anthropology of their denizens, the squeaks and rattles of their compelling machinery. Digital Foundry did a great overview of shot-for-shot comparisons; you can complain about some color/shading decisions and whatnot, and scaling the islands to interactive 3D means there are some crucial changes to architecture and backdrops. But I find the island is evoking exactly what they wanted, with the full freedom of a modern 3D environment.

With the switch to 3D, though, brings probably the single greatest issue: people. Between Myst and Riven, there's a greater emphasis on the characters in it, including soliloquies from Atrus, Gehn, and Catherine as they give exposition, plus some other important bit characters that set the mood around the islands. The opening cutscene bugs me in particular with the remake, as it does a bare minimum with 3D character modeling. I love the frantic, troubled, frustrated, distracted scribbling of Rand Miller's performance in the original, and putting Atrus front and center with his eyebrows raised just does not convey this well. It's not a technology problem, it's a direction issue. Other characters feel a bit hampered by the same limitation in facial expression - particularly Gehn, where John Keston's face gave his character some depth, intimidation, and payoff. I'm surprised they didn't spend some more time on this. Then again, when they're working with the original audio to preserve Keston and the others' performances, I'm not sure how much I can really blame them for this. But it's certainly disruptive.

...Plus, it's missing jumpscare girl! And the Spyder eggs! C'mon! I mean, it's not the worst that could happen. But it's the little things that make Riven, y'know? Anyway.

It's some little things that also made Riven a difficult sell in the 2020s, too. Riven is a puzzle game, but when you rule out the machinery it's really about a few major puzzles that sprawl through the game, which you eek out the solution from the environment and people's perceptions on what's going on. Reinventing those few puzzles is key to keeping it a fresh experience. The infamous Fire Marble Puzzle was a bit of a kludgey miss in the original due to nitpicky precision, but updates to that and the other grand puzzles really add up here. While one very specific puzzle felt a bit over-engineered - leading to a probably unintended shortcut - the satisfaction is still utterly incredible once you put the solution in. It keeps the feeling that every detail matters, whether you played the original or not. And the remake retains that grip the game has on your attention through the island, its systems, its machines, its fauna, its creatures, its people, their intentions... All that is still here - but updated to have a bit less logical friction, and to throw a few curveballs for those thinking they have everything figured out.

The original's wonderous harmony is a little out of whack with its technology, though. The new 3D environment and the new engine, while keeping the aesthetic of the islands intact, occasionally made me miss the original's exact creative control over what and when you were looking at for every machine, picture, and vista.

Perspecive is a huge factor that interrupts gameplay. At one point, I missed that a note was trying to said "+" due to aliasing in a texture. In VR I missed that a lever was on Boiler Island, and that a button near the submarine. Going back to 2D, I missed something extremely important on a rocky wall. While my antiquated CV1 may not be the greatest tool for judging VR, the fiddly nature of VR controls makes all of this more difficult to predict and tune due to view heights, turn angles, and comfort settings. Rand Miller expressed the difficulty of dealing with this transition himself, so it's not like this was a total blind spot; still, it's something I'm sure you'll come across in your own way. Just make sure to check the settings before you shove off.

3D brings a slew of extra technical considerations as well, and this is where I had a bit more ire. VR had some really jarring shadow and lighting issues at particular angles, flickering all over the place. In one new segment, I clipped out of the border of a particular puzzle as the game moved my character from an interface spot and back onto an area that didn't seem to exist anymore. I was forced to reload and lost a few minutes. Not the craziest thing in a modern 3D video game, but it's certainly not within the framework of the original. I heard a couple stories of people in VR peeking through edges and getting crashes or out of bounds in response. (I mean, who wouldn't want to explore every nook and cranny of this place?)

The game also has a lot of little technical hiccups that add up over the runtime. In particular, loading screens are the death of losing that connection to the world. Linking was instantaneous in the original, and we lose that punch-in-the-face feel of the original's linking books shoving us into a brand new environment. There's also some serious microstutter as the game tries to "seamlessly" load new areas - especially walking between long hallways, elevators, mag-lev machines, etc. One next to Gehn's lab brought me out of the experience a few times.

I say this as someone collecting my thoughts in comparison, though. I'm not sure I would've felt this way without nostalgia in the back of my head. This is a wonderful, wonderful remake, and my complaints are just not enough to kill my love here. But it does make me remember that the original doesn't have a lick of the technical friction. It game was so rock-solid in practice and ambience that the one space in background sound - travel between islands, where all sound cut out and your computer quietly ejected the CD tray - was eerie enough to some to inspire horror. It's what just prevents this game from obsoleting the original.

Ultimately, I think the original is beautiful, seamless exploration broken up by some frustrating puzzle design. This remake felt like a beautiful, seamless puzzle broken up by some frustrating technical design. Here is where I find myself having trouble directly recommending either the remake or the original to new people. But I feel it comes down to this:

If you're new and are looking for an enrapturing puzzle game, go with the remake. It captures the feel of the original and deals with some of the long-held hang-ups by the community on what's otherwise nearly perfect execution of a concept.

If you're new and are more intrigued by the exploration elements, go with either. The original's acting and stellar 90's PC aesthetic are charming, as is the new game's freedom of movement. I'm sure either game will blow you away.

If you played the original and want to know if it's worth retreading the ground, yes - absolutely, yes. I had a blast. It's a bit frustrating to see all these little bugs take out of the experience of returning to Riven, but it's so fresh that you might not care.

And if you're coming here after the remake and wondering whether you should go back and try the original - I recommend it. While the feeling of really knowing the environment as a moving actor in it is great, there's something about the picture-perfect views of machinery, the temple, the islands, and its ecosystems. Everything in it gives a wonderful frame of reference for why people fell in love with it, especially if you keep 1997 in the back of your mind. And you might just find yourself loving the original puzzles.

I come out of this game feeling invigorated. I've got hang-ups, but I don't find myself particularly annoyed about something that feels like it was made with genuine love and a wish to keep it faithful. It shows, and I'm extremely happy to have played it.

To those who haven't played Riven, my last note to you - before it blew up, I did my best to preach Outer Wilds to people looking for something after Myst or the original Riven. I find myself in an opportunity to work the opposite direction here; I don't think this game will be more approachable for new people than it is now, maybe save for technical patches. Maybe play Myst first for some lore bits and to see the natural progression between these two titles, but remake or not, Riven scratches that mind-blowing environmental-mechanical storytelling you're looking for. Outer Wilds is Riven In Space, and while Outer Wilds In Liminal Not-Space Island Atmosphere isn't as catchy, hopefully you'll still enjoy Riven like I do.

To people who have played the original Riven, I think of one of those common things I see people muse about Outer Wilds, Riven, or other games with a big perspective change that you can't undo:

"I wish I could experience this again."

This might be your shot. I think you'll love it.

Soulless.

There's something fascinating about how From Software can't help but make the same game but less interesting every time they put out a new one of these. Dark Souls was an iteration of Demon's Souls, sanding down the roughest edges while mostly adhering to the broadest strokes of the game that came before it. Dark Souls 2 is more confused, and is certainly something of a pilot project. The danger of experimentation is that you'll inevitably meet with a lot of failure, but that's what makes experimenting fun; still, though, none of the changes made in Dark Souls 2 are anything that deeply impacts the core of what it is, remaining a safe iteration of an iteration. I had hoped this had reached its apotheosis with Dark Souls 3, which is a game so utterly self-reverent and self-referential — so completely unambitious — that calling it anything other than boring at best and sad at worst would be a blatant lie. Bloodborne made a token attempt at getting out from under the yoke of what FromSoft has been expected to make, both by audiences and seemingly by themselves; Sekiro and Armored Core VI are further attempts to get back to the different roots of Tenchu and Armored Core rather than a to-the-fourth-power abstraction of Demon's Souls.

But, sure as shit, Elden Ring is yet another repetition from a studio that isn't hungry anymore. They're comfortable. We're doing Dark Souls 3, again, and it's less interesting, again. It's pathetic just how much the personality has been sucked out of these games. In the Molochian name of streamlining — of chasing the almighty dollar through riskless, broad appeal above all else — Elden Ring wants nothing more than to be like everything else, but with a coat of Dark Souls paint over it. It wants to have an overstuffed, copy-pasted open world; it wants to be a bland RPG where your planning amounts to little more than equipping the gear with the best numbers and popping buffs before the fog wall; it wants to be a shitty action game where you choose whether to press R1 or the circle button at the right time, making the videos of people playing this on Guitar Hero controllers far less impressive when you realize they've got three extra frets to spare.

Part of the problem with criticizing the design of these newer games is that Matthewmatosis already did it perfectly, and he did it more than seven years ago. Long before Sekiro, long before Elden Ring, people like him were already pointing out how FromSoft's titles kept getting more and more like other people's games, rather than focusing on what made their work stand out. If you haven't seen his video, I can't possibly recommend that you check it out enough; it's going to be the best Elden Ring review you'll ever get, and it was made in a world where Elden Ring didn't yet exist. Just in case you're pressed for time, though, here's a passage from it that's been lingering in the back of my mind for nearly a decade now:

"Players whine about 'gimmick' boss fights, so bosses become basic combat encounters and nothing more. Players want 'honorable' PvP so they can they can test their skills against each other in a shallow, laggy, min-maxing backstab magic-spamfest, instead of having fun with the things you can uniquely do in these games. [...] Players want convenience, so they can fast-travel and respec their stats, removing absolutely any and all tension wherever possible, just like every other RPG from the past ten years. At some point, you just start to wonder what's next on the chopping block. [...] If current trends keep up, sooner or later all we'll be left with is a generic blob of a game: enjoyed by everyone, and loved by no-one."

What chills me about that final conclusion, though, is the fact that these games have devolved into generic blobs, but they seem to be more beloved than ever before. Elden Ring is one of the best-reviewed games of all time; Shadow of the Erdtree is the highest-reviewed DLC ever made. FromSoft seems to have figured out that the quickest way to stellar reviews and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue is to just keep watering down what once made them special, playing the same hits over and over again, but getting sloppier and duller with every subsequent release. These games are like Nickelback. I have to wonder if it gets exhausting to release worse versions of something wonderful you made a long time ago. If Ronnie Van Zant hadn't died in that plane crash, do you think he would have started hating Free Bird? To be an artist playing to an audience's tune rather than your own drains the fucking life out of you. How many more of these do Miyazaki and his team have left in them? How much sawdust can you put in a Rice Krispy Treat before people notice?

Matthewmatosis didn't have the benefit of actually playing Elden Ring before he made that video, so allow me to fill in some of the gaps of how this is specifically less interesting than its predecessors. Call these nitpicks, if you'd like; I'd do the same if I liked this game and didn't want to address its problems, either. The open-world nature of Elden Ring (at the scale which it exists) necessitates having a way to get around the map faster than your running speed, which they dealt with by giving you access to Torrent. Rather than just letting you get around quicker, though, Torrent lets you skip over so much of the game that it genuinely feels as though you shouldn't have gotten him until way, way later in the game. The horse is a living sequence break. He tanks status effects from poison swamps, has an obscene amount of health should anything actually manage to hit him, makes the fight against Radahn a complete cakewalk, and allows for you to walk past so many enemies and the traps they lay without so much as a hint of challenge. Foes in the world will lay out chevaux de frise and palisades to kettle you into tight paths where they wait in ambush, and you can just sprint right past faster than any of them can keep up. I felt bad blitzing through so many of these encounters on horseback; they were obviously placed with some degree of care and intent, and I seriously doubt the person who designed them wanted me to be able to double-jump straight over everything in my leisurely sprint to the next site of grace.

The multiplayer is far-and-away the worst these games have seen. The Furcalling Finger only allows for you to be invaded after you summon, meaning that there's no tension whatsoever if you wait to pop your gold summons at the fog gate instead of before it. Invasions can now only be done on players who have summoned phantoms, because people kept complaining about solo invasions being unfair or unfun, and now invaders can find themselves staring down the barrel of a 4v1 when they enter into another player's world. Twinking is even more of a problem than it used to be, and you'll regularly run into invaders and gold phantoms alike who are powerstancing dual Rivers of Blood +10 in full Radahn armor at level 40. The quickplay, duty-finder-style summoning of gold phantoms offers no sense of place nor purpose, because players who are summoned can be summoned from anywhere, rather than just the single place where they've placed their summon sign. The only thing that's remained from the original games intact is the dogshit netcode, which still hasn't been updated in a decade and a half and is broken into matchmaking regions of "Japan" and "everywhere else". I cannot possibly understand their priorities here.

You're free to explore a much larger world than any of the previous games in this loose series, but it might be the emptiest one yet. Copypasted pickups and dungeons are absolutely everywhere, with bosses constantly being reused, and multiple identical rooms being spammed across every one of the catacombs and hero's graves. I hope you liked fighting against the Red Wolf of Radagon, because everyone got jealous of Radagon having a cool wolf and decided that they wanted one of their own, too. Even still, you'll find that most of the recycled bosses in these side areas are absurdly weak: the Cemetery Shade shows up a few times, and he dies in four fucking hits. You'll be fighting against Black Knife Assassins and Cleanrot Knights until your fingers give out, and you're expected to like it. If you're really lucky, sometimes the "boss" will just be one or two regular enemies but with boss-style health bars on the bottom of the screen. Fucking riveting. They're all as weak as they are boring as they are rehashed, which is to say very.

Every sharp corner that there ever was has been carefully padded over, leaving nothing more for a player to actually struggle against. Killed NPCs will drop ball bearings that let you continue freely using their shop, completely erasing any serious penalty of offing the merchants the second that you see them; the Twin Maiden Husks who you feed the ball bearings to cannot ever be killed or otherwise close up shop, meaning that you've always got a consistent, persistent merchant no matter what you do or what happens in the world. Enemies are constantly holding anticipation frames or lingering in the air against gravity like Wile E. Coyote when he runs off of a cliff, but it's simultaneously never been easier to just spam your rolls with their obscene amount of i-frames and their lowered stamina costs. Enemy tracking has gotten so disgusting that it's difficult to land a backstab on anyone drinking from a flask. Wielding a weapon with insufficient stats no longer gives you sloppy animations. You don't even need holy damage to kill undead enemies anymore, because even that required too much planning and thus needed to be removed. Rare, powerful items are now color-coded gold when you pick them up like a fucking Overwatch lootbox to let you know that they're strong and that you should use them, as though leaving the player to experiment on their own somehow just wasn't good enough.

What's sad, I think, is that FromSoft keeps making games not with the intent that they be unique or immersive, but that they "be hard". And that really is unfortunate, considering how Elden Ring is piss-easy. Regardless of whatever you think of them going all-in on the difficulty — focusing heavily on these reaction checks and long boss combo strings — the grim reality is that Elden Ring is far, far easier than a game like Ninja Gaiden Black or God Hand without having the underlying mechanics and depth that make those games interesting. Instead, every boss in this game is completely vulnerable to the immutable strategy of walking backwards while flicking Glintstone Pebbles, or doing jumping heavy attacks with your powerstanced hammers, or popping any of your legendary Spirit Ashes +10 and breaking the enemy AI in half over your knee. Without a hint of irony, there's nothing here that's more of a challenge than the 4-2 boss run in Demon's Souls.

People only think that this game is hard because they don't put any points into vigor. Hit the first soft cap and you're basically immortal; once you've got yourself to 60, the game may as well just roll credits. In spite of the fact that FromSoft tries to spike the difficulty by making regular mook enemies gradually start chunking you for a thousand damage through heavy armor, you've got over a dozen health flasks at plus-twelve potency which will allow you to chug your way through the entire map. By the time I got to the end of the game, I'd managed to first-try every single boss from Morgott to Radagon. Elden Beast took a couple attempts, but it wasn't any more than five or six in total. Without being immersive, and without being difficult, and without being interesting, the game failed to give me a reason to play it. I only bothered beating Elden Ring because of the meta-reason that I wanted to write a review about it and I didn't think my opinion would hold enough weight if I were to stop halfway. I should have stopped, and I know I should have stopped, but I did it anyway because I wanted to epically own all of the "git gud" spammers with the reveal that this is the easiest game FromSoft have put out in over fifteen years.

I had the thought at one point that this was unengaging enough that it would make for an excellent "podcast game" — a game like The Binding of Isaac or Vampire Survivors, which you can use to keep your hands busy while you listen to something in the background. I put that theory to the test and started listening to episodes of Citations Needed just to keep myself awake while I shambled through this, and I regret to report that my theory was completely correct. This is a perfect podcast game. Jesus Christ, how far we've fallen. I couldn't imagine saying anything similar about Demon's Souls, or Dark Souls, but here we are. FromSoft has at last managed to make something so sleepy that I had to keep myself busy with some fucking Subway Surfers on the side to get through Leyndell.

There was a brief moment near the beginning where I thought that I'd been wrong. I thought that me and Elden Ring understood each other. I was running through Stormveil Castle, got wiped, and decided to go roaming around the world in search of items and upgrades. I was, admittedly, having fun. I hadn't seen enough of it to know how shallow it was. Once I got past Godrick and went out into Liurnia, it didn't take long for the cracks to start showing. The inherent problem when it comes to something being repetitive is that it takes until you've seen the same thing over and over again before you can make the connection that it is, in fact, repetitive. Eventually, the truth becomes apparent and impossible to ignore: there's nothing about Elden Ring that isn't done better in a lot of other places.

I said that I was going to stop playing FromSoft's new games after Sekiro, and that ended up being a lie. I wanted to believe in them. I thought that them delivering as hard as they have in the past meant that they deserved yet another chance. The truth, though, is that they're never going to learn anything. There's no money in it. All they need to do is keep stripping the copper wiring out from the walls until there's absolutely nothing left of what I used to love. They need to keep releasing the same game but worse, year after year, decade after decade, as long as they can. They need to throw themselves upon the altar of market tests and focus groups, giving every last piece of themselves over to a committee, such that there's nothing resembling an original thought nor a unique concept left to put in a game. They need to do this, because it's what sells. David has become Goliath.

I almost wish that I'd never fallen in love with Demon's Souls. Maybe it would sting less to see what's become of the people who made it if I hadn't.

i hate leaving things incomplete. whether it’s some evil or ill conceived bullshit or just a plate of no personality gruel dusted with quest markers, i’ll run headlong at the wall for hours. it’s not because i’m stubborn or stupid or that my time is worthless—though all of those things are true—but because my mother always stressed the virtue of not wasting food.

i’ve found enough good to keep me going, theoretically, during my shortish stint. i like how quests contort themselves, and i’m sure i’ve only scratched the surface. i like how the game luxuriates in its characters. i love the richness of its environments, neither overtly stylised nor starkly realistic. even the bad—the general ubishit, dull levelling and progression, infinite looping flavour dialogue, a script betraying the writers’ unfamiliarity with actual real life women—spurred more indifference than umbrage. the bigger issue was bubbling under all of that, a slow realisation that the witcher 3 and i are fundamentally misaligned.

an entire mountain of hay has already been made over how the gameplay “feels bad.” this is true to a point but oversimplifies the nature of the issue. it’s not that basic movement, basic combat, basic everything feels so awful as to resemble trawling through sludge or anything—at least that might grant an access of willpower to overcome it. this also isn’t to pine for perfect silky precision or excessive, sublime heft. i’m not that picky. at its core, a game just needs to feel like something, and therein lies the problem: the witcher 3 feels exactly like nothing. i press a button and geralt surely acts, yet there’s no feedback, no physicality. we aren’t in sync.

anyway, wake up babe, it’s time for your tangential hamfisted analogy.

driving an old car feels good as fuck. it doesn’t need to be finely tuned or exacting in its control to feel so, and the experience will of course differ vastly with make and model along with where your preference lies on the heft-pep spectrum. at any rate, your turning circle might be wide enough to orbit the globe. the road will more strictly demand your attention, absent modern sensors and cameras. momentum may build slowly as you accelerate from an intersection; newer cars might get off the bat faster, but you will catch them as sure as the engine’s purr becomes a roar. the enthused motorist revels in these things despite their antiquity, because they feel the friction of rubber on asphalt. at all times the motorist receives constant feedback, feeling as much a part of the road as they would with their bare feet planted on the tar.

the electric car, by contrast, may as well be hovering. what we receive in the (justifiable) transition from fossil fuels is an increasingly mediated, disconnected experience. whirrs and clicks take place of the engine’s rumble. the gearstick becomes a binary lever. knobs and switches now reside (spiritually) within a tablet, all centre-dashboard, taking our eyes off the road. turning requires not a full rotation but a slight nudge. and sometimes the car just does shit on its own. above all, the driver loses all sense of presence. we no longer feel each bump and change in texture, we just glide forwards sans resistance or force. the car doesn’t need us anymore; manufacturers decided that ux can stand in for live feedback, to which end our relation to the road is mediated moreso through sensors, alarms and cruise control features than through our own awareness. its operation is smoother—and simpler—than ever, yet at no point do we feel essential to its function.

very few action-[other descriptor] games are like an electric car. most are an early 2000s toyota camry, entirely unremarkable but reliable nonetheless. dark souls is a lumbering ‘88 volvo 940. super mario world is a zippy ‘92 honda city. resident evil (1) is a giant shitbox ‘71 range rover. you get the point. even where these fall short of perfect, they each have a distinct character and exhibit unique quirks in their operation. then we have the witcher 3: a shitty tesla stuck on cruise control, luxurious only until you start the ignition. sure, i can see a nice view ahead, but i only want to feel the road beneath me.

i wouldn’t mind seeing this through had cd projekt red not had the audacity to include silly things like ‘movement’ and ‘combat’ in their game despite knowing they’re straight up, fundamentally busted. why put me in the drivers seat if my input is so perfunctory? there’s plenty that’s compelling about the witcher 3, if only the core experience wasn't so eager to disregard my presence at every turn. oh well. hopefully someone turns it into a book someday.

"The greatest indie metroidvania"—so here's the 8/10 it deserves.

The main thing Hollow Knight has going for it is of course its massive size and true nonlinearity. When I was deep in the process of exploring, finding secrets, getting lost, finding my way again, seeing how different regions link up—these were the times when I thought I was playing one of my favorite games. The charm system is pretty cool as it is, but it along with all the other goodies in the game gives plenty enough reason to explore every nook and cranny (and overlook some pretty bad Super Meat Boy-esque spike maze level design along the way). There's so much to admire in how distinct each region feels and how elegantly they all fit together, and the amount of freedom you're given after a certain point is something few games arrive at even when they strive for it.

But.

The issue is that Hollow Knight's very scale tends to emphasize one of its genre's inherent limitations. Backtracking is built into the genre's DNA—and this is no bad thing, in fact it's kind of the whole point: revisiting areas with new tools and with a new purpose develops a much more organic relation to space than is usually the case in more linear games. The tradeoff is repetition: not only is the space itself usually unchanged, but obstacles are usually static as well. In a game this big and this long, in which backtracking is therefore not only mandatory but extremely time-consuming, seeing the exact same enemies respawn in the exact same places over and over again starts to feel like a drag—much moreso in a 40-ish hour game than in a 10-ish one like Super Metroid. Moreover, Hollow Knight, like Super Metroid, wants you to be immersed in a massive and seemingly "alive" world, but the world and its inhabitants are essentially static, existing only as a backdrop to the player's "hero's journey." Having no internal dynamics or logic of their own, they change, if at all, only in response to the player's actions, and then only rarely. (I was almost ecstatic when I first got to the Infected Crossroads, and then massively disappointed when I realized that other areas of the game would not get the same treatment.) Size aside, the difference between the two games is that only one of them came out in the same year as Rain World: a game that shows us how the player-game relationship can be reimagined in the context of a 2D platformer with a massive persistent world, and how decentering the player character can result in a more rewarding and immersive experience.

There are other aspects of Hollow Knight I'm ambivalent about. The "soulslike" elements are a decidedly mixed bag, and despite the variety within the player's toolkit, the core moveset feels kind of generic. Samus may have fewer abilities at her disposal, but the ones she does have define her as a character to a far greater extent than... (wait, what's the little guy's name again?). I also have to admit that I balked at the endgame boss rush, but that's more because I took a long break between getting the three thingamugugs and facing the Titledrop Monster, and completely lost any momentum in between. I may return to Hollow Knight—some years down the line—but if I do it'll be from the very beginning.

The biggest video game mystery of the past decade. It's the most groundbreaking, medium-redefining experience of our generation - and nobody can explain why. I'm convinced this is all a conspiracy orchestrated by YouTube video essayists. The promise (yet unfulfilled) of The Great Open World Video Game blinds us to the fact that we've seen all of this many times before.

Fundamentally, Breath of the Wild is a pastiche of the safest, most focus-tested game design principles of the preceding decade. You could call it the 'Tower' type game. Climb a tower to unlock a new area on your map, which will reveal the repeatable skinner box activities you can complete there. Puzzles, dungeons, enemy camps, the usual. These activities give you something like XP, increased health, or a new item, which account for progression. Once you're done, you climb another tower and repeat the process until you're ready to fight the final boss (or more likely, until you're bored and ready to rush to the game's end).

That's the gameplay loop. And like every single other one of these games ever made, the loop eventually becomes a dull grind. Breath of the Wild does nothing to solve this problem endemic to open world games. Some have praised the game's traversal, which, other than shield surfing (which is cool to be fair), is really just climbing walls, riding a horse, using a glider, or fast travelling; the same traversal methods in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, released seven years earlier (Shadow of the Colossus is also a clear influence). Really I would challenge anyone to explain how Breath of the Wild is a masterpiece while Assassin's Creed is a soulless corporate product. You're playing the same game. What's the difference besides some nice vibes and a cell-shaded art style? Grass? At least Assassin's Creed has that cyberpunk meets ancient aliens meets secret societies meets historical fiction bullshit made up by French people. That's creativity.

Proponents of the game may praise the Shiekah slate physics abilities as an innovation, and that feels true at first. But eventually your enemies become too powerful for hitting them with rocks or whatever to do a thing; you'll need to use some bullshit level-scaled RPG weapon. And even if the Shiekah slate remained effective in combat, you would still end up doing this. Why? Because this game has so much dull, repeated content to wade through that it becomes easier to take the path of least resistance, the least thought required, and just hit them with your sword. 30 hours in, no player is using cool Shiekah slate tricks to clear those regenerating bokoblin camps.

Much discussion has already been had on the monotony of the 120 copy-pasted shrines, which make up the bulk of the game's content (its version of the side tasks from Assassin's Creed), and the 900 copy-pasted korok seed puzzles, which act as the collectibles obligatory of every Tower game. I won't rehash that too much here, copy-pasted content is already the most common criticism of open world games in general. But knowing that, I want to talk about something I've noticed with a lot of the praise for this game.

Some of the most common sentiments expressed toward Breath of the Wild are that it's "magical" and captures the "joy of discovery" and a sense of "childlike wonder". And I think if you play through the entire game and still feel this way, then that is a horror beyond comprehension. What was your childhood like? Did you spend it as a laboratory subject or something? Just completing mundane, repeated tasks and being awarded food pellets? Because that's what Breath of the Wild is: a world filled not with a sense of mystery or infinite possibility, but the exact opposite: A world where you know exactly what you will find under every rock, inside every strange ruin, over every next hill. A completely controlled, sterile environment of utilitarian systems for the player to exploit. Completely antithetical to anything "magical".

I think there's a pretty strong argument to be made that video games fundamentally cannot represent anything magical, emotional, or spiritual. Depicting anything in interactive form drains it of all sacred meaning, makes it a joke; it's the "press f to pay respects" problem. The tenets of game design stipulate systems and mechanics that are rational and understandable to players. That might be the biggest sin of video games as an artistic medium: taking everything unquantifiable and beautiful in life and reducing it to man-made systems for a single individual to exploit (For more discussion of this issue, play the Metal Gear Solid series).

This is felt especially harshly in a Tower game like Breath of the Wild, where an entire open world is reduced to a few classes of interactive activities. Progressing through a game like this is a process of total disillusionment with the entire world; spiritual death. It accidentally replicates the central theme of Ocarina of Time: the transition from idyllic childhood to grim adulthood. But Ocarina ends with Link confronting the darkness of adulthood and returning to a childlike state of play with his adult wisdom integrated. Breath of the Wild, though, is a state of permanent adolescence - it never goes anywhere, and simply decays over time. Eventually, you exhaust all of this life's possibilities and choose to finally, mercifully end it. Deciding to face Ganon isn't about bringing the story to a climax; it's the gameplay equivalent of taking a plane to Switzerland to get euthanized. And the game practically spits in your face after you defeat him, simply reverting to an old save before the final fight. There is no salvation, no redemption for this world. Only the ceaseless march of content.

Early on I said this game's reputation is a mystery, and I actually lied; there's a pretty simple explanation, one that I briefly mentioned: grass vibes. The game has an incredible atmosphere when you're first starting out, and that's what people are talking about when they call it "a breath of fresh air" or whatever cliché they think of. It has nothing to do with any game design element found here. Because there is no common understanding of what that would even mean. There's no concept of the formal elements of game design, or the storytelling language of video games. We're all just making this shit up.

People only pay attention to, y'know, the actual art: music, animation, visuals. The game itself can be anything, nobody really cares. The discourse surrounding games as a medium of art in themselves is mostly bullshit. People appreciate the traditional artistic aspects of a game (music, animation, visuals, acting performances, writing) and then project that sense of artistry onto the game design itself, where there is none (and in fact, there is a profound dissonance between it and those elements). That's how people process games as an art form. And that's why games like Breath of the Wild are held up as the pinnacle of games as art.

(I'll also say that I have no respect for any open world game like this after the release of Metal Gear Solid V (2015). It correctly portrayed this breed of AAA open world game as something that cannot be revived or rejuvenated as Breath of the Wild attempts to do; this is all salted earth. If MGSV had been properly understood, we would have seen it as the just and merciful execution of games like this.)

I never liked dungeon type rpgs very much growing up. I was a really story-focused gamer even in my youth and I didn’t love super fiddly systems stuff so anything more complicated than like a Bioware system was a pretty hard pass from me, and a lot of those games didn’t even have the types of really overt narratives that I preferred anyway. My love for Stories In Games hasn’t gone away but a perusal through my backloggd account will tell anyone that I’ve broadened the scope of where I look for them. I’ve also really blown out my tastes for what kinds of games I’ll play, and my experience with Dungeon Encounters in 2022, which I would describe as nothing less than euphoric from start to finish, activated a thirst for this specific type of tile-based rpg in me. I played Phantasy Star (or, most of it) around that time too and found myself completely enchanted by the first-person dungeons in that game, even as bare as they were there.

So I’ve found myself, as I often do, back towards the beginning of things. I’m not going to talk directly about the mechanics, about the act of playing Wizardry on your keyboard or controller, because Cadensia has already done that here so much better than I would have and I think anybody interested in what it feels like to Play Wizardry who doesn’t somehow already know should read her piece on it, it’s really good.

I found myself thinking about The Story in Wizardry a lot while I was playing it. The narrative is, I think, the most interesting thing about the game by far. But I was also thinking a lot about how all I had ever heard about this game and indeed this whole genre that it spawned was that they eschew narrative in favor of taking inspiration from the more mechanically minded, number crunching side of the earliest editions of Dungeons and Dragons. And that’s true, right, there aren’t narrative scenes in Wizardry, people aren’t talking to you, there aren’t really NPCs the way we think about them today. And this remains true today today – I’m a solid few hours into Etrian Odyssey right now, a game that so famously Doesn’t Have A Story that its remake would add a game mode that gave your party bespoke character art and personalities and dialogue and insert a much stronger narrative structure into the game as it existed. One of the major selling points of the even more recent and very popular Labyrinth series by Nippon Ichi Software is that they have their developer’s signature long, elaborate, dialogue-heavy stories. All kinds of scenes where one guy stands on one side of the screen and another guy stands on the other side of the screen and they go back and forth in the text box in those games.

But in playing these games I’m finding this to be a really weird understanding of what’s happening here. Etrian Odyssey is a game drenched in story. DRIPPING with incidental dialogue from the MANY characters who live in the base town at the top of the labyrinth, which changes constantly as you continue to descend, and all of whom are extensively characterized across various missions and side quests in which you interact with them. You’re constantly encountering other people within the labyrinth itself, and often get a choice of how to express yourself to them. There are little encounters sprinkled throughout the dungeon, where often you’re making a choice as small as whether you want to take a short break or pluck a piece of fruit you’ve found or investigate a rustling in the brush; rarely do these moments have huge effects but every time they are lending your characters, your environment, and your situations deeper context and personality. The game is full of narration, gorgeous prose that so expertly communicates wonder and danger, which both loom constantly in equal measure. There are immediate hints of a greater mystery at play regarding the circumstances of the dungeon’s existence and hints that other people already know what’s going on and purposely withhold information from you, to mysterious ends. This isn’t “no story.” This is “the girl on the boxart doesn’t talk about her backstory if I choose to play as her.” This is players not doing their half of the work. Which is fine! We don’t have to want to be active participants in every part of what a game’s doing. But we shouldn’t accuse games of having failures when what we’re actually doing is disagreeing with a style.

Anyway so like, Wizardry. The thing about it is. It’s fucking sick. THE PROVING GROUNDS OF THE MAD OVERLORD holy shit dude. Something I didn’t know before I played this game is that the mad overlord isn’t the guy you decapitate at the end but in fact a fucking loser ass king who has shoved you into the dungeon forever until you get his necklace back for him from a tricky little guy or die trying. IT BEGINS right like yeah you gotta read the manual to get the Good Good flavor but oh baby the flavor is hits. Fuckin Trebor what an asshole. His magic amulet is stolen by the evil wizard Werdna and a gigantic evil dungeon appears beneath his castle and he’s like hmm yes I will pretend this evil dungeon is here on purpose. Now everybody has to go die in the dungeon. If you get out of the dungeon with my amulet you get to be my bodyguards for life also you can’t turn that job down.

This immediately paints everything about the game in A Light. Given the time this came out, and its audience, and the guys who made it, most of this is cast in a fun light, like oh the place you buy your equipment is run by a funny fantasy dwarf who would sell you your own arms if he thought he could get away with it hoo hoo hoo (the manual goes out of its way to clarify that it means your body arms and not your weapons in fact). The castle is always bustling with activity, and there are always new adventurers at the pub to refresh your party with or uh, make a new one if you fucking wipe in the dungeon. At the same time though, the act of play itself creates a dour scenario for us. It’s brutal down there, no doubt about it. A punishing grind, one that kills and demeans the poor losers who find themselves trapped here at every turn. Adventurers have free reign to come and go from the labyrinth as they please because, after all, they don’t seem to have the freedom to leave the castle town itself. Every step could bring you into conflict with some monster or shade or even other guys, and who knows what their deals are? Other adventurers, given up on their hope of conventional success? You run into a lot of wizards but their relationship to Werdna is unclear, especially on these upper floors.

This is how you live now, though, and it’s here that the mechanics of the game that I see almost universally complained about create richness for this emergent narrative of tedious despair that felt most appropriate for my parties. It’s so, so, so easy to die, in the dungeon. If your friends can lug you back out then great news, you live in dungeons and dragons and the priests over at the Temple of Cant can revive you but like, only maybe, and fuck dude it costs a LOT of money to try. They mention these prices have been going up. They used to be tithes. Makes you wonder if these economies, not just the exploitative services run by the church but the pub, the armorer, if this little bubble is a result of the Mad Overlord’s perpetually trapping of adventurers into his death maze or if it was only made worse by it. If they fuck it up and you’re lost in death forever you uh, don’t get your money back.

Money essentially loses all meaning so quickly, which is bad news because it’s like the single extrinsic motivator your characters have for exploring; there’s a huge cash payout when you find your triumph, and your dubious final reward is a supposedly lucrative position of honor and prestige. But you’ll find yourself drowning in gold with nothing to spend it on before long. The shit at the weapons shop can barely handle a couple floors worth of enemy scaling, and all else there really is to buy are resurrections and other permanent status cures. By now though you’re empowered enough that you’ll need them less and less often.

That means there’s less and less incentive to spend time in town, and more and more to spend time in the dungeon. Deeper, darker, more twisted up. More disoriented. Meeting more guys who start to look more like you. Ghosts. And monsters are friendly as often as not! They’ll leave you alone if you leave them alone. That’s up to you, though. Something that’s undeniable is that you’re getting old down here. Every time you stay at the inn in town the game suggests that this isn’t a night of rest but an extended period of time out of the dungeon. These aren’t brief trips in and out. You make camp every time before you go down, you’re in there for a Long Time and when you come out you need to recover. Your characters age, and if you let them they’ll age substantially over time. When you change their classes it takes them three or four years to learn their new trade. Sometimes stats get lower when they level up. They’re getting old. They can die of old age! You might have to make a bunch of new guys because your old guys were Literal old guys who fucking died from being in the dungeon too long, at the behest of a cruel king but without the magics that grant him and his adversary power and longevity.

When you do this, if you do this, making new parties for any reason, such as stepping on a trap that teleports you into a location that makes your body impossible to recover such as into the castle moat or the inside of a rock wall, there is created a sense of generational knowledge, that old guard adventurers pass homemade maps and wisdom on how traps work and how to fight certain enemies to the new suckers who find themselves trapped here. After all, you’re making those maps in your notebook, and you’re keeping tabs on which enemies have fucking permanent level drain skills. Your new guys don’t learn that from nowhere. And you’re making Guys, definitively, like you name them and shit, they’re people. At least, they’re what you bring to them.

I bring a lot to this game. We can’t forget either that this is still this game where the two big evil guys are named Trebor and Werdna, the names of the game’s two developers, Robert and Andrew, spelled backwards. This is funny, this is a funny thing to do. There’s nothing intrinsically dark about the game beyond perhaps the oppressive feeling of claustrophobia that its main setting naturally implies, and indeed you’re always running into funny little tablets that read more like bits of graffiti or troll posts than they do ominous inscriptions. I can’t stop thinking about how when you fight Werdna he’s joined by a Vampire Lord and some normal vampires like what was going on were you guys just hanging out were you playing halo 3 did I crash the party. But it’s easy for me to pull all these elements into what felt like the story that was coming together for me, too.

I do think it’s worth mentioning also that while I did actually finish the NES version of this game I spent a significant amount of time poking around with the DOS, Gameboy Color, and PS1 editions of Wizardy as well, and all of these have very different renditions of this world and its environments and creatures and sounds. The PS1 version is by far the most self-serious, the one that at first glance lends itself the most the story that Wizardry and I told together, but something about the near-monochrome of the NES, the encompassing blackness of the screen at almost all times, and the way that it’s so much easier to completely lose your sense of place in the dungeon that made me feel so much more afraid than I ever did in the comparatively earthy and well-lit early floors of the Playstation version.

My point, at the end of all this, is that all that stuff is there for the reading at all. It’s been there the whole time, waiting to be engaged with. Wizardy isn’t a deep game really at all. Especially given how influential it is on all modern video games but especially turn based RPGs, it’s THE template for over 40 years now, and beyond the act of physically mapping your own shit while adapting to some often comically mean-spirited traps, the part where you get into fights never ever amounts to more than grinding until your number is bigger and you know more spells. But that didn’t matter to me. I had a great time with Wizardry, entirely down to the atmosphere that was in no small part created by how brutally terse that mechanical crunch felt. I don’t know if when I play Wizardry II it will be this version or if I’ll fully jump ship to the Playstation and its automap features, but for the experience I got these last few months with this game I wouldn’t trade any of that friction for anything, and I wouldn’t put any cutscenes in a remake either.