A Play in Three Acts

ACT I

Setting: A Discord Server

Many People Over the Years: DC, you love Twin Peaks, you should play Alan Wake. It's inspired by Twin Peaks.

Me: Oh wow, sounds cool. I'll check it out. I liked Control but it didn't blow me away.

Many People: Just be aware that the gameplay/combat sucks.

Me: I don't care! How bad can it be? I love Twin Peaks! It has a diner in the opening segment! It's about a writer! How bad can it be?

ACT II

Setting: The First Several Hours of Alan Wake: Remastered

Me: Oh wow, I'm pretty sure my grandma can sprint longer than this guy. How did they go from Max Payne to this? Like...I know he's a writer but still..

Me: Doesn't matter! Hallucinations, fake Mrs. Tremond, a book mystery, a wife mystery! This is great! I'll just turn the game down to easy so I can get through the bad parts faster!

ACT III

Setting: Despair. A lone chair on stage while a disheveled man forces himself through a video game out of spite.

Me, quietly sobbing to my controller: please...make it stop. I never want to see a flashlight ever again.

The lights dim and go out leaving the stage in blackness.

Me, a low, trembling whisper: How did they go from Max Payne to this?

T H E E N D

Well known today for its brutal difficulty and being the originator of the Belmont Strut, Castlevania is one of the rare classics that lives up to its legacy. In fact, I never touched a single Castlevania game until just a few years ago, and rather than going straight for Symphony of the Night (arguably the series most popular title), I figured I was better off starting from the very beginning and working my way through for as long as I could tolerate it. This game has aged like wine and has become something of an annual replay for me along with a few other games in the series, usually around October because... Draculas.

The controls in this game are very deliberate. The jump is stiff, heavy, and cannot be broken out of, making each leap something you must commit to completely. The pace at which Simon moves is steady, both fast enough to avert danger yet lacking in just enough mobility to only narrowly avert disaster. The whips speed and hitbox are well defined, making each boss encounter a calculation of how many strikes you can land before pulling back. Subweapons not only make a palpable impact in terms of raw damage output, but have clear advantages and disadvantages in how they augment the trajectory of your attacks. It all feels clunky the first time you pick it up, but subsequent playthroughs feel like slipping into a warm bath. It's perfect.

I am now going to invoke one of the most tired tropes in game criticism and compare this to Dark Souls, only in reverse, because Dark Souls is the Castlevania of action RPGs.

Castlevania teaches the player through trial and error, with repeat jogs through levels becoming a bit easier each time as you start to learn the rhythm of it. You get a better feel for what subweapons you might need, or how much health you should have before a specific obstacle or encounter. Finding hidden money bags to build towards lives right when you need them, or carefully metering out the hits you can take before that next wall chicken start to shift control from the game to the player. It's one of the few games I think plays better every time I sit down with it. This is, essentially, the same way I view the Souls series. You learn whatever stretch of the level you're stuck on and when you get a handle on it and make that perfect run through, it feels amazing. It's a compelling loop that encourages you to keep trying rather than pushing you away.

I know, I know, comparing a game to Dark Souls is, well... heinous, and I should be punished for my crimes. Just be thankful I'm not reviewing Castlevania 2, or you might have to put up with me insisting those games are equally as obtuse.

There's precious few things I can really fault Castlevania for. Some instances of slowdown cause really interfere with your ability to avoid hazards, and a few stretches between checkpoints are needlessly grueling. The level with the fleamen is a bit dull once you realize all you need to do is hold right, as it's otherwise a straight line that you have to start all the way back at if you screw up. Really, these are all minor complaints. Castlevania is so tightly designed that I really need to stretch for something bad.

I've given a few other versions of this game a shot as well, and in particular I really like the X68000 and Chronicles versions. Of course the original is easily accessible through the Castlevania Collection today, which I think is well worth picking up for this alone.

Vice: Project Doom's cover looks like something you'd see on a bootleg GI Joe box, and you'd be forgiven for dismissing it on sight as some cheap 8-bit crap not worth your time. I first came across it while watching Jeff Gertmann blow through some retro games on Giant Bomb dot com, a website that was, at one point, about video games. This is a good case of not judging something by its cover, because Project Doom has great presentation in-game, and backs it up with excellent gameplay and a surprising amount of variety.

Vice: Project Doom is broken into three distinct gameplay types: Overhead driving, shooting gallery, and Ninja Gaiden. The comparison gets brought up a lot because it's incredibly appropriate. If it weren't for these being countless other Ninja Gaiden derivatives on the system, I'd question how they got away with it. But what sets this game apart from the other knock offs is the developer's keen understanding of what makes Ninja Gaiden fun, while smartly ditching other elements that held those games back. None of the bosses feel like slowly punching down a brick wall like they do in the Gaiden games, for example, and the level design doesn't feel as punishing to go through after a game over.

The other two gameplay modes feel pretty fleshed out in their own right. The overhead driving segments are a lot of fun, and opening the game on one is a great way of immediately throwing the player into the action. It sets the tone and the pace of the game immediately. The shooting gallery sections might be my least favorite of the three types, but they're still solid for what they are (and probably a lot more fun with a light gun, assuming one works with the game, I have no idea.)

The story is presented exactly like it is in Ninja Gaiden, and it's every bit as insane. Aliens have been pulling the strings in our society for decades, but their food source, Gel, has begun to spread through the underworld as a street drug. Detective Hart, a vice cop, has to investigate the corporation the aliens use as a front. And by "investigate" I mean "shoot aliens indiscriminately" and also "commit untold amounts of vehicular manslaughter."

This was a very late era NES game, releasing in 1991 both in Japan and America. It definitely shows as the game really pushes the NES hardware, but I have to wonder how much more they could've gotten up to by making this a 16-bit game instead. Perhaps it's for the best that they didn't, as it's trying to emulate a very specific game. If NES action-platformers are your kind of game, then good news, you can play this on the Switch. Or pirate it! Detective Hart would probably shoot you dead if you so much as thought about it, but he lives in the video game and can't hurt you.

So I played this ages ago when it first came out and even then I remember thinking, "Why is this game a shooter and not an adventure game where you have to like sneak into the engine room of creepy-ass racist Laputa and throw a wrench in the works?"

Now in 2022 with post-Disco-Elysium-glasses, and with half of the stuff in Columbia basically happening in real life, it's pretty easy to see how much cooler this game could have been if it wasn't dead set on being another stubbly-man-shoot-thing simulator, except it still probably would've kind of sucked, because the writers are weird liberal centrists who don't actually understand any of the themes they are writing about. Ah well. The setting had potential is what I'm trying to say. And building a relationship with Elizabeth (or any other character) could have worked so much better in a less pew-pew-centric genre. Unfortunately in this cursed timeline we are stuck with White Man Go Blam Blam MCMXCIXVIII: Why Slave Revolt Is Bad, Actually. When we could have had an infinitely more horrifying and more compelling Exploring the Twisted Funhouse of American Fascism Simulator! Damn you quantum physics.

"A Hilariously Broken Stealth Game"

As the first entry to the franchise, "Hitman: Codename 47" is really rough around the edges. It's not a particularly good-looking game, with its poor antialiasing and reduced color palette making the game look even more aged than it already is. Its default control scheme is terrible, and adjustment is an absolute necessity in order to properly interact with the game. The dialogue is painstakingly bad and has some blatant racial stereotyping at many points. However, the title starts to form the groundwork for the creative "Hitman" series, despite being unable to properly implement many of its mechanics in this first mess of an entry…

Upon booting up the game, many settings and tweaks to game files need to be made in order to actually get it properly working. Once that mess is figured out, the opening tutorial starts… and man was this thing awful. The default controls were incoherent (resulting in even more tweaking of settings), and the introductory mission was just so broken and misguided. Voice lines would interrupt each other, objectives would fail to trigger properly, and there was no real, well, TUTORIAL. I had to pull up the control schemes multiple times to even get a gauge of how to make Agent 47 function, and by the time the first few levels were presented I was already at a disadvantage due to the sloppy introduction to the game.

The next few missions proceed to just throw you into procedurally larger areas and give you the objective of assassinating a target and occasionally completing side objectives. The first sniper mission is terrible and really doesn’t explain much of the mechanics. The next mission is a bit more interesting in that you have to take out multiple targets, but the real meat of the experience doesn’t happen until the third mission. This is where the first act starts to ramp up, and in doing so the gameplay starts to become more layered than I had originally believed it to be…

The third mission definitely gives some more interesting mechanics to think about. Hiding bodies was already introduced, but disguises and enemy pathing are very important here. The goal is to frame an assassination of the police chief on one of two gangs you are tasked with starting a war between, which is a really cool idea! However, it’s a bit janky though - you basically have to follow a very specific path to victory here, and it feels less like a feeling that there is creativity on the player’s part and more like a simple act of solving a puzzle. Much different from later games, but it is the first time in the game where a challenge is presented.

The fourth mission is where the game really starts to show how the “Hitman” franchise started to find its own identity, but it's also the mission which made me quit the game. You’re thrown into a much larger and more sprawling map than prior missions, but are given very little direction to work off of. There’s a lot of blind exploration, trial-and-error, and luck involved with these tasks, and while it builds up a really cool mission where you must interact with different characters and objectives, it feels super janky as you play more and more of it. The confusing map doesn’t help either, and it feels more like a really well-done experimental demo than a finished level for a game.

By this time a player might notice the poor presentation of the game. The graphical quality is just not very good, and both environments and character models look lesser in quality than one might expect. There’s a lack of smoothing on edges around the world, causing a jaggy look to lots of assets. This game’s budget wasn’t the highest, so there were likely some limitations on what could be accomplished in the visuals department when looking at the relatively unique style of game this one tried to become. The voice acting is also really bad. At times it appears to be really offensively racist, especially for Asian characters. I couldn’t help but laugh at the mixture of bad voice work and cringey dialogue, and it made the experience memorably bad. Not a good look overall, though it might be funny to you if you choose to “experience” it.

While the creativity of the series was starting to show itself, it didn’t mean that the game wasn’t unfun or extremely punishing in difficulty. Stealth is super broken here, and enemies are able to see and hear just about anything. There are no clean angles, and you have to start abusing the AI and weird “stealth mode” in order to clear some guards from certain areas. Then, there are strangely placed objectives (that are randomized each time for some reason!) as well as a weird escort mission with a…well…escort. It’s just a really lame cycle that repeats itself each time you fail, and you see the strings of the game’s AI being pulled left and right. I’m not saying the game has to be “easy” to be a fun stealth game, but the game offers creative kills and then doesn’t allow them to go unnoticed. Really disappointing, and I quit without completing this mission.

Overall, “Hitman: Codename 47” was a very flawed start to the franchise. It had some awful presentation, poor controls, and an unrefined gameplay loop. It contains a bit of the heart and soul of the franchise and where its gameplay would end up going in future installments, but here it was too sloppy to continue playing through. I would Not Recommend trying this one out, especially since a future sequel includes some missions from the first game.

Final Verdict: 3/10 (Poor)

Beaten: Mar 15 2022
Time: 19 Hours

Platform: Xbox Series X

And thus ends my playthrough of the Dark Souls series (kinda… still gotta do all the dlc and DeS and BB). Still though, beating this one is a weird feeling for me. Three weeks ago I wasn’t even sure if I’d end up beating Elden Ring when it came out, and here I am, four games deep into FromSoft’s most influential series, and god damn do I love these games now.

Dark Souls 3 in particular feels like a refinement of the games that came before it, a nostalgic look back on the series. It’s filled to the brim with references, both overt and subtle, to DeS, DS1, and DS2, both mechanically and thematically. 



As for how the game works, it feels obviously like a hybrid of DS1 and DS2, but with a lot of BB (I think) under the hood. More than any other Souls game, this one is tight, responsive, dare I say even “fast” at times. Coming from 1 and 2 this feels like a revelation, and coming from Elden Ring this feels like the ground that house was built on. 



Like Elden Ring, there aren’t any areas in particular that stopped me dead in my tracks. I had to grind a bit for one boss, but all of the areas felt doable, approaching fair even lol. There’s no Blighttown, no Earthen Peak here. The bosses never really stopped me either, with the exception of one fairly early on (my first Lord of Cinder, the equivalent of the bosses that hold the Lord Souls in DS1/2). What gives these encounters texture in place of such frustration is the performative spectacle of it all. All the bosses are larger than life, visually striking, and fluid in ways the other games could only gesture towards.



I think I perceive this game as more of a step between the first “set” of souls games from FromSoft and the newer “set” of them (Sekiro and ER, who play with the formula to a much greater extent). Maybe it’s just a revisiting to Dark Souls’s style, but with the foundation of Bloodborne to hold it down? But its backwards-looking perspective mixed with its newfound kineticism makes it kind of poignant as a bridge, maybe even a last hurrah for this particular style of game from FromSoft. I doubt they’ll go back to the pure Dark Souls style anytime soon, especially with the next rumored game from them being based on Armored Core. 



As it is, this feels like a fitting note to go out on. For the series it resides in, and particular style it seemingly marked the end of. Fittingly dark and romantic (in that 19th century sense of the word), I think I love it, though only time will tell how it sticks in my mind.

A lonely journey through ruins punctuated by dense trials in honeycombed dungeons. What (obviously) distinguishes this for me from previous Souls entries is the ability to stray from the Light of Grace and just wander through the vast overworld and navigate the winding geography in an almost frictionless manner, then return to the dungeons when I have recovered my courage (usually with the added warmth of a friend guiding or being guided through the labyrinths).

It isn’t really the bosses or combat that draws me to this series, but the perpetual sense of a larger world, of meaning and history, just beyond your grasp - a sense of mystery evocative of Gene Wolfe’s New Sun or Harrison’s Viriconium. This isn’t a living world in a Skyrim sense - there are few areas that evoke a bustling town or real city, and like Souls games before, this feels like playing through a myth, with unusual characters guiding you, withholding information from you, tricking you.

If you are fatigued by From's work, this may not be the one to bring you back. Occasional repetition of bosses can at times reveal a game outreaching its ambition, of assets stretched too far, but so many encounters constantly wake you up and undermine your sense of how the world works. The map grows, above and below ground, and never offers a complete image of the world and its secrets.