Many years ago, Dara O’Briain did one of the only good standup routines about video games. Video games, O’Briain argued, are the only entertainment medium that actively tests the observer, withholding their content behind challenges of mentality and dexterity. Albums, television shows and films will carry on regardlessly from the moment you press play; sections of a book that prove hard to read can be flipped past; but challenging sections of a game have to be bested or even mastered in order to progress. Want to see what happens next in Dark Souls, but can’t beat the Capra Demon? Too bad. Heard that Through Time and Space is one of the best video game levels ever, but can’t grapple with The Witcher’s inventory management and combat systems? Tough shit.

While there’s an amusing honesty to the bit, it kinda belies an uncomfortable truth about video games - that the parts where you’re moving the joysticks are likely to be the only moments of intellectual stimulation that most video games have to offer, with cutscenes more or less functioning as rewarding soap opera spectacle. It’s hard to discuss this kind of thing without sounding like a wanker, but it’s just a fact that even prestigious “adult” game-fiction like The Last of Us or God of War still rarely stirs anything more than an acknowledging “huh” in the players who’ve deigned to step outside the cultural borders of electronic entertainment and other mainstream media. Games narratives still tend to rely on cinematic cutscenes to convey information and drama, and most of the time said information or metatext is barely worth parlaying to the player - $10 million spent on comic book writers telling us “man is the real monster” or “depression is bad”. At their very best, our prestige video games are still just doing replicas of better movies.

killer7 differentiates itself from this convention in a number of ways. It’s a game that makes no concessions for those who expect a linear, event-driven narrative, peppering weirdo pseudo-plot and thought throughout map layouts, door keys (ever thought about what the Soul Shells are?) and helpful hints from dudes in gimpsuits who are prone to taking left turns into Baudrillardian philosophy while directing you to the bathroom. Textual and subtextual ambiguity reigns supreme. The gameplay (on Medium, at least) is unlikely to challenge the player all that much - aside from a few head-scratcher puzzles, it’s more or less a case of walking from point of interest to point of interest to open doors and shoot zombies. And, in a strange inversion of the problem outlined above, it’s the cutscenes and character dialogues that will tax a player’s brain far harder than anything that involves clicking buttons.

I think killer7 is a work of profound ridiculousness. Or ridiculous profundity. Something like that, anyway - I’m not quite sure of the precise term I need here, but I think Suda and Mikami are pulling from the playbooks of guys like Thomas Pynchon and David Lynch with this game - keep throwing potentially meaningful ideas and images at the screen, both within and outwith the realm of the cutscene, and let the true ones stick - the viewer will be too busy grappling with the good to remember the bad. It’s a technique that surprisingly few games dabble in, despite the supernatural properties of the medium and the obnoxious, inhuman lengths that most games require a player to play for.

So what are the good images here? Well, I guess it’s a function of the temporal, political and personal preferences of the player. Like abstract paintings, surrealist movies and post-modern novels, killer7 is wholly open to interpretation through your own kaleidoscopic lens. Unlike most game narratives that more or less bluntly prescribe a story and some associated themes (if any at all), killer7, like most Suda games, seems content to spray blood against the walls and do some interactive Rorschach testing with your psyche. Sure, there’s talk of American-Japanese relations and terrorism and borders and killers and the valise of our personae, but there’s nothing proscriptive or particularly didactic here - it’s more or less a presentation of post-9/11 realities that the player is asked to order and interpret as they see fit; a balancing act of feelings versus facts in opposition with fictions. Hand in killer7, the companion book for killer7, even (deliberately?) contradicts the facts of its own reality within the first ten pages - as if to highlight how pointless an endeavour Making Sense of it All is, especially in our Fukuyama/Fisher-influenced End of Capitalist-Realist History-Present.

By complete coincidence, I played through this game in parallel with the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, and finished it on the same day she was convicted - so Target 03: Encounter (Part 2) - where the Killer 7 head to an Epstein-pre-Epstein prescient-simulacra of Little James Island to take out an organ trader and implied child molester - held particular relevancy to me. The Jeffrey Epstein case and its relevant co-conspiracies are probably the best examples of what I’m prattling on about above - get ten, twenty, or a hundred people in a room together, and you’ll probably get a hundred interpretations of what the inner sanctum of Epstein’s reality really was - a whole smoothie bar of blended facts, news, fake news, Facebook news, speculation, fiction, fact and fuck knows what else. killer7 is often lumped together with The Silver 2425 as part of the “Kill the Past” series, and I think this info-meld of history in the melting pot of public consciousness is one of the chief relationships the games have with each other. Ironic that games about removing the past would so thoroughly realise the future of our present.

How did Suda51 know that the word’s top players would conspire to send an assassin after a sanctioned private ally of the United States government, a living evil who trafficked young girls with both personal and ulterior purpose? And how did he know a global pandemic would (temporarily) return humanity to a road-faring race? As is often suggested with Suda51 (see also: The Silver Case, No More Heroes) he may be one of gaming’s top producers of prophetic works. “Prophetic media” has been in vogue since March 2020 - references to media-elite paedophile rings in mid-2000s Nickelodeon cartoons; references to coronavirus in mid-2010s K-Dramas; references to Tom Hanks getting sick in mid-1990s episodes of The Simpsons. Wow! How do they pull it off?! Well, as with killer7’s imagery, I think it may be down to volume of produce rather than accuracy of content. The Simpsons is able to predict so much shit correctly because every ‘incorrect’ prediction isn’t even recognised as a prediction until it comes close to resembling some form of the truth we want it to be. The same applies to the images that Grasshopper’s games create.

Is this the secret to making remarkable, meaningful art and cultural commentary? Just keep producing, producing, producing until your images become resonant by virtue of the typewriter-monkey principle? That’s maybe underselling what Grasshopper achieved here - the foundations killer7 are built upon are more or less rock-solid. The cel-shaded mono-colour aesthetic is timeless, and the chosen palette for each Target is fittingly eerie. The control system, while initially awkward, is ultimately a solid compromise for a game that distills a gameplay fusion between Mikami’s Resident Evil series and Suda’s Silver Case adventure games - and it feels even better on PC, where 90% of the game can be played with just the mouse.

Although often cited as unconventional, I think the gameplay style of killer7 is a fairly logical compromise for these two creators, who seem more concerned with tone poetry and 2000s-exploration than providing a compelling and practical gamefeel. Anyway, it’s sometimes more important that a game feels good in the brain than on the hands moving the controller. killer7 is a game that locks its content away inside your mind, with progress often being made many hours after you’ve stepped away from the console and allowed your third eye time to process the images your two eyes have seen. It’s all in your head.

I won’t bother with any preamble about the influence this series has had on FPS games or the seemingly eternal wait for Half-Life 3, you all know about that by now. But what do I think you might be asking, assuming you didn’t see the star rating already. Well, yeah it’s pretty good.

Ok but in all seriousness this game is absolutely kickass and has almost no right to hold up this well after nearly 20 years since it’s release. Right off the bat the presentation is way more unique than any other game I’ve played thus far. The game doesn’t have cutscenes in the traditional sense as you’re still allowed movement during most important story moments, albeit with limited mobility. On the one hand this does result in a lack of great cinematography for the most part like the Halo series could often achieve, but on the other hand it makes for one of the most immersive experiences I’ve had with any game.

Regular gameplay is also pretty solid, as I’d expect from one of the major innovators for the genre. The gunplay isn’t amazing or anything, but it’s really tight and responsive, which coupled with really solid enemy A.I makes for many tense and fun set pieces. One thing I appreciate over other shooters though are the puzzles, which make a nice way of breaking up the pace of the regular gameplay. What I don’t enjoy quite as much are the vehicle sections, which while not necessarily awful felt way too finicky and sensitive in terms of controls. Admittedly this may be a victim of a PC control scheme being modified to fit with an Xbox controller (I played this through The Orange Box collection) but even still those sections weren’t any less cumbersome.

Another great aspect would definitely be the soundtrack and sound design. Whilst the former is used quite sparingly, it makes every instance of music all that more affective, with Apprehension & Evasion and Triage at Dawn being my personal highlights of the soundtrack. What the game makes up for in its sparse use of music however is the sound design. The heavy emphasis on ambience over music for most of the game once again adds to the immersion, while also making the horror moments a lot more effective.

Of course I’d be remiss without mentioning the story, which also is unsurprisingly excellent. I do find the borderline deification of Gordon Freeman among the freedom fighters to be a bit overplayed at times, but it’s more than made up for by the great cast be it big players like Alyx and Dr Breen, to more minor characters like Father Grigori. The plot treads a fine line between being entirely episodic and a more linear narrative approach really well, yeah you can divide the game up into particular sections with their own little mini stories carrying through, but it all plays a bigger role in building up to the finale which while really intense and fun, can’t help but feel a bit anticlimactic. Of course I get that this is just one part of a (still) ongoing story so I’m willing to excuse that, especially since a certain someone even alludes to the anticlimax during the ending. If you know, you know.

Overall a pretty awesome game, and one I’d consider a new favourite. Yes I’m super original in my takes on most highly revered media, aren’t I? 10/10

This game tends to get the short end of the stick more than any of the 3 Luigi’s Mansion titles, and even despite having grown up playing this a fair bit I didn’t have great expectations going in. I played Dream Team a lot growing up and I think that games a load of arse. Fortunately that’s not the case here, as I still consider this to be a solid game despite being a bit lacking as a sequel.

To shoot the elephant in the room right now, yes this takes a decisively more comedic approach compared to the first game in terms of tone, and while I do very much favour the first game in that respect I don’t think this games approach is inherently awful. Despite being released very early in the 3DS’ life, the character animation is really impressive and conveys a lot of emotion, be it from Luigi to the ghosts and Boos. It does seem a bit simple in this regard when compared to the third game, but even still it mostly holds up really well.

As for the other glaring aspect of this game a lot of people take issue with, yes I don’t like the mission based structure compared to the more open ended original. Admittedly it doesn’t hamper the core gameplay as much as people make it out to be, but it is still annoying only having a roughly 20-30 minute gameplay cycle before E Gadd drags you back to his lab.

As for the main gameplay, I’d say in some ways it makes a couple improvements compared to the original. There’s a much greater emphasis on puzzle solving to proceed to the next room, which compared to the first game which used puzzles way more sparsely is a welcome change. Also the Boo hunting has been drastically changed for the better. Not only is it not required to have the majority of them to beat the game, but most of them are only confined to one room and are mostly there for completionists more than anything. I do wish there wasn’t one Boo in almost EVERY level, seeing as how you’ll have to replay earlier levels since you don’t get the equipment required so you can spot them, but since they’re not mandatory to finish the campaign I can look past that.

While I still overall think the first game is superior, I definitely don’t think this game is quite the blasphemous mark on the former that it’s made out to be, and I’d still say this game holds up alright in spite of a few flaws.

7/10