Hi Fi Rush cleverly marries 3rd person character action with rhythm game mechanics, transforming the timing-heavy combat of a Devil May Cry into the literal, musical rhythm of, say, Parappa the Rapper. If there’s one thing Hi Fi Rush nails, it’s the way it so naturally blends these mechanics together, making a connection which initially seems abstract very literal. The reason why it can do this is because the entire world, in every level, responds to the beat of whatever song is playing. It isn’t only the player who acts in tandem with the backing track - enemies, NPCs, and even the set dressing all form a landscape of visual percussion. It’s magic, seeing this all work the first time you play it.

All that being said, this game has a major fundamental problem that undercuts everything that makes it work: its music isn’t good. Most of the game’s levels are soundtracked by this undifferentiated stream of early 2010s studio-budget garage rock that doesn’t grate on the ears so much as it…depresses the mind? Levels then culminate into boss fights that feature licensed music, none of which are contemporary, and all of which are whatever the opposite of timeless is. “Lonely Boy” by the Black Keys makes an early appearance, of course, as do a couple of Nine Inch Nails’ less controversial tracks (somehow, “March of the Pigs” or “Closer” didn’t make the cut). Prodigy is in here, for whatever reason, as is “Free Radicals” by the Flaming Lips, which, as a Flaming Lips fan – and I’m being as serious as I can be when I say this – is literally the last possible rock song by the Lips I would want to see in a rhythm game. The entire soundtrack feels like it was conceived of by a classic rock dad whose only experience with contemporary music comes from television advertisements he remembers from a twelve years ago.

Part of the reason Hi Fi Rush’s music is so stale comes back around to the narrative. Despite being a game about a counter-cultural revolution, Hi Fi Rush is overfilled with safe choices. Chai, the protagonist, is presented as an anachronism, a guitar solo-obsessed rebel who can overthrow the corporate establishment. using the power of that old time rock ‘n roll. But radio-friendly rock very much is the music of the establishment, of car commercials and political rallies. There's nothing subversive about it - that Flaming Lips song I was complaining about earlier is a song about anti-radicalization, yet it kicks off the revolution in the game.

Tango Softworks’ creative scope as far as its core game design is concerned is incredibly wide – say what you will about The Evil Within games (which, to be clear, I think are great), but they’re full of huge choices. Regardless of whether or not you like them, if you’ve played them for a while, I’m sure you’d at least remember them. In this sense, Hi Fi Rush is a fitting next step for the studio. In every other way that matters, though, this is the video game equivalent of listening to the music they play at the mall.

I agree with what seems to be the general consensus about Lies of P, that it’s much smarter and more coherent than you’d expect from a Pinocchio-themed Bloodbourne-ripoff, and that it’s one of the better carbon copies of the From Software Souls formula in general. Yet, after about twenty-thirty hours of play, I realized I was getting so little out of it compared to Souls games. Which got me asking – what does emulating Dark Souls mean, in practice? What value do Souls games possess that’s unique, what effect do they have that differentiates them from other, similar genres of games that emphasize exploration and combat?

What I learned from Lies of P is that the genre is ultimately inflexible. The number of prerequisites to its design are too numerous for a Souls game to iterate beyond what was accomplished in the original Dark Souls, a game which took its progenitor’s (Demon’s Souls) more experimental design and stitched it into one cohesive space, the final building block of the Souls-like game that would ‘complete’ its design. Every Souls and Souls-like game since the original Dark Souls keeps each individual piece of that game’s design intact, relying entirely on variations in combat mechanics or variations in the aesthetic of the world map to differentiate themselves.

Put simply, this means that while combat mechanics can be added into a Souls-like or removed from a Souls-like, the thematic or narrative horizons of these games are ultimately pre-defined. For one, no character in a Souls-like can develop onscreen in any sense except for the numbers attached to their character sheets. Given these games’ emphasis on combat and movement, imagine how alienating it would be if NPCs were able to express themselves at length with Baldur’s Gate-style conversations or Metal Gear Solid-style cinematics. These games also cannot occur within a social space – their ability to depict even basic sociality is hampered not only by their need to provide perpetual combat encounters, but also because those combat encounters must always challenge the player. Downstream from the Souls-like philosophy of overcoming discrete, hand-crafted challenges is a limitation on the dynamism of these games – nothing is ever simulated beyond whatever occurs when NPCs are idle, and whatever occurs when they’re in conflict. Because enemies will always appear in the same place with the same pattern of behavior, developers in this genre can only contextualize the oddly static nature of these big video game spaces as the result of a worldwide post-apocalyptic event or of a fantastical, miasmatic dementia. Why else would an NPC stand permanently in a dark corner awaiting the arrival of the player, unless they were literally unable to think?

This creates a combustive internal tension within Lies of P, an adaptation of a story in which a child learns the consequences of lying. Besides adapting basic qualities its source material in order to build some kind of shared universe of Souls-likes that adapt public domain fairy tales, Lies of P supposedly intends to complicate the pre-supposed ethics or aftereffects of lying, but it stars a character who cannot regularly speak or explicitly express himself onscreen. It’s a game about labor, automation, and the dehumanization necessary to the function of industrialization within capitalism, in which the central figure in the story achieves his transcendence from machine object to human being by participating in an economic incentive structure in which the world’s currency manifests as experience points spendable to keep pace within a world of constantly inflationary numbers. While its true that in the explicit narrative the protagonist achieves humanity through lying, his survival is only made possible by participating in commerce with a small variety of local merchants.

These are deep and meaningful disconnects within Lies of P’s narrative, but the problems extend much further. Even very basic functions of the Souls-like game – things like fog gates, souls as currency, healing flasks, etc. – are kept completely intact in Lies of P regardless of whether or not they fit. Why should there be fog gates in a Pinocchio game – even in this specific Pinocchio game? Why can Pinocchio summon ghostly allies into boss fights, and why only during boss fights? Why does Pinocchio need to be at a mechanized, bonfire-emulating fast travel point to heal himself, if he’s a tireless death robot with the capacity to swap out his own limbs on the fly? I don’t ask these questions to, like, Cinemasins Lies of P, but because it seems that any narrative game that uses the format of Dark Souls to tell its story without accounting for the extreme limits of that narrative potential will always descend into incoherence.

Only three games I’ve played have managed to overcome the narrative limits of Dark Souls’ design: Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption is a Souls-like boss rush game in which each boss represents one of the seven deadly sins, making the subtextual pseudo-spiritual masochism of Dark Souls into text by disempowering the player after each successful boss encounter. In this way, Sinner presents a kind of auto-critique of Souls games purely by the alterations to the Souls ruleset. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order patches together a workable, character-based narrative by staging a bunch of dense, Naughty Dog-style ‘walk and talk’ sequences inbetween each new Souls-like area. Vampyr, the Dontnod vampire role playing game, overcomes Dark Souls’ inherent inability to depict social spaces by building a Bioware-style dialogue system into the game and emphasizing the player’s ability to murder any given NPC as the core mechanic of the entire experience, producing heavy, specific consequences to any acts of violence committed by the players in any of the game’s social hubs.

Ultimately, based on these examples, it’s possible to overcome the extreme limits on narrative that plague Souls-like games with some ingenuity on the developers’ part, but only by altering the Souls format such that players no longer place the game in question in the category of ‘Souls-like.’ Based on discourse surrounding these games, many players seem to feel like these alterations to the formula actually disinherit these games as full-on Souls-like games in total. Instead, they’re catalogued under different genres of games which only feature Souls-like elements, less preferable, perhaps, than what is accomplished by games like Lies of P or Nioh or Ashen or The Surge or Lords of the Fallen. But games like Demon’s Souls or Dark Souls, which use those hard limits to enhance rather than detract from the very specific stories they tell, perfectly synchronizing their philosophy on combat and their grim, gothic narratives, which a game like Lies of P simply does not do. To simply resituate those existing pieces into a new shape using a public domain figure, or a period of history, or an aesthetic change from fantasy dystopia to science fiction dystopia – it’s impossible to come to a new conclusion or produce a new idea this way. From Soft games work, but they’re a delicate mixture of qualities – making a new game with a bunch of minor changes only enhances their potential flaws rather than highlighting their better qualities.

Sea of Stars only exists because of nostalgia. However the game progresses past this point and whether or not its hyper-powerful ideation of what SNES/GBA graphics/art is designed to subvert your expectations of the narrative in some way, Sea of Stars is stuck in that creatively stagnant web of its developers’ experiences with the Super Nintendo, retroactively inflated by the weight of childhood memory. Sea of Stars exists because it is impossible to feel the rush of playing Chrono Trigger for the first time, again, as a child, but it would be really cool if you could.

I haven’t completed it, but I have faith that Sea of Stars evolves beyond its surface-level premise. The Messenger, Sabotage’s previous game, explored the distance between the loos, open-for-interpretation art style of 8 and 16-bit video games and the impossibly high ceiling of childhood fantasy, which can so effortlessly elevate a rough sketch into a vibrant world. I have faith that Sea of Stars eventually gets there, or somewhere like there, that it won’t simply produce a newer, less iconic Chrono Trigger-like. But a retro-inspired game has to do a lot quickly to get me there these days. Looking through any digital storefront and you’re always immediately confronted with dozens of new attempts at recapturing some imagined ineffable quality of old games we’ve lost as we’ve gained newer and more powerful technology. It’s depressing, actually, to see the precious few indie games which get elevated by press coverage do so entirely because they emulate older, already content-complete games, games which have already been expounded upon through sequels and successors, and games which are easily accessible games from decades past. Is making a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy 6 – which everyone will defacto agree is significantly less interesting and less important than Final Fantasy 6 regardless of what is actually in the game – even interesting in the abstract? Would adding Paper Mario-esque timing-based attacks to Dragon Quest V do anything at all to change that game’s relevance to today?

I can admit, at least, that Sea of Stars is very pretty. The art style reminds me of last year’s underappreciated Game Boy Advance-like, Floppy Knights, in that it creates a little festival of the 16-bit era in each screen, recalling the semi-forgotten GBA vibe even as it exceeds what would’ve actually been possible to depict on that system. There’s definitely some charm to that.

Redfall’s greatest failure wasn’t its rough launch, its empty open world, or its tacked-on loot/progression system – although those things certainly didn’t help – Redfall’s greatest failure was a failure of imagination. On a conceptual level, a mechanical level and a visual level, this is a game built piecemeal from borrowed materials, a hastily-assembled Jenga tower of tired FPS formulas poised to collapse at any moment. Contrary to what some reviewers have said, Redfall, even at launch, is a functional co-op shooter, but that’s all it is – functional. Its systems do not produce dynamic play, its characters do not produce dynamic drama, its location does not produce dynamic set pieces. It is the back-of-the-box bullet-list from a Far Cry game remodeled as The Next Arkane Experience; it’s the video game equivalent of Studio Ghibli making a sequel to Pixar’s Cars 3.

What makes it all so heartbreaking is that Redfall isn’t a terrible game; it’s a mess of systems failing to interact with one another. But outside of the loot system, every other design element has something there, something worth the effort. The combat, weapon design, enemy design and level design are vibrating with unfulfilled potential, begging to be expanded upon or placed in a different, better game. You can feel that while Redfall might lack imagination, it’s not because of a lack of talent on the developer’s part. Rather, you can viscerally feel the suppression of the developers’ talents and instincts, quest lines that, had the characters been granted the opportunity to grow and change in the way characters in Prey were able to grow and change, would’ve made an impact.

The good stuff is there, buried deep beneath the FPS market trends that dominate the game. Just look at the Redfall’s cast of playable characters and you’ll see what I mean. We’ve got three misses and one hit. In the misses category: a Call of Duty soldier with a knockoff R2-D2, a grimdark PMC sniper with a pet raven, a stereotypical engineer character – boring, boring, boring. But then, there’s Layla, the telekinetic wunderkind who can summon her vampiric ex-boyfriend in battle, and whose student loan woes simply do not stop, even during the vampire apocalypse.

You play as Layla and you think, ‘oh – here's what Redfall was supposed to be. There’s the Arkane magic.’ In another world, this whole game would’ve been Redfall: The Adventures of Layla. It would’ve been single-player, its narrative could unfold under the auspices of narrative structure rather than in fits and spurts following repeatable in-game junk missions, its world could’ve accommodated these things called ‘subtlety’ and ‘good pacing.’ And it would’ve kicked ass. Redfall isn’t that game, but like Layla, bits of that game shine through now and again.

It’s been interesting to watch the re-evaluation of this game over the course of the last year. I haven’t played the Phantom Liberty expansion yet, but I have a pretty huge chunk of the 2.0 update, and if nothing else, I’ll say that CD Projekt Red have produced a functional version of 2020’s biggest discourse-generating disasterpiece. The police are no longer phantoms who apparate 16 feet behind you every time you commit a crime, and instead have an actual a presence on the streets now (there’s a police scanner, even!). NPC drivers are more rational than before, only sometimes doing something really unhinged like, say, driving into a busy intersection, pulling on the E-brake and then screaming at the top of their lungs. NPCs also don’t seem to stand around waiting for death quite as much during combat encounters. The perk system has been completely re-done, simultaneously making the upgrade system about 300% more immediately coherent than before while also making the player’s ascendance into godhood a guarantee rather than a possibility, trivializing most (if not all) combat encounters long before the endgame starts up.

I first played through Cyberpunk back when it released in 2020, and like everyone else, was disappointed by it. Regardless of the technical difficulties, the writing in the original release of the game felt insufficient, as if it was afraid to commit to a perspective. This, to me, has been the most mysterious aspect of the discourse around the game. Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 is ultimately the same game as before, only more beautiful. But regardless of how photo-realistic Night City becomes, no matter how high the NPC count gets or how in-depth the simulation of urban life is rendered, Cyberpunk 2077 will still always be the game where every outfit worn by every character looks like if a marketing manager from The Gap circa the 2000’s was asked to make ‘punk’ fashion for 11 year-old boys. This is still the game where its late-capitalist dystopia is informed by 80’s-era orientalism (anxiety about Japan outpacing America in the tech sector? please – America has moved onto even more pernicious and pronounced forms of xenophobic angst since the ‘80s!). Cyberpunk is still the game in which every line of dialogue is pockmarked by the corniest examples of fake urban slang in basically any media released within the last twenty years. A choom might say the sitch is so un-nova it makes me wanna zero a corpo gonk!!!

Everything Cyberpunk 2077 does right is undercut by its inability to commit to saying anything coherent – anything, at all – on any kind of ideological or philosophical level. It’s always struck me as weird that this massive dystopian sci-fi blockbuster, this story about corporations ballooning to such an extent that they actually, rather than functionally own the state and its police, that they have granted themselves the right to kill and even, in a literal sense, own peoples’ literal bodies – a story filled with criticisms of corporations and corporate culture more broadly – explicitly disallows every character in the entire game from ever, in even a single instance, disparaging capitalism as a system in total. Even Johnny ‘Keanu Reeves’ Guitarhands, an implicitly left-leaning terrorist who sets off a nuclear bomb inside of a corporate weapons manufacturer, asserts he doesn’t specifically have a problem with capitalism, but with social ‘entropy’ (look at my leftist terrorists, dog, etc etc).

The worst part, for me, has always been that Cyberpunk 2077 is a game about a low-level twenty-something crook looking down the barrel of their own mortality, forced to slowly fade away before they can do anything with their life, that also lets the player indefinitely prolong their character's life, so long as they still want to complete open world content. This is the contradiction that is too extreme for me, the one that turns the game from a messy but occasionally compelling attempt at dystopian crime drama into regular old video game mediocrity. Other games have toyed with this exact idea - another AAA open world game in recent memory has depicted a wasting disease suffered by its protagonist may come to mind - but Cyberpunk simply erases whatever symptoms the protagonist experiences whenever it might inconvenience the player. So, Cyberpunk 2077 becomes a game about death, about wasting away, that doesn't want to inconvenience you, and so it trivializes death.

This profound inability to communicate a coherent perspective on its own subject matter extends to the game’s mechanics. This is a game that is nominally about living in and experiencing a fictional city, that nevertheless does not enable the player to actually do stuff in that city outside of gun combat. In the latest update, Cyberpunk added working subway lines, which, impressively, actually work like subways do. You have to study the train route, choose the correct direction, and figure out where you want to go on the map to use the subway – and then you have to actually sit quietly in the subway car and go to your destination. This is all executed beautifully, too – CD Project Red nail the almost meditative vibe of quietly minding your own business on your commute while you’re squished into a tin can with a bunch of other people. For a brief couple of minutes, Cyberpunk seems to remember it is a game about people who live in a place, and not a game about a gun that shoots enemies and harvests resources for itself. Romantic partners have also been upgraded, now occasionally sending text messages to the player and hanging out in the player character’s apartment semi-regularly to maintain a sense of continuity in those stories. And so, Cyberpunk becomes a simulation encouraging the player to immerse themselves in its massive open world – before the player leaves Judy in their apartment, double-jumps across the street, and explodes eight criminals’ heads with their cyber-mind, at which point it returns to what it actually is, which is an Ubisoft-esque power fantasy.

All this is to say, Cyberpunk 2077 is a profoundly insecure game. A lot of my frustration with it comes down to the fact that, unlike so many AAA open world games, Cyberpunk has so many of the right pieces to really build something that matters, something that transcends the kind of blockbuster superficiality haunting the open world genre – but much like Starfield, it is dominated by a directionless-style of direction, an ideologically blank expression of ideology, in which the pursuit of the ‘ultimate’ cyberpunk video game subsumes all, producing an ideologically-conflicted, cyberpunk-themed amusement park. And did I enjoy the amusement park? Sometimes! There’s no question in my mind, at all, that the decade-plus of labor that created such a dense, fantastical simulation of a hyper-urban dystopia is in itself worth the price of admission, if only to experience the spectacle of this big, ungainly, wacky thing CD Projekt Red cooked up. But as far as games which are about something go, games which earnestly seek to explore grief, or the fear of death, or the annihilation of the self through the forced anonymization of capitalism, Cyberpunk 2077, whether its given yet another shiny new coat of paint or not, is still rendered with the color of television tuned to a dead channel, a media object which embodies what it criticizes and trivializes what it takes seriously on its surface.

A combination of grindhouse exploitation cinema and a Jason Bourne knockoff thriller, Absolution is the dumbest Hitman game by a wide margin. The vibes start off badly right away, as the first thing the game decides to do is to face-reveal Diana - a character who, up to this point, is 47's only human companion - by putting her in a nude scene before having 47 apparently shoot her to death. Then, the game dad-ifies 47, having him adopt a genetically-modified assassin-child from an orphanage only for her to disappear from the series before the game even ends.

Thing is, Absolution isn't a bad game, in total. It's sort of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword of the Hitman series. A lot of the mechanics people liked from the World of Assassination trilogy are developed here, the lore of the series gets a little more developed, but in and of itself it feels clunky and out of synch with the other games.

The bits where 47 has to use his skillset to escape pursuers are pretty fun, although the checkpoint/save system is abysmal. I dunno. It's not all bad. Sometimes Absolution blossoms into a traditional Hitman level and that's usually where the game starts to click into place. But then I remember this is the game where 47 shoots sexy battle nuns to death in a corn field and the good bits seem a little bit less good.

Every Hitman game exists in its own genre bubble: Codename 47 is a light sci-fi thriller, Silent Assassin is a spy novel, Blood Money is an American satire, Absolution is a grindhouse film, and The World of Assassination trilogy is a prestige TV show. Hitman: Contracts, though, is a psychological thriller. It is the black sheep of the Hitman series, in that all of the other games are centered around plot - around other people and events in the world that are external to 47 - except for this game, which is entirely centered around 47's internal experience. Contracts is a game about alienation, in which the player embodies a spy who ultimately belongs nowhere, and who can only exist in the world as a kind of virus which infects it.

The opening cutscene and introductory level in this game are legendary, to me. The game opens out of context, as a TV in a hotel room flickers on to a documentary explaining the science of gunfire. The documentary's narrator has a detached, clinical tone, as she describes the physics and mechanics of firing a handgun. An onscreen depiction of a pistol firing plays onscreen, and just as the bullet exits the barrel of the gun, the documentary audio is interrupted by blown out audio of a public shooting. There is an explosion, the sounds of people fleeing, and a woman screaming. 47 stumbles into view, clutching at the rapidly-pooling wound in his abdomen, and collapses. In this sequence, Hitman's relationship to violence is transformed from a dispassionate act performed by a professional and into a transgressive, dangerous, and traumatic event.

And then the game begins properly, and 47 relives the moment in which he killed his 'father,' the man who cloned him in a lab, at the end of the first game. The corpses of 47's 'brothers,' his fellow clones, litter the laboratory in which he was born. As police raid the building, 47 is forced to steal a car to survive. The first level in this game depicts 47's first act as an independent human being, and it doesn't even feature a target - in fact, 47 is the target. He's the one being hunted.

Contracts builds on this idea as it progresses. There is very little to this game on the level of plot, which could be easily summarized in one sentence, but in terms of theme, Contracts is a weightier game than the rest of the series. All of Contract's levels are memories replaying in 47's mind as he goes in and out of consciousness, and all of them are colored by his emotional state. Some of the levels in this game were originally in the first game, Codename 47, and you can read a lot into the discrepancies between them: levels that were previously straightforward and literal are re-experienced in Contracts as darker, meaner, and colder. The new levels are similarly grim: one sees 47 as an interloper in the short story The Most Dangerous Game, and another, The Meat King's Party, straight up puts the series into horror game territory.

Contracts is also the game in which the qualities that make this series special come into being. 47's targets are better characterized, with more specific personalities than 'gang warlord' or 'terrorist.' The possibility space of individual levels is dramatically broader than in the previous game, filling each area with a variety of more narratively meaningful puzzles to solve. The restrictions on movement have been lightened, improving the general pace of the game as well. The many NPCs who litter each level no longer simply walk through the motions of their jobs, but now have their own little stories and bits of gossip which helps bring the levels to life a bit more.

Contracts is the first Hitman game that's actually about something, and I think it gets a bad wrap for stepping too far outside the box. People still love Blood Money, this game's sequel, and I love it too, but I think you can tell, playing that game, that its a response to the audience's experience with the series, like they were building the game the fans wanted to play more so than the game they wanted to make. Blood Money features a much-improved feature set, and the quality of the level design in that game is incredibly high, but you can feel the horizons of the series restrict a little bit, too. Contracts is kind of the Far Cry 2 of the Hitman series, if you will, a game that was too weird for its own audience.

Following up the developer-obliterating annual release schedule that ultimately destroyed the original Tomb Raider team, Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider: Legend ensured the series would remain a running concern. To accomplish this, they abandoned any pretense of capturing what made Tomb Raider good in the first place. Legend is a game all about smoothing out friction: the puzzles are simpler, the gunplay is easier, and the many open areas of the original games have been compartmentalized into discrete combat arenas, puzzle rooms, and platforming hallways, respectively. Everything you know and love from the original games is here, but the portions are smaller, and the ingredients are cheaper.

The biggest sacrifice made in the transition is precision. The platforming in this game is partially automatized by the engine, which steers the player towards whatever ledge or rope or ladder they point Lara at. In my experience, this semi-automated platforming works 90% of the time; the other 10% of the time, when the player is leaping around in a way the level design doesn't intend, Lara clips through whatever she's jumping at, ragdolling to her death.

Based solely on playing it, Legend feels like it uses a modified version of the Just Cause engine, another Eidos-published game, as the character movement and the proportions of the characters are very similar. I don't have any evidence that this is true, but what I mean to say is that both games feel the same - they feel slippery, like the player character is barreling through a bounce house. This isn't necessarily a problem for Just Cause, as Just Cause is an open world game predicated around stealing tanks and driving motorcycles off of a cliff while firing a bazooka. Tomb Raider, historically, has been a game about staring at a wall for a half-minute to figure out how you're supposed to climb it, which makes this imprecise navigation jarring.

Playing Tomb Raider: Legend is like drinking a cocktail out of a shot glass; it's four-to-six hours of gameplay that goes down easy. You're getting an impression of the thing you like more than the substance of the thing you like. Legend's pithiness as a game is probably what saved the series, but it's ultimately a diminished reinterpretation of an older, better game.

Resident Evil 4 is one of those games where people will just sort of gesture towards footage of Leon Kennedy shooting people in the head with a gun as if its self-evident the game is a masterpiece. And I don’t think it’s that self-evident! Coming to the original game late like I did, even though the panic attack-style active resource management and beautifully constructed blockbuster action movie mechanics leave a lasting impact, the game is, on a conceptual and an aesthetic level, a little bit of a sloppy mess. Characters matter until they suddenly don’t, the entire game is a hazy shade of brown, and the big bad dudes are attached to so many disparate surface-level concepts that it’s difficult to glean any meaning from the game at all. Ultimately, for as effective as the game’s combat and game feel is, the fact that Resident Evil 4’s core mechanics – in which the player slaughters hoards of mindless, rag-ridden poor – later generated the repugnant, racist imagery propagated by its sequel, Resident Evil 5, comes as no surprise.

But this is a review of the Resident Evil 4 Remake, not the original game, and as a follow-up to the stellar remakes of Resident Evil 2 and 3, its value set is a bit different. Combat in the remake never feels quite as dynamic or hypnotically unwieldy as the original, sure, but if nothing else, this remake is infinitely less embarrassing than its predecessor in its characters and world design. Throwing out some of the more bonkers aspects of the original enables this remake to emphasize the horror part of Resident Evil 4’s action-horror, which makes for a stronger and more distinct experience than the original on the whole. The difference between the games, though, isn’t so vast that one truly exceeds the other. This is still a very fun game with memorable b-horror dialogue and some ingeniously hectic set pieces. Also, this is the version of Resident Evil 4 that doesn’t sexually objectify a teenager, making it a little less morally suspect, if nothing else.

The original Tomb Raider has so many paradoxical qualities that could only ever have been dreamt up at the time of its release. This game is popularly remembered as a kind of kitschy action/adventure but it also gives us a glimpse into a video game industry future that never actually materialized. Its design philosophy embodies a sort of evolutionary dead-end for 3D level design, especially as it pertains to the movement of the player character. To ask a new player – even a current Tomb Raider fan! – to play this game without any prior context would be like asking them to learn how to walk again, as if from scratch, thanks to the game’s emphasis on momentum and discrete spacing. But those clunky-feeling controls and finnicky platforming mechanics serve a purpose: they slow you down, get you to look before you leap, making this a proactive rather than reactive action game. Despite its crass title, Tomb Raider is a game all about subtlety – that just so happens to also demand you shoot the occasional T-Rex to death.

The highly intentional nature of Tomb Raider’s game design is complimented by the game's sort of diegetic approach to level design. While nothing in Tomb Raider is 'realistic,' per se, there is a coherent logic to the enemies and paraphernalia scattered throughout each level that encourages you to learn about them a little more deeply. Nothing in Tomb Raider feels arbitrary, and so every new area and item feels like progress. There’s a heavy emphasis on discovery and atmosphere – a huge percentage of this game’s big, memorable moments all center around uncovering new areas, like a lost village, an ancient cistern, or a mythical Atlantean burial ground. Because Tomb Raider is a quiet game with a modest soundtrack and sparse dialogue, the moments where you unlock a door and find, say, the fractured remains of King Midas’ Golden Death Memorial Statue feel so much more powerful. The game rarely signposts its ‘big’ moments, and it subsequently feels like a game without guardrails, like the secrets in the game are for you to find rather than be shown. Whereas later Tomb Raider games treat these moments of discovery like diversions along the path of action set pieces, in the original Tomb Raider they are very much the centerpiece of the experience.

All of Tomb Raider’s sequels are attempts to remake this game but without any of the weirdness and with more tertiary mechanics, which is nonsensical, because Tomb Raider is already the most perfect version of itself. I enjoy more of the Tomb Raider sequels than I don’t, but all of them feel are the equivalent of trying to improve the Mona Lisa by making her expression less ambiguous, or adding a man cave into Falling Water. The formula is already a complete! And despite the sequels’ attempts to go bigger in the action department, they always think smaller. As evidenced by the final section of this game, which is a totally bonkers digression into cosmic Geigerian horror, the potential space for what can be imagined in a game like this was already huge.

Let’s get this out of the way: El Paso, Elsewhere is the least weird Strange Scaffold game yet, and as far as I’m concerned, their games’ weirdness is directly proportional to their value. In terms of gameplay, El Paso, Elsewhere is Max Payne with too many parts, a series of recycled combat encounters within a handful of very dark, mostly non-descript levels. Strange Scaffold stole Max Payne’s gunplay, its attitude, its ‘healing item as addictive drug’ mechanic – hell, it even steals the level intro ‘BOOM LEVEL NAME’ thing from Control, another Remedy game – but, bizarrely, leaves behind the chatty NPCs, the non-combat sections that made those games’ pacing work, and the conspiratorial stuff that drove the plot forward. To try and remake a Max Payne game without these things would be like stealing McDonald’s recipe for hamburgers but leaving out the bun and the toppings.

What El Paso, Elsewhere really is, is a mumblecore take on Max Payne with vampires. The game’s narratorial voice is less Raymond Chandler and more Mark Duplass. Gone are Sam Lake’s flowery, gloriously tacky monologues about fallen angels and fear giving men wings, replaced instead by whispery, whispy dialogue in which no two characters ever finish a line of dialogue because they’re always too busy nervously cutting one another off. All of this is underscored by a soundtrack which sometimes bites off more than it can chew, particularly on the tracks which feature vocals, which – I don’t know how else to put this, but it all sounds a whole lot like two people trying to recreate Death Grips tracks from over a decade ago, which is fine, but this was ultimately a miss for me.

So far, Strange Scaffold have proven to be at their best at executing on high concept stuff. The higher the concept, the better. An Airport for Aliens Currently Run By Dogs? Fine! A perfectly fun, surreal little experience. Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator? Perfect, extremely cool and strange, a thoughtful criticism of capitalist exchange expressed beautifully through game mechanics. The studio have proven they can do a whole hell of a lot – romantic drama, as it turns out, is not one of them.

In a bizarre move, 2023’s Big New Forza Game is a minimalist release, presenting a version of a game typically jam-packed with infinitely-repeatable career mode races and a plethora of photorealistic locales with what I imagine to be the bare minimum amount of content the developer could put out without somehow infringing on the very concept of a new Forza game. The photorealistic locales and the wide selection of cars is still here, the very basic aspects of the Forza game work just fine, but the structure of a single-player game is totally missing, with career mode races abstracted almost completely from any kind of tangible infrastructure of progression or even from any wider context at all. This is a game of menus, of tuning cars to ever so slightly alter their numbers in your favor, and of loading into practice races that lead immediately into identical, full-fledged races. This appears to be the entirety of the content in this game, exactly that, with nothing else attached.

Forza Motorsport is one degree of remove from, like, job training software. It’s the most basic possible version of a AAA racing game, one which technically contains everything you’d expect from the genre but totally without what makes a racing sim engaging on a human level. It’s the most a Forza game has ever felt like raw content – of all the games I’ve ever played in my life, Forza Motorsport is the single biggest example I can think of, in history, of a game having been developed for no other reason than a release calendar demanding it. The game is a visual showcase for the Series X, no doubt, but that’s all it is. This is the game you play after you’ve just bought a new Xbox and want to see the shiny photorealistic graphics.

Thirsty Suitors is a Scott Pilgrim-like in which you reconnect one precocious college dropout with her seven friendly exes using Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater moves and some old-school turn-based RPG combat. Oh, and there’s a cooking game in here! This is a game with personality – a big personality, a personality which radiates off of every surface, object and character. Thirsty Suitors is delicious, colorful, vibrant, in the way that Persona games are full of, like, Big Colorful Stuff, stuff that (sometimes literally) pulsates with attention-seeking stylization. Thirsty Suitors has a one-up on Persona in the personality department, though, because it isn’t obligated to devolve into ten-hour dungeons or battles with Godzilla-sized ancient gods who represent human disenfranchisement, or whatever. Everything that matters in Thirsty Suitors is happening onscreen in Thirsty Suitors all of the time. The other thing Thirsty Suitors has over Persona games is that all the relationships are, uh, age appropriate. So. Yay, Thirsty Suitors!

Taking the comparison a little more seriously, though, I really like the way Thirsty Suitors adapts the Persona games’ daily routine structure into a more social-heavy kind of gameplay. It’s always been a source of frustration for me that the Persona games have this robust system of socialization for the player to experiment with, but that there are these very hard limits on what the outcomes of those social systems are, that the player has to appease their companion hard enough that their companion maximally likes them. Everyone talks about how Persona games have all these dating sim elements or whatever, but the games stop just shy of obliterating your romantic partner out of your life once you’ve maximized your relationship status with them, because no relationship in a Persona game ever occurs that isn’t transactional. Thirsty Suitors re-aligns the priorities from Persona, dominating the RPG stuff with more colorful social stuff and character-developing mini-games, which makes for a more interesting game.

With each new Souls-like that gets released, that special, indefinable quality of From Software’s Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls and Bloodbourne is sanded down, layer by layer, made more and more skeletal and unrecognizable. Non-From Software devs making From Software games may remove tertiary mechanics from their source material or add additional complications to the basic actions the player can make, but the core loop and structure of From’s transparently video game-y, action-heavy dungeon crawling is always left intact. The repetition of this process over the last few years is enough to make you question the entire endeavor. Is any of this interesting, really? Do these changes to the Soulslike formula add anything to From Software’s 2009 game design thesis, a thesis that is interpreted and reinterpreted in perpetuity by players the world over, every day on the internet? ‘This one is about Chinese history, this one is about Samurai mythology, this one is about Pinocchio, haha, isn’t that bizarre.’ But what is being produced by these redecorated spiritual successors? What do these ‘Souls-like’ games do that the original titles didn’t already accomplish?

One essential quality of the original Souls games was their mystery, the sense that the only way to understand them even on a fundamental mechanical level was to close-read them through both experimentation in play and through careful study of in-game locales and scarcely available bits of lore. The transparently video game-y nature of Dark Souls – by this I mean the stat-laden character sheets, the casual mass slaughter committed by the player through the course of the games, the health bars, the heavy reliance on tried-and-true life-and-death violence as the games’ only major verb – was not a hinderance to the game’s design, but instead a source of familiarity in an extremely unconventional video game space, an anchor steadying the player in a game that would outright lie to and deceive them.

Famously, all of the familiar signposts of video game heroism existed within the original Dark Souls, only for Dark Souls to punish the player for fulfilling that traditionally heroic role. If a Dark Souls character convinced the player to take some sort of noble mission, chances are the player was being deceived into doing something permanently ruinous to another character or to the entire game world, whether the player was aware of it or not. Meta-textually, the original From Souls games seem to suggest that the incuriosity of video games lineage about their own presuppositions and religious adherence to monomyth – their inability to peel back the surface layer of the narratives they produced – ensured that many video game narratives were subtextually (or even textually in some cases!) fetish objects celebrating basically the worst ideological position within the worst kind of person, the unrestricted violence of a propagandized strongman with a God complex. In this sense, Dark Souls’ final choice is a kind of final fulfillment of what video games promise to players: you either recognize the reality of the fantasy, becoming King of a world fueled by violence towards a more complete annihilation, or you remain ignorant to the motivations of the game and become consumed by the fantasy.

‘Souls-like’ games, like Wo-Long: Fallen Dynasty, which only borrow the Souls format rather than iterate on it, rarely force the player to ‘close-read’ nor attempt do they attempt to unsettle the player from their simulated heroism. Instead, they use the Souls format to do the exact opposite, to strike a kind of sense memory into the player through familiarity in design. ‘Here’s your combat roll, here’s your inventory of bizarre magical paraphernalia, here’s your fog gate, here’s your summon, here’s your set piece boss fight with a laughably gigantic health bar. You get what’s going on here.’ There is, in other words, no mystery; Souls-likes have become a comprehensively, encyclopedically charted genre. The possibility space of the Souls-like game can only produce exactly the experience that the original games subverted, and it can do nothing else.

The game systems and mechanics, which were previously obscured from the player in the original From Software games, are laid bare in games like Wo-Long. It’s as if the core design premise, the actual thesis of the original games that Wo-Long so casually borrows, are somehow also an inconvenience for it, like they want all of the original mechanics but robbed of their purpose. The consequence is that whatever commentary on violence or on monomyth made by the original Souls games has since been fully, cynically reformatted as yet another avenue for the pleasurable video game death match. Wo-Long’s greatest feature was meant to be its setting, the twilight of the Han dynasty era in China. While this game is by no means a straight-ahead historical fantasy – it’s way further into myth than the cable TV drama-like, ancient aliens-obsessed historical science fiction of an Assassin’s Creed – I still have to wonder why a Souls-like would make any kind of sense as a depiction of history, even a fictional history. The systems of Souls games obscure information, revealing as little as possible to the player, making them a poor fit for a player interested in the era. At the end of the day, using the Souls structure as it does, Wo-Long could’ve been about any period of history at all and the game would be just the same.