thebestmark
2023
Jusant is a meditative journey in which, entirely through climbing and exploration, the player traces a historiography of man-made ecological annihilation. In terms of tone and look, Jusant gives off the impression that it’s another post-Journey Journey-like (such as Abzu), but these similarities are superficial. Journey was a game that painted with a broad brush, using a storybook framework to go through the motions of an intentionally broad hero’s journey, whereas Jusant is all about the specifics of apocalypse. Besides all of the forgotten villages, artifacts and otherworldly wildlife the player encounters, there are also many abandoned letters, journals, advertisements and work orders to read; it would be more apt to say Jusant is like a hilariously vertical Gone Home, in which the heart of the game is contained in these little familiar documents, which are rendered otherworldly by the absence of the people who wrote them. And unlike other eschatologically-minded games like Fallout or Last of Us, Jusant’s characters, off-screen though they may be, are normal people under an imminent threat of annihilation, making bad choices in bad circumstances, pitiable and/or sympathetic as opposed to idiotically cruel and/or murderously evil. The game’s mechanics, which are centered around freeclimbing, necessitate careful observation of the game world, enhancing the player’s relationship with the narrative.
It also lets you travel the world with a fun little alien guy, which is always a plus.
It also lets you travel the world with a fun little alien guy, which is always a plus.
2023
Cocoon is a ‘visual spectacle’ puzzle game in the Limbo and Inside lineage, with an inventive high concept: the game is built upon a series of discrete worlds which can be miniaturized and contained within one another like Russian nesting dolls. The player is cast as a kind of planet-stacking dung beety, ferrying swamp planets into forest planets into desert planets. Hopping inside of a world holding a different world in tow with the intention of taking something from that different world into an altogether third world is a fun parlor trick.
Cocoon didn’t do much for me beyond that. I like it fine enough, but it’s not a particularly thought-provoking experience. There is a compelling visual language at play, in which the sort of scale of the world vs. the scale of the bug-like player character are constantly at an inverse with their real-world equivalents, which calls to mind the way a game like Everything visually demonstrates that the microscopic world of bacteria is as infinitely vast as the macroscopic world of star systems. But Cocoon doesn’t develop beyond that in the way that a game like Inside does. Inside is initially as broad, but it reaches a conclusion, and in doing so is able to convey specific themes and ideas. Cocoon seems more interested in executing on the fundamentals of a puzzle game, but its puzzles aren’t particularly novel, and much of what the game has to offer is contained within the first hour of play.
It’s been gnawing at me that I must be missing something, considering all the high praise Cocoon has received. Cocoon cracked quite a few Game of the Year lists, but critics who’ve covered it don’t seem interested in exploring what the game is actually saying or doing. Most criticism I’ve read about Cocoon begin with superlatives about each major part of the game’s design and end with basic descriptions of how legible the game’s breadcrumbs are, how effortlessly it can lead the player towards the solutions to its problems, and how smart the player will feel once they’ve been made to solve those puzzles.
This last point, that Cocoon is supremely legible as a puzzle game, doesn’t necessarily do anything for me, in the abstract. In the broadest possible sense, I don’t think padding the ego of the player is a good instinct; it doesn’t produce an experience that matters. Puzzle games are not drugs that are supposed to make you feel smarter than you are, they’re interactive narrative objects like anything else, and pretending otherwise means you’re doing the game design equivalent of a Sudoku puzzle – or, if they are meant to give you a space where you can pretend you’re smart, then they’re meaningless. But hey, Myst made me feel incredibly stupid and I thought it was maybe the most interesting puzzle game I’d ever played, so, take what I say with a grain of salt, I guess.
The moment-to-moment gameplay of Cocoon is context-free video game stuff. Fighting boss battles with bomb-tossing spore-monsters and shepherding robots onto control pads doesn’t express very much about that macro-level part of the narrative. The reason why I prefer Inside, a game that’s functionally a predecessor to Cocoon, is that its imagery and mechanics told its story. The greyscale cubicle farm workplaces, the antagonistic security guards, the police dogs, the discovery of the mind control mechanic that enables the player to remake corpses into dutiful workers – all of these things paint a sharper picture of corporate dehumanization, layers of violence and domination disguised as a society. There is an emotional arc to that game, a reason to care about and to think about what you’re seeing and why you’re seeing it. Cocoon is a game that uses the core design tenants of something like Inside, it seems interested in producing that initial sense of intrigue, only to do less with more.
Cocoon didn’t do much for me beyond that. I like it fine enough, but it’s not a particularly thought-provoking experience. There is a compelling visual language at play, in which the sort of scale of the world vs. the scale of the bug-like player character are constantly at an inverse with their real-world equivalents, which calls to mind the way a game like Everything visually demonstrates that the microscopic world of bacteria is as infinitely vast as the macroscopic world of star systems. But Cocoon doesn’t develop beyond that in the way that a game like Inside does. Inside is initially as broad, but it reaches a conclusion, and in doing so is able to convey specific themes and ideas. Cocoon seems more interested in executing on the fundamentals of a puzzle game, but its puzzles aren’t particularly novel, and much of what the game has to offer is contained within the first hour of play.
It’s been gnawing at me that I must be missing something, considering all the high praise Cocoon has received. Cocoon cracked quite a few Game of the Year lists, but critics who’ve covered it don’t seem interested in exploring what the game is actually saying or doing. Most criticism I’ve read about Cocoon begin with superlatives about each major part of the game’s design and end with basic descriptions of how legible the game’s breadcrumbs are, how effortlessly it can lead the player towards the solutions to its problems, and how smart the player will feel once they’ve been made to solve those puzzles.
This last point, that Cocoon is supremely legible as a puzzle game, doesn’t necessarily do anything for me, in the abstract. In the broadest possible sense, I don’t think padding the ego of the player is a good instinct; it doesn’t produce an experience that matters. Puzzle games are not drugs that are supposed to make you feel smarter than you are, they’re interactive narrative objects like anything else, and pretending otherwise means you’re doing the game design equivalent of a Sudoku puzzle – or, if they are meant to give you a space where you can pretend you’re smart, then they’re meaningless. But hey, Myst made me feel incredibly stupid and I thought it was maybe the most interesting puzzle game I’d ever played, so, take what I say with a grain of salt, I guess.
The moment-to-moment gameplay of Cocoon is context-free video game stuff. Fighting boss battles with bomb-tossing spore-monsters and shepherding robots onto control pads doesn’t express very much about that macro-level part of the narrative. The reason why I prefer Inside, a game that’s functionally a predecessor to Cocoon, is that its imagery and mechanics told its story. The greyscale cubicle farm workplaces, the antagonistic security guards, the police dogs, the discovery of the mind control mechanic that enables the player to remake corpses into dutiful workers – all of these things paint a sharper picture of corporate dehumanization, layers of violence and domination disguised as a society. There is an emotional arc to that game, a reason to care about and to think about what you’re seeing and why you’re seeing it. Cocoon is a game that uses the core design tenants of something like Inside, it seems interested in producing that initial sense of intrigue, only to do less with more.
2020
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.
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.
2023
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.
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.
2023
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.
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.
This one’s got a phenomenal premise: a writer goes flat broke and is tasked by his debtor with using a magical device to steal – literally, as well as figuratively, I suppose – certain artifacts from other writers’ more famous novels. How deeply the stories the writer visits are altered by the theft is left up to the player.
There’s some really neat divergence in visual styles here, with the real world taking place entirely in a realistic-looking apartment building controlled using a first person camera, while the actual metaphysical book exploration adopts a kind of tactical isometric perspective. This was the first point at which the game lost me: the tactical combat. Turn-based combat mechanics are towards the bottom of the ‘how would I, the player, like to explore literary dioramas in a video game?’ list.
The second point that yanked me out of The Book Walker was the many, many bugs I encountered while playing. I read somewhere that The Book Walker eventually got patched, but I wasn’t able to make it too deeply into the game when it came out due to the sheer number of progress-halting bugs. The main character is sluggish in the first place, and some of the wilder bugs slow the framerate to unplayable single digits. I once loaded into two overlapping versions of the apartment complex level, with every object in the environment jutting out from the other instance of that object. There’s definitely something here, but this one needed to cook longer, I think.
There’s some really neat divergence in visual styles here, with the real world taking place entirely in a realistic-looking apartment building controlled using a first person camera, while the actual metaphysical book exploration adopts a kind of tactical isometric perspective. This was the first point at which the game lost me: the tactical combat. Turn-based combat mechanics are towards the bottom of the ‘how would I, the player, like to explore literary dioramas in a video game?’ list.
The second point that yanked me out of The Book Walker was the many, many bugs I encountered while playing. I read somewhere that The Book Walker eventually got patched, but I wasn’t able to make it too deeply into the game when it came out due to the sheer number of progress-halting bugs. The main character is sluggish in the first place, and some of the wilder bugs slow the framerate to unplayable single digits. I once loaded into two overlapping versions of the apartment complex level, with every object in the environment jutting out from the other instance of that object. There’s definitely something here, but this one needed to cook longer, I think.
2023
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.
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.
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.
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.
2023
This review contains spoilers
Writing anything at all about Atomic Heart in 2024 feels crappy. Remember the discourse around this game when it released, particularly by liberals who, caught up in a nationalistic reverie, equated any interest at all for this game, even academically, as support for Russia’s attacks on Ukraine? Wild times.
It’s doubly wild considering what Atomic Heart ended up being is basically what it looked like from the start, which is a confused (but ambitious) BioShock Infinite-like that paints Russian nationalism as an anti-human force which must be eradicated at all costs. This was always the most confusing part of that discourse – they were clearly aping BioShock. Y’know, BioShock – the series about libertarianism and nationalism being bad. Even BioShock Infinite, the flimsiest and most cowardly political treatise in AAA gaming, is nevertheless deeply critical of American mythmaking. Why would a game about Russian nationalism use the format of a game series about how nationalism is bad to prove that nationalism is good?
Atomic Heart isn’t totally guileless, but it is a tremendously confused work of satire. The plot: Russian scientists became too intelligent and created a slave underclass of robotic automatons who rebel against their creators at the start of the game. So sort of a ‘science has gone too far!’ type deal. But that’s only the first problem – the other, more sinister problem is that the Russian government also developed a technology to control human beings as well, a classic children’s cartoon plot for, say, Batman to solve, except this plot occurs…communistically. Giant golden statues of Karl Marx overlook piles of viscera from slain human beings freed from workplace toil by their own robotic slaves. Through a series of emails and in-world documents, we learn that humanity somehow dropped faith and religion altogether along the way to this bizarre slave state/communist mashup society, that the communist slave state somehow necessitates or is necessitated by the loss of religion, an interesting little detail that reveals a bit of the ideology which underpins the satire. The main character must harness the power of raw, masculine individualism to undo the psychic damage of his own brainwashing by the state, so that he can destroy the machines – a bit messy, this part, considering we’re to understand the automatons are basically a slave class in this world – and realign Russia to be a bit more democratic, I guess.
I don’t know about Atomic Heart being anti-Ukraine, but I will say its certainly the first actually pro-Rand-ian BioShock-like ever made. And because its Rand-ian, none of it makes sense. You can’t take an anti-Randian text and just…decide that its actually Randian. In BioShock, I can easily follow the linear series of events that lead to Rapture’s destruction, the series of contradictions that bubble to the surface and annihilate its society. Deregulation frees its wealthy citizens from their so-called ‘petty morality’ and they produce medical miracles which also happen have cataclysmic side effects that go unstudied and untreated. The underclass, which must exist in order for the upper class to exist, eventually realize things aren’t going to improve. As soon as social discord reaches a boiling point, because the societal mechanisms to follow through with social change do not exist, the society gives in to its true nature as a purgatorial war of all against all, resolving all of the contradictions through perpetual lapses into psychosis and violence.
In Atomic Heart, character/faction motivations are not so easily explained. The social leaders gain total power over the Earth and choose to escape it in a city in the sky because it would free them from the prying eyes of other countries. One sentence in, and already we’re at an impasse – in BioShock, cities escape America because they’re secessionist, but in this world, creating the most conspicuous government land in human history somehow hides you from sight. But fine – so the leaders of the Atomic Heart world gain complete power, which only enables them to gain a second, more insidious , and more complete form of complete power. Considering Russia, in this context, is utterly dominant and everyone is basically rich, I don’t quite get the motivation there, either.
Anyway. The power or structure or incentive that compels Atomic Heart’s Russian government to do all this is nominally communist, in that the game continually references communism, but is utterly materially incoherent. Atomic Heart seems to be saying, if you make a perfectly equitable society in which everyone is some level of rich, then you’ll inevitably produce a slave class, and the government will control you on a biological level rather than simply an ideological level. So what’s the solution to a social problem like this? Capitalism? Capitalism is the ideology of worker-displacing automation, so it can’t be capitalism, because capitalism, in real life, is already creating that robotic underclass. So is Atomic Heart arguing that False Communism must be defeated by True Communism, or some other offshoot of Marxism? Well, no, that can’t be it. Look at Atomic Heart’s dystopic landscapes: they’re filled with ironically bloody statues of my man Karl, imagery which does not suggest, to me, that Atomic Heart is invested in the political movement begun by Karl Marx! Perhaps the answer is Rapture-esque libertarian lawlessness, or maybe anarchism?
It’s impossible to make sense of, because Atomic Heart’s truest ideological commitment is traditionalism, of turning to religion as the embodiment of morality as it pertains to the social, of destroying the new and replacing it with the old, of individually destroying the society in which the possibility of collective happiness exists. But this is largely conjecture, for my part, because no action save for violence is ever actualized within the narrative. What Atomic Heart leaves us with is a swirling, aimless violence, obliterating all entities attached to intellect to return to something that was never really there in the first place.
It’s doubly wild considering what Atomic Heart ended up being is basically what it looked like from the start, which is a confused (but ambitious) BioShock Infinite-like that paints Russian nationalism as an anti-human force which must be eradicated at all costs. This was always the most confusing part of that discourse – they were clearly aping BioShock. Y’know, BioShock – the series about libertarianism and nationalism being bad. Even BioShock Infinite, the flimsiest and most cowardly political treatise in AAA gaming, is nevertheless deeply critical of American mythmaking. Why would a game about Russian nationalism use the format of a game series about how nationalism is bad to prove that nationalism is good?
Atomic Heart isn’t totally guileless, but it is a tremendously confused work of satire. The plot: Russian scientists became too intelligent and created a slave underclass of robotic automatons who rebel against their creators at the start of the game. So sort of a ‘science has gone too far!’ type deal. But that’s only the first problem – the other, more sinister problem is that the Russian government also developed a technology to control human beings as well, a classic children’s cartoon plot for, say, Batman to solve, except this plot occurs…communistically. Giant golden statues of Karl Marx overlook piles of viscera from slain human beings freed from workplace toil by their own robotic slaves. Through a series of emails and in-world documents, we learn that humanity somehow dropped faith and religion altogether along the way to this bizarre slave state/communist mashup society, that the communist slave state somehow necessitates or is necessitated by the loss of religion, an interesting little detail that reveals a bit of the ideology which underpins the satire. The main character must harness the power of raw, masculine individualism to undo the psychic damage of his own brainwashing by the state, so that he can destroy the machines – a bit messy, this part, considering we’re to understand the automatons are basically a slave class in this world – and realign Russia to be a bit more democratic, I guess.
I don’t know about Atomic Heart being anti-Ukraine, but I will say its certainly the first actually pro-Rand-ian BioShock-like ever made. And because its Rand-ian, none of it makes sense. You can’t take an anti-Randian text and just…decide that its actually Randian. In BioShock, I can easily follow the linear series of events that lead to Rapture’s destruction, the series of contradictions that bubble to the surface and annihilate its society. Deregulation frees its wealthy citizens from their so-called ‘petty morality’ and they produce medical miracles which also happen have cataclysmic side effects that go unstudied and untreated. The underclass, which must exist in order for the upper class to exist, eventually realize things aren’t going to improve. As soon as social discord reaches a boiling point, because the societal mechanisms to follow through with social change do not exist, the society gives in to its true nature as a purgatorial war of all against all, resolving all of the contradictions through perpetual lapses into psychosis and violence.
In Atomic Heart, character/faction motivations are not so easily explained. The social leaders gain total power over the Earth and choose to escape it in a city in the sky because it would free them from the prying eyes of other countries. One sentence in, and already we’re at an impasse – in BioShock, cities escape America because they’re secessionist, but in this world, creating the most conspicuous government land in human history somehow hides you from sight. But fine – so the leaders of the Atomic Heart world gain complete power, which only enables them to gain a second, more insidious , and more complete form of complete power. Considering Russia, in this context, is utterly dominant and everyone is basically rich, I don’t quite get the motivation there, either.
Anyway. The power or structure or incentive that compels Atomic Heart’s Russian government to do all this is nominally communist, in that the game continually references communism, but is utterly materially incoherent. Atomic Heart seems to be saying, if you make a perfectly equitable society in which everyone is some level of rich, then you’ll inevitably produce a slave class, and the government will control you on a biological level rather than simply an ideological level. So what’s the solution to a social problem like this? Capitalism? Capitalism is the ideology of worker-displacing automation, so it can’t be capitalism, because capitalism, in real life, is already creating that robotic underclass. So is Atomic Heart arguing that False Communism must be defeated by True Communism, or some other offshoot of Marxism? Well, no, that can’t be it. Look at Atomic Heart’s dystopic landscapes: they’re filled with ironically bloody statues of my man Karl, imagery which does not suggest, to me, that Atomic Heart is invested in the political movement begun by Karl Marx! Perhaps the answer is Rapture-esque libertarian lawlessness, or maybe anarchism?
It’s impossible to make sense of, because Atomic Heart’s truest ideological commitment is traditionalism, of turning to religion as the embodiment of morality as it pertains to the social, of destroying the new and replacing it with the old, of individually destroying the society in which the possibility of collective happiness exists. But this is largely conjecture, for my part, because no action save for violence is ever actualized within the narrative. What Atomic Heart leaves us with is a swirling, aimless violence, obliterating all entities attached to intellect to return to something that was never really there in the first place.
2023
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.
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.
2023
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.
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.
Here’s the thing about the original Coffee Talk: much like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, with which it shared a release year, Coffee Talk was the dictionary definition of a ‘right place, right time’ kind of game. 2020 was the year for Coffee Talk. As I spent yet another month entirely within my apartment during lockdown, roleplaying as a coffee-serving pillar of a near-future science-fantasy community provided me a level of comfort that would’ve been less potent in a more…sociable kind of year. And that’s not to say the original Coffee Talk wasn’t good, just that it was slight. It was a colorful game with precious few mechanics and a cast of characters who alternated between bubbly and traumadump-y like many contemporary visual novels. And that was fine. Coffee Talk was not ambitious, but it hit its marks.
Coffee Talk is also a game that ended with a bizarre non-sequitur of a twist that left a bad taste in my mouth. Coffee Talk 2 is more of the same on a surface level, but it’s a little twistier than that game, a little more packed with lore and just a little less tuned-in to the real-world. Example: one of Coffee Talk 2’s big new character is a Youtuber/influencer zoomer who is abrasive until he learns how to be a normal person thanks to the power of socially drinking coffee. Something about enduring this guy’s whole pre-scripted character arc set to Coffee Talk’s ‘Lo-Fi Beats to Chill and Study To’ soundtrack made the game feel somehow ancient to me, like it was the product of a time and place in culture that preceded even the first game’s release window. Haven’t we moved on to new forms of post-adolescent mass media sociopathy upon which to project ourselves? Shouldn’t this guy be the most toxic alpha male fake-podcaster you’ve ever seen? Maybe the next one’s music will graduate from Lo-Fi girl to whichever version of Undergraduate Bedroom Hyperpop (Fast Version) has become viral most recently.
Coffee Talk is also a game that ended with a bizarre non-sequitur of a twist that left a bad taste in my mouth. Coffee Talk 2 is more of the same on a surface level, but it’s a little twistier than that game, a little more packed with lore and just a little less tuned-in to the real-world. Example: one of Coffee Talk 2’s big new character is a Youtuber/influencer zoomer who is abrasive until he learns how to be a normal person thanks to the power of socially drinking coffee. Something about enduring this guy’s whole pre-scripted character arc set to Coffee Talk’s ‘Lo-Fi Beats to Chill and Study To’ soundtrack made the game feel somehow ancient to me, like it was the product of a time and place in culture that preceded even the first game’s release window. Haven’t we moved on to new forms of post-adolescent mass media sociopathy upon which to project ourselves? Shouldn’t this guy be the most toxic alpha male fake-podcaster you’ve ever seen? Maybe the next one’s music will graduate from Lo-Fi girl to whichever version of Undergraduate Bedroom Hyperpop (Fast Version) has become viral most recently.
2023
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.
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.
2021
This game is a fan service-providing, slot-machine-mimicking, free-to-play parody of other fan service-providing, slot-machine mimicking, free-to-play games. It’s fine! I like the art style, the haptic feedback is nice, it’s occasionally funny. Most importantly, it gives me something to fidget with on my lunch breaks at work.
I’ve played enough of this game that the levels seem to have run out and I’m now stuck playing all these generic mini challenge levels, some of which introduce rule sets which literally do not activate once the game starts. So, clearly not a lot of long-running support for this one. There is an entire ‘you can only make 30 moves before the level ends’ mechanic that was never actually implemented, so some of the daily challenges just play forever, because the game can’t actually track the number of moves you’ve made. I feel like I might be the only human being playing this game regularly. It's also a parody of money-grubbing FTP games that also just...does all the money-grubbing FTP stuff it's making fun of?
I’ve played enough of this game that the levels seem to have run out and I’m now stuck playing all these generic mini challenge levels, some of which introduce rule sets which literally do not activate once the game starts. So, clearly not a lot of long-running support for this one. There is an entire ‘you can only make 30 moves before the level ends’ mechanic that was never actually implemented, so some of the daily challenges just play forever, because the game can’t actually track the number of moves you’ve made. I feel like I might be the only human being playing this game regularly. It's also a parody of money-grubbing FTP games that also just...does all the money-grubbing FTP stuff it's making fun of?
2023
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.
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.