thebestmark
2014
This review contains spoilers
Beneath the surface-level grime and gore liberally splattered all over its cursed elementary school, beneath the torture and suffering experienced by its cast of teenage characters, Corpse Party possesses a libidinal drive to explore one existential question, posed simultaneously at the player and backwards at the game's developers: why are we engaging with this game about suffering? Why do you want to see material in which characters suffer? What happens to you when you either write or experience a story about suffering? And most importantly of all, why would a person enjoy engaging with a game about suffering, in its development or in the playing of it?
Corpse Party is a sprite-based game about a group of teenagers who get trapped within a haunted elementary school, and are made to both witness and endure extreme physical and psychological suffering. The haunted school is possessed by the ghosts of tortured children, who are compelled by the haunted school to torture and kill anyone else who becomes trapped there, producing yet more ghosts who trap and kill yet more people, creating a kind of escalatory economy of murderers.
Late in Corpse Party's story, the player learns that the trapped ghosts aren't inherently vengeful, but that they're directed to be vengeful by the school itself; more specifically, they succumb to a process the game refers to as 'darkening,' in which the entities that exist in the school, living or dead, are forced to become more vicious and psycopathic. This means that the perpetual acts of violence which permeate the school are not produced by the inherent desires of the survivors and ghosts, but are instead inherited by the survivors and ghosts from the school. Even once the player drills down into the lore of the game and experiences the true ending, in which the ghost at the center of the narrative is exorcized and the story concludes, there is no true, originary act of cruelty that compelled all of the suffering within the game to occur, but instead that there was one act of cruelty which compelled this particular instance of suffering to radiate outwards into the world, which absorbed more and more people into itself and its economy of suffering.
In other words, there is no 'true end' to the haunted school, no final act of good that can sufficiently act as an oppositional force negating the ultimate evil depicted by the game. Further, anyone who dies within the school is both permanently erased from living memory and is forced to live out the pain of their death for eternity. Corpse Party is a game of helplessness all the way down, rendering any positive outcome for any given character incidental. The future potential for suffering is the only impermeable thing; this is a bleak game.
Not all characters are destroyed by the ghosts, but are instead destroyed by other, potentially 'darkened,' survivors. One of the more notable survivors is a teenager named Morishige. Because Corpse Party relies heavily on character archetypes, Morishige can be summarized as the 'serious academic' teen in the cast.
Morishige is unique in that he survives most of the threats in the school, never seems to come into contact with any of the school's ghosts, never seems to experience 'darkening' as far as we can perceived, and yet is 'othered,' both literally and structurally, by the characters and by the game. Characters who come into contact with Morishige agree that, as if out of nowhere, he's begun to act creepy as hell. He chases after the player character at a certain point in the story, and so becomes the only member of the cast to embody the role of an antagonist. He is also the only character in the game who reveals his secret motivations to the player without the player needing to take any special action; he is, in fact, fundamentally unknowable to everyone except the player, to whom he reveals his inner desires via monologue.
When the player first encounters Morishige, he is standing near a pile of human viscera with a smile on his face, taking snapshots of it with his flip phone. He refuses to join the player characters when they encounter him, and makes vaguely unsettling comments when questioned about his motivations. We find out towards the climax, during a genuinely absurd bit of writing, that viewing the destroyed bodies of other people brings Morishige a sense of emotional security and pleasure, a kind of profoundly unsettling schadenfreude. If Morishige can apprehend the suffering of others and enjoy it, he feels reassured of his good fortune relative to the sufferer, creating a sadistic positive reinforcement mechanism. The mechanism seems to stabilize Morishige up until he realizes one of the bodies he's been leering at is the love of his life, at which point he experiences every empathetic response to suffering he had deferred through his voyeurism throughout the game, which psychologically annihilates him, likely driving him towards suicide.
Morishige's characterization is an act of autocritique within Corpse Party. He embodies the role of the player, an interested observer who experiences enjoyment in the act of visually apprehending suffering. This passive, sociopathic enjoyment Morishige experiences is depicted within the game as an evil act, which ironically condemns him to a fate worse than death, to empathetically experience the most tremendously damaging act of self-destruction, forever. Yet, in essence, Morishige does what it is the player does - he intentionally apprehends the suffering of others, because he wants to do it, because he enjoys it. There is a direct relationship between Morishige's fictional apprehension of suffering and the player's material, real-life apprehension of Corpse Party. The character closest to the player, the one whose actions mirror those of the player, is, in the language of the game, a character who has done something wrong, who deserves to be punished for a transgression. Corpse Party possesses a libidinal, almost pyschosexual desire to depict or even fetishize suffering - with Morishige, it drags the player into its mess, attaching the player into an apparatus of shame and psychological self-flagellation.
Corpse Party's understanding of horror as a genre - and more specifically, Corpse Party's understanding of itself, of why a human being would engage with it, think about it, and yes, enjoy it - is insufficient. People do not, generally speaking, engage with horror media because it fulfills bloodlust, or because they're indulging in a psychosexual craving to witness suffering. If we're going to psychoanalyze the act of intentionally watching horror media, of intentionally watching the suffering of others (and, to be clear, I do not believe it is possible to reduce that act to a single motivation which all people who engage with horror media experience), then the common academic understanding would be that it provides the potential for catharsis, that you don't witness the suffering of others because you displace yourself from their emotional experience and consume their suffering from the outside-in, but instead that you see yourself, directly, within the people who are made to suffer, and in them see your capacity to endure whatever the horror media in question depicts as the worst possible thing.
Lacking that more complex understanding of horror, Corpse Party ends in a bizarre anti-climax. The surviving characters simply go home and feel uncomfortable about what happened. Even moreso than Morishige, Corpse Party's climax reveals its own fatal flaw: it cannot imagine a world complex enough to contain the capacity for positives in its world of apocalyptic negatives.
I liked Corpse Party a lot. It's an exquisitely economical game, and its ability to squeeze so much use out of such modest narrative components is an achievement in horror storytelling. Yet, at the core of it, it's also a kind of brazenly unhinged act of simulated voyeurism that is, at certain crucial points in its story, consumed by its fetishistic narratorial voice and overall bizarre fixation with violence.
Corpse Party is a sprite-based game about a group of teenagers who get trapped within a haunted elementary school, and are made to both witness and endure extreme physical and psychological suffering. The haunted school is possessed by the ghosts of tortured children, who are compelled by the haunted school to torture and kill anyone else who becomes trapped there, producing yet more ghosts who trap and kill yet more people, creating a kind of escalatory economy of murderers.
Late in Corpse Party's story, the player learns that the trapped ghosts aren't inherently vengeful, but that they're directed to be vengeful by the school itself; more specifically, they succumb to a process the game refers to as 'darkening,' in which the entities that exist in the school, living or dead, are forced to become more vicious and psycopathic. This means that the perpetual acts of violence which permeate the school are not produced by the inherent desires of the survivors and ghosts, but are instead inherited by the survivors and ghosts from the school. Even once the player drills down into the lore of the game and experiences the true ending, in which the ghost at the center of the narrative is exorcized and the story concludes, there is no true, originary act of cruelty that compelled all of the suffering within the game to occur, but instead that there was one act of cruelty which compelled this particular instance of suffering to radiate outwards into the world, which absorbed more and more people into itself and its economy of suffering.
In other words, there is no 'true end' to the haunted school, no final act of good that can sufficiently act as an oppositional force negating the ultimate evil depicted by the game. Further, anyone who dies within the school is both permanently erased from living memory and is forced to live out the pain of their death for eternity. Corpse Party is a game of helplessness all the way down, rendering any positive outcome for any given character incidental. The future potential for suffering is the only impermeable thing; this is a bleak game.
Not all characters are destroyed by the ghosts, but are instead destroyed by other, potentially 'darkened,' survivors. One of the more notable survivors is a teenager named Morishige. Because Corpse Party relies heavily on character archetypes, Morishige can be summarized as the 'serious academic' teen in the cast.
Morishige is unique in that he survives most of the threats in the school, never seems to come into contact with any of the school's ghosts, never seems to experience 'darkening' as far as we can perceived, and yet is 'othered,' both literally and structurally, by the characters and by the game. Characters who come into contact with Morishige agree that, as if out of nowhere, he's begun to act creepy as hell. He chases after the player character at a certain point in the story, and so becomes the only member of the cast to embody the role of an antagonist. He is also the only character in the game who reveals his secret motivations to the player without the player needing to take any special action; he is, in fact, fundamentally unknowable to everyone except the player, to whom he reveals his inner desires via monologue.
When the player first encounters Morishige, he is standing near a pile of human viscera with a smile on his face, taking snapshots of it with his flip phone. He refuses to join the player characters when they encounter him, and makes vaguely unsettling comments when questioned about his motivations. We find out towards the climax, during a genuinely absurd bit of writing, that viewing the destroyed bodies of other people brings Morishige a sense of emotional security and pleasure, a kind of profoundly unsettling schadenfreude. If Morishige can apprehend the suffering of others and enjoy it, he feels reassured of his good fortune relative to the sufferer, creating a sadistic positive reinforcement mechanism. The mechanism seems to stabilize Morishige up until he realizes one of the bodies he's been leering at is the love of his life, at which point he experiences every empathetic response to suffering he had deferred through his voyeurism throughout the game, which psychologically annihilates him, likely driving him towards suicide.
Morishige's characterization is an act of autocritique within Corpse Party. He embodies the role of the player, an interested observer who experiences enjoyment in the act of visually apprehending suffering. This passive, sociopathic enjoyment Morishige experiences is depicted within the game as an evil act, which ironically condemns him to a fate worse than death, to empathetically experience the most tremendously damaging act of self-destruction, forever. Yet, in essence, Morishige does what it is the player does - he intentionally apprehends the suffering of others, because he wants to do it, because he enjoys it. There is a direct relationship between Morishige's fictional apprehension of suffering and the player's material, real-life apprehension of Corpse Party. The character closest to the player, the one whose actions mirror those of the player, is, in the language of the game, a character who has done something wrong, who deserves to be punished for a transgression. Corpse Party possesses a libidinal, almost pyschosexual desire to depict or even fetishize suffering - with Morishige, it drags the player into its mess, attaching the player into an apparatus of shame and psychological self-flagellation.
Corpse Party's understanding of horror as a genre - and more specifically, Corpse Party's understanding of itself, of why a human being would engage with it, think about it, and yes, enjoy it - is insufficient. People do not, generally speaking, engage with horror media because it fulfills bloodlust, or because they're indulging in a psychosexual craving to witness suffering. If we're going to psychoanalyze the act of intentionally watching horror media, of intentionally watching the suffering of others (and, to be clear, I do not believe it is possible to reduce that act to a single motivation which all people who engage with horror media experience), then the common academic understanding would be that it provides the potential for catharsis, that you don't witness the suffering of others because you displace yourself from their emotional experience and consume their suffering from the outside-in, but instead that you see yourself, directly, within the people who are made to suffer, and in them see your capacity to endure whatever the horror media in question depicts as the worst possible thing.
Lacking that more complex understanding of horror, Corpse Party ends in a bizarre anti-climax. The surviving characters simply go home and feel uncomfortable about what happened. Even moreso than Morishige, Corpse Party's climax reveals its own fatal flaw: it cannot imagine a world complex enough to contain the capacity for positives in its world of apocalyptic negatives.
I liked Corpse Party a lot. It's an exquisitely economical game, and its ability to squeeze so much use out of such modest narrative components is an achievement in horror storytelling. Yet, at the core of it, it's also a kind of brazenly unhinged act of simulated voyeurism that is, at certain crucial points in its story, consumed by its fetishistic narratorial voice and overall bizarre fixation with violence.
So, look: any remaster that enables you to play the original versions of the games it's remastering in the most optimized manner possible, on current hardware and without any alterations, is a good remaster. Tomb Raider Remastered accomplishes this, so I was happy to buy it.
However! Tomb Raider Remastered is also a 'new' Tomb Raider game, in that it offers new controls and remastered art for Tomb Raider 1-3. The new controls are whatever - just being honest, I'm not going to mess with modernized controls in a Tomb Raider game. That would be crazy. What I am interested in is the new art, which features some of the most garish visual redesigns I have ever seen. It's bad, dude. We're talking nightmare stuff, abysmal stuff.
The new graphics rely on natural lighting, so every scene has been arbitrarily re-lit, brightening sequences designed to occur in the dark and darkening sequences designed to be easily visible. Dreamworks-itized remade characters demonically jiggle their heads while they speak because they still use the old PS1 animations, designed for character models incapable of facial animation. There is a heavy, heavy, heavy reliance on AI upscaling, altering human-made textures into blurry, nondescript, and sometimes visually incomprehensible slush, rendering even the simplest structures like cliff-faces or mountain sides into abstract, goopy slop.
Smaller features one might hope for in a collection like this are also absent - it boggles my mind that the remaster adds well over a hundred achievements to pursue without also adding a level select menu.
In other words, I left this collection kinda torn. I'm psyched to see these games get remastered at all, but virtually everything this remaster does outside of making these games accessible is antithetical to what I think a remaster should be.
However! Tomb Raider Remastered is also a 'new' Tomb Raider game, in that it offers new controls and remastered art for Tomb Raider 1-3. The new controls are whatever - just being honest, I'm not going to mess with modernized controls in a Tomb Raider game. That would be crazy. What I am interested in is the new art, which features some of the most garish visual redesigns I have ever seen. It's bad, dude. We're talking nightmare stuff, abysmal stuff.
The new graphics rely on natural lighting, so every scene has been arbitrarily re-lit, brightening sequences designed to occur in the dark and darkening sequences designed to be easily visible. Dreamworks-itized remade characters demonically jiggle their heads while they speak because they still use the old PS1 animations, designed for character models incapable of facial animation. There is a heavy, heavy, heavy reliance on AI upscaling, altering human-made textures into blurry, nondescript, and sometimes visually incomprehensible slush, rendering even the simplest structures like cliff-faces or mountain sides into abstract, goopy slop.
Smaller features one might hope for in a collection like this are also absent - it boggles my mind that the remaster adds well over a hundred achievements to pursue without also adding a level select menu.
In other words, I left this collection kinda torn. I'm psyched to see these games get remastered at all, but virtually everything this remaster does outside of making these games accessible is antithetical to what I think a remaster should be.
2006
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.
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.
Surprising how much leverage Ubisoft was able to get out of an isometric perspective for a series that feels designed to be framed in literally any other way than isometrically, but The Prophecy ultimately has the distinct feel of an unfinished game. It has extremely limited audio, no music, and many repeated textures and enemies. The gamefeel is there, moving and shooting feels pretty solid, but the level design is about as basic as it gets. Feels like a tech demo for a game that never released.
The Angel of Darkness is not the worst Tomb Raider game. It's popularly remembered as such because it's full of unfinished material and is generally a huge mess, but it also meaningfully redefines the parameters of what a Tomb Raider game can be, making it a more inventive and imaginative sequel than the generally better-liked Crystal Dynamics sequels. Does this game cast you as some nu-metal-looking dude named Kurt for no reason partway through? Yes. Yes it does. But I like that Angel of Darkness had its own identity, that it managed to strike a different note for a character who was, at the point of its release, rapidly becoming old news.
Having been thoroughly exhausted and abused over the years of developing Tomb Raider games, Core Design, forced into making yet another unwanted sequel, decided to make, essentially, four different games that look and act a whole lot like Tomb Raider. Setting aside the Rome levels, which are pretty classic Tomb Raider fare, there's a James Bond section aboard a Russian submarine, a pseudo-adventure game section set in Ireland, and, bizarrely, a cyberpunk-esque Mission Impossible infiltration mission. I wouldn't say any of the material in this game is, like, terrible, but the atmosphere and subtlety of the original is about as far from what this game is doing as you could possibly get. Far and away the most unnecessary game in the series.
The narrative surrounding The Last Revelation's development is well-known - the devs, having crunched to death in the Tomb Raider mines for too many years, decided to simply kill Lara and end the whole thing there and then, upsetting the publisher. The sense of exhaustion on the developers' part is palpable. No mainline Tomb Raider game, before or since, feels as trite as this one. In an effort to make a final, 'classic' Tomb Raider game, all of it feels like a foregone conclusion - everything wraps up in Egypt because Egypt is the default Tomb Raider setting. The final villain is Set because Set would that would be the most obvious final threat for Lara to overcome. We learn that Lara was an amateur explorer in her teenage years because, of course, there's nothing else in her character that can be depicted without changing the trajectory of the series in a meaningful way; these games aren't built for Lara to, like, walk around and interact with other people. Lara lives to tomb raid, and so she dies by tomb raiding. And this is where the developers' exhaustion is most evident, moreso even than the bizarre, unsolvable puzzles and batshit platforming sequences littered throughout The Last Revelation: they had nowhere else for Lara to go than backwards, to material from the first game.
Tomb Raider III takes all of the missteps from Tomb Raider II - that is to say, all of the clunky combat encounters, obscure puzzles and confusing level design - and escalates them from missteps in design to what almost starts to feel like an intentional punishment of the fanbase.
Every frustrating aspect of the Tomb Raider games is exaggerated here, to the point where it feels like an artistic choice, like Tomb Raider III is this avant garde experiment exploring insanity and its relation to the Sony Playstation. I thought it was weird that Tomb Raider II ratcheted up the difficulty, but the level of challenge here is ridiculous. The late game has so many arbitrary solutions to invisible puzzles that it feels un-completable, but even the early levels are problematic, featuring directionless, wide open spaces spackled with messy, illegible textures which hide nonsensically-placed switches and levers. Levels are filled with enemies that poison you, push you off ledges, and rush you down. If the original Tomb Raider was meditative, then this one is the antithesis of meditative, a game designed to intentionally produce madness.
Despite the generally abhorrent level design, you can also feel the new staff at Core Design sinking the shot on some of its wilder ideas. The early Tomb Raider games oftentimes slide from 'adventure game' into 'horror nightmare' without warning, but this game more coherently builds a sense of dread into its levels over time, and the expanded investment in cutscenes and dialogue manages to make this stuff a little more immediately coherent than the haphazard tonal whiplash of the prior games. The climax of this game straight up puts Lara Croft in the movie The Thing without that feeling totally out of left field, which is cool.
In spite of the fact that actually playing these levels feels fucking awful, the London levels are some of the coolest looking areas in a PS1 game, coloring the city skyline in this unreal shade of blue that looks really moody and evocative, while later levels feature bombed out London subway tunnels with authentic (and highly pixelated) WWII propaganda plastered over partially-collapsed walls.
There is some cool stuff here, and the non-linear level select is a nice touch, but I can't emphasize enough that this game is more fun to watch than to play.
Every frustrating aspect of the Tomb Raider games is exaggerated here, to the point where it feels like an artistic choice, like Tomb Raider III is this avant garde experiment exploring insanity and its relation to the Sony Playstation. I thought it was weird that Tomb Raider II ratcheted up the difficulty, but the level of challenge here is ridiculous. The late game has so many arbitrary solutions to invisible puzzles that it feels un-completable, but even the early levels are problematic, featuring directionless, wide open spaces spackled with messy, illegible textures which hide nonsensically-placed switches and levers. Levels are filled with enemies that poison you, push you off ledges, and rush you down. If the original Tomb Raider was meditative, then this one is the antithesis of meditative, a game designed to intentionally produce madness.
Despite the generally abhorrent level design, you can also feel the new staff at Core Design sinking the shot on some of its wilder ideas. The early Tomb Raider games oftentimes slide from 'adventure game' into 'horror nightmare' without warning, but this game more coherently builds a sense of dread into its levels over time, and the expanded investment in cutscenes and dialogue manages to make this stuff a little more immediately coherent than the haphazard tonal whiplash of the prior games. The climax of this game straight up puts Lara Croft in the movie The Thing without that feeling totally out of left field, which is cool.
In spite of the fact that actually playing these levels feels fucking awful, the London levels are some of the coolest looking areas in a PS1 game, coloring the city skyline in this unreal shade of blue that looks really moody and evocative, while later levels feature bombed out London subway tunnels with authentic (and highly pixelated) WWII propaganda plastered over partially-collapsed walls.
There is some cool stuff here, and the non-linear level select is a nice touch, but I can't emphasize enough that this game is more fun to watch than to play.
1998
Tomb Raider Gold adds two new sections to the main game: a return to Egypt, in which Lara infiltrates what appears to be a temple dedicated to the general concept of cats, and additional levels set within the original game's Atlantis Stronghold. Both sections represent totally different understandings of what makes Tomb Raider work. The Cat Temple levels are very challenging, but they also capture a sense of space and sense of scale, recalling some of the better exploratory moments from the original. The Atlantean Levels, while intense, are pure challenge dungeons, the Super Mario Bros.2: The Lost Levels of the Tomb Raider universe. They prove to be a lot more frustrating and a lot less interesting. There's a sloppiness to the visual language in these levels generally that didn't really appear in the original, too, particularly in the Cat Temple, where certain rooms are so bizarre and unpolished looking they don't even seem like a finished product.
1997
Tomb Raider II ditches the measured, procedural quality that made the first game special to make an action-heavy sequel, and while the results don’t compare to the first game, this is still probably the most the action-blockbuster direction for the series has ever paid off. This is a shotgun blast of a Tomb Raider game. Setting the oil rig levels and the warehouse levels aside, everything in here is cool as hell: the pseudo-James Bond cold open sequence at the Great Wall of China, the abandoned opera house, the temple full of monks in Tibet (the series’ first friendly NPCs!), the bizarre metaphysical space temple at the end – A+. Tomb Raider II isn’t the best game in the series, and it contains approximately 300% much combat as it needs, but the stuff that’s good here is really, really good.
The best sequence of levels in Tomb Raider II all center around the Maria Doria, a shipwreck lodged within a massive rock under the ocean. A clear sign that the Core Design team were into the Titanic craze surrounding the James Cameron movie, these levels set a decidedly haunting tone. I think there are four or so levels in the Maria Doria sequence, each one taking you deeper and deeper into the ship, starting Lara just outside the wreckage of the ship with nothing other than a diving suit, then progressing through the engine rooms, living quarters and into the captain’s cabin. While the original Tomb Raider went underappreciated for how vivid and dynamic some of its levels could feel, the quality of the visuals during these levels is undeniable. Once you encounter the collapsed hallways and you’re trudging through the ship at a sideways angle, looking up out of a window to see the open ocean, with all the deep blues of the ship and the worn, muddy reds of the furniture, the game starts to feel almost impressionistic.
Unlike the first game, though, anything nice I have to say about this game is complimented by the caveat that it is sometimes ridiculously difficult and obscure. After having played through the first game only occasionally turning to a guide to figure out where to go, I completed probably like half the levels in Tomb Raider II with a YouTube playthrough. It feels like Core Design got the impression that everyone who would buy a sequel to Tomb Raider would be like a hardline, expert Tomb Raider fanatic or something, which I am not. The game punishes you for not remembering the location of every switch, hidden passage and locked door – getting stuck on a puzzle is therefore bleak, because anything other than a perfect mastery of a level means you may as well be totally directionless.
Tomb Raider II is also the game that makes the best use of Croft Manor, which is an open-ended tutorial area where the player can explore and learn the controls. In the first game, Croft Manor was a linear sequence, but in the sequel it’s a fully featured space with its own hidden secrets, challenges and puzzles. It makes a re-appearance at the very end of the game, in which the remaining bad guys do a home invasion, shutting off all the power and converging on Lara in the middle of the night. It’s an amazing little twist, taking the tutorial area and giving the player a bunch of ammo and supplies to not only prove their mastery over the game, but also to reinforce how dangerous Lara Croft is in her own element. At least, it makes for a more dramatic use of the space than, say, blowing it up for pathos’ sake, which is what many of the later games do.
The best sequence of levels in Tomb Raider II all center around the Maria Doria, a shipwreck lodged within a massive rock under the ocean. A clear sign that the Core Design team were into the Titanic craze surrounding the James Cameron movie, these levels set a decidedly haunting tone. I think there are four or so levels in the Maria Doria sequence, each one taking you deeper and deeper into the ship, starting Lara just outside the wreckage of the ship with nothing other than a diving suit, then progressing through the engine rooms, living quarters and into the captain’s cabin. While the original Tomb Raider went underappreciated for how vivid and dynamic some of its levels could feel, the quality of the visuals during these levels is undeniable. Once you encounter the collapsed hallways and you’re trudging through the ship at a sideways angle, looking up out of a window to see the open ocean, with all the deep blues of the ship and the worn, muddy reds of the furniture, the game starts to feel almost impressionistic.
Unlike the first game, though, anything nice I have to say about this game is complimented by the caveat that it is sometimes ridiculously difficult and obscure. After having played through the first game only occasionally turning to a guide to figure out where to go, I completed probably like half the levels in Tomb Raider II with a YouTube playthrough. It feels like Core Design got the impression that everyone who would buy a sequel to Tomb Raider would be like a hardline, expert Tomb Raider fanatic or something, which I am not. The game punishes you for not remembering the location of every switch, hidden passage and locked door – getting stuck on a puzzle is therefore bleak, because anything other than a perfect mastery of a level means you may as well be totally directionless.
Tomb Raider II is also the game that makes the best use of Croft Manor, which is an open-ended tutorial area where the player can explore and learn the controls. In the first game, Croft Manor was a linear sequence, but in the sequel it’s a fully featured space with its own hidden secrets, challenges and puzzles. It makes a re-appearance at the very end of the game, in which the remaining bad guys do a home invasion, shutting off all the power and converging on Lara in the middle of the night. It’s an amazing little twist, taking the tutorial area and giving the player a bunch of ammo and supplies to not only prove their mastery over the game, but also to reinforce how dangerous Lara Croft is in her own element. At least, it makes for a more dramatic use of the space than, say, blowing it up for pathos’ sake, which is what many of the later games do.
1996
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.
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.
2012
It's very difficult for me to think about Dear Esther because I get so easily overtaken by the discourse surrounding the game. In 2012 Dear Esther was, like, the hot button topic in video games. Many people - many professional game critics from mainstream outlets! - were slamming out paragraphs about how Dear Esther "isn't a game" to their readers, or expressing smug disinterest in what Dear Esther was doing on podcasts. The understanding was that, in spite of the fact that Dear Esther is a game, in the material sense, and that it could be played and completed like a game, it also was a non-game game, a game that fulfilled the parameters of a game but that, for philosophical reasons, wasn't really a game. Dear Esther was apprehended as a kind of pure antithesis to whatever it was that video games do, as it was understood in 2012, something that needed to be demeaned and forgotten so that games, as they were currently understood, could continue to be produced.
Playing it now, all that anxiety feels so...quaint. But for an audience who experienced a game like Uncharted 2 as the pinnacle of video game narrative craft, the alienation makes some sense. Dear Esther is this shiftless, languidly-paced narrative object that very intentionally avoids direct apprehension. For many players, this was something totally new.
The game, in total, consists only of a walk along an island in the first person perspective, accompanied by dynamic narration that changes slightly each time the game is played. This narrator provides conflicting information and is only semi-coherent. Even the game world uses props which change from playthrough to playthrough; Esther appears to be a woman who died in a car crash, but only sometimes does the player find sonograms around the island. Sometimes the narrator seems to be tracing the history of the island as he goes, and other times seems to be producing a hoax to confuse future historians.
There's this pervasive sense of defeat within the game, the sense that everything that's ever mattered has already happened and that any end to the story is therefore arbitrary. The narrator discusses his kidney stones and his injuries from a fall, and sometimes the island visually echoes his body back to him; in one playthrough, as I explored the cave section, the narrator described the way people peered over him from a hospital bed as I passed under a massive crater in the earth which framed the moon like an eyeball. There's this sense that this island full of junk is the narrator, and that as he gets deeper and deeper into the island the metaphysical connection he shares with it becomes more and more deeply tied to his body. But the narrator has also finished with life, turning the island into a kind of purgatory. This makes for a memorable tone-piece, if not a comprehensively good game.
I always get the sense that something's missing from Dear Esther, though, like it's one good ingredient away from transforming itself into something bigger, more profound than it ended up being. I think it's the writing. Dear Esther's script seems like it was designed in a lab to elicit eyerolls. The visual design, the pacing, the music, they're all making these interesting, big moves, but the script can't capture the mood, stumbling towards poetic obscurity without ever managing to paint the game's emotional landscape. In one particularly embarrassing moment, the narrator says that Esther's car accident 'rendered her opaque,' which is, in all the ways that matter, not what opaque means, or what being 'rendered opaque' figuratively indicates.
Still, there's something here. If I can say anything positive about Dear Esther, it's this: I have forgotten way more about most games I've played, which are dense with filler combat encounters, than I remember. But I remember how playing Dear Esther made me feel.
Playing it now, all that anxiety feels so...quaint. But for an audience who experienced a game like Uncharted 2 as the pinnacle of video game narrative craft, the alienation makes some sense. Dear Esther is this shiftless, languidly-paced narrative object that very intentionally avoids direct apprehension. For many players, this was something totally new.
The game, in total, consists only of a walk along an island in the first person perspective, accompanied by dynamic narration that changes slightly each time the game is played. This narrator provides conflicting information and is only semi-coherent. Even the game world uses props which change from playthrough to playthrough; Esther appears to be a woman who died in a car crash, but only sometimes does the player find sonograms around the island. Sometimes the narrator seems to be tracing the history of the island as he goes, and other times seems to be producing a hoax to confuse future historians.
There's this pervasive sense of defeat within the game, the sense that everything that's ever mattered has already happened and that any end to the story is therefore arbitrary. The narrator discusses his kidney stones and his injuries from a fall, and sometimes the island visually echoes his body back to him; in one playthrough, as I explored the cave section, the narrator described the way people peered over him from a hospital bed as I passed under a massive crater in the earth which framed the moon like an eyeball. There's this sense that this island full of junk is the narrator, and that as he gets deeper and deeper into the island the metaphysical connection he shares with it becomes more and more deeply tied to his body. But the narrator has also finished with life, turning the island into a kind of purgatory. This makes for a memorable tone-piece, if not a comprehensively good game.
I always get the sense that something's missing from Dear Esther, though, like it's one good ingredient away from transforming itself into something bigger, more profound than it ended up being. I think it's the writing. Dear Esther's script seems like it was designed in a lab to elicit eyerolls. The visual design, the pacing, the music, they're all making these interesting, big moves, but the script can't capture the mood, stumbling towards poetic obscurity without ever managing to paint the game's emotional landscape. In one particularly embarrassing moment, the narrator says that Esther's car accident 'rendered her opaque,' which is, in all the ways that matter, not what opaque means, or what being 'rendered opaque' figuratively indicates.
Still, there's something here. If I can say anything positive about Dear Esther, it's this: I have forgotten way more about most games I've played, which are dense with filler combat encounters, than I remember. But I remember how playing Dear Esther made me feel.
2023
This review contains spoilers
As someone with a deep, nearly twenty-year history with Remedy games, please allow me to say: Alan Wake II is the real deal. It pays off decades of narrative tropes established by the studio’s past titles, interrogates those tropes, extrapolates from those tropes, and binds them together into this surreal, indulgent, cinematic horror-action rollercoaster ride. The relationship between author/creator and character/actor in Remedy games was already deeply complicated – Alan Wake II just brings that all to the surface so that we can look more deeply into what makes Remedy’s games work.
The extravaganza of meta-narrative references in this game are impossible not to conjure when discussing it, so I’m just going to do that here. The original Alan Wake was a game about an author-as-game-writer stand-in (Alan Wake/Sam Lake) who created the world-famous detective Alex Casey (Max Payne), played in a movie adaptation by actor Sam Lake (who is played by game developer Sam Lake), who now, in this game, is the face/body model for the ‘real’ detective Alex Casey and voice acted by James McCaffery (famous for portraying Max Payne), not to be confused with the meta-fictional Alex Casey, who is the literal Max Payne stand-in also voiced by McCaffery. As hilariously cyclical and nonsensical as this sounds, it’s only the jumping-off point – Matthew Porretta, Alan Wake’s voice actor, is caught in his own metafictional recurring loop, returning in a cameo role as Control’s head of mystical scientific research and most iconic goober, Casper Darling, while Ilkka Villi, Alan Wake’s face model/FMV actor, plays another mirror figure for Alan, albeit without Matthew Perreta’s voice. We could also get into what’s going on with Shawn Ashmore, but I do not have the mental capacity to bring what Quantum Break had going on into this.
Although Alan Wake II is a horror game, these self-referential shenanigans only occasionally interface with the game’s horror, leaving the game’s antagonists curiously absent for much of the plot. Instead, Remedy stacks multiple layers of the same character in on themselves as a kind of character development mechanism. Alan never consciously changes or grows as a character, or at least, he never says anything until the very end of the game to indicate he’s changed. For most of the game, he is reduced to a bitter, paranoid, hapless tool to be manipulated at will by the plot. But he does change – specifically, he changes through interactions with his own antitheses, the megalomaniacal celebrity sociopath, Mr. Scratch, and the strung-out bohemian Thomas Zayne, who is transfigured from his original role as a savior poet into a malevolent arthouse film director. Mr. Scratch’s qualities are extremely easy to apprehend – he embodies the anger issues Alan works through in the first game, combining Alan’s inherent viciousness and the general public’s worship of his work into an iteration of Alan who is a uses that viciousness to lead a cult.
Thomas Zayne, meanwhile, is a little more interesting to unpack, because the ‘mirror’ qualities of his character are at greater layers of remove from Alan. Zayne was previously a fully different character, a grizzled poet played by Max Payne/Alex Casey’s James McCaffery, who led Alan into war with the Dark Place. In Alan Wake II, Zayne is an embodiment of Alan as an artist, a sort of writer’s writer, an Alan who sets aside the dime-store crime novels that made him famous to produce art that’s more challenging and less palatable to a broad audience. Hilariously, this mirror-image of Alan is also evil, albeit evil in a totally different way. Whereas Scratch is the raw, destructive qualities within Alan manifested into a person, a kind of metaphorically Satanic Alan, Zayne is more of a Luciferian Alan, an Alan who expresses domination through trickery and the erosion of boundaries between artist and subject, an Alan who uses writing as an act of domination.
Upon encountering Zayne, Alan is put through this weird little psychedelic music video sequence in which the pair simulate/experience the effects of hallucinogenic drugs, which attaches Zayne to the substance abuse Alan explores a little bit more in the first game. Zayne’s big moment in Alan Wake II is his metaphysically real/unreal indie film, Nightless Night, which plays in a movie theater within Alan’s sort of parodic manifestation of New York City in the dark place. In Nightless Night, the character of Alex Casey is not killed in a dramatic battle of good against evil, but is instead psychologically unmade and brutally annihilated by his own friends and acquaintances. If Scratch is an evil within, then Zayne is the evil outside of Alan – or, maybe, the evil Alan perceives in others, his inability to see the good outside that compels him towards the destruction inside.
That’s just one read on what’s going on in Alan’s head, there, and the multi-tiered nature of the narrative opens up a much broader room for interpretation than anything in Remedy’s previous work. This is part of what makes Alan Wake II so distinct, is that Remedy uses it’s meta-narrative as a way to exponentially widen the scope of possibility for its universe both in a general sense, in that it seems anything that can be conceived of can occur within this series now, but also in an analytical sense, that the player needs to read into characters and situations more deeply in order to understand them.
In other words, Alan Wake II’s use of self-referential meta-narrative stuff isn’t just for show. It brings together twenty years of Remedy history and stacks them on top of one another, in a sort of pseudo-literary Marvel Cinematic Universe event, but there’s more here beyond an excuse to manipulate a certain kind of fan response. In fact, the Saga Anderson plotline, which is the more traditional half of Alan Wake II’s story, is probably the better half of the game, as it forces in a bunch of immediate, human concerns that Alan’s wishy-washy, sort-of real, sort of not real plot can’t accommodate. Saga herself is a kind of mashup character, an Alan Wake-style small-town horror protagonist who goes on a superpower-fueled journey to self-actualization similar to Remedy’s Control. In tying all of these things together, Remedy proves that, to mature as a creative studio, it’s more rewarding to limit scope and broaden depth, a pursuit made virtually impossible for other studios at its scale in the current market.
The extravaganza of meta-narrative references in this game are impossible not to conjure when discussing it, so I’m just going to do that here. The original Alan Wake was a game about an author-as-game-writer stand-in (Alan Wake/Sam Lake) who created the world-famous detective Alex Casey (Max Payne), played in a movie adaptation by actor Sam Lake (who is played by game developer Sam Lake), who now, in this game, is the face/body model for the ‘real’ detective Alex Casey and voice acted by James McCaffery (famous for portraying Max Payne), not to be confused with the meta-fictional Alex Casey, who is the literal Max Payne stand-in also voiced by McCaffery. As hilariously cyclical and nonsensical as this sounds, it’s only the jumping-off point – Matthew Porretta, Alan Wake’s voice actor, is caught in his own metafictional recurring loop, returning in a cameo role as Control’s head of mystical scientific research and most iconic goober, Casper Darling, while Ilkka Villi, Alan Wake’s face model/FMV actor, plays another mirror figure for Alan, albeit without Matthew Perreta’s voice. We could also get into what’s going on with Shawn Ashmore, but I do not have the mental capacity to bring what Quantum Break had going on into this.
Although Alan Wake II is a horror game, these self-referential shenanigans only occasionally interface with the game’s horror, leaving the game’s antagonists curiously absent for much of the plot. Instead, Remedy stacks multiple layers of the same character in on themselves as a kind of character development mechanism. Alan never consciously changes or grows as a character, or at least, he never says anything until the very end of the game to indicate he’s changed. For most of the game, he is reduced to a bitter, paranoid, hapless tool to be manipulated at will by the plot. But he does change – specifically, he changes through interactions with his own antitheses, the megalomaniacal celebrity sociopath, Mr. Scratch, and the strung-out bohemian Thomas Zayne, who is transfigured from his original role as a savior poet into a malevolent arthouse film director. Mr. Scratch’s qualities are extremely easy to apprehend – he embodies the anger issues Alan works through in the first game, combining Alan’s inherent viciousness and the general public’s worship of his work into an iteration of Alan who is a uses that viciousness to lead a cult.
Thomas Zayne, meanwhile, is a little more interesting to unpack, because the ‘mirror’ qualities of his character are at greater layers of remove from Alan. Zayne was previously a fully different character, a grizzled poet played by Max Payne/Alex Casey’s James McCaffery, who led Alan into war with the Dark Place. In Alan Wake II, Zayne is an embodiment of Alan as an artist, a sort of writer’s writer, an Alan who sets aside the dime-store crime novels that made him famous to produce art that’s more challenging and less palatable to a broad audience. Hilariously, this mirror-image of Alan is also evil, albeit evil in a totally different way. Whereas Scratch is the raw, destructive qualities within Alan manifested into a person, a kind of metaphorically Satanic Alan, Zayne is more of a Luciferian Alan, an Alan who expresses domination through trickery and the erosion of boundaries between artist and subject, an Alan who uses writing as an act of domination.
Upon encountering Zayne, Alan is put through this weird little psychedelic music video sequence in which the pair simulate/experience the effects of hallucinogenic drugs, which attaches Zayne to the substance abuse Alan explores a little bit more in the first game. Zayne’s big moment in Alan Wake II is his metaphysically real/unreal indie film, Nightless Night, which plays in a movie theater within Alan’s sort of parodic manifestation of New York City in the dark place. In Nightless Night, the character of Alex Casey is not killed in a dramatic battle of good against evil, but is instead psychologically unmade and brutally annihilated by his own friends and acquaintances. If Scratch is an evil within, then Zayne is the evil outside of Alan – or, maybe, the evil Alan perceives in others, his inability to see the good outside that compels him towards the destruction inside.
That’s just one read on what’s going on in Alan’s head, there, and the multi-tiered nature of the narrative opens up a much broader room for interpretation than anything in Remedy’s previous work. This is part of what makes Alan Wake II so distinct, is that Remedy uses it’s meta-narrative as a way to exponentially widen the scope of possibility for its universe both in a general sense, in that it seems anything that can be conceived of can occur within this series now, but also in an analytical sense, that the player needs to read into characters and situations more deeply in order to understand them.
In other words, Alan Wake II’s use of self-referential meta-narrative stuff isn’t just for show. It brings together twenty years of Remedy history and stacks them on top of one another, in a sort of pseudo-literary Marvel Cinematic Universe event, but there’s more here beyond an excuse to manipulate a certain kind of fan response. In fact, the Saga Anderson plotline, which is the more traditional half of Alan Wake II’s story, is probably the better half of the game, as it forces in a bunch of immediate, human concerns that Alan’s wishy-washy, sort-of real, sort of not real plot can’t accommodate. Saga herself is a kind of mashup character, an Alan Wake-style small-town horror protagonist who goes on a superpower-fueled journey to self-actualization similar to Remedy’s Control. In tying all of these things together, Remedy proves that, to mature as a creative studio, it’s more rewarding to limit scope and broaden depth, a pursuit made virtually impossible for other studios at its scale in the current market.
2023
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.
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.
Slayers X was ‘developed’ by the character Zayne, the edgy, acrimonious, lovable Step Dad-hating teen from HypnoSpace Outlaw, which makes it a real game authored by a fictional character created within the greater fiction of another game. Despite the slightly confusing narrative device and the multi-layered metanarrative thing going on here, Slayers X is the antithesis of something like Alan Wake II, which wants to use its many layers to get you thinking about the ‘whys’ of genre structure and what we materialize into the real world when we write fiction. Bring your knowledge of HypnoSpace Outlaw into it, keep the multiple layers of abstraction in your head as you analyze it, take a stab at placing this game within the framework of an alternate late ‘90s/early ‘00s – ultimately, regardless of what you bring into it, this is a game about the undisguised fantasies and anxieties of a fourteen-year-old nu-metal fan circa 1996, expressed via a full-length Doom clone.
Much like HypnoSpace, Slayers X depicts so many specific, forgotten totems of mid-to-late ‘90s popular culture that it goes beyond nostalgia and into speculative fiction about what the world would feel like had the music of Papa Roach never gone out of style. This proves to be a deeply funny premise for a first person shooter. You dual-wield pistols to shoot clownish, shirtless ICP-looking guys who constantly do the Fred Durst scat thing, pausing to shoot energy beams out of your hands that produce random letters that use the Matrix font. It is unbearable. And perfect.
Slayers X also features a deeper, subtextual narrative. Much like HypnoSpace Outlaw’s parodic pseudo-Angelfire sites, which would convey a huge amount of information about people through their various forums, hobbyist sites and professional sites, HypnoSpace tells the story of a disaffected kid suffering through a crappy part time job and an unsteady relationship with his dreadlocks-wearing white stepdad, disaffected and living vicariously through his own power fantasies. Most of the beautifully stupid levels in Slayers X cuts to the very soul of this character because every single thing in this game that isn’t a DeviantArt monster is a stand-in for some personal grudge or fantasy of Zayne’s. Slayers X is an epic-sized MYHOUSE.wad project, and I think that’s beautiful.
Much like HypnoSpace, Slayers X depicts so many specific, forgotten totems of mid-to-late ‘90s popular culture that it goes beyond nostalgia and into speculative fiction about what the world would feel like had the music of Papa Roach never gone out of style. This proves to be a deeply funny premise for a first person shooter. You dual-wield pistols to shoot clownish, shirtless ICP-looking guys who constantly do the Fred Durst scat thing, pausing to shoot energy beams out of your hands that produce random letters that use the Matrix font. It is unbearable. And perfect.
Slayers X also features a deeper, subtextual narrative. Much like HypnoSpace Outlaw’s parodic pseudo-Angelfire sites, which would convey a huge amount of information about people through their various forums, hobbyist sites and professional sites, HypnoSpace tells the story of a disaffected kid suffering through a crappy part time job and an unsteady relationship with his dreadlocks-wearing white stepdad, disaffected and living vicariously through his own power fantasies. Most of the beautifully stupid levels in Slayers X cuts to the very soul of this character because every single thing in this game that isn’t a DeviantArt monster is a stand-in for some personal grudge or fantasy of Zayne’s. Slayers X is an epic-sized MYHOUSE.wad project, and I think that’s beautiful.