So I finished this and had mostly positive things to say about it as a shooter.

Then I watched a GrimBeard video and he commented once you're in a giant mechsuit, the game has actually become the antithesis of fear and instead has insulated you in the safest conditions a shooter could possibly provide.

It takes a big man to change his mind because of one comment. I'm a big man. You know what. Fuck it. I had nothing positive to say about it as anything but a shooter with some nice environments. But now I'm fairly sure those things mostly sucked too.

So, like, yeah. Bad game.

Been playing this bit by bit slowly for a month now. Played it high, drunk, stoned and burgeoning on a k-hole at times. Still haven't finished it. But fuck it. I just wanna diary my thoughts.

I think that it's as good as a good as a game like this could ever hope to be. It is a thematically empty experience. It is not as nuanced narratively or emotionally as it thinks it is. It is all aesthetic. It is a grim, brooding Dad game for people who love violent video games. All of its maturity is mechanical and physical. It is at almost every turn always a video game first. There are skill points and weapon upgrades. All sorts of video game narrative bullshit and conveniences ripple through it. But when you're swaying trying to load a handgun bullet-by-bullet or bashing some guy's teeth into a railing or machete-ing your 500th nameless post apocalyptic goon, all under some really intentionally well mood lit areas, you feel something. It loses impact the more you play, the game is way too long. But you see the rare instance of what happens when a AAA game developer gets an unlimited budget to heavily fetishise brutal violence. It's sick. I love it. I wish it wasn't coated in so much sentimentality and artstation lustre. But I think it's the most expensive murder simulatior ever made and it's stands as almost a novelty in my mind. The only other game like is maybe Max Payne 3 (and TLOU2, which I feel identical about but just as a sequel feel lesser).

So I played this game for a month straight. Got to level 105 in 100 hours and got to the Mountaintop of the Giants.

That was a month ago. I have played maybe five hours since. I have officially decided to retire. Real life is too stressful to enjoy this any longer.

I have nothing interesting to add or contribute about this game.

It is perhaps the pinnacle high art AAA game development. It is the video game equivalent of one of those meals that would appear in the TV show Hannibal. It is elegant and expansive and exhausting. It is every Dark Souls game gelled together and cubed and stretched out across a giant canvas. It is maybe the best game I've ever played. It will be the best game I never finish until I make headway elsewhere. I will return to Elden Ring. But I feel like I've been clubbing for 40 hours straight and Hidetaka Miyazaki's idea for an afters is a 2 week no sleep bender to Ibiza. I'm good. Maybe later

They hired Hoyte von Hoytema as a cinematography consultant, and for the opening D-Day levels it really shows.

I think it's sad for video games to still be chasing """"cinematics"""" in vain attempts to gain prestige because I think it highlights a thorough misunderstanding of what makes each of those respective mediums unique and special. BUT. Kudos for a game for at least admitting they need help in making their game look like a movie and working with someone who knows what they're doing. This game was lit to the tits. Shame it was written like an Allied propaganda, WWII-themed Fortnite weekend event.

At a basic level, I can summarise a good shooter as one that makes the immediate objective of moving from point-a to point-b exciting; enticing; entertaining. It can achieve this through story/narrative, character/dialogue, environment/traversal, gameplay/action.

F.E.A.R. fails at the first two. It's eight hours of game stretched from a single A4 sheet of paper. The dialogue is all expository. But none of that really matters because it succeeds so well as a balls-to-the-wall Hong Kong action inspired shooter, told through levels that evoke the sparse liminality of Half-Life and the seedy, grimy domesticity of Max Payne (with a hint of tactical gunplay and enemies that feel drawn from like a Tom Clancy shooter).

I only played Doom and Quake for the first time less than 9 months ago, but I find myself turning back to them as the essential shooters. The skeleton for what a shooter can be is all there. The guns are bomb; the levels evoke a very specific atmosphere, and are compact and pushing you forward on instinct; movement is swift; there's nothing to think about other than shooting bad guys and maybe using a health pack. FEAR is all that plus it lets you blast dudes in slowmo across an office cubicle with a combat shotgun (and can still switch it up on a dime making you feel like you're playing through The Matrix lobby scene).

Creates a nice hook between the fast-paced comabt of the classic iD arena shooter and the linear corridor structure and level design of the post Modern Warfare era.

The last three PS3 era shooters I've played too have been Resistance 3, Singularity and a little bit of Rage, and New Order - even in its hapdash narrative tissue that feels thrown together to connect setpieces and levels - feels like a huge of breath of fresh air after a wave of shooters that rarely cared to inject even an ounce of personality or human interest into their "campaign".

It's a little sad that instead of maybe being a forerunner for a new era of shooters, New Order winds up feeling like the closing chapter on the PS3 era. Titanfall 2 and DOOM would come around two years later, as well as a sequel, New Colossus, in 2017, but New Order basically closes the book on the Call of Duty clone. 🤷‍♂️

Post-Heavy Rain core.

Mechanically I like these walk and click adventure horror games. It's a shame when the writers cannot take advantage of the minimalist design to write a fulfilling narrative or compelling themes. I can look passed "this game could have been a book" if the writing was rewarding to experience. But as often with games it seems more work went into systems and graphics and neat-o concepts like splitscreen than writing. The Medium like all Bloober games feels like a mess to unpack and after playing four of them now I feel tired and done (and kinda tricked).

I thought this one was an "underrated gem". it's one i've been meaning to play for like 10 years. i skipped Fall of Man and Resistance 2 just to get to the one that supposedly had a story and maybe some crisper post-Modern Warfare gunplay.

such a weird game tho. it's like if neil druckmann made Bulletstorm. or somebody interspliced paragraphs from The Road into one of the Halo novels (or the Halo games, I guess, fucking plays as monotonously as the Library from Halo 1 but with the aesthetic of like every boring late-00s/early-10s brown FPS).

just... really boring. i guess i liked the dust bowl atmosphere of the early levels which isn't something a lot of games do. but like when you're just shooting mindless aliens creatures, it kind of seems like a huge waste of time.

I just think Portal is neat.

I like the simple somewhat malleable nature of the puzzles. I like the subtle, increasing complexity of them. The cute physics required to solve some of the later ones. I think in terms of environmental storytelling it's as subtle as a brick to the face but I really like the Valve-Half-Life aesthetic. All these abandoned, soulless, humanless science labs and garish, Evil maintenance rooms. The pulsing techno. The sparse blue, orange and white colour palette. It's all so beautiful in its minimalism. And GlaDOS is such a bitch, I love her.

after spending two months playing mostly ps4/5 games, going back to a blocky, linear, grimey ps3 era game was a real treat.

but i think i gotta divorce myself from the good vibes i get from simply playing this because at heart all i did was feel like dogshit for 4 days mercilessly beating up the poor and insane. batman, it struck me for maybe the first time, is the absolute embodiment of American imperialism. superman is the pretty face and the promised ideal but batman is the guerilla by night; the tightly knit, highly efficient machine with vast resources. if his parents murder is pearl harbour, then he is the atom bomb and the influence after that.

at one point in this game, batman (and calling him Batman, like that's his name, or could be a name, like on par with Dave or Jake or something, never fails to crack me up) has to get across a large gap. so he calls in for a tool to do the job, and this tool arrives via a remote controlled drone that crashes through the glass ceiling and delivers itself. at that moment i was like Batman absolutely terrifies me.

sucks i'mma have to play three more of these but i am who i am.

i wrote a longer review of this maybe 20% of the way through my experience and then finished the game and, well, my opinion didn't change, however, once i actually finished the main story though all i could think of were the words

who gives a shit.

it's a giant waste of time. kudos to the psychologists Ubisoft employ whose job it is to trick me into playing it though. they really know how to play me (and my dumb brain at least).

a camera is just like a gun, point and shoot

i think the most confounding thing about this game - a game that's full of levels that are clearly carefully curated and intricately decorated - is the timer. it seems so counterintuitive to the game's sort of spirit of observe and inhabit. i can only really think it's there to give you something to purposely ignore and disobey. likewise the checklist of items you need to photograph to advance. at first i felt really bad about "cheesing" some of these objectives and taking the worst, blurriest, most out of focus to advance. but a week or two removed from playing it all i can think, that's kinda the point, yeah. half ass the objectives, take in the rest of it. ignore the obvious and document the margins (where the real beauty and the tragedies exist).

i also wanna say the game's little diorama levels feel less like interactive immersive environments and more like these lifesized gifs of moments frozen in time. they really stick with me. in contrast i spent 3 weeks around this game also playing far cry 6 and i remember virtually nothing about that game's spaces other than how beautifully blue the water was. i played umurangi a year ago before dipping and taking my sweet time to return but that level was always burned in my mind.

nice game.

The cultural specificity here feels so personal that it makes similar contemporary horror walking sims like Amnesia, SOMA, Layers of Fear and Observer (and the mansion puzzle sequences of Ethan Winters Resi Evil games) feel so much lesser than. Which is maybe unfair. But it's a reminder of how overly reliant video game developers are on using existing genre trappings to tell a story, and how often that genre is fantasy or sci-fi, and what the point even of video games are at the end of the day if they only reflect fantasy and not reality.

Devotion itself isn't completely free from that because even it relies on horror and jump scares when it easily could have just been a Gone Home styled house tour/slice of life game in the vein of a Tsai Ming Liang film. But oh well. It's a step in a better direction.