Look, if you had one shot or one opportunity

To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment

Would you capture it or just let it slip?

A time capsule from 2010 was unearthed too early by accident and they found Ghostwire: Tokyo in it. A barren collectathon wasteland in which both the main and side mission have you fight a wide range of supernatural entities like checks notes a bald faceless guy in a suit, a fat bald faceless guy with a suit, a faceless woman in a suit, a headless child in a school uniform (a kind of suit) and a blanket with holes in it for eyes. Sometimes a big woman in a trench coat tries to gut you wide open with scissors.

I can’t really hate on it too much though. What it lacks in gameplay it makes up in soul. It has a unique atmosphere I can’t say I’ve seen anywhere else. Neon lit Tokyo night streets are sombre and beautiful, inhabited primarily by floating ghosts that have forgotten who they are. Passing beside them, you'll often hear them plead for help: ‘’Did I leave the stove on ?’’ or ‘’ I have to feed my cat’’. I enjoyed that. If you can stomach the brain-dead gameplay and you have a knack for digital tourism give it a chance.

This might be the first game I can truly call epic. It’s not that other games dont have such qualities or that the rest of From Softwares offerings aren’t similar; they very much are and have a shared aesthetic interest in mediaeval fantasy and creationist mythology. It was just never like this, never on this scale. My journey with it felt Homeric and it took me four months and about a 100 hours to finish this shit. It's arduous as a good adventure should be and by the end of it I felt I actually went through something physical. As if I had been changed in some way and my soles should have hurt after all that distance travelled.

It is one of the few games that can back up all that talk of gods and men, birth, death, sin, light, darkness with actual gameplay and match it in its biblical proportion. The secret to this awe inspiring grandeur is that Elden Ring doesn’t fake the space. What my brain usually detects as skyboxes, here steadily reveals itself to be ‘’real’’ environment, my mouth gaping in astonishment. The ominous castle in the distance isn’t just decoration. It’s shrouded in fog, but I’ll get there. Or I won’t. Every piece of architecture has a life on its own and it doesn’t need my presence as a player to make it authentic. It was there long before and it will stay that way after me. The Lands in Between are so large, that the history of its digital world dwarfs you (that’s not even halfway through your quest. Fairy early on, you descend by an elevator that takes its time more than usual. Upon finally reaching the ground, your expectations of a middling dungeon are destroyed after you find out that you didn’t make a 10 minute detour, but discovered an underground world, the bygone eternal city of Nokron, a whole different dreamy universe than the one you left behind). As a result of this you feel like a hero part of the fabric of the mythos, doing your part in the shaping of the world of gods and men. Each zone of the map is like a massive canto from the epic of Elden Ring. It’s insane how many times you tell yourself ‘’ Wow, this is mental, there’s no way they can outdo this’’ but they do over and over. I won’t get into unnecessary enumeration, but the potential for adventure you sense after you get your sight on Liurnia when you exit Stormveil Castle is palpable. It is the perfect fantasy image to tingle your senses. Between the sharp rocky ominous formations is nestled a valley swallowed by morning fog. It looks unnatural, as if it's poisoning the ground and hiding evils within. In the far off, you can make out the silhouette of a twisted magical castle begging you to trudge and fight your way through the fog to uncover its mysteries. A perfect fantasy image. Also, the first glimpse you get of inner city Leyndel, after you penetrate its gargantuan siege walls and emerge on the inside, is a sight that will stick with me for a long time.

So, what’s the problem then? I can think of two, a major and a minor. The minor is repetition. Even Miyazaki's titanic talent could not manoeuvre around the open world blight. The most glaring and objective issue of the game is the surprising amount of uninspiring copy-pasted dungeons and the overuse of bosses. It cheapens the world that they have worked so hard to create, when they didn’t even have to do it. This excess of content was unnecessary.

The major one (apart from trivial imperfections and overcomplicated rpg elements that I’ve always found cumbersome in these games) is that I think From Software might have reached their creative limit. The ouroboros has bitten its tail. Is Elden Ring the latest innovation of the soulsborne formula or its last creative push ? To me it feels like the latter. Everything that began with Demon's Souls level design revolution of the 2010’s has blossomed here into its most complete form. It successfully fused with the open-world, a mark of ambition that just has one logical conclusion. You can’t go bigger than the biggest. How does the saying go ? Once you go open-world you never go back-erd or something of the sort. These questions might be more telling of an imagination deficit on my end but where do you go from here? How many different ways can you roll around a big ass knight and his giant sword ? How many times can you make delayed attack patterns to keep me on my toes? How many more castles can you make? How much bigger can the map to your game be ? I can keep going. How do you bring new ideas into a game that was the new idea? Are From Software too big to change ?

Anyhow, everything people are saying is true. It is one of the greatest games ever made, there are no two ways about it, but by the time I finished it, I felt that I had played it twice already and that’s saying something. I think of it fondly though and despite the stress from its many death encounters, I envision my time with the game in the calm of the ruins, under the golden light of the great Tree listening to the wind and resting with Melina's whisper in my ear. She tells me of the times before and prepares me for the times ahead. I’m not sure I'm following what she is saying, but it’s fine; most of my time with the game is like this, full of confusion about its story and gameplay systems. Half of the time (assuredly even more) I don’t know what I’m doing and what for, yet I don’t care. The poetic malaise of this world has its grip on me just that hard. This is what the peak of the mountain looks like; I glance around and take in the view to see how far I’ve come. After which I take a short break and prepare for my journey down. There’s nothing left to see.

Harry wakes up in a wrecked car and the passenger seat is empty. Heather is missing. He crawls out of the ruins of the vehicle and stumbles onto the street, swallowed by a thick fog. The ghost town you find yourself in is smothered out of any visible signs of life. Snow is falling gently. Only your footsteps echo in company as you prod along the lonely streets. A mirage of your daughter vanishes behind the corner and you shout at her desperately to wait. You sprint into the alleway to catch her, but when you turn around the corner, you only find the massacred remains of flesh and blood in place of your missing girl. The spine of an animal is the only thing you can make out in the mush of guts that resembles anything. That is when everything starts to tighten, when you feel short of breath. A siren wails in the distance, it’s prolonged cry piercing the air with unresolvable panic. You run ahead, but you can’t be sure if you are running to something or away from it. The tight fixed camera angle of the alleyway gets narrower and you're beginning to squeeze yourself into the nightmare; the camera can’t even hold its footing. It trembles out of fear, swaying frantically, distancing as far away from Harry as it can, looking for an escape. It gets darker and darker, until Harry is forced to put a match out to not lose himself. In the darkness the world is shaking with banging and screaming, the camera is spinning all around. A trail of blood leads to an appalling crucified corpse, rotting with meat tangled in rusty barbed wire all round blocking the way. The light has almost faded and you can’t escape the maze. In the insanity of banging metals and scraping pipes you get attacked by something you can’t describe. Small creatures gnaw at your feet and stab you with their knives and you can’t do anything. You don’t know what's happening yet, utterly helpless you just wait for the nightmare to end. Right then Harry wakes up, gasping for air. His eyes are wide open, but the nightmare hasn’t ended. Silent Hill awaits you.

That is how you open your game. Hooked right away I was surprised the more I progressed through it. How, despite its ancient two decade plus age, a end of the millennium video game piece of technology could preserve its tone and stand its aesthetic ground. More than that, I even started seeing it as timeless. There is potential in retro texture work and low poly models that wasn't apparent to me before as it is now; horror might take advantage of more than any other genre. The jagged corners of the pre anti-aliasing days and the muddled texture work give clear enough information, but they also suggest. I can see that rusty door and its brown unappealing colouring, yet I can only imagine what horrors that gave it its tint. Objects just seem that much stranger, as if the way you see them is the closest someone could make them out from memory. This isn’t something unique to Silent Hill, but I hope we see these technical limitations of the past as an aesthetic choice in the future more and more.

The proportions are also way off, which adds to this unsettling feeling. Everything is a bit too big, a bit too wide. The streets are so much wider than they should be that there exists a space between opposite pavements, where you can walk, but not see either side of the street. Just fog and nothingness. It all accumulates in this surreal dreamy quality that is rarely matched to this day. What helps greatly too, is the effectiveness of the cinematography, if we might call it that. Fixed camera angles just shouldn’t have left mainstream gaming. They paint a picture and create tension in a way modern interactive right analog stick cameras can’t. It hits different when you press the handle of an old creaky door and enter a room where you don't see what is in front of you, but rather, see the character looking at the space beyond with the wall behind his back. The camera doesn’t let you see much and it induces anxiety, as you hear something coming closer way over the edges of the screen.

I don’t know what black magic and ritual sacrifice Team Silent performed to make this sound the way it does, but they made the official soundtrack to all your darkest nightmares. Absolutely legendary work.

What this ultimately is about as a narrative is of little importance. In a classical sense the story isn’t any good. It barely has a plot for things to keep moving and it completely loses me every time it ventures into ramblings of esoteric bullshit, occult crackpot gibberish and alien rubbish. The established atmosphere is so effective that explanations of things damage the psychological undertone that is present throughout the game. When it relies on writing it’s abhorrent. The Twin Peaks influence here is apparent, but the Lynchian approach to dialogue just doesn’t work out. It’s stilted and uninteresting and I couldn’t wait for it to be over. It’s not all bad though, because by the end, there is a death scene so peculiar and strangely sad that I remembered it for days after. There seems to be so much beneath the uppermost layer of this game. I'm sure that is why it has the following it does. I can’t wait to try the sequel.

We should repair rather than remove. This goes not only for an old broken camera or record player, but the relationship we have with the people we care about. This is what ‘’Assemble with care’’ is all about and it expresses that with 13 levels of you assembling stuff interspersed with slides of a story about a falling father/daughter relationship and two feuding sisters. Great as a concept, not so much as execution. The clickety clacks of objects while they are disassembled and put together is what is best here. Sliding my fingers through the touchpad to unscrew the screws never got old and was satisfying, which I guess is what the devs were going for. And it is, don't get me wrong, but for a game titled like this I expected a lot more. What should’ve been most important here is process: the process of taking things apart and finding out what they are really made of, what their texture of history is, how they were and how they are now. I might be describing a wholly different game, but the set up of the premise just asks for more. It is just too simple for my taste. Every action is relegated to unscrewing, removing basic pieces, connecting wires and glueing stuff once in a while. There is barely any character in the objects themselves .It is fine and quite chill though if I don’t have my occasional wrestle with the controls. I understand that the gameplay loop must have repeating elements in it for progression to occur, but what we have here barely kept my interest. It also didn’t help that what little writing this had was at a disney channel level of competence. At the end of the day we mustn't forget that this is an indie phone game, and for that I can cut it some slack.

p.s
Maria has to have one of the most fake jobs I've ever seen in a game. Repair woman, really ? She earns a living by gluing shit together that any 2 year old could and travels europe with it. Nah

Does exactly what it says on the tin. Cute, charming, funny. Full of spontaneous energy, as if it was made in the spur of the moment. Anti intricate game design that doesn’t try to take too much on its plate; in fact, briefness seems to be the name of the game here and I love it. Big crunchy pixel art style and ambient music make it feel homely as you glide around its beaches, mountains and forest valleys. The island is finite, but you never feel the world wrap around itself. Instead it continuously goes left or right until you arrive at where you began and that makes it feel more vast than it actually is. Sometimes you get to look at your surroundings from binoculars and then the top down perspective you are accustomed to is substituted by a more typical three dimensional one. It lasts only while you look through the viewers, but it gives a different feeling of adventure to the game, when you can see distant peaks and low island coastal strips in fog begging for you to explore them. It even changes the flow of traversal when it introduces a new biome in the later half. More games should have the focus this 3 hour romp does. I can imagine myself going back to this just to wind down for an hour or two to take my mind off things. Really lovely.

Echoes of the eye retains the magnificence of the base game, when I feared so, that MOBIUS couldn't capture lightning in a bottle twice. I even feared they might tarnish the tapestry of their perfect clockwork solar system by introducing too much new information onto its plane. This worry of over-saturation was unfounded. They’ve created a whole new place to explore, that is unconnected to the main moving parts of the base game. The instant you enter that new playground, that signature feeling of the unknown and mystery so akin to Outer Wilds envelops you once again. When you enter the newly crafted expanse for the first time you start to salivate from the feeling of possibility that hides behind every corner, nook and cranny. As is the tradition in the community, I can’t delve deeper. You must see it for yourself, but what I’ll add though, is that I'm still amazed at how any given space can change in this game. How a time comes when the solid structure of the playground changes permanently and you watch as what once was is forever altered. This time it’s the breakage that unleashes the torrents of water. Transfixed on the wave coming at me, I often sat in stillness watching nature do its thing, insignificant to its grandness.
The devs have even stepped more into genre territory with a greater emphasis on horror this time. And it’s genuine unnerve that they’ve crafted in the section with the lanterns.You’ll know what I’m talking about
Where it falters slightly, is the moment you get the general gist of The Strangers enigma. It depends on your ability to solve puzzles, but at a certain time the narrative momentum beckons you to reach its finish line and instead of doing that, you start hitting your head against every possible surface in order to force a development in your investigation. And given that you go to only this once place and not the whole solar system, analysis fatigue might settle in, because you feel like you’ve been doing the same thing over and over again for the past couple of hours. That one final puzzle was on the brink of damaging my enjoyment and I looked at it in order to keep my good attitude towards the game intact and I don’t think I would've figured it out.
When all the cards are laid on the table at the end a minute inkling of disappointment settled in. I fail to see how this reached any new conclusions. Echoes of the eye’s story is fine, but it’s emotional weight I inferred from the base game. Future, fear, birth, renewal, sacrifice, friendship… All of this I felt was already there and didn’t need that much more clarification. Story wise, this feels like a track from the Outer Wilds album B-side.
Despite that however, this remains one of the greatest DLC’s ever conceived. Don’t hesitate to try it as I did.

This has a bread crumb trail of fun charming ideas that are spread sparingly enough for me to finish it; a brilliant mini-game with Gamora’s singing and a lama, a fun encounter with lyric song guessing in a bar, museum exhibit, a level inside the psyche of a dog and many others. It’s those fun ideas that match the potential these characters have and I wish Eidos explored that energy more in a different kind of game. Instead, most of this is packaged, sold and played as a ‘’narrative experience’’, which immediately tells you all you need to know. A third-person action/adventure with a 50/50 distribution of combat and exploration (that feels more like a break between action where characters talk than actual exploration), QTE’s, squeezing through narrow spaces, simple puzzles, collectibles etc and all the rest of the usual suspects. Generally that’s fine and dandy, but Eidos are neither Naughty Dog nor Rockstar and it shows. The first hour of this nearly made me quit. Jankiness in ample quantity with many other problems to spare like pop-in and audio overlapping that made all of the characters talk at once almost destroyed the feeling of back and forth banter you’d expect from them. I begged them to shut up for one minute so I could rest a little in silence. By the time I got to the shooting, I was ready to throw in the towel. You play only as Peter (surely a missed opportunity to play as every member of the team) and you just hold the triggers in any general direction where enemies are. It lacks preciseness and any form of impact .It’s a system that’s clearly designed for you to fight mobs, meaning that most of the time you’ll be doing mindless spraying. Quill's guns feel unsatisfyingly meagre because of that. Later, for variety's sake, they introduce different elemental versions of the guns, but they feel seriously out of place. Do you think of ice shooters or fire blasters when you think of Star-Lord? I don’t think so. You can dodge enemies, use some power-ups and command the other guardians to assist in battles, which is a nice way of making you feel like a team, but that’s it. The enemy variety is laughable and the repetitiveness sets in around the game’s halfway point. It doesn’t recover and its last chapter is the most serious offender. I was so unengaged and bored, that I was this close to just ejecting the disk and putting on the ending cutscene on youtube, so I could spare the pointless exercise of punching some poor bloke for the thousand time. It isn’t great when one of your two main gameplay pillars is this bland and brittle. It threatens to topple the whole thing.
Other mishaps are pointless upgrades and illusion of choice. It’s dubious whether the choice in dialogue makes any real difference but I’d wager it doesn't.
The game mind sound awful now, but I had a great time with it and the main reasons are two. First, this has to have one of the best art designs in recent memory. It’s shocking to me that every single location manages to feel unique and jam-packed with distinct landscapes. It even somehow manages to evade the usual banality of a water/sand/snowy/grassy environment classic we all are accustomed to. It boasts visual diversity. The first time you see Lady Hellbender’s castle you are taken aback by its enormity and strangeness. The walk on it’s bridge features a cool transition to a flashback from old Peter to his younger self with a zoom that stayed with me. The clandestine pious halls of The Sacrosanct were both beautiful and foul with their impure golden radiance and I gaped more time than I ought to had at the titanic monolith meteor that had fallen on Maklu IV. Knowhere might be the crowning jewel though. I must have spent a couple of hours there alone, just admiring the hustle and bustle of the cyberpunkish thieves den. Also the work on the characters designs is phenomenal. The robes crown on The Matriarch and the lamentis priests are two standouts from many.
The second reason is that the story is actually decent. It’s adequately paced, which is a rarity in most games and it manages to balance light and heavy well. By the end this whole thing seems like a full fledged Guardians of the galaxy story and it might share equal weight for me with the movies. Just some fine conversations from all the main players and good performances too. I actually have nothing against it’s big win at the game awards. Go figure.

My brother bought one of those knock-off chinese 10.000 games in one console for twenty bucks and we decided to try this bad boy out. My foot immediately started tapping to the familiar 8 bit beat and we teleported in front of the old CRT TV we used to have back in the early 2000s. Way back then we didn’t know how to operate this; come to think of it, we didn’t even know what volleyball was. Just people moving about and we lost interest. He even might have not developed his speaking capabilities yet, still talking in baby simlish and holding the sega genesis controller. Our eyes lit up when we saw it on the list and we had to see what tortured us so as children.To my surprise, we found out a really fun game.
I don’t know if there are any famous volleyball sporting games right now, like football has FIFA and basketball NBA, but it was interesting to find that volleyball works really well for 2D space. It simplifies the sport to a couple of variables. After a ball is served you have to receive it by trying to place your player below the landing trajectory of the ball, nothing too fancy. After that he automatically passes it to the setter who also automatically raises it to the attacker. At this moment comes the most playing you have to do in this. First you have to time the hit, because there exists a risk of the ball just falling on your side of the court if you fail to touch it. Second, you have to decide to either spike it directly below or chip it to the back side. If you are being attacked, you have to either time your block or move your back player to receive the ball. That’s it. At any moment there exist only one or two things you can do, so it creates this really fun rock-paper scissors-scenario. It’s the minimum input a player can be asked to do, but it catches the spirit of volleyball to a degree I didn’t think it could with a game this simple. Really fun for half an hour with a friend. Give it a try if you and your homie love the sport.

Played on Oculus quest 2

With the sole exception of Beat Saber, which I gave an absentminded spin on in the local gaming bar, this was my first proper foray into the VR landscape. I had no point of reference for what to expect, but what I did have was a condescending attitude, despite that I had fun with the aforementioned title. My negative supposition stemmed from my inability to view these titles as ’’serious games’’, much like mobile games and for similar reasons. One expects them to use the technology as a crutch and in the process, forget the myriad of things that make a game, like narrative, length, pacing, progression ,variety and so forth and so forth. Games for VR have, it feels like, just recently started evolving and on account of the major financial investment they require to be played I expected it to be years before they developed their sufficient language. In a sense, I just expected a glorified tech demo.

This changed the moment I put it on. The whiteness of the loading screen and its opening titles slowly dissipate to lay bare an image of a city engulfed in smog. Before its immaculate detail can make an impression, a plethora of veiny cables supported by huge steel rail systems force your gaze to follow them upwards to an oppressive megalithic structure- The Citadel. Your nape has to bend backwards for you to investigate its ending, lost somewhere between the sky and sun, blocked by thick haze. It’s in my first moment with the game, that the VR system makes me feel something I wouldn’t have without it. The towering presence of the Combine Headquarters has its intended dominating effect on me precisely because real life movement enabled me to feel it. Speedy aircrafts take off left and right; huge mechanical spider-like government sentinels roam the rooftops scouting for trouble; the only organic life form is a tiny (in comparison) pigeon flock that wizzes past you in a second; I veer my head frantically to catch it all. I haven’t even started moving yet and I’m dumbfounded. Looking around is more than enough for my first minutes with it. It’s surprising to me that I have found the space to be as immersive as it has been, that I immediately accepted the presented reality and found it palpable. I see a railing in front of me and cautiously peep my head over it as if a chance of a fall existed; I already respect the depth of the world subconsciously. It also helps that Valve have gone to extremes to describe the detail of this world, both visually and mechanically. After I surveyed the street and its passengers I noticed a radio on my right. A core frequently asked question that comes to you throughout the entire game arises in that moment: ’’Can I ?’’, a mark of any great game. My fingers aim for its little antenna and I raise it to receive the signal. It works. I go for the knob and it turns. I bend over, pick up a matchbox and shake it beside my ear to hear the trembling of the matches inside. I lift a pot and wonder if can time it’s fall and drop it on a pedestrian's head. It doesn’t work ( didn’t expect it to), but I'm already in play with the systems. The physics engine reputation Valve has built hasn’t been damaged and City 17’s tangibility invites one to see what it’s made of. My appetite for experimentation is growing and I begin to see how much unknown the space for play is.
I wonder if it is a coincidence that VR has finally emerged as a real thing when graphics have become photorealistic, or hit the gradient of becoming. I’m sure a basic, low poly version of this would still extract a reaction out of me and have merit; yet, it’s full mesmerising effect hits due to the cutting edge graphics worthy of a non-vr competitor game. While you enter your first interior in the game, you walk through a dingy corridor. Not that it has anything to do with it, but at that moment I got reminded of P.T, Kojima’s infamous unreleased cult project and its treatment of light shadow, texture and reflection (The Order 1886 also sprung to mind for similar reasons). Naturally, graphics have been moving the bar ever since 2014, but it was at the beginning of that demo that I thought a new graphical fidelity plateau was established, and not just by pure graphical horsepower alone. It was in the way it gave them the opportunity to express drama through it, how light reflected off different surfaces, while still allowing for the personality of the material to be noticed, like stains on mirrors or smudges on the floor. It could account for the whole spectrum of light and shadow, having a corner of room in pitch darkness, and then gradually transition to full lightning. The same physical based rendering techniques are present in Alyx and it is many a times where it’s detail made an impression; entering an abandoned hotel lobby, singularly illuminated by sunbeams suggesting all the unclear air and accumulated dust by the years of neglect; fighting for dear life in a pitch black basement with a flashlight, only having some light reflect of smeared old monitors and dirty ceramic tiles or just taking in the last sunset rays bathing the industrial buildings sheet iron rooftops.
It was after my initial techno stupor wore off, that I noticed my hands and was intrigued at how they shadowed my real life movement so well. The mind connection I made between my real hands and virtual counterparts was mind boggling. I inspected them thoroughly, their back and front and I moved them closer to my face and really far from it. For all intents and purposes these were my ’’real’’ hands, and as such, they became the most intuitive controls any game has ever had. I had many of my friends come and try it out and it’s always the same, despite the major difference in gaming experience we all had. By the fifth minute of the game, by the time you go down the elevator, they play with it as if they have done this their whole life, and in a sense, they had. Drawing from real life experience of the physical world, walking, crawling, tip-toeing to see something, even shooting had become a second nature in the game. These types of controls minimise the gap between intent and execution of action so much that it practically opens a new horizon for 3D space. An interesting instance of this is the concept that hands and head are tracked separately, which might not sound like much, but brings so much more life to the virtual world. You can open a door with your right arm slightly, just enough for you to peek inside and have your gun ready to terminate with you left, while you still hold the door with your right one, prepared to close it and protect yourself from danger. You turn cranks in panic, hoping for a door to open before some (beautifully rendered) freak gets you, cycling in the process between him, the door and the crank. Chances are you fumble in your haste to reload and drop the life saving mag you could not reload. I could also never resist the temptation to break glass whenever I had the chance. To watch it shatter piece by piece while I was trying to make an opening in for my grenade was a delight .The examples of this are many and it made me think that I hadn’t really noticed how classical controls lacked this continuity of motion and made these in-between moments of tension and discovery get lost between the cracks.
The remarkable thing all of this manages to do is make you reinterpret conventional video game syntax. It is indescribable how different the process feels, when you have to perform an action in its full capacity. It reinvents the basics, like walking, picking ammo, reloading, throwing, aiming a flashlight, lining a shot yourself, and even the tedium of looting. Raviging kitchen drawers and cabinets has never been this involving. Changing ammo isn’t a heedless press of a button, but a whole affair of reaching behind your shoulder to an imaginary backpack and performing the magic hat trick of pulling out not a rabbit, but a fresh clip. After that you have to manually cock the weapon to use it, which you often do and it never gets old.
The shooting is in the same vein, familiar and also different, enhanced by a witty gameplay addition on Valve’s part, very similar to the Gravity Gun in Half-life 2. The big deal with that weapon, despite that it was really cool to play with, was the use it made of the groundbreaking physics engine made for Half-life 2. In a similar stroke of pragmatic genius, they’ve replicated this in Alyx with the introduction of the Gravity Gloves. The VR realm is a great place to update this concept, because on one hand it provides a tool for you to experience the tangibility of the objects in the world while you zap them around; on the other hand, it swiftly deals with a problem the devs would’ve had, that is present in any normal shooter i.e the picking of ammo, or for that matter, everything else. In Alyx, you just extend your arm and beckon at the desired object (usually ammo) for it to soar in your direction. Before you know it, you already use it on the baddies and continue on your path of destruction. Could you imagine if you had to walk to every piece of ammo or collectible on the ground and bend over to pick it up? With the gravity gloves you avoid redundancy and insert a really fun sense of pace into the gameplay, which consists mainly of shooting stuff hither and thither.
It's enjoyable to face off against the headcrabs and their hosts, but the action shines once you have your first fight with enemy soldiers that can shoot back. As the synth and drums start blasting their beat, enemy fire becomes the supporting background music to the encounter. I land a couple of shots, but then duck behind a shielding concrete column and cower on my left knee, waiting for the enemy fires to cease. I pop up from my cover for a second, enough for me to squint an eye and headshot a dude, immediately after which I renew my safe position that's still getting shot at by the remaining soldiers. I giggle, imagining myself in my living room, hunched, playing pretend. It looks like a scene in a sci-fi movie that’s not even twenty years old, yet it’s my current reality and I participate in the outlandish scenarios people envisioned we’d have in the far future. Sure, it gets you a little dizzy if you play sessions longer than an hour and a half and you second guess your judgement of reality in the first moments you remove the headset, but it doesn't have the dystopian feeling I expected it to have. Instead, I’m engaged in a game, something that happens less and less in today's overblown mega budget titles and want to see what its systems can do.
It doesn’t take much time for me to fully roleplay while doing this. It's definitely not required, but it feels like such a shame if you miss the opportunity to do so; you have the tools to take so much out of this. The Combine militia enters the arena and I reach for safety. They open relentless fire on my position and stop me from moving anywhere. A grenade lands beside my feet, thrown by a frustrated soldier that can’t get to me. Escape is impossible due to enemy fire and death seems imminent. It’s out of reach, but I have a couple of seconds to get to it before the explosion proves fatal. The looney tunes bulb above my head lights up and I remember my trusty gravity gloves. I extend my arm and the speedily beeping grenade teleports in my grasp. The physics engine of the game creates a reliable realistic world and the intuitiveness of the controls invite you to test its limits and it’s so fun when you do and have your curiosity rewarded. I throw it back at them, which opens a window for me to escape. Later, they have me pinned down again and force me to crawl to my nearest cover. I frantically exit my shielding and shoot, then duck again several times. My health isn’t enough for me to stay in the dangerous open for long. I try to shoot blindly by bending just my wrist and pistol around the corner, while the rest of my body is still protected. I empty the entire clip and it seems in vain. I can’t tell if I got someone but the prospect of it was fun. I lay on my belly and press the stick forward, while moving my limbs like a crab, emulating the real life motion of crawling to escape the situation. I move intensely in real life and in the game and my heart is racing from the physical activity. Everyone, but an advancing heavy combine soldier is terminated. A remaining shotgun shell is my only ammo left available and I scour the surrounding for anything that can help me. I'm out of luck and wait for my demise with my last remaining drop of health. Like Trinity in the iconic scene in The Matrix, I wait flat on my back, both of my arms pointing at the space where I expect the grunt to appear to finish me off. His breathing and walking can be heard and is clearly getting closer. The intensity ramps up and I can feel the salt from my sweat dripping from my brow to my mouth. I'm frozen like this and starting to feel fatigue in my upper abdominal muscles because I’ve been contracted in this position for a while. The thumping gets louder and louder. I dare not blink, for I could miss the exact frame he appears to end me. As soon as his silhouette appears above me I blast him with my last remaining shell to save myself and continue on. If that ain't cool I dont know what is.
The biggest fault of the game is how uninteresting the plot and narrative are to the point that Alyx might not even classify as a game that has them. You just fuck around a lot to get MacGuffins and listen to people who give you instruction via comms. Not that different from it’s predecessors, but this one has a distinct lack of character and even semi-interesting writing. I doubt a single line of dialogue will affect you in any way. It’s easy to speculate that they deliberately made it this way in order to protect the ’’canon’’ of the Half-life universe by making a game that wouldn't make a dent in the overarching narrative. Is it because they didn’t want to alienate people that could not afford the hefty asking price of a game and whole system or was it due to fear that a bad experimental title would tarnish the legacy of the series. I personally couldn't care less but this franchise has zealous fans and Valve is aware of that. It’s a shame that they did not try more in this department, but in the end, it doesn’t bother me that much and I close my eyes to this just for the ending. So much else is at offer here, that it feels petty to critique.
All these descriptions I have given of the Alyx experience is to illustrate how special a step it is, if not the leap people fear it could be; it doesn’t work if it’s not in VR. I watched as my friends gave it a spin and it was boring as shit. It looked like any old game, or even worse, thanks to the inherent jankiness and silliness of titles made for VR. The shift in perspective is just untranslatable to normal screen based gaming. The success of this title is summarised in this quote by lead designer David Speyrer: ’’... yeah, we’d watering down the VR experience to try to do both at the same time, and as we explored the idea it just drove us in a place where the game became essentially VR, not just superficially VR.’’
With that core production philosophy Valve also crafted the epilogue. Right at the tail end of it, a final moment of interactability is presented to you. In a standard game, a press of a button would suffice, even if the physical action was the same. In Alyx, you have to do it yourself. Extend your arms and receive what is offered. As I was doing it, I felt the weight of action more and was awestruck again by the wit of it. This one moment made me excited for the future of VR and how a story might be told uniquely by this specific branch of gaming in the future. Hands off to Valve for that. It's insane that they put their chips on niche hardware that only bourgeois gaming royalty will be able to afford, made an exclusive twenty hour game for it that actually delivered both a worthy sequel to a beloved franchise and made a technological leap in history. It doesn't birth anything new, but brings a different perspective that shows what we had before in a different light and gives a glimpse of what we might have in the future. I can’t wait to find out what that is.

P.S the Jeff chapter rocks and the collapse of the Vault was one of the coolest things