“Is this what other video games are like?” was my girlfriend’s only response after we finished this. It’s the first game she’s beaten that wasn’t on the Nintendo Switch.

Like many people around the world, coronavirus made her into a gamer - a combination of lockdown boredom and watching me play video games every single day of the week convinced her to find out what all the fuss was about. She’d played plenty of Mega Drive and PlayStation as a child, but, like most normal people, fell away from the hobby when school, sex and other pressing responsibilities began to take hold.

The Nintendo Switch is, of course, the ideal console for re-introducing someone to the world of video games - capital-G Gamers may rankle against Nintendo’s minimalist UI for dummies, baby-friendly options and softly-softly in-game tutorials, but watching a newly-minted member of our organisation come to grips with gaming via Nintendo’s safe, friendly little ecosystem makes it undeniably clear what The Big N are up to when they remind you that “A” means “Jump” 10 hours into Super Mario Galaxy. A twenty-second irritation for you is a life-saving clarification for someone who still has to hold the controller up to their face to read the buttons.

Within 18 months, Nintendo has gradually guided my girlfriend through the worlds of Animal Crossing, Super Mario Odyssey Captain Toad, Bowser’s Fury and many other great wee games, eventually climaxing in her getting a near-100% completion stat on Breath of the Wild last week. Unfortunately, as the daily blood-thirst for Yet Another Nintendo Direct proves, Nintendo only make so many games - even for more laid-back fans - and my girlfriend has near enough run the Switch’s first-party well dry.

Which is where the Xbox Series S comes in - while peering through pop-ups and paywalls at countless click-baiting “Best 2021 Games” lists to find new things to enjoy, we found that a lot of interesting stuff that appealed to us - Sable, Forgotten City, Psychonauts 2, Twelve Minutes - were heading straight past the Nintendo Switch and only coming to Xbox and PC. While I have a pretty good PC that could reasonably play all these games, I would never willingly subject a human being I care about to PC Gaming. So we bought an Xbox Series S instead.

In many ways, the Series X|S is the Switch’s antithesis, for worse and for better - a confusing smorgasbord of hardware options that are laser-focused on performance and deeply-integrated online components, with a homescreen that relentlessly bombards you with options, adverts and other worthless media tiles - it’s genuinely amusing that a games console hides its video games in a sub-menu that sits alongside Disney+ suggestions (when you haven’t even downloaded or enrolled Disney+ on the console!) and adverts for games you already own within said sub-menu. Needless to say, starting an Xbox game can be a daunting task for anyone who’s used to just pressing the power button and clicking on a big picture of the game they want to play. Between my “””smart””” TV and the Xbox, I now have to run a gamut of broken advertising just to play a little bit of Blast Corps in glorious 4K. The next generation of gaming is here, folks!

The Series S would be an outright contemptible little device if Microsoft hadn’t essentially mastered their ability to give console players a comfortable PC-like experience of near-infinite diversity in near-infinite combinations, all from the comfort of a controller. This thing has the best multi-generational compatibility of any console I’ve ever owned - surpassing even the mighty Nintendo DS and O.G. PS3. It’s confounding/astounding that I could, technically, if I really wanted, sign in to a workplace Teams call on a device that simultaneously allows me to swap between Halo 2, Daytona USA, Symphony of the Night and Halo Infinite. I could give my daily team brief using a Turtle Beach headset plugged into an Xbox controller while playing Conker’s Bad Fur Day, if I really wanted to! Does anyone want that? I don’t think so, but Microsoft have made it possible, for some reason! The next generation of gaming is here, folks! (If you can play Microsoft Teams on an Xbox console, does that technically qualify it for inclusion in the Backloggd archives? I’d love to read those Top Reviews.)

On a console that neatly demonstrates many of the things that make playing modern video games a surreal Kafkaesque nightmare, Twelve Minutes is more or less a perfect package of everything that’s shit about those video games themselves: repetition of mindless tasks; the banal trial-and-error dragging-and-dropping of [USE] [ITEM] [OBJECT] that has plagued adventure gaming for three decades; trying to click on things that are too small; clicking on wrong things and having to slowly watch wrong things unfold; watching polygonal automatons walk slowly to their destination; watching polygonal automatons bump and jerk against and around each other; watching clunky plot unfold at sub-iceberg paces; watching accomplished actors of stage and screen recite from torn-out pages of school play dialogue; hearing that same dialogue again, and again, and again on your way back to the destination of your next clunky plot point; cognitively-dissonant clashes between gameplay and narrative; and, of course, one of video gaming’s most reliable staples - unnecessary, senseless and gratuitous violence against defenceless women.

A game about a police officer exploitatively wielding his authority to prey on a woman in myriad horrific ways is never gonna come out at the “right” time, but playing Twelve Minutes in the ongoing moment of the Sarah Everard case feels so sickeningly sour. It’s morbidly impressive how quickly the game lets you watch a woman get handcuffed and choked out. It’s even more impressive how quickly the game gives you unprovoked player-driven options for violence against your own wife! The next generation of gaming is here, folks!

Early on in Twelve Minutes, “a prestige mystery-thriller timeloop game” (Annapurna Interactive press release, 2021), we realised you can grab a knife and stab your wife while she sits on the couch reading a book. Don’t worry gamers! We had to do it to gain more precious intel about a pocket watch that helps move the mystery along! It’s wholly justifiable woman-murder! There’s a mystery to solve! When we worked this part out, there was no “aha!” moment that usually comes with solving a puzzle in a video game. Just an instinctive revulsion of “do we have to do this?” - and not in an introspective, meaningful way, like, say, that fateful R2 press at the end of Snake Eater. Just a pained, mindless “ugh” while dragging the knife to the wife. A far cry from turning into a funny little jumping cabbage to collect power moons in Super Mario Odyssey. Video games provide infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

Nonetheless, we persisted on the assumption that the game would address its own inhumanity in pursuit of a greater goal or message. It’s a “prestige” game, after all! This is the kind of high-calibre gaming that only the next generation of video games hardware can provide! Of course, it never did - Twelve Minutes is never interested in examining itself, even though it has all the endlessly looping time in the world to do it. Another example within the prior example - American Husband (Scotland’s James McAvoy) resists the player’s first suggestion to carry out the act of wife-stabbing with a weak-willed “No…” refusal before capitulating on the second attempt. What does that mean, really? I hoped the game was taking a page from Deltarune’s playbook by suggesting that the player and the player-controlled husband were distinct entities in the Twelve Minutes world, but alas - we already established that this game is a portrait of every blemish and pimple on the face of video games. There’s no space for interesting thoughts here! Ignore that cheap gesture in the general direction of drama and get back to stabbing your wife! You need to stab her to get The Facts! You’ll be absolved of your crimes on the next loop anyway.

Fortunately, the game’s incoherent and incompetent tone often comes to your rescue whenever it forces you to do something rotten. Immediately after shanking his wife (for the third time) for having the temerity to read a book on the couch, we commanded our witless hero to sit down and eat his chocolate mousse. He remarked on how tasty it was, then read a book on the couch with his dead wife, behaving more like an auto-piloting Sim than a Serious Protagonist. It was a very good bit of morbidly dissonant ludo-narrative giggling, and a rare moment of joy in a game that is trying so very hard to be mature. Remember the Groundhog Day montage where Bill Murray trial-and-errors his way around diners and offices? All those bits in Edge of Tomorrow where Tom Cruise bit the dust in increasingly sadistic and silly ways? Weren’t they fun! No room for that here. We’ve got women to kick in the ribs!

I’m not opposed to video games and other artworks depicting our ugliest inhumanities, but I feel like it has to be to some meaningful end. Twelve Minutes is so obsessed with presenting itself as maturely as possible that it ultimately comes off as immaturely meaningless as it possibly could - no amount of prestigious acting credits or allusions to brutal murder and rape can save it from coming across like a Christopher Moltisanti spec script. Like a corny mafia movie, Twelve Minutes lets you watch a woman get punched, kicked, choked and stabbed - again, and again, and again, and again, and again (Achievement Unlocked, by the way!) until you’re bored. Then it’ll introduce something about incest, for some reason. The perfect introduction to the world of video games beyond Nintendo’s borders. The next generation of gaming is here, folks!

Brigador is an unfolding tactical lotus that is always hiding something. At first, it hides unit types, and weapon synergies, and lore, and those other kinds of mechanical things. Once those mechanical things are exhausted, Brigador begins to unfold how it's supposed to be played. There are suggestions, ideas, a "feel" of an intended gameplay experience, but Brigador continuously removes smaller and smaller training wheels and begs the player to ask "Okay, but what if I just full fucking send it?" with a wider and wider spreading of mechapunk murderdeath. Every time you thing you've found Brigador's intention, the lotus opens again and you realize you could have been doing better the whole time.

With this in mind, the game is built not to be a mecha twin-stick shooter, or a tactical stealth game, but as a sandbox. Brigador is a sandbox with a very specific kind of sand in a very specific kind of box. Can you only build the biggest sand castles with quiet, tactical, high-risk, and high-precision stealth builds? Yes. But as long as it involves shooting robots in 3ish dimensions, you can spin Brigador to make it happen.

Brigador's constant lotusing and unfolding start buckling at higher difficulties, though, and it can only go so far. The 'correct' way to play Brigador is whatever way is the most fun, but the 'best' way is stealth. While this has no meaningful consequence in Freelance (due to how silly payout scaling is with certain pilot/vehicle combos), it's hard to cope with in Campaign mode. Is that a skill/personal issue? Mostly, yes, but it also means the later you get into the campaign a player gets, the more the game zooms in on high-risk low-reward stealth play. It's not a terrible place to end up in; Brigador always has an undercurrent of tactical stress. There's simply a loss of player expression in the later campaign that the rest of the game doesn't struggle with.

So much internet culture and entertainment has roots in this game, and even now I can understand how I'd be so impressive, but also this game is mid.
The world and campaign of HL2 is so strong, so much of the game feel desolate and hopeless. Gordan Freeman really is a messiah for what he'd accomplished in a few days when every outpost and cache made by the resistance is either skin and bones or filled with death. Your trek is filled with stops and starts of needing to clear a narrow path against an overwhelming force. Or at least until the end where out of nowhere the resistance rises in just a week and overthrows City 17.
And with the main writing and direction there's the massive weight of being a 20 year old game. So many of the things that would be impressive like vehicles and physics puzzles seem cool until they end up tedious or jank. Another thing is that there's only like, 4 enemy types. Yes many of them function differently, but the game only really having Combine, Head Crabs, and Zombies alongside other miscellaneous things makes a ton of encounters boring. This is probably the worst in the last chapters of the game when you're running around a grey city fighting waves and waves of Combine with the only exceptions being repetitive rocket launcher fights. There are more boss enemies in then game and set pieces, but it really feels like the budget and smoothness of the game dropped out at the last minute.
Looking into the development of Half Life 2, I can kinda get why that is with a different build being leaked and them restarting development along with advancements in the larger industry making games like these quaint. But also, I don't think there's enough meat here for me compared to the other shooters I've played.

Innovative but also toothless as it relies on smug meta-commentary to get across its theme of the malleability of bodies in the video game medium. Something that is bound to date itself real quick as this angle is one of the most overplayed ideas in games. Its central gimmick becomes tired by game's end BUT makes for some really effective moments of genuinely badass excitement. Cannot deny its a very well crafted experience with an eye for acute visual detail and sound design. The best kind of minimalism, as it strips down FPS tropes down to its minute essence. Can't say I loved it but I admire what it does and I see great things for the studio with whatever they have coming next.