I don’t really have too much to say about Snatcher by itself, and what I do have to say about it is in relation to another game that I’ve been writing a “review” (read: book length essay) on for about 6 months, so I’ll put a few points below on small things I think about Snatcher:

- Game designers have really only recently, en masse, started to actually reckon on what their interplay of systems allowances and object interaction do to create meaning when colliding in an environment that exports the same ideas of commodification and exploitation that occur in reality. What a player is able to do when interacting with the environment in games runs a commentary on what the developers consent to as flavour or storytelling hutzpah, as well as what they consider viable as a character portrait through interaction of their cast. Explicitly what I’m saying is this - 2B climbing a ladder and the player being able to jam a camera up her ass shows what Takashi Taura thinks, or at least assents to agreeable commodification, about the function of looking in a game and the reasons for looking, at least in part, when in a game; similarly, Resident Evil 4 having Ashley (at least in her non fetishized outfits) demurely bunch her skirt when the player directs Leon’s gaze at her is lampshading the idea of the player’s impulses interacting with Leon and Ashley’s interactions. They both as games have hard programmed textual abilities to conform the reality of simulated approval, and physical law generated within a framework, of objectification that considers the objectification of real life women which has reinforced the desire to do these things in game, and have both fallen on sides of that being cosmically approved of by dint of manufacture. Kojima, for all his faults, seems to want to avoid this type of implicit approval. Kojima, because of his faults, apparently thought this type of system interaction should be made explicit instead, and so created a verb that lets you smell every woman in this game.

- For a game that is in no way original as it draws from its sources of inspiration - which in itself is charity towards the idea of inspiration; in would be no hyperbole to simply call Snatcher the lowest rent Blade Runner one can imagine - it’s a bit surprising to feel like the beats of the story are in themselves freeform developed from the minor tweaks of internal logic to the Snatcher reality of humanity that differs from Scott’s Los Angeles. While Kojima, deftly, doesn’t try to entangle his writing with any of the weight or gravitas of the existential inquiries that Decker and Batty are forced to consider, so the actual progression of character takes a backseat to the Dashiell Hammett style plotting that causes realisations instead of reckonings, he Kojima does have a path for his characters that mostly adhere to the differences of his cyberpunk future instead of the similarities it shares with the more foundational one. Whether or not this borderline Cold War propaganda fares better than it would have had it more openly cribbed the themes instead of the iconography is up to your take on how Hideo has handled weighty ideas in his career.

- I like shooting game. I think it makes sense within the world and allows for some actually quick gameplay in a game that is weighed down by looking and investigating everything 10x before allowing progression

- The sprite work is pretty marvellous; if they ever re-released this game, I would love to see most of the character models and backdrops kept the same in grandeur with only a bit more movement and texture added for parallax.

Reviewed on Jan 31, 2023


2 Comments


1 year ago

there's no apostrophe in "Finnegans Wake"

1 year ago

thank you for both correcting me and perfecting the quixote