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Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077

Dec 28

Resident Evil 3
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Aug 10

Battlefield 3
Battlefield 3

Aug 09

Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep Final Mix
Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep Final Mix

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Recently Reviewed See More

"Loving V"

Mascara drenched-tears and gunfire. In the end I just stuck the iron in my mouth, pulled the trigger.

As V and Johnny sat on the roof of Misty's Esoterica, their voices drowned-out in the noises of Night City, Cyberpunk pulls me away at last, removes us from subjectivity by panning the camera out of this digitally-stricken body and towards a wider angle of two trajectories mercifully coming to a stop - deciding they wouldn’t play the game anymore. “Cleanest, least bloody option” she said. My first-person absorption within the computer-game was hence wholly consumed, putting V in front of me in a way that felt true to the experience of playing 2077’s broken, shimmering jank, the achievement of ending one’s life making sense of both our acts of roleplaying; mine as a holistic, experiential avenue and hers as dramatic diegesis given shape through the only language video-games seem to understand well enough, that is, the accumulation - and ultimate bubbling - of violence.

Shit felt terrible, no questions about it, something of the unfinished and unachievable kind - the right kind of wrong for once, first-person shooting in the directness of your face, forever. Suicide is exhaustion given infinite form and no language to remedy it’s omnipresence - that's no easy sentiment to tease out of me and it sure as hell ain’t a virtual one but Cyberpunk did succeed and I do not mean it as just another rejection of failed ludonarrative ventures, though this particular ending does carry with it an air of disdain for your decision to not act out the blaze of glory-seeking bravado that’s meant to close out the story. But I was exhausted. The wild circle of Cyberpunk 2077 goes both ways; cornucopia as trash and trash as cornucopia. All the narrative swings and systemic inconsistencies that fed from the ugliness of the work's dangling bits and in turn shone back some of their own light to form genuinely unique video-game sequences that deserve to be examined and contextualized on their own, beyond the meme, formed a world alright. All of it was too much. I could not play a minute longer, had - many times - threatened to pull the plug on 2020's most wildly surreal corporate art experiment and so finally I did. Hit the proverbial Blackwall in a sense. The artificial prose and passes ruling on this empire of code could not - and then would not - accommodate my presence within their simulation. Doesn't matter how towering or complex, a simple data block which we fuel with credence for the time it takes to wrestle with its fictitious circuitry remains just that in spite of itself. V and I were simply tired of sharing this body - a veritable second Silverhand I had become -, me attempting to imbue her with an essence that was never really there in the first place whilst she roared and raged to stay alive for another day or another hour, to exist inside the megalopolis of the dark future whatever the cost.

In the middle of this mounting heap of conflicted desires lied an encounter producing atomic material. Proper character-moments and personal voids, dejected ones. Times like “Automatic Love” and times like Takemura. Enough of those will fry your brains out. Make sure I can never come back nor forget Night City. From my continuous first-person to theirs - a third vision, on top of that apartment complex, saying things but really saying nothing at all because nothing is left to be said. And they're just there. And then they're not. And in this split-second where the linearity of your decisions establishes itself - this shift where the verb “interact” becomes “witness” - you realize, or at least I did, that you felt (no, feel) a certain type of way about her. The choice - if ever there was one - had been made from the start; all I did was press the button in an honest mistake. Enough play, more flatline.

And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space,
hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames.
Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
Please, he prayed, now–”

Now the whole bathroom’s messed up and there’s vomit in the sink. Daddy is naked. Daddy’s blown a billion dollars down the drain in search of the ray-traced fields of yore only leaving third-degree burns in his wake. This is not a video-game-centric problem but Video–games are the medium. Two years later, Phantom Liberty brings me back. V is brought forward from the dead, still fucking unstable, still drawing me in and I’m thinking to myself “Now is the moment”. Brand new chain, brand new RTX. I’m back not out of Edgerunners-fever but perhaps plain naïveté, thinking that I knew a way out. I knew, at least, of the Tower, this new epilogue that would let my V live out the rest of her days in Night City free of Silverhand’s cancerous engram, a character somewhat damaged and reformed - so I cultivated a plan. If my first journey was to be defined by the game’s egregore, then my second outing would act as its negative. Let blights and blessings wash over V in equal measures, see where the world of Cyberpunk would take me this time. A descent into roleplaying. Towards-

A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
Now–”

A nowness. The septic tank of frame generation and path-tracing galore. Lights softly lashing out. A hundred paces into the grid. Immersion has always been at the heart of the 2077 project. A nowness, by which I mean the immediacy with which the game attempts to hold your attention and force you to engage with its world through the eyes of a digital construct. No computer software captures the push-and-pull of first-person like Cyberpunk which makes the failure deeper, almost more cutting. Soft games versus hard games - with 2077 in-between, attempting a hard act without the substantive arguments, building itself around a prefabricated fantasia of the subjective camera as this sort of all-encompassing dramatic cliché of immersion where the virtual gestures performed by V’s body are set and ordained through expensive cinematography instead of gameplay - draping itself in the robes of Deus Ex even as the meat falls off the bones to reveal an intense, almost angry focus on being a shooter first and foremost. It's that kind of teleguided rhythm which dictates the juiciest chunks of Cyberpunk's action-roleplay; a game that simply feels best when the gatling sings the cries of a thousand dead punk babies. And to these we add our faerie touch - a dialogue system skimming through flavour options as heavy stakes and lush set-pieces orient our gaze throughout CDPR’s theatrical exposé.

A nowness. When V shouts at the top of her lungs, when she’s desperately crawling her way out of a sky-wide hole. A nowness is when she touches another human being’s face, when she is touched and being looked at herself - which is why scenes like our intimate confession at Clouds or Aurore’s appearance in «You Know My Name» hit such a fever. In their paranoid arousal lies a sincere expression of the hardships that come with human interaction in our day and age of disembodiment; searching for closure in a sex club, going rogue, or better yet, cyberpsycho, all of us, together alone. There and now. V is not, in other words, a character who expresses herself a lot through violence at the hands of the controller. In order to stab/stealth we must suppress this desire to get closer to the world she inhabits - replace it with the utility of conflict-solving, which is not to say that this violence serves no purpose. It is the sensory-deprivation chamber, the numbness you feel after sleeping the day-off; this dream that despondency fed every time you took the elevator to the 8th floor of H10 and were met with an aesthetical fart on the telly or every time the core was laid bare, exposed by bugs and cogs - because, yeah, everything feels slow, sluggish in Night City, as if the interplay between V and her numerous points of acquisition never quite met their intended target and instead underlined the facade of the whole structure in a way that feels relevant to the text, a text, not the one Cyberpunk 2077 is writing but the one written about and around it, a game that’s more than a game, filled to the brim with dead things that pretend to be alive. Anything to feel something in this place removed - so why not a shotgun blast?

A nowness without which the text of Cyberpunk would feel half-superfluous in truth. Suicide doesn’t happen without these empty pockets of play. My V needed this violence, this dishonesty, for her death to make sense of it all. But my affection only happens in the game’s jello, in this space where play's internal logic is superseded by the outbursts of tactile production riches. Sequences like the Heist or the Chimera boss-fight - one of Phantom Liberty’s many highlights -, our countless segues into the city's underbelly as societal observations games were never really well equipped to answer in the first place but which 2077 tackles with surprising softness at times, punctuations in the routine of car rides and murder contracts; the lead in a detective story that’s always about touch - whether it's for pyrotechnical deluges or intimate reunions - at the end of the tunnel. A nowness - an entrapment. It’s all the same to V.

Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of palergray.
Expanding-- And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick,
the unfolding of his distance less home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity.

Sometimes I get so tense while playing games that I forget to breathe. My fingers tense up, just enough that the tendons jerk back a little but not enough that it actually hurts in the long run, intermittently gritted teeth ease their pressure every dozens of second or so to let me swallow a little and I lean forward from the back of my chair like anyone who’s ever lost the first two rounds in a LAN. What I am describing here is not the buildup of tension that hard games tend to inflict upon the player - there’s joy (and an exchange) happening in that trade of blows, I think. No, what this situation feels like to me is a voicelessness in the matter of the video-game. The game having and very much using its voice to suppress mine as an action that does not scream of authorial intent so much as it aims to render the player mute. This is what these worlds, in their openness, do to us. They bloat and gurgle most - if any - possibility for expression to emerge within their likeness - to impart a certain elasticity of being to the fiction and its characters. For play to go in more than one direction at a time and meet these undercurrents, make them integral parts of the text. Night City is different in that it’s aesthetically crude and conscious of what the city is to us (what drives the player to seek out its spectacle) yet, as the strongest - sometimes only - voice in play by virtue of its open-ended nature, it cannot let go of two conceptions essential to its successes ; an idea of the player as a set of neurotic impulses (which we are) drawn in parallel to its own view of itself as a space that both seeks and belies simulation. Peaceful cohabitation between Cyberpunk’s slew of systems was never on the cards and so the most salient question anyone can ask of 2077 isn’t whether it answers every political point of aesthetics that’s been ascribed - rather pointlessly - to the genre but instead see a translation of play’s tropes into an actuation of its game-world through the following question: Is Night City A Walkable Paradise?

Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America,
and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.

In one of my favourite early passages of Neuromancer, William Gibson describes a nowness. Through richly-textured streams of consciousness we get a glimpse of protagonist Case’s emotional ecstasy on the threshold between flesh and computer, a sort of strobe-lights reel akin to the religious experience of being visited by the Internet’s composite angel. This encounter with the world as perceived and rendered from our screens is the essence of Night City’s flash drive - that moment lived in the intersection, this longing that inhabits the mind and can only be met with an image of totality; every neon reflected in its corresponding surface, every aspect of reality densely explored by the weight of writing and asset-imprinted on the cornea itself. Baudrillard’s simulacrum realized. Night City is not a walkable paradise - it is a perceivable (video-game) one.

What I’m trying to get at is…we need an alternative. 2077’s rendition of the "natural world" is deeply moving to me in a way that most other games of that scale fail to achieve; a barren, unstimulating expanse of polluted desert and dry grass that acts in contrast to everything else in Cyberpunk and makes itself vibrant whereas Wild Hunt's impressionistic canvases of aerial pine forests and ravaged country roads felt synthetic because, this time, there's no artifice. I drove there once with no poetic ideal. There was just too much light everywhere else. Blood spilled on halogen. Repetition, often empty conversations. An absent escape. So I just took Jackie’s ride and blasted past the Stateline, as fast as I could, because I wanted to remain in the game whilst simultaneously wanting out of it. Ditched my motorcycle and started walking, breathing a little in the shadow of wind turbines as the scenery unfolded before me. I think that’s due to this want - at least on my side - for the game world to work. Something’s leaking through the grapevine. We come back to open-worlds not because of their quality but because we believe they might one day attain the true colour of reflection and surpass their fragile status as simulated environments - hence the rise of A.I. and infinite terrain generation pushing a hollow artistic envelope. In this case a pedestrian motion invites a sort of contemplative boredom that is vital to traversal. Why else, for example, would CD Projekt RED insist on adding a fully functional metro system to Night City, years after the fact? A nowness. I value games where walking doesn’t feel redundant. I value this stride towards play outside of ravenous incentives supposed to inform the wider context of the story the game's trying to tell instead of distracting me, as something that smells like games but only binds us to physical limitations insofar as they evoke something within us. This is the heart of Cyberpunk 2077 - the thing it’s reaching for. A game trying to use the framework in order to bypass it. Unlimited budget in the service of capital’s immersive production of a nowness within which players could nest themselves. What V embodies then in my eyes is this effort to push past “the new and improved meaning vacuums, where the only thing that mattered, and the only thing that players could rely on and relate to, were their own individual experiences” created by the contemporary sandboxed open-world. Why would we wanna leave? And isn’t that wish for immersion worth examining in itself? Despite what it does to a human heart?

Night City is not strong enough to hold down the fort. But in instances like the one(s) I’ve just described it’s stumbling, perhaps half-knowingly, into player-engineered but space-emergent resonances, and the people at CDPR - for all their evident lack of swagger - know that too. This time V didn’t kill herself. She just stayed there in the heat of perpetual summer, jumping over rock geometries, listening to SAMURAI on the radio for a while, before riding into the heart of the city one last time. I quit the game - left my player-character in a state unanswered - and got down to writing. There's so much more to life than this. But it’s also all there is. We're in it for the love of the game, for the slices of life - roleplaying for the briefest of moments, calling a dead friend's phone number, sharing a room with Judy for the night knowing full well the moment will pass, too. Pulling the trigger or, even, leaving Night City altogether. Whether V lives or dies and by which hands she chooses to do so matter equally because this fate is hers and hers alone, in that final pull-back of the curtains where we become mere observers of a story which - both by design and happenstance - never really belonged to us in the first place. It's impossible not to hold some regrets in departing from a perspective we willingly populated with our own thoughts and choices for so many hours yet becoming relevant to us at the exact moment agency stops being a factor. V walks - just not in the same city as us. Like this image of Reed at the end of Phantom Liberty drifting-off into the desert, towards the uncaring sun of empire. "Sand's fucking hot", V says. Burning at the proper temperature it will shrivel into new matter, becoming glass before scattering again like the ashen shards of a bygone mirror we glimpsed into in order to find her again.

A nowness

"And somewhere he was laughing,
in a white-painted loft,
distant fingers caressing the deck,
tears of release streaking his face."

Neuromancer, Chapter 3, William Gibson, 1984

[ATROPOS_SCOUT_LOG_#01]://“DualSense"

The drizzle of rain rippling through my fingers. Stone hearts pulsating, shocks to my system. A fog unending. This ain’t home but the place where I must be. The ghost of Sisyphus lost in a dark forest where the rivers run red with neon-blood at her feet.

This is not an ordinary planet. Everything wants [to kill] me. The worm-fed wolves and the speckled colossi uncoiling their endless garments of tentacles. Selene gets bashed into her suit by a biological blade. A slice, a bullet rainbow. Azure echoes, a scan. Soft waves washing over my palms, producing new images, forming a sense of space built on the past-pulled directions of Selene’s previous deaths - rubber-banded triggers and reflexes snatching at the pressure of our fingers, dashes across a yard of grass, concealing its cosmic horrors, gestating new ones, each loot chamber a tomb filled with little dilemmas like a gun or another gun or a malignancy that’s worth the bite it will inflict on your virtual corpse once the creeper’s been fed if only I could survive that long - come through the other side of the mirror not unscathed but changed, finally, freed from the kind of anxious death-drive repetition forces upon you with its binaries of risk and reward. The sepulchral horror of Returnal’s feedback loop isn’t so much the impossibility of our escape as it is the unveiling of desire’s deepest seat; Selene - and by extension the player - are exactly where they’re meant to be, embedded within this unbelievably tight system of dashes and haptics, movement mechanics that thankfully prioritize responsiveness over groundedness complimented by an array of weapons each embodying distinct ways of approaching and eradicating our outer demons in this inner hell - and god does it feel good to burst this Hollowseeker open, watch Ixion fold into a cloud of golden dust; to see polygons devolve by my hand and understand this information in the skin directly then commits the player to kinesthesia as a form of immersion in which Returnal refuses subjugation and offers a direct line of conversation with the text instead - the best rumblescape since Rez’s Trance Vibrator. I’d go one step further even : Atropos as a sexual device. Of parasites latching onto my arm and skin saturated in power-ups. Digital matter that burrows in my brain's DualSense, carries me over this teleporter and away. Pop the bubble bath. Selene crumbles like the feeble being of particles that she is before reappearing somewhere else. Another room, another reverberation, this time I fail miserably at dispatching the heretic Phrike but I’ll soon be here again no doubt, and if not here then perhaps up in this spire that festers into infinity, grinding the score, collecting poppy flowers, attempting to make sense of the frenzy of it all. Bared tendrils at the mere sight of me, so I respond in kind - they tear me to pieces, they send me under.

Hihi, Atropos.

-

[ATROPOS SCOUT LOG_#02] :// “DreamSequence

Her name was Echo and she made the mistake of helping Zeus succeed in one of his sexual conquests. Hera found out and punished Echo, making it impossible for her to say anything except the last words spoken to her. Soon after, Echo fell in love with Narcissus whose obsession with himself caused her to pine away until only her voice remained. Another lesser known version of this myth has Pan falling in love with Echo. Echo, however, rejects his amorous offers and Pan, being the god of civility and restraint, tears her to pieces, burying all of her except her voice. Adonta ta mete. [—Adonta ta… = “Her still singing limbs.”]”

- Chapter V, House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski

Between every crash, a vision. Dreams in cathode ray-tubes and ocean-memories leaking through [her] with each failed attempt, a corrosive force of time itself, a marriage happening in reverse. Days falling into darkness; back to the beginning. In that particular fold of forest green a house stands - stood - still. Upon entrance, on the left wall just before a flight of stairs resonates with unknown footsteps, there hangs, I remark, the wooden-carved face of a sun left alone long ago. My son. Her daughter. Someone else’s Pandora's box - the soft voyeurism of play as metaphor. If DualSense’s intent was to obfuscate, to render tenuous and tactile the delineation between player and character then the house serves an opposite function - it sings with echoes, granting my poor astronaut the corporeal presence she so desperately craves in order to grasp the dream sequence and tear this body away from me. In her first-person perspective, at last, a new symbolic layer of reality touched in artifacts. Each passage through the house's pristine innards bores new holes in the narrative whilst grounding Selene in a larger picture of Returnal as an object both about her and itself - incapable of escaping its own maze of contradictions. But it's never enough. For me, for her. Even in death the proverbial rug is pulled from under us; to end her life on Earth means the same for Selene as it does on Atropos. We never escaped. And in this realization something shifts in our perception. Biomes of meaning begin to coalesce as crimson wastes become fractured and composed again, a ruin overgrown no longer and instead echoing our knowledge of design, confronting it to that of a decaying specter - except there's no one to race against but ourselves, frolicking in lasered flesh, taking a certain pleasure in charting that tract of scorched earth turned calcified snowmetal, in knowing that the planet glances back at us with every variation of its arcade terminologies. Sometimes on the ground you find a music box. Couple of omens, couple of tunes. Suddenly Returnal shrinks - and then expands. This planet is real, I’m convinced of it and the more Selene remembers, the more she seems to forget. I was lost in a forest once but now, it seems, I am trapped at the bottom.

Smile, Atropos.

-

Further journal entries will be added, in due time.

You wish this ladder had a song. But who is left to write it?

A Ground Zeroes flick acting in reverse; punishment instead of extraction. Delicious cruelty. The prisoners hide in their nowhere bunkers with guards patrolling their cramped steel corridors like the automatons that they are whilst you stalk each one relentlessly in order to absorb their essence - behind this metal mask, the byproduct of industrial gears and dead stars, a computer left to run alone in a dark room.

In the end nobody will be left to watch the execution.