Down the sinews of memory lane again.
You have this spirit caught in a tree in the Whispering Hillock that utters : "A mare, wild and free...In meadow's pasture caught...Dark as a bottomless well...Black as the depths of night...Such a beast, no other." It's one of the best moments of the game. The whole quest smells like putrid devotion, with a love for language old and profane. Instances like these are when you truly understand how enamoured Wild Hunt is with speech and its intricacies, the way it can flood back and forth between rustic tongue twisters and theatricalities. This, to me, is the draw, at all times, in a game such as Wild Hunt.
But words are precious things and a story like this one always has too many of 'em. In the process of playing a videogame, of sitting at the desk for hours on end - consuming swathes of informations even in the most restrained of environments - we tend to fuse with it. A mouse movement becomes a handy one / You learn how to instinctively use the array of systems at your disposal. Ease of play ; you ride through the mechanics, swinging your sword aimlessly before picking up a thousand little materials that you can never grasp anyway. Then you press A to have your horse get you to the next dialogue. Imagine bearings of all places in a fantasy setting - but let's say for a second that it's the point, because it is effectively the point. Speeches of all shapes and sizes are Wild Hunt's way of framing the moments, big and small, that tend to make or break our experience. You don't necessarily remember the time you looted a Witcher's grave but you do remember setting up a stage play with your best friends at the end of the world. Speeches, short and long, are Wild Hunt's way of conveying theme. Of manifesting (and maybe even warping to the extent of our choices) the text. Wild Hunt, as it happens, has a lot of thoughts on human nature. On society. On being a father - every ten hours of gameplay or so.

But in these moments all I really care about is Johnny the Whiterun guard that told me about the arrow once lodged in his knee. What gets me thinking - what got all of us thinking in truth - is just how common of a name Johnny was in Northern Tamriel and how many arrows seemed to be flying, daddyless and unsupervised, around Skyrim's terrain.
This interaction is revelatory to me.

Because the more you play Wild Hunt and the more you realise that its open-world is full of Johnnys. Because what I need to know about Phillipe Strenger is not a façade reproduction of abuse or some kind of temporal puzzle that would allow me to solve the riddle of his humanity.
I don't care about the how, only the why. Why did you take up arms in war ? Why did you choose that woman ? Why did you no longer choose her ? Why why why. And in the absence of answers to this question, a movement then, something to bend me towards the videogame.
It's like, I could never trust someone whose favourite game is The Stanley Parable. It's not about whether The Stanley Parable is good or bad. It's about It being a game of hows and ways. Of metatext for the sake of the metatext - so just a text, then.
Wild Hunt is a game that asks the Skyrim soldier the circumstances of his crippled knee, but rarely why he wanted to venture the wildernesses in the first place. And I think that's preposterous.

One of my favorite lines in the Whispering Hillock goes as follows :

"It is done already...
It cannot be undone.
There are no roads...
To Aard Cerbin."

This is the pIace. Somewhere beneath the veneer. I wish we could go there. Leave the boring social apparatus to the kings and the elves and instead chase a wilder one. Be explorers, adventurers of strange forces beyond Geralt's comprehension. Actually, I'd just wish I could feel his body, his thoughts sometimes incorporated in play or dialogue variances. But I'm always away - away from men, from him - and decidedly following foot-tracks to learn the name of a killer when all I really needed to know was the shape and colour of their favourite dagger.

Resident Evil 6 is the theater of goop.
Here be the sludge that stirs across the surface! Imagine not being able to tell the difference between tar and honey ?

"What's good for you is good for me."

This is not a rehabilitation letter. Six will be buried if necessary, never to be talked of again now that we've got another virus on our hand. New alphabet ; one Wesker for a Birkin. Turncoat Redfields, fake Adas but more importantly, hot people. People on topic, at the cutting edge of any given threat. Videogame protagonists for videogame times, with three fingers on the trigger while a glance back affords us a little breather. It's still our franchise, right sir ? Biohazard moves forward because Resident Evil never can.

Two things have been sitting at the back of my mind while playing this mess : On the one hand you have the release of Resident Evil 4's HD Project 1.0 version - a work of restoration so thorough that Jacob Geller already dedicated a whole video to it - and on the other you've got swirling reports of CAPCOM's very own attempt to resurrect the golden child once again by (among other things) drawing inspiration from the infamous 2003 castle demo. I'm excited. Curious! A little chained to the peerless promise of next-gen frights ; man with hook is the verb, an absurdly new one to wield in this here place and house. It's like we're circumventing the whole Village just to go back to the source material. Modernity is overrated anyway and I want my cookie moody instead of soaked in the era of greys and beiges - but what greys and beiges! See the thing about Resident Evil 4 is that I don't want to play it again. It's cliché to call something modern, especially within the context of a specular videogame canon, but Four is the Shit and everyone knows it. It's just that blatant. Now what we do with that notion is at our own discretion but the fact is this rift no one has been able to close ever since. Of course I'd wanna be back there, spoil the ancestors. Resident Evil is not "special". But we like it enough to have turned the monster into a cultural touchstone. I see the stone and it's oozing sludge. I touch it and the wet grips me. Let us all recess in this pandemic together. I have never been more invested in discovering the refreshed polygon count of a dog in my whole life.

Sometimes this craze - this hopelessness, really - pushes me to reevaluate things in a pseudo-scholarly gesture of boredom. My brain is inherently wired to go down rabbit-holes, draw cosmic lines of meaning between points of interests that don't even intersect at the most obscure of angles ; and sometimes the line leads me to take patience with a title and meet it on its own terms completely. Embrace the fire and awkwardly march towards my own doom. Welcome to Racoon City 6.

There's an ugliness at play that is key (I think) to share some sort of commonality with a game like Resident Evil 6. I don't mean basking in a rotten decor or giggling at the prospect of seeing the burning car rolling-on down the hill. This I don't care about - bad is important and insightful but ultimately I'm a sucker for beauty and grace. When I use the term "ugly" to describe Resident Evil 6 I mean it not in the aesthetic sense but as an "aesthetical marker", better yet an "aesthetical touchstone" of the material. Because the words that kept popping back in my head as I fucked around this globe of bioweapons were Michael Benjamin Bay. The glory of Bay's entire body of work has always lied in how ugly his film were. They're cynical, nihilistic, nothing-of-a-project ideas envisioned as pornographical and commercial in nature. Bay is a storyteller - a damn fine one at that - but he is also a fundamental nonbeliever. Because of the formless ideological void that shapes his stories some of his most potent visual ideas often don't mesh well with each other and end up resonating more strongly across separate films (this is why his disregard for bodily sanctity has never been more vibrant than in Transformers or how the upcoming dream that is Ambulance looks to be one of his most syncretic works yet). In the eyes of Bay, our earthly decor has long been an anti-matter for humans where only his gaze deems objects and shapes worthy of examination. And of course to him, serpentine camera motions and explosions are the only lifeforms worth maintaining in the end. An America for the people, without the people.

"No Hope Left" is the tagline of Resident Evil 6 through and through. Everything about it is guided by this thematic zeitgeist, pushing our heroes to go through the motions of a game that can't stop, won't stop. Ever. Six's economy is watered-down, uninterested in subtle mood swings. It's relentless. Always on a "have some more attitude" and unwilling to part with that drive for the sake of play conventions. Hence it's impossible to view it as a singular suite or some supersized block of ideas because to do so would require some type of body-beacon to illuminate the reason of its existence. A humane garble that would cut through the horde ; or put it another way, what Ed Smith once referred to as "the headshot". Resident Evil 6 is profoundly, explicitly anti-headshot, not just from a gameplay standpoint but also from an ideological perspective. This world is a hydra-state that solely follows the flow of bullets from one country to the next. Any attempt to make a narrative out of this conflict fails once you realize the game exists in this persistent state of in-medias res, the kind where every second is spent in disbelief of what the developers decided to throw at you. I play Resident Evil 6 and ask myself "How ?"
That is not the mark of mediocrity, that's just a dog chewing at its own leg and liking it.

But anyway, a world without people, without zombies, really, without monsters even - or without time to properly explore their effects on a consistent metagame. The lifeforms that CAPCOM deems worthy of exploration here are harder to identify than in any other title in the series. Leon's campaign, for example, does a decent job of setting up this framework of bravado - slipping and sliding and kicking interwoven by bouts of excellent QTE work - I'd hoped would be further expanded later only to be thrown off the deep end by Chris and the boys. Only Resident Evil 6 would be so foolish (so brave) as to orchestrate close-quarters rocket battles...I hate this campaign, because it's the one that gets the closest to this idea of "bad" I referred to earlier. Nothing can be gained from its furious exchanges, every encounter deserving of a crass and finicky dissection no one would walk away from with their sanity intact. Like drigo said to me one evening "It's impossible to tell whether or not they thought about [any given idea] for longer than 5 min." This is the theme of Resident Evil 6 more than anything else, and it occasionally leads to beautiful meanderings into what I call this theater of goop.

Goop is mush. It's fluid, indistinct but mostly is the state of games with an ambivalent bond to genre. Attachment to genre is the reason of Six's whole identity crisis because its understanding of the word is so gleefully malleable, as if 600 employees at CAPCOM deduced that ambiance only consisted of shadows on the wall and Nemesis could just be airdropped into warzones unscathed (as if this "space" had nothing to do with “those” bodies). Genre is when an object with this many ambitions is so aggressively "of the market" by way of gesturing to western audiences while imagining that it could be anything other than profoundly "Resident Evil". There's no easy answer here ; Six doesn't lend itself to any kind of catharsis, even ten years later, passionately playing it does not assuage the shortcomings of its mechanics/level-design in the face of king shit like Resident Evil 4 even as its highest highs invoke a sense of return to Spain - not by way of knife-play this time but through a kick-and-slide metagame that, if it could, would reject any notion of the necessity of firearms to fight bioterrorism - while its many artistic inconsistencies prevent me from loving it from afar. This theater has no sense of place tying the frame to some shared space with the player ; no stage upon which to string ourselves along or spectatorship at hand to reassure us, there's just the linear play, the consistency of our need for business in the face of explosions that run mud-caked in radioactive blacks and yellows. Resident Evil 6 can't be denied.
Leave exhausted or don't come at all.

In the absence of resolution, I'll make up my own lie.
I think I have an idea of what this game is and it all comes from a very specific point in Jake and Sherry's campaign I like to call the four doors of the Ustanak.

The four doors of the Ustanak are a set of precisely 4 (four!) metallic military-grade doors you need to open with your partner one after the other at the end of a chase with our resident Nemesis. Throughout Six doors are a huge component of the environment, whether bashed-through with a partner or careful half-opened in anticipation of the next threat. But this set is special. You go through each one of these thresholds - themselves divided in a two-part ritual, first unlocking the valve and then opening and closing the door behind us - only to find yourself in the presence of another one of Chekhov's gun - here taking the form of a huge drill-tractor which we promptly hijack in order to retaliate. What ensues is one of my favorite moments of the game as Jake and Sherry proceed to ram the Ustanak through each of the doors in reverse order all the way to mountain rock. Beyond the absolute insanity of making us go through four successive instances of Quick-time-event handywork as if drunk on its contraptions I think this sequence holds the key to understanding just how much the game wishes to be noticed and engaged with at the most basic level of play, repeating patterns to better nuke them out in front of our eyes. It’s not so much the individual chain of motions composing it that endeared me but rather their absurd repetition, the belief that this was what the game required at this point in time and space. Contrary to Bay this ugliness at work is exactly what draws the game away from cynicism and into unknown territories ; whereas he makes engines of fatigue that serve the disintegration of everything human in his frame, Resident Evil 6 is pushed forward by this notion that aesthetic destruction will make a live beast out of moments of desperation.

Leon and its companions are not actors of their own lives - and neither are we there - but Six offers the distant possibility that maybe, just maybe, if one keeps on kicking and sliding in this world where every door is screaming and death-drive feels indistinguishable from survival we could be heard someday, somehow.

Helluva manifesto this.

Death is so easy in videogames. We flow through it - make it mundane - in order to experience the editing process of our playthroughs, shedding layers to further reach a win-state. The summer is coming to a close and sometimes I can't be arsed to play Dark Souls again so I boot up games that just lend themselves to us, perfectly understandable and playable in every aspect. Death's Door is something like that. It's difficult to attack smoothness. You just run your hand on it and slip. But it's sweet. You do it again. Until you find yourself one night having finished the game to near completion in the ten hours that you had to spare somewhere between now and the outside noise.

The older I get and the more difficult I find it to deny the pleasures of "relaxing" games. The last time I refused myself like this was probably A Short Hike. If games are to be put on the same pedestal as other art forms - as they should, sometimes, as they won't, fortunately - then we have to acccept that they too must reflect a vastness and breadth of experiences larger than our own limited scopes. The human experience, baby. Not every game is meant for y'all and accessibility is important. Representation matters. Sometimes a game is just a game. Each one of these statements is "factually" (meaning morally) correct.

To say that I felt nothing while playing Death's Door would be factually wrong. The art, the music, the story, the difficulty, the secrets and mechanics all blend together in the primordial goop of "goodness". The only thing was that for a game named Death's Door, it doesn't contain much if any death at all. Your dodge/attack window is generous and unburdened by consequences as you don't loose any souls for failing your progress. Eventually you kill the Big Bad, Lord of Doors, Committer of the Greatest Sin in all of Videogames : To be a Gatekeeper.

You break the cycle. Freeing yourself from the bondage of serfdom, you live the rest of your days surrounded by your community of crows - wholesome reapers now without jobs. You embrace Death, without having ever truly grazed it in the first place. You beat the game.

It's my fault and not the game's for asking all these questions. Game doesn't care. Game just requires to be played - or better yet, observed. I, for one, am just grumbling. But like I said I didn't have a bad time with Death's Door. I did, after all, finish the damn thing. It might come as a surprise to some that I adore videogames - there's no trick to that. I'm enamoured with their worthlessness. They rarely make me raise an eyebrow, but then again they so often do. Death's Door makes sure that I can detect every part of itself. That I can wholeheartedly play it to bear witness and remember fondly on the time a Pothead Knight asked me if I wanted some soup. Or when a mindflayer latched onto me for a midnight quest.

My favorite part of Death's Door actually came after the game. The Dead Lord leaves a key to a Rusty Belltower that calls forth a night on the whole map. The music ceases along with the enemies, leaving room for an endgame made of missing shrines and stone tablets. I don't care much for true platinums and epilogues. But here's a terrain suddenly emptied in a quiet, serene levels that I can walk through to the sound of owls, no longer forced to engage much or activate my facilities as a gamer in order to progress. I've earned this, have I not ?

Mindful practices. Games should never be nice. They can be devoted, hearthrobbing or even joyful but never nice. What's the use of nice ? What functions does nice serve and how do you feel once niceties have been applied to you ? By you ?

Kindness, now here's the real kicker. The hard one. The one that requires commitment. Kindness requires sacrifice. Kindness - to their player, to themselves - is something videogames often prove incapable of handing. And yet we talk in the language of care, of inclusivity and adjectives. Of hyperbole. Death's Door is not a social justice game but it sure is a progressive one. This review could have been about any number of games but I chose Death's Door because its essential narrative boils down to that : The system can be undone if you embrace change to the song of old flutes and nice dungeons. Convenient ones. It's important to accept the inevitability of your own death xx. I write these words and they're probably read as highly irritated. But the truth is I'm mostly typing them in a pout. Dark Souls didn't die for this shit. I don't mind the fancy aesthetics. For example there's this game called Going Under that, while a little blunt, perfectly captures the hellscape of wholesomeness. Of saying things while not really saying anything at all. The contained chaos of that thought alone. What happens then is that the conversation ends and everybody goes home having played "a really good game".

It's not everyday Maximalist Country in this hoe. Sometimes a game is just a game, I know. But that's a little disappointing, isn't it ?

The boy is innocent. The boy is cruel. The clock is ticking and we are moving ever backwards.

The more I play INSIDE the less I understand it. The journey remains the same but the drama, the order, the sequence of facts and events leading me towards this beach keeps shifting in my head. Forest. Factory. City. Center. Conspiracy. Factory. Forest. City. The pig?

The pig is the first time I sensed danger within the boy. So far violence had only come from one side – foreground pushing against background, my corner of the screen under constant assault by hostile forces. But then you get to a barn. You put shapes through the grinder and the game plays a joke on you by revealing that it was in fact, merely, hot air. Moving. But then you progress a little further and there’s holes in the dead. The pig runs ceaselessly after you until it can’t anymore and a thread is pulled. Now it’s barely alive but you need its frame to move forward, to take control of the others.

I recently played the game with my little brother who kept referring to them as “veggies” first, before they themselves become engines of control, from which point on it was “the hanged men”. By putting our collective bodies on the line we become a voice for the voiceless. A King of limbs that can barely moan may nonetheless surge and thrive.

You can never discount the pleasures of INSIDE. Of watching this little skeleton getting blown to bits by a soundwave, teleported to start when the camera's done dwelling on its physics, succeeding this time because we've been here before, many ways actually and none of this matters but the ragdolley motions of the boy display not just an urgency of flesh but also clear playfulness, his turns a little too high-heeled and televised to reflect their imparted violence - he puts on a hell of a show for someone who never talks, doesn't he ? That is not to say the boy is without words but his language is plain and practical, never crossing beyond what the game requires of him which is to say a few actionnables verbs of command. Run. Jump. Grab the box and then break the necks of a few employees as we crash through the ceiling of this life-sized diorama. Everyone of us, complicit in unassisted murder.

.

Limbo was a sham because it refused to say something of its greatest moment - the spider. To make a fairytale you need to recognize the taint that's shared the moment a story is put into the world. INSIDE has many legs - many "spider moments" - to pull us astray but it consciously decides to cast its support to the boy in all instances. That's not just a matter of gaze, it has to do with every facet of play here and if horror at the fate of this particular body was the sole point, I'd be displaced. The voyeurism of INSIDE is nearly wholesome - I wouldn't go as far as saying this story is a fairytale but this is not a test for societal collapse and these are not warning signs. No, INSIDE best functions as a dreamlike object, something you'd see between the trees in a half-dozed-off car, or could touch through the cold iron, or hear on a late night before the moon's signal is lost, forever. What's translated is often not what was actually received yet here we are, playing still.

Radio static just makes too much sense for us not to exploit. It’s a tool of calibration containing the possibility of sound, for it to be simultaneously produced and heard in order to make sense of the narrative. Distorted echoes become distinct, likewise the back-and-forth of frequencies allows us to reshape the puzzle into a humane form of communication – manufactured, tempting but unreliable. INSIDE rejects the appeal of the static even though its world is littered with remains from a radio era that demands we go back to the soil, find the collectibles, make the protagonists and ourselves whole again by unplugging the progression bar, halfway emptied – always waiting. Who wonders about the shape of infinity in the age of capital?
The trap was thinking revolt was ever an option when the first death occured, and then stayed onscreen for a few seconds too long as the boy gets dragged into darkness and then we reproduced the inputs with a slight variation and this time the boy stumbled and lived but would kill by accident later down the line and finally by necessity because there's only one of two way this dance can end.

What's fair in this gamble is that I was never under any illusion of life - illegitimate or otherwise - bubbling under the surface of INSIDE yet I still cared deeply - but for who or what ? I mean who else than me right ?
I like narratives of death and rejection in games because they allow us to make sense of our place inside and outside their ecosystem of immersion. You can never lose if the game itself is telling you to touch grass. A guilt-free form of autoscopy. What the game is about becomes less important than the gesture itself (to go against the grain) projecting value, maybe even morality, towards the onlooker by way of sensations at the tip of our fingers. I barely made the jump, swerved a bullet and just, just escaped the clutches of the superstructure. Still, I got to experience it all. Fuse-out and curtains.
What remains with INSIDE for me is a lingering sense of doubt, in the shape of a space where we can't actually delineate the strings from our unique first-person experience. I have so many doubts about the boy, about this world, about its very real absence of façade. Where even am I ? John Battle said it best a while ago :

“I float all the way down there, most assuredly dead and if this is where I am to die, then, so be it. The game has shook me in so many ways that I feel so far from those woods, dogs and that warehouse… I’ve been taken so far down that I’ve entered the other side, a proverbial underworld. And then I move. And I’m not dead. And I did not drown, at least not completely.
Moreso now I can never drown.”

And so the stage is set, and I am in the forest once again.
All inside the immortality machine.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Until I've gathered my thoughts on the subject enough to attach my own hyperlink to this.

[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 slicing through the 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 her 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.

After hours. I am a single line across which all other lines unfold, slick, slipping. Going so fast the strands slide through the cracks of the emulator.

2:00 am. My automobile body funnelled into video-tunnels that stretch without end to the rhythm of nu-jazz beats. A drama that plays on repeat for my Pearl Blue Soul.

Someway, somehow, R4 reminds me of a Hong Sang-soo film.

It's a senseless comparison, played-out across mediums and genres but every time I come back to these tracks it persists, blends-in along the city lights and tire marks in my rear-view mirror.

There's a tension in this philosophy of drift, the joyous longing of century's sunset, that makes me pause for thought at the end of every race. The stories are so simple, the game presented with such expert straightforwardness, as to blur the feeling itself in Camarro-yellows.

Still, where I think this iteration of Ridge Racer joins the cinema of the author is in that insistence to make flows coexist - rub emotion and expression against one another in ways most often hidden - and leave the outbursts at the edges of the screen.

The speed of Ridge Racer is the pace of life itself but for all its glamour breathlessness the moments that truly stir are those near-misses, the curves in a length of road where the vehicle goes slightly out of control and you brush past a rival. The little encounters. The seconds where the heart stops. I wish I could've held-on to your hand a horizon longer.

Type 4s and margaritas, that’s all I want for the summer.

"A mask! A face! Does it need one? Does it not? To define. To focus. To exist"

The bugs of Hallownest are not really bugs. They may share some attributes but underneath each hood and every shell lies a purpose greater than the sum of its parts. The Maskmaker tells me to don this visage. A Collector hides in the Tower of Love, jealously hoarding grubs, while somewhere far beneath the earth, where the underland itself has grown stale, my knight came back from the grave. In this tale, we all have our part to play. The people of Hallownest, then, are archetypes with hopes and aspirations much like ours, pushed to toil even as their kingdom crumbles to dust, minds going with it, stuck in the vast network of formula. Pray, do scurry little one, in the nooks and crannies of this Wyrm's body ; through dream your desires become manifest, so do not hesitate to fashion yourself in the image of your father, the King.

Unfortunately for us in this instance, the King is dead. The King was always dead - that's when games come alive and we can only go full-circle from here ; having dragged ourselves out of the pit we drive back down, in remembrance of a time when Metroidvania meant something which is to say never, the term never meant anything - or, if anything, the meaning was ahistorical, misdirected, imprecise, it doesn't really matter anyway because the language of play was built on nostalgia and approximations and there was always a dark, wide gap separating us from old Samus. The sense that this world was not ours to tread, that this architecture belonged to "others", a hostile plane that could suddenly snarl with tendril-teeth, lost in this "labyrinthian airport" with a creep.

Hollow Knight is built on the absence of such emotion. Its insects have gained sentience, the ability to dream themselves and therefore communicate to us in a language devoid of any mystery, each of their purpose clear from the start and destined to unravel the deeper we venture towards the heart of Hallownest. The knight - our vessel - functions the other way ; below is where its loose focus begins to coalesce, below is the place where power starts to make sense for It on the level of lore - the accumulation of charms and trinkets aiding us in mending the broken order of the world. In other words, we make our own purpose in this web of reward nodes through swift exploration and world-building but mostly devour at the expense of everyone else. Reason matters little. Aren’t we the most honest of creatures, down here where everything tries to kill us ?

Interiority is what moves us through these cavernous tapestries as players compared to the rest of the bugs - the bubble that refuses to burst in Samus’ air-tight silence - but interiority is also what the knight fundamentally lacks as an operator so obviously designed with hallways in mind. Its reason for existing in the world never quite aligns with ours nor veers away from it, into violence, or hurt, or hypnosis, or whatever other reason one could find to not do exactly what the game demands from us. Interiority - or lack thereof - is interestingly what also makes the knight a prime candidate as protagonist ; in the story’s true ending - Godmaster notwithstanding -, it is revealed that our sibling vessel (the titular Hollow Knight) was tainted by an “idea instilled” - that an offspring, even one manufactured such as us, could take affection for its progenitor the King ; this half-filled promise in turn made the Hollow Knight into an impure seal for the god on which Hallownest was built, resulting in the progressive decay of every lifeforms within as they returned to their radiant, hiveminded state.
We, on the other hand, are one of the experiments who did not made it onto the King’s lap and as such harbour no fruitless desires - we’re a cavity without purpose, therefore being the only one able to fulfill the game’s. What TeamCherry seems suggest here is a form of cynical abandon; divest yourself from the dream and embrace the stakes for what they are - a challenge, a boss rush, an undeath. This world’s a little too paper-thin and we both know it - the only way to put an end to Hallownest’s endless wrestling with the cycles is to void one’s heart of any desires, to only go through compulsory motions and follow the nervous system towards its natural conclusion : The percentaged map.

Hollow Knight can’t help itself, though, because dream is the location - it always is - and as part of our attempt to acquire this platinum soul the game throws on us one penultimate challenge in the form of the White Palace, a paranoid delusion inside which the King hid himself to die at the moment of failure.
In there everything about Hollow Knight begins to make (late) sense ; instead of a classic “genre” piece, the White Palace unfolds as a series of encroaching platforming challenges designed with a deliciously cruel twist - whereas most other regions of the game emerged from the natural world, this vault was trapped and fabricated with one intention in mind : to kill the player as mercilessly as possible, squeezing it tight spots after tight spots, impaled on razor’s edge in accordance with the flight system, generous windows and wriggle-rooms now replaced with tortuous breathers beating me into submission. I couldn’t get enough of it. Five hours of Hollow Knight’s truest attempt at discouraging me from ever finishing it, and in doing so, finally, a crevice filled with the most videogame, with less-than-precious designer intentions finding parallels in what the space expresses as character, about one of its characters. My stakes, at last, aligned with the knight’s. But then you do find the King. Of course it’s dead. Surprise. Hallownest awaits, again. Down I went, and in this movement, I think, lies the beautiful exegesis of Hollow Knight :

It tells us exactly who we are, what we want and how it compels us to want so yet is incapable of offering its players a way out - or in - or put it another way, of looking through the world and seeing that maybe, even as the ground swallows up on itself and everything goes to shit, the dream is worth maintaining.

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The Stone Sanctuary of Greenpath contains an epitaph that once singed to me in prose and poetry. Bullshit. I banished the ghost and claimed the Essence for myself.
The next time I visited it simply said :

“A face carved from stone.”