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.

"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.

-

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.”

The first time you meet Nargacuga he prowls around waiting for someone to finally cut through the green. Unceremoniously you approach and the fight begins – as they all do – with a slap. In Nargacuga’s case it’s a wild swing of the tail, something so swift and fierce that there’s barely time to register the hitbox before you’re sent flying across a porcupine haze. As hunters, most of our encounters begin that way ; bloody tastes followed by revenge on a motive yet unknown, led by a species that just doesn’t care for our neat little preparations, a divorce perpetually in the making until you learn the patterns and the tells, even begin to dodge every move as if by second nature and emerge from the other side with a point of your own. The chicken-panther thingy becomes a simple matter of rehearsed inputs meant to maximize the harvest out of a pixel corpse; in this meat-grinding lesson Nargacuga is the impossible apex predator - a killing machine to make a bitch out of through the intimate language of portable wet-work. It’s just what we do, bleak and repetitive, strikingly animated, in the arena as in the jungle, trading blows for skeletons and every time you see them, and by that I mean truly perceive them on screen, with swords coming down and last-second realizations that this screaming charge can’t be avoided, even as you start to speedrun those hunts in search of G-Ranked material, assembling tails and bladders into the largest gunlance known to man, the monsters of Monster Hunter rarely cease to be just that. Their embodiment primes each one for mythologization, just short of being genuine paleontological wonders in fear of a reskin. They may be at the top of the food chain but you, you’re something else. You know them more perfectly than they ever could, down to the last inch. Such is the nature of the hunt ; to play Monster Hunter is to learn to love the things you kill until one day a Nargacuga comes your way.

It’s the little things seen in gameplay and heard throughout each encounter (Imagine a submarine on tribal alert) that have made Nargacuga into this force of nature we know today. The more you fight It, the more you accumulate a widening array of ideas about what the monster is, what its strengths and weaknesses are in relation to your respective ideas about buildup and play practices, followed by their subsequent deflation when finally faced with the harsh, epic game reality that is Freedom Unite. A muscle memory’s tested in reaction to signature moves, deadly mistakes and triumphant runs interwoven by the split-seconds where nothing special happens, dodge-rolls leading into character reassessments – and then all you have left is eyeing each other. "Look at us, in this videogame." A truck-sized feline fantasy. But like I said Nargacuga’s different – otherwise I wouldn’t be here making what shouldn’t be an especially hard case given its popularity among the fanbase. What I want to emphasize is how much Nargacuga always reminds you – me – that it’s just a game fiend, that whilst none of its particulars ever threaten to breach the other side every animation pushes you to imagine what could have been. Just one more slice into the cushion and I might be put in doubt. That’s what happens after ten years of fighting the same creature, from desperately trying to prolong an imaginary combo spewed-out of the two-buttons attack pipeline to grooving in and out of sync with the wealth of attacking options found in Iceborne’s emotionless wasteland, Nargacuga is everywhere, touches everything and embodies an uneven friction in Monster Hunter history that made the terse into an exchange. And it’s live. Your first monster is like your first Souls is like your first bike except Nargacuga wasn't my very first at all. Monster Hunter Tri's aquatic swamps and online tribulations came before - made for the better game - and 4 Ultimate would later have for itself the hint of story, a real sense of physical progression through the fiction and within the environments that no game in the series has been able to emulate since (one day, time permitting, I’ll profess my love for this silly little game on here). But in-between these respective milestones in a franchise that's always relied on prudent mutations lies Nargacuga – seeing it, facing it, is an instant reminder of the aesthetic possibilities of the franchise: if - and only if - I can beat this stretch of biology and live to tell the tale then who's to say of my chances in the wider world? You can kill the hunter but not the idea. Monster Hunter was always the product of unsavoury values towards animal life, rendered, sizzled-down to the lean purity of the hunt, that is until you realize that in order to craft the asset a kill must be rendered twice. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling but faith never wavers when the beast is so assuredly angry and determined in seeing your end. There are way harder monsters in Freedom Unite than Narcaguca - look no further than its rig cousin, Tigrex. There is, however, no monster that feels more like a monster to me regardless of the entry it inhabits. That’s a feat. My hunch for the longest time was that the series awkwardly sat between the "Catch'em all" fetish and FromSoft's reverence for the figure of the Minotaur - our nightmares were not cute enough to serve a virtual safari and lacked the mythological context to be examined under a narrative lens, but loved them we did, regardless. There's a certain beauty in that, seeing my relationship with Nargacuga as set. It's kill or be-killed all the way, or so it used to be because now I'm not so sure and a panther is never enough when one starts killing dragons by the dozens though it's often been the most charming argument of the earlier generations ; in Monster Hunter the grind works towards a de-escalation of the apocalypse - power not in service of entropy as seen in Dark Souls but of its reverse force, your Kushala Daoras and White Fatalises existing in the shape of playful, repeatable catastrophes for the player to engage (and defuse), even when, like in Dos, the tedium of survival heightened the stakes and - perhaps - made for a more syncretic representation of ecosystems. Monster Hunter is amniotic awesomeness and in this Nargacuga, I think, set the pace. A panther is never enough when eventually the players could have something like Zinogre in Portable 3rd or later Rise’s Magnamalo; these monsters function differently from - and in direct conversation with - Nargacuga, on par with design tendencies that reflect the franchise’s full-blown foray into exuberant, ultra-rich systems of fantasy dedicated to making the player feel like a boundless performer that could revel in the pile-on of quests and multiplayer incentives. In that sense, it’s a logical evolutionary step to grow-out some Oni fangs, defer the task to lightning itself - I mean, Teostra was blowing us helplessly in 2008, and dotted sparks do make for immediate visual responses. Still every time these monsters come onscreen, so full of polygons and visions, their theme songs screwed in my head, here revised, heightened by an orchestra maximal, I see “the weapon to surpass Metal Gear'' whereas I want to imagine an Anti-Nargacuga - no next-gen nor nostalgia but a secret, third thing. Maybe we got it with the monsters of Lordran and Boletaria - kinda, who knows - but Dark Souls’ cruelty is too entrenched, its jokes awfully repetitive and one-note for my taste, and hell am I terrible at using the wirebug in creative ways to transport myself inside these maps which require no footing. And maybe what we saw was always a byproduct of blurry reflections, yearning to turn the hunt into an indiscriminate affair of numbers as soon as possible. This would mean that there’s only ever one monster, fine-tuned, morphing with every evolution of the combat system towards this brave new World and its wider verticalities. Hack'n'slash a deeper body. I hate this idea. We've been doing the same thing for a long time so three cheers for Nargacuga. Into the slaughterhouse and away we go.

Feels good to put the old dog down, every now and then.

Wolves come out at dusk to curse the rest of mankind. The fated prank is past, must return, will return the land to its proper state. A legend written out of habit. Link, Zelda and Ganon dropped-off in the wet remains of a dead MMO. Amygdalaes and termites fall through the sky, shadow bugs, of sort, whose tears I crave. Village tasks, wolven tasks. A cliché quest. Light to all.

Lonely fields, but not empty fields. There should be a thousand links but only I remain. Subservient to the game’ staccato logic. Buttons that push themselves. Defibrillated dungeons, castles that don’t wanna be alive anymore, glooming, shimmering, looking down on me. Places that exist as their most common denominator - sky city is a city in the sky. We’re never crashing down. High-definition lows followed by trombone highs when melody permits - sipping-in like Ross and Reznor got trapped beneath the map. Heroism absent from itself. Faded gold. Grandiose. Muted.

Twilight Princess is not the Zelda game we need but the one we deserve. Twisted women on our back with malformed bodies and shadow appendages arousing suspicion. Trust a teleporter to not shred me to bits. Use the tool and then discard the tool when pressure points stretch themselves far and thin into the horizon. Whistling-by. A horse that controls like a race car carries me towards the dark lord. Back in a castle that’s not even haunted anymore. Break the princess out of her stasis and save the day - Midna can’t stay. Fused shards on flat grass. Three people looking at each other on dried fantasy.

Neck mirrors. Neck snaps.

Twilight no more.

Arrest of a stone Buddha lies.

It’s not immediately apparent nor is the revelation striking in nature but the lie or, rather, the absence of telling permeates each frame. Flair is the primary mode of conveyance here ; the charm of retro games meets the stylishness of a John Woo flick. Hitman is searching for an answer in 70s France. Take the dread of Slavic game-design and watch it morph into high-concept anime motions. You’re fast and lucky enough so you don’t plan your actions too far. You kill with one shot and you never miss. It’s the kind of nihilistic manifesto games have become so good at over the years, where killing turns into an operation of existential purge. What’s the point of moving forward when death is so clearly in sight ? We’ve all seen this story - this swan song – a million times. Virtual entrapments. This play, repeated in front of us, by us. In a sense, even before us. You know from minute one, nested in this “fausse” Notre-Dame with a gun to the priest’s temple, how it all ends. Killer is Dead.

But let’s rewind nonetheless. What is Arrest of a stone Buddha about ? Like I said, it’s explicitly about the back of the box : An assassin and a city and a question. There’s no point in really teasing it any further ; it’s the story of a man searching for meaning in-between the killings that punctuate his life. Though perhaps we can see it in reverse ; actually, let’s look at it this way. It’s the story of a man actively searching for meaning within the killings themselves. So every time his job’s done he sits on a bench with a friend, his contractor – his lover ? Lines are blurred anyway. And then comes a question. “When’s the next assignment ?” It’s a one-way conversation between the world and his shadow. ”Lanky got killed.” No response – none that matters anyway. He mutters a few words as Erik Satie‘s Gnossienne plays in the background. If it wasn’t evident enough beforehand, I’ll reiterate for good measure ; Arrest of a stone Buddha is not just moody, it’s bleak.

“Just find something okay ?“

”I will.“

Now you roam the streets from dusk till dawn. Light a cigarette on your way to the movies. Or scratch that, turn around and booze yourself into altering the very soundscape of the game in some Parisian cafe. It’s the other side of the experience : Call it daily-reality simulator. Shenmue impersonator. A performative exercice in living stuck inside a death loop. From the graveyard to the bar and back again, the only certainty is our forward movement in time. Somedays a storm, somedays a mere wandering. Until you reach the date that’s been circled in red above your bed. This 7th of November 1976. The day one chooses to die.

.

The body count of Buddha is thankfully ridiculous. Every gunfight acts as the missing link in a series of finales that keep on stacking upon one another. At times it’s exhausting, an impossible march where enemies keep pouring out of each side of the screen until we either make an escape or join the growing pile. But one does not rush to the finishing line here – the death drive must be consumed, soaked-in through accumulation. There’s no denying the scene is absurd, but contemplate it long enough and it forces a certain kind of empathy upon you. The relentlessness with which Buddha forces you to slog through murderous armies demands a pause, a constant inhabitance in this body of labour – it’s one kill to a thousand, all located at the source of your character. Breathe in, then dance. This is By Yeo at his best : Beauty by blunt force; a trauma that outlasts the bang of the iron. If Arrest of a stone Buddha was to be shrunk down to its most basic elements, it would be a matter of binaries. Left or Right. Whisky or murder. Which direction spares us a bullet and which one keeps the killer going for another day? Bullseye or bust. An affair of life and death in the plural – or rather of exquisite repetition, of withstanding this dying in service of something. I noted earlier that the gunfights of Arrest of a stone Buddha were a unique gesture of pedestrian violence ; looking back on it, I think a better term would be “limping”. Failure is inevitable, the game makes sure of that (the further you move through a shooting gallery, the more accurate the goons around you become and sometimes a cruel trick is pulled on you ; just as you’re about to walk out of the frame, you meet your fate at the end of a barrel summoned by off-screen depths). Weapons are made irrelevant by their empty magazines, so the only way to procure yourself another is to wrestle one away from your agressors. This in turn requires a closer approach, leaving you vulnerable to the pace of the game’s incessant happening. There is always something, both wonderfully intricate and brutally evident, going on in those exchanges of bullets – dodged shots followed by a collective charge, a scope adjusting its aim with your skull. Out of fire and out of time. The key here is to embrace how perpetual the collapse is in hindsight. You get good at it eventually, it’s still just a videogame after all. But the feeling never really goes away. Miss the coup de théâtre and another swiftly comes your way. Now your move friendo ; you have to, keep walking. Shooting. Doing. Something’s got to give, so even when it means nothing a choice must be made. Hell or high water.

.

Every assassination attempt begins with Buddha at a standstill. Tinted windows for a stray car. A restaurant table whose dishes are getting cold. The killer and the target. Hold [R] to aim your weapon ; press [X] to shoot – and then the music starts.

“I’ve got to get the hell out of here.“

In Arrest of a stone Buddha, every assassination attempt culminates in a single frame of grotesque still life. The pure and quiet spectacle of sidescrolling generation. Stop, start ; and suddenly, a wave.

A parking lot, overflowing.

Mobsters by the dozen, all converging

On this single point in time

And space, where you lie.

A forest shootout leaving

No trace.

“I have a train to take.“

To nowhere, in particular.

To a room with a view,

To a rooftop, another

Man is sitting at a bus stop with

Ten corpses down.

.

In the streets of Arrest of a stone Buddha, I always stroll with my hands in my pockets. It’s not really about the style, it’s performance. I am comfortably away from the simulacra but I wish to engage, to blend-in. At night, the edges of my screen become vectors of paranoïa ; silhouettes in trench coat walk past me quickly and I come to fear their passage. They’re just bots – pallid imitations of behaviour – but my violent strides have produced this strange overlapping motion where I am, simultaneously, above and beneath. My rampage invades every spaces of the city – bullet wishes against glass pedestrians. They share my proximity for a fleeting second before disappearing again, never interacting, never harming my little killer in any way. The greatest trick Arrest of a Stone Buddha pulls on the player is to switch perceptions into a set of compulsory habits, from one space to the other; what does it take to press the trigger ? Nothing more – and nothing less – than a corridor to dwell in the levels where I can properly identify and recognize better. A target that was never really there in the first place.

It's a story of the meaningless decisions that animate everyday life.

It's a tale about choosing to be someone else, even if it’s just for the time it takes to smoke a cigarette.

A lie on a respirator.

A fantasy fed one day at a time, until the date is reached. Until it’s impossible to go on anymore.

7th of November.

You’re alone in your room. I am alone in mine. You hold the first button to aim.

Then I press [X] to shoot.

Or maybe not. Maybe both decisions are taken at the same time.

Maybe in the end we keep on dancing.

In this life or the next.

—————————————

Originally posted on VDT, a while ago.

Like the mad century philosophers of yore, I gouge my eyes out playing Destiny, mouth agape, head dripping and drooling with futures baroque until my ass is on the floor. I’ve had a vision and the vision was videogame neoliberalism, perfected. Guardians make their own fate. We knew what we were getting into from the start yet we plunged nonetheless. This time, maybe, it will be different.

Two years ago, on the icy moon of Europa, Beyond Light orchestrated one of the greatest one-two punch a shooter had ever thrown my way; a game of musical chairs where the chairs are actual orbital shuttles sending you past the stratosphere and the penalty for failure was nuclear annihilation. Take my hand, let's walk out in space.

« La fontaine de jouvence. », Clovis said.

A year ago, Vow of the Disciple had perhaps the most haunting image I've ever seen in Destiny. And it's not even the best part of that raid. Not when you can practice bullet horticulture on the body of a fifteen feet-tall alien after he kicked us out of existence. Not after the Upended. Destiny, in a way, keeps getting smaller as it expands outside the confines of our own solar system - towards a place where the up is down, where dreams are flesh and the waking world becomes a foolish expanse. 60 frames per seconds of pure cornucopia.

Lightfall has for itself the Root of Nightmares raid. Vexcalibur. Some of the most broken, explosive meta-build combinations in the new Strand subclass, using its grapple as a means to punch dudes in the face or marrying its crowd-control venom with Osteo Striga’s submachinegun mania. It's always the same; shoot the orb, grab the buff, watch a million numbers leak through the cracks of the monitor. But what an orb this is. I haven’t even beaten the new raid’s first boss and I’m already sold, devoted almost. It’s a dude, big, Explicator of Planets and whatnot, dragging with its demise the obscure promise that as we move these celestial bodies around a dark planetarium their galactic configuration may actually change, a symmetry to match our damage phases and remake the universe in our image. The main goal of Root of Nightmares is for us to resurrect a famous god of pain just so that we can kill him all over again - its sarcophagus pointing skywards towards this Traveler we’ve called home for a decade and which now lies broken in the middle of our star map. At its best, when things click and lore makes dots connect, Destiny feels terribly simple - circle meeting triangles in our ironsight, obscurity followed by sudden light. A tree of silver wings bloomed, full of loot. My assault rifle explodes and it’s this explosion that invests me in history. A gun is a text is a person and each person is a revelation that happens through repeated touch, the forming of new patterns by building their perfect legend in our minds. That Destiny is so concerned with giving its guns personhood, through their use and the way each tend to inform and shape relationships inside the fiction, probably reflects its tendencies to imagine the feedback loop as something sacred - to grind is to reach God or as Brandon Taylor put it in a series of hilarious tweet about something entirely unrelated:

“You can take the Skyfather out of heaven, but you can’t take the desire for a Skyfather out of man. 😤”

Pause.

“Y’all be giving Erasmus vibes every single day.”

But it’s got me thinking; Destiny as an eternal vacation. Lightfall is far from the best Destiny has ever been in terms of its world feeling like a lived-in place by putting forth unique gameplay propositions (chasing an exotic “whisper” down platforming depths, ragged-riches or treasure of a Leviathan) but it is the most fun I’ve ever had with its gunplay; the build-crafting has been streamlined, dumb-downed even, and in exchange for complexity the moment-to-moment experience feels swifter, allowing for immediate self-expression and, by extension, an easier doorway into Destiny’s true endgame : Building the most fashionable killing machine this side of the Milky Way. But I digress. Now that we’ve entered the realm of absolute omniheroics, that excavated narrative threads are starting to pull together - awkwardly killing-off old characters like the A.I war machine Rasputin while graciously upscaling the larger scale of its kinaesthetics - and the promise of a star-wide power fantasy has essentially been fulfilled it’s easier to realize that Destiny has always been hammering the same point home: We will not go gently into that good night. Dream’s end. If you dig enough inside the Vexcalibur exotic quest unlocked post-campaign the game rewards us with a sight that just made smile; a full-3D visualization of the Veil, this expansion’s incomprehensible McGuffin. There’s been a lot of uproar around the nature of the object in the community but I, for one, loved it. It’s a cyclopean hourglass, mixed soil of Light and Dark containing an abstract representation of the memory of the universe that we find in the campaign by descending deep into the heart of a cybernetic city hidden behind Neptune, inhabited by the ghosts of people who’ve chosen to reside in the wood-wide web when the fighting started. And underneath it - sustaining this phantasm - is the Veil. A purple root of psychedelics - matter and its antithesis merged into one. Destiny’s all in there. This longest of summers is coming to a close and as we approach entropy’s center, the shapes begin to feel more familiar. A pyramid filled with horse figurines. Bones of a whale from an alien moon. An hourglass - a « Veil » under which we once slept - powering the galactic engine, paraphernalia sipping back out of the black hole. All this time sunk into a game who, at the end of the day, is interested in grass and trinklets. That’s where the prestige lies for Bungie. Bringing us back to Earth.

« Once upon a time a Gardener and a Winnower lived together in a garden. »

The best we can do is burn our way out of there.

[Killed by the Architects.]

"Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts."

Jumpman is the realest a gaming character's ever been. Feet, hop and time. One forward movement in space - or two, actually - pull(s) us back into the Kingdom, into its familiar rhythms and tunes ready to be upset by the variables of our inputs. It’s on.

"The first part is called "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't."

So the very first thing I notice upon booting is the way Mario now enters a pipe, instead of reverting to a default pose he contextually transitions from a jump, ground-pound, run or even simple press of the down-arrow on your directional cross like the frames of a true hand-drawn, motion picture animated character; as the rush horizontally stuffs him into a tube, his cap remains suspended in midair for half-a-second, just enough time for us to notice and for him to grab it with one hand, finally penetrating deeper into the level. I use the word "penetration" here because I think it appropriately reflects the physical relationship the game wishes to establish at that moment between Mario and its environment; by so directly making a case of each entry and exit as cartoonish friction, Super Mario Bros. Wonder makes us notice, makes us remember what it felt like grabbing an old magazine on our way home from school, craving for this return to the digital world. This is a 2D-world given the scent of nostalgia and the depth of simulacrum.

"The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know."

These worlds are oases and therefore act as such. At their core hides a series of wonders for us to play through and into - onscreen fingers if you will, fiddling and remaking the very fabric of each level -, in doing so adding further splashes to the experience of interacting with this reactive plateau that isn't really one in the first place. The beautiful twist is that there is no twist - the oasis doesn't change, it fundamentally can't, but the space in which it occurs (its contextual aesthetic) is itself subject to change. Mario transforms into an elephant and suddenly flowers sprout anew in his wake. Collect some water, feed the earth. Collect another flower and this time the whole world finds a second life, rigidity now dictated by fluid motions. The box bends into a circle. Always, what's next. This distorsion of shape is the heartbeat of Super Mario Bros. Wonder because it is, in effect, a direct statement of power from the game to the player. This is what a wonder does. It's as if the levels themselves could now jump of their own accord. Wonder, wonderful.

"You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige".”

With Wonder I keep on circling around this thought that we've been participating in a wholesome fanfare, smearing us with coins and particles that leave little trace once the screen is shut. I don't doubt the soul-magic but its application, and so words like "joy" or "(re)invention" make a paranoid man outta me, make me feel like we're missing something amidst the obvious Nintendo wizardry that is at play here, trading-in the technicalities for visual spectacle and really is this Wonder any different than the bark of a trillion polygons rendered in open-world vanity. Worlds don’t have to react to me but I need to react to them. Wonder has a Spiderverse-sized problem - the second one - in the sense that its exhaustivity wears me thin with a certain excess of enthusiasm for the form. The sprite-like (near painterly) aspect of the presentation as Digital Foundry put it in their technical breakdown produces as many flourishes as it bloats out the possibility of any more complex game feel arising throughout the levels. First, every wonder interaction should come with a timer - or at the very least an incentive to urgency - that constrains the player into experiencing the "switch" as a proper play-capsule and second is the lack of punctuation in the placement of these events, less a suite spaced-out into crescendos that iterate upon what's come before than a supermarket stack of variations on the same exclamation mark. The platforming feels responsive, yes, bouncy like never before yet completely childish. This version of Mario is dedicated to the immediate response each press of a button must produce on screen, of which the movement system is a good example : spreading traversal options into badges limits both our range of expression and the level-design's complexity in ways that only become clear as the difficulty attempts to ramp up without ever truly peaking, precisely because you can only design so much around the limits of basically one extra-ability per-course, culminating in one of the most bog-standard incarnations of Bowser as a final boss yet in the series. This tale was also that of Breath of the Wild; craft alone cannot lend a strong sense of direction to the work, otherwise we end up with what amounts to an expensive technical demo - here, and time and again before this, sold to us as this expression of genuine videogame affection. So really, what are we talking about when we qualify Nintendo as one of the last bastions of true "play"? With every level we're flung into a new micro-dosed reality offering everything and nothing all at once. The projected value of imagination without practical gameplay applications of its aesthetic principle. Rainbow refreshes on stainless materials. And thus the Prestige is attained. These pixels bleed emotions, don't they?

Mario is magic. Always has, always will. But magic’s overrated anyway and the spell that binds us to the caster matters less in the end than knowing their hand was real in the first place. Super Mario Bros. Wonder feels wholly digital, like the type of image you could clip on an Instagram aesthetic feed to recall in ten years as a whole vibe that we got to collectively experience and then shuffle out of memory entirely. But the most frustrating aspect of it all is that Nintendo is so close to connecting the dots lyrically, the technological foundation is there, along with a troves of ideas and genuine artistic highs that would make this the kind of games I’d wished I played as a kid. At times the mind does wander, and you can see it all through the pastels. The bullrushes and the lollipop constellations. Fragments of true videogame. It's in the magma coastlines and the stone archways turning into blue hues of a dragon. A light-switch logic producing simple effects of relations between objects. Sometimes simple is best. Like pipework taking on a life of its own. That shit is so cool to me, but then it disappears, is never explored in a way that would allow their geometries to imprint themselves onto me past the next change of shape. The real trick was always the most straightforward one : you press a button and the wee-little guy jumps. What comes after that is pure, simple accessory to play. But it's what you do with that fact, how much you're willing to commit to it, that makes all the difference. Or in the words of Elpadaro F. Electronica Allah :

Extra honey in my tea but pay no homage to the bee
Whatever happened to us?
And will we ever come and let the magic tap into us?

“As flies to wanton boys we are to the gods, they kill us for their sport. Soon the science will not only be able to slow down the ageing of the cells, soon the science will fix the cells to the state and so we will become eternal. Only accidents, crimes, wars, will still kill us but unfortunately, crimes, wars, will multiply.

I love football.
Thank you.”

- Eric Cantona, King Lear, Act IV Scene I

In stench there is a story.

A genuinely moving articulation of faith through virtual mediums. Hope dies in the vacuum of space and is found again through the fuselage of blood and deep water. On the oceanic floor where we once drowned I emerge - a nü-man. I am a very smart bear now. I will see the sky.

The world of Stasis left a big gash on me because like the dead genre that it is point’n’click needs a jolt, to be dragged across waves engines and into a space where flesh and interface meld into one - behold, my precious Bone Totem. The convergence point of adventure-play with a place vivid enough to make the trajectory of our clicks worth more than a mere curious inquiry of hidden nooks and crannies. My sea is no corporation, my sea will crush you. There can be no logical order of exploitation to the whims of the depth's currents therefore locating your story inside an environment whose hostility far surpasses any capital contempt, that will only deal in blood and iron as its sacred currencies; to make it through the day deeper truths need to be held - a belief in something other than broken ribs, powered by said-broken ribs. DEEPSEA15’s all rust and grime, a place for the true masochists, lovers of algaes and wire-grids alike, actively pressing down where it hurts and yet prodding at our insides with a great deal care - binding itself instead of shredding our characters, a slow-burn of cog-wheeled violence amidst stormy seas. Oil rig's always the play, because here it's the only play. Nobody wants to be down there yet we’re all exactly where we're meant to be - wound up in this great skeleton unfit for any sort of humane life, unable to function for long without our continued presence within itself. And in this mother of all contraptions “the only way out is through.”

The big question posed by Bone Totem's vast array of characters and computer terminals is as follows : Is survival even worth it in this world? Capital has become its own religion & theology, a literal promise of digital afterlife for the devout worker while their exploitation fuels the expansion of CAYNE Corporation and its Churches into further enslaving mankind. Liberation only exists in the glimpses of shadow organizations off-world whose motives may not even be all that benevolent and by the time the credits roll on the last act's torture porn, barely anyone is left alive to answer my questions. This is a story about what happens when you take the pay that's too good to pass and sink in the process anyway. In the derelict's underbelly Charlie, Mac and Moses make sickly sweet bed, a grieving couple and their teddy bear, each one pushed to go on by their faith in something larger than themselves - that could save them as much as it could swallow their body and soul whole. Mac is a true believer in Cayne's gospel, implanted with the technology that's supposed to transport his mind into the Nexus at the final hour; Charlie's the practical cynic, a clever and desperate engineer, while Moses sits in-between those two as Bone Totem's touch of uncanny genius : It's their dead daughter's animatronics bear, one infused with the artificial intelligence to match; a pure soul in the most profane body. The second stroke of ingenuity of the narrative lies in the use of each character's abilities throughout the game and the way they communicate with one another : Mac possesses the brute-strength to bend contraptions to his will while Charlie expertly crafts sparks out of the dead and inert. Moses, due to its size and circuitry, finds wiggle room in ventilation shafts and back-panel motherboards to get his humans out of tight spots. But what binds this whole system together is the ability to AirDrop objects between the three of 'em in order to take advantage of their respective skills at any moment, swapping characters and squeezing the abstract bits out of the gameplay loop by allowing the player to guide the story's rhythm through each perspective, the actual pointing and clicking pushed to serve a constant state of fiddling and putting things together, connecting skin to metal and arteries towards their new orifices, making due of the broken state of it all just to get through the day in one piece. Shit’s a breeze for my monkey brain, as much as a slow, catastrophic systemic failure of corporate machinery can in any way be qualified as swift - spaces compressing and then stretching themselves, water-filled elevators in contrast to their air pockets, finding finality (always) in death puzzles whose fail-states splatter in grizzly 3D. Here violence is not so much a shock factor as it is the character-building exercise in which we must all partake - the atrocity of which Stasis spares us no detail. Only the most broken and dysfunctional of families could get through this sloshing steel. But even then their survival is not the point in Bone Totem. What sits at the heart of the game's troubled conscience is artifice and hesitation - how we may progressively find ourselves bound by the clauses of the new flesh. Everyone on DEEPSEA15 is kept on a loose leash, wanting out of the hurt that comes from being born in this putrid place called reality. And it's not happening. And it keeps happening. No one's got the keys - we simply cannot leave, nor be left to our own devices.

[This is a MULE Emergency Broadcast]
WATER PRESSURE REACHING CRITICAL LEVELS_
SEEK THE SUN OR DROWN IN THE DEEP_
BE A GOOD BEAR NOW_

In Moses, Bone Totem finds its few answers.

Towards the end of third chapter, damaged and stranded from the rest, he discovers that one of the trapped scientists who's been helping him through radio in exchange for his own freedom was nothing more than a brain in the proverbial jar, condemned to sink with the rest of the station. We enter a room and find the cable-crucified approximation of a circulatory system atop which sits what little remains of Faran, a consciousness unaware of their own predicament. Eyes in literal darkness. It's impossible for me not to think of my first steps back in PATHOS-II, finding the robot body of Carl Semken and him looking at me, believing, truly believing, that he was still human - and then unplugging the cord because the only way out is through. Bone Totem walks a lot like SOMA - threading a bleak and complex existential line - but what separates it from Frictional's work mirrors the gap in emotional fortitude between the original Blade Runner and 2049. The question that gets its hooks into me isn't whether Deckard is a replicant or not and, henceforth, if androids do indeed dream of electric sheeps but rather the turnstiles of such an existence, or in other words, what meaning do you ascribe to the wooden horse that Constant "Joe" K finds in the furnace? Knowing you are nothing but a byproduct possessing the ability - however life-like in its fakery - to feel things and coming back to DEEPSEA15 with that same line of questioning, from Moses to Faran, presents a difficulty...the horse could, in essence, mean nothing - in fact it does. So why the struggle? Moses is remarkable in his artificiality because it grants him the most human quality a robot could have : Delusion. Contrary to Faran who scorns his watery prison as a physical manifestation of Hell itself, Moses only perceives it through the rosy programming of a glass-eyed teddy bear who does not like to be wet - the lens of tales and arborescences. This world taken as a whole may well be humanity's future purgatory but Moses doesn't see it that way. How could he? Charlie and Mac may still survive. The memory of the little girl he played with remains. This day has not yet met its end. Reality, as he perceives it, is still magical, still to be thought of as something more than an oil spill even as he himself is nothing more than a facsimile. A faith brittler than bones is still worth carrying by souls untainted. And so as Moses leaves the room for the last time, promising hope to his artifical brethren, the once-human Faran asks :

"I...can never leave here. Can I?"

To which the plastic bear responds :

"Yes, but it is still a story."

There’s still life and tears to be found, even under the water.
And the only way out is through.

Mad Max adrenaline by way of tropical jet fuel. Scorched engines and ocean-washed monsters of steel hurling their fragile husk across the sand of the Island in search of this historical death on the Pacific Rift.

Motorstorm at its absolute peak, the tracks act as biomes who themselves serve the riders as much as they threaten to derail them at any moment - few games have had as genius of an idea as the dual nature of the cooling mechanic; bodies of water slowly refresh your turbo charge whilst fire-engulfed parcels cause your whole hood to light-up, preventing you from going completely gun-ho in some of the tighter bends and treacherous shortcuts of the tracks. What goes around comes around - the Island will claim its tributes in the grand festival of life, no matter what. AI deficiencies and a lack of variety in the modes of racing prevent this one from a claim to all-timer status but this remains one of the most impressive games about cars in motions of the last fifteen, twenty years. Sublime kinesthesia - all cracking to the brim with PS360 visual exhaust and grain - complemented by astute camera work that blends utility and cinematography to produce some truly gripping angles, making you flow from tail to rear in an instant and back again without sacrificing control over your vehicle - there's never an unsalvageable turn here, never will you not be one with the environment all the way to the point of (literal) combustion on the finishing line. They simply do not make 'em like this anymore.

This is racing for the movers and shakers, not breakdancers, those who party knee-deep in the morning mud and drink full from the source to cure their caldera blues.

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.

[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 here 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.