Katana ZERO is a game about killing.

"Yeah, of course it is" you might say. And it's a fair point. Most games involve killing enemies. And especially in this one, you will be doing a LOT of killing.

But this is a game where the violence you unleash is just as much a part of the narrative as it is the gameplay. But unlike many similar games, you're never meant to feel guilty for the mass slaughter you commit. It's not framed as good, or right, or even necessary, but it never asks the player to feel guilty. You, as both the character and the person playing the game, simply did what you were told. It wants you to be utterly desensitized to it.

Your character, Zero, is a former war veteran, who after some undefined event, lost his memory and is now an assassin working for what is implied to be the city of New Mecca's government. His handler, strangely enough, is a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist seems to be merely a front, only meant to ensure that Zero doesn't begin to remember the true nature of the war and his role in it.

The psychiatrist orders most of the killing that you, as Zero, will commit in the game. Though the psychiatrist tells Zero his mission is merely to eliminate drug trafficking, in reality the drug the government wants so desperately to eliminate all traces of is their own creation.

Back during the war, the government experimented with a serum called Chronos, designed to give its soldiers enhanced reflexes and the ability to see the future. They performed these experiments on children they abducted and raised them in the NULL combat program to refine their abilities.

The serum worked like a charm and NULL soldiers became unstoppable. However, despite NULL never being made public, the atrocities its soldiers were ordered to commit were. This prompted New Mecca to withdraw from this totally-not-Vietnam war.

And so, in the seven years since, the government has tried to keep Chronos, NULL, and their involvement in it a secret. And so they have taken advantage of Zero to kill anyone who knows about Chronos or NULL. This includes both the scientists and financial backers of the drug, but also people more innocent, such as DJ Electrohead who simply found the drug in a storage unit.

However, innocence doesn't matter. The government is only doing this so that information about Chronos isn't leaked. This is kept from Zero, the person they sent to slaughter all of these people indiscriminately, as well. Zero was chosen for this program because he, even as a child, displayed an aversion to killing, one that was manipulated both in his time as a soldier, and now an assassin.

And so you, as Zero, will hunt down and kill people who you are told little about other than that they supposedly need to die, also killing anyone who gets in your way. Death is all that you are. Death is all that you create.

The psychiatrist urges restraint, but this is not out of a desire to protect innocent lives. This is merely done to prevent drawing media attention to all of the killing. But no matter what you do, your killing will attract attention from others. But the news broadcasts calling you "the Dragon", a notorious serial killer, are an easily ignored part of your nightly routine.

But, as dispassionately as Zero seems to be to killing, on some level, he wants to do it. This is seen most explicitly in the prison level, in ways so subtle you likely won't even notice without a repeat playthrough. In the level, you have the option to sneak past the police who arrive on the scene and not attract attention, or simply cut them down like every other obstacle in the game.

After the mission, Zero encounters an old man who tries to steal his service medal from the war. If the player killed anyone during that mission, you'll be given the choice to kill him or simply take the medal back. But if you killed no one during that entire mission, attempting to select any of the dialogue options will cause a glitch effect to appear as the option to kill the man is automatically selected. Death is all that you are. You cannot go a day without killing.

And yet, despite this, Zero shows some traces of humanity. The rather detestable V, a Russian gangster who idolizes the violence Zero commits, is someone even Zero himself recognizes for the monster he is. You're also able to form a connection with a mysterious little girl who will show up after several missions.

And so, in spite of Zero's need to kill, he still has a conscience. He still has some trace of humanity. But, in a pivotal moment, you're forced to make a choice. After a mission gone wrong in Chinatown, you'll find yourself surrounded by police. It is then that the mysterious Comedy and Tragedy will appear. Earlier in the game, they appeared in a dream and gave you a cryptic warning that in the future you would have to choose between life and death. Now the moment has come.

Just as Comedy wears a golden mask, and Tragedy a silver mask, so too must you choose a mask. You can wear either the golden mask of life, or the silver mask of death. But the masks are a bit misleading. The mask you wear is what you bring to others. If you die in this moment, the little girl you formed an attachment to will live. But if you choose to survive, she will be in danger.

So, those are your options. Choose to die so that others might live, or choose to live so that you can only bring death to others. Choosing the golden mask will see your killing spree come to an anticlimactic conclusion as you get shot by the police, ending the game. Choose the silver mask and you will embody death itself. You will bring death and destruction to others, just as you have been up until this point. And so, if you want to continue the game, you'll have to choose the silver mask.

Death is all that you are. Death is all that you create. Choosing the silver mask has bound you to that fate. When you return home, the little girl is seemingly fine. She didn't die, all is right. Your rather public display of violence against the police has angered the psychiatrist, but otherwise, nothing's changed.

But a mysterious phone call will change everything. Just before your next appointment with the psychiatrist, a mysterious caller tells you to seek out Leon von Alvensleben, the creator of Chronos who Zero has only just learnt about. And so you carve a new path of carnage and death, just have you done before. You learn everything about the NULL program, and that you were once a part of it.

And so, you confront the psychiatrist with what you've learned. The psychiatrist admits that everything you learned from Leon was true. That your true mission has always been to eradicate Chronos. That you were a NULL soldier, chosen because you enjoyed killing. If you try and deny this, a similar glitch effect to the old man scene will occur, and Zero will confess to enjoying killing. In choosing the silver mask, you have accepted this.

The psychiatrist also confirms that Chronos has a disastrous side effect. NULL soldiers required routine injections of Chronos to maintain their abilities. If they go too long without the serum, a withdrawl occurs. Time begins repeating itself. Hallucinations occur. Past, present, and future become blurred. It's a process that kills them. But even death is not the end of such a painful experience.

When a Chronos user dies, the serum traps them in an endless cycle within their mind. All of their worst nightmares, up to and including their own death, on loop for eternity. The psychiatrist insists there's enough Chronos for you to survive, but it's unlikely he's telling the truth. Your dosage has already been slowly decreasing, likely in an attempt to make their limited supply last long enough for you to finish what you started.

And with this revelation, you are sent on what will be your final mission, as if nothing's changed. You are not given a target this time. You are only told to go inside of a government bunker and destroy all evidence of Chronos held within. Even despite all that you've learned, the routine is the same. More death, more blood. You kill everyone inside of that bunker as you make your way deeper and deeper.

It is here that the final confrontation awaits. It's unknown if the psychiatrist or his superiors even knew it, but there is a mysterious woman here. You've met her before, but only once in a brief confrontation that caused the Chinatown mission to go awry. It's only now that she tells her story. A story that will put everything into perspective.

She's a NULL survivor too. She enjoyed killing, and thus after the war, she became a hired assassin for Al-Qasim, one of the people behind Chronos. Essentially, she's you. A bringer of death. A discarded weapon of war, continuing to kill as if the war hasn't ended.

That was, until Al-Qasim died during one of your missions. Al-Qasim was her only supplier of Chronos, and without it, she's dying. She's desperate to find more of it, and will do whatever it takes to get more of it and avoid the endless nightmare that awaits every NULL that dies. And so upon seeing you, she gets an idea. Chronos is pumping through your veins. There might just be enough to last her one or two more days. Maybe enough time to find more of it.

And so, she becomes the only character to try and kill you for reasons that are not your fault. She's not acting in self-defense, nor out for revenge. She simply wants to kill you. You're finally on the receiving end of the death you deal out.

A battle takes place in your minds. Each using your Chronos abilities to try and predict each others' moves. You're evenly matched, the real winner will be whoever's will is stronger, whoever gives up on trying to find a way to win last. And, ultimately, upon beating her, that person is you.

She's the most difficult opponent you'll have faced by this point, and yet, whenever I beat her, I feel no sense of triumph or satisfaction. Nor do I feel any guilt. There's just a hollow feeling, unlike any other I've ever felt in a video game. Because the fight was meaningless.

She was a mirror image of you. Much like you, she enjoyed killing and did it without hesitation. In truth, whoever lived in this fight wouldn't make much of a difference. You'd both continue down the paths you were already on. You'd both keep killing to stay alive. To feel alive. Death is all that you are. Death is all that you create. Nothing would change if this fight ended differently.

And yet, in spite all of that, it's hard to feel that she deserved to die. Or that Zero should have died instead. All the killing, all the death, you're not the ones at the root of it. It's the New Mecca government. Those who created Chronos. The ones who turned you into their tools. This is their legacy. As she puts it, "two junkies fighting over the last hit."

And so it's hard not to feel bad for her. You're the same. You were both used and manipulated. You were both taken advantage of and thrown aside. Neither of you had a choice. Chronos supply is limited. This fight was inevitable. You two just happen to be the ones fighting it. Fighting to see who meets the endless torment that is death for NULLs last.

It is that moment of victory in this fight, that brief moment in which you have ended her life, that stands out as the game's defining moment, in my eyes. A moment that hits entirely because of the medium it takes place in.

It cannot be conveyed through just watching someone else play it, and as much as I try and do it justice by writing down my experience, nothing can replace the experience of actually playing it. Of killing her and feeling... empty. All you're left with is knowledge that you get to live, and she doesn't. It's terrifying, in a way.

And yet, it only lasts a moment, because as she crawls on the floor, bleeding out, she asks something of you. She asks you to make "them" pay for what they did to both of you. And if you've been paying attention, you know exactly who "they" are. And then you cut off her head, and move on with your mission.

Inside the vault in the deepest level of this bunker hides not sensitive files on Chronos, but a mother and her children. Zero's mind flashes back to a similar mission he undertook during the war. The objective is clear: Kill the targets. That's your only option. It doesn't matter if it's right or wrong, you're supposed to kill them. So do it.

You are forced to select this option again and again and again, and still Zero just stands there, doing nothing. In this moment, something has changed. Did that NULL's words actually get through to him? Or was it the little girl? Or was it something else? Who can say what motivates the choice Zero makes in this moment. But he knows it's wrong, and so, he abandons the mission.

The psychiatrist is furious when you confront him in the aftermath. His superiors blame him for your failure to complete the task, and now his family is in danger. But you don't care. You confront him over his various manipulations, to hide what you were forced to do during the war. But he hardly even pays attention.

The scene from here plays out in two different ways, neither of which you will have any say in at the moment it happens. Rather, it depends on the choices you made earlier in the game. If you played the game "normally" Zero will simply beat the psychiatrist over the head until he dies a brutal death, and then inject himself with the few vials of Chronos he had left.

If you sufficiently angered the psychiatrist enough throughout the game, however, when you try to kill him he will inject himself with another experimental drug during the war that triggers an insane psychedelic boss fight that, admittedly kind of ruins the pacing of the game. In the aftermath of this fight, the psychiatrist dies, and Zero simply leaves without touching the Chronos. The implications of this version are that in some way, Zero has conquered his addiction to Chronos.

But it doesn't really matter, because there's still an addiction Zero hasn't overcome. He's addicted to death. He is death. Despite making the right choice and sparing the family down in that bunker, it doesn't matter. Just like the prison, he simply cannot go long enough without killing.

And so we reach the end. Zero returns home to find that the little girl is missing. A note has been left behind, which simply reads "A life for a life." And so, the final scene after the credit shows us that Comedy and Tragedy have captured the little girl. They mention that a horrible end awaits her.

Though they say this, I don't believe that end will be by their hand. That note was meant to remind him of the choice that he made. In Chinatown, they said if you chose the golden mask, to die in that moment, the little girl would be protected, but if you didn't, she'd almost certainly die. But I think it's important to consider your choice to wear the silver mask. Death is all that you are. Death is all that you create. You have chosen to bring death to others.

What awaits in the yet-to-be-released final level is unclear, but it likely will be a violent rampage through a government lab. Judging by the lab coats Comedy and Tragedy wear, this lab is almost certainly where the little girl was taken. Thusly, there's a good chance that in some way, Zero's rampage will likely be the thing that puts the girl into jeopardy to begin with.

But there is something else to consider. We learn one more thing in the ending. When Zero first finds the note, he also learns from the landlord that there are no children living in the apartment building, implying that the girl isn't real. Thusly, a common interpretation is that the little girl is simply a metaphor that represents his humanity.

I don't know if that's real or not, but if Zero's inevitable rampage through the government lab is what is supposed to put the girl into danger, I don't think it matters what the answer is. Either way, the tragic result is the same: the end of Zero's humanity. He'll fully descend into being a remorseless killer.

But of course, time will tell what will actually transpire in that lab. Zero could make a different choice, and hopefully spare the girl and retain his humanity in the process. If he can overcome Chronos' effects, there is hope that he can, in turn, become more than just a bringer of death. Hopefully, he can become something more.

There is something wrong with the world of Axiom Verge 2.

I'm not referring to any malevolent force within the game. In fact, there really isn't one. Sure, about halfway through a villain will start interfering, but this game is surprisingly... relaxed compared to a lot of Metroidvanias.

No, what's wrong is just that everything feels a bit... off. The first Axiom Verge is a phenomenal example of plunging you into an alien world, utterly unrecognizable from our own world. Nothing about the environment, the native species, the characters, or anything feels like Earth. The protagonist, Trace, a scientist from Earth, is the only grounding element to be able to follow along with what's happening at all.

In this second game, despite not taking place on Earth, all the environments are distinctly Earth-like. There are other human characters this time around, there are structures clearly built by the human researchers who inhabit this place, and there are even familiar vehicles like trucks and helicopters. At certain moments, you'll forget you're supposed to be in some bizarre alternate dimension.

Though you play as a human in this game, a CEO named Indra, it is you who will feel like the alien in this world. Because the world doesn't feel like it was designed for you. This is going to be complicated to explain, because I mean that last statement in both good in bad ways.

Unlike the first game, which revolved around shooter combat, this one is mainly interested in melee combat. And yet, the game weirdly doesn't seem suited to it. The most common enemy, the tiny drone, runs completely underneath your basic swing, requiring a crouch attack. Swing speed is so slow they can usually get a cheap hit or two in as well.

Tougher enemies aren't much better in this regard, as they aren't knocked back very easily and sport attacks that are almost impossible to dodge within the typical combat range. While you do have an additional ranged option in form of the boomerang, it's pretty slow and still doesn't have particularly impressive reach, especially when it comes to flying enemies.

The choice to revolve this game around close range combat isn't inherently bad, but the execution is bizarre. I wasn't necessarily dying constantly, but I was still taking damage a lot in ways that felt beyond my control. I couldn't help but feel like every single enemy I faced would be a much more manageable and fair challenge if instead of the melee weapons or the boomerang, I had Trace's gun and its staggering multitude of attack modes. Instead, I often resorted to cheesing combat by sending out my drone to deal with foes. But more on that later.

I'm not here to claim that the clunky combat of this game is somehow good, but it's strange how aware the game felt about how little Indra's combat fit into the world. Indeed, Indra feels strangely... out of place in Axiom Verge 2. Early obstacles like grates appear, surely teasing the fairly early teleport powerup from the first game. Certain spaces begin glitching in ways that could surely only be resolved by the signature Address Disruptor... right?

You do not get the ability to teleport in this game. In fact, the grates are the last possible obstacle to bypass through an ability that lets you turn into a cloud of nanomachines. The Address Disruptor also does not make an appearance, and the glitches in the environment are there moreso as a hint system for a completely different powerup to begin with.

Similarly, on a narrative level, Indra could not be any more different from Trace. Trace was a pretty typical everyman, and was written to ask pretty much all the questions you, the player, might have about the world you've been thrown into. It was pretty clear what was going through his head at every moment.

Indra, on the other hand, isn't as curious about the world. Though she's not devoid of questions about the world, almost all of her conversations are based on things the characters know, but you don't. And no one will stop to explain. Indra has a backstory, and to an extent a knowledge about what's going on in the world that you are not immediately keyed in to. And she has a motivation not immediately revealed to the player. Indra is as much a puzzle to you as the world and all of its strange history and secrets.

So much of this game exists in contrast to the original in a way that is fascinating. Where Axiom Verge 1 zigs, this game zags. That is, with one notable exception. Fairly early into the game, you'll find the one returning powerup from the first game: the Remote Drone. One of the first things you'll do with it is send it through a strange interdimensional portal. And once you cross this threshold, the wrongness begins to take hold.

Across the portal is an entire second world to explore, only accessible as the drone. This alternate dimension looks nothing like Earth. The visuals, the music, the enemies are all completely unlike the ones you've just been exploring. In a way that feels familiar. Though the drone still uses melee combat, this side of the game feels much closer to the experience of playing Axiom Verge 1, and yet it can never be explored as Indra. Only as the drone. Indra doesn't feel right... but the drone does.

And it's not just within this alternate dimension, known as the breach, that you'll be using the drone. You'll be using it to solve puzzles constantly in the main world as well. Not to mention, its faster movement and attack, along with its smaller hitbox makes combat much more manageable than as Indra. Indra begins to feel like the burden. The character you slug around so you can keep playing as the drone. So why is she even there?

This might seem like a criticism, but this feels... intentional, because of the way the game unfolds once this feeling begins creeping in. About midway through, the game's main ally tricks Indra and steals her body, trapping you within the Drone. You'll have recently unlocked the grappling hook powerup (something Indra could never access, even before this moment) so this hardly even feels like a downgrade. The drone has already become more capable of navigating the world than Indra.

And yet Indra, the character, doesn't want to be inside of this drone. Her goal from here on out is to get back to her original body. But you, as the player, are going to be having a lot of fun playing as the drone. You'll unlock tons of powerups during this phase of the game, such as a slingshot attack with the aforementioned grappling hook, hovering, and tons of powerups that improve navigating between the overworld and the Breach. The drone becomes more fun and versatile than Indra could ever hope to be.

It's during this section that the game really begins to feel... wrong. Why have I felt more at home navigating the alien world as the robot than as the human character who most of the initial mechanics centered around? I don't think it's a coincidence that it's during this phase of the game that the connections to the first game become clear.

Indeed, as you become more comfortable with the game, the world has become more familiar as well. It's not just a few reminiscent doorways anymore, familiar enemies, sights, and sounds begin to take hold. It becomes impossible to deny at this point. Somehow, some way, the world you've been navigating is connected to Sudra, the world of the first game. This strange, alien place is more of a comfort than the world that more closely resembles our own.

I'm going to be blunt here, I don't really understand the lore of these games with any sense of authority. I can only go off of my own experiences and what my own very limited understanding of the series' lore can reveal.

That being said, one of the most blatant themes the series has explored is knowledge and power at the cost of humanity. This can be seen in the first game, whose main antagonist is an evil version of Trace who became mad with power upon learning the secrets of the universe.

This theme continues through the second game. The people of this strange alien world were turned into sentient machines to fight a pointless war. Even a young child was forced into this process, with the thought that a child's mind would be more capable of controlling this technology.

This theme also applies with the player. Encountering familiar environments from the first game runs parallel to your increasing reliance on the drone. Your early time with the drone is when you'll first encounter vaguely familiar resemblances to Sudra within the Breach. Once you become trapped inside the drone, you travel to yet another alternate dimension that looks like Sudra was ripped straight out of the first game, albeit with a slightly higher resolution.

And then, late into the game, after being stuck inside of a drone for who knows how long, you finally gain the ability to transform back into a human - sort of. Even your new "human" form is now robotic, entirely composed of machinery. Now, rather than deploying the drone, you simply transform between Indra and the drone back and forth. The dynamic has flipped. Now you'll primarily be playing as the drone, only switching to Indra on the occasions when you need her abilities that the drone cannot access.

And it's during this portion of the game that you'll enter an area that will instantly throw you back to Axiom Verge 1. No longer are the familiar sights and sounds relegated to alternate dimensions. Now, even in the more familiar, Earth-like world, the alien architecture and devices of the first game have made their presence. And it's only now, even after several other visual callbacks to Axiom Verge 1, that you'll finally hear the familiar music of the first game.

This area is filled with a sense of unease. The world of the first game almost feels like it's infecting this one. Despite being a prequel to it, explaining how the technology and architecture of that game came to be, it feels wrong. Invasive. Like it's not supposed to be there. And yet, as you progress through this area, you'll learn about how all of this familiar technology from the first game came to be and what its original purpose was. The strangeness becomes natural, understandable. It's no longer alien.

But at the same time, another realization becomes clear. You've gotten so used to playing as the drone that you have to remind yourself you even still have a human form to change back into. Playing as this machine has become natural. It's a subtle sense of dread that I didn't even consciously realize it at first, but in hindsight, it became clear: I was no longer comfortable being human.

As mentioned earlier, it feels as though this world wasn't designed for you. In truth, it never was. The reason Trace, a human, was able to so easily navigate it, is because he was unique. Some entity known as a PatternMind, capable of manipulating the world to his will. He was special, he controlled the world, not the other way around.

Who is Indra, in comparison? She was one of the most powerful people on Earth, and yet here, wealth and status mean nothing. She was trying to swing an ice pick against alien robots beyond her understanding. It's only once she becomes irreversibly integrated with the technology of this world that she has any hope of truly navigating it.

Plenty of Metroidvanias give you tools that make you better capable of interacting with the world as you progress, but I've never seen a game start you at such a low point only to drastically increase your capabilities so much by the end. You're literally at your most capable of progressing through this world when you're not even the same character as the one you started as.

I'm not trying to defend the poor design of Indra. She is undeniably clunky to play as, even at the height of her abilities. Nor am I trying to treat that poor design as a work of genius. I can't exactly give this game a higher rating than I have precisely because there are several parts of this game I can't describe as "fun" in the traditional sense. That being said, I do still believe this contrast between Indra and the drone means something more than just the gameplay aspect of it.

The first trailer for this game begins with "You are not in control. You are not yourself. You belong to us now." It truly is the most accurate description of Indra's progression through this game. Indra, and indeed all the other humans in this game, are hopeless in trying to understand the full scope of what they're dealing with. Both the technology, and the alternate dimensions this series revolves around.

You, as a human, are insignificant to the scope of Axiom Verge. It is only as you slowly integrate yourself with technology you don't understand that you begin to see the wider truth. It is only as you become more machine than human that you begin to see into more and more of these other worlds.

The game ends with Indra accepting that she'll never truly be Indra again. She can never be with her daughter again. Not just because they are forever trapped in separate realities, but because Indra is no longer herself. That part of her died with her human body. She's someone else now. No longer is she an alien to this world, now she is part of it.

Full spoilers for Undertale, Deltarune, and most importantly, the alternate route introduced with Chapter 2 of Deltarune. You may not even realize this route exists, but it tells a very different story so I highly recommend checking it out for yourself.



Deltarune is a rather strange game. I didn't really write a lengthy review of Chapter 2 because there wasn't really that much to say. This is, at its core, a very fun and silly game that, although not completely devoid of depth, simply isn't setting out to go to some of the same places as Undertale did. And this isn't a bad thing, I don't think we should expect creators of something really good and excellent to be able to be forced to create something that does the same things the original work did. This just let me with the feeling that I wasn't really expecting the overall story of this game to reach the heights of what Undertale was able to say, and I was okay with that.

And then I played the game's rather ill-fittingly named "Weird Route." Because to say this route is merely "weird" doesn't really get to the heart of what makes it interesting. This route completely changed my tune on the idea that Deltarune wasn't going to have as much to say as Undertale. I had heard and seen many out of context spoilers about this run beforehand, but believe me when I say nothing, can replace the experience of actually playing it. It contextualized all of the subtle implications that were already there in Chapters 1 and 2, and now I think I already know where this story is headed.

Before I really dive into this, I want to dive into the kinds of stories in game I tend to gravitate towards. Games are, fundamentally, a different medium from books, movies, television, etc. due to the inherent nature of interactivity. And yet so often, the temptation is to simply treat story as separate from gameplay. The story simply contexts the various sections of gameplay. And this is fine, I have liked plenty of game stories that follow this mold.

But the games that are truly special to me are the ones that truly engage with you, the person playing the game. That uses its mechanics and how you engage with them as a way of reflecting back on you. It might sound pretentious, but it's been done before. Undertale itself is so blatant about this that it actively characterizes the player as an extradimensional entity exerting influence over the world. In the Genocide route, the game actively calls you out for trying such a dark and twisted path through the game, both subtly by making it the least fun to play, and explicitly when Sans all but tells you this in his boss fight.

Other games are capable of this too. I talked about very similar subjects in my Katana Zero and Axiom Verge 2 reviews. These games actively manage to tell a story through their mechanics. They make engaging with the world, actually interacting with it on your own terms, part of the story. These games are less explicit about it an Undertale, but both of these games also have a narrative experience that simply cannot be replicated through watching a let's play on YouTube. Which brings us nicely to Deltarune's Weird Route.



To understand what makes the Weird Route so special, I'm going to do something weird and start at the very end of the ways in which the Weird Route will change the content you experience. After exiting Cyber World, you run into Noelle, a character you repeatedly threatened and manipulated within Cyber World in this route, who wants nothing more than to convince herself that all that transpired was nothing more than a dream, so she doesn't have to live with these events on her conscience.

When she questions if those events were real or not, you get a choice between two dialogue options: Say nothing, or tell her "It wasn't a dream." As a player, it should be blatantly obvious that saying the latter option would only serve to get under her skin even more. And yet, I think everyone who plays this route, myself included, will find themselves choosing this option, despite knowing how blatantly awful it is. So, the question becomes, why is that? How does this route condition you to want to say that to her?

To unpack that, now we can jump back to the beginning. Deltarune, from the very beginning of Chapter 1, beats you over the head with the idea that your choices don't matter. There may be small differences based on the choices you make, but the overall story is fundamentally the same. The choice to fight or spare enemies has less ramifications than in Undertale, basically only serving to slightly change the final confrontation of each chapter. Reducing an enemy's HP to zero simply has them run away.

Chapter 2 mostly continues this. If you play it normally, fighting or sparing enemies won't really affect much in the long run, other than whether or not the enemies you meet will hang out in your hub town or not. You still end up befriending the characters the game wants you to befriend. The story and cutscenes are all pretty much identical. The option of this alternate Weird Route is not communicated to you, the player, at all.

Compared to the Genocide Route, whose existence could at least theoretically be stumbled upon blindly if you happened to grind enough, this one almost feels designed so that you'll be doing it because you learned about it from the internet. Because there's a character you meet in this chapter with a new attack, that when used to lower an enemy's HP, will have a very different outcome.

Enter Noelle, a character who had a minor role in Chapter 1 as the easily frightened childhood friend of protagonist Kris. In Chapter 2, she and her annoying classmate Berdly get sucked into Cyber World along with our protagonists. After the rest of your party goes off on their own temporary adventure, you run into Noelle, who has no idea how to play the game of Deltarune. By this point, you're expected to kind of show her the ropes. But you have another option, which is to tell her to use her unique Ice Shock spell on the enemies you encounter.

If an enemy is defeated with this spell, a unique outcome occurs. The enemy will remain frozen in place after the battle has started, forever. Doing this to as many enemies as possible will quickly convince Noelle to stop seeing these creatures as anything more than enemies to fight. After all, you are Kris, her friend, who she trusts. Clearly you wouldn't be asking her to do this if she was actually doing anything wrong.

But as you progress further and further, the doubt slowly grows in her mind. Suddenly you're having her freeze a shopkeeper who holds an expensive ring that would increase her powers exponentially. You begin threatening her into using her ice powers to freeze over a puzzle. She might not pick up on it, and just thinks you're acting weird because you're trying to help her become stronger, but you, the person playing the game, know what you're doing.

As her power grows, enemies stop chasing you. Now they're running away. Noelle begins questioning things more as she eerily becomes more and more comfortable with the path you've set her on. You find the eccentric salesman Spamton from the normal route in a dumpster, and he agrees to sell you the most powerful ring for Noelle if you freeze every single enemy in the entire area. And you so you do, giving her a ring that begins hurting her. But it's in the name of making her even stronger, so she begrudgingly accepts.

This all comes to a head in the final thing you do with Noelle in this route. When you encounter Berdly, the other character who got sucked into Cyber World, ordinarily you have a pretty typical battle where you get him to back off, although in his arrogance he won't see it as a defeat. But, if you've done this route correctly, you can use that last ring to cast a new spell: SnowGrave.

Noelle initially resists, saying she doesn't even know the spell. You have to keep telling her to cast it, keep pressuring her into doing something she's not comfortable with, until eventually she just gives in and uses it, freezing her friend Berdly in a block of ice. Revolted with what she's done, Noelle leaves for most of the rest of the run. You are now locked into the Weird Route.

The key to what makes this route so special isn't just that you, the protagonist, are doing awful things. It's the unique emphasis on choice. This is a game where your choices supposedly don't matter. And yet, in every single battle, you have the choice to not let Noelle freeze an enemy. If you defeat an enemy normally, you'll lock yourself out of this run, in fact. When you're threatening her into freezing a shopkeeper or a puzzle, you're presented multiple times with an option between simply saying something simple like "Get it." and "Proceed." or something more sensible, reasonable, that doesn't involve manipulating your friend. Selecting any of the latter options will also invalidate this route.

Every time you select one of the former options, however, Noelle expresses hesitance. And you're offered a similar choice. Pressure her to continue down this path, or abandon whatever sick plot you have in mind for her. You have to keep on doing it until she relents. It makes you feel revolted with yourself. Why are you even doing this? Why are you forcing this character into doing things she doesn't want to do? Why are you willingly acting like a toxic person?

Much like the Genocide Route in Undertale, the answer is because you can. But Deltarune gets more specific than that. It says the reason you're doing it is because you have the option to. Because you know it's possible. Because you know there's a way of deviating from the "intended path." A way of letting your choices matter. And when framed like this, it almost seems understandable, an act of rebellion against a deterministic story. But this is where Deltarune finally shows some of the metatextual energy that permeates throughout Undertale.

Because you see, you are not Kris, the protagonist. You are... something else, controlling Kris' body like a puppet. By turning on this game at all, you have forcefully inserted yourself into Kris' life. You are experiencing Kris' story despite not being Kris themself. In the endings of both chapters, Kris will rip out their own soul in a desperate attempt to have some sort of agency from you, the person controlling them.

And so, in this Weird Route, the game is questioning you. It's questioning what right you even have to interact with this world at all. What right you have to interfere with Kris' life. And yet here you are, trying to prove you can do whatever you want. You can seemingly kill off one character and traumatize another, and the impact is... minimal. You get to have your cake and eat it, too. You get to exert influence over this world, you get to have that feeling of power you so desperately crave, but you don't have to face the consequences for it. At the end of the day, you still get to go back home and live someone else's life.

And things brings us to that dialogue option I started off talking about. Noelle, who is naturally a bit messed up from all those times you gaslit her and the way you got her to possibly murder her friend, begins to realize that something is very wrong with Kris. She mentions that Kris speaks in a completely different voice, calling direct attention to the fact that the player and Kris are separate entities. And yet, some part of her still tries to brush it off, that everything that happened was just a dream.

And then you tell her it wasn't a dream. Why? Well, because you want to see how she'll react. You want to see how far you can take this. And it's right here, when that thought consciously enters your brain, that the alarm bells should start ringing. In that moment, it becomes clear what this route was actually setting out to do. The game has actively conditioned you into acting like a toxic person. Throughout all those runs, throughout all those times you selected "Proceed." you have been slowly silencing your own conscience. The part of you that feels guilty over the actions you undertake, even though it's only a video game.

And that is fundamentally what Deltarune is setting out to do. It's asking you to treat the lives of these characters like a game. Yes, technically speaking, it's not real, but it is still able to say a lot about just how easily you can trick yourself into a similar mindset. It asks you how far you're willing to go. How much you're willing to tamper with other people's lives. When do you start viewing this cast of colorful, memorable characters, as the video game NPCs they are? When do you stop playing as the character you've been inserted into the life of, and when do you start playing however you choose to?

The idea of "choice" stops being an expression of agency. And it starts becoming an expression of power. What does "choice" really mean when you're living someone else's life to begin with? Someone who doesn't even seem to want you there, no less. Your choices take away the choices of others. Maybe you should just listen to the game, stop trying to have a meaningful impact, and start following the story it's trying to tell, rather than twisting it into whatever you want. But let's face it, you've already come this far. Can you really tell yourself you're gonna stop? No, you want to see how this goes. You want to see where it ends.

It's for this reason I feel rather guilty that I swapped over to the Switch version of the game to play this route. I don't trust Toby Fox to not manipulate the game saves to warp the ending like how the Genocide Route in Undertale twists the Pacifist ending. And now, after playing this route, I understand I've done exactly what the game is trying to tell me I'm doing. I did awful things in this game because I wanted to, and now because it's separate from my PC saves, there won't even be any consequences for that choice.

This is why I think Undertale and Deltarune are games that are simultaneously so easy and so disastrous to spoil. They actively reach out and almost demand you to analyze the deeper meaning of it all, because these games speak to you through the way you interact with them. Thusly, it becomes difficult not to talk about it online. And yet, because of that, a lot of people get spoiled on the experience. They lose out on that ability to have those same experiences, irreparably.

I do think, even if you've read all of this without playing the Weird Route, that it's worth playing. But don't do it like I did. Don't try to escape the consequences in a desperate attempt to outsmart the game. See where your choices lead for yourself. Maybe it'll amount to something in the end, or maybe your choices really don't matter. There's only one way to find out.

In many ways, Metroid: Dread is an obvious triumph, a display that there is still passionate investment in a series of games that would go on to inspire a whole genre. Obviously, it hasn't been that long since the same developers did Samus Returns, but this is their chance at making a fully new Metroid game.

And for what it's worth, it's pretty good. The way it incorporates many of the series old ideas to the new one it introduces gives this game its own unique identity. This game is utterly dripping in atmosphere, the environments are beautiful and haunting, and although it lacks any memorable music, the way the score sets the mood for each area is still wonderful.

None of this is even mentioning the game's encounters with the E.M.M.I. robots who, although far too heavily tutorialized at the beginning, do invite a certain sense of tension that calls back to the series' horror roots once you unlock the Phantom Cloak ability. In stealth games, I usually feel like I'm cheating when an enemy hears me but then I get back behind cover and they go back to their usual patrol, forgetting my existence. In this, though, stealth is rarely expected to be successful. No, the fun comes in the search.

I don't know if the E.M.M.I are programmed to do this, but the amount of times I managed to turn invisible and find a safe place to activate cloaking, only for the E.M.M.I. to get extremely close to me, scan and find nothing, and then leave, was very high. The feeling of danger is very much real because if one of them so much as touches you, even accidentally, you are most likely dead. I quite enjoyed these sequences.

The problem is that there's a weight dragging this game down. Another game it's trying to be on top of the game they're selling you. The Metroid game where you explore a completely new alien world and get stalked by killer robots is great, but it's also trying to be something else: the finale to this era of the Metroid series.



I don't think anything sums up this problem better than the game's halfway point. After spending so much time in the lower depths of the planet, you finally unlock the grapple beam and use it to take an elevator upwards for the first time in what feels like forever. And what awaits you is unlike everything else you've seen so far.

Ferenia is a grand old citadel of the Chozo, a race of bird-like aliens who are responsible for most of the technology Samus uses. Without words, you immediately understand everything about this place. The simple, ominous chanting the game establishes as the theme of the Chozo echoes through the halls as you realize you've stumbled onto a place of great importance. This once great place has been abandoned, yet its beauty is still preserved.

It's short-lived, however, as you soon find yourself in yet another cold, mechanical environment signaling the presence of an E.M.M.I. robot. This sudden clash of environments is already not great, but it can be forgiven. What's worse is what happens just moments later. Before you really have a chance to encounter the latest E.M.M.I. robot, a cutscene plays where it catches you and suddenly a living Chozo appears and shuts it down, saving you. What follows is one of the most clumsy ways at storytelling I've seen in a while.

Before we continue, let me make something clear: I'm not an expert on this series. The only Metroid games I played before this were Super Metroid and the remake of Metroid 2. I know the stories of the other games, but I haven't played them myself. However, the two I have played are regarded as some of the more important series narratively, so I have to assume that my problems with this story aren't that I'm missing out on important details, but rather that the attempts to tie everything together in this game were handled poorly.

The Chozo introduces himself as Quiet Robe and goes on an exposition dump that feels like an hour long, explaining the Chozo's presence on every planet Samus has been to over the series. I cannot stress enough how little this matters. The only thing of importance you learn is that the villain Samus encountered earlier in the game is named Raven Beak and that he's after Samus because he wants to use the Metroid DNA she was injected with in Metroid: Fusion to clone a new army of Metroids.

This concludes with Samus, for the first time since the universally panned Metroid: Other M, speaking. In the language of the Chozo (which I guess she knows because she also has Chozo DNA inside of her?) she tells Quiet Robe she'll stop Raven Beak's plans. As cool and impactful as it is in the moment, it rings kind of hollow. Familiar, heroic music may be blaring in the background but this tells us nothing about Samus' character. Certainly less than what other entries in the series were able to communicate completely non-verbally.

Quiet Robe robe then gets unceremoniously killed off now that his role as exposition machine is complete and he's informed Samus of her "destiny" or whatever, and a boss fight ensues. In this moment, it becomes clear that the game you've been playing up to this point is over, and it's become something else. This isn't inherently bad, one of this game's best strengths is its ability to surprise you, but the haphazard way it's implemented leaves something to be desired. The game's signature E.M.M.I. robots are basically a non-presence from this point onwards and this is now a sequel to Metroid: Fusion.

Again, the way the game surprises you is interesting. I hadn't played Fusion so the moment where you accidentally release a swarm of X-parasites and they suddenly revamp every single enemy in the game's behavior was genuinely cool. There's also a lot of cool new boss battles, my favorite being Experiment Z-57 who forces you to use the Space Jump in a lot of fun ways.

It's not that the gameplay stops being exciting or fun, but that what was once a genuinely atmospheric, chilling game, filled with the intended feeling of dread, is over now. However, as much as I criticize this shift in the story, there is one moment where these two story threads converge: the last E.M.M.I. encounter.

There are very few E.M.M.I. encounters after the big "twist" if you want to call it that, but the final one is a complete curveball. Throughout the second half, they've been teasing that something physically is changing within Samus because of her encounter with Raven Beak at the start of the game. And in this final E.M.M.I. encounter, it awakens. The Metroid DNA inside of Samus activates and she completely drains the final E.M.M.I. of its energy. YOU have become the terror, the thing your enemies should be afraid of. I do have some problems with this story thread broadly, but I won't deny that this singular moment is effective.

There unfortunately isn't that much left to talk about, the game is mostly typical Metroid fare once the E.M.M.I.s are out of the way. Which is a shame, because without this twist, I feel like the game could have built on the E.M.M.I. encounters more, had to spend longer amounts of time with them hunting you, and genuinely had to use your powers to navigate the environment. Instead, all of your focus is spent solely on trying to find an exit and make your way to it. Again, I feel like this could have been fixed had the E.M.M.I.s not been effectively tossed aside in the second half, but as it is, it's a major missed opportunity.



Where things take a turn for the worst is the game's final act. Again, gameplay-wise, it's pretty fun. There's a long and genuinely challenging boss battle that allows you to make use of all the game's mechanics in a way that's frantic and exciting. However, story-wise, I again have to express disappointment.

I know it's a bit rich complaining about the story in a Nintendo game, but in this case, even if the game isn't riddled with cutscenes all over the place, it's trying to have one. If it wasn't, there'd be no reason to have the cutscene just before this boss.

For you see, just before your last encounter with Raven Beak, Samus reports to ADAM, her ship's AI named for the character Adam from Metroid: Other M. One of the most widely-criticized aspects of Other M was Samus' relationship with Adam (the person, not the AI), where this once fully independent character now wouldn't do ANYTHING without specifically being told to by Adam, her commanding officer, who she was also in love with. I haven't played Other M to confirm, but these criticisms were ringing in my mind during this cutscene.

Because, in this moment, ADAM (the AI, not the person) tells Samus that the Metroid DNA awakening within her makes her a threat to the galaxy. The only way the Galactic Federation will allow her to live is if she follows every single one of their orders to the letter from now on. This gets weirdly personal as ADAM tells her that following orders is always what she's done and that this should come naturally to her. Samus responds by blasting ADAM right in the face, or rather, computer screen. I can't describe how much this felt like a direct response to the criticisms of Other M.

Of course, before Samus even fired the blaster, it was clear that something was wrong here. ADAM had already had some... strange dialogue throughout the game, talking about Samus' "destiny" and constantly telling her that she's totally not strong enough to take on the super cool villain Raven Beak. So it wasn't a huge shock when ADAM was revealed to have been controlled by Raven Beak all along in this moment. This makes the moment ring completely hollow, as now it's not really Samus asserting her independence, it's just her seeing through the disguise of this one specific villain.

The villain also drops another minor lore dump, which is that one part of the alien DNA cocktail that Samus has been injected with is that some of the Chozo DNA she has actually came from a transfusion from him. I honestly could not tell you what adds to this story other than to haphazardly justify why this previously unseen and unmentioned antagonist should be the final boss of this series. For the record, I really don't care that the final boss was never mentioned before, rather I care that this game tries to pretend they've been building to this Raven Beak guy all along when they really haven't.

After the genuinely spectacular boss fight, the ending sequence has Samus' Metroid DNA fully take form as her armor becomes green and Metroid-like. She completely drains Raven Beak much like she did to the E.M.M.I. from earlier, and then leaves the planet in the obligatory escape sequence. For all my complaints, this feels like a cool ending for the series. Even though all the Metroids are gone, the series' title of "Metroid" will live on through Samus. This new design and potential for new Metroid abilities for her would allow the next game to be a complete breath of fresh air and shake up the formula.

And then there's a moment that just crushes me. Right before Samus tries to take off, her ship warns her that if she touches the controls, she'll just accidentally drain it of all of its power. But Quiet Robe, who for plot reasons that are way too complicated to get into, shows up and reverts Samus back to her human form so she can activate the ship and fly away.

This continued the game's pattern of teasing something interesting and then immediately going back on it, so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. But I'm really bothered by this ending for a lot of reasons. This is the literal last beat of this series until whatever the next era of Metroid looks like. This does line up with that moment I was talking about earlier, with Samus taking the place of the E.M.M.I.s as the one who instills fear, so this ending where she gets healed is meant to be a good thing. But here's why I think it was a mistake to handle it that way.

The Metroids, at least in the games I played, were framed fairly sympathetically. In Metroid 2, Samus is sent to wipe out all of the Metroids. But throughout the game you'll discover that these Metroids are not all energy-sucking monsters. They've evolved into different forms and even seem to have a queen and hive system. They are hostile to you, but only because you came into their home to wipe them all out just because they could "potentially" be a threat. This is reinforced by the ending, where Samus chooses to spare the last Metroid, the recently-hatched baby of the Queen Metroid she just killed.

Super Metroid continues this. In the ending of the game, the baby Metroid from the first game who has now grown in size, sacrifices itself to save Samus. It drains the boss of its power and then gives that energy to Samus to give her the boost she needs to win the fight. Without words, these two games have formed an emotional arc between Samus and the Metroids. That moment where it gives the energy to Samus also establishes something else, which is that the Metroids aren't only capable of taking energy away, they're also capable of giving it. They're not just the mindless destroyers they were made out to be. They were simply used as a weapon by others.

Metroid: Dread basically throws all of this out of the window. Quiet Robe just casually mentions in his big exposition dump that he and the members of his tribe wanted to wipe out all of the Metroids and this is seen as a good and heroic thing by the story and never questioned. This isn't helped by Samus becoming more Metroid-like and having to be "cured."

Yes, obviously Raven Beak trying to create an army of Metroids to use as weapons was bad, but what is the point of this ending where basically the last trace of the Metroids gets wiped away? This series basically regresses its own stance on the Metroids completely for no good reason.

It's genuinely bizarre that they both had a chance to move the series forward in an interesting way AND deliver a satisfying conclusion to Samus' journey with the Metroids by having her end the series as this half-Metroid, half-human being, and then chose to undo it at the last minute. To not only do that, but to actively derail the new ideas this very game was exploring just to deliver this nothing of an ending, is disappointing in many ways.

I say all of this and I still give it 3 and a half stars. Why? Honestly, it's because the game is just too fun to play. Aside from the game locking you into areas just a few too many times to the point where intentionally backtracking to get items you missed becomes practically impossible until the very end, this game is genuinely enjoyable. As the first fully new Metroid experience in over a decade, it delivers... if you ignore the story.

There have been plenty of games with some ludicrously tough postgame challenge that tests your skills before. If I enjoy the game, I will almost always attempt these challenges.

On some occasions, the challenge proves too much for me, someone who ENJOYS playing video games at the highest level of challenge I can achieve. On these occasions, I will usually abandon the game for a while, and return. Upon returning, I will keep attempting this challenge until I either beat it or I give up entirely and never return.

Hades, however, did something that's never happened before: I had multiple times where I thought I had given up on the game's 32 heat challenge for good. And yet, every few months, I found myself coming back all the same. It did not hit me how unique this was for how I play games until yesterday.

Yesterday, I attempted the game on the highest officially endorsed level of difficulty (the game uses a sort of difficulty points system called "heat") of 32. It can go much higher than that, but even I'm not enough of a sadist to attempt that just yet. And something happened to me.

This was the "perfect" run. My build had everything I wanted it to. I could easy reflect any projectiles, I could place down laser beam crystals, I could weaken enemies with the mere throw of my shield, and I could go invincible once I charged up my special meter enough.

Then, in the final boss fight, which lasted nearly 10 minutes of pure intensity with my current build, I lost just before the end of the last phase. If this were Dark Souls or the like, I'd be seething with rage. And here I am, in a roguelike of all genres, where death means redoing long stretches of gameplay all over again, and I felt... good. Exhilirated, even.

In all honesty, it's not exactly "good" to get enraged at a game, however difficulty, however unfair the death is. I've never had any extreme reactions, but all the same, the feeling of anger at a video game is always the worst part of playing a challenging video game. So I find it relieving and fascinating that a game inspired such a vastly different reaction from me.

It could be easy to ascribe this to a matter of "fairness." Hades is a remarkably fair level of challenge. The controls are tight, there's no glitches, every attack has a telegraph, and it's very easy to make everything out despite all the visual noise. And many other games known for their challenge can't claim to do the same. The Dark Souls series is notorious for is awkward camera controls and lock-on system.

But I wouldn't say that's the issue. I've played plenty of other "hard" games where the challenge was also fair and still found myself getting upset, even other roguelikes. I think what Hades does that no other game that prides itself on its challenge manages to pull off is a matter of simply what the game expects you to enjoy about it.



In most action games, the formula is fairly simple. You are presented with a challenge, and you must use your abilities in skillful manner to overcome that challenge, and are then rewarded for your victory. Hades follows this formula as well, but I think where most other games fail is that few steps of that process are consistently rewarding. The emphasis is placed on the victory. If you fail, then there is no satisfaction in the experience.

I don't mean to keep invoking the name of Dark Souls, the dead horse of video game comparisons, but I think it is genuinely relevant to this conversation. This isn't about comparing their mechanics, but rather in comparing them in the context of wider difficulty discourse. Because Dark Souls has a series of, shall we say, passionate fans who are radically opposed to the concept of having any sort of difficulty or accessibility options.

The argument against adding any sort of options to better manage the challenge usually boils down to supposedly compromising the vision of From Software, the company who develops the games. This is somewhat true, From Software has stated multiple times that the vision for their games is to face players with an overwhelming challenge so make victory all the more satisfying.

However, while I do respect that as a vision and I'm not trying to say anyone did anything "wrong" here, I think Dark Souls' influence has consequences on how we perceive difficulty in video games generally. Because so much emphasis is placed on the victory, defeat is seen as weakness, and victory as the only sign of strength. This makes it easy to wear each victory as a badge of honor. And there's nothing inherently wrong with being proud of any accomplishment in a video game, but like many things, it's possible to be taken to an unhealthy extreme.

There is a not-inconsiderable amount of these people who are so obsessed with their own victories in this game that it causes them to look down on others for not being able to do the same. Some fans even debate whether using features Dark Souls already has to make things easier, like summons or grinding, truly count as skillful play. A game that is meant to be collaborative through many of its multiplayer mechanics has a very competitive discourse surrounding it.

And yet it misses the point of why it's so hard for people to get into From Software's games. It's impossible to truly appreciate all of their strengths when the core gameplay loop is inherently centered around victory at all costs. Death is not treated merely as failure, but as a black mark upon you for not daring to be capable of beating that boss that can kill you in two hits on the fist try. The game itself may not directly punish this (other than losing all of your souls) but the social pressure is very much there.

This may sound like a criticism of Dark Souls' design, but it's really not. I enjoy those games, but I think the impact their community has had on difficulty bleeds into how we talk about other games too. Dark Souls, after all, is one of the most influential games of the 2010s. And with that influences also carries over how we talk about difficulty.

It's very easy to look at failure, in life as well as video games, and to feel like something was taken away from you. I am not trying to blame this phenomenon on a video game, but rather, that I think how we talk about difficulty exacerbates this phenomenon.

Nothing material is "lost" by losing in a video game, other than perhaps your time. But when you're encouraged to tie some sort of social status to your victory in a video game, well, then it DOES start to feel like something was taken from you in losing. That, subconsciously, is part of why I think it's so easy to get upset at even video games that aren't some competitive multiplayer game where you're given a ranking that denotes your skill.



So, how does Hades fix this problem? I think, fundamentally, it's one of the few games where losing just feels like part of the experience. Other than reaching the end of the story, the incentive to "win" is actually minimal. Even after finishing the story, the game simply turns your various escapes from the Underworld into your character's official job in the universe.

Your goal is to push back against the obstacles in your way as hard as you can, yes, but there's not really meant to be an "end" to this. Other roguelikes, in their inherently replayable nature, can also claim to do this this, but this is one of the few where it was integrated on a narrative level in way that was framed as a positive. This is not some tragic curse or cycle, you're genuinely helping out all of the lovable characters you've met along the way.

Losing is baked into the mechanics on a fundamental level as well. The game's equivalent to an "easy" mode makes you stronger every time you lose. With that comes the inherent expectation that you lose, and the game pretty blatantly reinforcing that losing is okay.

There's also the Mirror of Night, the game's permanent upgrade system. Your character starts out pretty weak, but by spending the currency you've unlocked over your escape attempts, you can become stronger. This kind of mechanic is in many roguelikes, but Hades basically makes it blatant to you that it's next to impossible to beat the game without these perks. Therefore, you're going to have to lose... a lot.

You see, the fun of a roguelike isn't winning or losing. When you boil it down to the bare essentials, the core appeal is just how ridiculous you can make your build. Again, this may not be a unique trait to Hades, but this game runs with that idea and turns it up to 11. You will start out every run with a few basic attacks and a dash and by the end of a run you will be causing lightning strikes all over the arena, reflecting projectiles back at their sender, racking up insane combos, and just generally filling the arena with so many particle effects it's a miracle you can see anything at all through the chaos.

Hades has so much variety in the abilities you can get and the weapons you can use that the bosses are less obstacles to overcome, and just targets you can use your ludicrous new abilities against. When your build all comes together, it feels like you've outsmarted the game, even though your synergies were all carefully crafted by the designers. The challenge is not meant to merely give you satisfaction in overcoming it, but in the fight itself. In both you and your opponent giving the fight your all. Thus, the outcome becomes almost irrelevant.

It's also worth noting how all of this is integrated on a character level. I think Zagreus might genuinely be the most genius roguelike protagonist I've encountered. Roguelikes are generally light on story, but even the few that try to have one never really go out of their way to conceptualize a character who truly fits the genre. Even Returnal, a roguelike I enjoy almost as much as this, doesn't ever quite define why its protagonist keeps on trying again and again as well as Hades does.

Zagreus, at his core, is incredibly stubborn. To a fault, perhaps. But the story, in its thousands of lines of dialogue, doesn't really portray this as a proper character flaw. All the characters you encounter are very stuck in their ways, completely certain that nothing can be done to improve their own eternity. But Zagreus' own stubbornness proves the necessary force of change needed to improve all of their lives.

It's in this way that Zagreus' stubbornness isn't treated as a shallow character trait, but as an integral part of the narrative. This even makes itself visible through the Death Defiance system, a sort of extra lives mechanic. This itself is explained as Zagreus just being too stubborn to die. His sheer force of will makes it almost impossible not to give it your all in turn.

For reasons that should be obvious, this is perfect for a roguelike. This is a genre that's punishing, repetitive, defined by its steep difficulty and large consequences for every mistake. Having a protagonist that is as determined to achieve his goals as you are means you can't help but project yourself onto Zagreus. Stubbornness is not defined by success or failure, but rather the will to keep going. Your player character's personality is built around the idea that although victory is the goal, it's not the point. The point is simply to never give up.



Stubbornness does have its drawbacks, however. In my own stubbornness, I refused to engage with the Mirror of Night for a large portion of my early playthroughs. I only unlocked a handful of abilities that I thought would not radically tip the scales in my favor.

I did eventually beat the game with every weapon and every aspect this way, but it wasn't really satisfying. It just felt... obligatory. This was entirely self-imposed, by some arbitrary feeling that permanent upgrades go against the "true" roguelike experience.

It was not until I kept attempting the 32 heat challenge that it became clear just how much the game was built around using the Mirror of Night and permanently upgrading Zagreus' abilities. Doing so not only made victory satisfying, but the game itself more satisfying. The game feels much more expressive and strategic with each of these abilities. The game's mechanics only truly come alive when you see how well they synergize with each of the Mirror of Night's abilities.

And so, on that perfect run, when I got to that final fight, and whittled Lord Hades himself all the way down to his third phase, and died, I felt good. I had fun the whole way through. That fight was a delightfully intense experiences. For several minutes straight, without a second to breathe, I was frantically darting around the arena, trying to pile on as much damage as I could while trying to dodge attacks that felt like they were coming from all sides.

This is where I think how we talk about boss design in video games is especially relevant. There's much discussion over whether a boss is "fair" or "well-designed", but I feel like the discussion has become less and less about whether it's straight up fun to fight them. How does the fight actually encourage you to play? This game is one of a rare few that I think genuinely asks that question, and it's so much stronger for it.

Now that I've finally beaten the game on 32 heat today, the day following the run that inspired this review, I'm technically "done". There's a few more things I can unlock, but to be honest, those incentives are meaningless to me. The sheer fun of this game makes me want to come back. Even without changing my weapon or its aspect at all, there's so many other builds I want to try out. There's so much potential with these mechanics that I don't know that this is a game I'll ever truly "stop" playing, which is something no roguelike has never achieved for me.

Roguelikes still have some sort of "end", some final challenge to overcome, and after that, there's not really much incentive left to keep playing. But with this game, it truly feels like it's about the journey and not the destination.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is a frustrating story in many respects because it's such a captivating world but there's so many missed opportunities.

On the one hand, you have the circumstances surrounding the game's apocalypse. The disappointingly believable mundanity of its cause being a billionaire who disregarded safety and ethics for profit, all of the effort that went into building the system that would save the Earth, and most importantly, the totality of it.

In most post-apocalypse stories, the end really isn't the end. That's the point of calling it the "post"-apocalypse genre. There are remnants that survived. But in the world of Horizon, there was a point in time where the Earth had truly died, and not a speck of life remained. And all the world's civilians were duped into fighting a losing war just to delay that day as long as possible so that a new world could be created.

And then on the other hand, you have the present day storyline. Somehow, they took the fascinating concept of the villains' motivation being "our God-King is dead and we want our holy city back, so we're turning to this ancient AI who we think is the devil figure from our mythology for aid in taking it back" and made it boring. There's absolutely no introspection from the game's main human antagonist about this outside of a few audio logs. The rest of the time he's just ranting about strength and how super cool and strong and epic he is. How do you underutilize a concept as dripping with potential as this?

This, I think, is at the heart of the main criticism of the game, which is that the present day storyline simply isn't as captivating as the backstory. And I think there's some truth to that. I just vented about the utter waste of its entire faction of main antagonists. But it ends up opening an interesting conversation about video game storytelling. Because I think we're beyond the question of whether or not games can have good stories, now the dilemma facing most AAA games is how to tell them.

The way Horizon's two major stories are conveyed to the player are just fundamentally different. The present day storyline is told the way pretty much every AAA open world game tells its story. You'll get most of the dialogue through interacting with NPCs, with plenty of dialogue choices that don't really define the narrative as much as allow you to project your own thoughts on the current events in the story. There are also, obviously, occasional cutscenes where dialogue alone just won't do. It's a very involved story, never cutting away with Aloy, always putting you in the middle of the most important events as they happen.

The backstory, on the other hand, is just about the opposite as far as storytelling goes. It's told extremely indirectly. At best you'll get holograms of people from the past talking, but even then, it's very distant. With few exceptions, these are never even used as proper cutscenes, you can still move around as Aloy as they play out. And that's just the stuff you're required to see. Everything supplemental you'll have to go digging through text and audio logs for. Which means a lot of walking around generic purple bunkers constantly checking your compass to make sure you didn't miss anything, then scanning every individual log one by one.

And yet, despite these issues, the backstory ends up being more engaging somehow. Why? Well, although I think the backstory is just genuinely a great depiction of the apocalypse I could write a whole separate review about, I think there's a deeper problem here. I believe the answer is that despite trying to tell a more involved, cinematic story in the present, corners were cut. And it shows at almost every moment.

Voice direction for all but the most crucial NPCs was clearly poor, as if they only had one take. And if that's not enough, even for the performances that did manage to avoid this problem, you'll have to deal with the most awkward dialogue animations I've ever seen. Yes, hand-animating every interaction would have been a staggering amount of effort, but everyone's faces look like they're struggling in pain to say every word.

This ruins some of even the most important moments of the story. Much of the first half of the game revolves around Aloy chasing down a character named Olin, who served as a spy who gave up her location to the game's main villains, leading to a brutal massacre that wiped out a significant portion of her tribe along with her adoptive father. As she chases Olin down, Aloy learns he did it under the threat of his own family who were being held hostage by the villains.

And so, with these conflicting feelings about this man bubbling inside of her, what are we treated to when she finally pins down this man and confronts him? Animations so awkward and bad you'd be forgiven for thinking they were done by an amateur in an afternoon. All narrative momentum and emotional weight are gone before you even get to choose whether to kill or spare this man because it's impossible to take these animations seriously.

I don't mean to discredit any of the people working on this game. It's not a lack of talent or effort necessarily, but this was the developers' first open world game and was in development for 6 years. Eventually, you have to ship a product. I get where corners were cut. But it's hard not to empathize with people who didn't fall in love with the present day storyline when this is the result they ended up with.

I think it's important to say all of that because honestly, I think when you view it from a birds' eye perspective, the present day storyline is just as captivating as the backstory. There are precisely two moments of the game that stuck out to me as being far and away the best parts of the game, and each comes from a different one of the two "halves" of this game's story. The first was the revelation of the fact that the apocalypse of Horizon was a true, total apocalypse. That the entire world we've been seeing was the product of a terraforming system trying, and mostly succeeding, to bring life back.

The second was the game's genuinely impactful ending, in which Aloy finds the corpse of the closest thing she's had to a mother, the one she embarked on this whole quest to find, while a recording of this woman's interaction with the terraforming AI she designed plays in the background. The score, the dialogue, and for once even the animations all sell this moment perfectly. It's the perfect ending for this game's story. (Even if there's a pointless post-credits scene that kinda kills the mood)

But it's not just the ending that works about the present day storyline. The world it sets up is genuinely compelling. Due to some outside intervention by a man I hope secretly survived the apocalypse somehow so I could have the honor of making Aloy kill him myself, the terraforming system that rebuilt the biosphere and spawned a new generation of humans wasn't able to put its education system for those new humans to learn from into place. Pretty much all they received was an early childhood education, and a weirdly comprehensive knowledge of the English language.

So, eventually, when these humans are let out into the wider world, they all come to their own conclusions about the ruins of the old world left behind. Some of them remember the multiservitors that took care of them like mothers, and so revere motherhood. Some of them looked at old books about the Sun and devised an entire religion around it. Some of them looked at the animal-like terraforming machines roaming around, each glowing with the same blue energy, and formed their own beliefs about the world and life around that. And the list just goes on.

It's all genuinely captivating, and it's really a shame it all gets overshadowed because of the same repetitive discussion about how the backstory is more interesting than the present. Again, it's a fair criticism, but I feel like it ends up discouraging a lot of wider discussion about just how intricate the world this game has constructed is.

This is what happens when a good story is told badly. For all the praise I just heaped on the game, you're basically looking at this wide world with its new range of diverse cultures through a keyhole. The game really only explores the culture of two major tribes and lets the others be window dressing. And one of those tribes really only gets explored via a rogue faction who serve as the villains of the game, who as I described at the start of this review, are bland and lacking in any introspection. And the other is explained very thoroughly in the first half and then utterly shafted in the second half minus one main quest.

The answer, I think, to all of these problems comes in the game's Frozen Wilds DLC, which I think might be one of the most impressive expansions I've seen in a game for just how willing it was to tackle almost every single issue the base game had. Although it doesn't go back and fix any of the old story content, the new story content easily makes it worthwhile.

For starters, right off the gate, every single new dialogue animation is vastly improved. No more of the same shot, reverse shot animations with pained expressions. The facial animations themselves are better, and characters actually move around and talk with their hands as they speak to you. On rare occasions, it's a little much, but I can tell you I skipped through a lot less dialogue in Frozen Wilds than I did in the base game, so the pros vastly outweigh the cons.

But this is not the only way the presentation has improved. The backstory is, admittedly, told pretty much identically. In the new region of the game you'll still be going through a lot of audio logs, more than usual as there are only a few holograms. But the present day story is made far more compelling.

The present day story is focused around one, central, focused idea: The Banuk Tribe and how they interpret two AIs fighting for control of a volcanic facility. The entire central conflict revolves around Aloy helping a Banuk shaman try to gain access to the facility because the shaman believes an AI she's become a friend to over the last five years is some sort of machine spirit, and that spirit is now being held captive by a "Daemon". Unsurprisingly, this Daemon is just another AI trying to wrest control of the facility.

I'm not going to get into too many more specifics here because this review has gone on long enough. But this DLC has a much more central focus on the people of Horizon's world and how they interpret the events surrounding them. What the main game only glanced past becomes the centerpiece. It's no masterpiece, but it's probably the best story this game has to tell.

I hope the game's sequel, which seems to heavily revolve around Aloy teaching her companions all of the discoveries she's made about the true nature of the world and how everything they know came to be, can expand on this further. The people at Guerilla clearly showed an understanding of their flaws and a willingness to learn from them, which makes me very optimistic for how much further they can push this story further and really make the case for why the Horizon world is genuinely captivating sci-fi.