As unmatched as Silent Hill 2's atmosphere is at times, with its incredible music and uncanny FMV cutscenes, I really dislike how it tackles the things it's "about". There are no real mysteries to the human unconscious here; it's all been categorized into clearly identifiable 'Themes' and 'Symbolism' based on a skim through the Wikipedia article for Sigmund Freud. There really isn't much room for interpretation or disagreement on what it all means.

The monsters represent James's repressed views toward his sick wife. The nurses represent James's sexual frustrations while visiting his wife at the hospital. Laura represents innocence and redemption. Maria represents an idealized version of his wife that he fails to hold on to. Pyramid Head represents James's endless self-flagellation. The appearance of the empty, decaying town of Silent Hill represents James's empty, decaying life. And I'm not a fan of media that can be boiled down to "this represents this", "x symbolizes y" so cleanly. It's so... sterile - like going through some kind of intro course for being able to identify themes and symbolism in art.

It's fitting then that the literal exploration of James's unconscious is similarly trivial. The game will present you with an initially daunting and unsettling place: an abandoned hospital, a labyrinthine prison - and then, right at the entrance, it hands you a map. As you explore, James marks down doors, dead ends, and puzzles, systematically demystifying anything uncertain about this place, revealing the artifice of all of this. It's just a crude process of elimination; walking door to door, checking each one off of a list. This is the problem with video games as a medium for horror: The tendency is to represent everything as a concrete, understandable 'system' or 'game mechanic' that sabotages any sense of confronting the unknown. These dilapidated ruins we explore throughout the game sure have an air of uncertainty, but in terms of our actual interaction with them, they're just video game levels, like any other.

The architecture of these spaces isn't very creative either. If you ignore all of the horror set dressing, they're mostly just regular buildings. That's unfortunate, because video games as a medium, while not entirely suited to horror, are uniquely suited to experimentation with architecture; they're the one form of media that asks the audience to personally inhabit and navigate a space. And considering Silent Hill is all essentially a dream projection, the developers could have gone in a very surreal direction. But other than a small labyrinth and one section of the hotel, you'll rarely find yourself in truly hostile or confusing geometry - the only real hostility you face is from the monsters.

And when James encounters these personifications of his most shameful repressed thoughts, how does he deal with them? Gun. The joke answer to "How would you make a video game about trauma?" After all, what did you think this was? A nuanced psychological horror/drama, the sort that you would find in an actual artistic medium? This is a video game, dude. Your actual engagement with these complex issues can only be in the most braindead ways imaginable.

Maybe this would be forgivable if the combat had more complexity than the story - but it doesn't. James is supposed to be a wimpy civilian, but thanks to auto-aim he shoots like a trained sniper. Even this would be excusable, though, if it weren't for the essentially limitless ammunition scattered thoughtlessly throughout the map. These two aspects come together to make combat a formality. The only way to really fail is to allow enemies to close distance with you and do melee damage. Then again, health potions are plentiful (and can be used while the game is paused), making even this threat moot. You can try to address these issues by turning the difficulty up, but this just turns the monsters into bullet sponges. That may fix the overabundance of ammo, but it also heightens the core absurdity of this game; you'll find yourself standing there, mashing square to unload shell after shell into a video game monster that represents depression. As you do that, ask yourself: is this really the height of "interactive art" or whatever people claim this game is?

Maybe my attitude toward SH2 is unfair; I will admit that the devs continuing to answer questions and debunk fan theories online 20 years later gives me a less favorable outlook. It could be my fault for letting content outside of the game ruin it for me. But I don't think that's completely it. The game itself seems to eschew any subtlety in its message, and the developers openly explaining the game's meaning online seems like a continuation of that lack of subtlety. I honestly think even the Metal Gear Solid series has infinitely more layers of hidden thematic meaning than anything you'll find here.

One thing I will give the game credit for though is how it assigns you an ending based on the psychology of how you play. If you fight recklessly and always seem to be an inch from death, the game is more likely to end with James taking his own life - reflecting the player's apparent death drive. And examining the knife (Angela's would-be suicide weapon) too many times can also result in James's own suicide; a great representation of suicide as a social contagion. Even if James retains the will to live, getting too attached to Maria will result in an ending where he loses all grip on reality. To achieve true redemption for James, the player must keep him in good health, avoid contemplating suicide, and keep Maria at arm's length while respecting the memory of his wife. This is a genuinely innovative way to implement psychological storytelling in a video game and I haven't seen anything else like it. And most importantly, this process is entirely mystified to the player; you don't see a tally of "depression points" or a scale between Mary and Maria telling you which ending you're leaning towards as you play. Unless you read the wiki, the game's process of assigning you an ending is a complete mystery - as it should be.

It's a shame the rest of the mechanics are so by-the-numbers, because this game's stellar art design deserved equally creative game design. And while it may have been a milestone for video game storytelling in 2001 (but then again, was it really?), I honestly think the medium has done a lot better, before and since.

3&K takes over so much of this game's conversation I honestly forgot the two halves were playable separately - hell, that's how childhood me first played them! Even though I had the S&K collection, nobody in the family was smart enough to get past The Barrel - so the bits of the back half I saw were from booting &Knuckles directly. Toddler me didn't even realize 3&K was the two games combined until later - I just assumed it was a bonus version of 3 with Knuckles playable.

And honestly? S&K alone is a vibe. Something about it has this unspoken edge when treated as an isolated continuity - hard levels right out the gate, no tails to morally support sonic, mostly roboticized or harsh environments, and no save feature as a safety net. S&K also feels like a realization of Sonic 1's design philosophy, which focused most heavily on platforming supported by speed instead of the other way around. You get that scheme here but with infinitely more meaningful level design and much better pacing.

Main flaw is that (A) you're missing all the amazing content from 3 and that grander 'adventure' feeling, and (B) S&K has a pretty rough zone quality ratio. Mushroom Hill's my favorite Classic Sonic hill stage, and Flying Battery is raw, but then Sandopolis and Lava Reef are mid, followed by cool-but-short Sky Sanctuary and the overly-tedious Death Egg.

Cartridge shape is a bitch to organize on a shelf and I'm not stacking enough paper to buy a box for my copy rn. I got other financial priorities and shit

Sonic, as a franchise, has three particulars about it that really stood out to me from back when it started, three core tenants that SEGA have been routinely trying to work out how to translate forward whenever a new game comes out, and despite the initial reactions to Frontiers being a stark separation from what came before, I think it’s interesting to look at what we have in the game and how Sonic Team chose to tackle these challenges in a new way.

1. An adaptation of SEGA’s arcade score-based philosophy brought to a home console experience.
2. A response to the trends of its time period (originally inversely to Mario)
3. A means to harness what was possible with technology to be a showcase for a style of play few others have dared to replicate.

For the first point, although Sonic started as a franchise on home consoles, minus a few arcade games here and there, the first games still had a score to keep track of with ways to balance earning more by the end of levels, limited lives and continues. The highscore stuck around for years, with Sonic Adventure 2 making it a gameplay objective to earn a highscore for the mastery ranks of every level. But it’s been because of this arcade style philosophy that most modern Sonic games end up with short, elaborate zones holding levels designed to be beaten in only a few minutes but designed to be replayed over and over.

Sonic Frontiers answers this by peppering its open zones to have bite-sized challenges at around every corner. There’s very little downtime in Sonic Frontiers, which I think helps keep the pace up. Almost everywhere you look there’s a rail or a spring or a dash panel, with islands 2 and 3 in particular having a lot more height structures and being fairly large in size. Despite pop in, seeing larger, vast structures in the distance does inspire wanting to find out what’s at the top of the challenge, and there’s sometimes a bit of level fun along the way. The game has a lot of quick engagements with several rewards at the end of them, and the open zones being a flow to get from setpiece to setpiece I think is a solid gameplay loop, provided the terrain supported the potential with player expression, but more on that issue later.

Cyberspace is also there as an answer to the high score replayability of past titles, and I think conceptually they’re solid. They’re spread far enough around the world that finding one actually feels like a bit of a surprise, short enough to feel like a quick change of pace and you’ll not need to play many of them just to progress. But, to get the elephant out of the room, the only momentum these have is managing to boost off of the halfpipes and there’s only four themes to go around. It would’ve been SICK to have Eggmanland as a fifth theme, surely, they have Unleashed assets hanging around somewhere to reuse, but alas. The 2D ones I got something out of, mainly due to the bounce to air boost combo giving you some additional height and fixing the insanely speedy acceleration from Forces, but 3D feels very wrong; air control is directionally locked when trying to make platforming which leads to a lot of slippery turning and falling off the sides. I really wish they would’ve kept the Open Zone controls in these; THOSE I think felt pretty comfortable after some tinkering and it’s the main disconnect from what’s otherwise being an incredibly cohesive full experience. This concept is sound, but I hope gets an overhaul for a supposed sequel.

When it comes to being in touch with current trends, it’s far from a secret Sonic’s existence was born of attitudes from the early 90s, but continuing that down the line, Sonic Adventure 1 was constructed as an elaborate tech demo for the Dreamcast complete with an entire campaign to show off its capability for fishing. Sonic Adventure 2, and specifically the creation of Shadow the Hedgehog, feel almost prophetic for what would be viewed as “cool” during the 2000s, the kind of nu-metal emocore cool bouncing off the more spunky ATTITUDE Sonic himself was created under. Sonic 06 was trying to adapt too many things in its rushed development, the increased focus on real time worlds, physics systems, hubs full of NPC sidequests and the grandiose storytelling not overly dissimilar to the Final Fantasy X’s of the world. Since then, we’ve had Sonics focused on dual world gameplay, God of War combat, motion control sword swinging, Mario Galaxy level tubes and custom characters.

Sonic Frontiers’s hat to throw in this ring is player freedom. Past 3D Sonics have often had the issue of containing multiple different gameplay styles or arbitrary conditions players HAD to power through in order to get through to important content across the game. Sonic Unleashed was a particularly egregious example of this with its medal collecting blocking progression and often necessitating backtracking through levels. Frontiers in comparison is refreshingly loose in progressing across the world. Multiple small missions exist in Frontiers to bridge story gaps, but they’re quick and aren’t terribly taxing so players should get back into it fairly fast. That players can use a fishing minigame to help bypass walls of whichever kind of progression they don’t want to deal with the most I find to be pretty funny, when considering how the fishing minigame back in Sonic Adventure is viewed as a primary case of out of place content being outright required to finish the main story of the game. That “repeated content” in an open world game is presented mainly through quick bits of speed and platforming and light map opening puzzles instead of overly elaborate sidequests which I think, again, largely keeps the pace of the game up. Everything you can see (aside from plot progression doors) is something to be toyed with immediately, even if I wish there were more creative ways to finish sequences beyond air boosting to reach character tokens early.

There’s also a skill tree combat system, and it’s a mixed bag. The many moves can look cool and have satisfying sound design but combat itself is very simplistic, to where mini bosses need to have their own gimmick to spice things up. I like MOST of these (the Shark goes on for too long) for giving certain enemy encounters a distinct feel. It’s a combat system that’s very drive-by, in a way not unlike the classics, prioritizing efficiency and style and not effective use of button combos. You see an enemy, do the thing to make them vulnerable, get a thing and then keep running. I still prefer this to locking you in rooms within levels like a lot of the 2000s Sonic’s liked to do, yet it’s hardly deep. But I do appreciate how for the first time ever in a modern Sonic, said combat moveset is actually transferred through during the Super Sonic battles. Those go insanely hard; you have to babysit the camera to keep track of your onscreen position, but they’re the incredibly satisfying and raw energy Sonic’s been losing since the turn to more lighthearted games. The metal music tracks for these are prime workout music in what even without them is Sonic’s most varied soundtrack since 2008.

What surprised me while playing was how this freedom aspect actually ties into the plot of the game, and more specifically, the character of Sage. She’s an AI created by Eggman that routinely attempts to halt Sonic’s progress using the world’s technology, while at the same time questioning what his unfettered morals are to her black and white understanding. This parallels with Sonic’s, and in turn the player’s tenacity to go about the open zones accomplishing objectives, helping your friends recover their memories, and standing up to the giant bosses and mini-bosses. It’s through the player’s sense of progression through the world and Sonic’s interactions with his friends (for the first time in over a decade feeling genuine and not like an excuse for comedy skits) that Sage begins to question her purpose and whether Sonic’s intentions are pure despite also wanting to please her master, his longtime enemy. An actual CHARACTER ARC conveyed through the player’s gameplay in the open worlds, and I find that neat. The rest of the plot was light but pretty pleasant to experience due to Ian Flynn’s character dialogue and….some of the animations. The canned NPC animations are very stilted, but the actual hand animated cutscenes are headed back in a more actioney camera direction with expresses as much as can out of these models, with even some concept art used for flashbacks expanding the lore. The Sonic gameplay Vs Sonic lore video only got more wider after this game.

Beyond the story, there’s also what Frontiers is trying to accomplish on a tech level. As much as blast processing and lock-on technology could be seen as marketing buzzwords today, SEGA adopting them represents trying to push Sonic, and by extension themselves, as being on top of what technology can be. In 2D, the best Sonic level design still had to have branching and a sense of speed blasting through the levels, but it could be said to have been easier to craft it all considering the games were sprite based and only so much needed to be on a screen at once. Going into 3D made it harder to manage creating an innumerable amount of unique assets the player would speed by in seconds, from multiple angles and setpieces, rather than only following the sandbox trend other platformers found more comfortable. There’s few things truly like what a 3D Sonic game is capable of, but it’s a difficult beast to manage and polish.

Sonic Frontiers finally takes the step of making sandboxes the core tenant of the game while also retaining the sense of speed. While the first island is fairly small, the second island is incredibly spread in terms of content and all the nooks and crannies within the canyon of the biome while the third island is a vast set of separated landmasses. If there’s one major pro I can give the open zones in Sonic Frontiers, it’s that, with the right capabilities, you really do FEEL fast while exploring in a way that no other open world type game has even tried to accomplish. Using the Drop Dash to slide down the many slopes, power boosting to cross large portions of the map in seconds, and jumping rails at the right angle to hurdle forward through the air like a slingshot.

That being said, there are two issues with this approach. The first is pop-in, which can be incredibly apparent even on the next gen consoles where the game does genuinely have moments of looking quite stunning otherwise, with the day/night cycle. It can be a pretty jarring immersion breaker that makes it harder to gauge where to land on sometimes, even if such is thankfully less apparent during the 2D segments and cyberspace. Seeing it had me wonder if this is more an engine limitation or an actual programming issue?

The second issue is more annoying because of the potential for fun movement in the world: inconsistent reactions to the terrain. Inconsistency is something that could be said to have been associated with Sonic games for years, and as much as Frontiers earnestly tries to have the most fluid 3D Sonic experience out of all of them (never had any bugs while playing aside from briefly flinging off a structure one time) it’s hard to tell, in the game’s current form, what terrain will let Sonic fly through the air and the player subsequently trick their way across platforms, and to what terrain Sonic will cling to and fall like a rock. It can be fun when it happens, but it’s rarely of your intention. I hope this is something they’re better able to delineate in a followup.

I’m glad Sonic Frontiers earnestly looked at these core elements of Sonic to make something I think has done a lot to understand what me and many other Sonic fans personally adore about the brand despite all its ups and downs, but the future continues to be uncertain. I want them to go further, stabilize the control, make terrain more consistently reactive to your movement, have more vibrantly Sonic aesthetic open areas as the new indulgent playgrounds and if Cyberspace is still going to exist have more variety or consistent 3D handling with the worlds. But I also don’t want them to drop the format they’ve created, more serious yet still cheeky tone, Ian Flynn’s understanding of the characters and the more animesque plotting/spectacle.

But this is Sonic Team, or more specifically, SEGA glaring at them near constant. You never know when they’ll live and learn.

(ps. Someone at Sonic Team really liked Ikaruga)

Enjoyable if wildly unfocused mechanics, paired with situations that permit expression without exactly inspiring much strategy: as cursed as it sounds, Bayonetta 3 has big Action RPG energy in how it lets you choose a setup and run that exact flowchart for the entire game. It's cool that these massive enemies aren't limited to formulaic set-pieces, instead roaming each arena relatively freely, but individual actions seem to not carry much weight when 90% of your button presses amount to screen-filling unga bunga shit. Enemies either stagger in a roughly similar, sort-of simplistic way or are still weirdly inconsistent (Grace & Glory parry in mid-air now, which wasn't the case even in Bayonetta 2; unique health thresholds for when enemies can be launched in a game with this many foes leads to an awkward amount of memorization for an intentionally-minded player; leg sweeps sort of exist but only work on a particular set of enemies and don’t actually result in a proper “downed” state, etc.)

This is obviously disappointing when compared to the original's roster of challenging enemies that allow for a wide variety of meaningful soft-counters, set against devilishly varied level design: Grace & Glory with their distance-blocks and fast movement, encouraging attacks with strong hit-stun, knockdown effects or wide hitboxes, Fairness with their anti-air grabs, disincentivizing (but not strictly prohibiting) jumps, Route 666 allowing for risky insta-kills or how you’re asked to maintain a combo during chase sequences — nothing really like that here in the regular mid-level verses from what I’ve played.

So, rather than Bayonetta’s happy medium, 3 ends up opposite to 2 on the “BRUHHHHHHHHHH”-end of the expression vs challenge spectrum: as a pure technical action game, the experience feels about as inconsistent and littered with holes (still no item penalty, totally broken strats like Phantom’s self-destruct, density of mini-games only an insane person would want to master, etc.) but the fact it’s so much less prescriptive appeals way more to my sensibilities. Demon Slave feels like a different take on Umbran Climax that is much more flexible and inviting to experimentation: you get to use it more regularly for longer spans of time (meaning you feel less rushed and encouraged to mash,) but the attack speed and range of your demons is now focused enough that it’s difficult to just stagger the entire screen by mashing X (despite my prior hyperbole in the opening paragraph.) Not only are you allowed to instantly switch between demons mid-combo (either adopting the previous demon’s position or summoning it right next to Bayonetta, granting even more flexibility,) it’s even possible to queue up commands and then take back control of Bayonetta while your demon executes them. It is genuinely clever that the queue can only hold up to two commands (rather than having a larger queue you can fill up for longer just by mashing,) meaning you’ll have to regularly tag between the two actors and coordinate between them positionally to get the most out of the system (specifically, you have to tag back to your demon before the second command has been executed to prevent them from leaving the play space.) The scoring system (while flawed) even takes this into account by having each actor contribute differently to point acquisition (Bayonetta raises points, demons raise the multiplier.)

Like I said, whatever strategy you pick kinda linearly works for the whole game — but at least there’s a lot of stuff to play around with! It almost doesn’t matter that I don’t actually click with a lot of the weapons and demons here when playing through the entire game mostly with Scarborough Fair (meaning “as sub-optimally as possible”) somehow doesn’t turn it into an active chore. I’m not fond of demons where control feels indirect and disconnected (Umbran Clock Tower, Dead End Express) or how weapons in general take control away from Bayonetta for too long (Yo-Yos, Color My World charged Heel Stomp, etc.) and don’t seem to follow intuitive/useful patterns in their dial combos and hold properties, but if anything that actually speaks to the variety on offer and just how many swings Platinum took with the player’s arsenal here. Unique Shot or Umbran Spear variations per weapon don’t even strike me as great inclusions (having Shot as a consistent action was helpful in the previous games to cancel out of certain states or target enemies, and a lot of this stuff just feels linearly better/worse,) but I’m honestly not sure any action game up to this point matches Bayonetta 3 as far as the pure AMOUNT of shit in it. That, and how much freedom you’re naturally given over the enemy’s position as you're toying with them, makes it an absolute buffet for combo fiends, and I can respect that.

I suppose if I had to sum it up, I would say that Bayonetta 3 is packed with interesting and sometimes even very thoughtfully implemented mechanics that spark a lot of intrinsic enjoyment, but the game Platinum have built around them doesn’t immediately inspire me to want to get truly serious about it. You spend a lot of time dicking around and exploring, with movement mechanics that are surprisingly versatile but still feel weirdly kneecapped in some ways (again lacking Bayonetta 1’s satisfying momentum) and are used in platforming challenges that are mostly just kinda quaint and insubstantial. Even rushing through all that, you’re stuck playing through what are probably the shallowest mini-games Platinum have put into code yet (Rock-Paper-Scissors, literally just moving an aiming cursor across the screen — the P**** shmup section was cool though.) But like I said going in, the biggest offender for me so far still is the seeming lack of meaningful encounter variety — at least the Alfheims with all their weird stipulations are a massive step up from Bayonetta 2, but based on what I’ve hard, I’m skeptical that mid-level verses will reveal more sauce on Infinite Climax difficulty.

TLDR: I recommend it! Expectations about met! Incredibly scuffed around the edges but I’ll take that over Bayonetta 2 any day.

I was dooming extremely hard when my long-range Wicked Weaves didn’t hit despite lock-on in the intro mission though. Come on guys.

Discussion stream I did with more practical examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxop2B5b4rQ

Silent Hill 3 is a horrifying game. While the first and particularly the second games in the franchise are more of psychological horror, Silent Hill 3 maintains this while simultaneously being one of the most disturbing, disgusting, and uncomfortable games I have played through, despite being much shorter. I cannot really describe it other than this game is absolutely fucked. The hellish imagery, repulsive sound design that haunts you area to area, and creature design that cranks it up to 20 compared to the first two games. Silent Hill 3 is also a massive graphical improvement from 2, a very impressive leap for being on the same console, allowing the imagery to shine and bring life to the characters' faces.

Generally I think that this game takes the best parts of 1 and 2. While the story isn't exactly as moving as 2, it has some meaty lore and really ties together the first game's story nicely and in a way I was not expecting at all. The gameplay (on Normal) is finally difficult in a fair way; you are no longer given bucket-loads of ammo and health, instead actually needing to think about ammo management. You are given more melee options to supplement this, each of which (apart from the knife of course) does actually have a use. All of these options are necessary, as the monsters are the most aggressive and lethal than they have ever been. I'm not sure I would say it has the best puzzles in the series, but I needed to look up solutions the least out of the three games, while also feeling accomplished for figuring them out, which is a difficult balance to maintain.

The voice acting for Silent Hill 3 is just as... mediocre (generously) as the rest of the early series. Sure, it is part of the charm to an extent, but there is a point where it just is bad. I particularly did not like Douglas's voice acting, who's voice didn't really fit and the delivery was pretty awful throughout the game. I do think this ended up taking away from otherwise impactful moments to an extent. Regardless, Silent Hill 3 is a fantastic continuation of the series, and I think my favorite of the original three. The consistently chilling atmosphere will stick with me for a long time, particularly the cutscene before the final boss fight, something that I would've expected from an A24 horror film ending..

9/10

fully automated gambling is a mainstay of digital entertainment, but whenever its presence is established in other titles i never once felt the need to participate. too much time, too little reward. i imagine most players feel the same given the achievement stats for new vegas, a title where hustling on the strip is the game’s core motif. and yet in spite of my disposition, i found myself spending an inordinate amount of time in red dead redemption II playing poker. when i wasn’t playing poker, i’d be hitting blackjack, and if i wasn’t betting against the dealer i’d be making my bones in dominoes. on paper, none of this served any real practical purpose. unlike the brisk pleasures of most computerized gambling, a round of poker in RDR2 takes much, much more time – your opponents need to shuffle the deck, lay out the cards, or place their chips on a bet. sometimes their decisions won’t be near instantaneous, and in all cases, the victor will smugly reap the spoils of their bet, dragging their hoard of chips inwards. as if the protracted length of gambling wasn’t enough, RDR2 axes the high-stakes poker variant from the original game, so even in the best-case scenario – a six player poker match, no player leaves early, and you rob everyone of their chips – you can only stand to net $25 dollars in profit. a handsome sum in 1899, but a pittance in contrast to RDR2’s other revenue streams, especially when you factor in the time investment. it’s all too likely you’ll end up losing money if you gamble poorly. why bother?

i still gambled a lot though. no matter the inconvenience of the supposed realism on offer, i wanted to fleece people. i wanted to stop and think about my decisions, and i wanted to withstand droughts of bad luck only to tap in when fortune was turning in my favour. and i guess uncle’s smug aura at camp made me want to rip him off all the more. the defining trait which enables this engagement is also RDR2’s greatest strength: the level of verisimilitude it aspires to. the slowing-down-of-affairs intrinsic to RDR2 is somewhat uncharacteristic of rockstar, but they’ve thrown their immense weight behind a kind of granularity not often observed even in comparable massive AAA productions. i honestly think it saved the game for me. i had to force myself through gritted teeth to finish the first red dead and GTA IV, and i’ll never finish GTA V at this rate, but conversely for close to three weeks straight i lost myself in rockstar’s portrait of the old, dying west, however illusory it was.

GTA is very much predicated on extreme player agency in real-world facsimile. the dedication the team committed to this vision creates this inherent friction where in the absence of real limitation, the world rarely feels alive but feels more akin to a little diorama or a quite literal playspace. the devil is always in the details with these titles, but i find the fetishism for the microscopic to be little more than framing at best and rote at worst. maybe if you walk the streets of san andreas in GTA V and get lost in a suburb, quietly observing the mundane (they need an umarell minigame in these games), a lived-in feeling really does exist, but this does not feel like genuine intent so much as it feels like supporting the foundation of american pantomime.

while the quotidian is nothing more than a byproduct in GTA, its function in RDR2 is the games essence. new to the series are various impositions which carefully stitch together simulation elements, asking for a stronger degree of investment from the player than past rockstar entries, both in a literal and abstracted sense. hunger and stamina have to be continually managed for both the player and their steed, money is harder to come by than prior rockstar games, and every activity (hunting, fishing, crafting, cooking, gambling, weapons maintenance, chores + camp support, horse grooming, even just simple travel given that fast travel isn’t immediately present) represents an innate time investment – gone is the sense of casual gratification, tightened ever so slightly more for the sake of a more cohesive world. naturally i’d be remiss to not point out they’re intrusive to only the mildest of degrees - it’s certainly the ‘fastest’ game ive ever played with a simulation bent - and rockstar’s aim here isn’t necessarily to rock the boat but instead one of vanity, to impress with their technological prowess and visual panache.

i understand that rockstar titles are now once-in-a-generation events subject to whatever epoch of games discourse they are releasing in but it is with great amusement that i look back to two strands of dominant conversation at the time of the game’s release: that it is too realistic for its own good, and that its mission design is archaic. both are conversational topics that, at least from my perspective, miss the forest for the trees with critical rdr2 discussion, and at least partially feel like people taking rockstar to task for GTA IV & V’s design after forgetting to do so the first time. firstly, everything addressed as cumbersome in rdr2 is polished to a mirror sheen; whatever truth might be found regarding rockstars digital fetishism impacting personal enjoyment loses a bit of edge when one considers that the inconveniences imposed on the player are essentially operating at a bare minimum. for every measure of sternness here there is a comical remedy. players might be expected to have attire fitting for the climate zone they travel in lest they suffer core drainage, but the reality is that preparation is easy, conducted through lenient menu selection, and at no point is the player strictly via the main narrative made to trudge through the underutilized snowy regions. even a snowy mission in the epilogue automatically equips you with a warm coat, negating the need for foresight. temperature penalties are easily negated for lengthy periods of time if you consume meals that fortify your cores. you don’t even really, honestly have to eat. the penalties associated with the ‘underweight’ class don’t obstruct players very much and individuals can forego the core system entirely just to rely on health cures and tonics alike, meaning it’s a survival/simulation system carefully planned out so certain kinds of players don’t actually have to engage with the systems at all. the most egregious offender for the audience, then, is time investment, for which my rebuttal is nothing so eloquent: just that it’s barely a significant one. there’s something genuinely fascinating about this undercurrent of somewhat strained response to an AAA production making the slightest of efforts to cultivate a stricter set of systems for immersion only to be met with the claim that it goes against the basic appeal of games, something which i at least find consistently prescriptive, contradictory, and totally self-interested. that breath of the wilds approach to open world design predates this is probably at least somewhat contributory - after all its priorities are to filter reality and freedom through more sharply accented and cohesive game design, far from the totalizing rigidity of rockstars work – but it’s not a case of one needing to mimic the other when it’s simpler to state that the contrasting titles just have different priorities. all this is to say that RDR2 is really missing something without some kind of hardcore mode, which would have probably increased my personal enjoyment exponentially and led to a tighter game.

secondly, the complaints regarding mission design are reductive and downplay a much, much broader foundational problem. there are a lot more missions that i actually liked compared to the usual rockstar fare this time, in part because character dialogue is mostly serviceable and not grating, but also because several of them are content to serve characterization or to convey some kind of tailored experience. all the best missions bring the combat to a halt rather than a crescendo. serve on a mission alongside hosea, for instance, and the odds are unlikely you’ll end up drawing your revolver. likewise certain missions are focused entirely on camaraderie, narrative, or some other kind of unique quality. this works really well in spite of the game’s tendency to anchor the proceedings to the mechanically dull yet market-proven gunslinging. it’s unfortunate to center so much of this game around combat when the shooting rarely, if ever, registers as more than serviceable; pulling the trigger feels great, but its repetition, lack of intimate level or encounter design, and oddly weighted aiming reticule underscore a game in need of some kind of revision. strangely enough there are many options for mixing melee approaches and gunslinging in a manner that feels close to appealing but is never leaned on because it’s just not efficient, paired nicely with level design, or geared towards survivability. likewise, the scores of ammunition types and combative crafting options feels redundant in the face of the simplicity of the ol’ reliable revolver and repeater, the lack of genuine ammunition limitation (you’re always able to stock more ammo than you could ever reasonably need) and every enemy’s total vulnerability to precise aim.

but the fact that there are genuinely enjoyable missions that focus more on the game’s verisimilitude is indicative of my chief takeaway from RDR2: all of my favourite components of the game managed to make me finally understand the appeal of the rockstar portfolio, and all of my least favourite components reminded me that i was playing a rockstar game, with a formula and brand reputation that now serves as a millstone around the neck obstructing genuine innovation or risk. for one thing, it was absolutely lost on me until RDR2 that these are open world games which are concerned with a loose sense of role playing but don’t much care for the implementation of stats, skill trees, abilities, or what have you. because these systems are handled with more care than in the past, i found there to be genuine pleasure in this complete reprieve from the mechanical, with an emphasis towards simply just existing and being. without the admittedly illusory constraints of the core systems or the time investment required from its activities, i may not have stopped to have felt any of it – it would have been every bit as inconsequential as GTA. but RDR2 demands to be soaked in. its landscapes really are vast and gorgeous. the permutations of the weather can lead to some dazzling displays; tracking and hunting down the legendary wolf at the cotorra springs during a thunderstorm is imagery permanently seared into my brain even after dozens upon dozens of hours of play.

however well-intentioned it is though, this emphasis on simulation betrays a tendency towards excess that is profoundly damaging and saddles RDR2 with a lot of detritus where a sharper lens would have benefitted its approach to simulation. this is especially bad when considering that a good deal of these extraneous elements are where the crunch surrounding RDR2’s development is most inextricably felt. broader discourse often struggles to find a way to discuss bad labour practices without either treating it as a footnote in the history of an otherwise ‘good’ title (thereby excising its role in production completely) or only writing about it from a pro-labour critical stance, but RDR2 makes my work in reconciling these threads easy: it’s just too sweeping in scope for its own good, and it’s difficult to see how mismanagement and crunch resulted in a better game. after years of these scathing reports and discussions, it’s hard not to let out a grim chuckle when you reach the game’s epilogue, which opens up an entire state in RDR2, only to realize that all this landmass has zero main narrative context. new austin and the grizzlies are massive regions, perhaps not pointless in their inclusion per se, but the campaign has difficulties integrating them yet leaves them present in their totality. it’s a wealth of untamed land included for its own sake.

this is especially frustrating because the game’s structure is suggestive of, strangely enough, sly cooper. the van der linde gang moves further and further away from the west over the course of the game into new and uncharted territory and in each chapter, comes to grips with the surrounding locales trying to pinpoint where the next great score or heist may present itself. every time seems like a small reinvention. the atmosphere at camp changes, new dialogues present themselves, new opportunities, and the narrative is content to settle on one small pocket of the world rather than its sum. perhaps it’s not the rockstar modus operandi but when i realized this was the game’s impetus, i thought it would have been a fantastic way to try something different, for a change – to focus on a small number of higher density regions with a bit less sprawl. i think at least part of why i feel this way is because the narrative is not one bit committed to its stakes. they want you to feel like an outlaw on the run, the law at your heels, the world shrinking around you, and your freedoms slowly being siphoned away, and yet there’s no tangible consequence in RDR2’s worldstate for sticking around valentine, strawberry, or rhodes – three towns that you wreak significant havoc in – like there is for even daring to return to blackwater, the site of a massacre which kickstarts the events of the game proper. obviously the ability to return to blackwater would break the story on its hinges, which is treated as such, but it’s hard to say why any other town gets a free pass.

anyways i find it somewhat ironic that after a journey replete with as many peaks and valleys as the old west it's modeled on, it's the comparatively muted epilogue which is still holding my attention and adoration. the first game's epilogue was, similarly, a striking coda to a wildly uneven experience. after screeching to a halt for its final act, RDR1's culminating grace notes center around a hollow, self-gratifying act of vengeance which succinctly underscored the alienation & ennui of the world you were left stranded in. it was a weirdly audacious swing for rockstar to take in 2010 - to explicate the ever-present emptiness and artificiality of their worlds as part and parcel of RDR1's thematic intent – but in spite of my dislike of the rest of the title, i found that it resonated with me.

RDR2 has a somewhat similar ace up its sleeve. following the game's highest point of intensity, the player (now with john marston taking the reins instead of arthur morgan) is thrust into a narrative scenario ill at ease with the game's prior formal language, seemingly begging at all turns for the player to put up their guns. every triumph in the epilogue chapters won by means of gunslinging bravado is, as a result, sharply dissonant; the score is often explosive, almost mythic in the way that it recalls RDR1, but there's a sort of uncanniness present because, in leveraging its prequel status, one has total clarity as to where this path eventually leads. like in RDR1, the throughline here is still one of inevitability.

complimenting this is the epilogue's equal amount of focus afforded towards john struggling to acclimate to the simple pleasures of domesticity. a natural extension of john’s unexpectedly genius characterization in RDR2’s narrative up to this point as arthur’s perpetually irresponsible and imprudent little brother, this focus on smaller-scale character study allows for his character to be more fleshed-out than he ever was in RDR1. similarly, the missions present in the epilogue are afforded more variance than anywhere else in the main game, taking the title’s previously established simulation elements and bringing them to the forefront of the proceedings. taking your wife out for a nice day in the town is probably my favourite mission in the game - it felt tender in a way that i have never once come to expect from these titles.

it's a taut novella that honestly represents some of rockstars finest work, so naturally it's only accessible after some 40-70 hours of ho hum debauchery and mediocrity. no reason to waste more time on this so let’s carve through the more important bullet points quickly. arthur is a wonderful protagonist, likely the best rockstar has conceptualized for how he compliments the structure of these games. he’s someone who isn’t a lone wolf nor a second-in-command, but rather a mover and shaker who is third in the hierarchy and remains blinded by both loyalty, cynicism, and self-hatred. it’s a reasonable enough marriage between the game’s pressing narrative demands and the freedom to act that a rockstar title is built on, disregarding the horrid implementation of a trite morality system. all the little flourishes animating his character are excellent – the journal he writes in quickly became one of my favourite features of the game. roger clark’s performance alone is enough to carry the game’s writing when it sags, which it often does – clemens point and guarma are terrible chapters. side quests are also largely bad, save for a few that present themselves in the beaver hollow chapter - up until this point they are rife with the kind of desperate attempts at juvenile humour rockstar built their empire on. it’s less good that so much of arthur’s arc is connected to the game’s worst characters in dutch and micah. rockstar’s writers just do not have the capacity and talent to bring the vision of a charismatic leader to life in dutch – they want you to believe in the slow-brewing ruination of the gang and dutch’s descent into despotism but the reality is he starts the game off as an insecure, inept, and frayed captain and only gets much, much worse as the game chugs along. micah is just despicable and not in a compelling way, an active thorn in everyone’s side who no one likes and whose presence makes everything worse. reading about the van der linde gang’s initially noble exploits in-game and contrasting it with an early mission where micah kills almost everyone in a town to retrieve his revolvers is actively comical and it never really stops gnawing at one’s mind. just registers as a total impossibility that not one person in the gang considers this guy an active liability to continued survival. i think he’s someone who can be salvaged since he’s already an inverse to arthur and implicitly serves as a foil to john but not enough work was done to make these elements of the character grounded or believable. cartoon villain level depravity, dude sucks.

the rest of the characters range broadly from underused & underwritten to charming in a quaint way. arthur and john are the highlights, i liked charles and uncle, the rest...mixed bag of successes and failures. javier and bill are more well-realized than their RDR1 incarnations, but most of their character work is tucked away in optional & hidden scenes. sadie is one of the few other characters to be given narrative prominence towards the end, and she kind of really sucks. the list goes on. despite this, lingering in camp is so easily one of the game's strongest draws - wandering around and seeing hundreds upon hundreds of little randomized interactions is a delight, and there's no doubt in my mind that i still missed scores of them.

those more inclined to cynicism probably won't be able to reconcile any of this game's messy threads, and its strengths will likely be eclipsed by its tendencies towards waste as well as its tactless emulation of prestige drama, but for a time i found my own pleasure in the illusion of the west. i think i felt enthralled by it realizing that this was the closest to a great experience rockstar had in them, knowing that they're only likely to regress from here on. rockstar has an unfortunate habit of only being able to conceptualize one’s relationship to their environment if it’s predicated on danger, but at its best RDR2 is able to overcome this, however briefly it might last.

There are two constants to internet culture: Impact font memes, and the insatiable bloodlust to ascribe solid-but-unconventional sonic games to an abomination against humanity. No case is more clear than with Labyrinth, which gets constantly lauded as the absolute bottom of the franchise's barrel because gamers have zero literacy and can only judge games in hypothetical voids.

Sonic Labyrinth is good.

"But you go so slow" No you don't, the spindash is right there. "But it's so wild and uncontrollable" Uh, get good? Sorry, can you say 'skill issue'? Filtrado? Shit and poop and fart?? It goes in a straight line, you curve it slightly with the d-pad, or stop it with a button. Sonic skids to stop and you have to anticipate that in advance when on the move. That's not janky controls. That's not a lack of testing. That's game design. Learn it, sillies. The contrast between slow walking and risky spindashes DEFINES Labyrinth's design economy: It's an intentional juxtaposition. You can't think of it as platforming, it's more akin to golf: Spindashes are your putt, and walking is for modifying your lay on the green. You are playing a nonstop, high-speed game of mini-golf. Every level is designed intimately around this, with wide boxed areas divided by slopes, doors, springs, and other railed transportation devices. You can't divorce control methods from the environments they are contained in; they're tangential to each other, and Sonic's controls work for these levels, period.

The REAL problem is the last few levels, which are just genuinely terrible, giving 'Labyrinth' its name, expecting you to trudge through poorly-directed mazes of teleporters and gates. 4-3 is basically unbeatable without a map and is what people THINK this game is.

Bosses ain't too hot either, but at least they're easy, with the one exception being 2-4's crab (which SUSPICIOUSLY looks like a gadget twins enemy). The Eggman robot with a feathered helmet is fucking ridiculous-looking; Robotnik commited too hard to the castle bit.

One other critique is the length and visual variety; 4 zones is kinda slim, even as someone who prefers short games. And of those levels, there's only a small amount of level palettes that they distribute between them. There's a lack of distinction per zone that creates the same sense of world other Sonic games have.

Anyway, bottom line, it's good. I stand my ground that careening through its levels is really cathartic, at least until endgame. If you took Kirby's Dream Course and made it a real-time platform game, this is it: The textbook example and a great exercise for it. I think people should have more open-mindedness for the way Sonic games are designed instead of shutting themselves off because it's dissimilar to the traditional speeds and flows that define the classics. People are fully capable of understanding divergent or intentionally discomforting gameplay schisms for so many other franchises, and I will never understand why Sonic specifically is the one who cannot be blessed with that same respect.

There's all kinds of games that are a piece of the creator's childlike wonder, glee, beauty, et cetera. I'd find it difficult to name one that has the same kind of resonance this emanates from start to finish. Gentle, elegant, earnest and bringing you along the ride through a wonderfully crafted landscape of dreams. Sour, dance, play and gymnastics your way through the circus stage made for you. Fears and anxiety are formed only to melt away in the light.

I'll keep thinking about it as the music swells and shifts over the coming days. A lasting impression, of which Oshima himself noted that above all else, they wanted a character and an experience that someone would look at and think "the future looks bright." I'll dance atop that spire of hopeful joy they made.

a sadistic exercise in problem-solving and masochism

i can't sing enough praise about this game's exploration. so instead i'll post a warning: take notes meticulously, and do not slack. i started thinking the difficulty was overhyped, and began writing fewer notes. that came back to bite me in the ass during the last third, and i needed to look up hints just to understand where to go next. don't let up or these ruins will fucking eat you alive

what i won't applaud so much is the combat side of la mulana. the bosses are all fair, but not all that fun or memorable in many cases. there's exceptions (mostly in the endgame) but generally i found myself just blowing them away with expensive pistol rounds to save the hassle

looking forward to running the sequel with no external help. my notes will be unparalleled. those ruins are fucking mine

Simultaneously easier than DD, but also more insane and significantly more illegible. I kind of hate it much much more, and also can't help but respect it more. The biggest issue is that I am personally tired of treating the game as half a manual, things especially here are so counter-intuitive that even the training mode is simply teaching you how you're 'kind of' supposed to be playing at the very minimum. This sort of compounds into a glorious but sort of fucked combo shooter that desires to be as ultimately incomprehensible as possible for you to pass over.

That's kind of sick, but it leaves me rather in the dust. It doesn't induce the panic that Devil Daggers does to me and instead feels like a sense stress test. For its modus operandi of some utter hellish ultraplanar fight against some undefinable deity I can't think of many things in general that's such a perfect match. It absolutely continues on its predecessor of being a congruous entity that you have to fully understand in order to survive and even progress. Its arcadey nature asks for creating clarity out of unwatchable madness.

So as a realized vision I have to like, sort of stan it! But I also feel an utter bone to pick, a sledgehammer I want to take to this sort of approach. From a personal note, for one, this game is absolutely irresponsible. The steam page fine print has an epilepsy warning but the game should fucking start with one, if not more, as should its creator be saying such shilling this game past twitter and youtube. When I first streamed it in front of a friend they felt so unwell they had to tune out for a solid 15 or so minutes because they felt like they were going to have a seizure and they're not epileptic. It's rudimentarily so overzealous in its mission that it genuinely hurts my eyes after a little bit of time to play, and its mixing and sound design just hurts and nails on chalkboards but all of those are Intensely Important Indicators to play. To be blunt I almost feel a sort of noxious "loves its ingroup and hates everyone else" vibe from all that.

But idk, it's like mostly fun past all that. Things connect pretty smartly and it can lead to some intense fun, and it'll certainly satisfy those who REALLY REALLY like Devil Daggers and this uncompromising way of creation. Which is totally valid. It has got crazy good game design top to bottom.

A marvelous tone piece. The muted, but not quite black-and-white art style complemented by the cold howls of echoey synths reverberating into empty factories and dark woodscapes produce a tense atmosphere of quiet dread throughout the experience only rivaled by the creators' previous game LIMBO. But whereas LIMBO relishes in the shock value of its edginess, INSIDE's edginess feels subtler, and more cohesive towards its themes of control and oppression. Playing INSIDE feels like being trapped in an Edward Hopper painting. Other people may exist right beside you but their sentience is only ever an idea. The city outside the cafe may be vast and its glass may be transparent, but even if the outside is clearly visible, one can never truly escape the feeling of being...inside.