Yeah so this was something. The Bungie run of Halo games is pretty amazing, starting from the Super Mario 64 of first person shooters and ending with Reach, the best game in the franchise. 343 had a tall task before them following that up, and unfortunately that resulted in them making some pretty safe choices.

There is some cool stuff, I like how much Master Chief and Cortana talk to each other in this one, I like that the stakes feel more personal, and I like that Master Chief begins to question what's happened to him all this time and how its affected how he looks at himself as something different than a human being.

But man, the levels are pretty boring. It's some real "touch these three things and fight guys while you get there" stuff for most of the game. The forerunner enemies also just do not hold a candle to how well-designed the covenant are. All the new character design just looks like some 2000s graphics card box art. And I'm not crazy about any of the new guns... Okay, I actually kinda like that forerunner battle rifle quite a bit but other than that its a bunch of duds.

Wish I liked this more, but also it seems like I still like it more than a lot of folks so at least that's something. Guess I'll play Halo 5 soon

SWAT 5 but instead of copaganda its a Francis Bacon painting with a biopunk filter. This shit is the most arresting video game I've played since...I don't know when. I really hate to throw this in the 'needs a write-up' pile but there's so much to gush about here. The instant quotables ("I've been getting really into "hell". Both as a mindset and as something to strive for, in an organizational sense."), that OST, the gunplay that perfectly emulates the old skool tacticool FPS games, the level design, the secrets (did you know there's an additional hard mode that has rare enemies, new sections, & additional targets?!), the implants, the cryptic but emotionally evocative storytelling, both the LIFE and the Entrapment cutscenes, and just the whole indescribable aesthetic of the game. I've seen and experienced a lot of media that takes comfort in being dark, disdainful, and dreary, and indeed have the same emotional arc as this, but none do it with the quite the same balance of levity, futility, mania and malice like Cruelty Squad does.

Edit: So I saw that the dev retweeted this excellent video review of the game, which touches upon the actual themes of this game, which is something I neglected to mention in my gushing here.

I'm not a big Bataille fan, but this game inspired me to take a second look at his work, particularly the Accursed Share, and I'm finding his words increasingly compelling. There's something so...accurate about the way Bataille describes capitalistic societies as being excessive growth & energy without any tension release. The "growth" of Capital, and the resulting inequality, is like an endless edging session that has turned the temporary delay of gratification into an eternal permanence of longing, a longing of gratification that is never coming (haha penis). Gone are the days of the potlach, Bataille notes, in which inequality was solved in a cathartic day of gift-giving and redistribution ( and maybe some orgies ;) ); what we have instead in capitalistic societies is that the wealth is concentrated into luxuries, with redistribution being only done "as necessary" through welfare. The excess & inequality is entrenched in the capitalistic system.

What gives me hope, and what gave Bataille hope, and what ultimately Cruelty Squad is hoping for, is that the growth will overflow at some point. A potlach is just a sexier, voluntary revolution--one of the capital P Points of The Accursed Share is that the excess growth in any economy must be dealt with; the problem with capitalistic societies is that the recursive spending on luxury and the restrictive spending on welfare isn't really dealing with the issue of growth. The excess growth, if never dealt with, will spawn its own revolutionary growth that'll find itself amongst society's most spited and downtrodden. For Bataille (and for me), this was American Descendants of Slavery; for Cruelty Squad, it's the gig worker. It's not just some 'le random xd' moment that Cruelty Squad Man begins his journey waking up from a depression nap in his small weak-ass apartment; it's recognition that the revolution will find its strongest energy in the depressed, the marginalized, the unlucky, and the unloved. The final text of Cruelty Squad is a quote from Bataille emphasizing the inevitability of this revolutionary energy; this era will collapse or it will burst, whichever comes first.

And after that?

G O L D E N A G E

Strange Journey is a return to the first-person dungeon crawling roots of the Megami Tensei series. It makes an interesting choice by having the story be set in a military context, completely bucking the trend of high school aged protagonists. It's an RPG on the DS so there are a lot of little tactile upgrade systems to sift through as you explore. There's no open world, instead the entire game's story is told through interfacing with a hub area thats basically just a menu and just like... exploring big ass dungeons. And I mean big. These things are winding, there's every annoying dungeon crawling trick in the book: damage floors, teleports, conveyor belts, one-way doors and invisible walls.

This game is super peculiar as a follow-up to Nocturne, so that makes it all the more shocking that this game actually gets pretty damn close to matching Nocturne's greatness.

All the things I mentioned earlier work really well in this context, and they contribute to an absolutely oppressive tone that makes the dungeons get under your skin as they tell you stories about humanity's failures in their effort to convince you to give it all up. This game is hard, it's actively fighting you the entire time and it feels like a challenge you actually want to overcome. The characters as well as the way this game deals with routes can be a little predictable (and def simplistic compared to Nocturne's stuff with Reasons) but that doesn't make it not compelling. The story events that led into the big route split-off were especially great.

All that being said, the atmosphere being so oppressive can make the game a slog, especially in times when you can feel the dungeon get long in the tooth (looking at you, Eridanus). Also, the Demon Co-Op system is just a straight up downgrade from Press Turn. The fact that it feels so limiting for just an extra little bit of almighty damage really hurt the pacing of the battles for me at times. It's not a wonder why it never stuck around.

Demon passwords were really cool though. What an extremely Nintendo DS feature to have.