The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/-qajdeYdJdA

Wanted: Dead is an anomaly within the modern video game market. The game wasn’t created to dazzle people with a phenomenal presentation, it isn’t some avant-garde break from typical action gameplay, and the narrative doesn’t go anywhere a video game hasn’t dared to go before. Instead, what makes Wanted: Dead stand out is Soleil’s unique game development philosophy. Similar to games like Axiom Verge, Dusk, and Disco Elysium, Soleil made a game in a style that is no longer catching the attention of the money-men who control the big studios. Wanted: Dead adheres closely to Soleil’s signature style: it is an over-the-top action game with elements that would be right at home on the Playstation 2. I can imagine that description alone can be enough to convince some players to go out and give the game a shot, but I can also understand the concerns this could raise in others. “Looks like a PS2 game” is a frequently used pejorative term nowadays so it’d take something really special to convince those people not to immediately write Wanted: Dead off. Soleil has used many modern game development techniques to deliver an experience that wouldn’t have been possible on that old hardware, while still holding true to a lot of the conventions from the time - which I think is a good way to summarise this game. The player uses swords and guns and grenades and chainsaws, they roll around and parry enemy attacks - which makes it a soulslike - there are boss fights, long, linear levels, tons of stylish kill animations, 80s music, minigames, weird character designs, and a lot of funny cutscenes. It might share many of these features with other games, but the combination is distinctly Soleil’s own. Wanted: Dead is basically an Extermination redux which is exactly what the world needs right now. But, since this game wouldn’t be filled with purchasable cosmetics or offer the publisher some means of selling the players’ personal information, Wanted: Dead’s budget was remarkably small, and that lack of funding is very apparent throughout the game. There are a slew of technical issues that are detrimental to the experience, then there are a few gameplay segments that would probably have been left out had the studio been playtesting more thoroughly, and then the game’s difficulty balancing could have benefitted from some extra time for refinement. With all that said, however, I don’t think this is a bad game, and the air of negativity surrounding it is completely unearned.

A while back I played Devil’s Third, the infamous WiiU game that was brutalised by professional reviewers at the time. I liked it quite a lot - the cutscenes made me laugh, the gameplay is solid, and Ivan is a character who deserved the trilogy that the developers had been dreaming of, but it was far from flawless. The developers’ inability to secure a publisher and target hardware put a big dent in Devil’s Third that I’m happy to overlook. I definitely attributed far more of Devil’s Third to Valhalla Game Studios than to Soleil which has ultimately proven to be incorrect. Devil’s Third and Wanted: Dead are very similar games but Valhalla had no hand in the latter. And now I’m questioning what Itagaki and co even did. Both games feature similar third person hack-n-slash elements, cover-shooting, party mechanics, a war criminal main character, and ambiguous world-ending stakes that are kind of trans-humany. In one game there’s synthetic humanoids, in the other there’s Joe Rogan clones. I think the mechanical differences favour Wanted: Dead overall, but I laughed a lot less. Whether this was due to having played Devil’s Third first and thus I was ready for the kind of wacky nonsense Wanted: Dead contained, or if the humour just doesn’t quite land as well is something I can’t really pin down. But at least the parry-counter system is cool.

As the player makes their way through Wanted: Dead’s linear levels they’ll frequently be presented with a new batch of enemies to fight. Pretty much all of these enemies are some form of humanoid, but the variety of guns and armour values they have force the player to interact with different enemy types in different ways. When entering the first level the player is shown the two guns Stone has been issued; not so subtly prompting them to try both out during the upcoming battle, which demonstrates to the player how the rifle and the handgun will be used. The rifle facilitates a cover-shooter gameplay style where the player can post up behind chest-high walls and play whack-a-mole with the enemies that are also hiding in cover. It’s the same cover-shooting we’ve all seen before but I was more than content to click on dudes throughout both playthroughs. If you wanna get spicy there is a range of other guns to grab from defeated enemies that include things like grenade launchers, shotguns, and LMGs. The selection isn’t gigantic, but I think every forageable weapon fulfilled a unique role, which is great. The handgun is more a component of the hack-n-slash gameplay. It’s mostly used as a parry: whenever an enemy’s attack shines a red danger indicator, pressing the handgun button interrupts the attack and stuns the enemy for a short period. There’s also a super the player can use to stun a bunch of enemies simultaneously and then watch as Stone dashes around to each stunned enemy, performing a brutal kill animation each time. The super is charged by landing melee swings with the sword, which was the primary weapon I used throughout the game. Stone only ever learned 2 combos when she was taught how to swing that sword, resulting in a melee combat system that is extremely simple. The sword has its own parry too, though, activating the parry can be done by simply mashing the block button until the parry triggers; no additional complexity or skill requirement is added. I don’t think the melee combat being simple is necessarily bad, but it means relying a lot on the enemies to offer interesting and exciting gameplay moments. Enemies that also need to be engaging to shoot at from across the room. It’s a fine line to be walking and I think Soleil just about pulls through in the end, but not without some severe compromises.

The enemies in Wanted: Dead belong to one of three factions, though the synthetics are exclusive to a single level, and the gangsters show up once more after their level concludes. The vast majority of the enemies belong to a mysterious private army or police force (?), they’re equipped with a wide range of guns, and generally have enough armour to take a few hits. The standard gunner enemies are surprisingly active: they move from cover to cover while attempting to flank, and if the player is close by they might charge in and have a kick. They’re solid at the very least, which also applies to the ninja enemies. These come in three colours and all of them have a lot of health. And the white ones have way too much health. Stone is also horrendously ill equipped to face off against another sword wielder and gets absolutely destroyed by a single mistake. Their inflated health pools also caused every battle that mixed gunners and ninjas to inevitably end with a handful of ninjas refusing to go down, which did get tiresome through the last few levels. There’s one section in a series of alleyways with like four white ninjas back to back that ends with a miniboss encounter against two black ninjas with no breaks or checkpoints at all. The runback to these final ninjas can take up to 10 full minutes because Stone refuses to open the door to their arena if any other enemy in the previous alleyway is still alive. The number of enemies in this alley doesn’t even change if the player chooses normal or “Japanese hard” difficulty, and “Japanese hard” difficulty isn’t even selectable until after the player finishes the game at least once. Putting aside the strange name, I couldn’t really figure out what about the game was altered by selecting this difficulty level. There’s still a black ninja in one of the earliest rooms in the first level, enemies with grenade launchers can still kill the player in a single hit, even the bosses seem to be around the same level of challenge. I hit a few troublesome areas on my first normal mode playthrough that I didn’t struggle with at all on the harder difficulty. Clearly I had learned how to play the game and understood how it wanted me to approach these challenges, but I went from spending minutes bashing my head against what seemed like a brick wall to breezing through effortlessly the second time around. The only real stopping point during my Japanese Hard playthrough was that ridiculous alleyway I mentioned before, and a couple of the boss fights.

There are five boss enemies in Wanted: Dead, with the spider tank making a repeat appearance toward the end of the game. The tank is the only boss that isn’t a melee only encounter so its reuse isn’t egregious or anything, and the rematch has a whole second tank skittering around. Unfortunately, it’s the weakest of a fairly disappointing showing of bosses overall. All the player really needs to do is kill the human enemies, take their explosives, and shoot them at the tank until it dies. They roam around the arena and shoot at the player almost lazily. The main cannon deals enough damage to kill Stone in one hit, and if the player happens to be standing in the tank’s path when it charges they can expect to die instantly too. So the fight is extremely easy but sometimes you get vaporised or flattened and have to start over. I like the tank’s visual design, though, and the battles against it are a cathartic flurry of audiovisual effects that manage to make the boss seem exciting in the moment. The rest of the fights are all against humanoids with a unique capability, almost exactly like Devil’s Third bosses. The first of these is the rebellious synthetic leader August, whose three phase encounter is gruelling when compared to the spider tanks. This fight takes place in an empty public swimming pool, which I think is a cool concept for a boss arena, and August’s first method of attack is to stand on a ledge above the pool and shoot a grenade launcher at the player while some regular synth enemies try to tie the player down. Killing most of the regular enemies or shooting August enough will cause the fight to transition into the second phase. I like that the fight is adaptable in this way since the player gets to decide whether they want to clear the synths out of the pool before August hops in himself. The second phase sees August switch to an assault rifle while patrolling the arena, which isn’t quite as interesting as the first phase, and his pinpoint accuracy is probably a bit much considering how long this fight can go on for. Eventually he puts the gun away and resorts to hand-to-hand attacks which would be trivial to overcome if the player had any bullets left. Things get weaker when it’s time to fight Kolchak. I’m a massive fan of invisible enemies that the player tracks via some environmental detail, so fighting this cloaking sniper on a rainy rooftop should’ve been awesome. Sadly, the fight is easily won by just waiting for Kolchak’s red warning trigger to appear and stunning her with the handgun. And she spends a lot of time cloaked looking for an opening to attack, but it’s possible to track her and land hits while she won’t fight back, pushing the fight to the second phase where the cloak starts to malfunction. Kolchak tries some new moves after this point but they aren’t any more effective than before. Then there’s the Mr. Holiday encounter. This guy has appeared a couple of times during the ending movies of some of the previous levels but I don’t really know him or get much of a sense of what he wants. He seems to be Richter’s second in command but what that means is difficult to discern. So it's a huge surprise that when the boss encounter begins there are two Mr. Holidays in the room. During the first phase both Holidays share a single health bar, and they play off of each other very well. One takes the melee role and the other hangs back and shoots. It’s a shockingly well-balanced encounter, but I have no idea what Holiday achieves by killing Stone. I do not understand what he’s talking about or why he “feels nothing”. The second phase is also a solid duel against an opponent with similar moves to the player. Holiday isn’t as flashy as the other bosses, but all in all I think this fight is pretty good. The final boss is Richter, who I guess is the main brain trying to take down Stone and her squad. He has a weird lightsaber and the power to summon a rainstorm, and he can heal too, but Richter isn’t an especially active boss. I found plenty of opportunities to slash at him a lot and he’d just sit there and take the hits. I also discovered that spamming the sword parry whenever he started his standard combo would give me a lot of successful parries which would drain Richter’s invisible posture bar. It isn’t an easy encounter and there wasn’t anything offensive going on or whatever, but the moment Richter fell into the darkness was hugely anticlimactic.

So that might have seemed like a spoiler but it definitely isn’t - the truly interesting part of Wanted: Dead’s narrative is trying to decipher what’s actually happening - which is why I’m going to talk about the game’s presentation first before we get stuck into the real meat here. Wanted: Dead looks counterintuitively cheap and expensive. The character models and textures are impressively detailed but the animation work doesn’t maintain the level of quality. The combat animations are great, and sometimes the movie animations are just as good, but other times the arm movements are strangely jerky and the faces seem overly wooden. I also think the lack of particles and screen effects cause a lot of the movies to look empty, like the characters are in some kind of vacuum. Fee Marie Zimmerman’s performance as Stone is mostly solid, but a lot of lines could’ve used another read. It’s tough to have so many different accents converge in a language that isn’t the writers’ first so some of the things Zimmerman has to say aren’t exactly friendly to her Swiss accent. The sound overall is genuinely really well done - there’s just these occasional hiccups in direction and implementation that stick out. Like, why are the gangster’s voice lines so strangely mixed? Why does the karaoke singing go on for the entirety of 99 Red Balloons? And the tonal whiplash I got from the karaoke segment had me in the ER. But then Herzog tells an awful joke in the elevator and the performance is perfect.

The game opens with blonde Hannah Stone in a tiny cell being recruited to the team by a mysterious red light. Things flash forward to the crew eating at a diner where the nearby TV reports on Dauer Synthetics’ stock price decline, as well as a report on Dauer’s violent response to protests in Baghdad. The footage on the TV during the protest report looks just like the Dauer building the crew are sent to at the end of the scene, so I initially thought the team were being sent to Baghdad, but they actually never leave Hong Kong. The whole opening scene is really strangely written. Lots of awkward lines back to back. The Dauer building the first level takes place in is being attacked by a mysterious force who are there to steal American bills. Why would they want this currency when they’re already equipped with unmarked guns and high end armour? And according to Doc, the soldiers sent in to steal the cash are untraceable. Who are these guys? What are they doing? It’s an intriguing premise - despite being kind of difficult to follow - but these questions are never answered. Instead, the crew are sent down to a park to deal with some troublesome Synthetics who are refusing to comply. This is where August is introduced, and instead of capturing or killing him, he manages to escape on a helicopter - with a little help from another Synthetic named October. The team takes October to be interrogated and learn a few things from her, and Doc makes his own discovery as well. October says her memories begin when she woke up in a bodybag, and the implants she has covering her body are primarily used as a means to punish insubordination. Stone had heard this “woke up in a bodybag” phrase before, and I think it’s probably the most pivotal part of the narrative overall. Dauer Synthetics’ business has been either reanimating corpses to be used as their “synthetic” workers, or they’ve been kidnapping and memory-wiping people instead. Stone seems to also be affected by whichever thing Dauer is doing which is shown in the 2D animated movies. These scenes don’t add much to the game for me; the artstyle shift is completely inconsequential and the stuff about Stone’s lost family doesn’t expand her motivation meaningfully - people don’t just do war crimes for no reason. If Dauer is reanimating dead people and selling them as “synthetic workers” secretly, then it would make sense to me that Richter and Mr. Holiday have been employed to stop Stone from figuring out what Dauer is doing, by force. The company is clearly powerful enough to do this - they run the police force that Stone and her crew of war criminal officers work for - but then how can the company’s stock price be in decline? If they are law enforcement, with a private army and private police forces and literal zombie slaves, wouldn’t they just subsume all other governments into the company and be the de facto authority? Why are they playing by the rules? And why would it matter if their police force discover the origins of Dauer’s synthetic workforce? This is like everybody’s dystopia. Nobody wins, not the company, not the public, not even the children.

When I decided what the thesis of this video was going to be, I did what I always do: I started writing and cutting and rewriting and recutting and hoping that eventually through persistence I’d be able to come to a satisfying conclusion. But this time I never had the epiphany that I was expecting to have. I created this document back in November, after first playing through the game in October. It’s now almost January as I finish writing this script and I have only just come to the realisation that I’ve been searching for. I had just finished editing out the stammering and poor line reads from the voiceover when I realised I had never read the About page on Soleil’s official website. Part way through the segment titled “Message”, below a picture of who I presume is Takayuki Kikuchi, there’s a smoking gun that answers all. “We… develop action games especially focused on the "good feeling when you press buttons" and the touch and feel sensation that is the primal appeal of computer games.” Wanted: Dead was designed to have good buttons. The player is primarily supposed to enjoy making their character do stuff, and the rest of the game is made to reinforce that philosophy. It’s so simple, and it’s so extremely obvious now. All the screen effects during combat that are totally absent during the movies, all the weird lines back to back, the narrative’s lack of coherence or a clear point, even the way some of the bosses are designed, it’s all secondary to ensuring that the player gets to enjoy doing cool stuff. And I’m here for it.

It’s nice to finally have an answer for why this game is the way it is, and while I enjoy the game for it’s quirkiness and fun gameplay, Wanted: Dead still has problems. The rhythm game sections are much longer than I think anyone would care for, that one alleyway is way more demanding than the rest of the game, and the narrative makes next to no sense at all. But it’s honest. And I’m happy to see that the Steam reviews have recognised the honesty. Soleil just likes PS2 games, and so do I. I like them so much, I’m going to be playing a real one for the next video.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/RdnLNoOkP3E

One of the worst crimes that can be committed in a tabletop gaming environment is murder - naturally - but powergaming is up there. Even the idea of disregarding flavour, immersion, and any other role-playing activity in order to exploit the game’s rules as efficiently as possible, often to the detriment of the others playing the game, can get people quite upset. I used to hear this stuff all the time back when I was attending 40K tournaments - despite those clearly being a competitive environment, and an unlikely place to find flavourful games where the Dark Angels player doesn’t have 37 Fenrisian Wolves on the table. But in more casual contexts - and especially in regards to tabletop RPGs - I can completely understand why aggressively optimising the rules of a game earns as much ire as it does. The primary objective of one of these games is to facilitate a collaborative story-telling adventure where the destination is tertiary to the journey at hand. Games like Dungeons & Dragons have rules to guide the players toward an objective, but they also require a Dungeon Master to participate who is at liberty to ignore those rules whenever they choose, since the point of the game isn’t to spend hours decoding some masterful puzzle or flicking through rule books with a dictionary on hand just in case, the point is to have fun with your friends. Unfortunately, people’s schedules don’t always allow everyone to play together on a whim but since these games have rules and were popular enough media properties on their own, adapting them into video games for the solo player was an instinctive substitution. Except this presented a bit of a dilemma: should the video game adapt the rules verbatim or should it instead try to adapt the spirit of the game? Whichever their choice, the subsequent video game would regularly divide fans. Bending the rules to favour a friendlier adventure for players would go over well with casual fans and beginners, whereas adhering strictly to the source material pleased the long-time players and the harcore audience. At the turn of the millennium, both groups had plenty of games to be excited about. As the 2000’s crept on, however, the closures of Black Isle Studios and Troika Games gave developer’s pause. Clearly these games weren’t selling well enough, and many big players in the RPG market switched their focus toward the larger customer base of casual and beginner players. Upon noticing the void this move left behind, German video game developer Radon Labs saw an opportunity to give the spreadsheet enthusiasts the game they wanted, and in 2008 Drakensang: The Dark Eye was released.

Drakensang is a relatively standard PC role-playing game, reminiscent of titles like Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Icewind Dale. The player picks a class, they can find additional members to join the crew, all of these characters have a wide range of stats and equipment to upgrade, even the combat is similar - using a real-time with pause system, though Drakensang’s version is a bit unusual. There are quests, dungeons, boss fights, light puzzles, and even a coherent plot full of ancient prophecies and rebirthing gods. Narratively, Drakensang is doing nothing new, and many of the characters and environments adhere to the western fantasy standard. But these aren’t the reasons to play Drakensang. Unlike those games I mentioned earlier, Radon Labs did not create another game based on Dungeons & Dragons, and they had a particular audience in mind when designing much of their game. As a German company, the tabletop role-playing system the developers would’ve been most familiar with was The Dark Eye. It is an aesthetically similar game to Dungeons & Dragons, but there are a number of mechanical and philosophical differences that separate the two. While both have combat and conversation mechanics, Dungeons & Dragons is more focused on providing a robust combat experience, while The Dark Eye contains more tools to resolve disputes verbally. Talking with enemies is also incentivised by the game’s punishing combat system. Characters in The Dark Eye will never be strong enough to defeat an enemy in a single attack and being outnumbered is almost always a death sentence. These characteristics have been replicated well within Drakensang. Combat encounters can very suddenly spiral into defeat and many big fights can be avoided through stat checks and investigation. Conversation isn’t quite king - by no means is this Disco Elysium - but among the fantasy RPGs that Drakensang positioned itself, the player can achieve a lot more by investing in those conversational traits. That being said, Drakensang is not a one-to-one adaptation of The Dark Eye’s tabletop rules, and I’m unsure if that is necessarily a bad thing.

First published in 1984, The Dark Eye is a fantasy role-playing game originally created by Ulrich Kiesow. Kiesow had been working as a translator within his company Fantasy Productions, and was contracted to translate both Dungeons & Dragons and Tunnels & Trolls in 1983 before Kiesow embarked upon his own original project. The Dark Eye’s first edition sold very well throughout German and French speaking countries, as well as the Netherlands, and Italy and a second edition of Das Schwarze Auge would see release in 1988, followed by a third in 1993. The fourth edition of The Dark Eye was the first to be translated into English and it was that 2001 edition which formed the basis of the system present in Drakensang. Like many other tabletop RPGs, The Dark Eye makes use of dice, a character sheet filled with a variety of stats and other useful information, and a dungeon master - who is referred to as the “Highlord” which is fun. The Highlord guides the collaborative story the group is creating together, requesting players make Attribute tests whenever they attempt any actions, playing the role of most minor characters in the story, as well as occasionally fudging the rules here and there to ensure the players are enjoying themselves. There are 16 different Physical Talents, 8 Social Talents, 7 Nature Talents, 18 Lore Talents, a handful of Language Talents, and multiple pages of Artisan Talents that players may mix and match at their preference. Demonstrably, Kiesow wanted players to position their characters as experts in specific fields and to allow the Highlord opportunities to integrate that expertise into their campaigns. There are still plenty of Combat Talents, weapon proficiencies, magic capabilities and the like, but the idea that knowledge of popular board games, heraldry, or tattooing could be the key to progressing a situation is uniquely compelling, I think.

Maintaining this gameplay experience was always going to be difficult when adapting The Dark Eye to a video game form, and Radon Labs had to rearrange, remove, and refocus the game in order to make it work. Previous adaptations of tabletop RPGs were often centred heavily around the system’s combat and Drakensang follows that pattern. The Dark Eye’s combat system isn’t its main focus, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the combat is underdeveloped or bad or anything. Most of the weapons and spells from the 4th edition rulebook are present in Drakensang, as well as a range of other magic spells and physical actions that aren’t part of the tabletop game’s base rules. I have to assume that all of the hit chance, parry chance, damage rolls, resist chance, and all of the other combat stages are handled the same since it looks like they are, but there aren’t any rolling dice to be seen. Since Drakensang puts such an emphasis on combat, the example professions from the rule book that wouldn’t grant the character any combat abilities aren’t present, but the number of classes the player can choose from at the beginning of the game is more than enough to overwhelm anyone. I’m sure any Explorer or Messenger players will be able to find something to enjoy amongst this list of professions anyway. Another significant change to The Dark Eye experience is how Drakensang confines the player’s actions. Tabletop RPGs are relatively cheap to produce and the grandiosity of a continent spanning campaign is extremely easy to implement; it’s just putting words on a page and letting the players’ minds fill in the gaps. Radon Labs couldn’t possibly account for this level of scope so their game limits the player’s ability to resolve all of its narrative conflicts. To me, this is acceptable, it would be immensely unreasonable to expect the scale to match, and the way things are implemented in Drakensang at least give the impression that the campaign’s Highlord just isn’t presenting many opportunities to use all of a player’s skills. A character might have a decent cooking skill but the Highlord never gives the players an opportunity to cook anything so the skill goes unused. Basically every tabletop adaptation is going to be this way, so Drakensang isn’t an outlier.

Up to this point, it doesn’t seem as though Radon Labs have made any big deviations from the norm during the development of Drakensang, and it’d be easy to see why their game doesn’t have the legacy of the games they were clearly inspired by. Other than the game’s rules being based in The Dark Eye, Drakensang’s most identifiable feature is its balance and difficulty. There’s a single difficulty level which has been meticulously constructed for the player to contend with throughout their adventure. There are a finite quantity of enemies in each of the different zones, and even within a single zone the player will find challenges they won’t immediately be able to overcome and they’d be better off trying something else first. A little ways in, a guy asked me to help clear some rats out of his basement, and I had been fighting some rats earlier, so, sure, it should be fine. What I didn’t know was the big rat at the bottom of the basement was designed to perfectly counter my team. I didn’t spend 24 hours fighting this boss, but there is 24 hours of footage between my first encounter with Mother Ratzinsky and her death. This kind of thing is pervasive throughout the whole game and I don’t recall any other game where the player has to drop out of a side quest part way through and return to finish it half a game later. Even encounters against normal enemies can force the player to follow a different thread for a while so they can power up a bit before pressing on. In a more narratively focused game I could imagine this constant interruption to be rather frustrating, so it’s fortunate that Drakensang’s story isn’t particularly special.

There is some narrative promise within this game, but I don’t think the story ever really amounts to anything worthwhile. It isn’t a bad story - things aren’t so bad that it detracts from the experience - but Drakensang’s narrative definitely leaves a lot to be desired. The game opens with the player receiving a letter from their friend Ardo. Ardo seems to have stumbled upon a shady conspiracy and, fearful for his life, asks for some muscle to come to Ferdock and back him up. So the player travels to Avestrue, a small village on the road to Ferdok. Avestrue acts as a sort of tutorial staging area, which is good because the Ferdok guards are refusing to allow anyone else to enter the town. There’s a serial killer currently at large and the guards are wary of travellers who may be in league with the killer. In Avestrue the player can meet Rhulana, Amazon warrior and potential party member, as well as Queen Salina and Arch Mage Rakorium, sponsors whose word would allow the player entry to Ferdok. Both Salina and Rakoirum are significant characters later on and I think the game does a respectable job introducing them. Salina’s task for the player involves ascending a nearby mountain to look for her boyfriend, Dranor, who seems to be making a deal with the scaly, green devil. This guy is weird. I got the impression that he was going to be the main villain, or at least a high ranking member of the evil faction’s army or something, and he kind of is, but also not really. He matters until he doesn’t. Once the player manages to gain entry to Ferdok, they discover that the letter arrived too late. Ardo has been murdered, and nobody has any idea who the murderer is. After following some information up, however, the player is able to determine who the murderer will be targeting next and the hunt begins. The killer makes their move and the player chases them throughout Ferdok’s sewers and alleyways before eventually cornering them in the city’s library. It turns out, the culprit is a noble, and he is using his wealth to fund a private militia whose purpose is to assassinate prospective chosen-ones, preventing them from being chosen, buying time for the other members of his cult to resurrect a dead dragon. At this point I was absolutely on-board with this narrative. There’s so much intrigue and potential, and even though there is a chosen-one story at play here, the way it had been handled up to this point was great. The last person the dragon cultists wanted to kill was this apprentice librarian; is she going to be the chosen-one? Would it be the player’s task to accompany the librarian to all of the different locations she needs to get to so she can prevent the return of the zombie dragons? Maybe she’s a fifth party member who can’t leave the team like the player character.
These possibilities are put on the backburner for a short while as the player is directed to the temple of Hesinde, the goddess of wisdom, since deonts of Hesinde are devout historians. They would likely have some information about what the chosen people were actually tasked to do. After helping clear the amoebas out of the temple’s library, the deonts are able to reassemble a magical, golden statue of the Dragon Oracle. The statue rises into the air and recounts the last time it was awoken. 78 years have passed since it was last assembled, and this is the tenth time the statue has been activated in total. The Oracle then names the player character as the next chosen-one and tells them to go out and collect a bunch of magical items without a clear purpose. This was… heartbreaking. All of the game’s potential just melted away so that my petty burglar character could save the world from evil wizards and immortal dragons. Her combat capabilities were nowhere near up to the task. Her whole skillset revolved around sneaking into a place, stealing something, and then sneaking out again. How could this character possibly defeat a dragon? The rest of the game tasks the player with completing a scavenger hunt before the evil dragon cultists can, and I can only be happy that the side quests are as good as they are. Choosing whether to side with a group of witches or a marauding band of inquisition forces, helping the townspeople of Tallon resist the goblin incursion that ends in a full-scale assault on the goblin camp with the town guards, or deciphering Aurelia’s alchemy recipe which went a direction I was not expecting it to go. This is a big game and I’ve only really scratched the surface with these examples. It’s certainly a shame that the main quest became so cliched and uninteresting, but there are a few hints toward the end of the game that suggest Radon Labs may have been running out of time.

In terms of presentation, Drakensang compares favourably to many of the blockbuster titles that were released alongside it in 2008. The character models are distinctive, the environments are lively, and the music is solid from front to back. Conversations with NPCs can be a little dry since Radon Labs didn’t bother with a complex facial animation rig and settled with mouth flapping and expressive body movements instead, which I think is a better choice for the time. This is bound to age better than those robotic automated conversations, in any case, but it is a bit impersonal. I also think the game’s palette is quite unique. The world is vivid, sunny, and warm, and there are colourful flowers everywhere. In the caves there’s always some moss or algae slathered over the rocky walls, or there’s a bunch of glowing mushrooms giving off a greenish light. I really like the way the fog layers are used too. Not only are they used to make the caves gloomier, with the air thick with steam and spores, but the fog is also tinted orange and used as haze to bathe rooms in sunlight, or a white fog washes out the terrain in the distance. It adds so much richness to the game’s environments, which are already impressively detailed. I think I should reiterate: Drakensang came out in 2008, these textures should not be this high res. Fallout 3 came out a month after Drakensang, and Bethesda spent almost half of Drakensang’s total budget on the Fallout licence alone. Radon Labs pulled off something truly incredible with the visual presentation. But then the game’s soundtrack kicks in. Yes, there’s a lot of strings and horns and it’s all very typical fantasy stuff, but it sometimes gets weird. I like it. It’s a shame that a lot of the voicework doesn’t quite hit the same highs as everything else. Some of these line deliveries don’t seem directed at all, which is odd considering just how few spoken lines there are. Characters will say the first text box aloud, and then nothing from then on. This works for and against the game. Some of the performances are really good so it’s a shame they talk so little, but then other performances are horrible, so at least the player doesn’t spend too long listening to the weaker performers. Similarly, the combat audio varies in quality. Sometimes the enemies sound great, the music swells and the fight is accentuated. And then there’s the fight against the wounded dragon. I spent a while trying to decide what this sounds like and I couldn’t come up with anything. Whatever this is supposed to be, it doesn’t invoke “dragon” in me. Which is strange because the dragon cry in the final movie is pretty good.

The player’s party can consist of no more than four characters: the player character, and up to three others who the player can meet as they progress through the world. Each character has a level and they earn experience points throughout their journey as is expected in any RPG. They also have a wide range of stats that influence their Base Values, Weapon Skills, Talents, Abilities, and Spells, but they do so in a way I was unfamiliar with. Instead of simply reaching the next level and being handed a bunch of skill points to assign, the player directly spends their Experience points on their stats, with the character’s level controlling the caps those stats can reach. So, for example, at character level 15 Gwendala the Elven Spellweaver can have a maximum of 19 spell levels in her Balm of Healing spell. What does that mean? This is about to get a bit hard to follow, and I can only apologise. A character must already be attuned to magic in order to learn to cast spells at all - there’s no way to force a character to learn magic if they didn’t start with magical capability. In order to learn Balm of Healing, the character must meet or surpass the requisite Cleverness, Intuition, and Charisma stats. They will also need a minimum of 10 Astral Energy to cast the spell. Okay. Balm of Healing restores 2D6 Vitality points (health) plus the spell modifier multiplied by five to the target. It may also remove up to the modifier number in Wounds from the same target, which is a mechanic we’ll get into later. The modifier is a number shown below the spell’s icon which the player can change at any time, though increasing the modifier also increases the cost to cast the spell. The maximum modifier is determined by the spell’s level. So with Balm of Healing using a modifier of 4, Gwendala must spend 14 Astral Energy to cast the spell, then 2 six sided dice are rolled, which returns an average result of 7, then the modifier of 4 is multiplied by 5 for 20, and the final effect is the target is healed 27 health on average. Fortunately, there aren’t modifiers on every spell and combat abilities don’t have them either, but those are a whole other mess of stat modifications and dice rolling. The big takeaway from all this is Drakensang is willing to tell the player everything. The player will know exactly what level they need to reach to pass a threshold, and they’ll know exactly what each spell will do and why. At the same time, there are so many other places to put points that the player will be swamped with options whenever they decide to level up. I don’t know how thorough Radon Labs were with adding Etiquette and Streetwise checks, but I did find Constitution checks and Alchemy checks in conversation which was cool. And the back half of the game was a breeze with high Perception, Dwarfnose, and Lock Picking talents, though they didn’t do much to alleviate the difficulty of the combat encounters.

Combat in Drakensang can be very interesting and exciting, but it can also be a frustrating slog. The game uses a real-time with pause combat system while simultaneously using a lot of turn-based features and mechanics hidden beneath the real-time stuff. The player is able to issue tasks to their party in real time; sending one character to battle a specific enemy, telling others to cast spells, use items, among other things, but those tasks aren’t just carried out instantly nor do they take a small period of real time to complete, they take combat rounds. Balm of Healing doesn’t take 3 seconds to cast, it takes 3 combat rounds. To me, this seemed really strange at first, but the deeper I got into the combat the more I understood why Radon Labs chose to handle combat in this way. Combat in The Dark Eye is a call-and-response type system; the attacker makes a to-hit roll, the defender chooses to make a dodge or a parry roll, then there’s a damage calculation roll, followed by any armour effects. If the units in combat weren’t synchronised to a global combat clock, these call-and-response dice rolls would be next to impossible to understand. Fights would all be moshpits where an orc could parry an attack from the flinching dwarf he just clobbered, and the player wouldn’t be able to react accordingly because the animations couldn’t possibly sync with the actions. It’d be like an autobattler with ridiculously complex rules, totally incomprehensible to a casual observer. Another consequence imposed on Drakensang’s combat by this is that the system can’t process area-of-effect spells. There needs to be time to display the call-and-response effects so a big explosion spell hitting multiple targets at once wouldn’t work. They did try to add one AOE spell, which is funny but functionally useless. If the enemies aren’t standing in exactly the right locations when this attack goes off then Forgrimm takes a few swings at nothing. Despite this, there are still many locations where enemies will swarm the player and there’s nothing that can really be done about it. Combine the large enemy populations with the lack of a taunting ability and you get some extremely irritating encounters. Enemies just love to rush the squishy backline wizard, though that was probably my fault for giving her a bow. There were a lot of cases where the number of enemies was just too high so I had no choice but to cheese my way through. Sometimes my method would involve hiding the wizard way in the back and bringing her into the battle after all of the enemies chose targets I liked, other times I’d take direct control and run the entire length of the countryside, hoping my teammates running behind me could hit the enemy whenever it turned. There aren’t too many encounters like this, but the worst one came right before that wounded dragon fight I mentioned before. While ascending the mountain toward the dragon’s lair, groups of harpies would spawn up ahead and path back down the hill toward the party. Harpies aren’t especially strong or healthy in Drakensang, but they have a special ability very few other enemies possess. Whenever a party member’s health reaches zero, they gain a Mortal Wound which prevents them from fighting. Mortal Wounds can be healed but only if the party is out of combat. Characters can also gain a Mortal Wound if they have 5 regular Wounds, even if they’re at full health. The player can use this mechanic to kill enemies with lots of health really quickly provided they have some means of dishing out Wounds. Harpies also apply Wounds in combat and man did I get unlucky a lot. On paper, I think this is a solid mechanic that makes sense if the enemy has a low chance to apply the Wound or the enemies that can apply Wounds are few in number, but a group of 8 to 10 harpies Wounding as often as they do is sadistic! But it comes so late in the playthrough that I expect most people who make it here are the ones who were always going to push on to the end.

Radon Labs was a German company and Drakensang basically runs in a proprietary engine from 2008, so technically things are on the decline. The game is very stubborn on startup - it often refuses to show the player the intro movie at all and constantly minimises whenever the player tries to click on the window. My method for resolving this was pretty simple, but I’m not sure if it’ll work for everybody or if I did some sort of miracle. Upon launching the game I’d click on the program window, hit alt and enter once to set the program to windowed mode, click the program window again, and then hit alt and enter again to go back to fullscreen. I had to do this every single time I launched the game, but it wasn’t a big deal. As far as other technical problems go, I think there were a few times where I saw the German text appear in a text-box, and I couldn’t resolve the farmhand hostage situation peacefully because one of the pigs the goblins wanted refused to move like the others. And there were the occasional instances where characters would just endlessly run into walls. And the skeleton cyclops fight is total bullshit but that’s not really relevant to this section. My biggest complaint about Drakensang is the strange distribution situation the game is in. Drakensang and the sequel are both for sale on Steam and GOG but not in Australia. All of the game’s original publishers are defunct and BigPoint only made and maintains the spin-off MMO, so it’s hard to say who’s even selling the game at this point. The only way I was able to get my copy was by buying a key from a third-party site, and as far as I can tell nobody who was even tangentially involved in the production of Drakensang is getting paid for it now.

I liked Drakensang for the most part. It’s an interesting system to play with, the presentation is tremendous, and there is so much to do. The game stumbles a bit toward the end, but the vast majority of the game is a solid experience. I think it’s worth playing if you’ve already exhausted those classic turn-of-the-millenium RPGs, though Baldur's Gate 3 is probably a better use of your money. That being said, this is probably one of the more guiltless pirates of your life.

Drakensang forced me to pay attention to it. I had to be alert to the next potential combat encounter and ready to act at all times. There are thousands of tiny decisions to make constantly, within and without the game’s combat scenarios, and I could easily imagine a perfect team exists on some long-forgotten spreadsheet somewhere. If the purpose of an art piece is to make the viewer think about it then Drakensang’s combat system alone is a work of art. The rest of the game is good, but the time I’ve spent thinking about particular arrangements of enemies far outweighs how long I thought about Avestrue’s golden wheat fields or how willing I was to transform some stranger into a toad because a witch told me to. The game penalises your Charisma stat if you smell bad so you need to keep soap on you in case you need to wash, but I’m too busy trying to concoct a way to kill this really big rat. I feel like I’ve just overcome one of the most granular video gaming experiences I’ve ever played and I did it all because a magic statue is actually a direct telephone line to a cyclops blacksmith who wants to retire from blacksmithing. I’m exhausted. I’m gonna go play something mindless to recharge.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/MgpW1h_XUqg

What makes a video game ugly? Is it the aesthetic qualities? If a game’s palette features too many clashing colours or is primarily grey and uninteresting, or the technical graphics are amateurish and the animation is awkward, maybe the music isn’t produced well or doesn’t keep to a single key, does that make a video game ugly? Perhaps a game’s technical implementation makes it ugly, or its mechanical components. Does it run just poorly enough to be noticeable without being too intrusive, or are the tools the player has to achieve their objectives unsatisfying to use? Could a game’s narrative be the source of ugliness? Are the things happening in the game distasteful or just cruel and evil? There are clearly a lot of variables at play, but I think we’d all be in agreement if there was a game that featured all of these possibilities. That game would rightfully be regarded as truly awful. Well, here it is. After the relative flop that was Shadow Ops: Red Mercury, Zombie Studios partnered with Bethesda Softworks who - after noticing Ubisoft’s successes with their Tom Clancy franchise - decided they wanted a piece of the military fiction money. Bethesda brought author Richard Marcinko on board, and in 2005 development of Rogue Warrior began. Over the next four years, the project would go through a variety of iterations, be stripped from Zombie Studios, and then sent to Rebellion Entertainment who would completely transform the final game. In December of 2009, Rogue Warrior was finally released, to critical savagery. The reception at the time was so bad that Rogue Warrior is often in the conversation as one of the worst games ever made, and I think it is no exaggeration to say that it absolutely belongs in that conversation. The game is short, it’s barely functional, the palette is bland, the enemies are vacuous, the dialogue tasteless, and this story of Marcinko’s murder spree throughout North Korea and North-East Russia is downright villainous. Rogue Warrior is terrible, and it is the ugliest game I’ve ever played.

If you’ve been watching my videos for a while, you’ll know that I like to play a stinky shooter every now and again. Sometimes they’re brilliant, but mostly they’re just fun lay-ups so I can use all the words I know that describe how bad something is. Rogue Warrior is special among these, though, and that’s down to its association with its main character: Richard “Dick” Marcinko. Marcinko was a member of the US Navy SEALs, an elite fighting force that focuses on coastal and riverine combat, similar to the Marine corps but usually more covert. In 1980, Marcinko was given the go ahead to establish his own SEAL Team, Six, who would go on to be known as the most effective fighting force throughout the USA’s armed forces. Despite all that he was afforded, however, Marcinko was jailed for defrauding $113,000 from the United States’ government in 1990, and was subsequently kicked out of the Navy. While in jail, Marcinko drafted his autobiography which was then rewritten by ghostwriter John Weisman and published by Pocket Books in 1992. The book sold well, and Marcinko and Weisman would go on to produce a series of self-help books and fictional sequels to the autobiography until Marcinko’s retirement in 2014. This summary of his life makes Marcinko sound like an intelligent, articulate man, but after reading the autobiography and playing the game, I can say that he was most certainly neither. Marcinko loves cursing, he even makes up his own new curses just so he has more to say. The expression “swears like a sailor” does not do his vocabulary justice. He sounds like a teenager once their parents are out of earshot, and it gets tiresome both in the game and in the book. Additionally, Marcinko’s motivations for the things he does are generally horrific and often unreasonable. Throughout the book, Marcinko makes it very clear that he just wants to kill people. He did three tours of Vietnam and relished the opportunity to kill as many Viet Cong as he was able to, though he wished he could have killed more. Marcinko regularly bemoans the administrative structure of the Navy; they didn’t see his murderous rampages through rural Vietnam as necessary which ultimately hurt Marcinko’s naval career in the long run. Those administrative types would still control where Marcinko would be working and who he’d be working for, afterall. He was moved away from SEAL Team Six in disgrace, hidden away in the Pentagon for a while, but he managed to start another organisation whose purpose was to deliberately annoy Navy base commanders before finally being indicted for fraud. Marcinko would then go on to have his authorial career while also hosting a politically conservative talk radio show - which seems counter-intuitive to me, like, the systems were the problem so advocating for them doesn’t follow, unless he just really hated gay people for some reason. After his final novel was published in 2014, Marcinko spent seven years in retirement before passing away in December of 2021, a period where many old conservatives seemed to all coincidentally die at the same time - wow, amazing. Marcinko led a full life, people threw themselves into frozen ocean water for him, opportunity for success came wherever he looked and he took those opportunities. When the concept of a video game based on his novels was pitched to him, there was likely no hesitation from Marcinko, and thus, we are here today.

Despite the shared title, Rogue Warrior the autobiography and Rogue Warrior the video game contain vastly different material. The events of the autobiography are probably true events, while the video game’s narrative is totally fictitious. The game is set in November of 1986, Marcinko and two nameless accomplices have been deployed to Unggi in North Korea where they are to meet with a CIA informant to receive information about a missile factory. The trio are dropped from a helicopter somewhere outside of town, before making the trek through the forest. They come across a patrol of North Korean soldiers, and while they were able to kill all of them, both of Marcinko’s buddies are killed in a grenade explosion. From here onward, Marcinko is alone, and despite orders to retreat, Marcinko chooses to press on. The rest of the game follows Marcinko’s murderous fantasies of killing as many North Korean and Russian soldiers as he desires, slightly justified by the thread of trailing the manufacture of intercontinental ballistic missiles throughout North East Russia. Each step of this story features Marcinko disobeying his commander’s orders, saying the dumbest one-liners ever written, enacting his own moronic plans that all magically succeed, and providing as many opportunities to kill as many non-combatants as possible. That might sound strange since these are clearly soldiers the player is fighting, but there was no formal declaration of war between the US and North Korea or the Soviet Union during the 80s. While there was political tension between all of these states, East Asia was the only region that didn’t earn any attention from Reagan’s military meddling. And without a formal declaration of war you can’t just roll up to a foreign military base and start gunning people down on a whim, that just makes you a murderer. The missile hunt eventually leads Marcinko to a large Russian dam and submarine base, which he promptly blows up as the game’s finale. The player does this by shooting people, placing explosive charges Marcinko pulls from his magic hat, and watching short movies along the way. Of course, this stuff never happened, but there is a book that features the same title and the same main character that is a record of true events.

Rogue Warrior 1992 is Richard Marcinko’s life story, his memoirs told from his perspective which detail his Navy recruitment in 1958, to his expulsion over thirty years later. It’s a fairly short book at around 370 pages, the language is simplistic when not referring to everything through Navy acronyms, and a hefty chunk of the content is useless descriptions of people who never speak or do anything as well as unnecessarily detailed explanations of whatever mundane activity Marcinko happened to be engaging in at the relevant point in time. The story opens in media res, as SEAL Team Six has been summoned to a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico. Apparently a Puerto Rican separatist group called the Macheteros had gotten their hands on a nuclear weapon and the SEALs were sent in to retrieve it. On approach, however, Marcinko discovers that the rounds loaded into their magazines are lighter than usual, and sure enough, they’re blanks. The Macheteros don’t have a nuclear weapon, they don’t even have a presence on the island. It’s a training exercise, much to Marcinko’s disappointment. Things then flash all the way back to Marcinko’s childhood, his relationship with his parents, what he did for fun as a kid, his first job, how many of the girls in town he slept with, vital formative details. Marcinko becomes aware of the Lebanese Crisis in 1958 and sees it as an opportunity to go and kill some people. His application to join the Marines was rejected, but the Navy accepted and it all kicked off from there. I actually had a scheme for marking points of interest in the book. Each of the different coloured tabs denotes a different thing. Pink is for things that are just propaganda, some of which Marcinko believes as fact and others he seems to just be saying. On page 49, for example, the Amphibious Force Commander John S. McCain delivers a speech to the trainees going through Hell Week. “We took his words to heart. (He must have been inspirational at home, too. His son, John, (is) now a US senator for Arizona…)” That’s Republican politician John McCain, there, likely Marcinko’s favourite politician and probably explains how he ended up on conservative talk-radio. Green tabs were for strange sentences. Originally I intended for these to be sentences that featured strange grammar or things that you can say in conversation but don’t really work in written form. “A boxer, light heavy-weight division, he’d been to EOD school so he could play with explosives. And he understood CT: he’d taken over Paul’s old job commanding MOB-6. He was big, ugly, and aggressive. Yeah.” (p.254). In the end, though, most green tabs were put beside things that I had to make sure I read correctly because of how ridiculous they seemed. Weird, racist sentences, talking about the Vietnamese people as “a useless class of nuc mam-swilling subhumans who needed two sticks to pick up one grain of rice but used only one to carry two buckets of shit” (p. 166), having his Cambodian houseboy say “You go fuckee-fuckee tonight, Mr Dick?” (p. 188), and creeper stuff like “... he’d married a young beauty named Denise, the girl he’d been dating since she was fifteen and he was eighteen or nineteen.” (p. 255-256). Green tabs were the ones I used the most and it made that line in the game about the Great-leader’s penis much more tasteless than it already was, though at least it was something Marcinko would’ve said. The orange tabs indicate murderousness. Marcinko wanted to kill people and his aggression isn’t limited to the US government’s victims of the day, though they are the only ones who saw the realisation of Marcinko’s fantasies. After returning from that training exercise in Puerto Rico, Marcinko notes “...it might be gratifying for the men, if ultimately unrewarding for our careers, to stage a live-fire hit on JSOC headquarters.” (p. 289). Frustrated by their lack of deployments to Japan or Iran, Marcinko ponders attacking the Joint Special Operations Command headquarters to give himself and Six someone to kill. I think the orange tabs are the most numerous in the book since Marcinko really wanted to end a lot of people’s lives and enjoyed killing the people he was able to. Blue and yellow tabs are by far the rarest, mostly because there isn’t a lot else to the book outside of what I’ve already mentioned. Blue tabs are for unexpectedly good takes and I used three in total. One was for recognising Operation Just Cause was an invasion, another was a Lebanese taxi driver explaining that the Israelis brutalise Palestinian refugee camps - which isn’t even Marcinko’s opinion, and the last one is Marcinko realising how horrific a car bomb actually is. Of course, this realisation doesn’t cause Marcinko to reconsider his own actions in Vietnam but I probably shouldn’t have expected it to. Yellow tabs were my Other tabs and point at things like Marcinko’s baffling Godfather impression - which is nonsensical in written form - as well as his embarrassing interactions with the people who worked at the Pentagon and some pathetic whining about how Six didn’t have enough time to make him a plaque when he got booted. Despite all of its clear failings, Rogue Warrior was the New York Times bestseller during its first week on shelves, though that was probably pretty disappointing to many working at the publication at the time. Writing for The New York Times Book Review, David Murray said “While his story is fascinating, the method of telling it in "Rogue Warrior," written with John Weisman, a freelance writer who specializes in espionage and military nonfiction, is not. Mr. Marcinko, 51 years old, comes across as less the genuine warrior than a comic-book superhero who makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Little Lord Fauntleroy.” (The New York Times Book Review, 1992). Naturally, this quote was chopped up and plastered on the front cover as though it were praise. Too bad Bethesda weren’t able to do the same for the video game.

Rogue Warrior was built within Rebellion’s in-house Asura engine, the same engine used to develop their Sniper Elite franchise, so it should be more than appropriate for Rogue Warrior. Mysteriously, though, Rogue Warrior refuses to run for more than an hour on my PC. Once an hour passes, the program shuts down. The game is only 2 hours long so it isn’t a huge problem, but there are other things I had to resolve. Rogue Warrior doesn’t natively lock the mouse to the window and it has horrible screen tearing throughout most of the levels. Also, the default controls put grenade on the right mouse button and aim on the space bar like some kind of maniac. And the menus aren’t mouse navigable, you have to use the arrow keys and enter which is mostly an annoyance. There isn’t a means to fix the menus, but everything else can be resolved if for some reason you also want to put yourself through this. Firstly, the game seems to have fewer issues when running in Windows Vista (Service Pack 2) compatibility mode. I do not understand why, but doing this prevented some of the hitching I was encountering early on and seemed to prevent a majority of the crashes. Next, there’s a file floating around in the Steam community section that’s part of an unwrapper called WineD3D. Putting both the D3D9 and WINED3D files in the game directory stopped my mouse from leaving the game window and resolved the last few crashing instances compatibility mode didn’t catch. I don’t fully understand all of this, and those older Sniper Elite games work just fine, so maybe Rebellion don’t care about making Rogue Warrior functional today. And honestly, fair call, they probably shouldn’t care for their own sake. With that done, though, we can finally play the game.

Rogue Warrior is listed as a tactical shooter online, which is to say that it moves at a snail’s pace and there might be some kind of stealth section now and again. The stealth doesn’t actually work; so long as you don’t sprint or shoot and you’re outside of the enemy’s field of vision the game considers you to be in stealth. I think there are two or three total sections of a level where the player might get a whiff of stealth gameplay, but this game does not compare to the likes of Splinter Cell at all. The player can just walk right up behind an enemy and press the kill move button at their leisure. If I can compare what the gameplay is actually like, in most aspects Rogue Warrior is eerily similar to Shadow Ops: Red Mercury. The gunplay is basic, with next to no recoil, bullet-spread, or screen effects other than the tearing. A headshot kills an enemy in one hit, and hip-firing is pinpoint accurate so even the highest difficulty level is a breeze. And the enemy scripting does nothing to make shooting them interesting. It seems like every enemy encounter is a mini set-piece event, where the enemies are spawned by the player crossing a trigger point, then they run to their specified cover point, and then they stand there and shoot at the player while occasionally dipping behind cover. It’s like one step removed from a Kim Jung Il whack-a-mole machine. There are a bunch of different guns to try out, though, so there’s a little replayability built in through that. And replayability was absolutely on Rebellion’s mind when they shipped Rogue Warrior. The Steam achievements are all things that can’t be done on a single playthrough as a desperate attempt to drag out the run time somehow. In order to complete the single player achievement list, the player needs to kill 180 enemies in different ways and there are nowhere near 180 enemies in the game. Something that also blew me away after my first playthrough was the lack of a turret section! These games always have a turret section. They were really hoping walking and shooting were all people wanted. Or maybe they were hoping people would just be so astonished by the game’s middling presentation that they wouldn’t notice how bare the gameplay is.

This game is very grey, but I doubt you needed me to tell you that. There could have easily been more green in the palette since these places aren’t as far north as they might seem. Rason, formerly known as Unggi, is as close to the equator as San Francisco, so it isn’t some frozen wasteland. Most of the game takes place in these semi-industrial areas which means a lot of sheet metal walls, workshops, chain link fences, and big pipes. There isn’t an awful lot of variety throughout the environments, and even the Russian palace level quickly transforms into more pipe-lined concrete corridors. The character models are fine for 2009, Marcinko’s mouth looks a little off and the animations are jerky and robotic. I think putting Rogue Warrior next to Uncharted 2, which was also released in 2009, shows what I’m talking about. The Rogue Warrior animations almost feel like stock animations, they’re so lifeless and flat. Even the kill move special animations have no punch. The soundwork isn’t even good. It sounds like nothing, and then Mickey Rourke says a Marcinkoism. Mickey Rourke might actually be the best part of Rogue Warrior - just his voice. The things he has to say are very stupid, and there are some line reads that don’t seem correct, but his gravelly rumble is fun to listen to at least. The only notable piece of music in this project is basically just a drum beat with the Rourke lines arranged over it, which is funny, but it's competing with that “wrap ‘em around your mouth” line.

Rogue Warrior definitely goes all-in on the stupidity but whether it was a conscious decision or not is hard to say for sure. The plot isn’t just poorly conceived, it’s idiotic and kind of despicable. After his voiceless buddies are killed in the intro, Marcinko makes his way through Unggi to try and meet with the CIA informant alone. He’s too slow to save the informant from being killed by a North Korean officer, but manages to piece together the location of the missile factory from notes left in the apartment. His commander again orders him to retreat, an order Marcinko ignores, choosing to head to the factory alone. Upon making it there and after fighting through waves of North Korean soldiers, Marcinko learns that the missiles have almost all been completed, and that they’re being transported to Russia on a train. Marcinko then travels to the loading facility, where he fights through scores more soldiers before diving onto the train. His commander then tells him to keep a low profile, as if that is at all possible after the massacres left in his wake. The train changes hands as it crosses the Russian border bridge. The bridge is rubble shortly thereafter as Marcinko steals a Russian military vehicle and heads to an old palace where the missile silos are being kept. Beneath the palace is a large control room with a display that coincidentally shows a representation of the Soviet Missile Defence system which is basically a targeting computer that allows the Russians to shoot incoming missiles out of the sky. Marcinko decides that the only solution to this is to destroy the palace by retargeting the missiles to hit the building he is standing inside. Not only is he somehow capable of operating a Soviet computer, but the computer is also able to target inter-continental missiles accurately enough to destroy a single building. Marcinko’s plan for surviving the missile strike is to wait in the bunker below the palace. His CO rightfully calls this plan insane. And it is. Nothing about this should work, especially since the missiles are supposed to be a defence system, and the control facility is on the eastern coast but all the diagrams are firing across the Atlantic. Moscow and St Petersburg are over 9000 kilometres away from where Marcinko is standing, so why would that be the operation centre of the Soviet Missile Defence system? Naturally, this totally nonsense plan works without a hitch and Marcinko is off to the next place. I do think it bears repeating, the Cold War wasn’t an actual war. The Americans and the Russians weren’t happy with each other, sure, but they weren’t formally in conflict. Marcinko is just killing people and blowing up buildings and bridges on a whim and against direct orders from his commanding officer. Rogue Warrior concludes at a hydro-electric dam that has been fitted to also be a dry-dock for submarines. The Russians are in the process of fitting an anti-ballistic missile system to the submarine docked there and that apparently warrants destroying the dry-dock and the dam. The sub base is by far the worst level in the game for variety, but once the player manages to slog through it they are finally released from this horrendous experience.

I think it’s very easy to point the blame of Rogue Warrior’s badness at Richard Marcinko - and while his contribution informs the specifics of the game - Bethesda were the reason the game exists at all. Rogue Warrior wasn’t being developed by a team who actually wanted to make a Dick Marcinko adaptation; Bethesda contracted Zombie Studios to make the game, decided they didn’t like what Zombie had made, and moved the project over to Rebellion Developments who squeezed the final release out in under a year. Rogue Warrior’s inception likely happened in a boardroom as a bunch of Bethesda executives pawed over some Rainbow Six and Splinter Cell numbers. Nobody actually wanted a Rogue Warrior video game, a bunch of company higher-ups decided it should exist so the company could win some more capitalism tokens - which is no way to make art. Since nobody actually wanted to make the game, is it any wonder that it ended up as one of the most critically panned video game products ever made? Did the Bethesda exec who scrapped the Zombie Studios project really think Rebellion’s game was going to print money? It might seem cynical to suggest this, but I genuinely cannot think of any other reason for Rogue Warrior’s existence.

From the minds of Bethesda’s opportunistic producers, the team at Rebellion who likely wanted nothing to do with the project, and the world’s most insecure, bloodthirsty radio host, Rogue Warrior is a pallid, pitiful, chauvinistic, cretinous, inane display, desperate to be perceived as cool and aspirational, a desperation so visible that everyone instinctively knows it is okay to bully the people responsible for it. How anyone could have looked at the Tom Clancy franchise enviably was already confusing to me, but for Bethesda to attempt to capture that audience by willingly associating with Richard Marcinko? Did they really expect more? Marcinko was a deeply stupid man, a murderous monster who could only fail upward for his entire life. He was sort of involved in the writing of a bunch of books about how much of a badass he was. I don’t think there is a more potent way to signal how extremely insecure you are. This man was pathetic. This game is a joke. I’m so happy I don’t have to think about it anymore.

Is it “fief” or “fife”?

The following is a transcript of a Youtube review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/62UVeiLrMIc?si=jNluQ-ZqpGalOlvG

I’ve been thinking about video game progression a lot lately. Way of the Samurai’s odd structure has been a big part of that but the Archipelago multiworld system has also really captured my attention. Both of these gaming experiences require the player to be far more active in seeking relevant progression, be it determining which clue they should follow-up on in Rokkotsu Pass or assessing what their current loadout allows them to achieve within the multiworld. When presented with a choice in either setting, familiarity goes a long way to selecting the best path to follow. I know which locations open up to me whenever I get a hold of the Monarch Wings, but I have no idea if finishing Dona’s haiku with the omelette line actually makes a difference. As far as I can tell it just makes Dona assume Japanese people suck at poetry. Unlike Archipelago, Way of the Samurai isn’t randomised upon game-start - it isn’t a roguelike or anything - instead Acquire have designed a game that revolves around the player making a big decision once an hour, then following that thread to its conclusion. And for some, a branching narrative adventure where small differences in action have a butterfly-effect impact that lead to different outcomes for the story overall is the Platonic ideal of a video game story. For others, Way of the Samurai looks like a cynical attempt at getting the most amount of game for the lowest number of assets. Whichever the case, the game’s structure is totally unique and absolutely makes it worth revisiting today.

Released in 2002 exclusively for the Playstation 2, Way of the Samurai is a 3D action-adventure game that follows a travelling ronin as they stumble into the end of an era. The Rokkotsu Pass is undergoing a rapid change of governance - whether the people present know it or not - and the player is allowed to navigate the upheaval in a broad number of ways. Whenever the player transitions between scenes the day advances slightly and, depending on the time of day, the player can catch and participate in a variety of events that inform how their adventure will end. Will they fight this crew of troublemakers, ignore them, or maybe attempt to get involved in whatever they’re up to? If things don’t quite go to plan, the player might end up helplessly tied to the train tracks or even recruited as cannon fodder in an upcoming battle. The game features three major factions in the Rokkotsu Pass that are all willing to accept the player as a member on a whim. There’s the Kurou Family, the current top of the hierarchy; a de facto dictatorship who shake down the villagers in the valley for protection money and resources, then there’s the Akadama Clan who have recently moved into Rokkotsu Pass with the intent to dethrone the Korou Family and take control of the region for themselves, and finally the villagers who live in the valley; most of whom have been chased away by the two gangs but a handful are still present and trying to scrape out a life amidst the chaos. The player is free to join and oppose any and all of these groups, leading them through a variety of circumstances with compounding effects. Way of the Samurai also boasts a complex sword-fighting system with 40 different weapons and over 200 attacks, which seems ridiculous and kind of difficult to understand, but most aren’t necessary and some might even be exclusive to the PVP fighting mode. Or maybe they are useful on higher difficulties, I don’t know, I just wanted to see the different stories.

At this point I would normally provide some kind of biography for the developers to help set the scene. Something to introduce the real main character to this narrative, because games don’t just emerge from the ether and install themselves onto 2001-gaming compatible hardware - someone had to make them. But I’ve run into a bit of a problem: Acquire’s strange online presence. The company was founded in the late 90’s and quickly made its way onto the Japanese stock exchange, where it was then acquired by a larger company, and then later sold to another media conglomerate while forming partnerships with other game developers along the way. Not only is the history of Acquire obscured behind language barriers and corporate acquisitions, but at some point a bunch of false information made its way into their online profiles throughout various databases, including things like western names being credited for work that was most likely done by a Japanese person, as the credits in the game would suggest. In a similar vein, I would’ve thought it appropriate to write a bio for the Archipelago developers who have done some tremendous technical wizardry to have created such a robust, generation-spanning machine. But much of the project’s early history is mired in sour politics and the egos of people working on a similar but separate computing marvel. Not only that, but the vast majority of game compatibility work within the Archipelago project was done by community members. Talented and determined individuals who just had to bring randomised Landstalker to the masses in a way that also adds cooperative multiplayer. I don’t think I’d be able to do justice briefly covering so many incredible people who have delivered to me my favourite multiplayer gaming experience of all time, but I am going to gush about it all for a bit.

You can only really play your favourite game so many times before you start to forget what made it so special in the first place. The deeper one’s familiarity with a world the more likely exploring becomes routine, most enemies turn into annoyances, and the story eventually grinds to dust. I love Hollow Knight and I’ve played it a lot, but I haven’t really touched the vanilla game in a couple years. I know where to go and where to avoid until later which means Hallownest’s wonder and mystery are gone. Until Silksong comes out. Randomisers help to restore some of that mystery while also requiring creative routing through a part of the world that probably hadn’t been designed for the player’s current mobility tools. Combine all of that with Doom’s items, randomised Minecraft recipes, and a Super Metroid playthrough and suddenly it’s all new again. The Dung Defender’s stinky charm doesn’t drop from the ceiling of the room after he gets Team Rocket blasted into the distance, this time it’s a BFG, or the bucket recipe, or the 80th pack of missiles. The system even saves the multiworld progress so one player can load up a playthrough of all 56 currently supported games and even throw in 15 extra playthroughs of Kingdom Hearts 2 because you just love Donald Duck so god damn much you fuckin’ lunatic Disney-adult maniac- and Archipelago will let you log in and out whenever you want. But it’s also possible to play simultaneous multiplayer too! Colloquially known as “sync games,” a group of players hop into a voice channel and communicate which items they need and when so the other members of the group can go collect them. And with the right settings most groups can get a full multiworld done in around 2 hours, which is crazy! It genuinely breathes new life into some of my most played out games and I seriously cannot recommend it enough. The website has a list of every compatible title and I’ll also put a link to the Discord server in the description in case you want to try it out and craft your own stories. But now, back to drudgery.

Aside from the ronin’s death and the ronin just leaving on their own, there are six endings to find within Way of the Samurai, which itself is a bit of an illusion. I’d argue that there are only two significantly different endings that don’t just change when each major character is killed. Every storyline is only an hour long and none of them are that special or interesting individually, so I’m not spoiling anything of any consequence. The first ending I found and I think the most natural path to follow would be siding with the villagers in the Station. When the player enters the game world the very first event they’ll come across is the attempted kidnapping on the bridge. Stopping to rescue Suzu momentarily swerves the Kurou Family related paths, since Tsubohachi won’t let the player enter their territory after this confrontation. Winning the battle isn’t necessary since Dona will save Suzu if the player fails to, and surrender only detours the player slightly provided they manage to convince the passersby to untie them. After some relatively unimportant posturing between the various clans in the area, the player convinces Suzu, her grandfather, Dojima the blacksmith, and Dona to follow them out of the Station and then the credits play. This is probably the ‘best’ ending where all the sympathetic characters get to live, but it’s massively underwhelming. It takes an hour to convince four people that maybe they should leave the Rokkotsu Pass, and then they do. The other paths all end with the ronin and a buddy from the Kurou Family or the Akadama Clan or both dying honourably at the hands of the Meiji army who have come to annex the pass into the government’s territory. I skimmed over all of that because, despite there being a really easy and obvious way to add depth to the characters the player will meet over and over while seeking out different endings, every single person in this game is paper thin. Dona wants to be a samurai and marry Suzu. Suzu is a damsel in distress and acts only as a prize to be won. Dojima is just some dude who watches stuff happen and that’s basically it. He used to be in the army so he knows there’s a government spy among the Akadama people, which if he didn’t know would mean this entire character lives to be the blacksmith and nothing else. The Akadama Clan wants to take over the valley from the Kurou Family because one of their leaders is the child of Tesshin, the Kurou leader. Like, that’s it. The Akadama have no more motivation or pivotal conflict besides that. Tesshin wants to sell land to the government but the government agent flakes on the deal and decides to take it violently instead. The game holds this stuff back like these are valuable pieces of information that alter how the player is thinking about these people. Like the player is going to become more sympathetic to the Kurou after learning that they want to sell their old steel mill to the government. The Akadama Clan could just want territory with residents to extort, using the word “revenge” hasn’t made that motivation more meaningful. And since the conceit of this whole game is following storylines to their conclusion and then picking up a new one on the next run, I think it’s a huge problem that none of the characters are written all that well and that the stories themselves are bland and forgettable. If this were a roguelike then the weakness of the narrative wouldn’t be such an issue - Way of the Samurai’s combat could be the star of the show instead.

The combat system in Way of the Samurai functions in a similar way to the first Tekken game, of all things. With a drawn sword and an enemy in the ronin’s sights, the player’s movements are restricted almost to a 2D line with the option to sidestep. Different attacks are triggered by specific inputs which not only depend on the type of weapon the player has equipped, but also requires the ronin to “learn” them by trying to do them in battle. They never get more complex than two or three inputs, but that’s still in line with the original Tekken movesets. All these attacks don’t really change how the combat flows which is why I said they weren’t overly necessary earlier. Different attacks don’t combine together so any attack that lands does its damage, then the combat resets to neutral. The more impactful combat mechanic is pushing and pulling the opponent to cause them to stumble. I didn’t notice any visual indicator for the player to tell whether the enemy was susceptible to a push or a pull, but with enough trial and error I was able to figure out which enemies were push and which were pull. Picking the correct option causes the enemy to enter a brief period of vulnerability - allowing the player to get an extra hit in. The defender can also push and pull their opponent, keeping this layer of interaction even throughout the more passive moments in combat. The advantage gained from pushes and pulls can be decisive and it naturally goes both ways, but a problem arises when the player loses too many of these interactions and is killed. The ronin’s death is considered an independent ending, regardless of the tasks the player completed beforehand. And because the game recognises an ending has been reached, any save data from the previous run is deleted to allow the player to start over again. So if the player pursues a thread all the way to the final showdown and gets unlucky or makes a mistake or can’t find enough vegetables to eat to heal up, that entire hour of progress is lost with no way of getting it back. I didn’t die too often, but if I was going to die it’d almost always be right near the ending I was chasing which completely killed my motivation to play and then I’d turn Way of the Samurai off. Eventually I did see all the endings and all of the models in the game, which are okay. It’s a PS2 game but the palette is very bland.

This game was released in 2002, the year of Vice City, Metroid Prime, and Morrowind, and while it lacks the scale of these games, Way of the Samurai’s visuals are at least on par with the top of the pile. Prime does have phenomenal style and direction over Acquire’s game, and I think having Tommy Talerico on board definitely contributed to Prime’s tremendous overall presentation, but I think we should probably stay on topic. Way of the Samurai’s character models are solid and the combat animations are great all around - a genuine achievement. Animation outside of combat is often a bit wooden and sadly never gets as action-figurey as stuff like Rune, so it’s just kind of boring to watch. And most of the environments are plain and boring too. The PS2 can handle much broader palettes and there are even examples of Japanese forests with a greater range of colourful plants and even some totally necessary god-rays. The rest of the Rokkotsu Pass is in decline and generally abandoned so the muted colours are appropriate, but why the Korou Family live in a big pit in a drab little house is very strange considering they’re supposed to be shaking the villagers down for all of their riches. Is the palette being used in a metaphorical way to signify the end of this era of Japanese history, the colours literally holding onto a time that ceases in this very moment? Or did Acquire just go for drab colours because that’s how you make things look more realistic? It makes sense for the Akadama clan to be based in a rickety old barn or something, and their mansion is sort of run down, but it’s hard to even say if that was a deliberate design choice or if the game just looks like that. And don’t get me started on Kitcho’s design. It’s a badass ‘fit but it cannot be historically appropriate. Kitcho standing there in his black jeans, string vest, and killer jacket while the ronin runs around in his kimono is a weird collision of fashion that I’m kind of into. But Kitcho might just be the real time traveller here.

Way of the Samurai was Acquire’s first game on Playstation 2. It was also the third game the company ever released and it was their first not to be specifically focussed on stealth. The video game industry was doing very well during the early 2000s, with Sony’s new console becoming one of the most ubiquitous electronics in homes worldwide. There was plenty of money to be made developing video games, and Acquire had shareholders to satisfy. My cynical brain wants me to say that Way of the Samurai was made to stretch a relatively small budget into a video game with enough content to sate consumers and make out with the highest yield for the company’s shareholders. I think many of the combat animations were either made during Acquire’s time as a motion-capture company or for their Tenchu games. That would explain how the combat can look as smooth and natural as it does, while the conversation scenes have characters’ heads swivel around like they’re owls. All of the environments are small, lacking in detail, and are reused often. I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with reusing assets to make a game - I’d encourage it, actually - just something about the way Acquire has done it gets my cynicism going.

Ultimately, I think Way of the Samurai tried something really interesting and unique, but this first attempt doesn’t quite live up to the strength of the idea. RPGs that divide narratively based on whatever choices the player makes are already compelling enough for players to regularly replay games just to see what else they could do - designing an entire game around that should be a recipe for success, but Way of the Samurai lacks compelling events. I don’t need to see the two sides of a dude pushing a pram through the wilderness, neither eventuality is that exciting. And the short runtime makes discerning between events that lead to particular endings difficult. The Meiji government soldiers are always going to show up at the end no matter how effective a negotiator the ronin is. Overall, I don’t think Acquire are happy with how this first game ended up and I’ve seen that the rest of the series expands a lot on this first attempt, which is good. But it’s also a shame, for me I mean, because when do I ever play sequels?

This next game is some wild tactics thing.

The following is a transcript for a video review, which can be viewed here:
https://youtu.be/XP5bTH6o-MM

There are people out there who like to pretend video games were never political and that political ideas being brought up in games is a new thing and that it should stop. Occasionally, I might humour that line of thinking, but Just Cause is blatantly political so I’m going to be spending some time talking about the game’s politics. Those politics are bad, from basically every perspective, so if you’re worried about listening to me throw shade at conservatism or something then don’t be. Okay, maybe one time. Societal progress will happen, whether it’s officially legislated or not. If you don’t want to adapt then you can go get eaten by bears, since that went so well. Just Cause is a 2006 third-person action adventure game developed by Avalanche Studios that was released on PC, the original Xbox, and Playstation 2, which was the version I played. The player is dropped into a mostly open environment and let loose on the general population. You can steal cars, steal boats, steal planes and helicopters, there’s shooting with generous aiming mechanics, as well as all of the sex and drugs to be expected from a Grand Theft Auto clone. The fictional country of San Esperito has fallen into unrest as a revolutionary force has risen up to overthrow President Salvador Mendoza. Amidst the chaos, an American spy agency deploys Rico Rodriguez to ensure Mendoza’s regime is toppled, and to buy favour from the new administration, continuing an American tradition of shoving their explosive skydiver fingers into everyone else’s governmental pies. When this stuff happens in real life, people are generally not too happy about it, especially the residents of the country that has earned the United States’ attention. Such a setting would imply that Avalanche has some opinions about foreign intervention that they would like to share in an action-packed video game form. Perhaps Just Cause exists to support this kind of political interference, or to condemn it, or ridicule it. Reviews at the time were generally positive about the game, praising the skydiving and grappling hook mechanics, but any mention of Rico’s narrative actions in San Esperito generally involved disinterest or confusion. The 2006 video game playing audience weren’t ready to consider the USA’s geopolitical actions in video game form. But, at the very least, we can hope something like the events of Just Cause couldn’t ever happen in the real world… Anymore.

The game opens with a news anchor reporting on a media release from the People’s Revolutionary Army of San Esperito, in which the Army calls Mendoza mean names. It then cuts to Rico preparing to skydive down to San Esperito while going over his assignment. There are a few shots of a dude in an orange shirt driving around, before he sets off a flare for Rico to aim for. Then the player gets hands on with the skydiving mechanics while Sheldon introduces himself. This section is basically the tutorial and it does a great job of outlining the mechanical systems that will be at play within the rest of the game. The player parachutes a bit, then they shoot some guys with the guns that basically aim themselves, and then they’re driven to the next objective while manning a turret to shoot at the enemies that don’t really fight back. Other than the driving and the grappling hook, this is basically the peak of all of these mechanics too. Sheldon pulls up at a hut in the forest so Rico can meet and be slapped by Kane, before being told that the next part of the mission will be briefed in the nearby RV. What follows is a series of missions in which Sheldon and Kane point at targets for Rico to hit, and then Rico goes out and hits those targets in whatever method he deems necessary, which is okay if a little bland. For now the player can rearm and get familiar with the game’s underwhelming presentation.

By 2006 standards, this game is plain. The entirety of San Esperito has the same grass texture and handful of trees, all the villages look the same, the small urban areas are all the same, and while all of the roadways do have different topography it’s hard to distinguish each one from the last. This is a big archipelago, with a surprisingly large population living on it too, so it wouldn’t be unreasonable to have more varying geography in different locations. The weak presentation seems like something that could be attributed to hardware limitations. Sony’s second home console wasn’t exactly a piece of powerful tech at release, but Just Cause is like this on Xbox and home computer too. The game compares really poorly to San Andreas in terms of variety and recognisability as well. Anyone who played San Andreas for any amount of time will recognise the iconic cul-de-sac, but after 11 hours I don’t think I’d be able to tell where Rico was from any screenshot of the game. Sonically, the game is serviceable. The gun and vehicle effects are decent, but the mix is pretty great. The way the music triggers whenever a big fight or chase breaks out is good and it manages to not blow out the rest of the audio, but there aren’t too many songs to apply to each scenario. Eventually the coolness of the trumpet parts wears off, and then the music just fades away. The voice work is quality too. The performances might be a little cliched but the script and actors did some excellent work, with a lot of roundness in many of the voices. And while it was rare I did find some NPCs interacting in an interesting way.

Unfortunately, the mediocrity of Just Cause’s presentation is also indicative of the gameplay. As is the case in many other games of this style, the primary gameplay loop involves travelling to a location in a vehicle and then shooting a bunch of people at that location until the mission parameters are reached. There’s nothing inherently bad about missions like these, provided that the actual gameplay is enjoyable, but that’s where Just Cause stumbles. Just Cause’s vehicles control exactly like Grand Theft Auto cars after all of the tires burst. The steering goes between horrific understeering until it hits the threshold where things transition to spinning out of control. Travelling anywhere by car is a tightrope walk through Fast and Furious one liners, and the cinematic camera triggering whenever the vehicle's wheels leave the ground for a fraction of a second only makes the journeys take longer. Aquatic travel is usually preferable since there are fewer obstacles, but the vehicles are similarly irritating to control. The aircraft control just fine, but they’re very rare so that luxury is reserved for only the end of the game. I find the choice to leave aircraft for the end game a little strange given that one of the game’s primary mechanics is the skydiving, and what better way to engage that part of the game than by ejecting from a fighter jet just above ground level. Apparently not. Instead, the player will gain access to a fast travel helicopter from which to skydive and never pilot. The parachute controls are fine on their own, but there was no way the grapple hook parasailing was going to work well. Rico can break inertia and every other physics constant whenever he enters car-surfing mode, but that flexibility isn’t afforded to the parasailing. Unless the target vehicle is moving slowly and directly away from Rico, entering the parasailing state is kind of a crapshoot. Rico gains momentum and lifts off of the ground, but travels in the direction his legs were facing when he was standing. It ultimately amounts to another finicky and frustrating system that thankfully becomes redundant by the introduction of planes. Vehicle combat is also very lacklustre as it is easy to drive enemy vehicles off the road, or destroy them effortlessly on foot. The game seems to be banking on the player feeling like an unstoppable deity of destruction as none of the enemy encounters ever really offer any kind of challenge. Squishy human enemies are all over the place and they go down in a couple of shots, while anything mechanical can almost always be ignored or simply blown up with any explosive. That being said, the combat systems aren’t really built to accommodate a challenge. The guns aim themselves, so driving challenges are the only candidate for increasing difficulty. Which would be horrific. Contextualising the battles could’ve gone a long way toward making them satisfying, though.

Just Cause’s actual narrative is super simple, but the implications of the events are just godawful. President Mendoza’s regime has been poor enough to inspire a revolutionary force to gather and begin fighting back. The President is apparently allowing a drug cartel to run the country while he focuses on staying in power. The Americans believe this means Mendoza has developed weapons of mass destruction, which is enough justification to assist the People’s bloody revolution. First order of business is to break the rebel leader, Caramicas, out of prison in order to establish a relationship with the future head of state. Most of the rest of the game has Sheldon and Kane introduce some member of Mendoza’s cabinet or the cartel for Rico to go and assassinate, but there are a few other tasks like destroying a crop of coca or helping Caramicas gain access to a radio broadcasting facility so he can deliver a speech to the currently uninvolved citizens of San Esperito. After pushing Mendoza’s forces back across the archipelago, Sheldon manages to locate a nuclear power station as well as Mendoza’s nuclear missile silos, confirming their suspicions. Due to the continued pressure, Mendoza does launch one missile at the United States, but Rico is able to intercept it, before chasing the dictator onto his jet while in flight and finally killing the President.

Okay, so, politics time. For those unaware, Operation Just Cause was the codename given to the United States’ military invasion of Panama during December of 1989. The CIA informant turned militarist dictator of Panama General Manuel Noriega had been assisting US intervention in El Salvador and Nicaragua during the 60’s and 70’s, but like with most things, the relationship soured when Reagan gained office in 1981. Noriega’s involvement in the scheme to arm the Contras in Nicaragua had earned him some bad press in the US and Reagan asked him to step down. Noriega refused, and throughout Reagan’s presidency the Panamanian leader began looking to the Soviets, Cuba, and Libya for military aid against coup attempts from his own army. After Noriega overturned the results of an election, the US would have trouble accessing the Panama Canal, so the decision was made to invade. Upwards of 1000 people died during the invasion, which was widely considered illegal under international law. It bears repeating, Noriega was on the CIA’s payroll, he had basically been installed by them and was friendly with the United States until the Americans refused to acknowledge his legitimacy. This is where the video game’s title comes from, as well as a great deal of content within the game. There were, and very likely still are drug cartels active in Panama, fueled by the high prices their products are sold for in the US. American forces were frequently deployed in the region by parachuting out of helicopters, and naturally, much of the fighting was focused around airports and power plants. I don’t think Avalanche Studios intended to glorify the events of the invasion, but I think they’re brazen approach to the gameplay and narrative events does belittle an actual military attack. The People’s Army and Caramicas are portrayed as fairly ineffective or incompetent without their American super soldier, but without the Americans’ involvement Mendoza wouldn’t be in power. And after everything’s over, when Mendoza is deposed, and Caramicas takes power, will San Esperito be free to govern itself or will there need to be an American babysitting the country? Well, “need”. And the American characters in the game are always portrayed as treating this whole thing like a vacation, as if people aren’t really being killed just over the next hill. Are these the people who are going to be running the country once Mendoza is out of the picture? Does Avalanche think that’s a good thing? Of course, there are other influences within the game. The Cuban Revolution is one. Cuba has been subject to a lot of foreign interference throughout the past 600 years, but the instance in 1959 is possibly the most blatant example of the United States’ meddling in geopolitical affairs. Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution had been popular in the US, but after a string executions and the repatriation of US owned Cuban farmland, the relationship between the two countries collapsed. Economic sanctions and a few failed invasion attempts led to the infamous Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 that saw nuclear missiles stationed in Cuba being aimed at the United States. We see this influence in Just Cause’s cover art, as well as a few events toward the end of the game. Appropriating the Che Guevara imagery for the cover is a bit strange in context, using Rico in Guevara’s place when it really should be Caramicas. Guevara was not an American agent, his ideology was very much the antithesis of Rico’s obedience to his imperialist masters. And finally, to end this whole rant, one of Sheldon’s plans to help depose Mendoza is to blow up a nuclear power plant. Not only does this potentially cause a nuclear meltdown on a small island, which would irradiate a large portion of San Esperito’s limited land space, but it also destroys a public utility that the people are still going to need. By that point, Mendoza and his forces had been pushed into a corner, making utility destruction little more than an act of terrorism and doing nothing to improve The People’s Army’s chances of victory. Avalanche doesn’t seem to have demonstrated opinions one way or the other on the conflicts they’ve referred to in Just Cause, the enlightened centrists both-sidesing a literal military invasion. Really poignant stuff.

There was definitely an attitude of ignoring politics throughout the 2000s that makes Avalanche’s decision to set Just Cause in such a tumultuous political environment kind of confusing. If they had something to say, any kind of commentary at all would be better than nothing. But then maybe the poor gameplay and environment design were made that way deliberately to reflect the writing staff’s inability to say anything of quality. Each facet of the game is a metaphor for how the writers refused to take a stance on anything, culminating in an amorphous green blob of a game that wants to ride entirely on its grappling hook gimmick and putting Che Guevara on the cover. It’s brilliant really.

Busting out an RTS classic next time.

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be found here: https://youtu.be/BCH3jbQyIiM

“Anarchism” is an unfortunate word. While it was initially used to describe a political movement seeking to abolish a hierarchical government and encourage a more cooperative arrangement for society as a whole, the word “anarchy” was derailed into becoming synonymous with words like “mayhem”, “lawlessness”, and “chaos”. Because of this, it’s difficult to imagine a world where an anarchist arrangement of society is anything but a dystopia, and yet Ace Team have been doing their best to truly explore the idea within the video game medium. Since their first released game back in 2009, Ace Team have been examining the concept of a fully anarchist society, how it would work, who would live in it, and how other hierarchical societies would interact with it. In this effort, Ace Team have created three games set within their fictional anarchist world. The first Zeno Clash game details a member of Zenozoik society struggling with a moral challenge. With no concept of crime and legal processes, Ghat has to make judgments based on his personal morality and desires, a decision resulting in his family disowning him and chasing him out of their home. In the sequel, a foreign power has come to Zenozoik to forcefully establish laws, encouraging the people to become admissible in the lands beyond Zenozoik at the cost of their unbroken freedom. Ghat understands these laws as little more than a means to ensnare him and his family, so he fights them all the way beyond the end of the world. The Zenozoik shown in the first two Zeno Clash games is a violent place. The people are all members of gangs, they’re technologically stunted, and they’re easily manipulated, but despite all of that, nobody starves - unless they choose to. This setting is tremendously rich and Ace Team could make games set in Zenozoik for as long as they have stories to tell. Clash: Artifacts of Chaos, the next game in the series, takes the player to an older Zenozoik, before Golem’s intervention, before Haldestom, back to the days when the old hegemonies ruled via their one law.

Unlike its predecessors, Clash: Artifacts of Chaos is a third person action game that follows the adventure of Pseudo, a hermit who has the inexplicable power to awaken as a skeleton in the night in order to revive his dead, fleshy body. Pseudo finds himself called to a nearby altercation when he hears a song in the wind. An elderly man and his grandson are being harassed by another person who insists the elder must fight him. The player then gets the opportunity to play the one law’s dice game before completing the fight part of the ritual as the elder. No matter how hard you beat this guy’s ass, I don’t think Grandpa’s attacks actually do any damage. Despite his efforts, the elder is unable to defeat Bhlag, and ultimately ends up being killed during the fight. Typically, murder isn’t accepted by the people of Zenozoik, and since Pseudo witnesses the fight, Bhlag quickly challenges him to try and cover up what he had done. Without dice, Pseudo loses the ritual game by default and must accept the penalty without retaliation. What follows is the player’s first proper experience with the game’s combat. The camera is positioned just above Pseudo’s right shoulder, giving the player a good view of the enemy in front of him, but not obscuring their peripheral vision with a first person perspective. Not all of Pseudo’s attacks will cause enemies to flinch, so the player will be punished for mindlessly mashing attacks, demonstrating to the player the thing they are told in the tutorial, that Pseudo is not the strongest and will have to take advantage of his superior speed. The player does this by dodging around their opponents and keeping mobile during a fight. At the conclusion of this fight, Pseudo and the Boy try to establish a plan going forward. Who will care for the Boy, and how will he get to wherever the carers are? Pseudo suggests waiting at a nearby fortress in hopes of catching a messenger going toward the Boy’s old home. The Boy then loots the dice and ritual belt from his dead grandfather before the two begin their journey to the fortress. When they make it to Gemini's palace, they’re invited inside to meet her. As it happens, the Boy also has magical powers; he’s able to transfer lifeforce from one living thing to another, though strangely he views this as a curse. Gemini plans to use this power to expand her rule throughout Zenozoik, but the reasons for why she would want to do this are fairly vague. It isn’t like she’s collecting taxes or anything. Sensing that the Boy isn’t safe in Gemini’s possession, and prepared to face the coming bounty-hunters, Pseudo commits to taking the Boy to his old home himself and the two set out across Zenozoik.

I’ve seen this game described as “soulslike” a few times now, and there’s definitely some merit to that claim, though you might have to squint a bit to see it. There’s a single combat difficulty that can be quite the challenge before the player properly gets to grips with the combat system. That combat system includes a dodge mechanic, there are campfires at which the player saves and heals, and may also brew a health drink to consume in combat. That health drink doesn’t activate until the animation associated with it completes, meaning that the player has to find opportune times to heal. The world is explored in loops, paths leading away from save points tend to loop back and give the player the chance to open shortcuts to previous hub areas. The combat is quite fast-paced and has a very effective quantity of audio and visual feedback. Pseudo’s attacks are snappy and cancelling between standard attacks, special moves, and dodge attacks feels like inputting combos in a fighting game. In the lower left of the screen is a bar that fills whenever Pseudo lands a hit on an enemy. When the bar is full, the player can engage a brief first-person mode which ends in an extremely powerful attack that is unfortunately a bit buggy. There are a lot of different fighting styles and options within the combat when in motion which is highly impressive and I enjoyed it a lot, but there are aspects that I think are undercooked and things that people who’ve played the game all the way through probably aren’t familiar with. Firstly, this game has a blocking mechanic. Blocking occurs passively, though, which is just baffling to me. In order to block an attack the player needs Pseudo to stand perfectly still and tank an enemy’s attack to the face. Who would ever do this? They can’t be moving, or dodging, or attacking, which is totally antithetical to what a normal player would do when presented with danger. And Pseudo still takes damage whenever he successfully blocks an attack. The parry system acts in much the same way, although there’s at least a timing challenge involved in parrying. Secondly, there’s a stamina mechanic in this game, though it doesn’t slow Pseudo down or stop him from relentlessly attacking which is appreciated. What it does is increase the damage Pseudo takes and reduces the amount of invulnerability frames on dodges, which isn’t conveyed well at all. For a while I thought enemy attacks were able to deal a random range of damage, when one moment I was surviving one attack, and then the next that same attack would kill me outright. But no, Pseudo just gets tired and takes more damage. I think all this pushes the gameplay toward a style that keeps the player out of danger at all times, which I didn’t find to be the most fun strategy, just the most effective. I often found myself using the dash attack, then cancelling that into a special move, then a dodge attack, and finally disengaging so that I might start the sequence over again. All of these attacks cause the enemies to flinch, so I was never in danger from the enemy I was hitting directly.

Actually, that’s a good way of transitioning into talking about the game’s level of challenge. I’m by no means an elite ultra mega gamer, but I can hang, and for the first half of the game or so it took me at least two attempts to beat a fight. I was trying to engage with the game on its terms which took me a few hours to unlearn. Again, taking increased damage from having low stamina was not well communicated, so I found I’d be relentlessly attacking enemies until they’d suddenly kill me. Eventually, though, once I learned the combat system, the game ran out of challenges. Once I was familiar with Wrehgg’s attacks, I beat him every time. The Outcast and his giant friend weren’t an issue either. The same crew of regular citizenry and members of the Director’s cult hunt the player all throughout Zenozoik, and while each new enemy has their own fighting style, their repeated appearances make them less interesting. This is additionally true when that citizenry is also reused as spectres in the night. At about 14 hours in length, the game is definitely spreading its content a bit thin, but I don’t fully subscribe to this idea. Naturally, games like this are going to have a lot of encounters against enemies the player has already overcome. The player gets to express their skill against an enemy that might have been troublesome before, and Ace Team gets some more use out of the complex enemies they’ve designed. But man, Bhlag just won’t stay down. The handful of boss fights are really cool though, mainly due to how fascinating all of the designs of the enemies are, but sometimes the fight’s mechanics are visually spectacular.

I think it goes without saying, but this game is gorgeous. The art direction and technical artistry are phenomenal, and I almost can’t believe a team as small as Ace Team managed to produce something this beautiful. The shapes, the colours, the shading, even the little scratchy marks, it all oozes style and artistic vision. The world is stuffed with life and character, even the wild areas where it wouldn’t be unreasonable to have a normal forest. And the people living in Zenozoik are wonderful. I love Pseudo’s design, his permanently furrowed brow perfectly encapsulates his grouchy attitude, and the checkerboard designs tattooed onto him show that while he is a hermit who dislikes interacting with other people, he is still very much subject to their one law. The Tchaks tend to have this red and white colouration on their tops in order to denote effectiveness, which is shared with some of Pseudo’s tattoos as well as the Boy’s clothes. The ritual dice game is quite plain in comparison to the rest of the game, though. The dice are thrown onto a skin placed over the grass, and while the skin looks great, I’d much rather be looking up instead. Just look at the sunset. And the stars in the night. Magical. The plant-life is similarly magical, when it isn’t trying to kill you, and the presence of non-Rath bird animals is very welcome. Mostly. This cat guy thing is a tremendous design but I absolutely hate it. Great job. The combat animations have great weight to them, and the variety is astonishing too, not just on Pseudo’s end. The way this enemy pirouettes whenever she throws her boomerang attack, or how this guy can’t actually see so he’s fumbling around searching for the player with his hand. I’m sure I could gush about this game’s presentation all day, but I think just looking at it does more than I can express.

Now, a beautifully presented world does little for a game if the thing is a nightmare to traverse and lacks interesting things to do. Fortunately, these visuals aren’t going to waste. Zenozoik’s geography has yet to be ground down to the rolling hills common in Zeno Clash 2’s rendition, instead the world is craggy and rocky, with a lot of vertical layers stacked on top of each other. Exploration often involves a lot of climbing and hopping over gaps in the path, circling around prominent terrain features, and then knocking down the same suspiciously placed stone block to create a path back to the campsite. The mountain region has a greater focus on higher climbs, while the coastal swamp features smaller ledges followed quickly by returning back down to the base level. There are small settlements all over the place, though they’re mostly empty aside from the two vendors who set up shops within. I don’t know whether the abandonment of all of the villages is because everyone is hunting Pseudo and the Boy, but maybe. It’s quite astounding just how many homes have been modelled and placed in the world, filled with trinkets and references for long-time fans to get, places where the residents might farm their food, and then nobody’s there. There’s also only a handful of Corwids in the whole game! They still live in the woods, but there’s much more structure out here than there used to be (or will be), and Haldestom seems to be actively trying to keep the Corwids away which is something I had expected to be present before. Also, the living statues return, due to popular demand, I suppose. I quite like the ancient fortress, though. The way it all tightly weaves around itself, with enemies suddenly appearing from their hiding places was a welcome change from the normal way lesser enemies are handled. Not that they’re bad, just that all the buff aardvarks in the game are pretty easy to beat and they’re surprisingly common. And since there are so many potion ingredients to collect, I did find myself fighting every single aardvark and pterodactyl I came across. Some of the routes that circle back to previous areas do seem a bit contrived, and while the design of the structure is impressive, I don’t think Corwids would really bother with building a one to one scale replica of Blight Town. Especially when Pseudo’s just living in a tent.

The player is first introduced to Pseudo in his skeletal form. Somewhat reminiscent of the opening of the first Zeno Clash game, Artifacts of Chaos begins in a dream realm while a mysterious person with a gruff voice delivers the combat tutorial. The voice then instructs Pseudo to wake up, though the world he awakens into is likely not what the player expected. Pseudo is still a skeleton, wandering in the night. There are other skeletons en route to where Pseudo’s flesh lies. He had been crushed by a log and his body lies face down on the ground amidst his current campsite. But with the skeleton’s help, the log is removed and Pseudo can truly wake up. Pseudo sees a former body point south-east, though what we are to glean from this I’m unsure. And this is how the player meets their protagonist, crushed and alone, fortunate that his ability to reanimate as a skeleton kept him from staying dead. As the player explores this first area, they’re likely to walk into a trigger which causes Pseudo to stop and wonder where music is coming from. As the player approaches the source, they’re shown the battle between Bhlag and the Boy’s Grandpa, and then Pseudo intervenes. Intent on returning to his life of solitude, Pseudo wants to leave the Boy in someone else’s care as soon as he can. When shown his original plan to offload the Boy onto a messenger wouldn’t work, Pseudo quickly decides that he will make the journey himself. There’s very little conflict in Pseudo’s thoughts: that option won’t work, he will have to find another way. When Pseudo and the Boy finally make it to the Boy’s brother, and Pseudo again learns that he cannot offload the Boy here, his immediate reaction is to find the next place. Though his original motivation may have been to get back to normality as soon as he could, Pseudo’s sense of responsibility is the strongest characterisation he has. It makes him very likeable, despite his grouchy outer appearance. And when everyone starts hunting him, and with no idea who should care for the Boy, Pseudo heads north to speak to someone he wants very little to do with. His former master might know what to do. But when that attempt also fails, I think players are supposed to get the sense that Pseudo makes the decision to care for the Boy himself. Instead of running around Zenozoik looking for a suitable guardian, the plan changes to collecting shield artefacts in order to defeat Gemini and call off the hunt. There’s even a distressing scene where a machine Pseudo comes across starts emitting sounds that cause all birds throughout Zenozoik to lose their balance. The Boy, being kind of a bird, is affected by this, and Pseudo must make the run north to hopefully destroy the machine to save the Boy from the pain. This kind of emotional run across Zenozoik isn’t unique to this one instance, though, but that second occurrence is something we’ll get into once those sensitive to spoilers are gone.

Which is why I’ll put the marker here. If you intend to play the game and don’t want it spoiled, you’d better skip to the timestamp.

We’ve pretty much covered the bulk of the narrative excluding the big finale and the details of the shield artefact hunt, so I won’t go over it all again in this section. Instead, I want to discuss some metaphorical readings of the story as well as address some comments on my previous Zeno Clash videos. In a past life, I went to university to study writing. While I was attending classes, I was enrolled in a subject called “Creative Reading”. It sounds really stupid, but the professor knew exactly what he was doing, and it was probably the best class I’ve ever taken. One of the biggest takeaways I got was the idea that nothing a writer ever includes is truly random. The blue curtains might “just be blue” to the writer, but they’re not telling the truth, they specified that information for a particular, maybe even unconscious reason. With this in mind, I’ve been thinking that Artifacts of Chaos is about impending fatherhood, and the journey an expectant father would be going through before finally accepting their new role in life. This interpretation makes the ending hurt even more, as Pseudo is finally ready to accept his new life with the Boy before he is ripped away, hopefully taken to serve some greater purpose. Of course, this is just my interpretation, and unfortunately it ignores the game’s exploration of anarchism and the presence of “the one law” which I don’t think plays much of a role in Artifacts of Chaos anyway. Compared to previous titles in this series, Zenozoik’s anarchic society isn’t given very much attention. Ghat expends a lot of energy fleeing from Haldestom after attacking Father-Mother in Zeno Clash, and he’s just as active in his attempts to find a way to free the city from the oppressive regime that has taken over in the sequel. Pseudo plays by the one law all throughout Artifacts of Chaos, until the very end when he declares the law unjust. I don’t dislike this direction for the series, to put more focus on the other people who live within Zenozoik, rather than just Ghat’s conflicts with the morality of law, but I am left feeling underwhelmed by Artifacts of Chaos’ narrative as a result. At least not to the same degree as Zeno Clash 2, though. Artifacts of Chaos feels kind of narrow in that way, at least that’s my interpretation of it. Which is also something that was commented on in my previous video on this series. I didn’t see the parallels between the prison Father-Mother was thrown into and Zenozoik itself being deliberately isolated. How Golem had basically created a miniature version of his own duty and handed it over to his Enforcers. A user named Munsonroe left a really excellent comment on their understanding of the first two games, and while I think their own life experience has coloured their reading a bit, it’s very well reasoned and I think a great example of why I’m still in the YouTube game. Tell me your ideas, help me to broaden my perspective, it’s not always bad to allow others to influence your reading of something.

As the game approaches the climax, with the player embarking on their quest to collect all of the great shield artefacts, they come across a guy who had once been Gemini’s right hand. Circumstances changed, however, and they were forced to exile themself, though they didn’t go far. The Outcast had taken up residence in a cave on the coast, beyond the swamp where the people of Zenozoik rarely venture. After the player defeats the Outcast, they explain that they cannot hand over the shield artefact. In a fit of rage, the Outcast had tossed the trinket into the mouth of a nearby sleeping whale. So, Pseudo and the Boy go to meet the whale and see if they can get the shield artefact from them. Word is an ancient being, so old that a tree seems to have sprouted from their face and someone has carved one of the rocks that they have stacked atop their head. Word remembers everything, they are empowered that way, much like the Boy’s life force exchanging power. And, as many ancient beings do in fiction, Word has been using their immense memory to think about the state of things and how the future might shape up. Word explains that Zenozoik has been a prison for a very long time, and I have to mention that whoever was directing the voice actors should’ve been super picky about pronunciation. “Zeno-zoh-ik”. But anyway, Word critiques the law, and the artefacts. The one law binds Zenozoik while the outside world drowns in their many laws. The artefacts are components of the magic circle the Zenos abide by, they aren’t truly useful outside of the one law. Nobody can hunt or grow food with an artefact, much like nobody could hunt with a wallet full of cash. It’s definitely profound in some ways, but Word’s presence in the story is only to deliver this monologue, which is little more than the writer directly inserting their notes into the story. As much as I might find the ideas agreeable, the way they’ve been given to this character to just dump comes across as a poorly wrapped bandage. As if they were doing play tests and realised people didn’t get that anarchism was supposed to be a strong theme in the game, so they literally just copied and pasted the first few sentences of the Wikipedia article into the script and then created an entirely new character to read it out. Word also “predicts” that the future will involve pain in the name of change, that the people of Zenozoik are going to have to struggle in order to make their world better. And yeah, they do. There are two whole other games that detail aspects of that struggle. Some clairvoyance this whale has. Real gifted individual. And the way Pseudo leans to the Boy to say “do you understand what this guy’s talking about?” is the same 4th wall unbreaking that Pathologic was pulling back in 2005. It’s not so exciting 18 years later.

While it is part of the greater Zeno Clash universe, it isn’t necessary to have played the previous two games in order to understand this one. There are characters you might lack context for and little easter eggs that you likely won’t understand if you only play Clash: Artifacts of Chaos, but overall, I would definitely recommend playing this. It’s just as unique as the first Zeno Clash, while allowing for the customization available in Zeno Clash 2, and I think its graphics are far more appealing. There is one caveat to this recommendation, though, and that is a hardware issue. This game is very resource intensive, and I actually couldn’t run the game at low settings and record it via OBS with my previous GPU. I had some rinky-dink AMD card that was a couple of years old by that point, but I’m now running a 4070 which allowed me to record the game at its prettiest. That being said, if you don’t intend to record your playthrough then it probably won’t be a concern.

I think Clash: Artifacts of Chaos achieved exactly what Ace Team intended for it to achieve. There’s a new, modern feeling combat system, the visual presentation is on another level in terms of quality over their previous titles, the world shadows the Dark Souls style interconnected map with looping level design, and there’s a charming character dynamic to enjoy throughout the game’s generous run time. The game ticks all of these boxes and it’s a lot of fun, Ace Team should be commended for making such an excellent game. But I think they felt Artifacts of Chaos had to adhere to the themes they were exploring in previous Zeno Clash games and resorted to jamming those themes in with little consideration with how it’d work. Zenozoik has a law and a hierarchical leader, not anarchy, and that law and leader are the reason for the conflict in the game, not some condition of the setting that the narrative has to work around. The othering of Zenozoik’s population and their isolation within their borders is not a factor any of the characters ever think about, save for one instance where it is mentioned and quickly forgotten. Don’t misunderstand me, I like this game a lot, I just wish it could’ve lived without feeling like it had to tie itself to something else. The setting and character designs were more than enough, and that would’ve been far, far easier to manage than trying to shoe-horn in this strange pseudo-anarchy.

More fighting with some wacky characters to come!

The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/ArhWJKf9rKA

As video game genres age, developers tend to reuse aspects of previous works as a medium to plant their new ideas within, allowing them to focus on creating new assets instead of reinventing agriculture every single time. In the past, there wasn’t a default first-person shooter player controller so many developers experimented with different styles to see what best resonated with their audiences. Nowadays, character controller styles have homogenised after developers discovered what players liked most. This has caused many games to function fairly similarly, but it also leaves re-examination of older attempts in an interesting place. We can expect the roughest examples to originate from a new gaming technology’s introduction, I mean, have you seen movement systems in VR games? Some genres lend themselves to being played with simple controls on a limited controller, but others often struggle to keep things simple. Fighting games, for example, are notorious for requiring complex inputs and precise timing, putting a lot of pressure on the game’s controls. These games are immensely popular, and are often one of the few video game genres that allow those involved in their development to earn continuous revenue from purchases of the next instalments, re-releases, downloadable content, and official partnerships for competitive events. Excessive input delay or awkwardness in execution could spell disaster for any game hoping to establish a competitive scene, risking potentially millions of dollars over a single mistake. In 1995, with the introduction of Sony’s Playstation, 3D rendering video game hardware was entering homes worldwide, signalling the beginning of the race to be the first to publish a fighting game for the new system that took advantage of the hardware capabilities. Shortly thereafter, Namco’s Tekken would solidify itself as the most popular among those first 3D fighters, with its immaculate performance, stylish characters, flexible playstyles, and a surprisingly intuitive control scheme that assigned each of a character’s limbs to its own dedicated button on the controller. 28 years later, Bandai Namco are about to add an eighth instalment onto their Tekken franchise, an entry fans are very excited for after the success of Tekken 7. Inspired by this, as well as my randomiser’s unflinching recommendation, I figured now would be the perfect time to see what all this Tekken stuff is about, and where better to begin than the first game.

Likely to be the biggest hurdle for most is the game’s presentation. Early 3D has undoubtedly aged pretty poorly, and anyone seeking to replicate the visual style of the original Playstation tends to draw inspiration from the system’s later games, as well as taking some technical liberties. Modelling for games was obviously a totally new thing: rendering would have to happen in real time, forcing the models and animations to adhere to stricter optimisation practises than necessary for 3D animation for film. Since the speed of fighting games during the early 90s was picking up drastically, Namco knew that Tekken would have to run well in order to seriously compete. Tekken’s director, Seiichi Iishi’s 1993 project Virtua Fighter was illustrative of this issue. On the Saturn, Virtua Fighter cannot maintain a steady framerate, a flaw that Iishi wouldn’t permit within Tekken. As a result, all of the game’s stages are flat, infinite arenas with a scrolling background to represent the stage’s location. Some of these, like the Fiji stage and the King George Island stage, seem to be hand drawn artworks, while others like Acropolis and Venezia could just be photographs. Neither style is particularly exciting or interesting, and the lack of a stage select option in Versus mode signals to me that nobody at Namco felt strongly about any of the stages either. The stages have been made this way to allow more processing capacity for the game’s character models. The majority of these models are genuinely really charming and characterful, even if I can count the polygons by eye. Of the eight main roster characters, Law’s permanently agape mouth is my only big complaint. Kazuya’s design is iconic and his outfits are great. I like Paul’s sleeveless red gi and square hair, but I don’t care much for the leather. Jack looks surprisingly good considering his exaggerated proportions, and King’s leopard head fits naturally on his model. Nina and Michelle look really good too, though Michelle’s casual outfit is a little bland in terms of palette. She’s also called Michelle Chang despite the Native American themes in her primary outfit and ending animation which is a bit strange. Yoshimitsu completes the eight primary characters, and while his armour looks okay I feel like how he holds his tiny sword seems very awkward. He only ever uses it when a specific command is input, so he could’ve just had it sheathed the whole time otherwise. There are 10 other characters in the game, whose visual designs are a mixed bag; Ganryu is a solid looking low poly sumo wrestler, while Kuma’s model is rough. Poor bear doesn’t even look good in the renders. I can definitely see how people thought this was a guy in a suit and not an actual bear. And there’s also Heihachi’s Grindr profile picture. I understand that P Jack is an incomplete version of Jack, but he looks much more like an action figure than any fictional military robot I’ve ever seen. Wang is this game’s plain old man, Lee is trying to get into one of those K-Pop boy bands with 20 members, and Anna is unfortunately just as bland as Michelle’s palette. The menus in this game are awful. They aren’t particularly pretty, they’re arranged in strange ways, and if the Arcade mode is selected, the player can’t back out to the main menu. The only way back is to reset the game entirely, or pick a character and lose the first fight. Though, I suppose the menus aren’t the main draw of the game.

Fighting games live and die by their controls, and while it has its problems, Tekken’s controls on PS1 are surprisingly solid. Triangle and square control a character’s arms while circle and cross control their legs. Movement and blocking are all performed on the d-pad, the Playstation’s Achilles Heel. The d-pad buttons are brutal. I hate them so much. How many other controllers give you calluses? Movements are mostly done through tapping forward or backward instead of holding the direction down, with subsequent taps triggering different movement speeds. There isn’t any real side-stepping yet, aside from Heihachi changing his angle of attack which doesn’t really do anything except show off that this is indeed a 3D game. As for the controls for the fighting, players hold back to block and can either block high or low. Blocking high leaves the player vulnerable to lows, while blocking low leaves them vulnerable to overheads. Which attacks are lows is pretty obvious, but determining which attacks are overheads is less clear, though fortunately most overheads won’t lead into a combo or a knock down. There are methods to beat blocking outright, but generally the neutral game involves a lot of blocking and repositioning, as both characters try to move into a range to hit their opponent with a move that passes their block, while also avoiding being hit themself. There are a handful of attacks that are truly unblockable, as well as grabs that beat blocking and some other moves that briefly stun a blocking opponent. Fully unblockables are very slow and easily punishable so they aren’t really worth worrying about, but grabs are pretty good when they actually hit. To input a grab, the player needs to know which series of button presses result in the move they want, it isn’t as simple as pressing the grab button. These inputs are often different depending on the character, and the player either needs to memorise all possible inputs or at least have a list of moves open somewhere. The manual lists a handful of special input attacks that each character might have, but it doesn’t include all of them, so I referred to a list I found online. A standard grab input typically uses triangle and square pressed simultaneously which I found easier to press with my index and ring fingers instead of trying to press both with just my thumb. I’m unsure if this is a failure on the game’s part - not using the L or R buttons at all - or the controller’s design but either way I definitely felt the game would play way better on a stick. Inputting the directional components of the special attacks would also be way easier on a stick. Pressing forward, down, and down-forward in sequence is Kazuya’s entire gameplan, and hitting that with a thumb took some time to get used to. The rest of the cast vary in terms of technical requirements that leave a fair amount of space for skill expression, as well as a pathway from simpler to more complex playstyles.

Tekken launched with an initial roster of eight playable characters, but when it was ported to the Playstation players were able to access an additional ten unlockable characters. Those extra characters are all derivatives of the main cast, and are usually unlocked by clearing the arcade mode, though there are two that differ somewhat. Most discussions of fighting game characters often use colloquial language to describe particular character archetypes, though Tekken kind of shirks the normal labels by the nature of the game’s mechanics. There isn’t a Ryu-style “Shoto” character since there isn’t a single projectile in the game. Instead, Kazuya functions more as a 50:50 style character, given that his strongest combo starting tools both require the same input to initiate and only differ when choosing either punch or kick. Opponents have to guess which height is the correct one to block, else they’ll be eating Kazuya’s full damage. Paul, in contrast, hopes to bully his opponent into blocking low with the threat of his incredibly painful two hit combo. Unfortunately, what Paul actually gets from forcing his opponent to block is barely worth worrying about. He can grab, or commit to an extremely risky jump kick to try to get comparable damage to the sweep-punch combo, or he can swing with single attacks. Michelle and Law unfortunately feel very similar to each other, both characters have long one button sequences that deal a hefty chunk on hit, and cause a knockdown. They also both lack a means to stun a blocking opponent, and Law even has trouble hitting most characters after knocking them down. I don’t really understand Nina’s gameplan, but I did finish her arcade mode on the default difficulty relatively quickly. The CPU likes to grab a lot as Nina, but I wouldn’t call her a grappler by any stretch. Even King, who is arguably the closest thing to a grappler in the game, isn’t really a grappler. He has more grab attacks than anyone else, but I found his more standard moves to be just as effective as any other fighter’s. King’s elbow attack also stuns on block so getting in to deal damage is fairly easy, unlike a typical grappler. Yoshimitsu functions similarly to Kazuya in that his main game plan revolves around forcing the opponent to guess between one of two options, except in Yoshi’s case the guessing revolves around whether the second kick is going to come out or not. The fact he has sword swings that are unblockable is entirely irrelevant to anybody picking Yoshimitsu, even the CPU doesn’t try it. They’re just unreasonably slow to start, and Yoshi doesn’t have any moves that’d realistically lead into hitting a sword swing. Jack functions as a keep-away character on account of his massive stature and long arms. The guy just swings normals and most characters have to respect him doing it. Well, most characters that aren’t Jack, which sounds strange but there are the additional characters to mention, a bunch of whom are Jack. P Jack is obviously Jack, Kuma is also Jack, even Ganryu is Jack. Kuma and Ganryu aren’t exact copies, but they use almost all of Jack’s moves. Ganryu’s arms are shorter than Jack’s, but he has a few Sumo-themed moves to set him apart. Kuma, on the other paw, has the longest arms in the game. So long, in fact, that it’s possible to tech-lock a knocked down opponent to death, including hitting them if they don’t tech. It’s super cheap, but I was able to beat the arcade mode extremely fast this way, though doing it as Kuma doesn’t actually reward anything. The only way to unlock Heihachi as a playable character is to beat the arcade mode in under five minutes as one of the original eight characters. On the default difficulty, and using the standard 2 round matches, I couldn’t finish all ten matches in the time limit without taking advantage of Kuma’s tech-trapping, so in order to unlock Heihachi, I had to drop rounds to one per match and learn to actually play as Kazuya. I had been playing as Armour King a lot prior to discovering Kuma since I liked using King’s elbow attack to stun blocking opponents, and then following that up with Kazuya’s powerful uppercut. Both of these moves are present on Armour King so it felt natural. That being said, Armour King most definitely isn’t the best of these unlockable sub-bosses. Lee is Kazuya’s penultimate fight in arcade mode, though he derives most of his attacks from Law. Unlike Law, however, Lee’s kicking string doesn’t have to end. The guy just keeps going. And it can’t be ducked like whenever Law gets swinging. Finally, there was one character that I saw but never managed to unlock. In order to play as the final character, the player needs to perfect the shoot-em-up minigame they can play while the game boots. It's fairly long and, honestly, it isn’t that fun, and any mistake forces a restart. But if you manage it, you can unlock and play as the final character in the game: Devil Kazuya. Who is just Kazuya but purple. What a prize.

Fighting game single player content is always a little thin, and Tekken is predictably rather limited. There’s no VS mode against the CPU, there isn’t a story mode, there isn’t even an easy way to access the shooter game mode without resetting the console. The only option is Arcade mode, which is slightly different depending on the chosen character. Arcade mode involves fighting each of the eight main cast characters consecutively in a random order, with the CPU strength getting slightly higher with each new character. Then, the ninth match is against the chosen character’s specific sub-boss, followed by the tenth match against Heihachi, victory in which earns the player an ending animation, provided they’re playing one of the main cast. Arcade mode as a sub-boss will make their penultimate fight their main cast counterpart. So, Armour King’s ninth fight is against King, Kuma fights Paul, Lee fights Kazuya etc. Heihachi’s Arcade mode is different by randomly ordering the sub-bosses instead of the main cast, before Kazuya transforms into his Devil form for the finale. This is the only way to fight against a CPU sub-boss while playing as a character that isn’t assigned to their main cast counterpart. So if a player wanted to play Ganryu versus Anna, they need to find a friend to play with. Gross. I did find the Arcade mode to be enjoyable, at least, but without a greater goal like a tournament or something, once I made it through a few times as the characters I liked, the game’s content basically ran out of stuff. I couldn’t even do the same Iron Man challenge I did when I played Dawn of War to get more out of my play time. And as funny as some of the ending animations might be, I didn’t laugh every time Kazuya smiled at me.

As a starting point for fighting games, there are plenty of worse options besides Tekken. It lacks a tutorial and it isn’t likely you’ll be able to get many opportunities to play against other people, but the game is simple to understand while also having some hidden depth to explore with the right time commitment. For someone who has put any time into a standard fighting game, there’s nothing really here aside from the historic perspective. All the things in Tekken are things any intermediate player would already be well aware of, even if they’ve only ever played 2D fighters. Aside from some mild juggling techniques, the top end of the first Tekken game isn’t particularly complex. It's impressive, but I think the third game is the landmark of the series for a reason.

At almost 30 years old, Tekken still controls remarkably well, runs immaculately, and laid the foundations for one of the genre’s most beloved franchises. It isn’t as visually revolutionary as it used to be, nor is it the pinnacle of gameplay expression, but for something that was among the first of its kind Tekken is remarkably flawless. In a modern context, Tekken serves as more of a niche tutorial than a competitive platform, but it wasn’t ever that competitive anyway. The character designs are simple, but still mostly great, and the animated endings are still relevant even now. The game is most certainly antiquated and the series will move further away from this basis with each new entry, but if you’ve ever been curious about the origins of an iconic series, Tekken is totally tolerable and definitely has value in retrospect.

Next up, the first multiplayer game I’ve featured on the channel.

The following is a transcript of a video review, which can be viewed here:
https://youtu.be/mXBwKXbX7mE

The open world is a form that video game worlds can take in order to add scale and create the perception that the game contains a broad adventure that the player will be able to get lost in for months if they’re willing. The typical series of beginning a level, and then ending it and moving on to the next map is absent from open world games, instead the player is sent around the world to find objectives in order to progress the narrative or develop their character. This type of world design can be used to great effect in many areas players find valuable within video games: an open world allows the art team to craft environments to feature prominent landmarks that can be referred back to repeatedly if necessary, reducing the required scope of the project and gaining more mileage out of the assets the team has created, the travel time also increases the length of each playthrough, stretching a game that players might be able to blitz though had the game used a traditional level structure, it also allows the developers to cleanly integrate side content by simply placing it somewhere in the world, the freeform level design also grants the player a lot of freedom when it comes to completing which objectives when, including sometimes providing alternative solutions to those tasks, and often looking over vast expanses of playable area can be quite a beautiful visual to impress players whenever they gain a vantage. Of course, the lack of structure can lead the open world to become a gigantic slog. Without quality level design, or at least clear signposts, players can end up spending a lot of time running around without achieving anything, but overpopulating an open environment with objective markers and minor tasks can quickly desensitise the player to the world’s scale. If everywhere has a collectible to grab or an event to engage with, they stop being special and start to become busywork. Recently, the majority of big studio open world games have strayed further into busywork, leaving many looking for a more qualitative approach to world design. Curious Planet saw these desires and decided to make that game. They sought to take the experience back to the beginning, back to when open world game design was in its earliest form, and then rebuild the concept from there. The End of Dyeus is the product from such a venture.

Upon starting the game, the player is given a single objective: find Dyeus. There’s a bitrate destroying display of particles before the player awakens amidst a stone circle in the middle of a forest. There are a handful of chests nearby with some primitive equipment, and a few enemies to try that equipment out on before the player enters the wider world beyond the trees. Here, in the grassy plains, the player will learn of the game’s nature. Throughout the world are a variety of notes and excerpts to find to piece together a sense of the setting, the hooded Shadows are engaging in a relentless war with the more advanced Guardian forces, with their battles centred around a mysterious door under the Guardians’ control. Surely, Dyeus is beyond that door. The player must then find and retrieve three keys in order to open the door, all of which are under the guard of the region’s most formidable beasts. It’d be quite the achievement to defeat these foes with a stick and a handful of arrows, so the player must delve into the rest of the world in order to gear up. While these aspects are indeed fairly similar to the original Legend of Zelda, I can’t help but think the game more closely resembles King’s Field. Vague objectives, no specific barriers preventing exploration, a mysterious military force, hit and run combat, and bosses occupying the normal world. This does beg the question, however: if The End of Dyeus is an open world game, is King’s Field? Does an open world require the fields and forests, or can a series of corridors still be considered an open world? I think this definition can change from person to person.

The first sentence on the Wikipedia page on ‘open world’ says “an open world is a virtual world in which the player can approach objectives freely, as opposed to a world with more linear and structured gameplay.” It also has 2 citations for this sentence and neither of them actually say anything like this, but as a start point I think this definition is as good as any. For a definition, in some ways it's very vague and in others it doesn’t seem quite correct. The implication of “approaching objectives” is that the player can complete the objectives however they like, but it really means ‘approaching’ in the geographic sense. The player is free to walk to the objective from any direction. And “linear and structured gameplay” sounds like an open world is indicative of sandbox gameplay, which doesn’t apply to a large quantity of games with open worlds. Some games with open worlds are basically linear, requiring the player to run to wherever the next objective is in order to continue the game. Just Cause is strictly linear; there is side content but for the most part the open world exists to facilitate the narrative missions without the developers having to build a new environment for each mission. King’s Field has linearity, but for the most part objectives are available to complete whenever the player decides to engage with them, even if it doesn’t seem mathematically possible. There are far too many exceptions to really create a single sentence definition, but as long as the majority of the gameplay occurs within a handful of game scenes and that there aren’t too many in-world barriers, I think we’re good.

The End of Dyeus’ world adheres to these very basic tenants, as well as being unique in its own ways. The game almost entirely occurs within a single scene and there are really only 4 or 5 objectives to complete, with the player being free to attempt the first three whenever they like. That’s far easier to say than it is to achieve but it does incentivise exploring the rest of the world to find tools to overcome the challenges. Overall, the game space appears to be a relatively standard earth-like environment, with forests, rolling hills, meadows, wetlands, and the dry desert areas toward the fringes. People have been present within the region for a very long time, and the structures they built have seriously deteriorated, though many are still inhabited. A city had once existed here, now little more than rubble, but there are other parts of this world that also seem constructed. The map has mountainous partitions between the zone of desert in the corner that functionally match the walls enclosing the similarly dried out region on the other side of the map. The mountain at the centre of the battle between the Shadows and Guardians is almost perfectly circular, and stands defiantly alone upon a large, flat area. In some ways the world isn’t trying to feel natural, it feels designed. The Shadows are using the same bows, spears, and shields the player has, but the Guardians have an armoury of energy weapons and robotic sentries. There was clearly an advanced civilization here at one stage, but they are now long gone. What happened to this place and how are ultimately unimportant, but there are plenty of pieces to assemble the puzzle throughout the playthrough. Amongst those puzzle pieces are also the various equipment pieces the player can collect to help them advance through the more challenging locations of the world. Equipment is almost always stored in chests, which makes sense in some locations, but oftentimes a chest will be sitting idly in the forest instead of its contents being laid out on the ground or something. It's as if someone knew the player was coming and scattered all the tools they’d need around the place in easily found boxes that protect the items from the weather. Which is true. I’m sure that Curious Planet did this for a good reason, and the answer can surely be gleaned from Mayto’s conveniently written video game design manifesto.

Within the About section of curious-planet.com is a cute GameBoy filter photograph of Thomas ‘Mayto’ Ducourant as well as a little personal blurb to read. This page also hosts Mayto’s philosophy. Primarily, this philosophy revolves around player agency and freedom. His games spawn from a concept that is almost entirely open ended, where the mechanics are the basis for the overall design. This idea bleeds into the rest of the game, the presentation, the narrative, the objectives, all informed by the mechanical content. This is somewhat reminiscent of something I said about King’s Field; that the game was strenuously constructed around a single piece of the final product. Things differ massively when taking into account which piece was the bedrock for the project as a whole. In King’s Field’s case, going with the level design first revealed some weaknesses within From Software’s optimisation practises, and the rest of the game, particularly the combat, suffers for it. In The End of Dyeus, Mayto decided to have the player controller polished to a brilliant shine before engaging with much else. The world is specifically designed with the movement speed of the player character at the forefront, meaning the player will never have to spend too much time walking from one location to another with nothing to do in between. When a game’s focus is heavily placed on exploration of its world, it is vital for the player to not be too slow as to be discouraged from actually exploring anything, but not too fast to avoid having them miss items of interest. And while there aren’t many especially mind blowing things to find within The End of Dyeus, the widespread, snack-like discoveries keeps the exploration enjoyable. Mayto also mentions that his designs aren’t necessarily innovative and I must agree, but I think that the focus on player agency is unique among game developers.

With the recent resurrection of the immersive sim the discourse surrounding video games has remembered the phrase ‘emergent gameplay’, and while both ideas do have some things in common, emergent gameplay and player agency are distinctly different concepts. During our conversation, Mayto expressed that his understanding of ‘emergent gameplay’ was that it more resembled a linear design with a sandbox toolset, which I find to be agreeable. ‘Player agency’ is almost the opposite configuration: the player has a comparatively limited set of tools, but the game contains an absence of tasks with urgency or specific direction. Where Deus Ex hands the player JC Denton the cybernetic pocket knife and tells them to escape the facility, Sable points at Simoon and ushers the player out the door. Neither one of these ideas is inherently superior to the other, but I think the examples that I was drawn to reveals my preference. It is far easier to drop a bunch of locations in a game world and hope the player finds travelling between them fun than it is to craft a hyper expressive player controller and then build levels that facilitate that expression. There are a million things a player can do in Deus Ex which I think is a much better fit for an interactive medium. That said, this kind of mechanical complexity is heavily reliant on everything working together well, and it doesn’t take much to break the entire experience.

The mechanical aspects of The End of Dyeus are simple, but that simplicity made the gameplay quite cathartic for me, while also allowing Mayto to construct some in depth challenges that push the player to use the full extent of the character’s capability. I mentioned the movement speed before, and that swiftness is also present within the game’s combat. At the outset, the Shadows are simple to defeat, but they’re more than just punching bags. They can block attacks, and are rarely ever alone, so the player had better get their rhythm down soon or else they’ll be taking a lot of damage. But their low health values make them unlikely to be able to kill the player, so being outnumbered isn’t too big of a hurdle. As the game progresses, the Shadows become better equipped and appear in greater numbers for the player to really test their timing. I like the helmet guys a lot because usually their big heads are easy targets, but in order to spam the armoured guys down the player has to play into their rhythm or start stabbing at their feet. There is also the rock-paper-scissors interaction between various weapon types the player can find and the Shadows can be equipped with. Swords are generally good weapons, but they lack range and can be comfortably evaded by spears. Enemies with spears usually cannot block, so the best way to defeat them is to shoot them with the bow before they can get close enough to attack. And of course, blocking arrows completely shuts them down so swords are generally going to pay off. This system is simple, it’s approachable, it’s accessible, but it’s also interesting and offers the player a lot of decisions to make while they’re battling enemies. Healing and resurrection are also handled in simple, but satisfying ways. The player can find food to eat in the world to recover some health, enemies and breakable environment objects can also reward a small amount of health, and there are plenty of healing Vials to find that can be administered to regain larger quantities of health. Much like King’s Field’s potions, these Vials offer health immediately and are not tied to an animation or an activation timer. Saving is done at fountains. Simply tossing a coin into the water sets the player’s spawn there, creating convenient locations to launch face-mashing expeditions throughout the world.

As engaging as the Shadows tend to be, they aren’t the only enemies in The End of Dyeus. Most of the wildlife in the game will also attack the player, and while a good many of them are designed much like the Shadows or offer similar timing challenges, there are those that buck the system to become more frustrating than I feel they should be. The crocodile frogs are clearly vulnerable to ranged weapons, but learning to fight them with a sword is fantastic. I adore the guys with the bombs and fireball weapons because they always kick off some chaotic scramble and manage to kill themselves or their allies a good percentage of the time. The birds, bats, and enemies from The Void are okay, though there’s a lot of down time when fighting them with melee weapons since they all engage in hit and run tactics. And as fun as the plant enemies in the swamp were at first glance, their proximity to each other often renders the player helpless for a long time. I didn’t dislike fighting the Guardians, but at the stage where I was fighting them often I found that I was either massively under equipped and being solidly killed by them, or I had their energy gun and could take them out with ease. That energy gun drastically alters the way the player engages with enemies and I would have hoped it was a bit weaker overall, to keep the other equipment pieces at least a little relevant. Fortunately, a typical playthrough won’t have access to it for too much of the game as it’s acquired from an especially dangerous location so the first couple of boss encounters won’t be the pushovers they could be. The first boss I encountered was Salamdra in the swamp. This enemy mostly charges around and shoots a flurry of projectiles at the player. It functions like many of the other animal enemies in the game, only more dangerous and with a larger health pool. I especially like its position in the world, since other enemies can get involved in the battle if the player triggers the boss before clearing out some space. Armadillium is a large burrowing insect who doesn’t directly attack the player, she walks around the arena while her offspring do the offence. The player needs to attack Armadillium’s face directly in order to deal damage to her, so the battle becomes entirely about positioning and juggling the presence of all of the other enemies as well. It’s a decent fight, but it won’t blow anyone away. The final beast boss is Aves, a giant bird who spends a lot of the battle flying far out of reach. Other bird enemies in the game fight in the same way Aves does, but Aves has an attack that can actually hit the player through their shield. Combined with her relentless aggression, I found this fight to be far out of reach of my favoured pike and had to look elsewhere for an upgrade. Shooting at the phoenix makes the fight slightly easier, but Aves can still torpedo into the player to deal huge damage through their shield, always being able to kill the player if the move selection dictates.

Now, there is another boss enemy, perhaps two if you’re generous. But that part of the game, that revelation is so brilliant, so earth-shattering, that I don’t think listening to me talk about it will do it the justice it deserves. If the game has seemed interesting enough up to this point or you might consider checking it out eventually, please skip ahead to the timestamp. It isn’t an especially long game and the reveal is far and away the best thing The End of Dyeus does.

So once the player has managed to defeat the three bosses, they’ve travelled to the door the Guardians had been, well, guarding, and they’ve inserted the keys into the locks, they may enter the mountain. Within a group of scientists had been working in a secluded laboratory during an apocalyptic event. As far as they knew, the world beyond the wall had ended. They continued with their work anyway, and they were ultimately successful. They had created Dyeus. Within a sealed chamber lies the lifeform, a mass of tissue that had been birthed to try and stave off humanity’s destruction. And while all of its creators had long perished, Dyeus remained alive. The player is given the option to touch the lifeform. Doing so immediately kills them and transports their consciousness far away. As the universe flies by, the stars blurring into lines against the deep darkness, the player approaches an object. It’s a planet, a rotten sphere, plundered and barbarised by its own inhabitants. Earth. Upon starting the game the player isn’t given any objective. There’s a bitrate destroying display of particles before the player awakens in a cave on the edge of a wasteland. They can scrounge around for some primitive equipment, and hope there aren’t too many enemies they’ll have to use that equipment on as they enter the wider world. The dream is over now, it was never about finding Dyeus or figuring out what had happened to the world, it was just a desperate mind trying to find some inspiration to escape. Now, they need to do it for real. The final throes of humanity are ruthless survivalists, ready to go to any length to get their hands on the resources they need and viciously fighting to defend what they have. They’re ill-equipped and the player can eventually get a hold of their scavenged guns and grenades, which they can use to fight back and to keep the blood monsters at bay. A great tower in the distance surely holds the key to freedom, so the player must travel there. Uroboros is the tower’s guardian and the battle is fantastically challenging. This enemy had been subtly foreshadowed throughout most of the game and it really lives up to the tales. I died to Uroboros a lot. In an open environment, the snake’s moveset is faster and more damaging than the player character can handle and they will quickly be defeated by the gunfire and charging attacks. Uroboros isn’t a pushover with some terrain in the way either, but it at least makes avoiding certain attacks a bit more achievable. I also think the name is great, the snake’s purpose is to assure its own destruction, signalling the end of the world when it does finally happen. Just an excellent detail to include. And with the snake’s destruction the player can enter the tower and destroy the core, punctuating the conclusion of this cycle of existence.

The End of Dyeus stands in defiance of many of the video game industry’s standard practices. There’s no list of features, there aren’t any UI prompts or mini map markers, the player is never explicitly told what to do, nor is there anything in the game that exists to explicitly waste the player’s time. The world is open from the jump and a light mystery is the player’s primary motivation to explore. Whether the player examines every corner, collects every item, or fights every enemy is entirely up to them, and if they do decide to engage with the game the player will experience an adventure unlike anything else on the market. Mayto and Curious Planet definitely have a winning philosophy on their hands if adherence yields results like this, and I think anyone aspiring to make video games could apply the same ideas to their own work and see tremendous improvement. Sometimes, bigger just isn’t better.

An example of how to do it very, very wrong next time.

The following is a transcript of a video review, which can be viewed here:
https://youtu.be/WgS7hmxQv9s

Originality is an unfortunately toxic means of measuring a piece of media. When something deeply unique shows up, it tends to be praised for doing something nobody else has ever done before, and then the creators are financially rewarded for coming up with such a cool new idea. That’s great if it’s the only thing the creators will ever have to make, but in our current economic system, most creators can’t just make one thing and live off of it for the rest of their lives. So a sequel is bound to release, and since that sequel will enter a world in which the original exists, the sequel’s uniqueness is already lost. What was once a single, novel idea is now duplicated, weakening the draw of both pieces simultaneously, but also still hoping to recapture the audience that enjoyed the original piece for its innovation. Zeno Clash 2 is everything the first Zeno Clash was and more. The game is longer, there are more interesting places to explore, there are new characters to interact with, and there are a bunch of new enemies to battle while utilising the game’s new combat system. As someone who greatly enjoyed that first game, I can confidently say that the sequel renders it redundant in every way, but it also poisons it. There’s now another game that lets the player fist-fight with wildmen in the woods. Another game where the intricacies of an alien society aren’t too deeply revealed, but that society’s rules are easily intuitive, even to an outside observer. These aspects of the first game are still good in the second, and the sequel greatly benefits from their inclusion, but I can’t shake the feeling that this return to Zenozoik is all about saying things that were better left unsaid.

I played the first Zeno Clash game a while ago and then made the video the weekend following, but I hadn’t played it since then so I went back and played the whole game again in order to cement my thoughts. The campaign is only 3 hours long which isn’t a big ask, unlike other things I’ve done for recent videos. I found the game to be just as compelling as it was when I first played it, and I definitely encourage anyone to play it if they haven’t, and especially so if they ever intend to play the second game. Everything about the first game is iterated on or directly continued in the second, so in order to discuss Zeno Clash 2 at all I’m going to have to talk about the first game. Zeno Clash is a first-person beat-em-up style game, sort of like Double Dragon and Streets of Rage. The player moves from level to level, getting into fist-fights with all manner of wacky creatures and quirky humanoid opponents. Single punches are thrown with the left mouse button, repeated clicks cause Ghat to swing out a combination of punches, and holding down left mouse engages a charging mechanic that results in slower, but more forceful attacks. Pressing space allows the player to block incoming attacks, and pressing A or D while blocking will cause Ghat to dodge to the side for a counter opportunity. There are a few projectile weapons like guns, crossbows, and a grenade too, which keeps the whole experience varied. As for the narrative, the game opens with a mystery. Ghat has just killed his own Father-Mother and nobody seems to know why. He refuses to tell Deadra, his partner, and the two resolve to run as far away from Haldestom as possible in order to escape from any retaliation Ghat might expect from his siblings. Their adventure leads the pair north, beyond the Rath-Bird fields, the Corwid Woods, and even beyond the desert from which nobody has ever returned. What lies in the north is a massive stone fortress, guarded by animated statues, and surrounded by a poisonous gas. Ghat manages to break into the fortress and awaken the Golem, a being who seems to know everything while also having incredible physical power. Golem convinces Ghat to reveal the reason he attacked Father-Mother to Deadra, and the trio make their way back to Haldestom to try and have Ghat atone for his crime. I managed to avoid spilling the big secret event of the story in Zeno Clash 1 in my video about that game, but I cannot avoid it now. In order to continue I have to reveal the secret. Seriously, I’m going to say the secret right now. The reason Ghat had to attack Father-Mother was that Father-Mother is not the biological parent of any of their children. Ghat and all of his siblings had been kidnapped by Father-Mother in order to form their family. Ghat never intended to reveal this secret, and even after returning to Haldestorm to accept whatever punishment his family decided he deserved, he still refused to reveal it. It turns out that Father-Mother wasn’t killed by the bomb, much to everyone’s relief, but Father-Mother still chooses to beat Ghat for his actions, at which point Golem reveals the truth. This is where the story of the first game ends, with Golem demanding the people of Haldestom attempt to adhere to some laws and create their own system of dispensing justice. I quite like this twist. It demonstrates that Ghat values his family more than anything else, and he would travel to the literal end of the world to protect it, but it also feeds into the unpredictable nature of the setting. Maybe Father-Mother really was their parent, everybody believes they are, and even the player has no way of knowing for sure. Maybe there really is a phenomenon where people’s children can transform into animals, this dude has feathers and a beak, and that guy has a pig nose and ears. The game isn’t perfect, the camera can be a bit strange at times, there are some technical problems that show up at the end, and I’m not a huge fan of the animated statue enemies, but the narrative is utterly bizarre and the combat is generally executed really well. I love the Corwids, and it’s a shame they weren’t explored further in the second game. Instead, we’re hanging out with the Tiamte which is okay.

Zeno Clash 2 picks up a short while after the ending of the first game. Ghat has spent the last few days avoiding his family as much as possible but the other people in Haldestom aren’t so gracious as to let him wallow in peace. While at his favourite bar, Ghat is harassed by a rival intending to get a rise out of him. Ghat obliges and the player gets hands on with the new combat system. Now, each of Ghat’s arms are controlled independently, left mouse for his left arm, and right mouse for right. Space still blocks, and holding the mouse buttons down still engages a more powerful attack, but this new arrangement allows for more active and varied punching combos. Ghat meets with his sister Rimat upon exiting the bar, and the pair create a plan to try and break Father-Mother out of jail, which is a concept that the pair are clearly disgusted by. In the time between the games, Father-Mother’s children had been asking Golem who and where their real parents were, and most left to go and be with them. Deadra also chose to leave, hoping to establish a new settlement away from Golem’s watch. This left Ghat and Rimat alone. After exiting the bar, the player can complete a side quest for an NPC nearby. In return for completing their task, the NPC awards Ghat a chain to be used as a weapon, which is the first of three new dedicated tools the player will have access to throughout the game. While there were a few group fights in Zeno Clash, as well as the challenge tower that consisted of little else, Zeno Clash 2 has a much heavier focus on groups. Enemies show up in greater numbers than ever, so the game provides the player with some tools for dealing with the increased danger. The chain has a wide arc of effect, and a much longer range than Ghat’s arms, enabling the player to hit multiple targets with a single swing as well as enemies that would typically be out of reach. In addition, before most fights the player is given an option to summon a follower to aid them. There can be up to 2 additional members in the party, although Rimat will always occupy one space. In order to add other members to the crew, Ghat’s Leadership stat needs to match or exceed the ally’s requirement. Oh yeah, there’s a levelling system now, allowing the player to increase their Health, Stamina, and Strength in addition to their Leadership. The player gains skill points from finding totems hidden throughout the world, which is now no longer linear. There are more than 10 zones to travel through, with enemies and upgrades and secrets scattered all throughout. Some zones contain obstacles that can only be passed with upgrades from later areas, encouraging the player to go back through previous locations to see what they might have missed. There are coloured moths and golden cubes hidden alongside the totems throughout the world, and while the mystery of the cubes is fairly interesting, the rewards for collecting the moths is much more desirable. This might make the game seem fairly long, and while it is more substantial than the first game, Zeno Clash 2 took just over 8 hours for me to finish. I am missing 3 Steam achievements, though two of those are for very rare combat occurrences, and the third is for maxing out Ghat’s stats which seems kind of pointless. It isn’t really necessary to care too much about these stats since the game’s controls allow the player to express much more skill than they were previously able to.

The first game’s combat system wasn’t so simple that the player could just mash left click, but Ace Team were very cautious with the challenges they included in the game. Spamming the dodge attack was often all the player had to do to succeed in most encounters, so it was refreshing to see all the changes the team made to combat to encourage a more creative style and incentivise using all of the moves available to the player. Assigning punches to each mouse button makes a lot of sense, and Ace Team also made the excellent decision to allow each punch to be charged separately for big damage, or together to form this double-arm slam that does even more. There are specific combo inputs to find too, often ending in this kick flourish that ragdolls enemies and makes them vulnerable to more damage while on the ground. With the camera fixed up too, the fighting system is all around greatly improved over the first game. The annoying stuff crops up when traversing the world. The only movement ability Ghat has is sprinting, which uses stamina that the player has to wait for while it recharges. There’s no jumping, so if there’s a knee-high ledge the player needs to climb up, they have to run all the way around to where it slopes down to the level Ghat’s on and then run all the way back. Adding a jump isn’t as simple as just enabling the ability, though, so I can understand why it isn’t here.

The things that are here are generally great, but that doesn’t mean I have nothing related to the game’s balance to complain about. I started out on Normal difficulty but switched to Hard after a few fights to see what the difference was. In the end, I don’t really think there was any difference. Enemies might be more hesitant to drop their block, or appear in larger numbers, or the loading screen tip about health and damage might be true, but I never noticed anything different. It’s very easy to plough through most areas without much thought, which is a big shame. These enemies have a lot of complex behaviours and elaborate attack animations that the player might miss because once they get a jab to connect with the enemy’s face the fight could end then and there. Not only are the enemies not challenging to fight one on one, but when the groups do show up the player is given the option to invite one or both of their party members to help out, who will then draw enemy aggro and generally make the fights even easier. This even works on the bosses. As the player progresses through the narrative, they’ll be given additional weapons to deal with the groups of enemies, starting with the chain, but then going on to include this really cool celestial bombardment gun-thing, and this entity-linking knuckle armour piece. The chain is handy, though Ghat can only swing it 4 times before he needs a break. There were guns and crossbows in the first game, and while they do occasionally make their appearances in the sequel, they actually have limited ammunition this time around. Because of this, it’s likely the chain will be the player’s best option for getting rid of flying enemies. They aren’t as gracious as they are in The End of Dyeus, flying down in order for the player to get a hit in, they just float up there and spit. The player gains access to the celestial bombardment weapon next, which I am a huge fan of, despite its niche application. In order to fire the weapon, the player must aim the sights at either the sun or the moon, at which point a small line of explosions will trail between the player and their target. It isn’t a particularly useful attack, but just the concept alone sold me on its inclusion. The final weapon the player gains access to is the entity-linker, when 2 enemies are linked, damage dealt to one enemy is also dealt to the other. It’s a neat idea that’s much more applicable than the other weapon, and it has its puzzle applications too. It also makes group fights easier. The reason I’m so hung up on the lack of difficulty is just how dissonant the whole thing is. There’s a huge gulf between the things characters say, and the tasks the player is given, the vast range of upgrades and weapons the player has access to, and how generally non-hostile this colourful world appears.

Zenozoik wasn’t a drab place in the first game, and colours were on Ace Team’s list of things to include more of in the sequel. Some areas in this game would horrify a conservative, and that’s before mentioning the prominent nonbinary character included in a video game from 2013. Shoutout to the Chilean people, you’ve really figured out this whole societal progress thing. Haldestom is now a bustling city. There are oddly shaped buildings all over the place, but they seem to coexist without any issue. Residents of Haldestom mill around in the street while mysterious 2D rendered people watch from a distance. There are also a few shops around, usually manned by an interesting NPC with a task for the player. It’s all very vividly coloured and busy, but it isn’t overwhelming. Out in the wilds, there’s the rocky coastline area with the skeletal remains of the big dead fish from the last game. The breezy Rath-Bird fields are populated by a few bubble-blowing trees, these other large bird creatures, and this mysterious broken egg thing off in the distance. Someone dumped oil in this river, though. Can’t stop frackers, even in an anarchist utopia. Anyway, the desert, as fitting as it would be to leave a desert area flat and brown, has these enormous creatures living in it, the ground is covered in patches of dandelions, and there’s this big stone snail man thing whose head has been opened as he lies above this pit filled with spikes. Who else is doing anything remotely like this? It isn’t totally flawless, though. There’s two options for field of view total, and looking down while using the wider FOV allows the player to see Ghat’s motionless leg sliding along the ground. I don’t much care for the Two-Headed Man’s model either, and I think the lands to the east could’ve done something more with its tremendous scenery. Look at this place. All the player does here is sprint across a bridge. Same with the tunnel under the fog in the north. It’s just a straight path. That being said, every boundary I reached just felt unfair. I wanted to see more, to keep going. What’s farther east than this tower? What’s this pyramid platform thing? Where did it come from? This is really cool, I want to know more. There is a moment where the player gets a glimpse of what’s beyond the bounds of the game, but we’re a little ways away from discussing that.

Ghat and Rimat’s jailbreak attempt goes very well, despite costing Father-Mother a few years of knee use. Golem’s enforcers aren’t too willing to allow Father-Mother their freedom, and apparently they pursue in high enough numbers for Ghat and Rimat to be unable to fight them off. Father-Mother is presumably recaptured, while Ghat and Rimat travel the surrounding regions to try and enlist their former siblings to return to Haldestom and help to keep Father-Mother out of jail permanently. This mission acts as a means to get the player to visit all of the various locations around Zenozoik, as well as increase their pool of potential party members. The first region I visited was the Garbage Canyon, since Rimat knew that Pott was there. Father-Mother manages to make their way to Pott’s cave too, and the 4 try to come up with a plan to end the enforcers’ hunt. In the past, Father-Mother claimed they had sailed from the west coast of Zenozoik in search of another like them. They didn’t find what they were looking for, but did find an island with a facility that kind of matched the Golem’s fortress from the north. Perhaps there was some weapon there Ghat could use to kill Golem and return Zenozoik to its lawless ways. While leaving the Canyon, Ghat and Rimat are caught in a mysterious trap and greeted by a strange voice. The celestial bombardment gun is tossed to Ghat by whoever has trapped them, which can be used to release the trap. The player then travels to the island Father-Mother had mentioned, and discovers that the Golem Ghat met in the north was not the only Golem in Zenozoik. Attempts to communicate with this western Golem fail, as neither Ghat or Rimat can speak to seagulls, and a fight breaks out. Defeating this Golem rewards Ghat with the Golem Hand, and confirms that the northern Golem can be killed. There’s a quick distraction in which Ghat’s former partner, Deadra, as well as one of his siblings had been kidnapped by the Tiamte, which is fairly inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Once that’s taken care of, the player heads north to look for more weapons or other information that could help defeat the Golem. This fortress was built at the northernmost end of the world. There’s nothing but poisonous fog to the north. But, after some investigation of the fortress, the player finds a tunnel.

Now, this is where Ace Team irreversibly smashed my perception of this world. Zenozoik is this wild, anarchic place where humans live in concert with all these other beings. It’s violent, yes, but even people without the will or physical ability to fight are welcome members of society, and clearly someone is taking care of them. In all the chaos of this world, a city has been built and a culture has emerged. It’s fantastical and bizarre, but it feels like its own reality. At the far side of the tunnel beneath the northern end of the world is a gnarled, rocky mass and the machine that pumps the toxic gas into the valley behind the fortress. Continuing north, the player can find some dilapidated, white objects. A piano. A clock. A bookshelf. Interacting with these transports Ghat into an empty, white room, each object occupying a different space as they’re added to the room. Then, the player comes across an archway that leads to a short passage through a cliff face. Beyond the cliff is a large, circular platform suspended by concrete pillars above an inlet of ocean. Across the inlet is a cityscape. An unusual cityscape, but a city with electric lights, skyscrapers, cranes, roads, and stars quickly travel back and forth over the city, which could either be helicopters or some sort of sci-fi flying cars, I can’t really say for sure. But that’s it. The world doesn’t end at Golem’s fortress in the north. Zenozoik does. Golem shows up and tells Ghat and Rimat that they are not allowed to go to the city. The world has decided that Zenozoik is uncivilised and is better left alone. “You Zenos have no notion of history, of how past events have an effect on the present.” I hate this, I really do. Instead of the world being a swirling cloud of absurdity, brutality, and conviction, it’s just a prison where the weirdos are kept. Ghat travelled to the literal end of the world to escape his family’s vengeance in the first game, but he also ran to protect Father-Mother’s secret. At the end of the world, when he had nowhere else to run, he found a conscience, a sense of responsibility that resulted in Ghat returning to his family to try and make amends. I never thought Zeno Clash was totally literal, it’s quite clearly laden in layers of metaphor coated in this eccentric shell that demands more attention. But then the sequel undoes all of that in favour of this goofy Truman Show reveal. Ghat beats Golem in a fight, but since Golem is linked to everyone in Zenozoik, letting Golem die from his wounds would cause the deaths of Ghat and everyone he’s ever known. So Ghat and Rimat go to the east to try and get help from the Eastern Golem. The journey east is cool, I guess. This quest to rescue Golem ends at a place called The Pink Tower, which is visually incredible. Atop the tower sits the East Golem, or what’s left of them anyway. The decision to isolate Zenozoik was made so long ago that not only did this Golem have time to literally resculpt the world around it for fun, he also had a hand in creating a bunch of two-headed Chimeras, then he got bored of that so he sat in his chair for a while and literally disintegrated. The Southern Golem arrives on possibly the coolest flying vehicle I’ve ever seen. This Golem is only here to remind the audience that he exists. He’s the one who gave the player the celestial gun thing from before, but Ghat and Rimat didn’t meet him before now. Since he has a flying machine, the Southern Golem offers to take the pieces of the East Golem to the North Golem in order to prevent everyone from dying. Ghat agrees, and unsure what to do next, the pair return to Haldestom to see what Father-Mother is up to. Turns out, Father-Mother is gone, captured and ensnared in a rock archway along the southern road. The South Golem is here, after delivering the organs to the North Golem, and so are all of the parents of the children Father-Mother had stolen from. The Golem explains that this lynching will end the story of Father-Mother’s crimes. It also acts as the Southern Golem’s opportunity to explain their motivation, which is to see what Ghat and Rimat will do. “I wanna watch you guys do interesting things. Maybe I should give you this gun, just to see what you do. How about I kill your parent? What’ll you do then?” This sucks. This is really really bad. Such a stupid reason to do anything. After rescuing Father-Mother, the Southern Golem asks Ghat and Rimat to meet him atop the highest point in Haldestom for a conversation. North Golem is there, South Golem says his motivation again, and then everyone attacks each other for the final battle in the game. I like the mechanics of this fight a lot, and the sun setting in the background is a great touch. But, once the Southern Golem’s health is reduced to zero, the North Golem hoists him by the throat, says some stuff about the makers sending replacement Golems and deliberately gets both of them crushed by some nearby clockwork.

I’ve been finding it really hard to come to terms with how Ace Team went from the tremendous levels of restraint and meticulous consideration that went into everything in the first game, but a couple of years later they resort to the least interesting twist a story like this could’ve ever had, and then had the narrative circle back to some dude who was barely developed and whose motivation is the dumbest cliche a teenager embarrassingly left in their Sonic the Hedgehog fan-fiction. Father-Mother wanted a family, so they made one. They had to do some unacceptable things in order to get what they wanted and that’s where the narrative’s conflict comes from. Golem shows up and starts trying to enforce a bunch of rules on a lawless population so they might one day join greater society outside of Zenozoik. As little as I care for the “Zenozoik is a prison for weirdos” plot, Golem’s plans to bring the law to this society is at least a good place to draw conflict. It raises engaging questions. Is it fair for Golem to be imposing rules on a functional society because they don’t conform to whatever’s going on in some other place? Is it right to punish people for crimes they’ve already received some form of punishment for? Why does Golem get to decide that Father-Mother should be imprisoned, and can that imprisonment ever end? What even are crimes? If I were to make some changes, I’d suggest removing any mention of a world outside of Zenozoik and the western island. Golem is this omnipotent robot god already, make it so he needs the world to be in perfect order because that’s the only way he can make sense of it. Ghat still dislikes this, Father-Mother still ends up in jail, but now the responsibility of altering the world is in the hands of someone who actually lives in it and not some amorphous entity that decided what laws were all on its own. Change the South Golem to be the mirror of the North Golem. Instead of his motivation being “I did something extreme just to see what you’ll do” it could be that the world being in chaos is the only way he can understand it. Then the narrative revolves around Ghat’s preferred Zenozoik; should he work with the North Golem to prevent what little logic exists within the world from being destroyed? Or should he work with the South Golem so as not to lose the world he loves? I know it’s kind of Petersonian to talk about law and chaos like this, but it’s at least something.

My thoughts on the narrative are unfortunately very negative, and it’s a shame my video format makes talking about the narrative last clearly the best choice, because I quite like Zeno Clash 2 and I think anyone who enjoys action games should really play it at least once. While it being a sequel does make it less unique, there’s still a lot of things on display that no other game would ever consider trying. First-person melee combat is usually either extremely simple and bland, or barely functional and frustrating, but this indie studio managed to perfect the style back in 2013. The game is similarly progressive in its ideas, and it barely draws attention to those parts. There are hundreds of details all over the place, hidden faces in a net, the huge automatons patrolling in the distance, the muffled yells of the Marauders behind their hoods, or the support arches holding up the tunnel beneath the fog being in the shape of human arms. There was clearly a lot of love and attention poured into Zeno Clash 2’s mechanical systems, presentation, and world and character design. A lot of care to finally realise the world Ace Team had been wanting to build ever since their inception making mods of other games. This sequel was on the precipice of greatness, but it was robbed of that last piece that tied the whole thing together, and the fans were robbed of a sure masterpiece.

Let’s hope James Hetfield doesn’t get wind of this next game.

The following is a transcript of a video review, which can be found here:
https://youtu.be/wxowZ6Sb28E

I like dark stories, and I think the success of From Software this past decade or so indicates that I’m not alone. Everyone loves an underdog, and there’s no greater challenge than overcoming the impossible. When the world crumbles to dust, that little seedling pushing its way through the rubble at least gives up hope that the next iteration of life won’t make the same mistakes that we did. The writers of these stories do have to practise a bit of restraint in order to create an effectively tragic setting, otherwise their world is just hopeless and even a huge victory seems utterly worthless. Where that line can be drawn is hard to say, and I think different people are going to have different tolerances for misery. I also think Zelart’s There Is No Light has crossed the line. Somewhere between Lovecraft and Glukhovsky, There Is No Light is set below the ruins of a once populous city, now uninhabitable due to some nebulous disaster. The people have been living in the subway tunnels for generations, guided by some self-appointed religious figures who interpret and accommodate an other-worldly being known as “The Great Hand”. The religious fanaticism isn’t confined to the followers of the Hand, and its repeated presence across the whole game definitely added to the notion that humanity is deep into an unrecoverable entropy. It makes me wonder why the player is fighting at all, and I think, unfortunately, that Zelart probably doesn't really know either.

The game opens with a short scene in which the unnamed player character is enjoying a few seconds with his pregnant wife in their home. The sound of a fight can be heard just outside the door, and upon going to investigate, the player character is suckerpunched by a man with strange shoulderpads. His wife is then abducted and carried outside into the carnage. The surrounding tent community is ablaze, the residents murdered by the armoured invaders, and the player character left alone to track down his wife. His dying mother tells the player that his wife has been taken to the Central Station and that they will give his wife and baby to the Hand. As the player makes their way toward the Central Station, they come across more of this mysterious army, as well as a much larger humanoid with a lot more health. Once they’ve defeated this enemy, they hallucinate a strange dark room in which another large man in a blue coat beats the enemy against a wall. The man in blue laughs, and the player is placed back where they were. Further along the path, the player is shown the dilapidated train network that used to run through the tunnels, some other civilian populations living their lives in the ruins, and more armoured people milling around. Upon entering the Central Station, the player sees the throng of people gathered awaiting the tribute ceremony. The gate to somewhere called the Sanctuary opens, and the player is allowed to enter. Inside, a priestly dressed man offers a baby to a hole in the wall, and a tentacle-like hand wriggles free to claim the child. The player character attempts to interfere, at which point he is beaten by the guards and tossed into the corpse pile tunnel. The man in blue appears from the shadows, revives the player, and offers them a sword, a pact signed in blood. A year passes. It’s time for the tribute ceremony again, and Samedi wants this to be the year the Great Hand finally meets their demise. The player returns to the Sanctuary within the Central Station, sneaks behind the curtain, and kills the monstrous deity. In its death throes, the Great Hand sucks 4 coloured lights out of the player character and uses them to seal a nearby door. From here on, the player’s role is to explore the quadrants of the underground, defeat a powerful enemy in each, and reclaim the pieces of their soul. It’s an effective opening that does a lot with very little text. The player is shown their final objective, given a method to achieve it, and introduced to their primary ally moving forward. The fact an entire year passes so suddenly is a bit surprising, but I suppose there needed to be some context given to Samedi’s casual tone throughout the game, as well as the rapidly improved skill set the player character gains as they progress throughout the world. It does lessen the drama of the kidnapping, though. Knowing that a full year has passed without the player character doing anything to fight back, rescue or avenge their wife, or reclaim their soul or whatever seems a bit strange. Perhaps the Great Hand really is that powerful.

The coloured blobs that flew out of the player character were scattered across the underworld, forming parasitic relationships with the most powerful beings they could find and kind of just sitting and waiting to be killed. These enemies wait at the end of long pathways leading from the Central Station, although they branch off of the station in a peculiar way. There’s a northern and southern path, a western path that immediately turns east, and the eastern path that’s more like a downward path. I followed the northern path first, and learned that each of these branches is shockingly formulaic. There’s a bit of a narrative throughline specific to each pathway that doesn’t interact with the others at all, and often these narratives circle back to the same ideas and themes. That being said, while the game is set within subway tunnels beneath a city, the variety among the environments is quite impressive. The Depot in the north is little mor e than a collection of subway tunnels, maintenance access walkways, and a bunch of spiderwebs holding it all together. But as the player continues further along the paths the tunnels disappear and things get more surreal. The New Dawn area is almost an ancient ruin with a writhing red lifeform smeared all over the place. That gives way to a stone temple, and then a series of decadent golden hallways that’d be at home on some kind of bougie science fiction cruiseliner. The abstract environments continue throughout most of the rest of the game too, which is visually great, but makes piecing it all together basically impossible. Also, for a game with such an apocalyptic setting, there are so many people all over the place. There are loads of pilgrims trying to get a grab of their Messiah, there are always a large number of people hanging out at the Central Station, even Nimbus has a big population, enough to mourn for family killed in a war. And I can’t imagine a desperate, starving civilisation somehow churning out this quantity of sculptures and monuments, and then just leaving them around. It makes me wonder how dire the situation really is.

The sculptures are beautiful too. This game is full of wonderful visuals scattered all throughout. Detailed and fascinating monstrous corpses float in the void, little more than the most grotesque plants continue to live in the dark underground, and stunningly opulent architecture spreads like a fungus throughout the entire game. Some of these places aren’t literal, at least I hope not, and eventually repeated exposure to all of the bizarre environments quashed my initial pedantry. It doesn’t matter how these things got here, they’re cool. I think the sound design is very good too. The footstep sounds change depending on the floor material. There’s low humming wherever large machines are spinning away doing whatever. It’s very immersive and done really well. The music is also great, it’s generally very moody and slow, but whenever a fight kicks off someone wheels out the distorted guitar and goes wild for a bit. I do have some gripes, mainly that there are too many songs that feature mostly a single, lonely piano. While that is good, it gives off too much of a Hollow Knight feel. A couple of songs are a little uncanny in that way and I could swear I heard Resting Grounds in there at one stage. Hollow Knight doesn’t own melancholic piano but it was definitely suspicious. The combat sounds are pretty good too. The fights can become quite chaotic, but the excellent sound design makes even the most hectic battlefield readable at the very least. The enemy sprites are also mostly good, though it’s probably the weakest aspect of the presentation overall. There are a lot of different enemies in this game, and they’re all visually very impressive, but too often things won’t layer over each other particularly well. There Is No Light doesn’t often swarm the player with enemies, but there are instances where the screen can become very noisy and the player character gets buried beneath a pile of attack particles and enemies bunching up. Some enemies also look quite similar to each other, making determining which should be the first the player targets difficult.

The combat takes up the largest portion of total play time, and while it is okay, it has a lot of problems. The player starts the game with one sword which has a two-hit combo and an instant activation special attack. Eventually, they’ll gain access to additional weapons, which can all be upgraded a fair bit too. There’s quite a lot going on within most fights so I’ll just run through it so we’re all up to speed. Whenever an enemy attacks a small halo appears above them, colour-coded to indicate the property of the attack. If the halo is red, the following attack can be nullified by dealing damage to the enemy. If the halo is yellow the attack can only be interrupted by a special attack, and if the halo is white the attack cannot be stopped at all. Most attacks in the game are yellow, red attacks are so rare that it’s almost a non-mechanic. In order to use a special move, the player’s Rage bar must have adequate charge. Rage is built by connecting normal attacks with an enemy but it dissipates over time. In the early game, enemies die so fast that it’s unlikely to ever have enough Rage to use special attacks which can get the player thinking that the entire halo system is totally useless, that they might as well just dodge everything instead. In the later stages the ability to cancel enemy attacks is handy, but it does take a few seconds of slashing at an enemy in order to gain Rage in the first place. There’s also another layer to special attacks that doesn’t really matter as the impact is so small, but I’ll mention it anyway. For each special attack landed, this counter in the upper left corner increases. Once it maxes out, the next special attack will cause a healing orb to spawn that heals one health if the player manages to hit it with their sword. This basically never matters, but it’s there. Most attacks deal 2 damage per hit so healing 1 health once every two or three battles is negligible. There’s also another colour-coded system involved in the game’s combat. Hopefully this isn’t getting too confusing. Each pip on an enemy’s health bar can either be red or white. Red health is standard video game health, while white health regenerates. To prevent white health from returning, all of the white health in a line must be removed within the same combo. The game uses this to gate off certain quest stages and locations behind damage challenges that require optimised attacking strategies. I think this is a good way to encourage the player to use all of the tools they have, but the number of enemies that just have 2 or 3 pips of white health is really high, so it’s rare to ever see this mechanic actually mean anything. It’s easy enough to just mash through. For the most part, the player needs to figure out an enemy’s attack rhythm and get hits whenever they can. In time, I learned to attack quickly before an enemy’s attack came out, dodge into a position where I could attack again, and then move away from the enemy to see what its next action would be. This seems like an effective strategy, but there’s an unfortunate input buffer that often causes some of those attack and dodge inputs to combine into dodge attacks that lands the player in danger. In most cases, slamming face first into an enemy is pretty bad, they mostly deal a minimum of 2 damage per attack, and healing resources are surprisingly limited.

Aside from the healing orb the player earns via hitting special attacks, there are other ways to regain health. The game has a similar checkpoint system to the Souls bonfires, although instead it's a big worm that the player heals and levels up at. The player can teleport between any of these that they’ve already come across, although they aren’t the only places the player respawns upon death. They also don’t refill any healing resource, just the player’s health. In order to gain healing charges, the player needs to find them in the world. They typically grow from small plants which the player can harvest once and then never again. The only way to gain a replenishing source of healing charges is to purchase a shrine that appears whenever the player dies in an area enough times. This costs a tiny bit of Karma, which is easy to gain and only ever used for unlocking an ending and the occasional shortcut door. The shrine also only spawns one healing charge per death, so while it is possible to carry the maximum of three charges, the player has to teleport around to all of the other shrines they’ve unlocked to get more. Most of the bosses seem to be balanced around the player bringing zero healing charges to the battle, which definitely makes sense since they fully heal the player and the player can quickly skip any animation associated with activating them. I don’t think I used many healing charges while exploring the world, but the bosses certainly ate them up. As far as balance for the bosses, I feel like the vast majority of them are good challenges, even if I might not care for whatever mechanic has been introduced for the player to try and overcome. The fights can be a little grindy at times, but I don’t mind getting punished for making mistakes. In games like this, it usually takes me a handful of attempts to really understand what the fight is asking me to do, and then I form a plan of attack and overcome the challenge. There Is No Light has that level of challenge and puzzle-solving, but whenever the player dies a certain number of times to a boss this giant text box appears at the top of the screen to tell the player there’s an easy mode. I don’t want to play the easy mode, the difficulty selection strictly said that this was the intended level of challenge. If this could’ve been disabled somewhere then this wouldn’t be an issue, but it cannot be turned off. One of the last things anyone wants to see as they’re struggling with a difficult encounter is someone telling them to turn the difficulty down. Get that away from me, please. The majority of traversal through levels isn’t even challenging, the game is fairly easy until the bosses show up, at which point there might be a bit of resistance, and then suddenly the game wants to patronise you.

Of the three paths open to the player at the start, I went north first, to the old train depot. The spiders have taken over the tunnels here, capturing would-be citizens to take back to their village and rip off their faces so they may live in peace. It’s a bit of a strangely violent facet to an apparently peaceful community. This inconsistent characterisation of the spiders also extends to them constantly attacking the player as they make their way through the tunnels. If they’re friendly, why are they attacking? Beyond the spiders’ lair, is the New Dawn area with its tribe of blood-crazed humans and their leader Corelia, and then the Great Archive further along the path. The people who were living in the Archive soon after the apocalypse were experimenting with demonic summoning, and accidentally summoned a number of beasts they weren’t able to control. Some knew that the demons would eventually break away and likely kill everyone in the Archive, but these detractors were ostracised and even killed by the more fanatical people around them. It’s a relatively strong route that stands out as the only one without the religious zealotry theme, but it is much more disjointed than the other routes.

I went south next, through the village of Nimbus, toward the old warzone in the tunnels beyond. The people don’t have many options for food underground, but a substance known as Wax had been discovered and it had just enough nutritional value to serve as a food source. The Wax is flavourless and viscous, and nobody really knew where it came from. Some started to believe that the Wax had some kind of depressing qualities, that they would eventually become mindless drones doing exactly as ordered by the Church of the Great Hand who seemed to have an unlimited supply of the Wax. After some time, a group splintered from the Church and travelled into the south tunnels in order to establish a new, Wax-less colony, with their own army called the Lunar Order. The Church was not pleased to see its followers abandon their faith and decided to wage war against the Lunar Order. The player travels through the old fortifications on their way to a facility referred to as The Sarcophagus. It’s essentially a giant, impenetrable prison that the Lunar Order tried to seal themselves inside, and while they were mostly successful, the desperation that led their leader to make this choice drove him mad. His insanity is physically manifested just outside the walls of the Sarcophagus, and the player gets to see the steps he took in order to get to this stage. It’s a cool series of levels, though the interior of the Sarcophagus is a little underwhelming by comparison. It’s mostly a return to the dilapidated environments the rest of the game is composed of, which isn’t bad, it just looks a little plain next to the madness just outside.

The third path I followed was the west road. Along this road are a number of camps from which a group of pilgrims are making their way toward their Messiah and his house of safety. The pilgrims are having a bit of an internal crisis, however. Someone seems to be messing with their signs and causing some people to get lost in the tunnels. One of whom is a woman and her baby, who she hopes the Messiah has some method of helping. There are a few events along the path to the Messiah where the player helps to protect this mother and her child from a bunch of enemies that show up to attack her. I don’t know what happens if she’s killed here, I won this event every time it showed up. One of the biggest challenges the pilgrims must face while travelling is the awfully inconvenient village full of cannibals that has been set up along the road. The cannibals clearly spent a long time decorating their village; there are potted plants, painted murals, wall hangings, and colourful streamers all throughout, as well as the cages filled with people that the player can’t release at all. This might be kind of racist. Beyond the village is the final push before reaching the outskirts of the Messiah’s palace. There’s a cave on the path in which the player must fight a copy of themself to demonstrate their willingness to overcome their faults or whatever, and then the player gets to see the hell that awaits most of the people trying to make their way to this place. For a reason that is never explained, the Messiah’s army captures and tortures a large number of the pilgrims. They’ve constructed a massive elevator that descends down into the torturous pit to move large groups of unwitting people all at once. I really don’t know why they’d do this. Eventually, the player comes across the main structure, fights a really unusual boss, and then gains access to the Messiah’s home. Just inside the main door, a gigantic machine lowers and emits an extremely powerful light, blinding everyone. The player’s vision is saved by Samedi, but all of the other people who had come to worship the Messiah are blinded. These people lay strewn about within the halls of the Messiah’s palace, still devout and desperate to find their idol, but now with their eyes burning in their heads. No prizes for guessing who the main boss of this area is. The Messiah does seem to have access to the surface, and it is bleak up there. Again, I don’t know what the Messiah gains from treating his worshippers this way. What good is a huge cohort of blind people in this terribly violent world? The fallout of killing the Messiah is never shown either, which I guess is fair.

Finally, the east path which only opens after the first three have been cleared, leads to another settlement filled with corpses. The city was once the most prosperous settlement in the underground, but things suddenly collapsed one day after the leadership abdicated all of their duties to an AI. The leadership had always planned to put the AI in charge, and while things were going well in the beginning, the AI inevitably succumbed to the tropes we all saw coming. Its primary objective was to protect human life, so it inevitably resorted to putting all of its subjects into stasis spheres so they couldn’t harm themselves or each other. It’s really obvious that this is what happened, but the game gently hints at it at most. All the holograms, and the humanoid shapes inside the spheres floating around and stuff. It couldn’t be more obvious. The boss here is also rather underwhelming. But with this area cleared, the player can finally return to the Sanctuary, enter the gate to the surface and see what the church had been keeping from the people all along.

There are a lot of boss encounters in this game, 28 in total, and they are mostly tough challenges. I criticised Eastern Exorcist a while back because I thought it had way too many bosses. It took me almost 10 hours to beat both narratives within Eastern Exorcist, and in that time I fought 31 different bosses. With the reused bosses added in, that game had an average of 3.5 bosses per hour, which makes There Is No Light’s 1.4 bosses per hour look far more reasonable. And there aren't any rematches. The quality of the bosses is also generally much higher. Most bosses have chunks of red health separated by white health pips. Some of these sort of act like phase changes, or damage checks before the real fight starts. I think the fight against Shedim is the most emblematic of the majority of encounters in the game so I’ll be covering it in detail, though there are a bunch of bosses that don’t fulfil the same boss fight style, and none use the same mechanics that Shedim does. Shedim is a demonic gryphon which mostly attacks by charging at the player and slashing with its giant claws. The arena is mainly clear of obstacles, and the crystal clusters that are present break whenever they take damage or the player dashes into them. Shedim cycles through its attacks, generally favouring the multi-part dash attack, but it won’t hesitate to slash at a nearby player, or teleport charge at a distant player. The fight is super fast paced as Shedim is very aggressive, and it’s unlikely for the player to ever get more than one hit on the boss between its attacks. The gryphon also has a fairly decent chunk of red health, but the last 2 hits have to be done in sequence in order to win. Most other bosses in the game are just as aggressive as Shedim, and they can kill the player super quickly if the player makes a mistake. I enjoy bosses designed this way, but the input buffer combining an attack and a dash together sometimes makes some of the hits the player takes feel a little unfair. Fortunately, there’s a respawn point right outside of the door so new attempts were quick to start. Also, the fight isn’t especially long. When I succeeded in defeating Shedim, the fight only took around 40 seconds to finish. At this point the boss stands up on its hind legs, sprouts a couple of extra arms, and a long golden tongue extends from its mouth. Avarice has about twice the health Shedim had, as well as a series of white pips to work through. It is also just as aggressive as Shedim and has a full-screen attack that requires a well-timed dodge to avoid damage. Fortunately, Avarice is much easier to hit than Shedim so it’s possible to beat this second form down in only thirty seconds or so. But, yeah. Most bosses in this game are similar to this. They’ll have something that makes them stand out among the other bosses, but they’re basically never boring and can be defeated in a matter of seconds. One might be in a room full of poison gas that the player has to manage by venting throughout the fight, one might remove the floor from beneath the player’s feet as the fight goes on so they have to keep mobile, one might change its name a bunch while you’re fighting it. The secret final fight is pretty middle of the road, so don’t be too discouraged if you can’t figure out how to access it.

I’ve touched on it a few times, but I think this game has gone too far in exemplifying how bad its world is. An apocalypse on the surface forced the population into the subway, where they’ve been living for generations. The most prosperous community is lorded over by a dictatorial theocracy whose deity demands yearly child sacrifices. The Church of the Great Hand strips the humanity from its warriors through some kind of ritualistic torture, and it enforces a rigid power hierarchy within an arbitrarily defined upper and lower class. I don’t really understand why wealth matters in this world where might-makes-right, if all the upper class people were members of the ecclesiarchy or something then it’d make sense, but there’s just like, rich guys here. Nearby is a slum for the sick and disabled outcasts of the Central Station who just have to live in squalor because The Great Hand said so, I guess. The Church waged war against a splinter of itself, the Lunar Order, who believed that the Wax the Church was feeding to people was causing them to lose their free will. That Lunar Order then developed a strain of the Wax that could cure any ailment a person may be suffering from or it could violently transform them into a lumbering purple zombie. Failure to administer this Black Wax to his mother caused the leader of the Lunar Order to grieve so hard his sadness physically manifested in the tunnels he used to rule. There’s all these desperate people dying as they try to reach someone they’ve been led to believe can save them from the horrors of living under the Church, and then that Messiah tortures and blinds those people just because. There’s another tribe of humans who’ve eaten the writhing fleshy mass on the walls of the New Dawn region who’re now mutated and have excessive, violent urges they never had before. There was a library full of people casting torturous demon magic on each other out of suspicious spite until they all killed each other. A lionised AI decided to pacify and cocoon all of its charges in amniotic bubbles, then kill everyone that it felt it couldn’t control. The one place in the game that claims to be looking out for the people’s best interests captures its future residents against their will, and then tears their faces off so nobody can judge each other or something. And don’t expect this place of relative peace to stick around. The Church launches a raid on Spiritina to try and scare the spiders away from their territory. Even the endings are bleak. The player character travelled this whole world, slayed giant demons and wicked false prophets, and, in the end, it was all for nothing. The citizens of the Central Station mount a revolution against the Church, but whether they succeed or not doesn’t really matter. The player can help to defend the spider village from attack, but either way the result will be the same, the spiders have to leave to find somewhere safer to live, or they die. The only person who seems to win at all is Samedi, but he was just fine watching the humans destroy each other anyway. Maybe he wanted to be worshipped too, but he could’ve just deified himself anyway. There are clearly people desperate enough to follow evil tyrants already, Samedi could just become the new Messiah.

I spent about 19 hours with There Is No Light, though I didn’t stick to the main quest the entire time. There are a few side quests to do, as well as a lot of little nooks to explore for lore or experience points. The side quests are all fetch quests, though some of them have multiple steps or involve fighting secret bosses that couldn’t have been encountered before. They’re entertaining enough, and it’s easy to find the quest items when exploring through an area anyway. I do think this game is about one quarter too long. When I unlocked the east path that leads down to the AI controlled city, I expected that to be the end of the game. I was kind of done with the game at this stage, I didn’t think it could include any more interesting enemies or challenges and if it had stopped at 14 hours I’d have been more than satisfied with the length. The final city environment is cool, and the visual designs of the enemies are really well done. They have a new mechanic where the player has to defeat the nucleus after destroying the primary enemy to stop them from regenerating. But this isn’t much different to any other enemy in the game. You still just slash at them and dodge their attacks like everyone else. The rampant AI bundling up the humans it's been designed to protect is a good cliche, I think there’s still some novelty in it at this point, but it is still a cliche. In my eyes, Zelart could’ve chopped this area off and the game would be better for it. They could even sell it as DLC later on if they really wanted to include it in the game.

I’d still say that There Is No Light is worth playing if this type of game appeals to you. It’s tough and nihilistic, but it’s mechanically very solid. If you aren’t already into this style of game, I don’t think There Is No Light will do anything to sway you. It’s solid, but it isn’t breaking any new ground.

Not every story has a happy ending, and I don’t think There Is No Light necessarily needed one, but I don’t think every part of its world needed to be crawling in agony. The player character almost immediately gets revenge for the deaths of his wife and child, and for the rest of the story he’s just killing big monsters and returning trinkets to regain his soul and memories. That’s just something that sort of happens to him and acts as a motivation because he was already done before. While on this journey of self-repair, the player gets to see how hopeless the world is. How the most powerful among us, who claim they’re working in our best interests, are actually monsters, choking what little life is left out for their own gain. How attempts to place our trust in some messianic being, be they person or machine, will inevitably lead to our own destruction. We can convince ourselves to be grateful when we’ve been blinded to the truth. We can sign all responsibility and freedoms over for our own good, and be imprisoned by the consequences. We can mourn for the old days, before everything went wrong. But we can’t fix it, even if we really want to… Except, in reality, we can. It’s scary and dangerous, but if enough people band together, we can change that oppressive regime. We can revolt. Or secede. Collective action is much more powerful than those lording over us would ever admit. It’s why big companies hate unions so much. If we stopped doing what our bosses tell us to, what can they do? If we don’t enforce the rules that we agree are terrible, what will they do? As citizens, we can unite. As humans, we can unite. The world can be brighter. There Is No Light is too dark.

Speaking of a brighter world.