Real Time Strategy games are defined by their relationship between resources and opportunity. In a game like Starcraft, you can only hoard your funds and stockpile units for so long before your opponent death marches down your base. In Pikmin, the unstoppable march of time is your enemy. Try your best to min/max your time in combat, shave a few seconds off your routing and maybe you won't have to waste a day farming onion food.

The part where this all falls apart is in the precision. If I don't feel like I am actually in control of the micro actions, then why should I care about the macro optimisations? Pikmin feels like a survival horror, but in most shooters I know that my bullets aren't going to glitch into a wall and die.

Within the Bounty Stores across Oddworld locales are curious fortune teller machines. As a child I had seen my fair share of bonus reel trailers for upcoming games, I had, when I was six, binged and gorged myself on repeated playthroughs and viewings of the Official Xbox Magazine demo discs, replaying an ill-fated prologue level of a sixth gen remake of Spyhunter a number of times equals or greater to that game’s final sales figures. This is all to say I was familiar with the visual language of V I D E O G A M E T R A I L E R and using this knowledge I understood the fortune teller machines to be teases for a sequel.

How bizarre. A fully realised trailer for a sequel living inside the game that it is in of itself succeeding? Ludicrous. As much as I was mistaken about the nature of these audio-visual premonitions I wasn’t far off the truth. The sequel to Oddworlds Stranger’s Wrath exists within itself.

The Fortune Teller machines depict gameplay from Stranger’s point of view using (depending on how far into the game you are) familiar and yet blatantly improved weapons in landscapes that seem more varied and complex than the ones you are currently navigating. The first time I viewed these videos, I felt a desire to burn through the game and realise what had been foretold. On a hot summer day in 2009, with a portable screen attached to my Xbox, nine-year old me sat in his bedroom cranked through the required encounters to see the fortune teller’s predictions come true. Three quarters of the way through the story is a pivotal reveal, a tone shift and a promise kept that propelled me through the last chunk of gameplay.

Some decade and a half later I can tell you another truth. Spoilers are good actually. People will argue whether you can spoil gameplay and that discourse doesn’t matter to me because I like being spoiled! Knowing what happens doesn’t invalidate how it happens. A twist that is spoilerable was never a twist worth experiencing. Often, a spoiler can keep me going to the end of a story that I would have surely given up on and being told what toys I get access to gets me excited.

The numbers go up. The weight that Sam Porter Bridges can carry on his back and shoulders increases, kilogram by kilogram. The distance between waystations grows metres apart as you inch from prepper to prepper. You get likes. You get more likes. A friendly porter gives you 1 like(s) which increases your total likes by 0.003%. you come home from your real life job, which probably involves walking, climbing or carrying (mine does anyway) and you login to the chiral network and receive thousands of likes. What do the likes do? You don't know. But the numbers keep going up. More ammo, more power, more speed, more resources, more roads, more ziplines.

The Earth however does not go up. Elevation-wise, yes it goes up and what goes up must come down. But the rocks, the streams, the snow, the ravines, the shores don't have numbers to increase or decrease. You don't roll dice at rubble. It is you and the Earth, mano a mano, every step an attack and every hill a combo. You get to the top of a mountain, turn around and take a photo. You have been climbing for 20 minutes. Just pushing the left stick forward, and yet you feel that you may be conquering one of the hardest encounters JRPGs have to offer.

At the end of Episode 2, 'Haunted' by Poe plays over a foggy screen, a blinking "press X to skip" sitting in the bottom left hand corner. This song, along with the rest of the tracks from the eponymous 2000 album form a companion piece of sorts to the much referenced and loved Mark Z. Danielewski novel House of Leaves.

When you buy House of Leaves you are intending to purchase a fictional novel, but no one has told the book that, and it will continue to present itself as a diary wrapped around an academic journal centering on a non-existent (in world and out of world) documentary about a house. Alan Wake is a game, it is very much a game to all of it's faults, but it desperately wants to be a TV Show about a writer who may or may not be living within his own manuscript.

Sadly in the year of our lord 2023, the monkey paw has already curled and we can't ask for a world where Remedy and Sam Lake just made a TV Show instead because Quantum Break exists and no one gave a shit.

In the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, Laura Palmer's body is washed up from Black Lake. The 2008 australian indie film Lake Mungo opens with footage of a young Alice Palmer being dredged from the aforementioned Lake. In Alan Wake, Alice Wake finds her own way out of Cauldron Lake.

Hit Trailblazer 40 and suddenly forgot why I was grinding this game out. Retroactively justifies my hate for Genshin. Calling out gacha as being the problem deflects from the ACTUAL problem - stamina. Anything worth doing costs stamina in such large amounts for such low rewards that it does not feel worth it to play/watch these tedious battles; but you need the 30 different currencies on offer to make the numbers go up... And then what?

The presentation and sophistication is purposely deceiving to keep you from realising that there is actually very little reason to get attached to these characters or even download this game in the first place, there is no pay-off, there is no endgame.