Electrifying. I love the way it balances moments of complete control, when you can use your items to guarantee a good outcome, and moments of utter chaos, when you have no choice but to play your luck and pray for the best. Its one major flaw lies in math since, for every game state, there is always an optimal action that maximizes your probability of winning. The game deals with this by giving the player imperfect information, leaving them to rely on their flawed senses to remember which kinds of rounds have been loaded and shot. It works because it's short. Were it longer though, I could see the temptation to write it all down and calculate possible outcomes easily getting to me, dumbing down the uncertainty that makes the experience work

Oh, and I LOVE the use of color quantization here. The sound design also serves as a wonderful punctuation

Half Life 1 is like a masterclass in pacing, as it moves from set-piece to set-piece with such confidence and intelligence that the game just breezes past you, on my most recent replay of it with my partner, it was basically just 6 perfect hours of one of the best games of all time.

Half Life 2, on the other hand, has so many bits that go on for fucking ever, and feel like they are NEVER going to end. It took multiple days of playing it where I just outright told them, "I am so sick of fighting the same 10 combine soldiers for today." This comes to a head near the end of the game in Anticitizen One and Follow Freeman, where you are fighting combine soldiers for what feels like 30000 hours. The combat is never engaging enough to carry the game on its own yet in some pivotal chapters it is being asked to carry hours worth of game. The game, ironically, excels when it is doing everything in its power to avoid gunfights. The explosive entrance to Nova Prospekt, the physics platforming of Sandtraps, the incredible finale of Our Benefactors, and of course the standout Ravenholm chapter.

When the game is clicking it reminds you why Half Life is such an incredible series, designed to almost perfection, and to be frank, back when I first played Half Life 2 around 2006, I did not share my current exhaustion with the combat, I found it thrilling and couldn't believe my computer was rendering such a lifelike experience. Nowadays? God why is Highway 17 so long?? Route Kanal and Water Hazard both feel like they are deliberately padded out!! Half Life 2 may have more variety than a game like F.E.A.R, but it is never as fun to play as F.E.A.R for an extended period of time.

But what it does better than other games, it does at a level of perfection few games could ever hope to match. Art direction, sound design, writing, animations, atmosphere, it is all typical Half Life brilliance. For the time, characters had never been this lifelike and well-realized, the main cast are such a lovable bunch with their own quirks and inner worlds, which thanks to the still really impressive facial animations, you can actually read them thinking and making decisions in their heads! It sounds a little odd, but watch Dr. Mossman in the Dark Energy chapter, and you can see her making the decision to betray Dr. Breen by her expression, it makes it feel more real in a way few games ever wore in 2004.

For what it far exceeds its predecessor on in terms of characterization, it really brutally lacks the precision pacing that makes Half Life 1 still one of the few games that could be described as "perfect." It feels desperate to deliver on being Half-Life 2, which in 2004 meant having way too much of everything, so after you shoot some combine overwatch and think, "damn this is kind of bland," I hope you are ready for 10 more hours of exactly that!!

I was playing Trepang2 when THIS was just sitting there? Shame on me for this one.

Incredibly fast-paced slow-mo gunfights with a cool girl protagonist with drum'n'bass music. Frankly, I have no one to blame but myself for not seeing the signs that I'd like this. Cooking much more than Trepang2 in terms of FEAR-style action, with much better arena design, weapons, movement, basically everything except framing. Severed Steel has a pretty superfluous excuse of a plot, whereas Trepang2 at least gave you SOMETHING to work with.

Actually, what is with indie games and being incapable of any sincerity beyond "metaphor for mental illness"? It feels like shit like this, Ultrakill and My Friend Pedro are more interested in being coolly detached to form an emotional core around literally anything. The reason FEAR is so cool isn't just because it has incredible action: it is grounded in its own tangible reality. the Point Man doing amazing, superhuman shit is given more gravity because we have a frame of reference for what normal is, we hear reactions from people about how unstoppable you are, and there is a PLOT with CHARACTERS that every gunfight serves to further. FEAR takes its psychic supersoldier plot deadly serious and it makes every incredible gunfight feel more real in that world. Artifice is important and I'm sick of these games deciding that they are too cool for it.

Comparing this to FEAR on more fundamental levels will also be very bad for it: arena design is way too loud and busy, meaning enemies have to be highlighted to make them visible amongst the backdrop. Whereas Replica soldiers stand out so dramatically in the office complexes of FEAR that no such bells and whistles are necessary.

One thing it NAILS is the destruction of the arenas, though. You can fuck these levels up, and if you are making a slow-mo action shooter, you better be looking at FEAR or Max Payne 3 to see how much a room can be blown apart by a hail of bullets.

I really like what is cooking here. I think this team is significantly more skilled than their contemporaries at action shooters, and the one-arm no reload design is brilliant in how it makes you never worry about anything but the shooting, so the pace is slick as hell. I would love these devs to take another critical look at FEAR and realize its color pallet is not a flaw, but a deliberate design choice. I want to see it expanded into something more substantial, as there is something good here even though I can only call it a dry run at this point.

There’s a story I heard from an excerpt of Béla Balázs’ Theory of the Film. The story goes that a Moscovian’s cousin was visiting from Siberia. It was the early days of cinema, and she had never seen a film before. They had taken her to the cinema to watch a burlesque movie.

“The Siberian cousin came home pale and grim. ‘Well, how did you like the film?’ the cousins asked her. She could scarcely be induced to answer, so overwhelmed was she by the sights she had seen. ‘Oh, it was horrible, horrible!! I can’t understand why they allow such dreadful things to be shown here in Moscow!’

‘What what was so horrible then?’

‘Human beings were torn to pieces and the heads thrown one way and the bodies the other and the hands somewhere else again.’”

She had never seen a montage before. The hand, the head, the bosom, disjointed by time in the image, the Siberian girl had seen them as disembodied. The ability to mentally situate the montage and its subjects in time and space is not an innate skill. To understand a montage, you have to learn to reassemble a body.

We are privy to something similar in Immortality. We reassemble a body of work, that of Marissa Marcel. We must do it through an understanding of the movements of cinema. The central movement in the game is the match cut, and it’s story is unveiled through the process of navigating a complex web of them. A cup, a stool, a cross, a kiss, a rose, wings, water, windows. Move through them. In a sense, the player becomes the editor, but without real control over it. These images are broadened, too. A cup may also be a bathtub, smoke may also be static. A similar thing is done in Sam Barlow’s other recent games. The Her Story system does something a lot like this, but with language. Enter a word into the search bar, it shows you five videos with that word, no matter the context. In a sense, these games are about understanding relationship between context and sign. In Immortality, however, we navigate through the image. This is why the game is made of match cuts.

When a film makes a match cut, there is typically something meant. Something is always meant with a cut, but the match cut often has its own specific meaning. With this magic trick, we signify a relation between the object and it’s corollary. In Immortality, these cuts are dense and the correlation is often superficial. A cup may be a bathtub because they both hold water, but not because “cup” means the same thing as “bathtub”. It is direct, and that is felt. You can line up every single picture of a rose, every single picture of a microphone, every single crucifix. Unmoored from context, grafted into the network of images. Metaphor melts away; through the network of cuts emerges a symbolic différance, crude and indistinct denotation. Meaning is transfigured and debased. Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

A more defensive approach would view this as decay in the visual language of cinema, but it is a strength of Immortality. A character in the game briefly speaks of cubism, saying that he finds it a shame to reduce a beautiful woman's body to a bunch of squares. Immortality is sort of a cubism of the cinema, splaying out its forms. The absence of the typical cinematographic structure, both in editing and in image, challenges the immediate response we have to the image. I’m not so sure the game is fully up to embrace that project, but maybe that’s more appropriate, since I don’t know how many people will take up that challenge. The narrative and the image of these games are dismembered like the burlesque show. There is a story here about many things. There are lots of things I could have written about instead of this: masks, religion, the frequent primacy of sex in cinema, lost media fascinations, the archetype of the Wandering Jew, the purpose of storytelling. Other stuff, I’m sure. That in and of itself will be a challenge, and now, anchored to the network of match cuts, we are challenged in the same way. You cannot avoid being a structuralist. Both in image and in text, Immortality asks you to engage meaningfully and directly with the act of making meaning. The Siberian girl must learn how to watch a montage, and then she must learn how to make one.

There's not a ton of complexity as to how Severed Steel operates and some elements need fine-tuning, but I can't help but appreciate how much the game accomplishes with surprisingly little. I'm a fan of the simple and effective UI; your aiming reticle is surrounded by two bars that convey how much ammo and slo-mo time is left (so these gauges are always near the center of attention) and the flashing light on your gun also changes color (from light neon colors to yellow to red) so you're constantly keyed in on when you'll need to pick up a gun early or engage/disengage when running low on supplies. Enemies stand out from the environment thanks to the cel-shaded enemy outlines, and upon death emit a distinct explosion sound-effect so there's no ambiguity when quickly rifling through targets during firefights or when picking off enemies from afar. Guns feel great to aim and fire in slow-mo, mainly because there's very noticeable recoil when firing in real-time; the contrast really helps sell the necessity of the feature. I also love Severed Steel's kick as both a form of attack and traversal; the obvious purpose is your primary melee attack while holding a gun if you don't want to expend your limited magazine to finish off an enemy as well as kicking open doors, but it can also be used to quickly ascend up walls or kick off of grounded/aerial enemies if your double jump isn't enough. The same goes for the arm cannon; you can fire holes into any surface if you don't feel like hunting down stairs/doorways for objectives, but it also provides a nice desperation option to instantly eliminate shielded enemies or drop heavy grunts down to another floor if you find yourself without a weapon.

Despite the appealing core gameplay, Severed Steel can often feel a bit repetitive. Enemy variety feels lacking since the player is usually approaching enemies in a similar manner (that is, entering slo-mo while using stunts to efficiently dispatch foes while firing into their heads/backsides), and I would have liked to see enemies that had to be specifically eliminated using the arm cannon or melee as mix-ups. The Rogue Steel mode does touch upon this with random enemy buffs that force such approaches, but at times I feel like this mode prefers to lengthen combat by overwhelming the player with excess enemies with more health. I do think the game could have also leaned a bit more into its parkour elements with additional stages that focused upon traversal and dodging/quickly disposing of enemies, as there were only a couple of timed story missions that necessitated a rush to the end. Finally, I have to agree with HotPocketHPE that the slo-mo gauge is unbalanced; you'll practically never run out of bullet time as long as you're staying in stunt mode (super easy since there are floors and walls aplenty to slide and wallrun), though this is again addressed from playing Rogue Steel via the "Rebalanced Bullet-Time" unlockable modifier. Even with these gripes however, Severed Steel is a pretty easy recommendation considering how content-rich the game is from its many different modes and extra campaign/workshop levels to tinker with. It was an absolute steal at 80% off on the Steam Spring Sale, and I can't wait to see how Greylock Studio iterates and improves upon their already fantastic formula.

I've been sitting on writing about this for over a week now, struggling to put my thoughts together cohesively, and honestly just dreading elaborating on what is, at the end of the day, a very short and sweet take on this duology, so I'll just say it and not care if I sound mean.

Adventures sucks. It takes until CASE 4 before you have a case with both a trial segment and an investigation segment, and even when you do get to the last two cases, it's only one chunk of each. Unprecedented, and while I guess I can appreciate a different approach, what it means is that the pacing drags for the whole game, not to mention inherently limits the stories of each case. Without multiple days for each case to build in complexity, the characters have to make the necessary revelations in a much more condensed time frame than any other Ace Attorney game has had to deal with, meaning that thing can't go as balls to the wall as its predecessors did, which, needless to say, is really disappointing. I haven't played Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney or... Dino Crisis... but those notwithstanding, this is the weakest game out of everything Shu Takumi's had significant contributions in.

Resolve is much more interesting. It often feels like it's trying a lot harder than the first game did to craft an interesting story. Thankfully the pacing is no longer an issue; every case after the intro has both a trial and an investigation, usually multiple of each. And in general the cases are a clear caliber above the first game, and a lot of the first game is recontextualized to make the story work.

But another issue rears its ugly head in this game: it's so AGONIZINGLY predictable! Every twist falls so flat and this game is never going to surprise you, making it a slog to get through, even though the cases are much more interesting this time around. This is almost worse than Adventures' pacing because all of Shu Takumi's works laugh in the face of predictability.

And most egregious of all, across both games, the characters suck. Ryunosuke is just Phoenix with less snark, no backstory, and the most generic character design I've ever seen. Susato is boring, and the takedown thing she does is obnoxious every time. I have never seen a duo with less chemistry than Ryunosuke and Kazuma, and the relationship they try and paint between these two is embarrassing. There is not a soul in either game who has as much life and personality as the parrot from the first Ace Attorney.

Resolve does a better job in this department. It doesn't have to do the heavy lifting of introducing the main cast, and its side characters are more entertaining. There's a decent selection of nutheads here, like Shamspeare, Harebrayne, Madam Tusspells, and the Redheads (side note I also really like the Eggert guy from the first game). But the best of these games can't come close to the original trilogy's cast in terms of zaniness, personality, or likability.

What's more disappointing is the main characters. The OG trilogy did such a good job of balancing its oddball ensemble with a main cast who were all very layered and developed. In The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, the only character who has any development is Gina. I mean, Van Zieks learns how to not be racist I guess. But everyone else is alarmingly static. I don't dislike these characters, but it's so disappointing that there is not a single identifiable character arc for our MAIN CHARACTERS (that isn't Gina).

That's it. Adventures sucks because of its terrible pacing, Resolve is much better and is definitely a worthwhile time but suffers from predictability, and both games have an underwhelming group of characters. Rapid fire good stuff time:

- Both games work great in 3D. Not sure what DD or SoJ did well since I never played those but 3D looks good in these games at least
- The Summation Examinations and "Herlock Sholmes Deduction Spectaular" sequences are both the best parts of the games. Sholmes brings so much style that is always a blast
- More period pieces in video games that aren't Assassin's Creed, please
- The soundtrack is sadly lacking in classic Ace Attorney energeticness, but makes up for it by making the harpsichord SUPER sexy
- The scope of these two games, building an international conspiracy across TEN cases, is laudable, and in spite of the predictability of its "what," the "how" of the final case is extremely satisfying.
- That final breakdown, wow!
- The whole aesthetic is superb. The courtrooms feel so grand, the watercolor palette is exquisite in every area, I don't like Ryunosuke's basic design but every other character looks great, the game contrasts the look of Japan and Britain so well.
- I like the funny accents everyone talks in.