I'm one of the weirdos that didn't like DOOM 2016 much. It was a fine game but the main campaign just didn't do it for me. I didn't much care for the Mars setting and I felt the level design didn't lend itself well to exploration.

So my expectations were REALLY low coming into DOOM Eternal. I was so so wrong.

DOOM Eternal fucking rules. Once all the abilities are unlocked, the combat just feels so good. I felt like I was constantly needing to use every tool at my disposal to clear rooms. The soundtrack slapped. The Earth setting was awesome.

I just really don't have anything bad to say about this game. I think the game is maybe a little too long and Battlemode is underbaked. But that's as negative as I can get.

DOOM Eternal is so good that it's making me re-think DOOM 2016. Maybe I need to give it another chance...

Has there been an uptick in our attenuation, culturally and individually, to the Icarus myth? Maybe this is one of the biases of living through a history of culture, one piled with objects more opulent, ever present, and referentially potent than at any time previously in its possibility amongst human states, as opposed to consuming that history but in the 21st century Icarus has seemed to draw more fascination and sunlight than had been, anecdotally, spotlighting his ascents and descents in the time between his first flight and now. As time has worn on, as time has allowed the delocalisation of centres of communication standing in for the varying world’s working class’s abilities to express sentiment and empathy between each other in a form and with functions not propped up by their non-elected representational nationalistic enterprises isolating them in hierarchical and interested speech, it seems as though evocation through myth has come to ground from its former place atop Mountains Olympus and Halls Valhalla. I’ve had it most obviously intended for me with Anne Carson’s mythical interpretations as well as the mythos interpreted and remade in Anders Nilsen’s Rage of Poseidon but clearly the trend is occurring heavily in games at the moment: God of War greatly pathologized it’s antagonistic forces with a humanism bred from systemic failures that occurred not in the grandiose melodramas of its earlier games, and Hades tenders from its pantheon a kind of postmodern conscientious empathy that occurs in our highly dialogic ecosystem with a form directly opposite to traditional mythic portrayals of the same characters. It seems like myth has been reorganised from a top down affair, seeing from which great heights may lend fall, to one that describes from the bottom a rebuke, whereupon that which falls leaves a mess and kills a friend.

The Icarus myth has been traditionally taught to be a display of one figure’s failure in recognising what constitutes hubristic reach and how behaviours can teach us our limits. Today, often without the name attached but with the wings stapled on just the same, we learn from Icarus what a small reach beyond one’s station will incur from that which our world revolves around. Citizen Sleeper has its beginning fawn like an Icarus who flew to the Sun and fell but on treacherous orbits breached was instead caught in a gravitational pull of something other than earth, where knowing what Daedelus wrought wasn’t attached to a spheres of gods but to that which was dominated over by their powers disattached. For their Sleeper, that wrought flight is not one of hubris expected by one out of their domain but of the thrust into the styx of which exploitations beget further exploitations entrusted to us in our purchased complicity (or more likely, what is societally enforced through however many propagandistic excesses are necessitated in our connections and expressions). In showing this fall, or rather flak shredding gravitational pull, CS in a lot of ways interstates the driving urge to develop a character from the outset of an RPG experience: entering your machinations at the where there has been a turning point in the remaking of a life, a chance which has become the driving force coinciding one’s becoming strange in the ways which announce value and type to systemic architectures.

This is the axis Citizen Sleeper ultimately fails itself and succeeds on. Thematically, it cannot allow the player character to become god emperor of the domains they plaster all eyesight aboard, indicating an examination of the mechanical emphases that place play subsidiary to narratives of specifically modern and potentially “eventual” complexity but no introspective complexity which devalues intentions of action with accessibility to action within the systems and within the narrative, backseating both into, at its most optimistic, making do with whatever you are given that day(often less do we see triumphs of the genre take this route, more frequently changing perspective of audience within these worlds of exponentiality from primary protagonist to ancillary protagonist a la Witcher 3). In play, this works for a while to an extraordinary degree - the first 3-4 hours are a taut balancing act between starving, being shot, wearing away into a carcass sprouting circuitry, and losing yourself amidst a sea of askers promising gifts without seeing those boons fessed. After that however, having reached the end of one or two quests and receiving the surprisingly large paydays squirrelled out from people ostensibly in the same situation as your PC, the tension is deflated entirely: you are never at a loss for good rolls, cash, and things to do, and by the final third you have presumably removed the target on your back as well. The mechanics which create scarcity, because of their function as a model for capitalism fucking people over, eventually lead you to become the 1% of your little world because that’s just how economics work when you are the most active agent with the greatest leniency to invest and divest. I don’t know what the devs could’ve done to really keep the boot down without making the game both far more complex as well as miserable, but their systems ironically fucked them over in ways totally unrelated to cash.

It’s unfortunate as well that at the end of things, with hordes of 6 die rolls and credits and mushrooms and corporate intel, your Sleeper is no different looking in their perspective and adaptability than when first starting the game. While there is a generously branching skill tree which can create preferences for activities on the station, there is no actual characterization to generally differentiate what these acts are informing in the state of play or narrative - you may be a mechanic by defect of muscle proclivity but you interact with the barkeeps in just the same dialogue as an artist or diplomat. There are options for dialogue, and of course the player will have characters for whom they invest the only scarce resource, interest, in, but they are choices in the vein of “hell yeah” and “that went well”. As well written and pursuant of depth Citizen Sleep is, make no mistake, the dice are not those found in Dicey Dungeons or Disco Elysium: it’s choose your own adventure visual novel territory.

Has Jump Over The Age flown too close to the sun? No, I don’t think so. You market the game however you can to try and proliferate it, and RPGs are big for a reason. A bit of slapdash game design, which does legitimately impart the feelings attempted for a while, on a worthwhile and well told narrative concerning highly prescient and necessary issues is still all that with just a bit extra. If they were a broader studio with a bigger budget, it’s easy to see that the final product would appear to us as a different spectre haunting not just the space above Europe but also any devs making +2% fire damage weapon skill trees. But this isn’t an RPG killer even if it is a killer little game.

Completed with 100% of 'forgotten things' collected. A relatively short, delightfully presented puzzle-focused game, The Last Campfire casts players as a lost 'ember' on a journey, searching for a way home, while along the way rescuing a number of similarly lost travellers. All themed around a message of hope, gameplay is a mix of exploration interspersed with puzzle scenarios, each of which is rarely all that difficult but well-judged, ensuring that solving them brings that crucial sense of satisfaction.

2022 is over; the GOTYs have been widely discussed, re-reeled, scheduled to be remade for 2027, doubled over in irrepressible initial praise and immediate vitriolic backlash - Elden Ring, God of War, 1001 Fortnites: here in January, they stand like Ozymandias before a sandstorm as the next New Year’s 1st comes 24 hours quicker every day. Further in the creases of the closed past year are the mites which were either praised in miniature or overlooked in grace; Signalis, Citizen Sleeper, Vampire Survivors, and the various other explosive indie-darlings that took their respective shelters in critical close-ups, let’s plays, sale prices, and at least one insufferable cultural neophyte’s, in grace before you, journal pages, but their smallness and comparatively miniature debt to market trends and hardware specs won’t keep them from wearing away under the beating sand of 2023, 24, 25, etc. Next year, everything that shone like gold in 2022 will be a humbled burnished bronze. The year after that, bronze will be a greening copper that seems less worthy to cover chapels housing gods and their pacts than was previously believed. On and on goes the cycle of games history that in 20 years, all of what feels momentous today will be scarred and ashen ruins; the scaffolding of a future which has rebuilt the past in retrograde and auburn.

Of course, ruins like these on a site like Backloggd are not inscrutable ancient labyrinths derived from partitioned alien design - they are sites themselves for a spatially derived historiographic practice, something like a map you unfold and step into. The winnowing away of time reveals the bones, beliefs, surgeries, births, burial signs of a past that has marginally garmented our present but was the progenitor of all present day genomes; it’s not just the DOOM to DOOM (2016) timeline, but the Catacomb 3-D to Neon White aqueduct.

In closer terms, what we see in future ruins here are the endless little foundations that run under well trod ground: Darklands to Wasteland to Fallout to New Vegas to Pillars of Eternity to Pentiment - the waters have run deep, shaping the hills, valleys, monument, and community settled above it today. Obsidian’s micro-team, led by Josh Sawyer, defined by his writing and Hannah Kennedy’s art, has produced, for my taste, the 2022 game of the year - they have, with their incisive and deep craft concerning this perfect niche, produced, in fact, the best game of the 2020s so far. It is a game that will extend out in perpetuity par excellence, filing in aura with regard to the lineage its writing and art direction take from Petronius, Bruegel, Eco, and Dürer; it takes its hyper-relevance to our current time and place by taking thematic sensitivities and beginning design principles from the mechanical arguments of games such as Night in the Woods and Kentucky Route Zero, as well as the sociological thoroughness seen in works such as Satantango and or The Green Knight; it reveals a deep, warmly academic respect by being a already fossilised and archived, splendorous and ruined, game that unabashedly lays in its own grave, being one of the only fictions in our medium, one of the only pieces of art made to mass release in the last 20 years, that takes place in our shared human history yet still promotes in us hope for a future we know to have already passed. It has quickly come to ruin, and unlike what has come to ruin so theatrically and agonisingly wrought in Darkest Dungeon, signalled by its infamous line wrung from the cycling death of those cursed grounds that feeds like a Dutch windmill grinding up the toil sweat out by centuries of peasants, Pentiment seems poised not to be a site of consistent archaeological investment, but the site of myth and folk-tale; the reception to Obsidian’s masterpiece was warm but it failed to appear on many GOTY lists and, from what I was able to find, topped none of them. Unlike other wordy winding works, your Torments, Discos Elysium, Citizens Sleeper even, the Early Modern murder micro-drama will not seemingly be poured over with the insight of scholarship forever. It will wind down time, seemingly, like Remus and Romulus and the wolves.

But I will never forget it, and here are a few of the reasons why:

Pentiment is the ultimate game in a branching thought I’d mulled over in 2022, a thought which has wormed through a great deal of the promising indie games that were lauded by critics and audiences alike last year that fell entirely flat for me: Stray, Tunic, Peglin, Shovel Knight Dig - these, while all having interesting design decisions guiding their creative goals, failed to create and populate a play environment that antiseptically made for exciting interaction. In all these games, the goal of play was a fun thing to conceptually head towards, but the verbs and feedback of using those verbs was tasking, arduous, leaden, and weak. Tunic’s uninvestigated combat intricacy, minimal animation depth, boring breadth of traversal option, and isometric simplicity (unlike Bastion’s or DOS2’s, which excite seeing what is around the next corner by leading the eye and rewarding with multiplicity the player’s exploration) made going from anywhere to anywhere, as well as encountering anything through that route, a hum that deafened the tidiness of its exploration loop. The play couldn’t support the play thesis, just as oftentimes in bad novels with philosophical aspirations (realised or not), bad characterisation or stunted prose can remove the possibility of a complete thematic denouement. For me, it was the same in many other games of 2022 which were heralded as excellent - and despite seeing no such announcement of a modally, and it is crass to describe this mode as such, ‘gimmick’ reliant mechanical frame in Pentiment, I found that it instigates a profoundly rich environment for its feedback loop of verb input/output. The thought which Pentiment completed was this: in Mario and Dark Souls and other masterpieces of the medium, swinging your club or jumping is simply exciting and rewarding within the action itself internally to do without any other intertextual interaction or goal necessitating the use of the game’s verbset to progress a completion. If that is the case, this exercise of verbs as good in themselves being the fundamental ideal for kinaesthetics, can more traditional forms of narrative development, herein specifically dialogue, be verbally pleasing in this same way? I’m not talking about dialogue being pleasing to the ear or well written from a perspective of not wasting words, I’m asking if it can be comparably intrinsic in its reward structure to talk to NPCs for no narrative or mechanical benefit, such as there is no mechanical benefit to hopping around the castle grounds in Mario 64, as executing kinaesthetically pleasing verbs in more mechanics focused games. In Pentiment alone thus far, for me, has this been proven as possible.

Being free of RPG mechanics, unlike most other dialogue heavy games, allows Pentiment’s non-narrative progression necessary text to be framed within a new light for evaluation as part of a mechanical experience. Contrasting this mechanically undriven approach with the mechanically invested Disco Elysium, which has similarly profound and primordial text (although Pentiment’s is nearly entirely with character voices, whereas DE’s is split between dialogue and descriptive text, so there is a greater elasticity to the veritability in DE, which works for that game whereas the naturalistic approach of Pentiment works better internally for itself), the RPG progression and quest system of it plays into the reward structure of engaging in dialogue with NPCs - that doesn’t mean it’s less rewarding to talk to people as Harry than as Andreas, but the nature of the pleasure and the reward felt by the player is of a fundamentally different quality. Pentiment’s lack of stat trees, alternate routes, or even ‘good’ and ‘bad’ outcomes to events inset an environment for Tassing’s cast to emerge as a budding garden of pleasurable filigrees to investigate or not: it makes no difference, these conversations, to meeting objectives or rolling credits, but instead informs the degree to which your Andreas felt inhabited, just as does the pleasure of jumping exactly off the edge vs within the precipice’s borders do in Celeste.. The characterisation of Andreas - logician, rapscallion, traveller of Italy, France, or elsewhere - entices these little discussions about taxes, carpentry, foreign customs, gossip into equal parts microstory and fleshing out of your ingratiation to your individual Andreas; everytime you say something about how Socratic such and such is or how you would woo them and theirs with what, you are completing a path to a summit with your allowed verbs in the same way that you might climb a mountain in BOTW: that is, just to see if you can. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything or do anything, but it creates as broad and as beautiful a fiction to step into that video games can afford by their tools - a formation of no less expressive verbiage than any mechanical interaction in more system’s heavy games. In comparison to Stray, which thinks that games are a narrative told with fancy lighting and context sensitivity, Pentiment is Donne next to someone who thinks poetry are words that rhyme.

I want to contrast this lightly with games which are seen as narrative/text heavy, such as Night in the Woods or typical visual novels: for the former, the player chosen associating of Andreas with specific locales, temperaments, and academic colleges allows for tutorialising which ramps up the complexity of interaction without attaching stakes to it, which Night in the Woods doesn’t do by shaping entirely Mae’s backstory and aptitudes (which works for that story), instead allowing all conversations to largely have one route which is made immaterial by non-conflicting conversation diverticula, and which will resolve in a set outcome regardless of player piloting. For visual novels, and I’m mostly unfamiliar with the genre so this is a generalisation, the non-essential conversation may not feed into a mechanical advantage or systemic interaction, but often does influence a mechanical tallying stat which coincides with extrinsic rewards of extra-PC character interaction. This is differentiable from Pentiment in 2 ways: 1) in Pentiment, you don’t have sex with anybody you talk to, so the pleasure of talking carries no ulterior sexual motivation, and 2) the reward for engaging in these conversations is primarily driven by the ability to express your player inhabitation by extending the game’s verbs for expression vs. progression. Just as the reward for beating a time in a racing game against a dev ghost is different from your own ghost, the reward structure and positive feeling of ingratiation is different between the dialogue system in Pentiment vs those found as standard in visual novels today.

Another major fixture of Pentiment’s success is its manufacture of a setting that displays no mechanical advantage, as contrasted by the mechanical advantages conferred by settings on games such as Red Dead Redemption, which allows for R*’s design preference for breadth in interaction stimulus as well as emphasis on travel as opposed to traversal, or Resident Evil, the mansion being both a thematic root for the minor chord of corrupt elites being villainous with hoarded wealth and jeopardised public safety as well as providing a comical expansion on the ridiculous affordances of immoral spending. Obviously the influences on Josh Sawyer, his background in history as well as fascination with all things, not to mention ability to speak, German, coordinated a desire to set a game in this space - and after Annaud’s “palimpsest” of The Name of the Rose, this fascination delivered what might be the only chance at a good ‘adaptation’ of Eco’s work. But whereas many other design leads will think play first when factorialising trends for progression and digression in their game’s setting, Sawyer and his team impugned the fictional world for divesting itself of cultured culture: whereas other games are built like playgrounds for referential but not really interdependent gamifying (again, see RDR2), Pentiment fosters a setting which forms a playground of contrasted and commentorial ideas that are often gestured at but not reflected on in games. Historical feminism, church/state governance (without demonising either), the role of marriage as communal coordination, the functions of early governmental bureaucracy, human rights, fashion and the signifiers of pre-capitalist class roles, and more and more and more yet than can be revealed in a review (I can’t even begin to discuss how much I love the treatment of capital T Taboo in this Early Modern setting - Mary Douglas would be so proud) - the devs have talked about their including mini-games to immerse the player interactively in the world while switching up the pace, but for my salt, the inclusion of these moments detailing a world that thinks with an era and mind different from our own is the real breaking up of play (not to discount the mini-games, as we’ll see below their purpose in my evaluation).

The moment, which thankfully comes early on so you can really whet your appetite for these cherished little strands of life in the 16th century, that I want to illustrate as a choice example is the detailing of women’s roles in life and art as acted out and discussed by Sister Illuminata and Andreas while tidying the Scriptorium of loose and unreturned texts to the Abbey’s library. As the books are carried over from the stations of the brothers to the locked door of the library (keeping the sisters within and the brothers, as well as peasants and Andreas, out), Andreas and Illuminata discuss the varying roles for men presented in the tales - knight, knave, and all in between - while the figures of women, ladies love and damsels, remain stagnated and ungraspable as true characters. Not only are the arguments presented by Illuminata well written, both in voice and in content, they are also preponderent on the lives of women in that time and, remarkably, even more specific to the lives of the daughters of those who have enough means to sponsor their children in convents. Illuminata’s perspective, which wonderfully contrasts with other feminisms of other women in Tassing and Kiersau, is both an entirely personal, non-prescriptive, drive towards analytical reads of her contrasted position to others in the convent, and more specifically, of the brothers who live beside the sisters in the abbey. Illuminata is not trying to rally or convert over the Christian villagers or Benedictines; her feminism, in accord and respect to the Early Modern reality of womanhood, has a degree of fatalism attached to the position (and what’s more, that perspective remains personal but changes over the course of the game as Illuminata’s position changes). However, you can decide how convinced Andreas is by Illuminata’s description of her life - it has minor bearing on the plot, and you can not only be either a chauvinist or accept this early feminism, but you can reject Illuminata’s analysis for an entirely different feminism, one which includes different elements of life in the 16th century from differently affected social positions. And ultimately, these choices are only incumbents of immersion in the world - a process of world building, a writing skill which has become both laughably and pathetically divorced from trying to form contiguous threads of social commentary and instruction with our own world. Sawyer’s and Kennedy’s flex is not only creating a multitudinous world which affords as broad a spectrum of perspectives as our own world, but one that bears actual relevance and contains commentary on our own little history.

This small corner of Pentiment’s writing is just one of many hollows which foster ideals, either lost (for good or ill) or progenitorial, to our modern era. Nearly every character will have as much or more to say on any particular subject that fixates them than they will disclose on suspicions regarding murder. Florian will go into length at the expansiveness of early European travel experiences, funnelled through the threshing of mercenary combat, which in him presupposes a kind of Nietzschean amor fati. With one of the best characters in the game, Vacslav, you receive nearly no actual plot acceleration at all, but instead have in depth discussions on combinatorial mystic practices of early Christian splintering, pulling theological ideas from Swedenborg, Weil, as well as Buddhist ideas and Kabbalistic strains. For every character, there are discussions on polite scruples, architectural wisdom, changing literacy, fashion, and political upheaval. Nothing is left unturned, and by tilling the soil so faithfully across its cast, Pentiment grows broader and higher than most any other game developed in a decade.

Small note that’s somewhat important herein as well - other well written games with a wide swathe of commentaries on non-plot necessary subjects tend to run the border on the Northern end of where ideas become practices. For example, Torment has a huge deal to say on the nature of regret, on loyalty, on making amends, on how beliefs are fomented, on how death is abstracted in modern life. These all enrich the world of the game, of the planes as entities which must be contended with in your roleplay, but unlike in Pentiment, they are in weaker reads merely abstracted and in stronger reads necessarily contrasted to our world. Pentiment demands a direct historical continuum, one which cannot ignore the modern world as the next of kin in the Mediaeval period dying at the beginning of the game, and as the next looming death of the birth of the Early Modern.

Something else which branches off from this devotion to diverticula is the legitimate development of a formal practice within games that doesn’t rely on any mechanical genre. Where in the 20th century many avant-garde movements found massive upheaval in what the constitutive structure of our various public art forms said about their content, both in the McLuhanian vein as well as the Steinian, games have not yet had a strong push towards developing ‘isms’ outside of micro-niches on itch.io - and those niches are mostly a combined one or two developers making games for each other without commentary on the formal expedition of that enterprise. We’ve seen 12 tone music develop, the language poets, endless film new waves, abstract expressionism, pop art in every medium on the planet, deconstructionism in anything that has been around for a fly’s life; games have innovated, but rarely under the auspices of reinvention, rejection, or preeminent perceived importance. Pentiment puts forth such a formal argument, demanding textual inferences that allot meaning to the conveyances of narrative writing and not just those events, dates, characters, and elements else within them.

I won’t try to house Pentiment within any cinematic, literary, or theatrical schools - media theorists already try too hard, in my opinion, to define with positive qualities their basis of evaluation by borrowing criteria for promoting obvious ‘excellence’ from allergic source (which in the worst examples come from ‘literary’ malapropism supplanted into games, movies, opera, or whatever else in an attempt to prove that something is ‘smart’ or ‘complex’, despite the obvious misapplication of terminology or device when stripped from the context which reflects its respective originating existence). I won’t try to define or create new terms to put on Pentiment which would seek to gerrymander past games or previous games into associations that were never intended; these groups of artists tended to group themselves, making art which reflected highly localised, referentially dense and obscure realities which the small Obsidian team may not have been aiming to tap into, and which I certainly have no outsider insight into as a passive observer to the game and its creation. All I can present is how I think Sawyer and Kennedy thought with a focus on structure which often goes under assumed in game design, particularly to what visual structure informs on when in concert with expressive allowances.

Briefly here, I’ll try to define what I view as the formalistic qualities in Pentiment, minorly contrast them with another formalistic work outside of video games, as well as point out how the different expression of similar facets would escape my definition in other games which contain component cousins. Firstly though, for clarity’s sake: formalism, extremely generally, is a broad umbrella term for art which tends to lean into the tools, perceived bounding constraints, expressionistic qualities, and any other content containing apparatuses that, while conveying narrative, are not narrative beats or content themselves. In books, this tends to be things like syntax, page layout, macro-structure, typeface, spelling, occasionally word-choice, and so on. In opera this tends to be things like the language that is being sung in, coherency between, and application of, costumes, integration of sets, instrumental balance and orchestra makeup, etc. In Pentiment, I view the formal qualities as primarily being, but not exclusively, the integration of non-standard input mini-games, the macro-pacing, the disparity between character art styles, the previously mentioned dialogue system, and the irresolutions of the first and second acts as denouncing stagnancy and demanding advancement. These elements taken individually all carry packages of narrative content, and indeed without them in this particular game, the narrative would not be conveyed through a satisfying or even complete arc. They are formal partly in implementation, and partly by way of noticing and labelling them as formal qualities in critique. That may seem ridiculous, but consider: part of the reason that formalistic qualities have had difficulty in rising within AAA games, or even moderately prominent indie games, is that games are nearly always developed to the point of a gestalt experience; the coordinating elements of development, put together by the vision of perhaps one person but reconciled by vastly disparate creative teams, are meant to seamlessly cohere into a vision which does not stutter, slip, or drawl in how it draws attention in the lack of similitude between competitive elements, such as descriptive item text to enemy stagger animations. This type of creation, while not unseen in the avant-garde works of the 20th century, is fairly uncommon in the formalistic works from which I draw comparison to Pentiment. One only needs to compare Paterson to Elden Ring or Einstein on the Beach to Hollow Knight to understand the difference. This gestalt development is decried more obviously in other formal works from other media because of the nature of their existential property: a disparately cohered Dadaist play, at a fundamental level, needs to adhere only to the laws of physics to be stageable (and in fact, Antonin Artaud’s “unstageable plays'', such as Jet of Blood, make light of these restraints) - a disparately cohered game from any ‘ism’ at a fundamental level is just a corrupted executable. Therefore it is the work of both developer and critic to uncover the formal elements and label them as such to convince further, more daring and considered, formalistic experimentation within the medium.

That all said, Pentiment’s formal qualities: the most contentious I put forth as exemplary is that of the mini-games within. These are, if taken at that definition alone, probably the most widely proliferated verb in modern games. In puzzle games, action games, RPGs, visual novels, adventure games, even some IF - if there is a mechanical thread to pull them together, it might be mini-games. Obviously, and this was the case stated by Sawyer in interviews explaining the modes of play within Pentiment, the inclusion of mini-games is to break up the main play of the game with a totally ancillary and perpendicular play experience. Hacking is everywhere in modern open world games, and rarely do you see the verbs of the main toolset allowed to players carry over into hacking (the only exception I can think of is Shadowrun: Hong Kong). At worst, these games are monotonous, but usually short, speed bumps that interrupt or slow down the flow of the main play; this is the case for Bioshock or Deus Ex: Human Revolution. At best, they are integrated into the main work as a textural, sometimes positively frictional, addition to the main conceits of their respective games - the hacking in Bioshock 2 is a star example of this, and Quadrilateral Cowboy makes the integration of hacking mini-games and anathematic play outside of that microcosm of play the entire thrust of its design. These run from tedious to terrific, but they have in common their inclusion being designed for content purposes, being components of designers encouraging the contained elements of the game to imply diversity of possibility within the playspace but not the vastness of possibility of games expression via contrasting extratextuality.

In Pentiment, while the mini-games do offer a new interactive element to the quite restricted playspace, if compared to other Obsidian games, they offer a grander expansion on the vision of possibility within the storytelling capabilities of the setting, an element of design which blurs the line between form and content, as well as the storytelling capabilities of juxtaposing verbs from those of an established set. Each of these mini-games foreground an experiential quality of newness, to the player obviously but more importantly, to Andreas, something which reinforces the strangeness and parallactic presence of an outsider in the village (a tact which gets inverted in act 3). Their respective play elements counteract the intuition of the main components of play, largely being restricted to time management, traversal, and conversation - each mini-game itself is a new verb, yes, as well as diverting, but are more importantly to the argument for formalistic transgressiveness in Pentiment, they are new ways of detailing important elements of the mystery within the possibility of the setting. Compare this to What Remains of Edith Finch: that game is entirely new verbs being presented within the various short stories of the Finch family members. However, the main verb of the game is walking from within a first person perspective and interacting with context sensitive button prompts. These are the exact same interaction elements that comprise the storytelling possibilities of the various stories - the lack of dissimilarity, of focus on the formal components of the storytelling, bleeds through the narrative elements of the game and blur all the contrasting experiences of what are very ostensibly different people (a point dully made by their Andersonian mono-interests). In fairness, the one standout story within Edith Finch, you know the one, does break up the play by introducing a new set of interactions to reinforce a different perspective, only to place play back within familiar controls at the concluding sequence of the epitaph so that the player may feel both narrative and mechanical sympathy more strongly.

For finding a beautiful cousinry, take Gloriana by Kevin Huizenga, which is for my salt the best formal work in 21st comics. The various juxtaposing elements of traditional comic form, from the bordering, gutters, qualities of ink, page layout, information allowed with thought balloons, even the actual shape of the book itself, tell a broader story about life in suburbia than any of the narrative components within that we would see traditionally make up narratives of Gen X adulthood. When Huizenga transitions from a panel of a bowl falling, across a gutter and page turn, we are not merely seeing the collapse of time, but the discontinuity of timeline, connection between husband and wife, ironic plausibility with the reader, and sequence of events as they have been built up; all done by using a formal element instead of a narrative conceit. Pentiment’s comparative usage of such wizardry can be seen in one of its mini-games, most prominently those which have Andreas traversing the maze at the centre of the narrative. Not only is it performing the traditional role of such diversions within games, but it is also informing us of the various possibilities of the skin allowing reality to breathe, shuddering and breaking at the embarrassment of history’s actors, of the possibilities of travel (something which, again, is alerted and transgressed in act 3 by changing progressions and accessibility paths). This is a move of formal storytelling, and one which could not be inferred by either any other medium nor traditional narrative construction.

I’ve gone on longer than I intended with this review. It’s rare that games have so much to say, so much possibility in what they can convey. It’s rare that games feel like you are being talked up to, asked to consider the variability of our relations with ourselves as players and as actors utilising time we are allowed to use this interactive medium as a valuable way of seeing the humanity in our existence. How often do you get to play a game that inspects and values the work of Aristotle, Aquinas, Avicenna, and Albrecht, only to go on and consider the player to be of the same species and collar of them.

I don’t really have closing remarks. Pentiment is one of the best games I’ve ever played, and while many people will not like it, much less love it as much as I do, I think it is a masterpiece of human storytelling and compassion. And also Ein Traum is one of Lingua Ignota’s best songs, I kind of wish she’d played it at her show in Montréal.

It's ok.

I'm aware at this point that Stray has been dissected to hell and back, but I did want to get my thoughts out there in relation to a lot of the similar games that I've dubbed "Journey-likes" that I've also gone through somewhat recently. You know, those games where you travel from point A to B to C with tons of emphasis on atmospheric exploration and environmental storytelling with maybe some minor puzzles and other limited interactions involved. Keep in mind that this review may have minor spoilers in the form of me discussing gameplay and story design choices, but I'll try to make the discussion general enough as to not impact overall plot enjoyment.

While playing through the first hour and a half of Stray, I kept thinking back to this video by Matthewmatosis, in which he argues that an over-reliance upon context sensitivity in modern games both limits player control ("press X to initiate cutscene of action for every case") and player agency (that is, just walking around in an environment until a context-sensitive prompt tells you that something can be interacted with) and thus results in less interesting experiences. Granted, I'd like to think that I'm acclimated to Journey-likes at this point, and so came in not expecting too much difficult or deep interaction, and yet I still think that Stray goes too damn far in abusing context sensitivity as to significantly reduce meaningful engagement or difficulty.

The main gameplay loop consists as follows; as a cat, you walk around various environments, and simply perform the correct context sensitive interaction when you approach the relevant objects/individuals. There are plenty of walls and rugs to scratch that are marked by a triangle button prompt, plenty of NPCs to talk to that are marked with a square button prompt, and plenty of objects and ledges to jump to that prompt you to press the X button every time. The latter is easily the most problematic case here, because this turns navigation into what is more or less a task of walking forward until the context sensitive prompt tells you to press X to jump forward. There isn't even a risk of falling off ledges or jumping into the abyss; just keep moving forward until the prompt tells you to jump to the next object. Again, I understand that Journey-likes are generally not difficult at all, but this design decision oversimplifies gameplay to a baffling extent beyond other Journey-likes, and it could have been easily fixed if the game was just a regular 3D platformer; I know I'm not the only one who's brought this up either.

If the strict gameplay loop for the entire game was just what I experienced in the first hour and a half, I would most likely be even more disappointed than I am now. Fortunately, Stray eventually opens up to a few "hub" areas in its runtime where you can meander about to find scattered secrets and memories as well as chat up NPCs. However, it's not quite entirely removed from the Journey-like formula, as there are two caveats. Firstly, these hub areas are still governed by the rule of context-sensitive jumps, so exploration can almost feel automatic at times just walking around and mashing X to see where the cat will jump next. Secondly, while there are sidequests and main-story quests of fetching key items, talking to important NPCs, and solving some fairly basic visual recognition puzzles, there's really only one "solution" for every problem, resulting in what is ultimately a pretty linear approach for finishing the side quests and following the main story fetch quests in these hub areas. I admit here that I'm nitpicking, as this is probably the least significant case of railroading in Stray, but I do lament that there was a great opportunity here for more player creativity and that ultimately, it's just a well disguised case of sending the player down the preconceived path that kills a lot of the joy of discovery for me.

Let's quickly go over a few of the other more gameplay-heavy segments inbetween these hubs too. After the first robot city hub, there's a "puzzle" section where you have to outmanuever and trap these goo monsters (called the Zurk) to safely progress; while this section is not particularly difficult either, it's at least engaging in that successfully luring and shutting traps on the Zurk brings some degree of satisfaction since you can actually die (albeit still fairly unlikely). There are also multiple straight corridors where you just have to outrun the Zurk; again, there's not much difficulty once you realize that strictly holding down R2 and tilting the analog stick forward will allow you to avoid most of the Zurk, but it at least provides a nice rush thanks to the hurried and tense accompanying tracks and the scourge of Zurk just descending upon you.

As a counterpart to these running sections, Stray also features a more horror-game inspired survival section filled with dimly lit tight corridors, alien red pulsating webs, and sloshing sewer water infested with Zurk eggs. This is probably the most engaging section of the game, since you're provided with a zapper that can eliminate the Zurk, and since it overheats quite easily, you often have to kite and funnel Zurk to successfully dispatch them; it's a slight shame that you don't get to play with your toy for too long, but it most definitely does not outstay its welcome.

Near the end of the game are three forced stealth sections, one right after another. Nothing like a good ol fashioned "stay outside of the lit cone of sight" segment to slow the pace down a bit and get a bit more out of the price tag, right? Interestingly, most of the forced stealth is actually somewhat trivial, because there are really few lasting consequences to getting spotted by the drones. You can just run at max velocity through all of the stealth sections, dodging the bullets by maintaining your speed and rounding corners, and then just mash circle when you see the circle button prompt to dive into a cardboard box at the end of the segment and wait for the drones to deaggro and leave once they're gone. Which leaves me with this question: if it's this easy to cheese and disregard the forced stealth sections, then why were they implemented in the game in the first place?

I've mostly been lambasting the gameplay for the last few paragraphs, so I'll give the game props where it's due; I really do enjoy the ruined yet nostalgic backdrops of Stray. The ambient tunes that drop in and out as you explore the subterranean wastelands as well as the decaying posters and hastily scribbled graffiti on the concrete walls really help etch this feeling that while something great has definitely gone to pass, there still linger a few strays (no pun intended) that seek to find their own sources of hope in the sprawling underground. I do appreciate that the game really lets you take your time soaking in all the details here and there, with plenty of snug nooks where your cat can curl up while the camera slowly pans out to let you breathe in and forget about life for a while.

Ultimately, I find myself somewhat frustrated because as great of an idea as they have shown in the final product, I feel like they could have done so much more. I love the little moments like the cat walking on the keyboard to communicate with the AI or random jumbled notes being played as the cat walks across the piano keyboards, so why are these cute cat interactions with the environment so sparse? The interactions between your cat and your lil beep boop buddy are heartwarming and set up the mood perfectly, so why do the writers also insist on inserting so many side characters in an already short timespan that leave after an hour or so with not enough time to develop any strong lasting impressions? It's a ton of fun just mashing circle to hear meowing through the speaker while attracting Zurks, but why is that NPCs have no strong reactions to my cat's meow? There's a section near the end of the game where you have to communicate and cooperate with another big beep-boop without your robot buddy translating, and it's a fantastic subversion after getting used to just reading so many textboxes of translation from random NPCs, but this subversion is ultimately over within ten minutes or so, and I really feel like there was a fantastic squandered opportunity to force players to think outside of the box a bit more.

I won't dismiss the possibility that perhaps, I'm just a bit jaded after playing plenty of fairly structurally similar games over the last twelve months, with a few more potentially on the docket. That said, I can't help but lament that as fantastic as the concept is on paper, the way it plays out leaves a lot to be desired on my end. Even while considering the often hackneyed genre of Journey-likes, Stray feels too safe, too straightforward, and too scripted. As cute as it is jumping and scratching your way back to the surface, I feel like it could have been so much more compelling.

I really enjoyed both Limbo & Inside and was instantly intrigued by the art style and story of Somerville. However, I'm just over an hour into Somerville and it's going to be one of the rare game that I abandon. While the art style is unique and initially had me hooked, it's hard to glean what is interactive in the environment and, occasionally, just how to navigate it. The camera cutting from one location to the next instantly doesn't help this. Puzzles are unintuitive and the mechanics just haven't made a ton of sense to me. So maybe it gets better but I'm just not having fun playing this. It's fairly boring and tedious so far. Might watch a walkthrough to see where the story goes, but I'm done with the game.

It's a story-focused game that doesn't have an interesting hook to start with. Things don't get interesting until the halfway point. There's little interactivity in horror games like these, so there wasn't much to keep me entertained in the meantime. I was even falling a sleep during play sessions.

The puzzles in the game are pretty light. There are some puzzles that are more interesting and intricate in the second half of the game, but they are never challenging. The focus is just to uncover the story which leads to disappointing results. The characters of interest in the story all seem to have similar backstories about childhood trauma, and in one case, childhood trauma isn't enough to explain their behavior. The story feels pretty aimless too as Marianne moves from investigating one person who leads to another and another while I have no idea why any of them matter until the second half. It leads to moments where I forget who is who. I honestly forgot what even started this all off, and the ending is pretty bad.

The coolest part of this game is how they present Marianne's medium ability. She can see the spirit world and the living world at the same time. This is presented in the game with a split screen where one half shows the living world and the other half shows the spirit world. The two worlds look different and there are things to interact with that only appear in one of the worlds. This is cool only in presentation though. There's nothing interesting gameplay-wise they do with this. As I mentioned before, the puzzles are pretty light. The game just has me interact with an object in the spirit world to trigger something in the living world and vice versa.

There is a stealth element to this game because there is a monster that occasionally stalks you. This, thankfully, is kept to a minimum. I think there are only about 5 stealth sections in this game. They aren't that bad. They aren't good, but they aren't that bad. Getting caught is a one-hit kill, but the punishment isn't much as the stealth sections are short.

There just isn't much here to make this a game worth playing.