Calling something "good with friends" is often the cruelest thing you can ever say about a multiplayer game. Yeah, you can have fun with friends in basically anything, it turns out friends are good, not Phasmophobia. And it's so easy to see that in Lethal Company, especially from the outside looking in - some bullshit lame horror coop horror game to scream at, acting as the new steam flavour of the month game to merely moisturise the slip and slide of socialisation.

Despite the resemblance, Lethal Company is not that. Flavour of the month, maybe, but versus the thousand souless PC games out there of it's breed it's truly closer to something like Dokapon Kingdom and hell, Dark Souls, for the kinds of emotion and socialisation it brings up.

Because truly, Lethal Company is a game about having a really shit job. There's no real sugarcoating it. It's a game about being explicitly underpaid for dangerous, tedius work salvaging objects from ugly factories, where the corporation you work under and the true majesty of visiting planets and experiencing it's fauna are so stripped back and corporatised that you don't even notice it. This setting and the gameplay really sets out a very clever vibe for the game, as frankly, it on it's own, is almost deliberately not fun, but it is a wonderful way of building up a camraderie between players and really get into the boots of a worker in a bad job slacking and goofing off a bit. On my first playthrough with friends I found some extraodinary catharsis in one of the gang spending some of our quota on a jukebox playing license free music and just having a jam for a while, and likewise, a good haul which takes some of the pressure off others is appreciated, and the "man in the chair" - the guy left behind at the ship to deal with doors, turrets etc, feels both valued as part of the team, but also themselves lonely, tense, awaiting their friend's safe return.

It is also, as a more obvious point, very funny. Basically every run of this game you'll make something funny will happen. A comrade fumbles a wonky jump to their death based on bad information. You walk just inside the range of your comrade's voice to hear them screaming for help for half a second. You watch as the man in the chair as a giant red dot slowly bears down on your comrade, try to warn them and then see the red dot taking delight in eating them, and there's so much more. It's surprising really as a game with so little going on in gameplay and so limited in variety of stuff that it keeps on bringing up new stupid shit to happen.

Its rarely legitimately scary, even in the rare case you're alone amongst monsters with all your friends dead. The stakes established are just set too low, the animations a bit too goofy for the intensity to ever feel too much. And that kinda folds back in on that "shit job" thematic of the whole thing. Being almost indifferent to the surprising variety of monsters, seeing them as much as obstacles as hell demons that want to eat your face, is ultimately part of the job. Yes, the fourth angel from Evangelion wandering around whilst you slowly crouchwalk across the map to your ship is tense, but almost amusingly tense. Gotta roll with it.

It's a delightful experience, really. If you wanted to you could linger on how cobbled together the whole thing feels right now and how limited the actual gameplay really is, but they do nothing to take away from the truly great times Lethal Company sparks. The closest a game will ever get to being on the last day of your christmas contract with debenhams and just slacking with the other temps, giving people discounts on their items for no good reason and occasionally the weeping angels from doctor who come out with a giant spider and they're in the ONE hallway that leads back to the exit and Ernesto is dead, damn.

hellsinker: hello! welcome to hellsinker. would you like to learn how to play?

me: sure!

hellsinker: alright, so first things first, this is a bullet hell shoot'em'up with three unique playable characters: DEADLIAR, FOSSIL MAIDEN, and MINOGAME, plus one unlockable character. hellsinker has a unique emphasis on strategy and problem solving with a special scoring system and different routes.

me: cool!

hellsinker: you have a weapon, which can charge, a subweapon, and a special move. there's also a slowdown button. you can combine and time these to do different special attacks. when youre holding down fire you'll also have a SUPPRESSION RADIUS around you where some enemy bullets slow down and you can even delete some! if you get close to an enemy, you can SEAL them, which stops them from firing.

me: got it!

hellsinker: on the left side of the screen, you're gonna see a bunch of HUD info. let's break it down. first, you can see how many lives you have left. you can also earn more lives. pretty self explanatory

me: right. so if i lose them all it's game over?

hellsinker: yeah. well no, you'll get a chance to continue. but it's not like a normal continue, you only get one and it changes the game significantly, and you can lock yourself out of a continue. anyway let's get back to the bars. next from the top is SOL. SOL determines the strength of your main shot but is also your DISCHARGE gauge, so you have to balance that. LUNA just below it determines how fast you fire.

me: alright

hellsinker: okay so next up is STELLA. the more STELLA you have, the more bullets enemies will fire. your score will also scale with STELLA. you can increase and decrease STELLA with item pickups, or by aggressive/defensive play respectively, that kind of stuff. you can acquire APPEASEMENT that will help you decrease your STELLA if you graze the requisite number thus spawning two OLD RELICS

me: hm

hellsinker: finally, TERRA starts at 240. you lose TERRA if you die, but also if you avoid LIFE CHIPS and stuff like that. oh, also, it goes down if you finish a level. if it hits zero, as the next segment, you'll be sent to the Shrine of Farewell

me: what

hellsinker: on the other side of the screen, we have at the top your autobomb status, which can be set to ASPIRANT, SOLIDSTATE, or ADEPT. as a reminder, your DISCHARGE and Subweapon will behave differently based on whether you're holding the fire button down, the state of your gauges, etc. after that, you have the Spirit score, one of the three separate scoring systems in hellsinker. it's represented by three bars which represent the base 10 decimal digit values of your Spirit score. you can get a BREAKTHROUGH at 5200 Spirit, unless youve triggered the other BREAKTHROUGH in Kills, in which case it takes 6200.

me: wait

hellsinker: there's also a Kill score, which can also trigger a BREAKTHROUGH at 2500 or 5000 kills. BREAKTHROUGH will reset the threshold of LIFE CHIPS necessary to earn an IMMORTALITY EXTEND (80+40n pts) and sets said bonus to 200. Below that is Token score, which is like the other two but has no BREAK, and is earned by collecting LUNA DROPLETS (which have inverted gravity mind you), which also slightly increases your LUNA, and DROPLETS increase in value arithmetically.

me: uh

hellsinker: okay, so remember TERRA? so the Shrine of Farewell is a bonus stage boss rush but you get infinite lives. STELLA is constantly rising. there are four bosses, and one extra. your Spirit score drops to zero though. oh, also, BOOTLEG GHOST doesnt work while you're here.

me: bootleg ghost????

hellsinker: because your Spirit score is reset (m=0) you're probably worried about your score, but don't worry, you get the chance to earn your Spirit back in the Shrine of Farewell by collecting Crystals. after this, TERRA is disabled for the rest of the run, so make sure to maximize your spirit-to-crystal ratio if you're chasing a Spirit based high-score route, but its also useful if you're going for survival. hard limit of segment 7

me: wait but

hellsinker: as i’m sure you inferred by now, along with executive fire, the primary engagement of HELLSINKER regardless of which GRAVEYARD EXECUTOR you’ve selected (and agnostic of MISTELTOE configuration) is one of: α) management of SOL (DISCHARGE when necessary), LUNA, and SUBWEAPON gauges by destruction, collection, and timing β) safely managing proximity between mutable projectiles while evading needletype and other immutables γ) proximity protocol beta applied to adversaries to reduce production of danger δ) judiciously balancing STELLA with RELICS and transubstantiation of mutables into STELLA, in order to synthesize needs for evasion and for Spirit/Kills ε) maximizing destruction (Kills), Spirit, and Token ζ) achieving IMMORTALITY EXTENDS through BREAKTHROUGH (5.2k(+1k)m || 2.5k(⋅2)d) and LIFE CHIP acquisition η) again, doing all this while evading and using the proper attack protocols contingent on your EXECUTOR and/or MISTELTOE θ) managing TERRA reducing actions in order to deploy the visit to the Shrine of Farewell strategically, such as to maximize Spirit (m) prior: 1 Crystal (i) = 0.5% m1, upper bound of n = 424i (disambiguation: non-summated) ergo maximal execution miΣ(n424) = 2.12 * pre-Shrine.

me:

hellsinker: alright! that just about covers the basics. ready to start playing?

me: i'm still working on the left side of the screen

In the old days, the cry in the joints, when they were ready to close, was “you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” -- Boston Herald (March 5, 1944) p. 19, col. 3

The meal is finished, the bill awaiting payment. The din of called orders and いらっしゃいませ indirect signs to leave. Maybe there's a concrete reason for lingering. The train won't arrive for a while. You're waiting for someone to finish shopping. The landlord is fixing the AC. Your parents have been fighting. You get an hour for lunch. Returning home means a slow spiral of distraction until rest and the cycle begins anew tomorrow.

A State Police office and a State Policewoman were on the premises when the Glass Hut was raided in 1960. They reported George Tecci, as was his custom, notified the patrons just before 1 a.m., “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” -- Record American (August 11, 1964) p. 8, cols. 2-3

Does the why matter? Isn't it enough to not want to go home? Isn't it enough to just want to be for a moment? The toll has already been paid, a bowl of negi ramen. Does that not grant me the opportunity to exist in space and time without spending more? The park is too far, my head too aching, the air too chill. I am here. Let me be here. Do I need a reason to exist, to be listless?

食い終わったらさっさと帰れ

There's no point to pecking at the oil in my ramen. No more than there is to counting the grains of rice in a bowl. No more than there is to playing any game. No more than there is to doing anything. Work and leisure both a conscious and unconscious consumption of finite time in exchange for a something which is nothing in truth. Everything is passing time until we die. It might be Zen or Stoicism or Ascetic. In any case, I choose how I while away my dwindling moments.

That, is itself, a freedom.

some of the fellas here are in DIRE need of reeducation

total blast from start to finish - even after the third playthrough. narratively it's just the right amount of explanation vs interpretation with a compelling cast whose voices are so well spoken that you'll remember the mains (especially walter and rusty) in full color even without putting a single name to face

they lend an incredible amount of authenticity to the story, which is pretty subtle overall and relies on foreshadowing and tension more so than big twists. i'll keep it vague and just say that when it comes to solidifying the routes, megaten ain't got shit

as far as combat goes, it feels great and build variety is top notch. there's something to be said about how some playstyles can outshine others in terms of efficiency/simplicity, but the biggest strength of the AC customization is that you're ultimately able to use whatever you enjoy (within the compromises of weight/energy restrictions, anyway). 100% buy/sell rates ensure you can always experiment and try new things too

some would claim this stops being the case with the "big bosses", which the same people tend to compare towards sekiro and dark souls, but i'd argue that's a case of what we in the biz refer to as a "skill issue" and nothing less. simply put - you can beat balteus with whatever the hell you want - i used two shitty assault rifles because i didn't want to restart the mission and it worked just fine (sure it took four hours of trial and error, but still - i got really good after that!)

also: this game's fucking gorgeous. and it only ramps up progressively more on that front as it goes on. i swear each chapter has at least 3 wallpaper worthy shots in cutscenes alone. music's killer too - more subdued than what you'd probably expect from hoshino (most of the time) but i dig the reznor vibes just as much as the autotuned dog barks, y'know?

at first i didn't really want to write a long review here, but it felt wrong just submitting a vague joke that only certain people would understand. so instead i decided to write that exact same joke anyway, but sandwich this review between it so i'd feel like i still did justice on one of my favorite games in the past ten years. now i'm the freelancer who has it all

main system: activating combat mode

Playstation 1 gothic expressionism is odd because it relies on both low poly 3d but also the then-underestimated aspect of infinite space and rupture in level design, even today many games yearn for such a surreal, labyrinthine structure that was commonplace then before being cast aside for the sake of normality, that aesthetic survives in games such as <i>Ultrakill</i> and the like which pride themselves on such exaggerated distances and spaces and scale- <i>Iron Lung</i> perhaps delves at the root of the expression by having the game take place in a very tiny submarine, theres no room for playing with scale even though the submarine itself remains gorgeous in its deep, disgusting browns, the blood ocean seeping in, as the epilogue describes, like an open would that consumes the planet, the PS1-Gothic found power in getting lost within these structures (one can say <i>soulsborne, Silent Hill</i> were directly decended by this inclination) but the only structures here are stripped to their bareness, no longer even relying on sight, just machinic thought and blank spaces, gameplay-wise <i>Iron Lung</i> owes to <i>Space Invaders</i> as much as it does lovecraft, navigation itself is less trial and error or horror and more the dread of the death itself manifesting in limitation, probably the best allegory for biopolitics in a game since <i>Metal Gear</i> for the NES

I've got to commend P5R on the fact that it assumes all Persona 5 fans must already accept that the pacing is a lost cause and lean in even further into its absurd longevity.

But maybe when I feel a game doesnt respect my time when I play it through a fucking pandemic and am stuck in my house playing vidya more than ever before, it can actually fuck off.

There's good changes in Royal, from the minor to the more substantial, and there are things I like a lot about P5 in general. Its art style is fantastic, the soundtrack is a banger, it's very cozy. Royal makes appreciated changes to combat, bosses and dungeons, and theres a bunch of little things improved throughout the whole game.

The extra story content in this game should absolutely have been like the Answer in FES where you can just launch with it. Yes, the Answer is garbage, and there's a bunch of little changes in the main story but 90% of the game being a retread of a story that doesn't really stand up to the scruitiny of me getting increasingly frustrated at it.

And the thing is, if P5R was an edit, maybe with an extra story added at the end seperately like the answer, it could have been really great. Persona 5 is a game that could have more interesting story content added whilst also being shorter. Dungeons and characters could be consolidated, the introduction could be shortened, the calendar could be made basically half as long - but Royal does none of this.

It's a shame, really. If this game was 50 hours instead of 100+ I could probably see past more of it's issues. Until then, fuck it.

I love hyper demon (HD). It improved upon the core appeal of devil daggers (DD) while fixing some of its biggest flaws. I believe it's one of the best spiritual sequels ever made (in the ballpark of DOOM, Dark Souls, and Bayonetta).

I saw the following one sentence 1.5 star review on here recently:
"Hey remember when the first game didn't need pages and pages of tutorials"

This review is funny to me because it isolates one of the biggest flaws of DD but touts it as something essential. DD didn't have a tutorials menu. But what is a tutorial? Is it just something the game labels as 'tutorial'? Must a tutorial be separate from the game proper? I don't think so; I argue that DD's first few minutes serves as enemy tutoriaIs in all except name. Among many other changes that improve replayability, HD extracts and largely removes these enemy tutorials. I only played each of the tutorials in HD once. However, because they are inextricably baked into DD, I played each of the enemy tutorials in DD hundreds of times. Am I supposed to believe this is a good thing?

It is common now for people (including the 1.5 star reviewer above) to believe that the 'correct' way to design games is to have seamless, built-in 'tutorials' that show the player how to interact with something rather than telling them. Ideally, these don't bring attention to themselves and are thus not labeled by the game as tutorials. It works great for many games, but DD->HD highlights a way in which a more 'traditional' approach to tutorials can be better for replayability. It's difficult to hide/obscure a tutorial and also make it optional because an unknowing/first-time player won't know not to skip it. This means that hidden tutorials are often mandatory, ensuring that experienced players still have to go through the tutorial even though they won't gain anything from it. DD has an extreme version of this, in my view. Sorath (DD/HD dev) recognized this, removed the tutorials and made them optional. In doing so, they had to reveal the tutorials as what they are which is maybe not ideal but, in my opinion, is completely worth it for the boost to replayability of HD over DD. You only live for a limited amount of time, please don't spend it replaying tutorials.

Kind of weird that, even with companies like Dodge Roll naming themselves after movement mechanics, the general dungeon-crawler inspired indie mass hasn't really congregated that much around the simple delight of planar traversal in any of its various games that take Zelda's screen by screen transition template. There was bound to be a game that understands how purely distilled a game's desirability can be, unscientifically, of course, according to this metric, by how good it feels to crank up the PC's movement speed and race across a room, especially if you get to bob and weave around enemies while maintaining your hyper-sonic momentum. Disc Room feels like if you modded Isaac to spawn only trap rooms, start the player with 2.0 speed, acquire 5 Mini Mushes, and get wrapped in a cohesive and more generally pleasing skin.

There is a lot of scholarship on how games do or do not enforce defensive types of play, but Disc Room puts forth in its environmental interaction type a soft thesis that, maybe, defensive play is born out of offensive play being a counter-balance to a defensive moveset. In each Disc (filled) Room, having no ability to counteract the danger existentially, the player never has the opportunity to rest on hope for an exsanguination of the threats present by encamping in cowed ferocity; the only progressive path is that which hurdles play towards the requirements for long term survival, which herein is that which is defined by aggressively seeking the tidiest lack of death in immediacy.

beautifully fantastic and creative the way that they create a whole unique mini-world for each minigame. on its own each minigame seems unassuming, especially in video clips or screenshots. as a whole tho, it makes the game feel like an unlimited toybox with new ideas every moment, and as the remixes scale up in difficulty an entirely more complex game is welded together from the individual minigames. something about the touch screen combines well with this model of rhythm game, possibly because actions like shaking maracas, strumming a guitar, or pounding a drum feel so much more tactile. it's not very long (tho will test your abilities quite a bit), but this is something I return to time and time again to get more superbs and perfects wherever I can.

I think I've hit my skill ceiling for some extent for this game so I'm not going to grind it like I have been in the last month since I bought it. I now have excellents on my fav 9.5* songs (jigsaw puzzle, envy cat walk, and gaikotsu gakudan to riria) and have five 10* songs under my belt with none of the others seeming within reach. none of the dlc I don't have is very attractive to me and the only 9*s I haven't cleared are ones like nyanyanyan or rin-chan now that I don't like LOL.

this is the first arcade-quality rhythm game I've sunk a lot of time into, and it's pushed me to want to explore more games in this style that I can easily access at home thanks to the high difficulty curve and huge pool of songs. it's a good entry point for this style of rhythm game for those who have played the console entries especially thanks to the similarites in charts between the console and arcade versions, and I think with that experience it gave me a leg up even when adjusting to how brutal this game can be from 9* and up. this game emphasizes hand independence far more than the console games do, and it requires a whole new layer of muscle memory just to get to the point where sight reading even easier extreme charts is possible. the player is expected to recognize combinations of notes in doubles or even triples and press the right combinations, often at high speeds at upper difficulties. this was very frustrating to me when I first started playing, but with enough practice it eventually does become much easier to do... if you're willing to struggle for 10 or so hours. there's also an increased focus on fast alternating strings between two separate buttons than the console games, though this is a welcome addition to the difficulty, as it felt like an unexplored concept previously.

the song list is quite solid, especially if you get the season 1 dlc in a bundle like I did (especially when it's on sale). out of the pdmm-specific additions, the aforementioned jigsaw puzzle is a delightfully challenging song, along with the bouncy ooedo julianight. while project diva has always had good swing tunes (colorful x sexy and blackjack come to mind), the new track jitterbug takes a stab at a highly dense swung chart via electroswing, giving the beatmap a weird push and pull between a straight backbeat and jazzy horns. the rest of them are pretty solid additions, though deco*27's song hibana is offensively similar to his previous song ghost rule (and neither is very good!). a lot of these have 2D animated PVs, and many of them are anniversary songs as well, reflecting both the age and decline of the vocaloid brand as well as the 10th anniversary of the project diva series.

more broadly for project diva arcade/future tone's song list as a whole, it became pretty apparent to me that there's a sharp divide between the pre-future tone songs (mainly from the psp games) and the post-future tone songs in terms of chart design. older charts impart less visual information on the patterns and often rely too heavily on confusing note-spam, whereas newer songs reward dexterity and close adherance to the rhythmic quirks of the song. this is especially bad in more difficult songs such as saihate and po pi po, which are a nuisance to learn. thankfully, the extra extreme charts make up for this by providing modern reinterpretations of the charts, some of which are more legible than the original. others that had extremely bland charts originally (sound and musou sketch come to mind) get a much needed injection of creativity to the charts from their exex variations; it fixes that feeling of disappointment when a song you love ends up having a boring chart. the later and later the songs were added the more exciting their charts are, and the more they feel like the designers had an idea with each song and wanted to iterate them to their obvious conclusion rather than just attempting to confuse sight readers. not every chart is great of course, and some very good ones have bizarre or misaligned sections, but given the size of the song roster I can't go too hard on the developers.

what does hurt this game though is the lack of access to arcade peripherals to play it with, specifically in terms of their cost. controller is still a perfectly fine way to play this game, but it feels like endgame charts are only viable if each of the triggers/bumpers are mapped to an individual face button. this is due to several reasons: for one there are often doubles and singles interspersed in such a way that is very doable on the arcade controls but very tricky with only two thumbs, and secondly the arcade game strongly incentivizes a button-hold mechanic that is very difficult to do without extra fingers for assistance. with face buttons also mapped to the shoulder buttons, there's a lot of flexibilty that comes at the price of requiring the utmost coordination between six of your fingers, along with the difficulty in clearing 10* charts, the controller layout also affects the difficulty for getting excellents, which is tuned for arcade play where holds are much easier. these holds can add up to 5% onto your final score, which is rather significant when aiming for a 95% excellent. without them, you must rely on maintaining a large combo. older console pd games would generally have about 20-30 notes of leeway for a given song to get an excellent, while here it can sometimes be less than five. I can't say it's a design flaw, since this game was in arcades long before a console release ever happened, but it's something to consider if you're debating getting into this game.

even with the punishing difficulty, I think this is a top-notch rhythm game, and one that might be fun even if you don't have a background in music or the rhythm game genre. those wishing to relive their vocaloid memories have a wide swath of both classic and modern tracks to play, while those wishing to sink their teeth into higher-level play will have a steep but satisfying climb ahead of them. it's unquestionably sega flexing their arcade chops, and I really hope I get to try a proper arcade cabinet of it sometime in the near future.

It's not as good as AC+R. I don't think it's particularly close, even. The lobbies barely work, the combat system is a bit too simplified, the wallbreak system is dumb, and frankly, there isnt that much do actually do in the game.

But it is very, very fun. When you actually get the game going, all the little niggles and issues strive has get washed out by the sheer wave of positive energy that comes when the battles get going, when the music's loud and the presentation is absolutely glorious.

I know its easy to enjoy anything with friends, but doing sets with Friends in strive, and for that matter, AC+R is just special. There's something about the sheer positivity and dedication to rule of cool about the series, along with the awesome characters and music, that just makes for an absolute whale of a time, ensuing with laughs, trying to avoid singing along with Chipp's theme in the discord call, and going "ooo" as your friend dunks you in the corner with an awesome Zato combo.

Particularly in these grim times, Guilty Gear has been special for me. Maybe the only thing i've played where even for a little bit, the worries of the world truly just give way to the sheer personality and fun of it all. And whilst Strive may not be truly as good as AC+R - it still has it's energy. And that's all that really matters to me.

To anyone who i've played Guilty Gear with in the past few months - Thank you.

I think I’m done with expecting things from summations, or rather, from explications of quality derived from experientialist assessment, in video games criticism. Time and time again, I hear someone or some article wax languidly on the pertaining of an ur-secret amalgamation to any game’s individual alchemy that renders a feeling of unique golden sublimity within software; washes of copper green roof tiling flaked away on the controller, colonnades, or keyboard - an unstiffening from historical input that has become a coral encrusted cloister of routine, religiously cycling through 1-1s or Dust 2s in place of rapture - that reveal the lithe and heavenly joisted, divinely scaffolded, intelligently designed liquid azure which creates the game of life under the crackling veins of half real, half gone painted cages. I hear this proselytising, from street corners and from the corners of the internet, and I rush to play Control because of The Ashtray Maze, or Titanfall 2 because of Effect and Cause, or Mankind Divided because of Prague. I sit in a pew, plug in for 6 hours to wait for that divine spark to reach me, and then once I pass through the sizzling whizz and shimmer of the Roman Candle’s burst, I am left like Eve and Adam and Michaelangelo: somehow apart, despite appearances, from that touch that seemed prevalent to others and made for us all. Maybe it’s beautiful, or maybe poorly restored, but it’s nevertheless the heavenly host hosted online.

That’s AAA gaming’s trick: made for everybody, delivered to every screen, and connected to the lower level of consciousness while being treated as nutrition came naturally intuited when really it is just ubiquitously conditioned. Nothing is challenging in a way that isn’t minute finger pushups, nor satisfying in a way that isn’t a set of exercises coming to their final repetition and mirror shewn form perfection: the rote exercise of wrapping templated interaction in the sheen of revolutionary systems design or narrative design is as shallow as wearing newly coloured shorts to assume a different degree of squat. And look, that all sounds very negative, but it’s not like this isn’t something which wasn’t built to be as it is: all mass market art has aimed for the middle, and much of the most commonly recognised masterpieces of art are these middle brow, carb and salt heavy, mass product ventures. These are movies like It’s A Wonderful Life or The Godfather, ballets like The Nutcracker or Sleeping Beauty, musicals like West Side Story and Les Mis, or games like RE4 and The Witcher 3: all are meant to hit low, hit hard, and connect broadly to get through on second base. Sometimes they are surprise home runs or go straight to the pitcher, but they are designed to get on base, that’s all.

The fact that everyone seemingly knows this, that we are being catered to in a way that explicitly shows that publishers (perhaps more so than devs, but probably not always) want to barely hold aloft the vessel of gaming above the watermark, is what brings me to finally recusing myself of any sort of stocking up expectation from the experiential praise AAA games get on release and in summation come December. Journalists and essayists who monthly extoll virtues and vices, cardinal sins and heavenly virtues, about the ur-tentpole delivering on expectations of not even property but on fulfilment of artistic attenuation, on the promise that the foundational inlay of profit generating internal ecology to the game is finally cohabitant, even dominated by, the accessorised partitioning (post the fact) of accessible humanity within the work do so with the knowledge of the vapid state of AAA games; the lack of identity, depth, or of empathy proffered overtly in these games weekly is met with such drastic extensions of one’s own powers of humanity that studios like Blizzard or Bethesda feel confident in offering flavourless mulch with the expectation that all necessary characterisation of their simulation will be filled in by the player. This has occurred for nearly every AAA game, from one source or another, since the turn towards prestige in the late aughts - all assumptions of character, pathos, or wit are now somehow granted to anything with enough fidelity to create a world which may hold its players seat of human courage, but can only, at best, render its own simulacra of such stillborn.

I’m not saying that any significant majority of the critical writing done on games from the AAA sphere of the medium is bad or dishonest, particularly not that writing which is able to articulate the sphere itself and why these highly sucralose rich products both work and appeal to wide demographics (I think William Hughes from the A.V. Club walks this line frequently with great aplomb), but I do think there is something regrettable about taking a primarily kinaesthetic experience like those listed above and transmuting both pathos and one’s seal of quality because the player was able to map on emotional strife and a conquering of such onto that experiential hurdle, all without the extension in return of the mechanics in the game to a actual thematic purpose, a la Spec Ops. Games should be able to render a language and introspection of quality which engages forcefully with the mechanical and interactive qualities inherent to it, not through sidelong implants of emotional turpitude perpendicularly inseminated, but head on and with appropriate function. Because the games listed above are not what we can, comparatively, call good due to their storytelling nor for their pathos, but most executively for their play, they are failing, in their minor ways, because they offer canvases for spreads of emotion and theme as such but ask the player to BYOB instead of providing nourishment on its own wonderful layout. As works in games ‘mature’, comparisons inflected within by AAA games own referential quality to media articles that are meant to inspire maturity and gravitas in comparison (looking at you MGS V with all that Moby Dick shit), the comparative nature of criticism must develop so as to draw out the cumulative quality, not reflect our own natures of complexity onto the games we play.

FINALLY, that brings me to Returnal. Embarrassingly, I’ve just put a good deal of personal opinion into what is supposed to be my overview of a game, mostly in reaction to a select few critics that I read both in anticipation for the game and in afterward help for the locution of my feelings Returnal elicited, but if this seems unsatisfying as appendix to read, let that contribute to my point. Returnal loops back into my point above as this: the game’s poorly mechanised roguelike structure, with the rote and underbaked narrative pinning its death and restart shuttle running, seems to surround a legitimately compelling, but obviously goofy and gamified play (which is to say gamified with hitboxes and gun mods and what else goes into the play, not the metaphorical layer of hell Selene puts over herself to justify the play. I hope it doesn’t need to be said, but when justifying your player character’s constructs of play within a narrative, herein the eternal penitence Selene’s delusions and guilt force on her through the play metaphor, the play metaphor needs to be justified yet again to the player; we engage in the play, not the delusion, so a further layer above needs to be accessible to us and not Selene.), but fails to, except for under highly specific circumstances, draw any useful or poignant meaning from the interactions between action and strictly narrative text.

The roguelike structure itself is probably the most significant issue in creating a playspace which goes through the gestation of a pregnant theme, despite it also being the aspect of Returnal’s design to note on how all the meta systems - gun stats, artefacts, consumables, parasites, etc. - to those most baked into the looping, which is to say the physics of Selene and her basic abilities to point, shoot, run, and jump; without the roguelike structure, the nature of almost everything that serves to progress play becomes utterly useless cruft, as well as functionless as iterating material to reconfigure and force usage. The roguelike structure is a monkey’s paw wish for game devs, one which allows for as broad as can be desired a system space: if a dev wants to add in 80 different interacting possible arms of their game, they can be assured that more, if not all, of those arms will be interacted with more consistently in a roguelike than in a strictly linear or open world game, simply because sometimes that mechanic will be all the player has on a run. The enormous, hugely hindering, flaw to this is that the mechanic, regardless of its name, function, art, or anything else above the game’s spreadsheet, is reduced to its function alone. When death is the truest end state of a mechanics use case, and as death is the functioning, one could argue insoluble, end state of videogame pathos, then all that is baked into giving the mechanics centred in a roguelike is lost. The ur-roguelike, Isaac, is so inculcated with this that oftentimes common parlance in its community denotes an item name in the lingua franca with its description, not its actual item label. Returnal seeks to bake around this nut with the narrative including a death inclusive meaning, as well as later on, the personal hell narrative. But this then doubles down on the foibles of roguelike structure. Not only is the genre so cemented with its expectations now, but if the player never or infrequently dies, as was my experience, then not only is the value of the typified roguelike mechanical arm stripped of its narrative weight due to the lack of death repetition (something which doesn’t happen so much with a game like Isaac, given that that game draws its narrative weight and iconography from emotions and recognition excited external to play), but also its mechanical weight as well. I never got to experiment with the roguelike possibilities, nor feel the true hell of unstable and chaotic ground, because I died to Phrike once, then steam rolled through the game with only two more deaths total, rendering both sources to possibly draw meaning from inert and barren.

There is also the general issue with the design of the consistent mechanics as well, not just in their nebulously justifiable narrative utility as Selene’s specific hell that is traumatically brought into being, but more specifically herein with how they mesh in the second to second play. There’s no getting past the readability of the levels, which inexplicably were seemingly designed to match the appearances of enemies in such a way as to give them complete camouflage in whatever environment they spawn in (enemies with tendrils are surrounded by anemone like plants, square and concrete enemies are ensconced in a brutalist architecture, etc.). This is an issue which feels like it shouldn’t have gotten past testing both for failing its lack of functioning for immediate play but also for the aggressiveness with which so many lit and moving textures tank performance, but also feels like it should have failed at the start of the project for how generally plain and common the designs are. Nothing really feels, in Returnal, like a unique and specific design, which if it were a pure narrative-free experience wouldn’t be anywhere near the issue it is, but for a highly localised and psychologically terrifying experience, one would hope that the tribulations faced would themselves reveal more about Selene as a character (and yes, they do later on, but in as equally a basic and unthought out way as the generic designs of the earlier, more rote sci-fi, way). The arena rooms themselves are frankly underbaked as well, not just in the too lacking of variety inset within the rotation of them to each zone - maybe 10-15 total per environment - but in how little they seem to complicate and excite possibilities of the mechanical base that is available to an everyday version of Selene in the game. Selene is, in fact, a very fun character to move around and shoot with. Actually, a brief slew of praise for Returnal, because I had a lot of fun playing through it, despite all that I’ve said above

- The amount of interesting cost/benefit choices offered up is incredible: on a minute to minute basis, the player is getting consistent possibilities for pain and pleasure that could knock the run into next gear (although if we’re being honest, unless you’re upping protection or damage, it isn’t usually worth any downside) or knock Selene on her ass. The pain/pleasure dichotomy is so powerful that it feels more of a promise on the Cenobites in Hellraiser than any of those movies ever did.

- Jane Elizabeth Perry’s VO for Selene, almost totally done in isolation of any other characters to draw reaction from, impresses more than any other AAA game’s performances from the last few years. It is a treat, and despite the bungling of the system narrative in my playthrough, carries weight across the entire play as something with genuine pathos.

- As above stated, the movement and shooting never feels anything less than incredible. So much weight is included and accounted for in every action - the shotgun nearly rips its barrel apart with every blast, the pylons screech with searing wounds, and Selene lands so coolly with earth shattering descents that I felt my knees give out with every impact. Kinaesthetic masterclass.

Anyways, all this praise is situated in rooms that don’t really need you to engage with any of the excellent bits, because tight concentric circle strafes will get the job done every time.

To bring this back to the beginning, I am nothing if not disappointed by Returnal. It’s not a bad game but it was talked about badly; the praise for its themes are dependent on highly specific play experiences, as well as on bringing an enormous amount of self implication to any given read that comes across as highly thought of the game. The trials of its design were underlaid in the frenzy that came in discussing the polish a AAA game brought to the already highly tuned roguelike formula, a formula which more suits the indie sphere which honed it to shining. This unfortunate discussion cycle damned my experience with the game, which I suppose was burdened in the concert I played it with my own naivete in expecting depth from a game released for $80. Really, you get what you pay for.