Sometimes your first impressions are wrong. I too found Dead Cells enthralling in the beginning. You stab and shoot and dodge and go: oh this. But the more I played, the less this mattered. What does this serve?

We still care too much about gamefeel. See Destiny. See also Celeste. There’s something icky about the way game critics fetishize it. That luscious feedback, that perfect extension of your will, that zone you wish to stay in forever. Gross.

I’m not here for your goodfeeling weapons. I’m here for enemies that fuck with my feelings. I’m here for encounters. But Dead Cells has no taste for that. Most of its enemies are locked to their tiny platforms, pacing like caged tigers, awaiting slaughter. It’s all discrete and exploitable. There’s no real dynamism. That precious this becomes rote. Nothing accumulates.

Except your cells, of course. Because Dead Cells never wants you to leave empty-handed. The metagame is all reassuring progress and new toys. It’s a people-pleaser wrapped in a hardcore skin. It’s roguelike comfort food, which goes against the whole point of randomness and permanent death. I don’t even care about getting good. I’m here for chance and uncertainty. I’m here to feel our contingency. And this game feeling, this, is not here.

What a sad game. So much writing. So much world-building. So much work.

And yet it doesn’t add up. Every likeable character, every piece of content, feels so isolated, disconnected. It’s the world as buffet. Everything, all of the time. Pile it high, go back for seconds, tenths, hundredths. But the fundamental structural problem remains.

I play not a female Qunari mage, shot down by Vivienne and Cassandra, settled down with Josephine, but an ever-quester, check-lister, loot-manager, skill-spammer, icon-follower, detail-gawker, conversation-exhauster, fool.

And lover? Not really. In Inquisition, love is just another quest. The reward? A canned scene. Also, despair.

Forgive the analogy, but Amnesia is one of those horror games that is good and scary so long as its fiction stays wrapped round its slight mechanical shoulders. In that stage of presentation and dress, the game is a good deal fun, with startles and moody atmosphere. We can love a game about nasty castle cooridoors down which terrible monsters amble as we shiver in cupboards listening to awful sounds and an unsettling score. And the torture, the screams for help from the innocents. These are good dress. But what if it slides off and we take in the naked horror game beneath? Well, Amnesia is not very good if we consider it just like that... but that is not all Amnesia is! Right?

I want to think so. Because this is part of the show: horror games thrive and perish within a small pocket of time where you're dumb enough to believe the threats are real, before you're jaded and see the skeletal mechanics covered over by the fictional dress it wears. And just because that time passes does it mean we should forget it completely? Aren't horror games good - amazing even! - for that brief period when we still believe? I want to think of that when I think about the way games make me feel.