really split here. the mechanics, the framing onto the animation, especially the immaculate first person puzzles, were engrossing to me. i love a good romp around spaces while micromanaging an inventory and avoiding enemies. however, the blatant, almost pandering references to other media coupled with an extremely abstracted storytelling structure just sort of punctured the work and deflated it. collapsed the narrative space entirely. i think you need a certain strength of theme to have the narrative economy to do things like "scene intentionally left out" -- and near the final boss fight i was begging for the game to end. it sincerely reminds me of bakemonogatari. no other way really to express it: the writing is amateur hour. an incredibly talented production taxed in this way. a shame.

abandoned after lady butterfly, during seven spears. 'not my shit', which it could be argued, is less the grounds for a critical assessment than admission of defeat. the elegant linearity of the level designs, all heading to predictable difficulty choke points in boss fights, means that one doesn't so much inhabit the world of sekiro as its mechanics. there is nothing here beyond wolf's capabilities, activated through training one's nervous system to align with contextual demands, and so the joke about fromsoftware games being rhythm games is actually true of this one. you must respond in a pre-given way to the rhythm, and this gives sekiro a kind of kinesthetic purity i wish i could appreciate more than i do.

but so what i wanted from lady butterfly was the heavy sense of accomplishment i get from any game with considerable challenge — between the weightless noise of the battle and cue to activate a 'death animation', however, i returned to the world without catharsis and doubting anything had ever really occurred. perhaps this is due to the repetition of boss battles, that because the next is up in fifteen minutes, this one's already been forgotten to make room for the next set of steps to memorise. or perhaps this weightlessness is inherent to the shinobi. the camera is placed further from the body than in other fromsoftware games, which communicates the broader field of possibilities available to wolf across any given environment. (he scales walls, ducks beneath things, flings himself across ravines). this also though gives a sense of remoteness to the fights which should require intimacy — instead of a red symbol flashing up to cue a response, it would be nice to actually see the actions performed by our adversaries in order to anticipate a response. unfortunately though they all look like miniatures you are to deal with through a kind of microscope. in the much desired 'flow state' of play you are an abstract flurry of white slices, and the enemy only the distant recipient of the barrage. i like everyone else have praised the dance-like flow of bloodborne, but the emphasis on fluidity here does not have the requisite physicality to be called dance.

it's a pity, because the stealth sections between bosses are some of the most fun i've had in a game by this developer. the camera closes in, and the space becomes vivid.

i had every intention of finishing it just to say 'i dislike this game and have the right to say so' but jesus christ i'm old who cares

Unpleasant by design, and, but, hauntingly beautiful. There seems little point in mastering the (very) difficult combat when it's all in the service of something so fragmented, maddening. For Jack It's like a hunger, a thirst, and for us it's an endless grind that doesn't even have the decency to feel continuous. Princess Sarah looks at Jack's face You have more scars — and so within the world of Stranger of Paradise he's an enduring Jack that rises and falls and comes back insistent. But to the player he's a wind-up toy, materialising in spaces, soaking himself in blood, repeating phrases, and dematerialising again. The central hub is only the menus available in the world map; the world map, stripped of navigation, is only the holographic top-layer. Every level is a different Jack with the same programmed phrases, the same lost memories, the same vague sense that if he gets to the end of this tunnel maybe this will be the last one. But over and over another appears at the end, a hollow shell reproduction from another Final Fantasy stripped of context and placed within the amnesiac Stranger of Paradise. The context without context. The origin without origin.

The will to remake something is the nostalgic return to Paradise. That timeless time where everything was okay and every new thing seemed to open a horizon for future discovery. Notably, beginning with Kingdom Hearts, it's Testsuya Nomura who has been elected custodian of Paradise: the one evoked by childhood memories of Disney, and Final Fantasy's turn of the millennium futurist spectacle. It's also Nomura who is chiefly concerned with the fact that terrestrial Paradise is an impossibility that only reveals itself in hindsight. To have the tools with which to recognise Paradise is to find oneself on the other side of the Fall, only now with the ungraspable that one cannot let go of lodged into the heart like a wound or like a chasm. Many speak of the opening of Final Fantasy VII as one of those rare moments where the future was here and everything felt possible, and so they cast the infinite promise once experienced within the language of nostalgia, which is the romance of the past's finitude. Note this paradox, because this is the difference between Paradise as another name for Eden, and Paradise as the thing that comes later. One unfolds hopeful into the unknown, and the other retracts, chasing only that originary feeling of the infinite. Nomura will simulate this feeling in Final Fantasy VII Remake, but then he will tell you that it stops there because this is only the simulation of a feeling. While you can simulate the idea of Paradise as much as you desire through each new generation of technology, terrestrial Paradise as you know it is gone.

The Paradise we now desire is not the arrival of the future but the prelapsarian point of origin. Nomura's rejection of Paradise is that of the Origin, because he knows that under these conditions if Paradise were to arrive, we, ever occupied by the unrecoverable origin, would be Strangers to it. And so what he does is present the Origin but fills it with ghosts who recognise that this is not the real Origin, because they have already been here, a hundred times before. Working within the repetition of simulation immanent to the videogame system, the Paradise we desire remains outside of what can readily be simulated. This is why Nomura's pursuit of futurity is so optimistic, even if it means campy iconoclasm. The game system must become unbearable in its inability to deliver us to Paradise, and then it must self-destruct in order to reveal the gap where Paradise may enter.

We're initially grounded in the body of Yuito/Kasane, almost claustrophobically. There's a slight hesitation between pressing the jump button and the character performing it, and awkward movement through alleys and stairways suddenly bring to attention just how little control we ever had over them. We are always gelled to environments that both look good and move us through set paths, deflecting interest. It's in combat that our movement becomes fluid, and this fluidity is, curiously, achieved through the character body being divided into pieces, disappearing from the screen in flashes, and directing present action through inanimate objects. Scarlet Nexus' narrative then matches this play, as it revolves around the merits and ethics of intersubjectivity. It's when we move from Yuito/Kasane and are distributed across others that we feel free, and the rhythms of Scarlet Nexus are felt and capable of being instrumentalised. Our eyes blur across the entire field, moving and shaking, and in the moment that we become one with the chaos everything falls into place.

The spatial logic of the hack and slash dictates that environments operate only as empty stages, and that working through the possibilities of the body-in-action is exploration. Items are given glowing outlines that highlight their functionality as game objects, and during action the beautifully imagined backdrops close in, revealing the illusionism of the grey box models. There's a reason for this — Yuito/Kasane direct their interest solely to the goal at hand, and the game graphically maps itself to this hack and slash intentionality. Unfortunately the telekinetic vision that could make the environments vividly alive with possibility gradually reveals how uniform these stages really are. It doesn't help that they are so fragmented, or that our progression through them is so linear. They lack the circularity of something like Nier, where the repetition becomes akin to madness, and instead dissolve as we depart.

As the game advances the levels get more visually minimalistic and so 'true' to their nature as virtual wireframes — like in the Arkham games' detective vision, there is a kick to being granted access to the world one layer down from graphical representation. And this should compound thematically in a game about recursive timelines and datasets. Early on there's the suggestion that the top 'semantic' layer (cities, people, etc) is a simulation projected onto a ruined Real, but Scarlet Nexus ultimately asserts itself as a political (rather than existential) dystopia. The fish and skies are holograms, but the people and buildings aren't. Memories can be transferred from a central database into clones, but we're to believe in the veracity of Yuito/Kasane. It tones down cybernetic/End of History ambiguities to make the case for concrete history and identities, but so why then does it all feel so dead and empty?

As the game through long static expositional sequences divulges its ultimately straightforward narrative (major players capable of manipulating space-time to their own personal/emotional ends), it's Satori the Archivist who continues to warrant interest. Saving and loading states is performed through this mysterious figure who is always there, at home, in dreams, in protected locations, and whose voice becomes less and less human. Early on the Archivist explains his position as a recorder of events for his employer (the same one as that of the protagonist), and this makes sense as the prevalence of surveillance and news networks is underscored as a fact of life in New Himuka. Before long it's clear that he's not actually working for anyone, and admits that he is 'air, and shadow' — an inhuman force that binds and gives shape to all things. This undermines the character-centric form the narrative takes, and insists on the eeriness of Scarlet Nexus' questions of time and virtuality from the sideline. That is, it is not us as Yuito/Kasane moving through concrete space that drives the game; our experience is only the flow of records kept by the Archivist who personifies the immanent code of the game system. It's the air, the shadows, it's God.

Just Cause 2 is not about overthrowing dictatorships or causing disorder or saving anyone, but is instead about the velocity of grappling hooks, the aerodynamics of parachutes, and the peculiar bliss of combining the two. It is about following the contours and open expanses of this fictional archipelago, gliding and cutting shapes like you were the wind.

Just Cause 2 is one of the finest world-as-playground videogames because it is never clear whether you are playing the game as it should be played or haphazardly combining various broken mechanics. And it is stupid throughout but only as seriously stupid as an arcade shooter cutscene. Unlike the followups it doesn't need you to know that it's in on the joke because the joke is just for you. Same with the broken mechanics. It is sincerely stupid and for that it is beautiful.

The world of Panau is lovingly crafted to be as anonymous as possible. It is assembled from Google Earth, travel ads, and shitty travel photos, all of which erase human specificity for a passive tropical emptiness. It's not even really a fantasy, it's too abstract for that. I almost feel bad because Just Cause 2 is so wasteful. It's huge, and filled with all these beautiful little townships and hideaways that could each sustain an entire game. Every now and then you might stop at one and walk around on foot and try take in the architecture and the views, and see where the people go to shop and eat, but then you feel like a fake.

You're so used to seeing the world blur past that actually appreciating Panau as something concrete and liveable is impossible. It's only ever as real as Google Earth, Expedia ads, and travel photos. Rico's role in The Company means he is defined only by his transience, his anonymity, and the world around him hollows itself out into an expansive non-place: a motorway/airport/mall decorated to look like some place else. Some place far far away.

This is the limit of Just Cause 2 and also the best thing about it. When you are in the playground you might find it difficult to leave, but enough time away from it and it dawns on you that it was only ever a playground. Unlike Grand Theft Auto and Far Cry, Just Cause 2's open chaos is always completely weightless. It's meditative, more meditative than any game that's ever been. Because again in Just Cause 2 you are the wind.

I can't help but surrender to its ambitions.

Has less in common with the 80s and 90s films its constantly referencing and more with tv projects like the second season of True Detective or Lynch and Refn's recent ventures in the medium. It's specially interesting how much Dennaton is capable to channel Refn to a point where this and Too Old To Die Young share some of the same thematic elements: from the increasing pressence of nationalist movements in US to the overall depiction of violence as some sort of comfrontation for the viewer's accomodated expectations of it in the medium.

Flawed to the core. Where the barebones of a narrative worked for the first game's own deconstruction and exploration of the vacous nature of its protagonists, here it plants so many threads it feels mostly loss of what it wants to develop, not because is really that difficult to understand, but because of its adherence to explore/connect the audience to these characters that feel less compelling in their archetypical nuisances, and the design of the levels can be really frustrating at times. By making these spaces more open, it also makes one of the first game's way to make the player more adjust to it (being able to create you own path to finish it) less effective. Instead, it seems that it wants you to go more for stealth and mantaining an active approach, to be contantly urgent and knowledgeable of the enemy placement, and i love that this develop into making these space more oppresive for the players to explore and limiting the options to these individual characters as their own form of expression through the violence (specially that one of the characters can't kill if you didn't pressure him to make the game easier), but when it does it wrong, it limits our vision badly, making the option of looking beyond the established field of view an afterthought: where we can kill an enemy in one point of the map, but our behind is constantly exposed or we don't have enough view to avoid getting shot and/or take cover on time when we are in front of them.

For the rest, i love that it's essentially about sequels, more or less about the exploitation of its own metanarrative being constantly appropiated to continue the satisfaction of its audience. Jacket is nothing more than an inspiration for wannabes who do nothing but projecting a way to escape from the roles that the zeitgeist have placing them or abusing the power that they are already given by the narrative itself.
But i think is the end when the game completely adheres to this idea the most. Finds the sense of going back to the past without any sort of futility to explore the present as some kind of meaningless endeavour. It's more thematically exposed than its predecessor and i found this game surprisingly melancholic in its final stages because of it. Jacket and Biker can retroactively change their own path for their own benefit, no matter how dissapointing the end result may be. Here, every effort is pointless in the long run. Almost no one comfronts what they are as individuals, don't go against the narrative at play, but are trustworthy to it until it catches them and devalues them to simple images, npcs and enemies to defeat.
Makes the end of the world a beautiful conclusion in which even the illusion of another title screen give a sense of hope that the own player can make the better call.

i always found the talk around its depiction of violence the most boring aspect of the game. It isn't bad per se, but with games like this or Spec Ops: The Line, i always found the setting (here, the 80s far remove from simple aestheticism, with the underlaying pressence of the Cold War and class dynamics as contrast of both protagonits) and the way in which we become part average videogame vessel and part conspiranoid interpreter of the game itself what attracts me the most.
It's all about how Jacket and Biker engage with their own violent travesy, where one tries to find a way to reconnect with the world only to realize that he's so far remove from the picture that he leaves it away in the air, and the other subdues to tentation of everything having a literal explanation. In that case, Jacket is reborn in Biker and, with that, the conclusion of both killing each other makes both journeys equally valid and meaningless. It recognizes us as active participants and spectators of the fiction at play, but it also understands how, to give meaning, we have to erase the most literalize aspects of it and perceive it as the fully realize metaphor that they are as individuals in the big picture.
Does the abstraction clash with the secret ending literalizing everything? Sure. But i think that the idea that's even optional is a step towards the overall message.
It was a "revenge story" with none of the moralist bullshit, born out of an inherent nationalistic perspective (killing russians, the villians plan being basic world domination stuff) and one in which we are small compared to the big landscape in which it was developed, with no other choice than to accept it and, no matter how many time we either try to complacent to the status quo or trying to change it (as Biker, we can kill all the people in the Phone company as we once seen as Jacket and mantain the "coherence" of the fiction, or leave them alive with zero repercution), it will find a way to keep going forward and accomodate us.

Starting from the oppresive and cold facilities of Mars before everything takes clear form as the body horror-esque nightmares of hell paints the walls and floors that we navigate, it's the ultimate power fantasy.
Not only a great actioner, but also very uncomfortable in its progression and occacionally anxious when it gets closer to the horror of the concept. Looking at the lamented souls and visceras of our fallen allies complemented with the carnage that we produce creates a sort of unpleasantness that (intentional or not) tells us the kind of character we are making in the process. We are as much fighting evil as we are becoming one with it. And wether by lack of vision (the darkness in some sections of "The Shores of Hell" that channel Ridley Scott's Alien) or the direct result of faicing flesh and metal as one manifestation of the militaristic desire of being the savior of the universe, one thing is clear to me: the demented face of Doomguy pleased after finding another powerful weapon is my sleep paralysis demon.

CANNOT hold up on a second playthrough and I understand the reservations people have about its blocky, awkward storytelling, but I think everyone's aim is off. Good narrative in a game doesn't mean 10+ hours of self-serious cut scenes, and should extend to how the 'story' is delivered via play as well. And that's the thing: holy hell does this thing play like blood and pain and laughter all at once. It's not as tight as the first one, but that was a linear corridor of simplistic AI and repetitive beefcake chokeholds — a consciously retro angle on the action genre — where this is an accelerating mess of burned bridges and pointless anger, in short, the ideal sequel whatever way you look at it. The Polygon review is right when it argues this says nothing beyond the standard revenge text (that revenge is empty) and that the first game fit into a time along with Spec Ops and Hotline Miami where reflexively implicating the player in game violence was en vogue. But where that reviewer is happy to dismiss this sequel on those grounds as well as, implicitly, the revenge format in general, a more generous reading of this game is due. Yes, of course, it's dumb, and yes, horrifically violent, and so but great, but let's return to how and why the procedural logic of the game bears on the player, and what this means in terms of level and AI design that in fact works to consciously thwart their sense of being in control over their actions, in short, to keep them in a state of violent panic. Because in this panic, in this blind rage propelled not by thought but by rapidly accumulating mistakes, this is the game, and this feeling of nervous blood and cackling ecstasy and tears summoned not through cutscenes but by play, this is what cannot be achieved in another medium and this is where criticism needs to be directed.

An unhelpful and personal review. The poetry of procedural generation, or the use of procedural generation for a poetry of time.

What does it feel like to have your (virtual) body die? Of course our virtual bodies die in videogames all the time, positioned as they are as fleeting moments of play atop an enduring game-world. To die in most videogames is to experience death as an imagined possibility before the real, which is the unfolding of new environments or new possibilities within the same. The virtual body then is a catalogue of mistakes. When the virtual body dies but the game-world persists, it is calling for another body, and another. It is difficult to say whether the virtual body ever actually dies when the game-world is immortal, because the virtual body always comes back. The traditional virtual body is like Sisyphus, eternally enacting a task predetermined by the unchanging physical world. But Proteus is the god of rivers and oceans, of the water that appears always the same because it is always changing. Proteus is vitality; the spark that animates all life. It is for this reason he is connected to the anima mundi or 'world soul', the world as a living being containing all living things. In Protean reality both world and entity are inextricable, and always actively changing together. The player is the body and the island. In Proteus, the game-world dies when the virtual body dies.

Nights in Proteus' day/night cycles don't introduce new mechanical threats like Don't Starve or Minecraft, instead they leave us fighting against the dark itself. Accounts of Proteus that describe the game as calming do not do justice to its sense of always encroaching cold. Because new days bring new mutation within the protean island, each night serves as a reminder of that impermanence; that we belong to time as much as space, or that our experience of space is moored to the living moment, each receding quicker than any of us can ever grasp. In Proteus, as in material reality, procedural generation comes through procedural disintegration, the loss of everything known for the ever-advancing unknown. The strange thing about night in Proteus is that this loss gives meaning to the day that came before it. Night draws the world in closer, making for an intimacy only available in resistance to the coldness of night and deletion of time. It is unsettling the way that we are subject to the passage of the sun and moon, but then Proteus is about belonging. Experiencing the ungroundedness of the game-world is to experience the mortality of the virtual body: they exist together, and they die together. The ever-encroaching cold is necessary for the emergent warmth of belonging in time and space.

It might be strange but the dramatic colouring of Proteus' blocky forms took me right back to seeing the world as a child. I have always had family in the farmland to the north, which is where the country grows narrower and narrower, and the sun-bleached pine trees stand alone in the paddocks, haggard and contorted. In the day the smell of silage, dirt, and cow shit imbues the landscape with a stillness and proximity that at night recedes, the moon distorting the familiar as it dances through the branches to the grass and rocks by the shed. I remember playing tag with my cousins and seeing my breath condense into fog and thinking the one thing scarier than being found and chased is being left alone out here. My uncle would tell us about the boogeyman by the window and the woman in the fields, and I thought about how I prefer that to the alternative, which is that there is nothing. We always left to drive home in the afternoon, so that by sunset we were surrounded on either side by distant fields, macrocarpa lining the perimeters and pointing at us with their bony fingers. My favourite time was the brief window after sundown and before darkness, where everything is stained the purple of wet running ink, and the smell of mud and grass rises from the ground. The safeness of being inside of the car, driven by someone else, was only enhanced by the horror of nightfall on the other side of the window. What growing up makes you realise, however, is that no such barrier ever existed.

To move through this space is to age with it, to grow ugly with it, and not even your parents can save you from the passage of the moon and the sun. But then this is the divine contradiction of youth: the total safety promised by parental figures is predicated on a belief in total danger out there: mud and rain and stone bridges that run into black water with trolls waiting to grab your ankles, and boogeymen, and the woman in the fields you hear sometimes calling even though you never said it. Like many children I was raised on cartoons, and this meant the painterly rural landscapes of One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Aristocats augmenting the images of the nocturnal countryside gleaned from the window of my parents' car. A sense of total belonging that only increased the more grotesque the trees and farmhouses, the grimier the cobblestones and ruined fences, the greater the likelihood of being sucked into that cold black river and never seen again. Like a candle in the darkest room of the darkest house imaginable. What Proteus makes manifest with its imminent cold nights is the realisation that in order to be caught, one must first be falling. In order to find warmth, a moment of intimacy must first be carved out of uncertainty.

It makes sense that Proteus' development team were inspired by visits to Avebury. Every night the player is met by the island's stone circles which, as others have pointed out, seem anthromorphic, almost like watchers, as the game goes on. Your greatest friends in the climbing night are these monuments that somehow prefigure your arrival and even, gasp, remember you. What the stone circles of Avebury point to is that the ground beneath the feet is similarly enchanted, haunted by the monuments since removed, and that were always unknowable any way; traces left in traces of a forgotten people. The creepiness of enduring monuments to something lost but always there is at tension with Proteus the game which is about the becoming and disintegration of everything. Proteus the pagan god of sea-change, of life as current, is also important in alchemy where all matter is transmutation. In Proteus the body dies and the world dies too, never to be seen again. It ends in apocalypse, and its procedural generation ensures that every life-cycle is solitary as its death. Every world generated algorithmically is the sum of every possibility it is not. What the haunted monuments do is remind that what dies is never fully lost. That every world and every body generated by Proteus swims in an ocean of everything that ever was and will be. What does it feel like to die in Proteus? It feels as though I belonged somewhere.