Mundaun’s first-person horror threats are recurring, and increase in number as the game progresses, and yet it retains the feeling of a walking sim. I mean this in the positive sense of environmental specificity, of wandering a landscape saturated in a history that precedes us, and which reveals itself in small, partial ways as we traverse it. I also mean it in the sense of an environmental intimacy. There is a second-hand nostalgia given to us by our virtual body (Curdin), who is prone to personal reminiscences as we uncover Mundaun’s mysteries together in real-time. This is to say the game conditions us to experience its landscape as both alien and profoundly intimate, and it is the intimacy that is most charged with folk-horrific dread. For the player who frequently feels as though there is a strange force watching them from within the world of the walking sim, Mundaun’s dread is most welcoming.

By capturing us in reminiscence and providing us with real-time tangible threats, Mundaun makes pronounced the strange negotiations of gamic tense. When I feel as though this is a walking sim, I consider my efforts oriented to the recovery of some past hidden in the landscape; when I feel as though it is survival horror I am attuned to the anxiety of the instant. This is not in itself novel — any game with attention to its world balances the time before us (past) with the time of action (now) — but Mundaun amplifies this tension through the strength of its environmental intimacy and the beckoning of its reminiscence within the horror format. That is its narrative, like its enemies, unfolds in real-time. Curdin has returned to his grandfather’s village for his funeral, and this return precipitates the series of events that is Mundaun. We talk to its inhabitants, run errands, solve puzzles, our actions all assisting in the progression of a narrative that has not yet occurred. And yet because of the game’s mood, the narrative still to come seems always already lost in the past. Who are these people? Are they still alive? Who attends Jeremias’ (the priest’s) sermons? H.R., the talking corpse in the snow? Walther, deep in his forgotten wartime bunker? The spectral Flurina? Playing Mundaun is wandering a buried village, its inhabitants trapped and reenacting the ghost story that binds them to this beautiful, tragic mountain village. In the end they asked me to return, but in the light of day I saw it for what it was. It’s over, I thought, forever now.

In terms of how it plays with or without this doomed mood, Mundaun’s enemies are consistent with its local geography, staggering through the hills. The hay creatures are frightening because they look like the haystacks we keep passing, and because their idiot-physicality gives them a sense of random, thoughtless weight more dreadful than a human-like intelligence. The beekeepers on the other hand hover — something I didn’t realise until I got too close, and which promptly brought to mind the haunting image of the Blair Witch “whose feet never touched the ground”. Both in their own way make our adoptive body in Curdin feel particularly leaden, and ill-equipped to respond to the world and its demands. He becomes the little boy, gazing terrified out the window of his grandfather’s house, believing all at once his superstitions. Mundaun’s puzzles carve a linear path through the world, providing us tasks to advance the day so that narrative time can proceed. Most impressive is the way that, as the story comes together and its emotions are made to resonate, the developers maintain the same patience that welcomed us in. It becomes ‘big’ but it is never loud, scripted sequences takes over but it still pretends it’s off-kilter, about to fall apart. It’s so good that it never wants you to know quite how good it is.

There's something to be said that I can't quite figure out yet about the way we are 'cursed' on arrival. It is only when the Old Man grabs us, deforming our arm, that Mundaun opens itself to us. I've tried to put into words elsewhere how a similar maiming of the arm takes place in Resident Evil 7 — we are 'welcome(d) to the family' only after our arm is cut off and reattached, making us kin to the Baker family. Despite their significant differences (both as texts and in their treatment of the arm), Mundaun is similarly interested in the notion of homecoming as a kind of physical maiming. The simple pathos of this sets in when, departing on the bus, our business concluded in our grandfather's ghost village, we look down to see our arm still deformed. Perhaps this is the cost of 'being there' in the world of the game, our physical bodies conjoined with Curdin's, Curdin's with Mundaun. Or perhaps more generally it's the cost of reminiscence, memory being the wound that cannot heal.

In Alfie Bown's excellent The PlayStation Dreamworld (2017) the author considers whether a videogame can truly be unheimlich. On one hand there is something unsettling about the malfunctioning technology of yesteryear. But then on the other, Bown notes, we have a way of smoothing over the gnarled edges of the past by designating things 'retro'. Maybe we can see this with the trend toward a self-consciously broken 'retro' style in videogames. For something to be unheimlich it has to reveal something about ourselves — perhaps if we call these things uncanny it's because they reveal hauntology's undesirable proximity to cheap nostalgia. 0_abyssalSomewhere doesn't have any answers, but it benefits by making a dual address to both the style and materiality of the past. What I mean is it pairs the ghostly trace with corroded industrial debris because in practical terms the two are the same thing. It comes from a future where we are dead but our technologies have survived, or, rather, have been programmed to await a human 'input' that will never arrive.

How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down? Aren't we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn't empty space breathing at us? Hasn't it got colder? Isn't night and more night coming again and again? Don't lanterns have to be lit in the morning? Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we still smell nothing of the divine decomposition? — Gods, too, decompose! (§125)

The final stretch of Dark Souls II is so effective from the perspective of storytelling, that I regret not documenting my earlier frustrations in better detail. True, even doing so I would have very little to contribute beyond the laundry list of complaints already shared by anyone who remembers the game: enemy and level designs are squat and very Maximo: Ghosts to Glory, the combat is as loose and weightless as an N64 Zelda title (but it expects a Bloodborne-like performance from you), the success of Demon's and Dark Souls gives it free license for scattershot cruelty, the total openness combined with fragmented levels (and uneven difficulties within) and steep punishment for failure has it even more bewildering than the first time you started up Demon's Souls; a problem ironed out by its follow up. But then, and here's the thing, acknowledging that last point is the first step in appreciating a future where these things continued to push for total emotional/physical/ludic bewilderment over what became across Bloodborne, Dark Souls 3, and Sekiro, progressively fine-tuned to tight, reactive play and linear progression. My preference is still with the proprioceptive rhythms of the other games, but the other games have never highlighted such an agonising disconnect between body and mind as Dark Souls II. Quite the opposite: for all they speak of corrupted flesh and the curse of undeath, they give way to the catharsis of the agile, the dynamic, the mastery of limbs and speed. The cosmic fatalism of their narratives is known but never known, in the posture, in the madness, in the burden of having to try for thankless and indeterminate progress, which is certainly not a criticism, but it's also not the only way to do things. Dark Souls II is less preoccupied with suggesting a shadowy cosmology than with the way it might register in dreams and memories — death is not tied to any greater philosophical purpose than going back to sleep, so you don't have to hurt any more. And this is where the final stretch of the game is so effective: what was so bewilderingly open finds itself inexorably within in the pull of thanatos, what was frustrating finds itself a sense of purpose in the game's guide, appearing intermittently to say only I'm sorry, I'm sorry you're here.

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.

It's strange, Bloodborne emphasises vertical exploration in level design and alien cosmology in vision but it also makes sure we're always confined to the matter of the violent instant. We have the ability to rotate the camera in a direction other to the one the player character faces — the player character moves, and the camera moves elsewhere — but the dislocation of camera from body rejects a sense of player-mastery over space (seeing more than the player character can see) and avatar-mastery (seeing all that the player character detects from their embodied position) alike. There is no negative space the player character can traverse. Instead Bloodborne's environment is a horrible amalgam of viscera, place, and action, that pulsate from the same sticky flesh. Everything in it glistens with the stickiness of connection. Pitch darkness draws things closer instead of pushing them away; the glow of lamps reveals the thickness of the atmosphere already present; the night sky reminds us that the earth is in the orbit of something else.

This claustrophobic, sticky presence is achieved through the synthesis of a heavy engine with agitated, jerky movement, and a design of disgusting tactility. There's an exhaustive precision to the hitboxes not found in a newer title like Elden Ring and this sets the player character as its own fragile body within the space, emphasising the dignity of the ongoing collision between equal adversaries. But then instead of slow and measured, Bloodborne encourages the balancing act of graceful movement and calculated barbarism. The roll mechanic is switched out for the dash, and so we sweep left and then and right, connect, and sweep again. It's both slippery and grounded, and success is entirely contingent on commitment to the flow of this weird ice dancing. To approach an enemy wanting to just inflict blunt violence is to fail, and so too is standing back to consider future action. If it's not felt, it won't work. The absence of shields for guns in parry is interesting, because there's no in-game penalty for getting the timing wrong, but the way it breaks the flow of combat spoils the feeling of its violent harmony. Backstabs too are arduous because they require multiple steps, the first charged. It's a quick victory but nothing next to the fluid carnage of the duel the game insists on and feels so good to perform.

Extending a weapon to its long-form is hardly ever practical, but emphasises the weird junk-mechanical nature of the instruments available. Assessing which weapons are required for which enemies is never a matter of looking at in-game spreadsheets but instead thinking about what the weapon's texture looks and feels like, and the quality of the enemies' flesh. We know when the jagged machinery of the saw will work, and when a clean cut would be better. In a world of crackpot physicians we're the worst, because instead of experimenting with different tools to deliver different ends, our vast and heavily modified toolset is entirely given to the act of bloodletting. There's a perverse intimacy to it that only grows more perverse and more intimate through the repetition of bloody violence. Every FromSoftware game is about a certain type of madness, but instead of the other games' desire to usurp one's tormentor (not as revenge, but to confirm the pain suffered was real and not a dream), Bloodborne unambiguously dramatises the madness of catharsis and will to eruption. The fight with Gehrman is most plain about this. We rush through white lilies, swaying at our feet, romantic music accompanying the game's climactic pas de deux.

Bloodborne lovingly invokes the vampire in order to place the brokenness of modernity alongside the endurance of the flesh. At a distance the romanticism of bodily fluids ("Will you drink my blood?") is contrasted with a Lovecraftian view on the insignificance of human life in the face of the cosmic, but for Miyazaki the vampire and the alien are consistent in the way they relate to the human body. Stacey Abbott points out that Méliès' film Le manoir du diable appeared before Bram Stoker's masterpiece, and that it conflates the vampire with the scientist, transfiguring human and nonhuman forms, conjuring visions, and deforming temporal order. The emphasis in that period was the more we understood about reality through novel scientific methods and instruments, the less 'real' and hospitable the world around us came to seem. Bloodborne follows in this tradition, using blood as the living string between cosmic, body horrific, and epistemological distortion, nodding to the dual concerns of horror fiction and scientific discovery. Its science-fiction is first and foremost of the body: what's seen in the cosmos implicates itself in the flesh.

Bram Stoker's vampire actually appears in the margins of records encountered within the volume, giving him the kind of formless-yet-omnipresent quality we might now associate with Miyazaki's reading of Lovecraft. The forces that most concern us are the ones only glimpsed in objects, conflicting manuscripts, and strange patterns of animal behaviour, and otherwise evade our comprehension. Alison Sperling has criticised Lovecraft scholars for placing too much of an emphasis on the limits of human knowledge — what Thacker characterises as "life according to the logic of an inaccessible real" leads to a lot of thinking about thinking, and that's all. A better picture of this horror, Sperling argues, is life completely saturated in the real. Miyazaki takes this reading too: the point is never the presence of an ancient or extraterrestrial force in itself, but the way awareness of these forces disturbs embodied reality. The revelation of the God that structures reality is that we are its dolls; the revelation of the alien that birthed us is that we are some mutant synthesis of the human and nonhuman, which is to say the human as we know it never was.

And so what's so good here is that it's all so addicting. Miyazaki does not expect us to recoil from the alien flesh but to embrace it, to want to see ourselves turned inside out along with the rest of the world. Everything in Bloodborne is calibrated to draw us into its ultraviolent dance, so we can feel it in our nervous system. Then, coated in blood, and guts spilled across the room, we're not supposed to be able to tell whose is whose. There's a tragedy to this vulnerable body that seems to exist just to erupt, but in that is ecstasy.

Elden Ring is staggering in breadth and detail, and like anything so big, gradually numbing. You want to slow it down, to see these new areas with the same sense of awe that accompanied every turn at the beginning, to press forward in fear of what may lie ahead. But a sense of forward momentum overtakes until it's irrepressible, and then the game is over. Increasingly difficult demigods appear in sequence to halt the flow, as a substitute for the rich environmental mysteries that had us forgetting there was an overall story in the first place. I'm thinking of how I never wanted to get through Stormveil, because that would mean I was done with Limgrave, and there was still so much to be learned in its fields and ravines and dead beaches. And then it was the same with Liurna. Altus Plateau was the last place I couldn't bear to leave, but even then Leyndell sits on the perimeter as a nagging reminder that things must end, and others must keep moving.

There are internal and external contributors to the persistent lapping of the call of progress here. As the player becomes more familiar with the game, they move more quickly through conflicts, and with the greater investment of player time comes the expectation of proportional narrative payoff. The detail of the here and now becomes a blur on the way to motivators on the horizon, and so Elden Ring like other games of its scale eventually becomes a virtual checklist. These factors are reflected internally, in the production of architecturally streamlined and graphically featureless maps that encourage forward momentum rather than the opportunity for getting lost. The player at a certain point either submits to the flow of the game and finishes it, or turns back and looks to rekindle their sense of wonder in the world behind them. The former is rewarded with quick and empty victory. The latter is also doomed, because by this point everything and everyone you ever cared about is devastated in progress' wake. If the player follows this path they turn to complete the game with a heavy heart, having found the world robbed of meaning before it even closes.

Elden Ring knows that it is doing this, because the interplay of internal (terrestrial, world) and external (noumenal, Outer Gods) forces is the defining fixation of FromSoftware titles. Here it gives the progress narrative the form of the 'Greater Will', and stages a conflict between its adherents, and factions that wish to end the world as we know it. The Greater Will is that the player finishes Elden Ring, their character ascending to the Elden Throne, so that Elden Ring can begin again, forever. New Forsaken will continue to be summoned to the Lands Between to keep the cycle turning. That is why the delivery of the Greater Will is so empty. The paradox of narrative progress for the ending-oriented player is that any ending involving a throne is not an ending but a moment lost to the vastness of procedural eternal recurrence. Encountering the devoted Brother Corhyn and Goldmask across the Lands Between transforms the two into a chorus, commenting on the progression of the Greater Will. Corhyn initially holds Goldmask to be a prophet, but soon thinks him mad, complaining that his rituals "betray a suspicion of the holism of the Golden Order." In truth, Goldmask realises the way of the Greater Will is to mend the ring and initiate its eternal cycle. This suspicion of Order is baked into its very belief system, leading adherents to hope the next cycle is exactly the same as this one.

Goldmask's order is bound to the notion of apocalypse as revelation. (Apokalypsis means 'unveiling' or 'revelation', hence the Book of Revelation is the book of apocalypse). For the apocalypse to operate as revelation, it is not to arrive from forces elsewhere, but to have been set in place by entities that are already here. The revelation is both future-oriented and ancestral, and its event means the elimination of future and ancestry alike. There is perhaps no system more apocalyptic than the game system — every ending is already present in the game text but hidden within the code, and all that needs to happen is for the apocalyptic event to be revealed in play. In Elden Ring's late-game revelation, Goldmask discovers what was already there, Goldmask recognises the corruption of the Order, Goldmask waits for the flames, Goldmask mends the ring so it can happen all over again. The apocalypticism of the Golden Order is, paradoxically, eternal stasis. Everything returns to the beginning so that the Forsaken can arise once more and fulfil the Greater Will. For all the flames and tears and wreckage it is an Order without change or difference.

On the other hand, many in the Lands Between hold a contempt for predestination and dedicate their lives to overthrowing the eternal recurrence of dysfunctional Order. There is a lateral (rather than linear) progression to many of the minor quests, in particular those given by Ranni. The theme and shape of these quests is the fate of stars and gravity, as opposed to the main narrative's rigid iconography of thrones, crowns, and bloodlines. Ranni actively sends you against the current, mapping out a constellation atop familiar places that now appear strange, and exposing undead cities beneath your feet. This is not done in the service of 'uncovering' a living, breathing world, but its opposite: the true undeath of the Lands Between. There's a madness to Ranni's story, and that's because it wants to tell you that you have already been here, many times before, under different names and at different times. Everybody has already died and come back. The fates of everyone you care about have accompanied and in fact defined them since before you even knew them, and so all of your action in the Lands Between has been for the deliverance of their microscopic tragedy. Thops will always arrive too late, Irina will always have to wait too long, Millicent will always live diseased, Latenna will always curl up beside her sister in the snow.

The revelation of Ranni's story is not the arrival of all of the pieces that were already there from the last reset, but that the world was already lost and empty. Travelling across the Lands Between on her apocalyptic mission severs rather than traces the golden contours of the world shaped like a furled finger. She wants to find the man who stole the stars so the moon comes back and the tides with it. Rejecting the dysfunctional order of the past, we now seek things born of nothingness, to realise the possibility of eliminating the eternal 'now' that was never present any way. And so we turn our backs to the stars and march ahead, to end things once again. There is an ending with believing in, and it's the one that never eventuates. It's the one born in the coldest night imaginable. Are you ready to commit a cardinal sin?

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.

Nightmare logic and 'nightmarish' are often reserved for works that evoke forces of total disorder that are malicious and occult and cosmic in scope. But these kinds of nightmares are thrilling, immediate, and easy to recognise as phantasms on waking up. I love these nightmares: they turn you into the happy audience of your subconscious' greatest horror film. There is always great catharsis to a descent into hell! The worst nightmares are the ones that are so ordinary that they are basically indistinguishable from daily life, that because they feel like a bad day rob you of the feeling of having slept. These nightmares sometimes recall situations and settings from your ordinary life, and even when they don't they capture its mundane processes and anxieties. If the former nightmares amplify these things to an extravagant scale, these ones cut through and distil the essence of life's exhaustion. Resident Evil 2 is this nightmare of ordinary life. It follows nightmare logic because it is deeply paranoid, and it is nightmarish because it is both very boring and very stressful.

Anyone who has ever worked in hospitality or customer service might think fast paced first person games distinctly nightmarish in their evocation of the horror of daily life. There is a universal alienation to moving through a crowd and realising that nobody sees anyone else, but what's worse is thousands of faces rushing directly toward you and you specifically and wanting something from you. Resident Evil 2 though is working as a teacher or administrator, performing as best you can with all eyes on you, putting out fires when they come up, and knowing that however well you resolve an issue in the moment you will never be on top of things. You are employed to make disorder manageable for minutes at a time from within the eternal disorder of human affairs. If things could ever be permanently ordered not only would you be out of a job, but humanity would cease to be human. The horror of daily disorder is also the beauty of ordinary life. I have nightmares about students challenging me in front of the class, but that's only because this can and should happen. If my lesson plans could be uploaded into the heads of a passive class-body, this would eliminate the need for interaction as well as thought. Teaching and learning is not about the absorption of information, but about thinking as a creative and disruptive process. If nothing is changing, then no thought is occurring. I have also had nightmares about online systems crashing, and databases dying with them. But the absence of interruption in an online system means that either the system is not being used, or that its uses have been exhausted. And if these databases could not be corrupted, they could also not be read. It is not a metaphor but a fact that disorder is at the essence of any working system, and noise is the essence of all transmission.

Both administration and pedagogy conduct disorder to maintain or further productive ends. Games are the same: disorder and precarity are the essence of the videogame's interplay of human and machinic agencies that test and collide and alter one another toward new and unforeseen outcomes. When outcomes are totally predictable, when disorder is under control, this means a victory to either the human or the game system, and this is when the game ceases to be a game. The system stops producing novelty when it is under control, and this happens when its heterogeneous components do not participate but dominate one another. Resident Evil 2 can be mastered by those players deeply committed to imposing order on systems, but as a game it works hard to maintain nightmarish precarity. The only thing inevitable about it is things, however under control they might appear, inevitably going the other way. It never makes the player feel entirely helpless like other survival horror games, and it never gives them a sense of triumph like other games with an atmosphere so dire. It is not about defeat or triumph or anything where things can be dominated or overcome. It is instead about just temporarily managing disorder before the cards are redrawn and disorder must once again be negotiated. The machine reads the player and the player reads the machine, and they both continue to adapt to and challenge one another.

This ongoing mind-game might sound strange because zombies are stupid, and the zombies in Resident Evil 2 are exceptionally zombie-ish, which means exceptionally stupid. But again Resident Evil 2's brand of nightmare is not always about the specifics of its settings or entities but instead life's quotidian processes and anxieties. Its horror is one of the failures of administration. The player can never be entirely on top of things, and the only way to progress is to memorise things and forget things and plan for things and when it inevitably happens, adapt to it all going wrong. It is to try and remember and account for all your mistakes and failures, and to manage as best you can the sinking ship of your best intentions. The introduction of Mr X and Lickers is not so much about introducing more mechanically powerful foes, but undoing your meagre efforts to put things into order. No one thing is scary or even difficult, but the game dynamically works obstacles, enemies, and affordances into a series of ad hoc recipes where the goal is always player frustration. Having Mr X walk into a room where you have things basically under control (one zombie with its legs blown off, another in the corner, another stunned, you're on low health but you know where you're going) is like having a supervisor watching you work. And sneaking past a Licker, then past a distracted zombie, and having Mr X walk in is like having a car backfire outside and wake up the baby you swear to god you almost, finally, had to sleep. Because you can never directly respond to Mr X, so continues an eternal chase through the same god damn corridors where hands are once again played with the hope of a new outcome. Because we memorise certain routes and blindspots and dangers, Resident Evil 2 makes the case that repetition in systems might lead to a sense of familiarity, but it also always leads to difference.

Resident Evil 2 is also the scariest game for how it so beautifully handles slow-moving frustration within a space that a single stray bullet can throw everything into disarray. Zombies are not intrinsically scary but they are always uncanny; Romero's zombies move slow to mimic the world of humans undone by capitalism and Fulci's present the ultimate desecration of human life and the divine order of our belief systems. Both inhabit films that feel zombie-like: sluggish, falling apart, and singularly focussed on devouring the future. Resident Evil 2 is smooth, albeit circular and obsessive. Here the zombies are obstacles for management, and the horror of managing the impossible makes them scary. It is a game made for fans of the series, and fans of the series are big fans. It's a cult franchise that's also enormously popular; it's a cult on the scale of a supermarket or mall chain. Like the zombie it returns from the dead and moves with obsessive purpose. As such it is made to be played twice 'officially', four times 'thoroughly', and a hundred times 'realistically'. It gets less scary the more it is repeated, because repetition gives the space to experiment with new ideas and outcomes. The second play is more laborious than anything else because it involves re-seeing what once scared you, this time as blank obstacles. The third however unlocks a new kind of obsession in the player's brain, where the pain and joy of managing disorder comes back stronger than ever before. It takes about fifteen hours to complete, but like the zombie it cannot die an ordinary death and is never really over.

Resident Evil 2's gore is not affecting, but the lighting and always obscured sight-lines return the player to this infantile state where they are afraid of the dark. We play as the detached adult, dealing with problems systematically, playing Tetris with keys and herbs, but we are also aways the irrational child hiding under the blankets from the boogeyman. Both are always at play: one does not contradict the other. Resident Evil Biohazard plays this up well by swapping out Mr X for Jack Baker, the lunatic father looking for you, his 'son' who won't stop slamming doors and ruining dinner and staying out past curfew. X is interesting because when you can only hear him he functions as a Michael Myers-esque 'shape', or abstraction as persistent as the shadows at your feet. But then when you see him he looks like a fucking idiot. He is frightening because of how he upsets your plans, because of how he reminds you that no amount of trying will ever allow you to control your surroundings, but he is also terrifying because he looks like such a fucking idiot. Commonsense would suggest he'd be more ominous the more abstract his appearance, but the idiot physicality of his bozo suit and hat and weirdly serene face is actually chilling because it's also funny.

The screwball comedy of this game is also one of its greatest strengths because it keeps things terrifying, and rubs your mistakes in your face as if to say how this whole thing's your fault. I had to laugh out loud when I returned to this room to pick something up that I had not been into in a week, and there were like five zombies I had not dealt with and had forgotten about and it scared the shit out of me, then Mr X entered from the other side with perfect comic timing like Honey I'm home what's with all this mess!. It was like getting ready to go on holiday and at the last minute remembering that final little job you had to get out of the way but it was sent to that other inbox you're not really checking any more because you've tapped out and you just want to see the water and sit in the grass for a bit but now there's like a hundred emails in there that get progressively less polite as they add up.

Life is shit because it's boring and hard and unpredictable all at the same time but it's also really beautiful for the same reasons and is worth doing forever. This is Resident Evil 2's philosophy, and also what makes it such a brilliant game.

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 tell people my first experience with James Turrell was working with Wedgework V (1974) over the summer of 2014/15, as it was included in the travelling blockbuster exhibition Light Show. The truth is I had played the web browser version of Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective two years prior on the shitty computer under the stairs at my dad's house, and only this Turrell encounter actually moved me to tears. It irritated me and made me laugh too, but good art should do all of these things. This is not to say that Turrell's work is inferior to Bubsy 3D because of its simplicity, but that Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visit the James Turrell Retrospective draws the artifice of Turrell's work into something irritating and funny as well as emphatically mortal, which gestures not to the ungraspable cosmos as Turrell's works do, but to something even bigger: to the time after the death of Turrell, to when Turrell's works have been eaten by the sun, to when there's nothing left but an exploding void and no one can ever know what will happen next, to when you're standing alone in the kitchen at 3am with your bare and trembling knees thinking about your childhood and wondering where the time went, to when you're sitting in the grass with the love of your life watching the rowboats go past on the El Retiro lake in Madrid with pizza and wine at sunset, to when you're lying in your deathbed and you're talking to the shadows on the wall and saying, I did it, I collected more yarn balls than anyone ever did, tell me I did it right, and the shadows stretch on with the moon just as the leaves do with the seasons, past the forty or so meaningless yarn balls that you collected against death, past the cold settling in to your lonely death rattle, to the time after James Turrell and the heat death of the universe and the sunset lake where once for just a little while things were good. Sculpting light is architecture, and sculpting art is games. Is that supposed to mean anything? Fuck no. It's art.

In a tour of Kendall Jenner's house she takes the time to point out the Turrell she has installed, which she uses to meditate. Her sister Kylie last year installed a Turrell in her hallway, and Kourtney has three installed above her bed. They were introduced to his work through Kanye West, who donated the millions Turrell needed to finish the Roden Crater project he began when he acquired the land in 1979, the year before Kim Kardashian was born. There is a clear connection between Turrell's practice and the musician's, in that they both sculpt forms out of the intangible, forms you would swear you could touch and feel and which alter the space around you but which you can nevertheless walk through because really it's a distortion of what's already there and what's still there when the lights go out. Like all blockbuster exhibitions, Light Show drew in huge numbers of people, dazzled them, and then left. Wedgework V was installed down a black painted corridor that bent at a right angle near the beginning and end to stop the light bouncing off the walls, and into a pitch black carpeted space between the walls of the exhibition. The 'frame' was made of perspex so that it would glow, and people would stand in this room, disoriented at first and then in awe of the hazy glow of Wedgework V. It looked like gas, or like water, or like an infinitely receding and expanding photograph of the soul or of God, that would pull you into its infinite nothingness and make you breathe it like oxygen and maybe never leave. I would wait a while and then say 'look at this' and stick my hand into it, which usually always led to the group emitting gasps before joining me. If that wasn't enough I'd shine a flashlight into it so they could see the empty room responsible for the appearance of God. The line was always very long because people like lining up for things. Nobody knew or gave a shit about Wedgework V lining up, but most people liked it by the time they left. Then one particularly busy day the line got out of hand and I had to trim the 'exploration' step a bit before asking if people would like the mechanics of the work revealed with the flashlight. It went well until, near the end of my shift, an ex-gallerist threw herself in front of the flashlight and scolded me in front of the group for spoiling the magic of Turrell.

Her position was that the world needs mystification, and that the great unexplainable arts are there to serve that function. I disagree. I don't think being ignorant makes the world more beautiful or interesting. Being ignorant makes you more impressionable, superstitious, and conservative. I think the more you learn about something the more magical it becomes, and the more open you become to learning more, humbled as you are of what you don't know. Ironically it is the idiot who thinks they already know everything, so turn off the flashlight and stop asking questions. The magic of Wedgework V is that it is both an empty room with some lights set up, and it is the soul, or God, or the particles we overlook in the atmosphere, or the revelation that there is no God or soul or divine presence, it's all just a play of lights. The artwork is both the material object and everything else it points to and becomes and stirs. Its radical meaninglessness is what gives way to the artwork's meaning, and to believe only in the illusion is to pledge yourself to ignorance or solipsism at the expense of the world's beauty which is also, as it happens, the beauty of art. Life, like art, means something precisely because it doesn't mean a fucking thing. I think James Turrell knows this well, I think Kanye West knows this well, and I think Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective knows this best of all.

Final Fantasy games are not strangers to the trick of having the player-character a step removed from the main story. Where heroic fantasy relies on the idea that the main character is fated to deliver peace and harmony to the world (and that the world then opens and closes for them), Final Fantasy's best titles subvert this through the perspective of the nobody. Here events are always already in motion, the absence of fate leaves conclusions open, and the world seems to endure before and after the protagonist ever entered the stage. The series has had hollow shells tricked by false memories of heroes, clones, puppets, and even ghosts; it is an always posthuman approach to fantasy that involves killing God and his mission of Peace through the restoration of fate and the divine right of kings. In God's place are nobodies. Final Fantasy XII is curious because it is very much mapped out as a heroic fantasy, but its traditionalist elements play out at a distance. Amidst stories of exiled royalty, imperialism, the ambivalence of soft power, and revenant princesses, Vaan just wants to be a pirate.

With its deserts and grimy machinery and big blue skies eclipsed by floating islands Final Fantasy XII clearly draws on the space opera of Star Wars. Vaan, like Anakin, wants to leave his poverty to find out what's up there instead. Unlike Anakin though Vaan never rises to become the centre of anything; fate never plucked him out, the heavens never conspired his overthrow, he only stumbled into something bigger than and other to himself. Vaan's perspective grounds the human impact of empire, and his distant observation of world events strips them of their drama, highlighting the bland subterfuge and broader geopolitical negotiations of royalty and commerce that determine who lives and dies. The series' enduring panpsychism is set aside for something drier too. There are minerals of supernatural origin, the use of which draws mysticism, politics, and business to the same stage in conflict, but in other Final Fantasy titles the minerals are always more than their use value. The panpsychist world exceeds the human, the earth gets revenge on humankind, or it otherwise recedes again. In Final Fantasy XII however there is no mystery, because the minerals are totally reified within the game-world's network of extractive capitalism. Of course there's the Mist, and there's always magick, but this is all secondary to what the mineral represents on the geopolitical stage as a commodity.

Maybe its fantasy is compelling because kept at a distance it's allowed to be more intricate. The characters in XII are less instantly memorable than other titles, thanks in part to their subdued mannerisms (more high fantasy than anime), and otherwise their connection to a story that we, as Vaan, are never intimately attached to. In fact many feel like discarded drafts from other titles or assemblages from a Final Fantasy database. But get lost in it from Vaan's very grounded perspective and their relative anonymity has them believably sutured into a world that is always bigger and more unknowable than what we're given. Because it always feels about ten times bigger than it is, and that's thanks to the way it always withdraws from full focus. Even returning to that small fishing village every week or so and finding it unchanged, there are clearly mysteries and forces and something being always withheld from us. It's something about the intricate patterning of the woven textiles, the grimy surfaces of the stones and sandblasted fabric of the tents, the cautious villagers that continue with their day but look across quickly just to see if we're still there. It's the most imaginatively and least narratively efficient way of presenting a world teeming with life, because it exists in its resistance to narrative purpose but never truly opens up and becomes home. It is magical because it is aloof; the feeling of 'I wish I could be here more and really get to know this place' never goes away because it is always extending beyond what we can access.

My only complaint about this remaster is that it sands off the distortion that made the PS2 version so unique, revealing too much of the 3D shapes that were always hidden behind layers of grain. The visual noise added to each location's sense of mystery, suggesting cracks and moving parts and just obscured details the remaster kills dead. It's a shame of course because mystery is such a big part of what makes Final Fantasy XII's one of the most alive gameworlds of any generation. The battle system is still ingenious, partly because it allows both exploring and fighting to take place in the same gorgeous panoramas, and partly because it leans on the small satisfactions of ultrabasic programming: if>then commands, or a play of algorithms that as the game goes on comes to absorb the player into the machinic team they've created within the machine. Final Fantasy XIII would automate things too much, XV would loosen things to the point of chaos, and Final Fantasy VII Remake would ultimately unify the live and algorithmic battle styles through a satisfying rhythmic punch. I still think this one is genius, and perfectly suited to a game that needs to make exploration in and of itself gratifying.

I earlier compared it to Star Wars because of its sand and laser gun retrofuturism, but its approach is very Lucas. Try as the story might to contain and make sense of the world for us, it also expects us to get distracted with Vaan, and to imagine our way off into the distance, to what's down there or around the corner, to what that unnamed character is doing or thinking, to whether the people here are happy. Much has been written about how the fragmentedness of Star Wars is its best asset, because its inconsistencies actively encourage investigation from audiences to fill in the blanks and tell stories about what's happening in the margins. No world exists beyond the images we access through the work, and yet we imagine one that grows and changes every time we revisit it. We're drawn to these broken worlds because the films we watch and games we play and stories we read feel like relics of something now lost; some unattainable feeling of home. Videogames require the wilful illusion that 'there's something over the horizon' more than any other medium, but Final Fantasy XII is the one that most consciously engages with the participatory nature of cult cinema.

There's a pathos to it, because not only is it the most fragmented of the Final Fantasy games, it's also the least remembered then and now, coming right at the end of its generation. A very quiet swan song, but one that swarms with more life than you can fathom every time you let it run.

It's an old story, as old as you want to make it, a woman takes the severed head of her lover with her into hell. Contrary to what she tells herself her journey is not to bring him back, but to confirm that she cannot. The paradox of death is that we cannot conceive of total absence, the absolute denial of being, and that to think of death is to fall into the trap of thinking nothingness a thing that can be positively thought. This is the problem for the living, how can he be gone and I just go on? Conceiving of death in its totality is a philosophical problem, and Senua is not concerned with metaphysics. She is concerned with the severed head hanging at her side. For Senua the journey through hell is to prove that one can walk with their body through death, that the afterlife is a continuation of life, that there is no such thing as total absence. "Turn your back on death and you only see the shadow that it casts". Like the sun, death radiates its own meaning, produces its own shadows, and that's the inevitable tomorrow.

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice has nothing to say, really, but it has a lot it wants to make you feel. I think where death and cruelty and meaninglessness are concerned, producing a work of feeling is basically an ethical act. Early on Senua's fights and puzzles distract from its feeling, although its strange and nonsensical puzzles are later explained as a conspiracy of madness. Why wouldn't reality adhere to the organisational patterns Senua projects onto it when reality for Senua is that which can be arranged against the total chaos that really is there? The signs that she looks for to support the answers she's already committed to? It's not a popular opinion that action games should be shorter, particularly relatively short games like Senua's Sacrifice, but this should really begin with The Bridge to Hel. Valravyn's Keep and Surtr's Domain feel like an unnecessary warmup before total despair. The fights feel like padding in these early parts, neither involved enough to invest in nor cathartic enough to match the game's mood. With The Sea of Corpses however, relentless mobs work to overwhelm and exhaust the player, which is the requisite path to ultraviolent ecstasy. Blood and blood and hands and fire and Senua with her rotting flesh screaming her way toward the rocks in which she hallucinates her mother's face.

I had been looking for a game like this for a while. I liked The Last of Us Part II because I thought of it as an exploitation work rather than a literary one with 'things to say'. In fact the game's total lack of ideas and tonal misery made it superior as an exploitation work to the ones that wink at you. The game's will to violence is moving, in that the AI and level design force you to only act out of desperation, resorting to the sloppiest and cruellest measures at the drop of the hat. It is about becoming one with chaos, and the speed at which blind adrenaline bypasses ethical thought. The arc from Downtown to the Seraphite forest makes for one of gaming's finest descents into hell. The Sea of Corpses in Senua's Sacrifice picks up from there, and the four Trials of Odin explore the psychological ramifications of this descent. The action gets sloppy and desperate, the colours bleeding into the eyes, the voices in Senua's head distributed across channels and adding to a spatial disorientation within even the most linear environments. The Trials draw affective game design back to its fundamentals: low lighting and shallow draw distance in horror, feeling space through the vibrations in the controller, how golden sunsets induce warmth in your body and the rain takes it away. It is a game that violently happens to you.

It is sensorially rich, its world rots and decays, and it is frequently geared to sensorial overload. When it finds its rhythm it is the inherent madness of the hack and slash videogame made text. But something that stands out in Senua's Sacrifice is its experiments with direct address. Senua's eyes bulge at the player, and in its heaviest moments the three dimensional spaces of the game fall away for a moving collage of grimacing faces emerging from blood and darkness, pressed flat against the screen. The game is frequently cinematic, not in the sense of looking expensive (although it does), but in its use of montaging techniques from experimental cinema, and in its understanding of the alienating pull of melodramatic acting. Here motion capture isn't deployed to make digital bodies look like natural humans but to explore human expressivity within the realm of videogames. Instead of withdrawn psychological realism Melina Juergens acts like a dancer. She expresses internal processes in such a way that the player can't help but catch and mimic them, contorting her unsettling rolling eyes and thrashing arms into the heart.

I'm not qualified to make any claims as to whether its famous use of a mental health advisor gets us anywhere closer to a visualisation of psychosis, but I doubt it. Sometimes I see people out of the corner of my eye who I know are not there, and sometimes I don't know where I am or if any of the things I remember actually happened. Sometimes my hands don't feel like my hands and I don't know if I exist anymore. I don't think aestheticising symptoms works to immerse the player in the experience of even mild depression such as mine, but what the game does so well is rescue psychological horror from generic surrealism. For a game concerned with mythologies and afterlives and eternities, it is always about the psychophysical toll taken by events in the material world, and the way this ruined world persists alongside you. Just as questions of nonexistence remain an issue for philosophical thought, Senua's Sacrifice knows that death is only a problem for the living. And if you're sobbing in the end it's not for loss, but for the persistence of life after death and the dawning of that inevitable tomorrow.

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.