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.

I was thinking, trudging joylessly over wet rocks through glacial streams, my controller making the sounds of a crying baby, that no game has ever made me feel this way before — this sad, of course, but this peculiar mix of weary and curious, of wanting to do something despite the crushing futility of it all. Kojima's bizarrely over-engineered menus and mundane mechanics are so expertly deployed to elicit exactly this paradox, it is no wonder the game is so divisive. The game-ness of the game is turned against you so as to add experiential weight to its surface thematics. And so continuing on this line of thinking no game has done this before (besides Shenmue), made its sadness manifest so physically in the body of the player. I came to realise no film or book or piece of music has either, and so maybe, just maybe this is a big deal. If we are looking to art to make sense of the moment of our own extinction event, then I can think of no better work than Death Stranding to thicken time, to underscore the heavy intensity of the world beyond the human, to remind us that a single rock could be the difference between the end of the world and another tomorrow.

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.

Being a series that never repeats a character or world, the enduring conflict in the Final Fantasy series is between technological determinism and artistic vision. Its arguably finest moment, Final Fantasy VII, resolves the two seamlessly: a game of unheralded beauty and scope that could have only been made with the affordances of the CD ROM over cartridges. The question of whether the game was made for the PlayStation, or whether the platform gave the developers the tools they needed for uninhibited creative expression can be argued either way, although it seems obvious that both are the case. For the past two decades however the picture has been one of negotiation: what in the mid nineties seemed like expressive opportunity quickly revealed itself as a contract for tech fetish show-reels, the game as an advertisement for the platform. This has put the series in a strange position where it has had to both embody and warn against the popular narrative of graphical (mimetic) progress leading to better art. Across the post-VII titles we see a variety of ways to use spectacle to artistic ends, to deny spectacle for artistic emphasis, to reconstitute notions of beauty and playability. The series' last moment of optimism was Final Fantasy X, a consciously next gen looking game that above all attempted to tell its most moving story yet. It succeeded, but beneath this was a subversive meta-commentary on stimulation; tech determinism and numbing blockbusters; resistance as affection; radicals salvaging and repurposing the tools jettisoned in the name of progress.

This decade's entry, and the would-be platform advertisement (as VII and X before) Final Fantasy XIII was met with scorn from players and critics alike for delivering on impressive cut-scenes but falling short as a game and a dramatic work. Although it seemed at the time upsetting that a once unimpeachable series could suddenly be faulted, this failure highlighted a widespread public rejection of tech determinism in favour of something more sophisticated. Game aesthetics after all are not surface textures alone but the way the game moves, the way the player feels grounded or groundless in its environments, the rules of the game (what can and can't be done), confrontations in and around the game's embedded narrative, and the way these things flow into one another. It is with this in mind that we come to Final Fantasy XV: the most joyously bizarre and infuriating big profile game released this lifetime. It's a heavily reflexive work, but unlike X it lays out and explores its themes with a startling clarity activated by free-form play. Where others in the series might force the player through tens of hours of storytelling before opening up as a reward, XV reverses the formula such that it begins as an 'open world' and it is up to the player to decide when to move things along in a dramatically meaningful way. Every day then is the sum of what the player explored, of the hangouts with the central friend group, of the pictures taken for the memories. The time of the open world is actually time-less, variable in weather events, but effectively a kind of influence-free dreamstate from which we choose to or not to, awaken.

Its curious approach to time and time-keeping is explored through the friction between storytelling and gameplay, and as such simply running around forces us to examine notions of entertainment, time-wasting, escapism, and responsibility. The game's master-stroke is that it all registers emotionally as well as thematically. What is immediately apparent is that its broad narrative takes place at a distance: where we typically expect spectacular cut-scenes to establish worlds, relationships, and stakes, Final Fantasy XV begins with silent stares and disappointed glances. The game starts when we walk out of the story at hand, and there we remain on the perimeter, with the nobodies. When macro context is required, we receive short flashbacks or fragments of action happening from afar. We might be curious, but Noctis has decided that these things do not matter because they are not directly impacting him and his endless summer. We remember back to those disappointed glances and realise that to the standards of everyone outside of our friend group (those engaged in what looks like a conventional RPG), we are failures.

Critics have pointed out that the bland repetition of sidequests in the game makes it feel as grindy as an MMO, and indeed this sense of uselessness is not helped by the anti-spectacle of the way that we receive the central narrative. This is all by design; we are both supposed to enjoy and not enjoy fucking around aimlessly. The combat builds on the gravity-defying kinetics of Kingdom Hearts to the point that it is difficult to tell whether you are terrible or super good at the game. For those who struggle with spontaneous chaos, there is the option to slow things down and change it into a more conventional turn-based RPG. One does get the feeling however that we're supposed to run into everything in real-time, sloppily, crashing into existence, and realising a bit too late that we need to pack our shit and run for the hills. Nobody is forcing us to do these additional pointless things. The central game can be completed in a matter of hours, but there's so much to do that means so very little! Where else do we get to hear the four friends talking shit? Where else do we get to launch into frantic combat half by accident only to come across spine-tingling vistas which we then photograph and review over a beer in the evening? Director Hajime Tabata knows that it is all meaningless, but the game is for those who find profundity in aimlessness-

Oh, the alcoholic afternoons
When we sat in your rooms
They meant more to me
Than any, than any living thing on earth

As we play through the batshit fights and race the sunshine to the lakeside campground, we come across people who all make a point of asking Isn't there something else you should be doing?. Early in the game this feels like the bland pre-programmed dialogue that so often comes in an open world with too many NPCS for meaningful scripting, but before long it registers in two ways. First, we feel guilty that we're not moving things forward and accepting responsibility as the game's 'hero', and second, an expiry date is put on this utopia- we become acutely aware that this is a fragile state that must necessarily come to an end. Like that last summer between finishing high school and deciding what's next, before people grow up and change and move to different cities, XV is full of pointless diversions, ecstatic highs, and a bitter feeling that the sun is setting on an endless summer. We feel the tipping point coming at about Chapter 9 and from there it's a free-fall into adult responsibility, mortality, and the dissolution of friendship. Tabata allows us to travel between this new dramatically active present and the useless past, but he does this in a strange and moving way- where in the present people are maimed and friends become enemies, in the past everything is still sun-drenched and golden- an eternity of youth and forever-friendships. I openly admit to welling up multiple times at the goodwill and happiness of the game's nostalgic utopia, as the present by contrast becomes so cold and unforgiving.

What is so unexpected is that we anticipate a hero's journey from Noctis, but the game is made jagged by its bold subversions. Noctis must learn what he can to make things better, but also to understand the implications of his shirking. He'll be the first to tell you that he will never be the hero the world needs, but it's more complicated than just walking away and letting someone else take over. The game is sympathetic to the teenage myopia of why should I? I never asked for this- like Donnie Darko's self-martyrdom, his ultimate expression of selflessness must come through a selfish framework. And like Donnie Darko there's a kind of empathy involved therein. We receive flashes of his betrothed, Lunafreya, but neither party seem interested in ever meeting. Luna has fully embraced her role as healer and oracle, orchestrating the events of Final Fantasy XV as its sole hero, the one person who genuinely cares about, and can positively influence how things will go. She deserves better, or different, but she's stuck with this, and whatever Noctis deserves, he's not up to what must follow. It's difficult to account for why Noctis and not Luna is the one we follow, although we can argue that Noctis is defined by the qualities he lacks compared to a) Lunafreya, and b) his friends who form a composite hero. We fuck around as Noctis, able to get by through the efforts made by others, and the realisation we come to is not unlike that of K in Blade Runner 2049. Final Fantasy XV is not the game we get to play; it's everything that we miss.

Tonally Final Fantasy XV strikes a perfect balance between knowing and spontaneous weirdness, which means that it frequently pushes itself into the domain of Deadly Premonition-esque uncanny horror. At its most pointed it uses this unease to take a stab at big budget games mimicking the surfaces of the physical world without considering how they'll appear in the context of an animation, and this otherwise underscores the cognitive dissonance involved in playing games whose narrative beats are out of sync with the way we play them. We'll receive bad news, witness something frightening, or just shit talk about frogs, and before we know it we're stumbling off into images of stunning grace and elegance. An ongoing issue with open world games is whether developers can make them feel alive, as emptiness makes for ghost towns and hyperactivity makes for claustrophobia, but Final Fantasy XV has a mixture of regional sameness and atmospheric dynamics that mean its landforms never stop exciting, especially when viewed from the motorways that have us gliding through the sublime. Towns and cities are brought to life with immense detail and have us stumbling through at night like drunks, not realising that we've been here already. Travelling at night means we're perpetually in need of a place to crash and restock, which means that settlements rarely feel redundant or deserted.

As a conventional narrative work it is unfulfilling by nature, because the onus is on the player to discover what matters and what doesn't on the narrative periphery. The real narrative is the memories made and reflected on at the end of every day through Prompto's viewfinder. When things come together they do so with a processional sadness that feels like a splash of cold water to the face. Even with closure, the game actively denies the player catharsis. The work concerns itself with ennui, responsibility, and the passage of time, and it liberates itself from the expensive demonstration of these themes by having the player work through them instead. As I have said, the Final Fantasy series has frustratedly been arguing for a complicated game aesthetics for over two decades, from its position as the leader of shiny new surfaces. In many ways the consciously retrograde Final Fantasy IX predicted (and encouraged) the rise in indie games as a response to regurgitative AAA titles, and Final Fantasy XII demonstrated the series' ambitions: an artistic digital patina; an emphasis on flow, freedom, and experimentation; a ground-view, decentralised view of a greater narrative.

A more truthful, more constructive view of the series is not one of self-contained masterpieces, but as a network of ideas about play, about storytelling, about art, which as time goes on increasingly learn from and challenge one another, resulting in works both disastrously and wonderfully broken. The series has always been progressive, even when it's retrograde, and sound even when it's scrappy. Final Fantasy XV is a perfect disaster, and an indication that rather than playing it safe, these things are only going to get stranger in pursuit of new highs and impossible resolutions.

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

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?

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.

A pretty bold descent into ecological nihilism in which giving agency to the earth results in the removal of the tumor, that being humankind. Its mysticism is tempered by its weird sense of humour, its severity by its hero's journey, but then its hero's journey by its deanthropocentric revelations. It's funny, and weird, and there's a damp, defeated atmosphere lingering over the entire thing that both draws me in and makes me want to cry. The amount of thought, precision, and poetry in every pre-rendered background is astonishing. If I were to recommend this game to someone else it would be entirely on the basis of this. We're off to save the world again but the world exists in that living room. On that beach. In that hut. And so on.

What the junction system introduces in customisability, it performs in sacrilege to the idea of characters progressing toward mastery. Having to 'draw' spells makes every individual just the sum of what is available to them on the threshold of an action; a compound or assemblage that comes into being moment-by-moment. Nobody is innately anything, they're all just ordinary. I can understand why this upsets some, not because it is a bad system in itself, but because the game is already so cold and strange. The human proportions given to the character models, and then the way they're rendered in sharp fragments, makes it all feel strangely distanced. The cutscenes as well work less to pull us into the world and impress us (as other Final Fantasy titles do), and more to establish that there is something already going on with these people, something we have to work to catch up on. The most compelling animations set the tone, with emphasis given to either moments of intimacy like holding hands or dancing, or just settling on the yearning across the cast's faces. There is something inscrutable about the closeups, but then looking itself is the action in the style of Sirkian melodrama. The emotion isn't given to us directly, instead we're left with a solemn affect that's basically classical; read across bodies and faces; gestural, but always restrained. It is well known that Erik Satie's three Gymnopédies appear across countless JRPGs throughout the 1990s, and here Nobuo Uematsu resists quotation to instead mine the composition's distinctive warm melancholy. Like a sunshower on a Sunday afternoon. The pre-rendered backgrounds blend familiar architecture with the speculative, which keeps it grounded in an ambiguous temporal and geographic register. Final Fantasy VIII is a high school soap opera and messed up science fiction thing with wormholes, amnesia, and a very literal interpretation of Marx's "annihilation of time by space", all in this gloriously austere package. Less broken than kind of aloof, and to me at least a genre masterpiece.

Artfully hides its linearity and fundamental game-ness by stripping away ornament. The player isn’t told where to go or what to do, and the feeling of anxiety that shadows the illusion of free will remains although there’s only one thing to do, and one way to do it. The process of subtraction extends beyond the game’s mechanics and into its themes and visual language too: that is, the language barrier (who needs dialogue) adds to the feeling of alienation the player feels when experiencing said illusion, and this is set against the bare backdrop of the sublime: the foreboding cliffs and vast landscapes constantly reminding of the relative insignificance of one's struggle for existence. This forced reflection strengthens the game's drive — the feeling of dread when experiencing "the dizziness of freedom" (the push/pull: to jump or not, to turn the system off, etc) becomes insignificant when compared to the responsibility one feels for saving Yorda. Love triumphs, life too.

Intermittently torturous, always detached, and Shenmue only improves in this regard two decades on. It is often cited as the open world urtext, but where Shenmue works in alienation the games it influenced put the player-character at the centre of the universe. In the Grand Theft Auto series the player moves in a reckless, fluid way, in stark contrast to the rigid and wandering NPCs — every frame explodes into being through our freedom, of movement, of decision, of infinite variety and eternal recurrence, and yet we are never allowed access to the patterns or behaviours of those around us. The very absence of an 'talk' button along with the sheer number of people spawned across the game environment has us intuitively accept that the world is that which we do — we are its God, its conductor. With Shenmue however, Ryo's body moves in this blocky, unwieldy way, and must fit into the whims and schedules of those around him. The game's day-night cycle seems to actively close rather than open opportunities, such as in cases where we are tasked with waiting tens of hours to meet certain people at certain times of day, and all Ryo's options for time-killing actively feel like time-killing (in the sense of time we know we will never get back) — throwing darts, visiting noodle houses, patting cats, watching the trees. There is no way to accelerate time's passing, and the only way to endure it is to actively make the time to enjoy the small things, which is to say reframing the story as the distraction and not the other way around. Still, as Zen as this all sounds, however beautiful the sunsets and poignant the broken swing by the stairs, Shenmue makes it so the player never feels as though they belong in it.

Every day begins and ends at the Hazuki Residence, in a curious disciplinary move that has us clumsily navigate a house that never becomes a home, waiting as Ryo puts on or takes off his shoes, before venturing into a world that similarly never opens up to him. The anonymous faces in Grand Theft Auto are props until they're activated by player action, reflecting the scale of cause and effect, but in Shenmue we are always trying to act according to the dominating logic of the world, making the people in it both obstacles that are necessary to progress the game, and ever-present reminders of our not belonging. If we see an 'interact' prompt appear near a stranger, Ryo is just as likely to receive some valuable information as he is to be, in the most polite way possible, called a creep and asked to leave. He can't jump or skip or even run through a door. He checks over his shoulder to make sure he's alone before exercising in the park. When Ryo sees someone else is using the stairs, he will wait until they get to the top before he even begins is ascent, one gets the sense out of discomfort rather than politeness. They have their routines and we don't have ours. This doesn't make us free, it makes us perpetually alone. An old woman asks Ryo for directions and says she'll wait at the park to hear from him. If the player forgets, the old woman can never be found again. How long did she wait? Did she find the place on her own? Is she okay? It's always like this, he's impossible, nobody knows who he is and neither does he. Even those who know Ryo's name expect something of him that he's failing to embody, and this sense of quiet failure permeates Shenmue in both the way the world is painted and the way it plays.

Interactions with friends and family remain at the level of surface courtesies, veiling a great sadness and isolation that hints at impossible rifts between each and every person. Nobody knows Ryo — he's always falling just short of being what others think they know of him, and on an entirely different course from what's expected in the long run. And looking to him for answers leads to an even more penetrating sense of absence, a passive neglect of others and a dead eyed embrace of tangible actions and information pathways where the insignificant is given significance, and significant actions are always underpinned by the mundane. He confronts gang members like a kid buying a toy, and he buys toys like he's finally found meaning in this world. The central ambiguity in Shenmue, and what makes it so affecting, is whether this suffocating sense of loneliness is inherent to the world or just Ryo, who as the game's protagonist paints the way it appears to us. Is there a difference? When he is showed great generosity by Fuku-San, Ryo's unreadable face casts a cold negation of the gesture, making the other person seem comically, embarrassingly over-expressive. But it's Ryo who is embarrassing — his straightforward detective questioning, gullibility, and tonedeaf approach to human interaction make his journey less a myopic descent into obsession than a sort of hobby or project, a convenient opportunity for something to do. At one stage Nozomi asks Ryu about school, and we realise all this free time he has is the result of shirking a role that could give him some structure; some direction. In every sense he is out of sync: like Kyle MacLachlan's character in Blue Velvet no matter how successfully he works through the underbelly of his town he's only ever met with bemusement and confusion by the people he finds there. He can't be here, but he can't go back either. Once again the mechanic of Ryo's return to the Hazuki Residence reinforces every morning and every evening that there is no home for him. Shenmue is affecting because it forces us to play through, to physically enact this discomfort, while reading around Ryo that it is he who is the stranger.

The strangest and most subtly moving decision made is that the game's final act begins with Ryo taking on a job at the dock, driving forklifts. Where Ryo's physically cumbersome body spent weeks running around Dobuita, mangling interactions and finding ways to kill time, Ryo's dock work finally gives him purpose, a routine, and targets to meet. Throughout the rest of the game it is impossible to know whether one is making progress or floundering, but the dock work gives instant feedback in the form of quotas and bonus cheques reflecting efforts made. The forklifts also control with a fluidity uncommon in the rest of the game and reach speeds he can't on foot. Lunch breaks begin at the same time every day with a shot of Ryo sitting with his colleagues and eating; he could almost belong here. And because we're not waiting for time to pass but rather trying to do things in time, the way the skies change during the afternoon shift can at the docks be appreciated for how beautiful they are. Time becomes valuable, and as it passes it fills the scene with warmth before it leaves. Despite the routinised action or perhaps because of it, it is clear there will never be another day exactly like this one. One afternoon Ryo sees Nozomi at the docks taking photos and there is this confronting atmosphere because Ryo for the first time sees himself in the face of someone who recognises what he's doing — not for what his family represents or what anyone thinks he should be doing, but for what he is doing as he works at the dock. This is followed by a strange and beautiful sequence where Ryo's and Nozomi's photograph is taken twice, and Ryo must pick one to take away. One makes it appear as though they are lovers, the other, total strangers, and clearly the truth is somewhere in between. This moment of self-presentation to someone who matters is immediately turned into a fiction, or perhaps memorialised as a future that can never be between two people, one who doesn't know who she is but knows what she wants, the other a blank surface reflecting back everything indeterminate, everything unsure, everything anxious about the one unfortunate enough to look. He is in short a negation.

As the year wraps up, the uncaring faces increase in volume, and many of the familiar ones say they're going away. Ryo's neighbourhood, already a quietly lonely place, comes to feel like a ghost town of dead end interactions and suspended time — a place simultaneously too big and too small to sustain life. Ryo's dispassionate movement through Yokosuka is curious, because he is not the one feeling these things. Everything to him is information, and if that information leads abroad, so be it. He doesn't care one way or another, but we do. That Yokosuka is framed as a place that is already dead and in the process of being remembered must then belong to somebody else, someone who is remembering the story as Ryo tells it. Indeed as others try to reach out for him it becomes clear that it is not the town that is the ghost, but Ryo, that figure once present and well liked but who died one day and now glides through with blank eyes, forever out of time and place.

Without the language of Chinese cinema the story is simplistic and weird, but its grandiose animated dreams and talks of fate cut an effective threshold between the exhaustingly quotidian world of Shenmue and its mythic aspirations. Its textures are uniformly dingy and wet looking but this adds to Ryo's sense of claustrophobia, and the alienating temporality of the game that insists we shouldn't be here. Indeed the construction of the New Yokosuka Movie Theatre that will never be finished, and dig site and Sakuragaoka suggest the world will keep moving once we leave but can't start until that happens. The ability to talk to people who will only offer 'Sorry I don't feel like talking' leads to disappointment before its themes of isolation become clear. The animations haven't aged well but the offbeat rhythms of the game work its visuals into an uncanny space both otherworldly and uncomfortably familiar. It's also occasionally gorgeous by any standards: in one scene on a motorbike Yu Suzuki manages an extended reference to Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels and, short a bloom effect to mimic that director's blurry expressionism, simply layers brake light colours across the screen. I'll admit I lost my breath for a full minute: the absence of a bleeding light for a strange, rigid, suspended rendering of abstract human emotion might be the game in a single wonderful image.

Not yet at the stage where in-game GPS can be used as a crutch for overly dense or visually monotonous levelling, the world design of San Andreas is all interconnected backstreets and shortcuts, and the artful use of colour and texture to suggest interest or to assist the player in building a mental map of all the landmarks across San Andreas' diverse city. To move through it is to learn it intimately, to belong in it, and to read the space and know which escape route to follow under which circumstances. Every backyard and park and underbridge. The missions carefully ripple out from Grove St, introducing new territories bit by bit, such that the player is still able to connect familiar signs and buildings with new vistas, like stars to a navigator.

Then when it suddenly all becomes too much, the story goes that it's too much too. We're miles away in the country and it's night time and the spaces are far too open and now we're lost because we're in exile. CJ cannot go home. The intricate network of passageways that constitutes Los Santos (where it's always better to move by foot or bicycle) is replaced with bare hills and long, straight highways leading to new nowheres. That which once took hours on foot because it was bustling with life takes minutes by car, and the human textures of the world are lost to a shiny sameness that actively works to deflect player interest. The passage from Grove St is to the Desert of the Real, its veins running cold and efficient with the anonymity of hyperspace.

The emptiness of much of San Andreas outside of Los Santos is testament to its overambition, but this works well for its narrative where CJ must return from the desert back home. It also gives the landscape an air of mystery that has to be actively filled by player imagination, hence the accumulation of community myths concerning ghosts, cryptids, angels, and parallel dimensions. GTA V would attempt to tap into some of these narratives in order to control them, but in San Andreas it's the organic byproduct of players, glitches, and weird landscapes. It's the perfect synthesis of broken and polished gameplay and features, and because of its homely details and manic scope, still one of the biggest feeling games there is.

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.

From Claude's scrunched up face to his black jacket and weird green pants and the water that churns the colour of concrete, there is a heaviness to Grand Theft Auto III that more serious entries (IV) never matched. But there's also a brutal clarity to the space, where we are always able to see objects in relation to one another, and where collisions seem active instead of incidental. It's just a genuinely explosive game, from the way it looks to the way it controls. I heard someone say it's the purest of the series, and it's also one of the purest games. Where it lacks in atmospheric effects its distinctive grime textures carry the weight of the whole city, and if that's not enough there's the radio permanently tuned to the haunted vibrations of Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires.