New fight mechanics make for a frenzied update of the first game's perhaps rigid to a fault slugging. That is until the boss fights where thought reenters the fore — sorry but Roxas is a more relentless, punishing, and decisive fight than Dark Souls' Ornstein and Smough. My issue is with the despatialisation of the game where the first so radically reduced familiar Disney worlds to clumsy sets in order to channel both the appeal and limitations of nostalgia. It was affectionate and utterly heartbreaking. The tangled levels asked the player to return, to see what they might've missed or maybe just spend more time there. Kingdom Hearts 2 is effectively a long cut scene with interactive bits. The levels are stripped of texture, Sora feels like he's gliding along the floor, and the painted corridors let us know that there is nothing here to return to after the cutscenes are over. Often we will get a cutscene that places us on a path, and there is nothing to do but walk along the path to cue another cutscene. It comes together near the end with a narrative charge that finally 'feels' like something, but really the game begins and ends in its (excellent) boss battles.

I stopped playing with Cataclysm, so I guess this is for the vanilla. I care less about the fact of WoW's place in gaming history than about the qualities that made it so appealing to so many gamers and non-gamers alike in the first place. It's a rare case of more involved and accessible playstyles coexisting, and where a huge scale is carefully filled with details orienting players to an acute sense of place. Every location has its own distinct look and feel, but they're also organised such that you can see how one unfolds into the other. The skies change, or the design of rocks and trees, or a subtle transformation occurs in the colour palette, or the texture of the paths. Changes in the continent's climates and geologic features cause the design styles to mutate and hybridise, leading naturally to the kaleidoscopic heterogeneity of port cities. It feels lived-in, believable, because the settlements seem to have emerged to suit the landscape and not vice versa.

Blizzard's clumsily physical character and building designs encompass WoW's topography, which exploits a dynamic vertical axis with quick descents into craters and forests, and dizzying mountaintops overlooking desert stretches and floodplains. The thrill of discovery is just endless, and this is helped by the rather reserved achievement system and unobtrusive maps. Other games of this scale load these things with achievements and filled-in mini-maps such that watching the HUD takes precedence over the experience of physical traversal. WoW is all traversal, all cliffs and boulders and things to scale and jump off for no reason other than to do it. It doesn't really tell you much, but it makes not knowing intrinsically enjoyable, and a perfectly viable way of existing in the game. Happening across the zeppelin in Tirisfal Glades, totally by accident, and realising with a rush just how big this thing is on arriving at Orgrimmar is a feeling I won't forget. I had spent weeks just wandering around those undead forests, taking in every hill and lake and cabin, and now here the horizons rolled out to the infinite, with people spilling everywhere across the glowing yet formidable desert landscape.

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.

It probably sounds trivial, and I can't rule out memory being a factor in a replay two decades on (how could it not be?), but Jak has a real impressive weight to him. It's expected now, but having your fingers wrapped around the triggers and thumbs feeling through the joysticks meant a physical anchoring from the hands to the controller that was revolutionary at the time, and was echoed back with vibrations and Jak's flailing limbs and thudding landings. Decades on it's still actively enjoyable to just move around as Jak, as he's both nimble and clumsy, and so grounded to the wacky shapes and paths of the landscape. Unfortunately it's all the more obvious that most of the appeal is exhausted by the time you leave Sentinel Beach, which is the game's opening level and highpoint as a multi-layered open space that also vibrates with those stunning PS2 era colours. There's a grit and shadow that contours the three dimensional shapes but it's still dealing in palettes as bright as something from the previous generation console. After this it's an act of drawing things in, of adding snow or muck to surfaces in order to complicate Jak's fluid movement, or even introducing some of the more irritating platform puzzles from Crash. Along with the tedious vehicle stuff it's all clearly just padding, making The Precursor Legacy feel more like a next gen proof of concept for Naughty Dog than a finished game in its own right.

The various landforms of Miami are interconnected with bridges that arch dramatically over the waterways, bringing about a ropey spatialisation in contrast to Grand Theft Auto III's boxed in claustrophobia. Driving around in Vice City you will never be glued to the road for too long because soon you will be flying. There's a kick to be had in noticing people go by in boats beneath you, because it reveals a cross section of the game-space where different surfaces follow different paths and call for different types of action. Vice City's horizons are all densely knotted with distraction, with other possibilities. The glistening ocean and waterways are a gelatinous mass that pulls turquoise ripples across the ocean floor more swimming pool than anything else, which all adds to the game's garish charm. In the spirit of 1980s excess everything in nature comes filtered through its artificial counterpart: every sunset and palm tree. Vice City is celebrated by fans for having every texture and action derived from an imploded database of 80s pop signifiers that's denser than dense, and happy to be that way. It also, maybe inadvertently, captures the ambiguous place of an artefact like Scarface in pop culture, in that it is presented here as both 'badass' and a work of seedy exploitation. To quote Waikay on this, however, "it is Scarface without de Palma, Pacino, and pathos". Not that the game needs to say anything Shakespearean necessarily, but beyond the reference it's just kind of empty.

And blank pastiche is the issue here. I don't see the point in distinguishing between form and content because any artist will tell you that expression is always negotiated between tools and ideas; moreso where the player/audience is involved. Focusing solely on game systems ignores the way we make sense of them sensorially in play, and likewise an account of only narrative beats and visuals precludes the way these things are actualised in-game. And so with Vice City there is a hypersaturated audiovisual style that nevertheless feels both naked and abrasive. Where every other Rockstar game has the player avatar firmly rooted to the ground beneath their feet (even to the detriment of responsiveness in later titles), Tommy's movements jerk in sharp directions and seems to flicker away just short of the game surfaces. I can understand this sense of irritation adding to its coked up atmosphere, but Tommy's twitchy body along with the game's more lightweight driving physics creates a distance between the player and texture of the world that just seems like a waste. It is always unfun to play, or, the pleasure is less in feeling your way through the game-space than in actively connecting your actions to the game's audiovisual signifiers. Sure, you get a chainsaw, but where is the weight of it? Where is the gravity of the scene it's referencing, or otherwise the pull of the machine itself? It doesn't help that the missions put more of an emphasis on combat than its predecessor but that its lock on and run system is even more scrappy. It's more stylised and grisly, but its flimsiness has it oscillate between agitation and frustration.

Again the case can be made for the amped up coke logic of its embodied play combined with the dizziness of its hollow 1980s signifiers. That's obviously enough if you buy it, but I need a sense of gravity in my ultraviolent sleaze.

(de)mythologisation of the West at its most self-aware — looks, feels, and plays all vibrant and 3D Space Invaders-y (gangly bodies running at you, flashing things flying at you) as an arcade game so as to avoid in every way possible competing with Red Dead (which itself snuck in while Call of Juarez was attempting modern-day war on drugs type westerns instead). You know the world dies as soon as you leave the level, but such is the nature of a story as a series of discrete events, and such is the nature of a memory which is fallible and constantly alluded to in its fallibility (a conversation between the narrator and his audience manipulates the landscape surreally or just calls bullshit). I would love to say that it's more important than it is satisfying to play, but time so far has not been kind to Call of Juarez: Gunslinger either. I'm sure it'll be featured in post-Western histories somewhere down the track and it'll deserve its place there. For now, who knows. That's the problem with concept-driven work, I suppose.

Removes the visual noise and circular paths from its predecessor and flows like an aqueduct. That it is one of the more linear games of its kind and yet also still feels more expansive than most is a thing of great mystery. Really it just does everything so well. To me it's the perfected rhythms of tension and release, of incentivizing forward momentum through novel affordances (weapons and vehicles), and of pure audiovisual affect: the game knows when to reveal a horizon or a sunset, and when to leave you buried or with the sun fading in the wrong direction, feeling in the shadows trapped and alone.

The finest art direction of any fantasy game: trippy but seamlessly so, like it all came together the only way it could. WoW's clunky physicality just pops with warped perspectives and spaces that seem to expand beyond the game container, cued exactly for when it knows you're breathless. The Fel Reaver, a giant that wanders the doom metal concept art of Hellfire Peninsula, is an all-timer. At a distance it moves with the eerie grace of one of Team Ico's colossi, evoking a similar loneliness (just here, it wanders eternally in space). But to forget about the Fell Reaver is to have the ground tremble and everybody else flee, and to have that inhuman loneliness shot through with fear of that which is beyond oneself. The Fel Reaver has a heart, but it does not beat for us. I wonder what it is looking for?

Returning many years later because at the time I thought it might be a masterpiece for its incredible sadness as a thing in its own right, and for its advancements within Rockstar games' linear history (if this is indeed 'GTA with horsies'). GTA IV pared back the 'scope' of San Andreas which was frankly too big for its own good (according to its detractors), shooting instead for a world which was living, breathing, and, crucially, inhabited (where SA was 3-4 cities surrounded by hills and (both intentional and unintentional) ghost towns). Red Dead proved you could have it both ways — when playing it feels lonesome it's thematically lonesome (rather than forgotten by devs) — there's enough variety in the environment that everything feels significant, and if that's not enough then the NPCs and animals found in the wild acknowledge the player's presence, whether through fear or violence.

My issue with it then was that everything post-Fort Mercer disappeared in a haze and then it was over. I've tried to pay attention to it this time in order to account for lost time, and what happens is that after Fort Mercer, Red Dead actually does become something like Grand Theft auto: Horsies. The landscape becomes secondary to the action or to advancing the plot, and all is lost in a blur of cutscenes, quirky NPCs, fighty-bits, and however much John Marston protests "I'll only help you if you advance the plot for me," (thus contextualising the fighty-bits) decentralised activity making for a sort of action-game lobotomy. This becomes incredibly obvious having 'completed' Mexico, riding (if, as you should, one refuses to fast-travel) through those war-torn deserts to the familiarly barren Rio Bravo/Cholla Springs, and stopping for a second in the prairie of Hennigan's Stead where the formative bits of Red Dead played out: in a silent introduction our hero is coerced into enacting a revenge that he does not believe in, where we think he will show off his ability to enact said revenge but is instead overpowered in spite of his stoic-cowboy verbalising, where he then wakes up in a shack on some prairie thanks entirely to the kindness of strangers, removes himself from his bed, and shoots rabbits and shit in the thickened and tender time of the prairie.

The body is a tomb and the body is vulnerable — in spite of the metaphysically astounding skies (the way different types of light effectively re-paint the entire world as it occurs in real life: from the harsh sun of midday where the game plays prickly, to the diffused magic hour where one moves slower) and weather (the storms with the power of a JMW Turner), Marston walks down the stairs one at a time. If I could write for shit I would write 100 pages on John Marston walking down the stairs one at a time and what this means experientially for the player, but these non-sentences will have to suffice: because the character is 'trapped' in this situation (depersonalised revenge on those who mean something, personally) and the player is trapped with him (as him?), the tragedy is gut-wrenchingly fatalistic. The body is a tomb, the revenge is hollow, the fights are both confusing and dissatisfying (almost Peckinpah-esque), and the videogame medium has been used for this anti-western in a way that is distinct to the videogame medium — it's embodiment as punishment. The painterly dimensions and cross-media references (Rockstar's pop culture regurgitation and the fact that most 'westerns' we admire are samurai films re-tooled as examinations of the values and tropes of the western previous) are worthy of critical discussion and admiration, but the way the game plays as a game (kinaesthetically) is where the ineluctable art lies. Even when one was not flying in GTA there was a forward momentum and impression that the body could transcend the world-as-prop. The best one can do in Red Dead is shoot birds from the sky, to bring what is up there down here with us. Whether one agrees that the landscape is the protagonist or not, it is sublime in the Schopenhauerian sense (i.e. not just beautiful skies) — it reminds again and again that the player is trapped in it, that it cannot sustain her, and that it will outlive her.

This cosmic insignificance is acknowledged and worked with in the early game, killing rabbits, herding cattle, and attempting to use in-game markers rather than the inexplicable horse GPS. As a build-up to a doomed stand-off, the game is perfect. One could certainly account for the blur of violence, narrative sub-plots, and ends-driven travel that begins at the 33% mark by pointing out that the further the character returns to his 'old ways', the less he gives a shit about his sublime insignificance, shooting rabbits, ascending/descending the stairs step by step, etc, and the more he welcomes the psychosis of ends-driven ultraviolence. But three things in particular stand in opposition to this: the fact that the player is 'welcomed' to Mexico with a forced on-the-rails twitch-game massacre (in stark contrast to the game earlier asking the player to consider every life they might take), the late game where Marston receives his payment (and the prairie-like 'every little thing matters' nature of the early game returns with it), and the ending (whose tragedy/fatalism/etc is reinforced or even resurrected by the return of the aforementioned prairie-style gameplay).

Red Dead Redemption is bookended by folk tragedy and low-key non-heroics brought about by a body that cannot help but react to every single rock, tree, patch of grass, drop of rain, sunset, staircase. What happens in the middle is one of the downsides to creating something expensive when success is measured by financial returns, and the way to guarantee said returns is to imagine the dumbest possible audience. There's enough to argue the case that Red Dead is one of the more thoughtful, fatalistic masterpieces of the medium, but the concessions it makes to fulfil its obligations to an imagined audience who want GTA: Horsies are difficult to ignore.

Red Dead Redemption was a beautiful and depressing game in which an old ghost of the wild west works his way through the other ghosts until there is nothing left. This sequel brings them back to life, which means revising the revisionist western, to what end I am not sure. It is a step back thematically and narratologically, and the first game I've enjoyed that I also hold to be entirely redundant.

It is a feat of open world landscaping but at its heart is an emptiness that is moving when one considers these are all future ghosts. That there never was an Eden.

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)

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.

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.