A strange and conflicted work shot through with the ecstasy and excitement of the return to the familiar, but there's also a trepidation felt in terms of what's to come. The game mourns with the player as things slow down, to spend more time with those familiar faces, and to, (sacrilege), potentially rescue them from fate. What starts as a fantasy of reclaiming lost time becomes a radical rejection of narrative telics; we all saw the end of the world last time, and the Remake is playing with exactly the same deck of cards. Like Anno's Evangelion Rebuilds, eternal recurrence leads to eternal difference. What's next is totally unknown.

The battle system is both indebted to the past (active time battle) and explores the less popular algorithmic models of the past 15 years or so. What could feel weightless and automated is fixed to every nail biting decision, and what could then feel too slow instead becomes positively musical: when 'things are working' it's not because you're winning but because you're finally working within its rhythms. It's a state of tension and elation, of arriving and diving off again, and it's so addictive you almost wish there was no story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was steering the car far too wide and checking the time to fit someone's schedule and going for the map but then realising I would soon be out of gas, and that there are only a finite number of cars that I can run until they run out of gas, and that there's not enough time in the day to walk everywhere, and then crashing into a tree, that this game broke my brain and changed my life. There is nothing in games more willingly maddening and eccentric as this. We like to laugh at it, and we should, but there's something scary and just unknowable in its total derangement.

There is thought that the more sluggish a game, the more it pledges itself to cinema, while the more quickly it moves, the more action and spectacle coalesce into a central torrent of 'pure videogame'. Kingdom Hearts III gets closer to this than KH2 where Sora's feet never touched the ground and the linear level design revealed not so much the experience of turbulence as a rush to get to boss fights (where the surprisingly involved action game would begin and end). III ever so slightly tangles the levels to suggest nonlinearity, and offers a consistency of headrush from level movement to the bigger fights, but before long it is clear that it only wants us to get to the end, that there is no interest in the levels beyond their function in the story, that it is all surprisingly empty.

The tragedy is that there is actually a good game in this but that it is all shoehorned into the product that ties the most loose ends. Which reveals a kind of ignorance on the part of the developers — fandom thrives on ambiguity, on unpolished edges, on exchanges left unsaid, and not on what this thinks it's doing.

Pulls the unthinkable in a Final Fantasy game in relegating the world narrative and all its spectacular cutscenes to radio chatter, to things happening beyond the horizon. What we do does not matter: this is the eternal road trip before the end of the world. The camping and sleeping mechanics enforce a camaraderie that matches that of the Dragon Quest series, while the save mechanic, requiring us to look through photographs taken by an in-game character before bed, sentimentalises things even further, and even works as a testament to freedom in emergence. In this world where time does not move, where we repeat the same routines, the photograph is evidence of life's infinite difference, of the world always becoming other. The way we are pressured into relinquishing agency so another in-game character can drive us places is also fascinating for the way it underscores the negotiation of human and nonhuman actants in gaming generally. Mostly it's in service of the game's sweet eternity, a gentle melancholy that renders every settlement a pit stop, a Route 66 simulacrum where the landscape's littered by ghost towns that, oddly enough, look more alive than these ones.

The 'closed' half is the most fatalistic these things have ever been. Genuinely upsetting stuff.

Detractors note that Dragon Quest XI is a JRPG about JRPGs which makes it very much a JRPG, which, yes? The story so fastidiously adheres to readymade fantasy that it is impossible to care about anything other than the joy of here and now, and before long the game's subversion of its own telics: the moment things 'almost come together' is but another opportunity for a tortuous route though colourful idiots and their absurdist affairs that we, the ones tasked with stopping the apocalypse, are very very much invested in. The battle system is fine, the unplatformable body that is occasionally tasked with platforming is confusing, but again the central joy in this is the sense of incoming novelty. Here the sugar rush of videogame fatigue is prevented in that, rather than lightshows, it's all Toriyama's infinite genius for character models and locations.

I am just fucking around on a grand tour of the world, and not enough games work through allowing you to fuck around. Stealth games encourage micro fucking around within clockwork environments, and Rockstar games allow you to fuck around before 'getting to work', but I have never felt as though I am achieving so much fucking around as I have playing Dragon Quest XI. The only two locations I need in fiction — games or otherwise — are beachside towns and ones further inland with hot pools and saunas. This has those AND lakes AND peninsulas with soft pink sand, which I am just like, I am getting emotional about how grateful I am. Like Final Fantasy XII, is this even a game? Games can be many things, and the ones I like or way I play them often bears little similarity to the way games are described by critics and fans. This one like that one is a game of spaces, of watching and exploring the idea of being in spaces, of considering how architecture and light patterns and proximity and colours and settings affect a sense of belonging that's both affirmative and flexible, always open to change.

I keep thinking 'Asterix x Dragon Ball' because I feel like I'm a child, when as a child every drawing or photograph you see is supercharged with a sense of aliveness that you have to rise to and imagine being in, and Dragon Quest XI feels like living inside Dragon Ball all morning only to turn to that stack of Asterix, to read it not movement by movement or word to word but most importantly image by image. It's just profoundly a lot. The way the game returns you to familiar spaces but revokes your fast travel privileges is really moving, as it forces you to pay attention to what's around you and what had become a blur. I'm personally not so big on it, but the game's call to 'break time' after the second half evidently works for others because it sends the game sprawling in so many new directions. Fair enough, it's hard to see things this good end.

It's strange that the game that popularised the idea of the open city is so opposed to privileging the player as a free agent. Instead of wandering, we must obsessively micromanage time to fit in with the schedules of Yokosuka's inhabitants. To miss a meeting is to wait for the next day, and to feel every minute of the full duration. Ryo is too young to drink, and even if he wasn't he probably wouldn't drink any way. The setting sun does not herald adventure for us because Ryo has to be home for his mum so he can collect his allowance in the morning. He is strange, and his body moves in a blocky, strange way, which eventually comes to make its themes of alienation and obsession manifest in the way we play Shenmue. To adopt Ryo's body is to absorb his hangups, his estrangement into the process of what is already uncanny: reentering the relic world of Shenmue, and learning to read all of its ghosts.

Before delivering on any of its digital impressionist vistas, Firewatch throws us into a black screen where we get to choose how we fail our loved one. We can only fail them, however hard we try, and that is our introduction to the game. It's a brief section, but it sets player expectations for narrative decision making in Firewatch, and demonstrates how even the smallest piece of player agency can make for something emotively charged when done well. As with Telltale's The Walking Dead it's not about mechanical branches, but about the player participating in the drama, providing the human angle to the game's events. As blockbuster games become more elaborate with the way they deal with cause and effect, indie games isolate moments of reflection, forcing the player to consider their own values as they work through what's happening on screen. Kentucky Route Zero does this with free association such that the player begins unconsciously drawing out their own fears and anxieties, but in Firewatch we simply participate in constructing Henry's bullshit. He's doing the wrong thing, reasonably or unreasonably, and when called out he's unlikely to tell the truth, because he himself has lost his mooring. Whatever we say is the right thing, because anything we could say would be wrong.

Firewatch has received widespread praise for its visual style, and for good reason. Where similarly expressive works such as Inside and Shelter are so commanding in their style that the player can only act in accordance with their logic, Firewatch holds back for an openness that makes it feel conventionally navigable. Its colour palettes draw on the jarring experiments of Proteus but its forms and textures are staunchly mimetic, and its pastel finish draws it back into stylisation compared to contemporary The Witness. This last point is critical, as the diffused colours and light effects make the game feel like an echo; like it's happening in past tense. Whatever narrative reason frames the game, there is a wistful quality to Firewatch that brings with it a knowing melancholy that this is all a fabricated memory. Even when outside influences threaten this rose-tinted utopia, when the developers employ cinematic ellipsis to have the world of Firewatch step down in favour of character-centric drama, the player feels it calling back through time. The parallel here to Henry is obvious, as he clearly needs to get back to the responsibilities of his life outside of Firewatch, but as the mysteries of the game grow more pronounced and even dictate our engagement in the dream-environment, the player's affective link to it is broken in favour of someone else's enacted drama. Prince Avalanche, another work in the wake of the Yellowstone fires of 1988, better handled this temporal unease, allowing the viewer to wander around Alvin and Lance's narrative instead of being chained to it. The story in Firewatch is good in the sense that it's well paced and often frightening, but a stronger work would have been made if it had been pushed into the background, allowing us to become one with the environment, and with loss itself.

There is the sense that Campo Santo are well aware of this, and opt for a balance between the much derided 'walking simulator' and a more obvious narrative compulsion to satisfy all potential parties. Rather than feeling lost, we come to watch someone else being lost, and the most compelling embodiment of isolation (the environment) becomes the stage for dialogue-driven storytelling about precisely this. I'd opt for an inverse balance of narratological and ludic components (in order to enhance the emotional significance of both), but can't begrudge how well the developer goes in the opposite direction. The dialogue is perfect, the performances uniformly tender when tender counts and guarded when it doesn't, the map circular enough for linear storytelling. The story is a con, the conclusion invariably a betrayal, but where the game's scripted 'moments' and role-plays subside are the small instances of individual panic and satisfaction that the player takes with them into the day, the week, the month. I can't wait to see what Campo Santo will do without feeling the need to compromise.

Has a totally unbearable physicality, which is well suited to the format of the return trip 'home'. Resident Evil 7 draws on Tobe Hooper's monstrous families, tempering the blunt force trauma of Texas Chain Saw Massacre with the camp theatrics of its sequel (as well as Eaten Alive, Funhouse). Jack as patriarch welcomes us to the family as his 'son' and for as long as Jack's around, playing dad, we're returned to a kind of infantile paranoia. Things knock upstairs, others rattle against the windows or roof, and to open the door is to build the courage to peer down and look for the monster under the bed. Jack stomps and rages and throws tantrums so we can always see or hear him, but the very presence of Jack turns the Baker house into the site of one's haunted childhood. Then finally, stepping out from his shadow, we burst from the house, and turning around reality sets in. It was trees and creaky floorboards all along. From here it's an action game. A good action game, but these four stars are all for that first act.