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.

Ah

I really needed that.

Hard to be cynical, hard to analyze what I needed emotionally in the moment. Something to plug a hole I didn't realize was bothering me. Sometimes the verisimilitude of a hike that I can't currently get right now is the best medicine for my mental state. The lighthearted soul of something really warm, uplifting that makes my heart soar. I cried to very small, very clearly crafted, earnest messages. I wandered, I explored, I went to the ends of the island and back, and I got something to remember this day forever.

Thank you for the gentle reminder to look forward head high.

Suggested by Phantom. Thank you

i recognize fully that this game is a goddamn mess but i love it even so. never played anything quite so dysmorphic, so hateful, so disinterested in its own legacy and in its expectant audience (at least until drakengard 3). that it nevertheless delivers unforgettable moments in spades and pseudoscientific genre kitsch in equal proportion just solidifies it as the mgs franchise writ large, a macrocosm of vestigial feelings, directorial gratuitousness, and creeping entropy. still one of the most interesting in kojimas ouevre, astonished mgsv managed to outpace it in charlatanisms

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.

Opening with a pregnant female hero, Tasi, whose plane crashes into a scorching desert, it's clear that Amnesia: Rebirth is a step away from its Gothic predecessors. It is still a more faithful sequel than A Machine For Pigs in terms of its return to anxiety-inducing nyctaphobia in tight spaces, now with the aid of the world's shittiest matches. Much like the original Dark Descent, Rebirth is most terrifying when you're stuck in these shadows with ancient monsters, but eventually tips slightly overboard into Lovecraftian cosmic horror towards the third act, which even evokes the art of HR Giger - not a bad thing really.

I actually found Rebirth's greatest strength to be the empathy felt with Tasi, who couldn't be any more vulnerable in her nightmare situation. I felt an equal amount of desperation in getting this poor unborn baby to safety, and was incredibly tense with every unfortunate plunge into deeper horrors - some of those chase sequences left me gasping. There's also some fun puzzle gameplay, involving assembling a cannon and making ammo for a tank; all of this absolutely necessary in punctuating those more terrifying moments typical of an Amnesia game.
The only thing that bummed me out was 'dying' only to regain consciousness back at a checkpoint with an easier or even totally absent foe, taking away the reward of beating something on a repeated attempt. This is especially frustrating when all you did was go 'the wrong way' in a desperate chase.
In these moments however, at least it felt like the stakes were high, unlike much of Machine For Pigs, which plays like a spooky walking simulator.

Whilst the Dark Descent undoubtedly has it's legacy and influence backing it, I can't help but find Rebirth's balance of horror, adventure, puzzles and character driven narrative greater refined and all the more satisfying as a package. It's really all can ask for from a survival horror sequel.

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.

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.

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.

Charming. Short.

I guess I was expecting this to be more of a sandbox game and less of an explicit puzzler. There's benefits and drawbacks to both approaches. The sandbox approach would risk boredom, and without being given any direction I imagine it might become frustrating not knowing how many reactions or outcomes one is missing out on by not having discovered the proper triggers for them. Conversely, the puzzle solving approach encourages and allows for more complexity in setting up elaborate, multi-step pranks that an individual player would likely never stumble upon without at least some guidance; but it also imposes a certain amount of linearity, and dampens somewhat the joys of pure discovery and anarchic-ness.

I was immediately disappointed when the checklist first made it's appearance at the start. (A meddlesome goose with a to-do list?? The scourge of productivity strikes again!) Realistically there was probably no other way to make this work, and any alternative would have likely ended up less fun. To their credit, they also do a good job trying to encourage more aimless experimentation by way of the "To Do (As Well)" secret checklist, whose items are only revealed after they've already been accomplished (or once the main game is beaten).

I also try to remind myself of a phrase my old professor, the filmmaker Thom Andersen, liked to repeat: "suspense is an alienation effect." In other words: by prolonging narrative closure, raising a question and then leaving it unresolved for a certain period of time, you create a space of heightened attention for the viewer, and this attention can be re-directed however the director sees fit. (Andersen's favorite example of this was a scene in the 1973 political thriller The Day of the Jackal where otherwise mundane Parisian street scenes become strangely riveting by virtue of our knowledge that Charles de Gaulle's would-be assassin is hiding somewhere among them.)

There is a case to be made that an analogous principle exists in game design: goals are an alienation effect. The gap between assignment and execution opens up its own space of unresolved tension, heightening our perception, and—in a feature that distinguishes games from a medium like film—directing or guiding our behavior. The experience of the game, in other words, is what happens while we're busy trying to accomplish other plans.

Still, there's part of me that laments the narrow way that goal-oriented engagement hews and anchors our attention. How much of the game's world is blinkered out as I fixate on solving the problems it presents me with? How much is lost when I perceive that world as purely means to various ends? How does the pleasure of an action done for its own sake compare to the satisfaction of an action within a chain leading to an end result already known in advance? (Even the attempt to uncover a "hidden" objective creates a wholly different, and arguably impoverished, way of looking from that of open-ended playfulness.)

I'm reminded too that Thom Andersen, in addition to his love for classical narrative cinema, is one of the most notable critical champions of the filmic work of Andy Warhol. Perhaps that's what I wanted out of this. A more Warholian experience. Not the heightened mundanity transformed by the alienation effect of suspense/objectives, but mundanity itself, raw. A slab of time to live in. An array of objects and effects and patterns to fuck around with.

But I suppose at that point what I'm asking for isn't really a game at all. So I can't say I was misled. After all, it's right there in the title.

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.