text by tim rogers

★★★★

“THE BEST VIDEOGAME OF ALL-TIME.”

Another World (released as “Out of This World” in the US and “Outer World” in Japan) is, perhaps by default, the best game of all-time by our criteria: it was designed and programmed by virtually one man, it is not long, it features no heads-up display to clutter the screen, it features precisely one weapon which can be used for three purposes (regular attack, charge attack, shield) using only one button (we love games that let us hold down a button and then let go), it possesses unshakable confidence in the sharpness of its mechanic (conveyed in level design that prompts the player to use his multi-faceted gun in many creative ways), it features puzzles whose solutions require no more than common sense, it has amazing music, it is gorgeous to look at, and it tells a story while it moves, relentlessly, never stopping, never preaching, never speaking, from the frightening beginning right up to the heartbreaking conclusion.

Out of This World was ahead of its time in 1991, and it is still ahead of not-its time in 2008. One might call it an art film of a videogame. This wouldn’t be a wrong description so much as a lazy one. It’s more of a silent film of a videogame. Or, better than that, it is a videogame of a videogame.

Out of This World shows (not tells) us the story of Lester Knight Chaykin, a red-haired physicist working in some kind of laboratory. The introduction scene impresses us immediately with visions of the familiar: a car (headlights), a building, a thunderstorm. Lester — whose name we will only know if we’ve read it out of the instruction manual — descends into his laboratory and boots up a large computer. He leans back in his chair. He sips a can of what might be beer. It’ll be the last can of what might be beer that he’ll ever have. A lightning bolt strikes the building outside. We see Lester’s car again, for a split second. Something explodes and implodes simultaneously deep inside the lab. A spherical hole replaces Lester’s chair. The screen hangs there for a moment, perfect, weighty cinematography befitting . . . cinema. Then there’s a crash, and a splash. Lester materializes in a pool of water. Vine-like tentacles begin to reach toward the sunlight on the surface of the pool.

The game begins.

Out of This World, from this moment until its fascinating conclusion, represents an Actual Genius’s osmosed omniscience regarding game design: we can say that it is Super Mario Bros. turned on its ear. In Super Mario Bros., the player knows he has to go to the right because his recognizable-as-human avatar is facing to the right, and standing just left of the center of the screen. The reason for going to the right is explained only in the instruction manual: a dragon has kidnapped a princess, and Mario must get her back (our imaginations fill in the perhaps-promise of getting laid). Out of This World doesn’t need an instruction manual: here we have a hero who was in one place, and is now in another. Sinking in a pool of water is objectively worse (humans can’t breathe underwater) a situation than sitting in a desk chair drinking beer (what’s a few dead brain cells?). We must get out of here. To further impress the situation upon us, we have those growing, evil tentacles.

It is possible to die a grisly, uniquely animated death not one second into Out of This World. It’s likely that the designer, one Eric Chahi, intended for the player to die the first time the game began. This is how you die in the beginning of the game: you don’t press any buttons. You just stare at the beautiful and serene pool of water. This is, in fact, what most people would do, if they found themselves suddenly transported from a desk chair in a laboratory to a pool of water beneath a vaguely alien sun. That one second is long enough for Lester to sink just far enough for the evil tentacles to grab him. Now you’re being dragged underwater. The next thing you know, you’re dead.

All great art tends to originate from a somewhat shy little need. Most of the time, the “need” is only a placebo. The artist eventually realizes he didn’t need anything. Like The Stone Roses said, “You don’t have to wait to die / the kingdom’s all inside”. Or something. Eric Chahi’s production of Another World began when he saw the game Dragon’s Lair, found the animation fascinating, and dreamt up — probably in a split second, while standing dead still in the middle of an intersection with a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand — a method to make similarly fluid animation using much less data storage space. He set to work immediately, having no clue what he was going to make — only a basic idea of how he was going to do it. It’s said he planned at first only to make a game like Karateka and Prince of Persia, only in a science-fiction setting. He spent half a year developing his excessively complicated though ultimately amazingly efficient animation technique. He developed it the only sane way: while using it to make a cinematic introduction for his game.

Now it was time to make a game. Eric Chahi presumably did not bother to jot his game design idea onto a bar napkin. The “game design” pre-production phase of Another World did not exist. Chahi had presumably had a simple idea brewing. When it came time to make a game, he figuratively snapped his fingers, and a genie exploded out of his ears.

Every third man who owns an electric guitar will claim to have met and hung out with the person who only they consider “the best unknown singer / songwriter alive today”. These singer / songwriter-warriors often impart the same advice regarding songwriting to every friend cool enough to drink a beer with them: if you want to write a song, man, just heckin’ write a song. Anything can be a song. A song can be anything. And If you have a song, sing it. This is not just the method for writing songs — you can replace these verbs and adjectives at random, and you’ll end up with a pretty fool-proof philosophy.

Another World is a song of a videogame. The dumbfounding simplicity of its core mechanics are such that they must have been set in stone from the very moment Chahi began level design. Chahi says, nowadays, that the level design was done completely at random, in a spur-of-the-moment sort of way, and this sticks: only when the game design is so thoroughly complete is the level design allowed to be spur-of-the-moment.

The basic gist of Another World is that you must not die. You play the part of a man in a world completely different from the home of cars and laboratories glimpsed in the introduction, and then never again. You escape from the tentacles in the pool to find yourself on a barren, rocky planet. You may walk either to the right or to the left. To the left is a cliff, and a vine. To the right are some slugs. If a slug bites your leg, you will see a pan-flash close-up animation of a silver stinger cutting through khaki. Then it’s back to the main screen. Lester falls over, dead. Your next attempt, you might try pressing a button. Press the Action Button, and Lester kicks. Kick the slugs to kill them. Press the Jump Button to hop over the slugs. Keep moving right, and you will come face-to-face with a beast. The beast is huge, and black. It is, in fact, the first thing you see upon exiting the pool at the beginning of the game: the beast is standing on a cliff in the distance. When you emerge from the water, he turns and gallops off-screen. You cannot kill the beast, and you will immediately know this because you know how Lester is hardly a match for a slug. Whether you walked left at the beginning of the game or not, whether you saw that vine and that cliff or not, you will be compelled to run back the way you came by virtue of the fact that the beast literally takes up most of the right side of the screen. You will run left, jumping over the slugs. The beast chases you. You run all the way off the edge of the cliff, grab the vine, and swing around as the beast rears up to avoid falling. Now you have to run again to the right, jumping over the slugs again. Make your way all the way back to the screen where you met the beast; when you run off the right side of the screen, the game suddenly betrays your just-founded expectations (that running off the edge of one screen takes you to a new screen) by having your character fall backward onto the rocky ground. Robe-shrouded, large humanoid forms walk into the frame. The beast comes gallopping into the screen. One of the robed men immediately shoots the beast with a concealed weapon. The beast crumples into a pile. Lester stands up, thanking his saviors. He is punched in the gut with a laserbeam, and the screen fades to black.

You wake up in a cage. It’s a brief cut-scene. You see an alien sitting across from you. This is very important: at the lower-right corner of the screen is one of the robed aliens. He immediately removes his robe. Underneath is a large, albino-gorilla-like muscular being wearing a skin-tight black shirt and briefs. This alien being is precisely identical to the alien beings mining in the background — and the alien sitting next to us in our cage. Why are we in the cage? As with most of the questions presented in Another World, this is a question we don’t need to ask. We can ask it — and then answer it — anyway: these aliens all look precisely the same. Lester doesn’t look anything like them. Lester is in the cage, perhaps, because he is an obviously intelligent being who looks nothing like the resident intelligent beings of this world. The narrative plays our brain on subconscious levels: if Lester is arrested for looking different, then these people might have some kind of racism in their hearts. That would make them inherently bad. We don’t hesitate to assume that the reason they locked up one of their own kind is because he is not bad. If the game’s first puzzle is getting out of the pool, and the second puzzle is escaping from the beast, the third is wondering why these terrible things keep happening to us. The solution to the puzzle involves a leap of conscience: escape from the cage. Escaping from the cage requires as much common sense as swimming out of the water. In the water, you pressed up. In the cage, you press right and left to make it swing. Make it swing once, and the guard in the lower-right shouts some unintelligible alien words at you. He fires his gun into the air. Guards appear in the background. Now you know you’re on the right track. Swing harder. The cage falls off its chain and crushes the guard dead. A quick cut-scene shows Lester’s hand approaching the floor, picking up a gun. The guards in the background panic.

The rest of the game begins.

The immediate, short-term, and long-term goals will, for the duration of the experience, be “move”, and “survive”. Moving will involve running and jumping; surviving will involve shooting and dodging.

Another World is a game centered on death. As we’ve established, Eric Chahi’s inspiration for creating it came from looking at Dragon’s Lair and wondering if he could create a similar graphical effect using much less storage space. There had to be a little more to the Dragon’s Lair inspiration than Eric Chahi has perhaps let on. Dragon’s Lair‘s initial appeal was its full-motion-video graphics. It was better than something that looked “like” a cartoon — it was a cartoon. That was enough, in Dragon’s Lair‘s day and age. People wouldn’t care about the control or depth of a game if it looked like absolutely nothing they’d ever seen before within the same medium. You play Dragon’s Lair by pressing the correct button as dictated by a glint on the screen. Press that button, and the hero will move, initiating a “successful” video segment. Don’t press that button, and the current segment of video will flow directly into the “failure” animation. Dragon’s Lair‘s conscience is a weird one to peg, however, because nearly as much attention is paid to “failure” as to “success”. Some would even argue that watching your hero die is more interesting than watching him succeed. If you have only successfully completed Dragon’s Lair without making any mistakes, then you haven’t seen the whole game. Another World is the same way, only — thanks to the beautiful animations taking up much less data storage space than full-motion video — there’s an actual game shoehorned into it.

Dragon’s Lair had been joyfully free of then-modern videogame genre restrictions: the action was shown from many bizarre, quasi-cinematic angles. Another World was intended from the outset to be an experiment in streamlining an artistic game experience. So it ended up as a side-scroller in the vein of Super Mario Bros. Chahi probably never had a doubt in his mind that many of the set-pieces in the game would rely on use of a context-sensitive Action Button. It’s the button you will immediately think to press when an alien grabs you buy the shoulders; press it in time and you kick him in the groin, and he drops you. No game has done Action Buttoning as well as Another World, try as games might. The simplicity of the situations — always one man, expressively and silently facing a faceless opponent in a unique struggle — and the honest, terse dread of every moment-to-moment conflict lend themselves well to a just-barely-subconscious instinct that knows to Press That One Button. The variety of set pieces exploits the Action Button’s function and timing in enough entertaining ways to qualify this game as a masterpiece, as the undisputed king of the “adventure” genre, far better than all those point-and-clickers with their byzantine puzzles with arcane solutions and tacked-on tacky humor. Then the game goes and takes one step closer to the edge of the Grand Canyon, when Lester picks up a gun; minutes later, we are playing The Greatest Videogame Ever.

Pick up the gun and proceed one screen to the right. You will see guards in the halls. The gun is the king in Another World: no living thing survives more than one shot. Landing that one shot is the trick. In your second fight, you will see a guard hold his gun out, and a ball of energy grow at the tip. Eventually, the ball of energy will become a shield roughlythe height of his body. He will then poke his arm out of the shield and fire at you. You can duck his shots. The game is telling you to hold your own Action Button down. Hold it down long enough, and you produce your own shield. Poke your arm out and shoot at his shield. Shoot his shield enough to break it. Or you can hold your trigger until the glowing ball appears, and then let go to fire a massive, shield-destroying shot. With the shield destroyed, fire another quick zap to disintegrate your enemy.

If Another World were made today, or one day later, or one day earlier, you maybe would have just had a gun that fired when you pressed the fire button. Maybe you would have gotten another gun, later, which fired really fast, and a third gun, which fired really big bullets. Another World‘s game design, however, was gracefully decided in what we’ve determined was the length of a snap of the creator’s fingers. A gorgeous one-off informed by all that was ever fun in videogames, and all that would ever come to be.

To recap, your gun can:

1. Fire enemy-killing lasers
2. Create a force shield capable of absorbing several shots
3. Fire a charged shot capable of destroying an enemy force shield in one burst

The level design escalates smoothly, then sharply. We learn how to shoot. We learn how to shield. We learn how to break shields. Then the game pushes us down an elevator shaft, the sink-or-swim approach. Soon, we’re making shields on staircases, or making two shields, or three. Soon, we have enemies attacking from two fronts. Eventually, we’re attacking enemies with craft. Each screen, each skirmish, becomes a little puzzle. Another World owes its elegance in no small part to its screen-by-screen nature. Like Pac-Man, like Donkey Kong, all action in the game takes place within one screen. What we can see right now is what matters. Maybe some literary theme is hiding behind the scenes of this, or maybe not. Either way, it works, because the creator only needed to think of every gunfight in the context of one screen.

Some will say that Another World‘s controls are hokey, or ropey. We say that they are exactly as they’re supposed to be. We’re not even going to cop-out and say that life is hokey and ropey, nor are we going to say that the characters in Gears of War move really slowly. We’re just going to say that everything bows to the game design. We believe that the highest compliment one can pay a single-player adventure game is that a two-player deathmatch mode, with each player controlling a clone of the main character, would be amazing. This is certainly the case in Another World: we can imagine a single-screen arena where players are free to set up shields, blast shields down, and take shots at one another. In that context, the controls would feel just right. It’d be at least as engaging as Pac-Man Vs., or as entertaining as four-player “Don’t Touch The Floor” in Bionic Commando: Rearmed.

The game flows along, through Action Button scenes, platform segments, environmental puzzles, split-second-long yet mesmerizing cut-scenes, and increasingly elaborate gunfights. Lester will eventually have to swim, solve a dastardly puzzle requiring him to flood a large cave, and pilot a tank in a death arena. All the while, you keep running, terrified. The story shows itself deliberately, with elaborate foreground and background animations. Eventually, there’s a “main bad guy”, who looks exactly like every other alien — including your buddy. The “final battle”, which you fight on your stomach, crawling at one-sixteenth your previous walking speed, involves a hysterically brilliant play on the physical appearance of the aliens, eliminating all doubt: no, Eric Chahi most definitely did not make all the aliens look the same because he was lazy. (Then again, to say he intended this conclusion all along would negate what he’d said about doing the level design randomly. In other words, Eric Chahi is even more of a genius for deciding to stage the final battle the way he did. Wow.)

The ending is beautiful, and you’ll never forget it.

Certain questions regarding Another World‘s continuity will only ever be asked by fourteen-year-old kids: at the beginning of the game, we see these aliens shooting a beast with a gun. If the only purpose of having a gun is to hunt for safety or for food, why is there a shield function? The answer to the question is, of course, another question: why are the aliens imprisoning one of their own, who happens to look exactly like they look? Eventually, if you want it, Another World becomes about more than survival. Eventually, a quite frankly spooky theme settles down gently over the experience: we are a man sprinting for freedom in an absolutely, mind-crushingly foreign universe. There it is: no matter how sharply the rules of life might suddenly change, any man will know from instinct alone what freedom is.

Right after the first gunfight, Lester and his Alien Buddy get on an elevator. You can go down — the right way — or you can go up. If you go up, you will find yourself in a small, dome-shaped room with a window. Walk over and look out the window. We see through Lester’s eyes. The first time you see it, you don’t know what to think.

It’s a view of the expanse of this terrifyingly foreign world. Immediately, you look at that, and you know you’re going to die. You know Lester is going to die, some day, even if — especially if — he survives this. All at once, the Looney Tunes nature of grisly death and oblivious rebirth subconsciously becomes an essential artistic element of Another World‘s design.

Playing Another World before age sixteen can, probably, make one a better human being in the end. It’s certainly more qualifiable as “art” than any Disney animation.

Aw, we shouldn’t have said that. That was kind of rude.

Another World is a lean game, designed through a series of what must have been excruciatingly difficult choices. Chahi chose not to incorporate every possible gun/shield-dynamic permutation into the game, because this isn’t a game “about” shooting. Overstaying his welcome was never Chahi’s intent. Chahi’s intent, presumably, was to make a game that begins, middles, and ends. He composed event sequences on the fly, maybe fiddled with the arrangement, and then set about removing what didn’t work perfectly well. This is something modern game designers don’t do, more often than not. Just ask the crew behind the Final Fantasy games: past a certain point in the development, if an idea is still sitting on the table, it will be in the game. It’s a terrifying staring contest. Luckily, one man can’t have a staring contest with himself, so Another World, with regard to flow, is absolutely perfect.

Modern game designers also toil over the question of how to balance story and action segments: if the game is too hard, the player won’t be able to witness the full extent of the story, which means we might as well not have a story. Attention, game developers: if you’re thinking this, maybe your game is, at its core, too long, too complicated, or just plain boring. Another World keeps the context front and center, and the most complicated it gets is offering us the opportunity to easily kill a near-invincible guard by climbing into the tunnel above his chamber and shooting a hanging green orb the instant we see his reflection pass under it. We’ve previously said that Lost Vikings and Portal are amazing games because the level designers stop at nothing to exploit every facet of their brilliant mechanics; now, we’re going to say that Another World is more brilliant because it possesses sparkling self-confidence, and uses its mechanics as a tool. It stays cool-headed, elegant, and noble until the end. It isn’t a “game” with an “engine”; it’s an experience, one big, elaborate “puzzle”. It’s a story. It just happens to contain the bones and sinews of an excellent game. As a “piece of art” where the focal theme is the utter dread of being a stranger in a strange land, both the very concept of dying and being reborn (offered the chance to try again) in a videogame and the Looney-Tunes-like snap-to presentation of the post-death rebirth lends itself perfectly to the theme. From the moment this man’s life is upset (again: transported from a laboratory to a bizarre alien world), we know deep down, instinctually, that he will die some day, and so will we. His multiple deaths in our effort to learn the ins and outs of the experience perfectly — and, (crucially,) accidentally — present us with a plausible “ending” at any and every deadly turn. No one can ever pronounce Another World‘s thoughtfulness “pretentious”, because it’s not. It’s unassuming, nonchalant, confident, and cool. In short: yes, it’s French.

Another World is just simply not a game in which to stand still. This is crucial: casual players the world over can aesthetically break any game in three to four seconds by standing still. During its conflict phases, Another World will not let you stand still. It works a miraculous magic on the player, compelling him to always be acting out his role.

The second fight we find ourselves in involves several guards coming from the left side of the screen. Our New Alien Friend pounds away at a computer panel. We immediately recognize our role, without some FPS-like commanding officer barking orders at us: keep the enemies back while our man opens the door. This is as fist-sized and logistical as the fights will get, or will ever need to get, for Another World to prove its point.

Other games saw fit to expand on Another World‘s spear-like, joyfully geometric mechanics in rudimentary, fundamental, or elaborate ways. Interplay’s Blackthorne is perhaps best described as Another World: The Videogame: the level designers picked up the slack and put Another World‘s crisp conflict model into a non-stop, overwhelmingly thorough puzzle-solving blast-a-thon. Years later, Oddworld Inhabitants, perhaps thinking they were being clever, unleashed Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, which they paraded as a brilliant, brand-new thing. Going by the way the developer hyped it to the media, they seriously believed it would be the Next Huge Thing, the next Super Mario. The game was essentially Another World, turned into a “videogame”, expanded, multiplied by eleven, and starring hideous character designs that not even a mother’s mother could love. (Thus we actually happen to like the game a lot.)

Modern games have inherited Another World‘s showmanship and close to none of its subtlety. BioShock pays fetishistic, loving attention to its own world, which it realizes with an awe-inspiring level of beauty: despite being very obviously a videogame, a “simulation”, its visual and sonic confidence exudes subconscious-like understanding of the greatness of Another World. Too bad the “game” part is convoluted and bogged down by a design document that no doubt contained an entire ream-long section labeled “Bullstuff”.

Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami has gone on record as considering Another World the absolute best game of all-time, and the primary influence on Resident Evil. Using Another World as a yardstick, we can say that Resident Evil is hilariously unsuccessful — it is laden with red keys, red doors, blue keys, blue doors, and an inventory management system that smacks of the developers being scared that the game wouldn’t have “enough stuff” in it. It goes without saying that Resident Evil possessed the opportunity to be as sophisticated and perfect as Another World; however, through the process of think-tanking and regularly scheduled Monday-morning hung-over brainstorms, through the absolute lack of “common sense” as a job requirement for the level designers (or: the absolute lack of the “level designer” in post-Famicom-era Japanese game development), the game became unnecessarily dirty. When it came time to “improve” the game in sequels, we ended up with only more bullstuff. Resident Evil 4, an amazing and beautiful game in its own right, saw Mikami getting conscientious, and leaning closer to the dream of Another World. The “horror movie” genre of videogame had perhaps been too ambitious, Mikami must have noticed. So they went about making an “action movie”. It worked tremendously well, and had it featured only one truly awesome gun and no speaking cut-scenes (seriously: heck that radio stuff), we’d probably love it a whole lot more than we already do.

Goichi Suda, CEO of Grasshopper Manufacture and director of games such as Killer 7, Flower, Sun, and Rain, The Silver Case, and No More Heroes, all titles so close to being masterpieces that they suck royally, is also a repeat professor of his love of Another World. Suda’s love of Another World stems from its absolute unwavering execution of atmospheric mood. You can see plenty of influence in Suda’s titles, if you squint hard enough. The confidence evident in the sound design and visual sense alone earn his games hall-of-fame status. However, the issue of game design has a problem — namely, that there isn’t any. We can certainly see what Suda is driving at with games like No More Heroes: he is imagining a concept and a world, and is keeping the game elements to a minimum so as to allow each boss encounter to be a game in and of itself. The problem is that he hasn’t hit on the right minimum yet.

Fumito Ueda would have to be the only Japanese game designer who “truly” “gets” the Another World aesthetic. He, too, praises Another World above all games. When we interviewed him on the subject of Shadow of the Colossus in 2004, we asked him some questions about Another World, and he replied by very frankly saying that it depresses him when he reads gushing reviews of ICO, which fail to note the copious Another World homages. Ueda is a game designer’s game designer, and he may or may not surpass Another World in the future. For now, however, his parents allow him the keys to the Ferrari, though not the Lamborghini: Ueda had apparently wanted Shadow of the Colossus to not feature any kind of HUD display at all, like Another World, only his higher-ups literally told him that having no HUD would result in the game being “looked-down upon” as “unsophisticated” by critics and players. What kind of hecked-up world do we live in, where (#1) people who have worked at a company for 30 years, being promoted only because they’re not doing anything worthy of being promoted (and laws of societal niceness dictate that we not tell a man implicitly that he’s “not making anything better”) are trusted over people with genuine creativity (#2) someone with a university degree can possibly think that a little icon showing a sword is absolutely necessary in a videogame where the main character stands in the center of the screen and one can clearly see, at all times, that he is holding a sword? It’s like face portraits by dialogue boxes in RPGs: these days, when the characters are so big and expressive, having a face portrait by the dialogue box is freaky and depressing. Either way, Shadow of the Colossus can’t be a perfect game, because there’s no explanation for why the bow has unlimited arrows. What a pity! We will gladly, turgidly anticipate his next works, however, because it’s clear he both loves Another World‘s vibe and appreciates Zelda‘s aims. A bullstuff-free, flowing game possessing Zelda‘s attention to detail could be amazing.

Of all the Japanese game designers claiming to love Another World more than any other game, ever, Hideo Kojima would have to be the most hilarious and ironic. He makes the longest, ugliest, most logically convoluted orchestrated fatuosities yet produced by modern man in the name of attempted entertainment; if he actually loves Another World, we have to say that his love has not inspired him, or, rather, his love has inspired him to run like the wind in the opposite direction. Furthermore, we would like to express our condolences to his wife.

Okay, maybe we’re being mean. Maybe, just maybe, we can see some Another World in the original Metal Gear Solid; some cinematics can be described as “virtuoso” (these tend to be the silent ones), and the setups for small-scale grunt conflicts express an eerie tightness which insinuates that Kojima, like Chahi, had allowed “play situations” to come along naturally. Likewise, we recall Fumito Ueda describing the production of Ico as “design by subtraction” — they designed puzzle-challenges one at a time, and then arranged them in the best logical order, eliminating the ones that were too easy, too hard, or redundant. Many confrontations in the Metal Gear Solid series feel the same way; it’s just that Kojima seems to adore the raw concept of the videogame on far too many levels. The fans have grown up alongside him, and they find the idea of Shakespeare in Japanese: Starring US Army Special Forces, Giant Robots, and Cyborg Ninjas to be as captivating as he must find it hilarious.

If anything, we arrive at the core of this analysis believing in the cold center of our hearts that the “design by subtraction” that Fumito Ueda speaks of is the only way to make an excellent videogame. We arrive at the conclusion of our list of the Best Games Ever awakened to the fact that Level Design is the most important part of any game, be it an epic cluster of entertainment purposely fashioned to be impenetrable to non-gamers or a sleek and simple rope-like experience. Game designers: think of a single, sharp, spear-like mechanic, stick with it, set it in stone, and then make awesome levels. If there’s a mood you want to go for, keep it in mind. In short: be cool, and you too can make a masterpiece. Even if your single mechanic is amazing, it doesn’t mean anything without great levels. However, even a bare-bones mechanic (like, say, “running and jumping”) can make for spectacular entertainment if the levels are great (Super Mario Bros. 3).

No one loves on Another World enough, these days. Five furious minutes of internet research have yielded us the information that no major gaming news / review site has ever put Another World on its list of the best games ever — not even at #100. These are lists that have hecking Hogan’s Alley or Kingdom Hearts on them, for God’s sake.

It’s safe to say that some of the right people like this game, however. We can’t exactly prove it, though when we played Call of Duty 4, there were times where we felt like everyone involved in that game must have instinctively gotten the point of Another World: for every moment of commanding officers shouting orders, there is a balancing poetic moment of fine level design; when the game twists the “conventions” of its “genre”, it does so matter-of-factly, without pretention, a post-Kojima kind of anti-bravado.

Gears of War‘s cover mechanic still feels to us more like something out of a 2D platform-action game — and a specific one, at that — than an FPS, which is probably why it works so well in 3D.

Half-Life 2‘s gravity gun is a whole game in and of itself, and the greater part of the game simply radiates with confidence and direction.

And then there’s the issue of Portal: like Another World, it begins disorientingly, and it ends apocalyptically. It tells a story with feet; it lets the player absorb the atmosphere and make of it what he or she will. It’s talky, though never annoying, because it’s also funny (at least to us). No one (even us) can accuse it of being “too linear”, because, like Another World — and unlike Half-Life 2 — your character literally is a prisoner in a restricted world.

Like Another World, Portal has often been criticized as being “too short”.

A game cannot be too short if it’s memorable. Portal‘s sterile atmosphere implants itself in our brains precisely because there exist moments of visual clash; the dialogue implants itself in our brains because it rides a change in theme. And the main reason the game works is because it has a brilliant mechanic: the Portal Gun. Another World is a better game than Portal, mostly, because we say so. Because it’s not glib, and offers no reason for no one not to like it. It is honest, humble, noble, and at the same time hugely artistic and expressive. It tells a story, it presents awesome, unforgettable gunfights, and it lingers in the back of the mind for an eternity. It is the closest videogames have yet come to a great film, and we probably shouldn’t ignore it anymore. Every element that causes critics to jump up and down with joy in modern games existed in a perfect, pure form in Another World. Everyone making games — or writing about them, or playing them — should either play it, play it again, or at least think about it. Because, seriously, though we can’t say with a straight face that we “need” more games like this, once we have a whole bunch more of them, we’ll definitely start wondering what we did without them.

–tim rogers

* Footnote: no, there is no particular reason we didn’t mention Flashback in this review. We thought about going back and adding it to the part re: Abe’s Oddysee, though we hesitated and now can’t remember the exact intended wording. Anyway, Flashback is a very nice game as well. It just tries a tiny bit too hard. We also almost mentioned Beyond Good and Evil because it too was envisioned by a French man, though we figured maybe we shouldn’t bother. That’d be like telling a Japanese person that you like Haruki Murakami and having them reply immediately with “I don’t know, man, I prefer Ryu Murakami.” Seriously, a man’s peers aren’t decided by his last name.

With the Phantom Pain, Kojima avoids the kind of spectacular descent into villainy that the fans wanted and the trailers promised. Instead he gives us the Sopranos season 6 of Metal Gear (but instead of a depressed mobster, we play as a depressed war criminal). Maybe that sounds like one of those hack game journalist "the dark souls of x" comparisons but it's true. The best case scenario for all of our favorite characters at this point is a swift death.

Spoilers below.

After losing everything in 9/11 Ground Zeroes, having his mind and body shattered, Snake just... gets what's left of the gang back together, rebuilds his army, and tries the exact same shit again. Only now, it is completely devoid of purpose; The revolutionary anti-imperialist cause of the 70's is all but forgotten. There's a sinking feeling of dread as the camera pans to "our new Mother Base" in the helicopter after rescuing Kaz; an undeniable sense of this being a pointless, doomed effort. But since being a soldier is the only thing these people know how to do, they are stuck repeating the cycle. They're just going through the motions at this point; You really get a sense of that as the once charismatic and driven Big Boss is rendered a mute with a permanent thousand-yard stare who just does whatever Kaz and Ocelot tell him. When he's at the base between these missions he just stares at nothing and vapes for five hours straight. Far from the badass antihero that people expected from trailers. Venom Snake is actually kind of a directionless loser, which makes him just as good of a player stand-in as Raiden.

And the missions in this game, while incredibly fun and well-made, really beg the age-old American question "What are we even doing in Afghanistan?". The plot feels totally incomprehensible at times; you spend the whole game going after random acronym organizations, shell companies, and mercenary groups with some vague connection to Bin Laden Skullface and al-Qaeda the American deep-state/Cipher. But every single character is lying and basically, everyone is Cipher. I had to repeat mission briefings multiple times at certain points to figure out what the hell was going on, and I still really don't. You could say that's just bad writing, but it works for what the game is trying to do, which is to make you feel like someone with a severe head injury. You're not supposed to understand this convoluted imperial entanglement - no one can. Especially not someone as fucked up as Snake.

And like Snake, the returning characters from Peace Walker are reduced to these broken versions of themselves. The only person who seems to be doing well is Ocelot, who has really come into his own as the sort dead-eyed psychopath that thrives in this kind of environment. Honestly? Good for him. Kaz on the other hand is a crippled, traumatized husk driven by revenge which is in turn driven by his own guilty conscience, and Huey has become a delusional, pathological liar focused solely on self-preservation. The few unnamed soldiers who survived 9/11 Ground Zeroes are literally running around as raving lunatics in the wilderness. All of these people were supposed to die a decade ago, and instead they linger on as hollow men. Even the metal gear Snake fights is broken - it literally doesn't work without someone's magical powers. It's just this technological abomination created by a madman. When it tries to chase Snake it gets stuck in rocks because its sheer size is self-defeating, and Snake easily sneaks away. Probably the most obvious meta joke in the game (watch the last couple minutes of the launch trailer and tell me the game isn't making fun of itself). These Metal Gear (Solid)s aren't what they used to be. I mean come on, Metal Gear Rex roared like a T-Rex; Metal Gear Sahelanthropus... makes monkey noises.

Even Skullface, who was built up in trailers and in Ground Zeroes as this terrifying villain, turns out to be just a sad joke like everyone else. His plan is the most nonsensical, harebrained shit ever explained by a villain in any Metal Gear game. He spent a decade practicing a 10 minute theatrical monologue about why he has to eradicate the English language and give everybody nuclear weapons to unite the world. It makes absolutely no sense, it's a parody of Metal Gear villains, which were already parodies of 80's movie villains. While Skullface is performing his monologue in the jeep (to the wrong person), Venom just hits him with that fluoride stare and loops through a 20 second idle animation. Then Sins of the Father just... starts playing as they sit across from each other in complete silence and avoid eye contact. It's one of the funniest scenes in the entire series, mistaken by many fans as simply botched and awkward on accident (rather than on purpose, which it was). And if that wasn't obvious enough, Skullface's defeat is just straight up slapstick comedy; he gets crushed by his own non-functional Metal Gear in the middle of another absurd speech. Genuine comedy gold.

I think a lot of people overlook the humor in this game. It's a lot more muted and sad than in the rest of the series, but it's smarter here than in any other entry. Miller's "why are we still here" speech is MEANT TO BE FUNNY AND OVERLY MELODRAMATIC, as well as depressing and hard to watch. The way it ends, with that uncomfortable silence before he just... awkwardly sits back down? That was on purpose. The tone is that this has all become a very pathetic (and funny) spectacle at this point. Kojima's famously asinine dialogue becomes something really transcendent here; each hollow, ham-fisted statement really drives home the fact that everyone is just making this shit up as they go along now, trying to weave some bullshit heroic narrative out of a long series of L's. Kojima is telling us: "This is you dude. This is the American Empire. Your War on Terror is as darkly funny as it is monstrous." MGSV isn't the self-serious death march the trailers painted it as.

The way V's cutscenes are shot adds to these moments too. The shaky, handheld camera builds documentarian realism and a sense of witnessing real atrocities in more high-stakes scenes, but can also lend a comedic awkwardness to these exchanges between characters. I've seen someone compare it to The Office as a criticism but I think that's a feature and not a bug, as strange as it sounds. Somehow, it just works so well for the tonal balancing act this game maintains. But what really elevates V's cinematography thematically is its use of continuous shots. One-takes are often criticized as being essentially a gimmick, style over substance. But in Metal Gear Solid, a series defined by the juxtaposition between hard military realism and over the top fantasy? It's pure genius. Having all of this insane Kojima bullshit captured in documentary style is so fitting for this series. Perfectly hyperreal.

Speaking of hyperreal, let's talk about Quiet. I've thought a lot about whether her portrayal plays into Kojima's contempt for the audience (and the Metal Gear series itself for that matter) or if it's just a part of the game that didn't land. I was inspired by this article to conclude the former. In classic Metal Gear fashion, Quiet's characterization is ridiculous and offensive, but ends up transcending its low-brow trappings and having an emotional payoff - all while playing into a greater meta-narrative. And if you don't like that method of storytelling, then you sure picked the wrong media franchise. That scene of her speaking for the first time to guide the helicopter through the sandstorm is genuinely great. It perfectly encapsulates Kojima's ability to make something ridiculous, cheesy, and melodramatic - but still deeply affecting and with a lot of heart.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves; Quiet is absolutely a biting self-parody of Kojima's own portrayal of women throughout his series and in the wider industry. It's Kojima saying "Is this what you like, you sick fucks?" or possibly a case of introspection on his part ("Oh God, is this what I like?"). She has some hastily made up bullshit explaining why she wears no clothes, she is literally incapable of speaking for herself, and she undergoes gratuitous violence and imprisonment. Kojima obviously knows how ridiculous this is; he's seen basically every American movie, he knows this isn't how you're supposed to respectfully portray women. No, Quiet's portrayal is purposefully exploitative. Her objectification starts out fairly straightforward, but it becomes more and more disturbing for the player to partake in as the game goes on, in order to heighten the dark absurdity of all of this (particularly in Chapter 2, which is where everything in the game falls apart, on purpose). The point of Quiet's character, and the whole game really, is to give players exactly what they want in the most contemptuous way possible. To make you "feel ashamed of your words and deeds", you could even say. MGSV is about getting exactly what you want (another MGS game, endless content, revenge on Skullface, a sniper gf) and resenting it.

To build on MGSV's portrayal of women though, I think it's important that Paz takes on the role that she does in this game. She makes an initially very confusing reappearance - that first moment when you see her is genuinely unnerving, as if even the strange, fucked up Metal Gear reality we have become accustomed to can't explain what we're seeing. Out of all the unrealistic fantasy bullshit we've seen in this series, a series where it feels like anything goes and there are no rules or laws of physics, this is the first moment where I went "Wait, what? How?" But as we find at the end of "Paz's" side story, this is all just a projection of Snake's fragmented psyche. It's incredible in the way it makes you question what's real and what isn't, while simultaneously using Paz as a proxy to just straight up diagnose Snake's own mental disorders. But it's tucked away where most probably never saw it - like a hidden repressed memory somewhere in Snake's mind.

It perfectly conveys his nostalgia for a time that was never even good, as well as his crushing guilt and helplessness over the death of Paz. It's genuinely moving. That last tape of hers is something right out of Silent Hill 2, and it adds such depth to Snake as this miserable person that you should absolutely not want to be. For Snake, women really are just these fixtures of loss, shame, and regret - feelings that no doubt originate from the killing of his mother figure, The Boss. And despite all of the talk about getting revenge and taking down Cipher, the only time we ever see Snake get animated in this game is in his scenes with Paz. Snake's desire for redemption, his insistence on nuclear disarmament that feels strangely out of place, and his statement at the start of the game that he's "already a demon"? It's all about Paz, man.

One thing fans really disliked about Snake's portrayal though is that he never really seems to become the demon we knew him as in the early games. We never get to see The Exact Moment Walt Became Heisenberg. Quite the opposite; his intentions appear to remain heroic all the way to the end. The only scene where Snake approaches the kind of evil fans wanted to see is when Snake appears to murder the children in the mines but ends up saving them instead. In trailers this was depicted as if Snake actually goes through with the murder; to me, this is the smoking gun of another Kojima bait-and-switch. Fans wanted a game full of shocking, flashy acts of villainy on the part of Snake, and Kojima deliberately lead them on in trailers (just like in MGS2) but denied them of it in the final game. What did fans get instead? Spreadsheets.

Don't miss the forest for the trees; Snake is absolutely responsible for unimaginable atrocities during the events of MGSV. But instead of sensationalist images of man's inhumanity to man, Kojima shows us the banal cruelty of what it really means to be at the top of the war machine: You're just... on the computer, like everyone else. And everything you're doing is represented through so many layers of abstraction that it is impossible to understand the consequences. This ties directly into the themes of Metal Gear Solid 2 as well; by issuing your orders via this computer interface, you are even further removed from what is happening in reality. You just do a cursory cost-benefit analysis before sending the next death squad to do god knows what in some African or South American country you don't even know the name of.

And when a disease outbreak hits Mother Base, Snake's iDroid computer makes it easy for him to commit ethnic cleansing, sentencing scores of people to imprisonment and death for the language they speak. It isn't until all of the digital artifice is stripped away, and Venom is forced to enter the quarantine zone and personally slaughter his own men, that he has any crisis of conscience (and you actually lose some of your best men, because Kojima never fails to give the story actual weight via game mechanics). And you can say "Venom didn't want to do it, he had no choice." But that's exactly the point. If the Metal Gear Solid series is about one thing, it's about individual will being crushed under the weight of systems and institutions that have become organisms in and of themselves.

It doesn't matter how much Venom yearns for redemption. It doesn't even matter if he's in charge of Diamond Dogs. The system of global private warfare that Big Boss and friends established has taken on a life of its own, just like the Patriots of MGS2. His own intentions are irrelevant. If this system demands he kill his own men, he will do it. If this system demands that Raiden later kill Solidus, he too will do it. All actions within the system, regardless of intent, perpetuate the cycle of violence, war, and profit. Even if Venom disarms all of the nukes and brings about the Peace Day that never came for Paz, it just sets up the nuke free world that we hear about Big Boss exploiting in the intro to Metal Gear 2.

That's why everything in MGSV takes on such a hilariously pathetic flavor. Nobody, not Big Boss, not Zero, not Skullface, not Venom, has any agency in any of this. They're just flailing, looking for anything they can do to enact their will in a system that now imprisons its own creators. The only person who manages to achieve victory over the system by the (chronological) end of the series is, once again, Revolver Ocelot. And he only does so by shedding all individuality, tearing his mind into a thousand schizophrenic pieces to always be one step ahead of the algorithm. And it's all because he wants to fuck Big Boss. In the end love wins, and I think that's beautiful. But for everyone else, they are doomed to perpetuate the system they so desperately want to be free of.

And to what end? The truth is that there is no point to this system beyond its own self-perpetuation - it's a Snake eating its own tail (pretty good, huh?). The soldiers of Diamond Dogs, and every other PMC, kill so that they can keep killing. It's all for the love of the game at this point. Sure, they did the same thing back in Peace Walker, but at least back then it felt like you were blazing a new trail, sending a ragtag band of freedom fighters to oppose imperialism - that's long gone now. Any lofty goals this organization may have had are now lying somewhere at the bottom of the Caribbean. All of the bullshit Snake and Kaz spout about "fighting for the future" and "standing tall on missing legs" are just words to talk the gun out of their own mouths, to convince themselves that they are still moving toward something.

But they aren't. In the end, after killing Skullface (which was made purposefully unsatisfying according to Kojima) as revenge for the events that destroyed his life a decade ago, Snake is left to rot in a hell of his own creation. There are no holiday celebrations or fun outings like on the Mother Base of Peace Walker, and it's far lonelier; Quiet is gone, Huey is gone, Paz is long dead but still haunts him, and some of his best men are dead by his own hand. His only friends, Kaz and Ocelot, are just using him in some schizo game of global 4D chess. Even Eli and the child soldiers are just suddenly gone, and your metal gear with them - much more simple and poignant than the infamously cut Episode 51 would have been.

The effort to rehabilitate these kids, and maybe figure out Eli's origins? Track him down after his escape? Nope, you never see them again; they're just another of Diamond Dogs' many failures, another part of yourself that will be missing forever. All you can do is take the same helicopter ride to do the same (flawlessly crafted) stealth infiltration missions again and again and again, because senseless murder is the only thing that makes you feel anything anymore. And with the battlefield always shifting to adapt to your tactics in-game, you'll never make any real progress. Oh yeah, and none of this is actually real and Snake's entire life is fake. And deep down, he knows it.

So what about the real Big Boss? Well, he's basically stuck in the same cycle, only he has shed even more of his humanity than Venom. By using Venom's life as a tool in his own geopolitical game, Big Boss has committed the very same crime that was done to him and The Boss back in Operation Snake Eater. And all you can do about it is watch him ride off into the sunset to pursue yet another stupid evil scheme (that we already know will be a total failure), before getting right back to work like the epic gamer you are. Because you the player, like Venom, love LARPing as Big Boss no matter how pointless and repetitive it becomes. You'll complain about how Chapter 2 is "unfinished" and repeats the same missions from Chapter 1 (those were optional just fyi), but guess what? You're still gonna play those missions.

The Phantom Pain left players with such a profound feeling of emptiness and loss, and that's the real reason they felt it was unfinished. It's not because of any actual missing content - MGS2 had far more cut content, backed up by documented evidence, not just internet memes. But the difference with that game was that there was no falling out between Kojima and Konami - a convenient scapegoat for any aspect of the game that wasn't what fans expected, anything that hit players the wrong way. But that gnawing void you feel playing this game, the feeling that something is missing? That was intended, and it's honestly pretty heavy-handed and obvious when you approach the game on its own terms. I mean do I even need to say it? The pain from something that's missing? It's barely subtext.

Kojima purposefully denied us almost all of the campy, goofy nonsense we love about the Metal Gear Solid series to force us to confront how fake and hollow the legend of "the world's greatest soldier" really is. The level to which this game irrevocably shattered the minds of Metal Gear fans, leaving them eternally chasing their White Whale (the Moby Dick references weren't for nothing), is a testament to how the whole experiment was a resounding success. It snuck past gamers' emotional defenses, subverted their media illiteracy, and made them actually fucking feel something for once. Something real, something about their actual lives even.

There's a reason the game ends on a mirror - it's because the game is trying to hold one up to its players. And they could never forgive it for that. For turning their shallow, campy video game funtime, where I get to be a cool secret agent and Solid Snake is my dad, into a challenging work of art that interrogates their life. Because it's true: you are Venom Snake. You're a slave to the whims of others, your own desire for satisfaction. You do not know why you do the things that you do. And everything you're doing here - in this video game, in the digital realm - is ultimately fruitless. Fans complain about how there's no real resolution or ending to the story in MGSV, but it seems to me like that's the point: There is no resolution to be found here - not for Snake, and not for you. None of this is moving toward any conclusion or moment of truth. If you spend your life playing video games, you certainly won't ever see one. Like Venom, you'll never understand yourself, never have a real identity. The only way out, to freedom, is to stop fighting - to stop gaming. You can't save MSF, or Paz, or the Boss, or even Snake - you can only save yourself. Get out while you can. In the words of Naomi at the end of MGS1: "You have to live, Snake."

And that's the way this story ends. No Mission 51 "Kingdom of the Flies", no unwinnable boss fight against Solid Snake like fans wanted. Not even a sudden cut to black à la the Sopranos. Just the same meaningless thing over and over again, but somehow getting worse, until it's just... over. Not with a bang, but a whimper. If Metal Gear Solid 4 was about accepting the death of something that has clung on to life far longer than it should (the Metal Gear Solid series), MGSV is about being denied that noble death, brought back to life in some profane necromantic ritual, forced to live a tortured, half existence for all of eternity.

MGSV is best summed up as Kojima's way of saying "You guys wanted to keep playing Metal Gear Solid forever? Fine, here you go. Enjoy yourselves." He knows that he'll never be able to give this series a conclusive ending - he already tried that with MGS4. Instead, Kojima hands it off to the player, letting each of us come to it on our own, privately. One day, each player will get tired of the same missions and the same fucking helicopter ride and quietly decide for themselves, once and for all "Alright... I guess Metal Gear Solid is over. I'm done." and turn the game console off.

     'We floated off into that quiet world which love made possible because the power devils had been admitted and therefore banished.'
     – Mary Wings, She Came Too Late, 1986.

Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (4th Jul. – 10th Jul., 2023).

The 1980s saw a shift in American lesbian fiction away from coming-out stories and towards the detective genre. This transition was not entirely smooth and was met with highly polarised critical responses. Reagan's presidency unleashed a national conservative fever that sought to normalise homophobia, while the AIDS epidemic was greeted with outright inaction by the federal government. Anna Wilson defines this decade as a point of transition for feminist and lesbian identities, as 'the focus of the women's movement had gradually shifted away from an emphasis on exploring and enhancing the "liberated" self toward a preoccupation with that self as embattled and endangered' [1]. Furthermore, the new discourses on sexuality also sought to de-essentialise lesbian sexual identities, rejecting the clichéd labels that sharply distinguished between butch and femme.

     American lesbian detective fiction in the 1980s

Unlike the coming-out story, which revolves around introspection and the exploration of domestic life – since the discovery of lesbian romance takes place largely out of the public eye – lesbian detective fiction reinvests the public sphere, especially the streets. Despite its persistent aura of threat to women, the street has become a place where lesbian detectives can express themselves. Some take on the authority of institutions: Kate Delafield, the protagonist of Katherine V. Forrest's novels, recognises the structural abuse caused by the family, a place of male domination, and upholds the weight of the law – which she believes to be just – as the only way to bring about change in society. Not all detectives are as reformist as Delafield, but the whole sub-genre recognises that society is constructed in the service of male power [2].

C. M. Ralph's Caper in the Castro echoes these changes. The player assumes the role of Tracker McDyke, investigating the disappearance of her girlfriend, Tessy LaFemme. Behind this mystery lies a series of murders that underline a vast anti-LGBT conspiracy on Castro Street – the main avenue in San Francisco's historic gay district. Finding one's way around the various screens is difficult at first, as the interactions are so rigid and the context so minimal, but after a few minutes it becomes clear that Castro Street is plagued by a wave of violence. Ralph – undoubtedly inspired by the events leading up to the White Night riots (1979) – repeats the same stern observations as crime literature, highlighting not only public inaction but also the murderous impulses of the privileged ruling class. The title makes no attempt to hide its ambitions, ridiculing white heterosexuality through the detective's pithy tone.

     Stigma reversal and agency through the detective's eyes

Caper in the Castro is not the first game to explore the place of lesbians in a patriarchal, heteronormative society. Moonmist (1986), another investigative game, made this a crucial aspect of one of its four scenarios. However, Caper in the Castro is notable for being written from the perspective of the lesbian character. Whereas the events of Moonmist are merely tragic, Tracker McDyke reclaims her agency and directly confronts the oppressive system. Many of the interactions necessary to progress are resolved by gunfire, reclaiming this symbol of masculinity from hardboiled fiction and turning it into a woman's preferred instrument. Surprisingly, Caper in the Castro also avoids essentialisation, thanks to its detective's perpetually mocking gaze; although some passages are clumsier and rely on glib puns, they nonetheless overturn the insults and 'social stigma' [3].

While the somewhat cryptic nature of some of the interactions is regrettable, sometimes made more complex than necessary by the overly rigid text parsing system, Caper in the Castro remains an enjoyable game for its lack of concessions and the tribute it pays to San Francisco's LGBT community, which suffered reactionary violence. Despite the tragedy of the murders, there is something comforting about following a detective who ultimately succeeds in her mission, self-assured and with such a witty take on the world around her. Much like lesbian crime fiction, Caper in the Castro is perhaps less interested in exploring the gender and sexual identity of its protagonist than in the means available to fight injustice. Anna Wilson mentions the contradiction of the lesbian detective who somehow fits in with the rules of the social order while performing her homosexuality in public; Caper in the Castro avoids this dilemma: its answer seems to be, unequivocally and albeit naively, the revolution.

__________
[1] Anna Wilson, 'Death and the Mainstream: Lesbian Detective Fiction and the Killing of the Coming-Out Story', in Feminist Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, 1996, p. 252.
[2] There is an extensive historiographical debate about whether lesbian detective fiction can accommodate reformist, assimilationist and individualist positions without denying its radical heritage. The question is complex and deserves a close reading of the various novels of the period, but a central idea is that the lesbian detective, because of the female gaze, does not have the same lived experience of the streets as the hardboiled, misogynistic male detective – this is particularly explicit in Barbara Wilson's Sisters of the Road (1986). The traditional hardboiled view is that the detective's acts of justice are isolated and cannot change society; the feminine and lesbian view emphasises above all that 'violence is never random; there are no haven' (Anna Wilson, op cit., p. 266). See also Catharine R. Stimpson, 'Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English', in Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 2, 1981, pp. 363-379 and Timothy Shuker-Haines, Martha M. Umphrey, 'Gender (De)Mystified: Resistance and Recuperation in Hard-Boiled Female Detective Fiction', in Jerome H. Delamater, Ruth Prigozy (ed.), The Detective in American Fiction, Film, and Television, Greenwood Press, Westport, 1998, pp. 71-82.
[3] Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1963.

Kane and Lynch 2 has received a positive reappraisal in recent years and having played it for the first time a year or so back I’d have to agree. Dog Days is a filthy and visceral satire of the PS3/360 gen of shooters and crime games. I have some familiarity with the first game and this game also feels like a takedown of its predecessor as well and its attempts to try and make Kane and Lynch gritty anti-heroes. The titular duo engage in the usual maelstrom of hyper-violence most shooter game protags get into but unlike most of those protags Kane and Lynch are completely loathsome and pathetic scumbags who created said storm of bloodshed completely out of their own blundering bullshit. They have no real sense of comradery; their hatred of each other bubbles up multiple times over the campaign and the only reason they stick together is that at this point all they have left is each other as well their shared delusions of being cool crime-men who are going to have one last big score. And the game loves showing how selfish and delusional they are without really stressing it; Kane thinks that his estranged daughter will just completely forgive him for years of his bullshit by throwing dirty money from a gunrunning job at her and its clear he has never considered her feelings and what she actually wants while Lynch callously disregards his girlfriend’s wellbeing by dragging her into his violent screw-ups which leads to its inevitable conclusion. They’re ugly, vile, washed up old men and the game neither sympathizes with nor glamorizes them.

One of the most discussed elements of the game is the camera and I have to agree that its rad. The camera really does feel like there is some unseen camera man chasing the duo around with a crappy camcorder. It can be a bit disorientating so it’s probably not recommended if you have a propensity for motion sickness but I was fine playing it. The VHS effects are also done real well, effects such as head-shotting a dude and having it be censored by a ball of static makes the game feel even more visceral and messed up.

The gunplay isn’t exceptional but it does add to the hectic and visceral feel that envelops the game. One interesting thing is that there isn’t any truly safe cover, enemies will plink away at you if you stay behind a piece of cover for too long, incentivizing you to be on the move when need be and to take out enemies as quick as you can. Kane and Lynch are also kind of crappy shots so they chew through assault weapon ammo if you’re not too careful, which also adds to the breakneck and sloppy feel of the game. The game is rather tricky at first, but once you get the feel for it gets more manageable as you go along.

The game ends in an abrupt anti-climax but I think it’s the perfect ending for the game. Kane and Lynch will never have a happy ending, will never find peace, they are incapable of achieving it due to their grievous character flaws and they don’t deserve it either. You know they’ll just meet their gruesome ends in a rain of gunfire eventually so the game doesn’t give its characters or the players any sense of closure. It just bluntly ends, just how the rest of the game has been so brutally blunt and breakneck paced. Dog Days is a short campaign, around 3-4 hours, but honestly as I said it as long as need be. Really I just love how abrupt the whole game is and even though I do like this game I don’t think I’d want a sequel, it would just feel unnecessary to me. Definitely check the game out if you’re interested, especially because it’s usually on sale on Steam for like three bucks. Just a unique game that we’ll probably never get again in the AAA sphere.